Threads of Suspicion

by Dee Henderson

  David laughed at the visual whacks Evie gave the air. “Maybe. It’s an interesting ball of twine you just rolled out.”

  She nodded and stabbed another piece of pancake. “We need to ask Lori if a client told her about the body. It stands to reason that whoever told her was either the person who killed Saul or was involved in some other way. We’ll get a confession of the crime, even if secondhand.”

  A server came by and refilled their coffee mugs. David nodded his thanks. After the woman had moved on, he offered, “You would think if all this shakes out as you’ve described it, Lori would simply tell us the story. ‘I heard this rumor in Houston from a client, decided to check it out since the building sort of fit the location he described. Wow. Body found. The client’s name was Joe Killer. I’m sorry, but the client is dead now.’ But Lori doesn’t say a word, just gives us the body.”

  Evie grinned. “Exactly. It’s a WITSEC situation. That’s how she knows the truth. And why she can’t tell everything she knows. Maybe the guy who told her isn’t dead yet.”

  “I agree it’s a theory worth a conversation,” David replied. “Do we talk to Ann first or Lori to figure out how much of this theory might be true and how much is us whiffing at a good pitch?”

  “My experience with Ann is that she tells you what she wants to say and no more, so I vote we start with Lori.”

  David nodded. “Lori it is. But first we do basic cop due diligence, see if Saul answers who murdered him with a photo on that camera, or a name in that notebook. We also need to check out what she told us about where she worked, when she moved here.”

  “You’re spoiling my fun by wanting evidence.”

  David was still chuckling as he signaled their server for the check. “Thanks for the mental detour, Evie—the brain-twisting what-if you just spun out, no doubt so I wouldn’t brood on the fact that my poor guy was buried in a wall.” He put breakfast on his credit card, handed it to the server.

  “You’re welcome. But I wasn’t entirely filling time. I think it’s a reasonably good theory. Lori knew there was a body in that wall. It’s the only thing that really works.”

  “We shall ask her just that, and soon. For now, let’s head back and see what the lab geeks might have for us. We need to dig into RB Electric. If we find out it was mob-owned, your theory gets even more interesting.”

  Sixteen

  “There are photos on Saul’s camera!” Evie slapped David on the shoulder hard enough to jar the coffee he held.

  “So I just told you,” David replied with a laugh. “You need some more sleep, Evie.”

  “It’s just awfully exciting. What floor?” She stepped ahead of him onto the elevator at the crime lab.

  “Adam said fourth, room 419. He’ll meet us there.”

  Detective Ben Jenkins was coming down the hall from the other direction as they exited the elevator. They waited for him to join them and then entered the door marked Imaging. Evie was expecting white counters and lab equipment, beakers and sinks. Instead, it turned out to be a conference room with several wall screens and an old-style overhead projector.

  The wall clock said 4:18 p.m. She was so ready to have something tangible to tackle. She’d spent the day learning about the building where Saul’s remains were discovered and the businesses that had last occupied it. Her brain was spinning with tax filings and bankruptcy court accounting documents.

  RB Electric had the smell of an organized crime family business front. The owner was the uncle of a man who’d been arrested on racketeering charges, who also had done jail time for money laundering. But RB Electric itself looked legit, paid its taxes, had twenty employees, had gone bankrupt only when clients stopped buying the equipment it manufactured. That filing had been in order. If they had been using the company as a front, they were taking advantage of the truck fleet, not laundering money through the business accounts themselves. Five trucks were sold during the bankruptcy, all with lift gates and more than a hundred thousand miles on each of them. It would have been easy enough to load contraband and make an extra stop on the way to a customer, use RB Electric for the resources and building it offered, but otherwise leave it a legal business.

