by J. D. Barker
“The Finicky House for Wayward Children,” Poole said.
This time, Porter did look up. “You know it?”
“It’s written on your evidence board.”
Porter nodded. “Vincent Weidner was there. Paul Upchurch—” He stood and went over to the board. “—these two girls, too—Kristina Niven and Tegan Savala. You need to run their names. They may be connected. There were several boys there, too. I’m still trying to identify them. Before going to this home, Bishop was held at someplace called the Camden Treatment Center. You’ll want to pull whatever records they have on him from there. That’s medical, so you’ll need to get a warrant, but I can’t imagine a judge denying you.”
“Sam, what can you tell me about Montehugh Labs?”
Porter frowned for a second, then looked up at the board. “You’re right. That should be up here.” He found a blank spot in the top right corner and scribbled in the name under the heading: Other Locations of Concern.
“What do you know about it?”
“That’s where Bishop said he got the virus. Have you confirmed that? If not, we need to. At the very least, they can tell us how much he has.”
“Bishop is in custody.”
It took a moment for the words to wash over Porter. When they did, he returned to the table and collapsed into his chair. “When?”
“About nine-thirty this morning, he turned himself in to Nash at some abandoned building downtown.”
“He turned himself in? Was his mother with him? What building?”
“Why does it matter?”
“Was it the Guyon Hotel?”
Poole shook his head. “No, not the Guyon. 426 McCormick. No sign of the woman who called herself Sarah Werner.”
Porter rose, wrote the address under Montehugh. “I don’t know if the location means anything, but best to keep it up there just in case. We need to find her, too. She can’t be far.” His eyes went wide, and he asked his next question as if his brain were working on a slight delay. “Did he give you the rest of the virus? Did he tell you where it is?”
Poole didn’t answer him, not at first, because he wasn’t sure just what to say to that. He decided on the truth. “Bishop said you have it.”
If this somehow shocked Porter, his face didn’t betray him. “What?”
“He said you broke into Montehugh and stole the virus, not him.”
Porter smiled, looked like he was about to laugh. “That’s crazy. Why would I steal the virus?” The smile left his face, and he stood. “Is he here? In the building? Where did you bring him?”
“Sit down, Sam. I need to show you something.” This time, it was Poole who got up. He went to the television in the corner of the room and placed the disc in the DVD player. Using the remote, he turned on the television.
Sam hadn’t moved.
“Sit, Sam.”
Bishop’s face filled the screen, and Porter did sit.
32
Clair
Day 5 • 12:06 PM
“We’ve got two bodies outside the hospital and two inside. That means he’s somehow getting in and out unnoticed. He’s got to be using the tunnels,” Clair said, glaring at Stout.
They were in his cramped office along with two of his security guards, Klozowski, and one Metro officer. She’d left another uniformed officer to guard Larissa Biel and Kati Quigley; two others were still missing.
“My guys have covered every inch of the basement, and there’s no tunnel,” Stout told her.
“There’s a tunnel,” she insisted.
“We’ve got some kind of copycat locked here in the hospital with us.”
“That doesn’t explain the bodies found outside the hospital.”
“Do you have time-of-death on them? Maybe they were killed and positioned before the lockdown here at Stroger,” Stout suggested. “Or maybe there’s two of them—Bishop killed the ones outside before turning himself in, and someone else killed the ones in here.”
Clair was getting frustrated. “Then who killed the one in South Carolina? Can’t forget him. We’ve got a body down there, too.”
Stout ran his hand over his shaved head, appearing annoyed at the growing stubble. “I was a beat cop with Metro. I never worked Homicide, but we were always told to keep an open mind, never jump to conclusions. What if the murders here in the hospital have nothing to do with Bishop or the 4MK killings? What if someone in the hospital, maybe even a member of the staff, is using the current circumstances as cover smoke? They killed these two people to settle some kind of score or agenda and just made them look like 4MK murders to cover their tracks. Your captain said as much. What if he’s right?”
