Cold Love

by Conell, Zach

  And yet, on a personal level, he was still utterly unconvinced of the official account. It just didn’t feel right to him, and he was therefore unwilling to toss his original supposition—that the professor had been murdered—out of the window over the lack of visible evidence on the body to support the idea of an unnatural cause of death.

  When Cillian told Rose about his findings—or more accurately, the lack of findings—she seemed strongly dismayed as well, but quickly reiterated that she was certain her father had been killed.

  “We will find a way to prove it,” she stubbornly insisted. “We will, somehow.”

  Cillian could only nod in silent agreement.

  The day got only worse after that, because their preparations to deal with the Fedora Freak, in case he entered the scene, turned out to have been futile. The chain-smoker with the yellow-gray hair did not show up at the funeral home, nor at Erdmann’s apartment when Rose visited it later while Cillian kept watch outside.

  “After what happened at the station, he probably figured that we might be expecting him and decided to stay away for now,” Rose explained once they were back in Cillian’s hotel room.

  “I guess so,” he replied as he fell down on the bed.

  The unsatisfactory outcome of the day had brought Cillian in a dispirited mood. While Rose delved into the case files yet again to prepare for their planned visit to the SNNs the following day, he lay pondering whether there was any point of them going there at all. So far they had found nothing concrete to indicate that Rose’s father had died an unnatural death, let alone a murder weapon. Neither did they have any witnesses, nor a suspect—other than the Fedora Freak, whom they knew nothing about—and the only semisuspicious character they had been able to contact about the matter, Dr. Leamington, had a watertight alibi. Furthermore, they couldn’t get any of Erdmann’s collaborators to talk as one of them had died and the other two had made themselves unavailable for comment. He found it hard to believe that visiting the South Side would make any difference. Erdmann himself had mentioned that the residents he talked to during his lasts visits there appeared petrified to even acknowledge, let alone discuss, the presence of the glacier-fueled headhunter squads. So why would any of them now be willing to open up about the topic to him and Rose, two people whom none of the residents had ever met before?

  Cillian deliberated how he might share his doubts with Rose without giving the impression that he was merely chickening out and trying to get out of his promise to help her. In an act of conscious procrastination, he took Rose’s tablet computer, navigated to the folder containing all the videos from Erdmann’s USB drive, and randomly opened one. He pretended to himself that watching footage of a headhunter squad during a training in one of the SNNs would help him make up his mind about whether they should go to the South Side tomorrow or not.

  The file Cillian had selected was one of the videos from the pen drive Erdmann had found in his pocket after visiting the SNNs on Tuesday. It showed about a dozen glacier fighters practicing with their automatic assault rifles in an almost hypnotizing continuous loop of speedy assembling, loading, unloading, and disassembling, while two headhunters were observing them from a position on the right-hand side of the screen, fairly close to the camera.

  Cillian was surprised when he didn’t hear any sound, as he remembered all videos having sound the first time he watched them. He then noticed a pair of earphones lying close to the tablet on the bed that seemed to be connected to the tablet. When he put them in his ears, nothing changed, however, so he increased the volume. Gradually the sound of the video became audible, but the sound did not come from his earphones. He checked the headphone jack and, noticing that it was not fully plugged in, gave it a push, thereby unleashing a hurricane of sound in his ears. It now dawned on Cillian that he had increased the volume of the tablet according to the speakers, but the earphones required a much lower volume, explaining the deafening noise in his ears now that they had been activated. Acting on instinct rather than rational deliberation, he frantically began pushing the button to lower the volume, instead of simply pulling out the headphone jack, thus only gradually limiting the pain in his ears. However, after pushing the button only a few times, way before the volume had decreased to a tolerable level, he stopped trying to lower it at all.

  “Cillian, are you deaf! That’s bad for your ears!”

  Rose, who had been sitting behind the desk, bent over her laptop, had turned around and currently looked at him with an expression of concern. He paused the video.

  “Rose, come listen to this. I think it’s a voice,” he said cryptically as he took out one of his earphones and held it up to her. She walked over to him and took the earphone without sitting down. Cillian continued playing the file. In a lucky coincidence, the prolonged exposure to the audio track at a high volume had enabled him to detect a low, muffled sound in the recording, which he had not noticed before. It resembled a human voice.

  “It does sound like a voice,” Rose agreed, “but who’s speaking?”

  “I think this guy,” Cillian responded, pointing to one of the headhunters at the bottom right corner of the screen who seemed to be addressing his neighbor.

  “Wait, give me a minute, I think I can fix this,” Rose stated as she walked back over to the desk. “I have a professional audio-editing program that should allow me to clean up the audio track of this video file, so we may be able to hear what that headhunter is saying.”

  “Don’t you need the USB drive?” Cillian wondered.

  “No, I already copied all the files to my laptop,” she responded as she went to work.