  Evie paced the room while David and Ben compared notes on the rest of the crime-scene recovery. The skull indicated Saul had taken a hit on the back of the head, probably with a baseball bat. The ribs showed a gunshot to the chest. Breaking up all the cat-litter chunks to see if the bullet had settled somewhere in the wall tomb would take another day. It was solid, steady progress. They knew how and where. She wanted something to point to who and why. The noon newscasts had led with the recovered remains, so anyone involved now knew their handiwork had been discovered. Another real unknown was how many other bodies might be found in the building.

  David had decided they would talk with Saul’s sister in the morning, once the remains had been transported to the medical examiner’s office. They would tell Cynthia it likely was her brother while the medical examiner worked to make it official. It would be good to have that hard conversation behind them.

  The door pushed open, and an older man carrying a thin box joined them. Evie was relieved to see the lab coat—she liked science guys when it was evidence she was looking for.

  “Thanks for coming so quickly, detectives,” the man said. “I’m Adam Billings. I’ve been coordinating work on your retrieved evidence. I have good news and bad. The bad first. The notebook in the shirt pocket is a mass of pages bonded together. I doubt we’ll be able to separate them. The good news, the camera had been shooting film, and there was nearly a full roll of exposed frames in the protected well of the motor drive. What I have to show you now are the negatives we’ve since printed to ten-by-twelve.”

  He opened the box he’d set on the table and took out an inch-thick stack of photo paper. “As these are time-stamped, I’m just going to lay them on the table so you can see the chronology. The last photo is Saturday, 10:16 p.m. The first ones begin on Wednesday.” Adam began to place the photos along the length of the table.

  “Oh, wow. They survived really well,” Evie noted, surprised. She was looking at a crowd of young people, some with arms in the air, some dancing, mostly facing the same direction. Good compositions. She could tell Saul had been a photographer for a newspaper before changing careers. Many shots came from a slightly higher vantage point than the crowd. Probably stood on a chair, she thought, or maybe a bench.

  “The concert Saul attended Wednesday night,” David said.

  Evie nodded. “That makes sense. He must have started with a new roll of film after he left his sister.”

  The concert photos went on for nearly forty shots—crowds, then a recurring face in the crowd, and finally ones that cropped in just the young man. He looked to be early twenties, had a neat haircut and wore a black T-shirt sporting some band’s logo. David picked up a photo to study it closer.

  “Does he look familiar to you?” Evie wondered.

  “Vaguely. These are six years old. I have a feeling I’ve seen a more recent photo of him. Maybe a union worker at one of the concert locations? I was searching the entire list of names in the DMV records.”

  “We know Saul was looking into concert connections for Tammy and for Jenna. That he’d found a reason to focus on somebody at another concert makes sense.”

  “Tammy—that’s where I’ve seen him. This guy reminds me of a boyfriend of hers from her high school days.” David pulled his notebook out, started flipping pages, then stopped. “Lucas Pitch,” he read with satisfaction. “Saul was tracking down Tammy’s former boyfriends. I can see him doing that on his own time, case suspended or not. He would’ve liked to find Tammy. If this is Lucas, he was at an Arlington Heights concert six years ago. Maybe he’s still in the area. I ran the name through Illinois DMV,” he added, “and didn’t get a current match, but we’ll dig deeper.”

  “A good lead.”

  David tapped the next photos. They changed to several of an overgrown lot wit
hin a block of homes, taken from different vantage points. “This must have been what he was doing up north in Gurnee Thursday morning. The time stamp is close to when he stopped for gas. But I haven’t run across anything like a land dispute.”

  “Maybe a favor for a friend? Or he was looking to buy the lot and build himself a home?” Evie asked.

  “Could be. Yet another mystery, if it turns out to be relevant.”

  “Can you make out the street signs?” Evie lifted one of the photos to check. “Maybe it’s Gradley with a cross street beginning with Tri.” She passed the photo to Ben.

  “I’m thinking that’s Gridley—the name of a former mayor in Gurnee,” Ben said. “It shouldn’t be too hard to find this lot. The house number here . . . it looks like a forty-six.”