Clair pressed her palms against her temples and lowered her head. “Kloz, you said you linked both victims to Bishop, didn’t you?”
Klozowski had brought his laptop with him and was busy tapping away at God-knows-what. He looked up at her. “Huh?”
“Nice of you to join us.” She repeated her initial question.
Kloz shook his head. “I linked Christie Albee to Upchurch’s insurance forms, but I haven’t found anything to tie in Sandford Pentz from Cardiology. I’m still looking.”
There was a chalkboard on the wall in Stout’s office covered with scheduling information. Clair went over to it, erased everything, and wrote down the names of all the victims discovered today:
Jane Doe – Rose Hill Cemetery
Jane Doe – Red Line tracks / Clark Station
Tom Langlin – Simpsonville courthouse steps
Stanford Pentz – Stroger Hospital
Christie Albee – Stroger Hospital
Above them, she wrote the phrase Father, forgive me and circled it. She stared at the text for several moments, then turned back to Stout. “Any connection between Pentz and Christie Albee?”
“What, like were they sleeping together?”
Clair shrugged.
Stout thought about this. “Not that I know of, but that kind of thing happens a lot around here. I think it’s the long shifts, all the time together and not with their families. The stress of the job. It’s possible, I suppose.”
“Can you poke around a little bit? See what you can find out?”
He didn’t answer her. Instead, he let out a sigh.
Clair’s eyes narrowed. “What, not a fan of homework?”
“It’s not that,” he said. “We’re spread thin already, and my focus needs to be on keeping the peace in that cafeteria. Those people are ready to explode. It’s not a question of if anymore, it’s when. You saw them—they’re ready to turn on each other, on us, whoever. That happens, we don’t have the manpower to stop them.”
She knew he was right, she needed to worry about that, too. She needed to worry about a lot of things right now. “What can you tell me about that doctor who offered to help? The one who tripped up my crime scene. Barrington?”
Stout said, “Nice enough guy. The staff seems to like him. He’s been here at Stroger about a decade or so. I think he was up in New Hampshire before that.”
“He graduated from Stanford,” Kloz chimed in. “Then completed his residency in a small hospital outside Dartmouth, New Hampshire. Looks like he went to high school nearby, so he probably grew up in that area. Spent a good chunk of his career there. Started here at Stroger in 2007. He’s focused on oncology his entire career. He was a consulting physician on Upchurch’s case. That got Barrington on the list and locked up here with the rest of us. I’ll keep digging in case he’s got a skeleton out there, but I don’t see anything.”
Clair processed this and turned back to Stout. “I don’t trust anyone right now, but we do need the help. I suggest we take it and keep him close. Maybe he can be our eyes and ears in that group. He’s been working with the CDC. I got a text from Maltby about an hour ago.” She nodded at the computer on Stout’s desk. “We’ll need all the video footage for the hallways around Pentz’s office and anything you have near the bathroom where Christie Albee was found.”
/> He exchanged a look with one of his security officers, the younger of the two.
Clair’s eyes narrowed. “You have video, right? I’ve seen cameras all over this hospital.”
“We do have cameras,” Stout said hesitantly, “but they’re not recording properly.”
“What do you mean?”
“Our IT guy says the system got infected with some kind of virus or malware. Everything is recording, but the time stamps are all off. He’s been working on it for over a week. He tried reformatting the drives, reinstalled the operating system. He even swapped out the recording hardware. Everything works well for a few hours, then the problem comes back. The more time that passes, the worse it gets. He said whatever it is, it doesn’t just rewrite the date and time once, it keeps rewriting and speeds up over time.”
“Progressive displacement,” Klozowski said. “First it rewrites the original time stamp across the board with a bad one, then runs back through and rewrites the bad one with a worse one, and keeps going. I’ve seen this before. It’s just a repetitive pattern. The real smart ones keep some of the footage in order so it appears the sequences are correct. The really smart ones use facial recognition and link footage with the same people together.”
They were all just staring at him.
