by Shane Lusher
I opened the door to the garage and tossed the bag into the receptacle next to the steps and then went back in to wash out my tumbler of scotch.
God, I wanted a cigarette. In the bathroom medicine cabinet I found the jar, unscrewed it in one motion like a junkie tying off an arm, and put a cinnamon stick in my mouth.
Up close and concentrated, cinnamon is bitter; makes the mouth salivate. I had read about it on the internet, some hundred-dollar packet of Chinese medicine guaranteed to help you quit. The one thing I remembered from that had been the cinnamon sticks.
The thing about cinnamon is that when you suck on it long enough it turns into mush in your mouth. I spit into the sink and was just about to reach for the faucet.
“Yuck! What, are you chewing tobacco now?”
Nine years old, going on thirty-five.
Erin stood in the doorway, four and a half feet tall, her hair a bird’s nest of a shambles, and while I searched for something to say, she said,
“Are you done in here? I have to pee.”
Tad had said she would save my life, and she was, it seemed, going to do that, even if it killed me. Since Tad had been gone, I’d cut down drastically on my drinking and hadn’t smoked a single cigarette in a month.
I suspected it was because when you have a high-maintenance pre-pubescent girl around, you always have something to do.
I made her scrambled eggs and fried ham—which she has every day for breakfast, just like her grandmother, who’d died 6 months before Erin was born—and then put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and went outside for my morning run.
I’d just finished my warm-up of jumping jacks and random bouncing and was stretching my calves against an old ash tree when the rumble of a car turning into the lane off Franklin Street brought me from the driveway around the back of the house.
A half mile away, churning up dust and chunks of rock, Dave Rassi’s unmarked Tazewell County Sheriff’s vehicle careened down the gravel lane. He made a perfunctory tap on the brakes—more of a gesture than an actual attempt—and hit the bridge and bottomed out. The remaining two hundred feet was all acceleration, albeit uphill.
“You're going to blow out that bridge,” I said when Rassi had stopped in front of me, his window down.
He ignored me. “Where’d you get those shorts?” he asked. “You inherit those from your Dad?”
Rassi folded his length out of the car, squaring his gym-molded shoulders as he stood. Rassi had been Tad’s golden boy; smart, savvy beyond his years, made detective at twenty-five. Now he was thirty-one. He reminded me a lot of who I had been at his age.
I glanced down at my pants, red short-shorts with a spaghetti line going up the side.
“Got them at a J-Lo convention,” I said. “And I meant what I said about the bridge.”
“You inherited that one from your Dad, too,” Rassi said, pulling out a stick of gum. He offered me the pack. I waved my second cinnamon stick of the morning at him and gave him a look that told him not to mention it.
For all that he reminded you of a cover of the old Dick and Jane books, with his whiter-than-white teeth and his sheaf of blonde hair, the first impression you got from Rassi was never one of confidence.
He’d just hang back, looking at you with his somber hound dog’s eyes, and then just as the conversation was about to end, he would grin and say,
“I’m sorry. I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Dave Rassi.”
And just like that, you liked him. I’d never been able to really understand that part, the way he could disarm people, but Tad had seen a lot in Rassi. He’d made him head detective, which doubled in Tazewell County as chief deputy, the second in command.
“What are you out so early for?” I asked.
We went up to sit on the porch.
“Aren't you supposed to be up at Molly's, drinking coffee and shooting the shit with the farmers?”
“No,” Rassi said. “Got something real to look at today. Thought you might like to ride along and have a look at it, too.” He took his gum out of his mouth and wrapped it carefully in a slip of paper before placing it in the pocket of his trousers.
“You don't have anything better to do, anyway, except fiddle with your computer.” He stood up.
“‘Fiddle with my computer?’ I was going to go for a run,” I said.
“Sure you were,” Rassi said. I followed him back down off the porch and over to his car. He opened his door. “Come on. I'll tell you about it on the way.”
“Let me just give Erin a head’s up,” I said.
“We’ll be right back. Fifteen minutes. Half an hour, tops.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Fire department decide not to come on this one?”
“Something like that,” Rassi said. “Jurisdiction issues.”
“Jurisdiction issues?”
I looked down into the black hole that had once been a house, now reduced to its foundation, some of the patches of carbon still smoking in what appeared to be a basement workroom, and then out over the field of corn behind the house. Apparently there was indeed a breeze, for although I didn't feel anything, the stalks seemed to be swaying back and forth.
“Land of a lotta fucking corn,” I said. I looked back over at Rassi. “So what, they all just sat around and watched it burn?”
“Nowhere to hook up,” Rassi said. He shrugged. “They weren't sure where they were supposed to go to get water.”
“What?”
“Look, man, this ain't the Chicago Fire Department, okay? It's all volunteer out here. Don't you know that?”
“Guess I've been away too long,” I said. “Maybe I should keep my well primed, huh?”
“Might be a good idea,” Rassi said. He motioned to a ladder leading down from the poured concrete stoop into the basement.
“Crime scene been here?” I asked.
“Think I'd be bringing you down here if they hadn't?” he asked. “Dubois is making us buy our own coffee now, he's so shitted that someone is going to come in and audit him for that.”