  Ten minutes later she invited Cillian to listen to a significantly altered version of the audio track. To his astonishment, he was able to make out most of what the headhunter was saying over the course of a few seconds:

  … will start on Monday, so he told me that we … ready for phase two by then. And we better be, you know the Stigmata Man don’t mess…

  Then the audio stopped abruptly.

  “What about the rest?” Cillian said.

  “It’s inaudible, because the recruits in the back—or soldiers or whatever they are—make too much noise after this until the end of the video,” Rose explained.

  “And the beginning?”

  “There’s nothing before this. It starts in the middle of this, unfortunately. But it’s already quite something, don’t you think?” She scrutinized him with a significant look.

  “Yes, it sounds like that,” Cillian admitted, trying to estimate the significance of their discovery. “You are quite a force to be reckoned with behind that laptop.”

  “Thanks. You should see me when I’m playing solitaire. Now that will blow you away,” she joked.

  “I don’t doubt it, McCormick,” he replied with a smile.

  Suddenly the case of Reinhart Erdmann appeared quite differently to Cillian’s mind. It wasn’t that he considered the audio clip they now had at their disposal to be a breakthrough revelation, but the way he had felt while watching her uncover this new lead behind her laptop, with a look of utmost concentration on her delicate face, made it undeniably plain that he enjoyed being with Rose and that he wanted her to be happy. He refused to admit that the attraction he felt was based on a romantic love for her, but he could not deny she evoked his admiration and definitely some kind of affection. And for that reason alone, he was willing to give both her and the case the benefit of the doubt.

  Cillian and Rose spent some time discussing the significance of the audio track, in particular whether it meant that someone named the “Stigmata Man” was behind the headhunter scheme and, if so, who this person could be. They also hypothesized what “phase two” could refer two. But when they realized they had too little information to go beyond the realm of the highly speculative, and their preliminary internet search for the Stigmata Man didn’t reveal anything useful either, they decided to call it a night so that they could wake up early the next morning to prepare for th
eir visit to Chicago city hall and, in case they had no success with Mulvaney, the South Side.

  Cillian proposed for them to sleep in their own beds “for a change,” to which Rose responded with a nervous chuckle. She didn’t seem too eager to leave Cillian’s room, however, and deep down he didn’t want her to go. But in the end they said good night anyway and parted ways. The night that followed went by in a flash for Cillian, since he slept as peacefully as he had the night before.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Their attempt to visit Brian Mulvaney in his office in city hall was as unsuccessful as Cillian had feared. They only managed to speak to Mulvaney’s assistant, who told them that the alderman wasn’t in but that he would most certainly call them back if they would be so kind to leave their number. Rose did give her number, but neither of them entertained any hopes that the city council member would actually fulfill the promise of his employee. And so their next destination was the South Side.

  Cillian and Rose decided to take the “L” train to 84th station in the neighborhood that housed three of the five people Rose’s father had spoken to on the previous Tuesday. Afterward they could take the train one stop farther to 91st station in the SNN, where the other two residents of interest lived. Their arrival at 84th station went a little different than they had anticipated, however, because when they exited the train and began walking toward the station exit, they soon learned that the CCFF police task force had set up a temporary checkpoint at the station on their side of the turnstiles just that morning.

  As it turned out, anyone who wished to enter or exit the station now needed to pass through a metal detector and present a valid ID to one of the six heavily armed police officers monitoring the flow of people, three for each direction. On top of that, people going into the neighborhood had to disclose the purpose of their visit and provide the address of their destination. And worst of all, the CCFF officers frequently sent back visitors who did not reside in the neighborhood, seemingly at random, as Cillian and Rose learned from a number of people who had been denied access and were now forced to take a train to a different station and hope that they would have better luck there.

  After Cillian proposed to walk back to the platforms to ask some arriving passengers about the situation at other stations, he and Rose heard stories about various other “L” stations in the South Side where similar kinds of checkpoints had been set up, and some travelers even mentioned the presence of checkpoints at every single stop in the South Side.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Rose whispered to Cillian. “What the hell is going on? Are they trying to hermetically seal off the entire South Side?”

  “I don’t know. This is really messed up,” he replied. “I was aware that Gullfay is crazy, but this is a whole new level of insanity.”

  “Let’s check what we can find out about this on the news,” Rose proposed as she got her phone out of her purse. Cillian moved closer so he could read along with her.

  They discovered that the local media had begun reporting on the checkpoints at the “L” stations only a short while ago, which implied that the measures had been taken unannounced. Coincidentally, they saw that the Chicago Transparent had begun publishing the articles Lucy Tiller had prepared with her staff on the basis of Brian Mulvaney’s information targeting Mayor Gullfay and his administration over the unlawful and counterproductive practices of the zero-tolerance unit. However, when it came to the news of the unannounced checkpoints set up by the CCFF task force along the “L” lines in the South Side, Cillian and Rose were disturbed to read that the CT presented them as “a calculated trial” initiated by the city council, which was supposedly meant as a potential “nonviolent alternative” to the “zero-tolerance force consisting of raging, violent neo-fascistic paramilitary thugs reminiscent of Mussolini’s Blackshirts or Hitler’s SS,” which Mayor Gullfay was “unleashing” upon the South Side in order to address the rampant crime and drug problems in the SNNs.