Kloz rolled his eyes. “You’ve got two people walking down a hallway together today. Let’s say those same two people walked down the same hallway together two weeks ago. A smart virus will swap the two but keep all the surrounding footage in chronological order.”
Clair groaned. “What’s the point of that?”
Kloz shrugged his shoulders. “Hackers like to fuck with people in new and interesting ways. I’m sure someone saw it as a challenge and wrote the virus to see if they could pull it off. Once a virus like that is written, it goes up on the Darknet, gets copied, and becomes a tool in the box of other hackers. Circle of life, e-edition.”
“Can it be fixed?” Clair asked.
“Probably. Maybe. I don’t know, I’ll have to look. If your IT guy has gone through all those steps and it’s still happening, that means the virus is living somewhere else on your network. It monitors the hardware, and if something is swapped out or fixed, the virus installs again on the clean equipment. That’s fairly easy to do. You can hide something like that anywhere—it could be in a router, one of the cameras, a switch, or any computer attached to the network.”
“I need you on this right away,” Clair told him.
Klozowski’s face went blank, and his mouth dropped open.
“Kloz?”
His hands started to dart around him. He quickly found his mask and fumbled it over his face, then sneezed into it. Not once, but four times. When it was over, he lowered the mask and looked inside. “Oh, that’s gross.”
“I need you on this right away,” Clair repeated, ignoring the sneezing fit.
He nodded. “Yes, in my weakened state of being, as I crawl down the hallway toward Death’s Door ravaged by sickness, I will work for you until the bitter end.”
“The people of Chicago thank you for your service.”
Clair turned back to Stout. “How many guys do you have looking for the tunnels?”
“Two.”
“Okay, keep them on it.” Before he could protest, she looked over at his other two security guards. Neither had said a word since arriving. “I want the two of you in that cafeteria. Stay as visible as possible but not threatening—I mean, don’t stand in front of the doors with your arms crossed and scowls on your faces—wander the crowd, get to know the people who don’t work here, talk to the ones who do. Try to find some way to calm whatever is brewing in there. You hear anything—anything at all—pertaining to our two dead bodies, I want to know about it, understand?”
The two of them nodded.
To her lone Metro officer, a lanky kid with close-cropped brown hair who still had that new-academy smell, she said, “Think you can organize interviews?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Treat this like you would a house-to-house. Talk to each person. Find out if they have a connection to either of our two victims, if they know Upchurch. If they saw anything at all. Try to put together the movements of Pentz and Albee. Who saw them last…whatever you can learn.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What’s your name?”
“Officer Dale Sutter, ma’am.”
“When was the last time you saw Henricks and Childs?” Her two missing officers.
“About an hour before Albee was found in the bathroom. Henricks said he felt like he was catching a cold. He was pale, and his eyes were all red. He looked like…” His voice trailed off.
“Like the rest of us?” Clair finished for him.
He nodded. “Childs didn’t look good, either.” Sutter hesitated for a moment, then added, “Henricks said something about finding a bed somewhere where he could lay down for a minute. Childs might have went, too.”
Clair would have killed for a bed right now. If she found one of her officers taking a nap, she knew exactly who she’d kill.
Raising her phone, she tried calling them both again—both went straight to voice mail. “Still no answer.”
Stout picked up the phone on his desk. “I’ll have them paged. Cell service is horrible in the building.”
Stout’s page came out over the speaker in the corner of his office. She heard it echoing out in the hallway. A moment later, his phone rang. He picked up the receiver and listened to someone on the other end of the call, his eyes on Clair. When he hung up, he said, “That was Dr. Webber in Pathology. She’s got a cause of death on Pentz and asked if you could come down.”
33
Poole
Day 5 • 12:07 PM
As Bishop’s face filled the television monitor, Poole raised the remote for the DVD player and hit play. The video ticked forward. Porter’s eyes locked on the screen.
“Why did you turn yourself in today?” Poole heard himself say from the television’s thin speakers. Aside from the corner of his head and a little bit of his shoulder, he wasn’t visible on screen. His back was to the camera. The camera was pointed at Bishop, over Poole’s shoulder.
