by Dan O'Shea
“That’s it, Collie. Just run that rag along there and get that extra grout up before it dries on the tiles. You’re doing great.”
He heard Colleen giggle. “It’s cold.”
At the top of the stairs, Lynch could see the boxes from the tile place, couple of corner pieces Johnny had snipped off sitting in an empty box.
“Fe, fie, fo, fum,” Lynch rumbled, turning the corner toward the bath. “I better not find things screwed up by no bums.”
“Daddy!” Colleen squealed, running out of the bathroom. She was only seven. Johnny walked out behind her, wiping his hands on a shop towel. Smile on his face told Lynch all he needed to know — kid had done things right.
“Hey, Dad.”
“How’s it going, buddy?”
“Got the floor in. Collie’s just helping me finish up. Gotta seal the grout tomorrow.”
“Let’s have a look.”
Lynch stuck his head in the door. Floor looked perfect. Couple more cut-up tiles outside the door than there should have been for a floor this size. Figured the kid measured wrong, or they cracked on him. But that’s why you got extras, and that’s how you learned.
“Damn. Looks real nice.”
“Didn’t we do a good job, Daddy?” asked Colleen.
Lynch scooped her up. “You did a great job, Collie. Your brother teach you how?”
Great big smile spread across her little round face. “Yep.”
“Is he a good teacher?”
Suddenly, she looked serious. “Daddy, he is the best brother in the whole world.”
Lynch reached out and tousled John’s hair. “Guess I’m a lucky man.” He buried his face in Colleen’s neck and blew a loud raspberry. She squealed again, Johnny smiled, and Lynch heard his wife coming in the back door.
“If the construction crew will come downstairs, I’ve got a great big bunch of weeds I’ve pulled out ready for dinner.”
Colleen laughing. “Mom, we can’t eat weeds!”
His wife shouting up the stairs, “Well, I might have something else for the picky eaters.”
Johnny smiling at him like he got it, like he understood how much it meant to be part of all this. Lynch thinking so what if he got traffic duty for life.
Later, Lynch was in the kitchen grabbing a beer from the fridge when his wife called him from the living room where she was watching the news.
“Honey, you better get out here. You’re going to want to see this.”
Lynch walked into the living room just in time to see Simba or whatever his name was standing on the street in front of several of his followers almost screaming into a row of microphones, looking a little washed out in the lights for the cameras.
“White fear-mongers tryin’ to incite hatred, say it’s the Black man you have to fear. It’s the Black man gonna break into your house, gonna kill you in your sleep, gonna rape your women. When Fred Hampton tried to say the Black man don’t have to live in fear, don’t have to live in shame, it wasn’t no Black man came for him. It was the white cops come and shot him in his bed. The white pigs come and murdered him and then walked away smiling while the white judges and white DA all say, ‘Yah suh, dat’s fine. You go on and shoot down that black dog.’ And now I hear dey coming for me, saying I killed the mayor’s pet boy, pretty boy walking around talkin’ how only the fine white man can save us poor Black folk. You pigs all come on. But don’t expect me to be lyin’ asleep in my bed. You want war, we be warriors.” He thrust his fist into the air, holding it there, and the line of black men behind him did the same. “By any means necessary.” All of them shouting in unison. Then he turned and walked back through the middle of the pack.
CHAPTER 15 — CHICAGO
Present Day
When John Lynch got to the Olfson plant, the mobile lab was pulled up near the east end. Meat wagon from the ME’s office after that, couple more units from technical services. Somebody’d set up a generator near the door, buzzing along like a power mower, couple of lines running inside. Lynch saw one of the lab guys coming out the door. Skinny guy with glasses and hair that was always falling in his face. Lynch trying to think of his name, then it coming to him. Novak. Kind of a grump. Lot of the guys called him No Sack because he’d lost a nut to testicular cancer a couple years back.
“Novak, how’s it going?” Lynch asked.
“You sure can pick em, Lynch. There’s like a billion square feet in this place.”
“Room work out? This the place?”