I looked over at Dave. He was chewing on his lip, bringing his hand up to his mouth, his eyes darting back and forth across the dark hole in front of him. I remembered I was nearly ten years older than he was. He seemed like he could use someone to talk to.
“Something wrong, Dave?” I asked.
“What?” he asked. “You mean, other than the fact we’re standing over a big, smoking meth hole I’ve got to investigate?”
“No,” I said. “You seem a little bit on edge.”
Dave pulled at his lower lip. “I don’t know. Maybe,” he said, but didn’t elaborate.
I let it go at that. “So what happened?” I asked.
“Guy named Justin Sweeney. Cooking meth in the basement. It got out of hand, and the whole house went up. It took him with it.”
Rassi looked at me and shrugged. It was a gesture that said this special case was nothing out of the ordinary.
I thought about Rassi’s position in the sheriff’s department.
Even though he’d beaten Dubois in the election, Tad had hired Dubois on as a detective, citing his experience, and for five years, Rassi had been his boss. Now Rassi was still chief deputy, but Dubois was above him.
That had to be a stressful situation.
“Well, with nobody else running, he does have a say,” I said as I climbed down into the smoldering pit. “Right, Dave?”
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“With the coffee,” I said. “He’ll be sheriff come fall, and then it’ll be official. That is, unless someone else runs against him.” I looked at him.
“I'm not interested in being sheriff,” Rassi said, kneeling down on the scorched concrete, where a clearing had been swept out and a chalk outline drawn. “Anyway,” he said. “This is where they found him, obviously.”
I knelt down next to him. “Cause of death?” I asked.
“You mean other than massive crystal meth lab explosion?” Rassi snorted. He s
tood up and looked over the lip of the foundation and out into the corn.
“He was killed,” he said quietly. “Somebody stabbed him the back of the neck with an arrow.”
“Come again?”
“You know, the kind of arrows they use in bow hunting? The ones that look like a cluster of razor blades? At least that’s what Kelly thinks.”
“Did somebody find an arrow?” I asked.
“Found a bow case on the garage floor,” Dave said, standing up. “But there was no smoke in his lungs, which means that he was dead before the fire started.”
“Could also just mean he was knocked dead by the explosion.”
“Yeah, it could, except for the cross-shaped wound they found on the back of his head.” He gestured toward his neck. “The body was burned, but he’d fallen backwards, and the brain was still intact. Or at least the part that didn’t have a big path cut through it by a very sharp object.”
Rassi looked at me for a moment as I pondered what he’d just told me.
“So, somebody killed a meth cooker with an arrow,” I said. “Creative, but so what?”
“They found footprints in the yard,” he said. “Size ten, men’s.”
I looked out over the cracked expanse in front of me, a patchwork of crabgrass in various stages of death and dying. The fissured earth had given way to footprints leading from the corn field to the house, and back again.
“Somebody pissed on the body,” Rassi added.
“Maybe they were trying to put out the fire,” I said. I looked at him and raised my eyebrows. “They can tell that, even though he was burned?”
“Table fell on him,” Rassi said. “He was burned, but recognizable.”
“I see.”
“Angie Hansen said you were down to see Alisha Stamm,” Rassi said, changing the subject.
“And? Am I not allowed to do that?”
“You know we got her for it,” he said. “You know all the facts of the case. She did it.”
“You trying to warn me off?” I asked
Rassi shrugged. “It’s just that we know she did it,” he said. “You know she did it. Leave it alone. And you can’t go bugging guards doing jail transfers. That’s not good for Tad.”
“Well,” I said. “I don’t have much to do otherwise. And if there’s a chance somebody else did this-”
I let that hang, because I knew that he was right.
We both stood and looked out over the incline of Route 9 which led out to Springfield Road. I could feel the heat from the foundation around me and the sun beginning to really beat down, culminating in a throbbing, late bit of a hangover that hadn’t been there when I’d gotten out of bed. I felt a trickle of sweat leave one of my armpits and travel downward toward my waist, and suddenly I was wishing for the suffocating comfort of my air-conditioned home.
“I'm surprised you didn't hear the explosion, Dana,” Rassi said as we climbed out of the pit. “It's what, a mile and a half, two miles to your house?”
“Well, you see, this whole thing is a cover up,” I said. “I set it up to look like an accident. I couldn't stand the fact that Justin Sweeney was undercutting my meth operation, and selling to my customers behind my back. Someone had to do it.”
“Go to hell,” Rassi said and began climbing back out of the hole.
“Well,” I said. “So, why did you want me to come out here with you?”
“Other than airing you out?” Rassi asked. “Maybe you needed to get some air.”
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” he said. He kicked at the gravel in the driveway.
“Anyway,” I said. “Since when do you need to air me out? I'm on vacation.”
He snorted. “When you go on vacation, you don't get sent on it for punching a doctor.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “I didn’t get sent anywhere. I cleared all that up before I left.”
“The way Tad told it, Chicago PD pulled some strings and got you out of it.”