  Evie focused on the mailbox number. “Forty-six,” she agreed.

  David had moved on to the next group of images. “These are from Saturday afternoon—I can tell even without the time stamp. This guy is Neil Wallinsky, who lives over in River Glen.” There were ten shots in all, six of a neighborhood and a particular home, four of the man, one taken without his knowledge as he walked toward a mailbox, the other three casuals with him looking into the camera.

  “You have to admire Saul. He put in the hours for his clients,” Evie commented.

  “He enjoyed the job,” David said. “Cynthia underscored that.”

  The next five were taken over a twenty-minute period, all of a gorgeous sunset. “Very sad,” Evie said, thinking about Saul’s last views alive.

  “Cynthia might be relieved to have these. Her brother had seen some beauty the last night of his life,” David replied, “had paused long enough to capture it.”

  Evie looked over at Adam. “Can you make duplicates of these five for his sister?”

  “I don’t see why not. They’re confirmation that he was alive past this particular time of day, but otherwise, not evidentiary.”

  Evie nodded her thanks.

  “The next time I know Saul’s location,” David said, “it’s eight p.m. and he’s talking to a source in Arlington Heights, looking for a card game he’s heard is going on somewhere in Englewood. I hope you can tell me a sunset isn’t the last photo I’m going to get.”

  “It’s not.” Adam spread out the final thirty photos. “My hunch, these are what you’re looking to see.”

  It was night, the first obvious difference from the previous ones. These were taken with a long lens, meaning a cropped effect on the subjects. Lighting was dim. Evie doubted her own camera would have been able to get even a faint shadow in such conditions. Saul’s skill was clearly evident—he’d manually held the exposure open on some of these images.

  The photos were mostly of men exiting vehicles, the figures caught in headlights, or some on a sidewalk with a streetlight providing angle lighting. Five photos showed groups entering the RB Electric building through a side door, with light from inside shining out and showing features clearly.

  “We’re working on the negatives to enhance the contrast. My guess, you’ll get another twenty percent clarity. And since some are of the same individuals, frames can be digitally combined to heighten more details.”

  “We’ll need that photo enhancement and more,” David replied calmly, but Evie heard something in his tone that made her glance over sharply. David pushed one photo up from the spread. “Recognize him, Ben?”

  Detective Jenkins looked closely and smiled. “I do. And isn’t this interesting?”

  “Who is it?” Evie asked. David had worked in Chicago for years before moving to New York. That he would recognize a major criminal player didn’t surprise her.

  “The organized-crime boss for the greater Chicago area, Henry Grayson, has two sons. This is the middle one, Blake. And this”—Ben tapped another photo—“is Blake’s one-time bodyguard, Tony Churchill.”

  “So who killed Saul?” Evie wondered aloud. “The middle son? His bodyguard? One of the security people watching for problems that night?”

  “We may never know,” David cautioned, “but we can pop news of a recovered body, the fact photographs exist, and do some squeezing on who might know something, beginning with the bodyguard. Whatever happened that night, you can bet it had Blake’s approval, before or after the fact.

  “Given the number of people Saul managed to get on film during forty minutes, this wasn’t a table game,” David proposed. “This was a multi-table, bring-a-guest affair. Probably blackjack, roulette, and poker, hosted at an out-of-the-way business controlled by the Grayson family. RB Electric is going to tie back to the Grayson family.”

  “Very likely,” Ben agreed.

  David tapped the last three photos. “Here’s the gambling husband Saul was looking for—fitting in a way. Saul was doing good work right up until the end of his life. The last pictures Saul took were of the husband, who had taken up gambling again. If this guy hadn’t died in a car accident a year later, he would be the perfect interview about that night.”

  “Serious gamblers at this level tend to keep on gambling and eventually come to our attention,” Ben put in. “We’ll see about identifying the other players in these photos. Maybe someone will talk to us. There were a lot of people there that night who might be willing to speak with us.