“Looks like. We got fresh gunshot residue on the inside of the window. Not much else. No prints that we can find, at least not upstairs. McCord call you about the stiffs?”
“Yeah. What’s that about?”
“The gangbangers you were looking for, ones that hung out here? Found four of them in the basement.”
“I’m assuming dead?”
Little smile from Novak. “Why don’t you go on down and have a look. Hate to spoil it for you.”
“OK. Hey, where’re we at with ballistics from yesterday?”
“You know, Lynch, I was going to check on that this morning, but then I got a call about how I had to get out here and toss an entire abandoned factory. Then it turns out we got a multiple in the basement, and, with the factory being the likely shooting location and being better than half a mile from the DOA yesterday, that gives me a crime scene about the size of Rhode Island. Ballistics is working on it. You want to call in, be my guest.”
One of the lines from the generator ran up the stairs. The other snaked down the hall and into a doorway on the left. Lynch followed the second line down the basement stairs. The tech guys had shop lights set up every twenty feet. Long hallway, doors leading out, all on the right side. What was left of some old furnaces, couple of rooms with machinery in them. Where the building turned in was a large room. Somebody’d set up some furniture down here. Green plastic chairs, a beat up old table with a big ass boombox on it. Three of the chairs were knocked over. Couple of ice chests under the table. Popeye’s wrappers and quart Beck’s bottles everywhere. Lynch saw three of the numbered yellow plastic tents the crime scene guys liked to set out to mark stuff. One was just to his left, inside the door. He could see a piece of brass on the floor next to it. Lots of gang graffiti. At the far end of the room was a dark area that ran back under the wall. Just outside that, four body bags were lined up on the floor. Lynch had seen plenty of the ME’s bags, these looked different. McCord was crouched near the end of the last bag on the right, had the zipper open. He looked up.
“Hey, Lynch. Welcome to Pee-wee’s playhouse.”
Lynch nodded. “You guys get new bags?”
“Nope. Perp must have bagged them for us. These look military. Bagged the bodies and shoved them back up under the wall here. Figure it’s that Keep Chicago Clean shit Hurley’s always pushing. Even your criminal element’s getting with the program.”
“Got a perp with his own body bags?”
McCord just shrugged.
“See we got some brass. They shot?”
“Haven’t unbagged them yet, figured you’d want to see everything in situ. But we’ve got no blood on the floor, no splatter on the walls. You want to help me unwrap them?”
Lynch pulled on a pair of latex gloves and helped McCord slide the bags out from under the stiffs. Four black males. As McCord and Lynch worked the last one out, his head lolled around like it was attached to the body with a piece of string. Two 9mm Smiths clanked in the bottom of the bag under the body.
“So these the gangbangers you were looking for?” asked McCord.
“They got the right tattoos, they’re wearing the right colors, looks like my boys. Guess they won’t be answering any questions. How long you think they’ve been down here?”
“They’re limp, so rigor’s come and gone. Bags kept the bugs out, so we didn’t get any help there, but based on some of the discoloration, a couple days anyway. Your guy must have run into them while he was casing the joint and decided he didn’t
want their company.”
While McCord looked over the bodies, Lynch slipped a pen through the trigger guard of one of the pistols and sniffed the barrel. Fired recently. Tried the other. That one, too. He checked one of the pieces of brass on the floor. 9mm.
“Sure nobody got shot? Somebody got off a few rounds in here. Cement walls, had to be like a fucking pinball game.”
“No gun or knife wounds on these guys. Number four, clearly a broken neck. Way broken, completely dislocated. Number two here? Got some blood from the nose but not much. You’ve heard of that shoving a guy’s nose into his brain shit? Think somebody may have done it. This nose is way out of whack, and that should have bled like hell. Unless, of course, you die and somebody lays you on your back. Bet I find a mess of blood in his sinuses. Number three here, he almost looks like a strangulation. You got your cyanosis and such, but no ligature marks on the neck. Do got what looks like blunt trauma to the throat, though. Somebody may have crushed his trachea for him. Number one here? Not a clue. I don’t see a thing.”