  While Cillian and Rose could relate to the grim depiction of the zero-tolerance unit, it baffled them that the CT was so naively sympathetic to the actions of the CCFF task force, since the latter police unit seemed to be a mirror image of the former and they failed to see in what way the locked-and-loaded CCFF officers were supposed to constitute a “nonviolent” alternative to anything. Since both of them had been reading the CT for years, they knew that it had an established reputation of consistently questioning government policies and never blindly endorsing them, even the ones that seemed positive at first sight, like Gullfay’s plans to organize the City of Chicago Fair of the Future, which had initially appeared promising until various institutions, including the CT, began calculating how much the event would cost the city. Then it had quickly became clear that the CCFF could not be considered a “golden opportunity for the city” by any stretch of the imagination, even though Mayor Gullfay and the mainstream media had depicted it as such. Therefore Cillian and Rose now failed to understand why the CT was so eager to express support for the CCFF checkpoints.

  “Who the heck is in charge of the Chicago Transparent now?” Rose wondered under her breath. “I am absolutely positive that the CT has never published something this ignorant under Lucy Tiller.”

  “I know. It comes across as an appalling and rather dubious pivot of the CT’s orientation after Tiller’s death,” Cillian replied.

  “Exactly. In any case, we’re screwed when it comes to visiting the South Side,” she determined while she put her phone away.

  Cillian had meanwhile begun observing their surroundings. The “L” station was elevated and located in between two office buildings, one of which was a tall, concrete abomination with over twenty floors and a pointy top, while the other was a one-story building with a flat roof that didn’t even come close to reaching the height of the station. The platform they were currently standing on, which was the same platform they had arrived at, was close to the lower building. Cillian couldn’t believe his luck when he counted that the distance between the metal railing on the side of the platform and the roof was less than ten feet horizontally and about fifteen feet vertically. He turned to Rose.

  “I agree that we don’t need to bother trying to both get through that checkpoint considering our ‘protective measures,’ if you know what I mean,” he said, referring to their weapons. “But I disagree that we’re screwed. If you manage to get through the checkpoint, we’ll be fine. Could I have your purse?”

  “What, you want me to go in alone, unarmed? That’s not happening,” she retorted angrily.

  “No, I know of a way to leave this station with everything we are carrying right now, but you will have to trust me and you need to go first” was his little revealing answer.

  “C’mon, Cillian, you have to give me more than that if you expect me to cooperate. What kind of foolish escapade are you planning?” Rose didn’t so much ask as demanded to know.

  “Fine.” Cillian gave in with a sigh, before explaining in a whisper, “I’ll wrap the weapons in my sweater and drop them on the roof over there, so I can retrieve them once we’ve passed the checkpoint. But I need to see if you can get through first, otherwise there’s no point.”

  Rose looked at him skeptically.

  “And you think this will work? What if someone sees you and informs those CCFF cops?” Rose gazed at him with a questioning look on her face.

  “Who’s going to see me? There’s hardly anyone on the platform, and everyone else is anxiously observing the checkpoint, hoping that they’ll get through,” he casually commented. “If you give me your purse for a second, I’ll show you what I mean.”

  “All right,” Rose relented, handing him her purse.

  He turned over to the railing so that his back was facing the station, and while holding the purse under his coat against his breast, Cillian managed to take Rose’s revolver and slide it into the inner pocket of his coat, before turning around and handing the purse back to her. The whole process took barely five sec
onds.

  “Do you think anyone saw this?” he asked with a self-satisfied grin.

  Rose glanced around at the handful of people scattered across the platform. Most of them had their eyes fixed on the screen of their smartphone, while the rest were either talking on the phone or with a fellow commuter. But regardless of what they were doing, each and every one of them seemed equally oblivious to what Cillian had just done.

  “Fair enough,” Rose said with a shrug. “Let’s try your little scheme. But what am I going to tell the police when they ask me about my purpose in the South Side? I can hardly tell them the truth.”

  “I don’t know. Just think of a heartbreaking story—you’ll do great,” Cillian replied as if it was self-evident that she would succeed no matter what she did. “Just wait for me outside.”

  “Sure…” she whispered skeptically as she began walking toward the checkpoint, seemingly without having the slightest clue why she was doing so.

  Cillian observed her from the side of the platform as she made her way down to the line of people queuing in front of the checkpoint. Five minutes later she handed over her passport to one of the CCFF officers and addressed her with her arms held out in front of her with the palms up in a pleading manner. The officer looked nervously at her colleagues, then back at Rose, and finally nodded, upon which Rose put her purse on the conveyor belt of the X-ray scanner next to the metal detector before walking through the latter.