  “The fact your missing person was buried in that wall,” Ben went on, “with these being the last photos he took, either he decided he could safely get closer to get a better picture of what was going on—maybe went up a back stairwell at one a.m. and got himself hit with a bat, then shot in the chest—or more likely someone spotted him, hauled him out of his car and upstairs to see what Blake wanted to do, with the same outcome.”

  “That fits with what we’re seeing here,” David agreed. He motioned to the thirty pictures. “It’s good his death didn’t happen in an obscure back alley. People were around, security, Blake’s inner circle, others coming to gamble, waiters, setup and teardown personnel. Add employees that actually worked at RB Electric come Monday morning. You can leverage a few names you know to tell you who else was there and build a pretty sizable list of people to interview.”

  “I’m guessing we’ll be officially taking this case off your hands tonight,” Ben said. “News is already out about the skeleton, and there may be more than one body in that building. We need to move with some speed to find these witnesses.”

  “I’m fine handing over what we have,” David agreed. “I can get you and a couple others briefed tonight. Let’s hope a slug turns up so that ballistics can tell us about the gun involved. How do you think the Graysons handle this?”

  “We put out the word we want to talk to Blake, he’s likely to walk into the station with his lawyer two hours later,” Ben replied. “He’s smooth that way, answers your questions but never admits or says anything specific. He’s also ambitious, impetuous, and not as careful as his old man. He’s got a temper. He likes to get even in person for perceived slights. He likes the connections and the power his family wealth and business give him. He’s been questioned in at least two other murders, but nothing has stuck thus far.

  “Blake’s been trying to prove to the old man he would be as good as his older brother at running the business. But rumor has it the old man isn’t buying. Sounds like when Henry decides to step down, he’s appointing his cousin to take over rather than pass it to Blake.”

  “You said two sons. What happened to the elder one?” Evie asked.

  “There were actually three sons, but the youngest died in a boating accident as a kid,” Ben replied. “The eldest son, Caleb, left the family about ten years back, has built quite an empire of his own, and done so within the law from what repeated investigations and audits have determined. You want to retire from organized crime, get out of the life? You go to work for Caleb. At least that’s the word on the street. And if you do, you don’t talk about what you know from the past—that’s the implicit deal.”

  “So no one needs to shoot you to shut you up,” David said.


  Ben nodded. “It’s an interesting dynamic. Caleb’s a lawyer, a good one from what I hear, representing all those who work for him, who pretty much enforces that no-comment policy when cops come around. He lets us do our jobs, doesn’t interfere, but doesn’t particularly help either. Sort of a mediated peace—no one shoots his people, and his people don’t talk about anything from their past . . . or anybody else’s. He’ll bend that occasionally by handing us physical evidence—a janitor just found a gun hidden in a heating duct of a building Caleb bought—that kind of help. He’s big into real estate, mostly low-income neighborhoods, single-family homes, apartment buildings.”

  “Real estate. That’s interesting.”

  Ben smiled. “Either someone like Caleb keeps the buildings together and in good repair or they end up needing to be rehabbed like what’s happening in Englewood right now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the size of Caleb’s world isn’t larger than his father’s by now,” the detective added. “The two are careful to keep the peace, staying out of each other’s geography. They’re still on good terms, but the brothers—to say there’s tension between Caleb and Blake would be a major understatement. The eldest brother left and still gets dad’s approval, while the middle son is too wild to ever get his dad’s admiration, and knows it. Chicago crime’s problem is liable to get even more dicey when Henry retires or dies.”

  David smiled. “I should have stayed in New York a few more years, as we just got done with a similar shakeout there.”

  “We’re not looking forward to the inevitable transition,” Ben said. “The hope is that the control passes on to the cousin, who can hold things together until Blake here gets himself arrested and jailed, removed from the equation. But so far we haven’t put together a case that can hold up in court.”