“Somebody threw some shots down here.”
“We’ll test these guys for residue. Maybe they were shooting while your guy was busting them up.”
“Some guy walks in here, takes on these four — and they all look like they’ve been in a few scrapes — snaps the one guy’s neck, shoves the other guy’s nose up his head, crushes a trachea, and, what, scares this last guy to death, and they’re shooting at him, and he walks out?”
“I keep telling you, Lynch, I just do the science.”
“You wanna switch jobs?”
“That mean I get to date that reporter chick you took home last night?”
“That on CNN or something?”
“Or something.”
“No. I keep the reporter chick.”
“Fuck it, then.”
Lynch stripped off the gloves and shoved them in his pocket. “OK, I’m outta here. I’ll tell Novak to go ahead and process the room. Once you get anything solid on our friends here, let me know.”
CHAPTER 16 — RESTON, VIRGINIA
“Fisher’s first mistake,” said Chen, handing Weaver a manila file.
“He doesn’t make them,” said Weaver.
“The Post Office’s mistake, actually,” said Chen.
“OK. What have you got?”
“We found a bill for a post office box rental from a UPS store in Fredericksburg at Fisher’s house.”
Weaver shook his head. “That’s a plant. Fisher wouldn’t leave anything he didn’t want us to find. And he stopped his mail service before he took off.”
“This item was delivered to the wrong address. One of Fisher’s neighbors found it in their box and dropped it in his slot after Fisher stopped his mail service.”
“You check the envelope?”
“Prints and DNA. Fisher never touched it.”
“OK. So what did we get?”
“We checked the box in Fredericksburg. Fisher closed it the day he left town, but it has not been re-rented. One piece of mail was left in the box. Based on the postmark, we believe it was delivered the day Fisher closed the box. A promotional mailing from American Express to Thomas McBride. This is not an identity Fisher pulled together in recent weeks to support his current activities. He has been building McBride for years. It is his failsafe.”
Weaver flipped through the file. McBride owned a townhouse in Reston. He had an account with Citibank. He’d filed tax returns for the past eleven years. He had the Amex card and a Visa. Virginia drivers license and a US passport, both with Fisher’s picture on them. Some activity on the Visa after Fisher’s disappearance but prior to the Wisconsin shooting. Nothing recent on the Amex. But Fisher had made electronic payments to keep the accounts alive.
“He hasn’t been using these since the shootings started. He has to be using something.”
“Paravola theorizes that Fisher has established some one-offs, accessing the cash lines for some, using the others for one or two days, then switching. We are researching that now.”
“But if he feels us getting close, he’ll switch to McBride.”
“Yes, sir.”
CHAPTER 17 — CHICAGO
Lynch stopped by Bernstein’s desk. “Getting anything?”
Bernstein looked up. “I’ll give you a printout, pictures of semi-auto sniper rifles. Helps that it’s semi-auto, because as far as I can tell most of these things are bolt action. Germans have a few, couple different H amp;K models. Swiss have a couple Sig Sauer models. Then you’ve got your Israeli Galils, and there’s a Russian gun, Dragunov, though these last two are maybe less likely. Accurized assault rifles, not sniper rifles per se. Anyway, you’ll know what you’re looking for. I’m pulling up a list of guys who have won this or that for target shooting at your range or better. Probably a waste of time, though. I mean, you’re still thinking this is some kind of hit, right? For-hire job?”
“Best I can do for now.”
“I can’t figure somebody who hires out wants his name on a trophy.”
“Still…”
“Yeah, I know. Gotta run it out. Also getting you a list of anybody official that uses this kind of talent. FBI HRT guys, Special Forces, SEALs, Marine scout/sniper. Overseas you got your SAS… Hell, you start looking overseas, and we’ll be at this awhile. Of course, most of the semi-autos are from overseas.”
“Any restrictions on these or can anybody buy one?”
“None of them are fully automatic, so as far as I can tell, you got your FOID card and you know where to shop, you can pick one up. I don’t think you’re going to find any of these up at Farm and Fleet, though.”