Bishop glanced down at his hands for a second, then forward. “I’ve been in contact with Detective Porter for months. I wanted to turn myself in sooner, but he told me not to. He said it would jeopardize his search for the real 4MK killer. He needed the public to think I was 4MK and still out there somewhere while he hunted for the person who was really responsible.”
“That’s complete and utter bullshit,” Porter said. “Why would I tell him that? You saw my apartment. I’ve been trying to track him down from the moment we lost him.”
Poole raised a hand, silencing him, and pointed back at the screen.
“I was stupid,” Bishop went on. “Naive. I shouldn’t have believed him. I should have gone to someone else, but he had me convinced. He kept saying he was close and it wouldn’t be much longer, kept telling me that, stringing me along. A day turned into a week, a week turned into a month, then several months. When I finally confronted him, he shot that woman, then tried to shoot me. I had to run again. I didn’t have a choice.”
“At the Guyon Hotel?”
“Yeah, at the Guyon.”
“Why would he kill her?”
“He said she knew him, from his time in Charleston as a rookie. He said she was one of the last people alive who knew the truth about him.” Bishop looked down at the table for a moment, rolled his thumb and index finger together, then turned back to Poole. “He said, ‘she was there, she saw me do it, and she has to go,’ those were his exact words. Then he looked up for a second, at nothing in particular, whispered ‘father, forgive me,’ and pulled the trigger.”
Bishop’s eyes got teary. He tried to wipe them with the back of his hand and had to bend down due to the restraints. “He shot her at point blank, right in the head, right in front of me! I was in shock, but somehow I snapped out of it
when he turned the gun on me and shot again. He barely missed. I managed to get away.”
Sitting across from Bishop at the table on the television, Poole took a moment to consider this, then leaned forward a bit, his head blocking Bishop’s face for a moment before he settled back. “What about the woman who was with him? Sarah Werner.”
Bishop’s face grew puzzled. “There wasn’t anyone with him. Unless she was outside or somewhere else in the hotel. I didn’t see anyone with him.”
“Porter said she was your mother.”
Bishop’s eyes closed and he let out a deep sigh. “My mother died years ago in a fire at our old house. My father, too. I’m sure it’s all in my DCS file somewhere. There was a lake on our property, and I used to go out there a lot to skip rocks. If I hadn’t been at the lake that particular day, I probably would have died too. I’d been gone a few hours, and when I came back, the house was burning completely out of control. The fire department was there, but I could tell they had given up. One of the firemen spotted me and asked if it was my house, and I told him it was. Then he asked me where my parents were, and I knew they were inside, I just knew, but I couldn’t bring myself to say it aloud. I don’t remember much after that. I was just a kid. They brought me to someplace called the Camden Treatment Center for a few weeks to recover while they tried to find a relative who could take me in. When they couldn’t find anyone, I went into the foster care system.”
“At someplace called the Finicky House for Wayward Children, right?”
This seemed to puzzle Bishop. “I…I don’t know what that is. After Camden, I went to live with the Watsons about an hour and a half outside the city—Woodstock, Illinois—with David and Cindy Watson.”
“Watson? Like the alias you used when you joined CSI for Metro?”
Bishop sighed again and tried to raise his hands. The chains clinked through the metal ring on the table. “That was stupid, I know. But I was worried that if I used my real name with Metro, someone would read about the fire and the way my parents died…I didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for me or give me some kind of preferential treatment, so I figured it was best if I used a different name. Back when I was a kid, when the Watsons first adopted me, a few reporters sniffed around. They wanted to write about the fire. They enrolled me in school as ‘Paul Watson’ to throw them off.” He waved a hand through the air. “Paul was David’s middle name. I guess it worked, they left me alone, and the name stuck. As far as I know, they never legally changed my name. I suppose I should have done it at some point. I just never got around to it, and it felt less and less important as time went on.”