“You mean I agreed to settle on a hundred thousand dollars, to bribe the bastard, so that he wouldn’t press charges?” I asked. By this time we were standing next to Rassi’s car. “Besides, you would’ve punched him, too.”
Rassi shook his head. We’d been over this before.
“Don’t tell me the guy was doing his job,” I said. “He should have been saving my child’s life, not helping the police interrogate my wife.”
Dave looked away. I stuck a cinnamon stick in my mouth and crunched down on it.
“Why did you bring me out here, Dave?” I asked again.
Rassi motioned toward the car, and we got in. He turned the engine over and backed out on to Route 9 and drove toward Pekin.
“How much time you got?” he asked. He cracked his window and the morning humidity flooded the car.
I looked at my watch. “About an hour.”
He nodded. He slowed down at the red light at Springfield Road, looked in both directions, and then sped on through.
“This is the second murder.” He looked over at me. “Darren Roe was killed the same way.”
“Who’s Darren Roe?”
“You don’t know about that?”
I shook my head. “Before my time. Enlighten me.”
“Darren Roe is the guy that went missing last fall? Didn't turn up for eight weeks. They found him in a shallow grave out behind the storage shed on his property.”
“Out in the country?”
“In Dillon. Right in the middle of town, more or less. Don’t know how anybody could have missed that, but there he was. I was involved in the search, but it wasn't me or any of my boys looking around the property itself. We were out in the woods, in the river bottom from here all the way up to Creve Coeur on foot. Nobody found anything.”
“Why were you looking there?” I asked.
“Supposedly, the last thing anybody knew, he was going hunting,” Rassi said. “On the day he went missing, he dropped his kid off at school and then wanted to get in a few hours in a deer stand down by where 98 hits 29, by the river.”
“Not much ground to hunt on down there,” I said. “I thought that was state ground.”
“Tell you the truth, so did I. But it's private. We talked to the owner. The guy was there by his permission. We didn't find anything on the property, no car, no tracks, no guns, nothing.”
“So, he either didn't make it there, or left before he was killed.”
“Right,” Rassi said.
We were entering the outskirts of Pekin, your standard American sprawl of strip malls, gas stations and shopping centers.
Rassi went on.
“Nobody was even really sure Roe was killed, except his wife. And about a hundred people writing commentary online on articles in the Pekin Observer.”
“What did Kelly have to say?”
“Not much,” Rassi said. “That's the thing. By the time they found the body it was so badly decomposed you could barely tell anything. No broken bones, no sign of trauma, nothing in the autopsy to suggest poisoning. Just a hell of a lot of mysterious circumstances, and enough people beating drums to make us all look bad.”
“You got good lab work on everything?” I asked.
“Sure, as good as we can get,” Rassi said. He grimaced. “As good as you can get, you know, given who's dead.”
“Problems with this Roe kid?”
“Oh, just your normal stuff, one underage drinking citation a few years back, a couple of speeding tickets. Had a wife, a kid, a job as a forklift driver. Always showed up to work on time.”
“So, not a bad guy,” I finished.
“Not a member of the Country Club, either,” Rassi said, glancing over at me.
“So, if they couldn’t determine cause of death, how did you figure out somebody had done it with an arrowhead?”
“We never put this out, but right before Kelly signed off on him she found two notches on the back of the skull.”
“And those matched up
to an arrowhead?”
“No,” Rassi said. “Not at the time. She just remembered it yesterday morning when she was doing the autopsy on Sweeney, because she had a complete pattern.”
“So you’ve re-opened the case,” I said.
“Was never closed.”
“Didn’t that draw some flak from the family?”
“There are ways to shield the family from some developments.”
I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t ask.
“I have to get back,” I said, watching Rassi take out another stick of gum. We’d just pulled up in front of Molly’s Café, on Broadway.
He sighed.
“You said you had an hour,” he said. “And I need your help.”
I looked at him. He’d told me it would take half an hour, tops.
“You want to run for Sheriff after all, don’t you?”
He ignored that. “I want you to help me solve these killings.”
I watched an elderly couple move slowly toward the door to Molly’s. The man held the door for his wife, and she shuffled inside, moving in slow motion.
“I’m a software developer,” I said. “I sit behind a computer? I do shit nobody understands and get paid for it? Jesus, I’m lucky I can still do that.”
“You solved those murders in Chicago,” Dave said.
“I didn’t solve anything,” I said.
“You wrote that software.”
“Which was bought by the Chicago Police,” I said. “Their property. I don’t get access anymore.”
Dave nodded. “Let's get some coffee.”
“I can’t do anything,” I said, thinking I was repeating myself.
Dave opened his door, but remained seated.
“You know, I always wanted to ask you,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“John Wallace. Why’d they call him the Chicago Shopper?”
“It was supposed to be a play on words,” I explained. “The guy left the bodies in shopping carts. Somebody said ‘Chicago Chopper.’ Somebody else said ‘Chicago Shopper.’”
Dave looked over at me for a moment and then got out of the car. “Yeah, but ‘Shopper’ just sounds hokey.”
“Well, when the press gets a hold of something, you don’t exactly have creative input,” I said. “You should know that.”