Lynch nodded. “OK. Let’s start with the domestic groups. Find out who to call. See if anyone washed out or got pushed out for being hinky.”
“OK.”
“What about Marslovak?”
“Did get some interesting shit there. Couple years back he finished a big-ass roll-up in the waste hauling industry.”
“What is this roll-up crap? Heard him say that on the phone.”
“Find an industry with fairly standardized operations but that’s segmented geographically. Waste hauling is perfect, right? I mean, picking up garbage is picking up garbage. Do it the same in Miami as you do in Seattle. You start buying out a couple big players in major markets, consolidate your back-office functions — HR, marketing, finance. Probably set up an HQ somewhere and shut down admin facilities everywhere else. Now you’ve got economies of scale, so you start undercutting the market on price, even working at a loss at first if the Feds don’t get after you for going predatory. Cripple all the local mom-and-pops cause their cost structures are top-heavy, then you buy them out cheap. Also inverts all your vendor relationships. Suddenly, GM or whoever is selling you a thousand trucks instead of two. So you get to beat them up on the price. Once you own the market, you ratchet your prices back up where they were, and bingo. Guy like Marslovak? He’s not interested in running the thing. Face it, operations is too much like work when you’re used to being the house in a roulette game. Probably sells as soon as he hits critical mass.”
“So you make a pile and put a lot of other people out of business and out of jobs?”
“Not quite that simple. Companies that catch the wave early usually sell at a premium, so they do OK. But yeah. Basically you’re driving inefficiencies out of a fragmented national or regional market model, one of those inefficiencies being people’s jobs. You also wipe out a lot of companies.”
“So that’s gotta piss some people off.”
“In this waste hauling gig, it’s interesting who he might have been pissing off, too. People equal garbage. Businesses equal garbage. So the Big Apple is sort of the Shangri-La of trash. Biggest market in the country. Also, mobbed up to its frontal lobes. Cost structures there were completely out of whack because mostly you had the mafia taking out your garbage, and they don’t work cheap.”
“And Marslovak rolled it up anyway.”
“Big time.”
“That’s good work, Slo-mo. Get what details you can. We’ll go down tomorrow and drop this on Marslovak, see how that shakes out. Get your butt out of the office for a while.”
“What, no ice cream?”
“Buy you a cone on the way back.” Lynch took a step away and then turned back. “Hey, Slo-mo. You dress nice. Think you could maybe give me some pointers?”
Bernstein turned in his chair, gave Lynch a careful look.
“You look OK. Little GAP-commercial generic maybe, but OK.”
“Yeah, but I was thinking of upgrading a little. You seem like you put some effort into this.”
“I’m a Lilliputian Jew, Lynch, not an ex-jock. We’re supposed to use money to get chicks, and I went with the cops instead of the investment bankers. If I don’t at least dress up, bris would’ve been the last time anybody touched my unit. So, you want to push the old sartorial envelope? You got a date or something?”
“Something like that.”
“OK. When?”
“Tonight.”
Bernstein laughed, shook his head. “It’s almost 4.00 Lynch. How much time you got?”
“Picking her up at 7.00.”
Bernstein pulled a planner out of his desk. “I’m going to call my guy at Barney’s, over on North Michigan. Andre. And yes, Lynch, he is gay, so don’t sap him or anything when he measures your inseam, OK? He’ll set you up nice. You’re at least gonna have to get some pants hemmed, which means he’s gonna have to push it through alterations for you, so slip him a little something. Otherwise I look like a schmuck.”
“What, like a five?”
“Like a twenty.”
“Jesus, Slo-mo. Maybe you should be working there.”
“Be a twenty-grand bump in pay if I did.”
CHAPTER 18 — CHICAGO
March, 1971
Lynch jerked awake in bed, looked at the clock. A little after 3am. Dog barking. Not Missy, neighbor’s dog. Somebody shouting, Lynch not able to make it out. Tires squealing in the alley.