by Dan O'Shea
The uniforms would call out the wagons, haul all the bodies in so the ME could thaw them out, try to make sure that each death was really an act of God and not the result of some nefarious human agency. Then everybody’d go home and have a drink or six try to figure out why God had to act like that.
“Pretty sky,” Bernstein said. “Only time it looks like this.”
“Yeah, when standing outside to look at it will kill you,” said Lynch. “Let’s go see our stiff.”
“That Stein?” asked Lynch.
“Hard to tell, just looking at his ass,” said the uniform. “Girl outside found the body, says it’s him – right size, right suit – nobody seen him leave, it’s his box, so I’m thinking yes.”
Stein’s body was wedged between the toilet and the wall in the bathroom of the luxury box at the United Center, on his knees, face on the floor, ass in the air. Aside from a little mess next to the three holes at the base of his skull, no blood at all.
“Two thousand dollar suit, luxury box, and you still end up kissing the floor next to the john while you take three in the back of the head,” said Lynch.
“Are all thy conquests shrunk to this little measure?” said Shlomo Bernstein, Lynch’s partner.
“What’s that shit?” asked the uniform.
“Shakespeare probably,” said Lynch. “He does that.”
From the floor of the stadium, the expansive post-game echoey sounds rattled around – the crew breaking down chairs and tables, starting to pull up the floor so they could set up the rink for the Hawks game the next night.
“Got a timeline?” Lynch asked.
“Girl said she’d been in with five to go in the game,” said the uniform. “Stein’s last guest had just left, so she wanted to see did Stein need anything. Stein said he was good. After the game, she came back in, didn’t see him, which she says was weird, cause he’s a pretty gregarious guy – saying hello to everybody coming and going. Anyway, she started cleaning up, bathroom door was open, she looked in, saw the stiff, ran out, called security, they called us. We got the call at 9.53. Five to go in the game is like 9.30 – got a twenty-minute window there.”
“OK, thanks. We got everybody rounded up that had access up here?”
“Everybody that wasn’t gone already, yeah. Got them in the next couple suites up the hall.”
“OK, let ’em know we’ll get to them when we can. Thanks.”
The uniform left the suite.
“So what can you tell me about this Stein, Slo-mo?”
Shlomo Bernstein was an anomaly. North shore, Jewish, big family money, but he always wanted to be a cop. When he tried to go to the academy right after finishing a double major in Economics and Philosophy at Brown, his parents made him a deal – get the MBA just in case you change your mind and want to take over Daddy’s brokerage business someday. So Bernstein blew through Wharton in two years, top of his class, and then became a cop, made detective in record time. Smart as hell, but a physical anomaly, too – five foot seven, maybe 140 pounds. Good looking guy, though, like some junior-sized male model. Sharp dresser.
“Abraham Stein. Huge in commodities – one of the lords of the universe down at the Board of Trade. And one of the real big shots in the Jewish community here – Jewish United Fund chair, Spertus Institute named a building after him. Word is he’s tight with Tel Aviv. His father was Palmach. Family goes way back in the diamond business – that’s where he started.”
“What’s this Palmach?”
“The elite of the Haganah, which was a sort of unofficial Jewish army in Palestine under British rule. These were the guys who won the War of Independence back in 1948.”
Bernstein handed Lynch his iPhone, Wikipedia article on the Palmach up on the screen.
Lynch scanned it, handed it back. “Jesus, Slo-mo, you sleep with that fucking thing?”
“If you want to stick with your talk-only dinosaur, that’s your problem. You want to be one of the cool kids, get yourself an iPhone.”
Lynch just shook his head. “OK, you and your electronic friend might as well get back to the station, start digging at the business and Jewish stuff. This had to come out of somewhere.”
Ashley Urra was in her early twenties with the kind of face that Lynch bet meant she never had to buy her own drinks. Blonde, a short cut with bangs Lynch was seeing a lot of these days. Shiny white teeth. Thin, decent figure, not real tall. Perky. Lynch bet she got called perky, and she probably liked it.
“You were working Mr Stein’s box tonight?”
“I was Abe’s regular hostess. It was a great assignment. He was very generous, and he wasn’t one of these guys who gets off on pushing the help around. He didn’t hit on me either.”
“Bet you get a lot of that.”
She just smiled.
“Nice spread,” Lynch said. Table at the back of the box had a chafing dish full of ribs, some kind of pasta, salad, bar set up on the other side of the room. “All this, he’s up here alone?”
She was looking across the suite to the bathroom, where the evidence techs and McCord, the ME guy, were working on the body. “What?” she said.
“Lots of food. Seems like too much for him to be up here alone.”
“Oh. Abe did a lot of business during the games. People would come and go. He always over-ordered. He’d let us have what was left, after the games. The staff loved him.”
“I bet. Security pretty good up here? I mean you can’t just walk in, right?”
The girl was looking over at the body again. The interview would go quicker if Lynch did it in one of the other suites, but most people didn’t see a lot of dead bodies and it kept them off balance, kept them from working on their answers too hard. If it didn’t, then that told him something, too. So Lynch liked to do interviews with a stiff around.
“I’m sorry, what?” she said.
“Security,” Lynch repeated.
“Oh, yeah. This level has its own elevators and ramps – you have to have a special ticket just to get up here.”
“You need to show any ID?”
“Not if you have a ticket. I mean unless you need to pick it up at Will Call or something.”
“Did Mr Stein leave any Will Calls tonight?”
“I don’t know. They’d know downstairs, I guess.”
Lynch waved a uniform over, sent him down to check; also told him to run down any records on Stein’s box, his contract, that sort of thing. The girl was looking at the body again. Lynch waited until she turned back.
“Sorry,” she said.
“It’s OK. That’s not normal for most people. What can you tell me about tonight? Who’d he have up here?”
“People from his firm mostly, I think. Mendy Axelman – he worked with Mr Stein, he’s here all the time. He was here early with a lot of younger guys. I think they were traders who work with Abe and Mendy. I recognized a couple of them. They bring them up to the box as a reward or something. Bulls went up by like twenty-five points midway through the last period, and they all took off. The younger guys were all heading for a party somewhere – one of them slipped me his card on the way out, told me I should stop by after the game, that it was going to go late.”
“You got the card?”
She handed it to Lynch. Mike Schwartz, Stein & Co. Business contact info on the front, address for a townhouse in Streeterville handwritten on the back along with another phone number – probably the guy’s cell. Lynch called another uniform over, told him to get a unit over to that address, make sure everybody stayed put until he could get there. Turned back to the girl.
“Were you going to go?”
“What?”
“To the party. Nice neighborhood.”
A weak smile; she shrugged. “Yeah, probably. I mean, not now.”
Lynch nodded, straightened his leg, his right knee barking at him some the way it did when it got cold like this. Green Bay had taken him in the third round back in 1985: strong safety out of Boston College. Blew o
ut his knee in his second preseason game, and they couldn’t do shit with knees back then like they could now. Came back from rehab half a step slower. Wasn’t a half-step he had to give.
“Anybody else?” Lynch asked.
“One other guy came right toward the end of the game. He was different.”
“Different how?”
She made a thinking face. “I dunno. Rougher I guess? He was real tan, which you don’t see that much around here this time of year. This wasn’t a just-back-from-vacation tan, more like, you know, weathered? And he wasn’t in the usual clothes. It was mostly suits with Mr Stein. This guy was dressed casual, but not like Banana Republic, you know? You see these guys sometimes in the cargo pants and safari shirts, and it’s like Halloween – like they’re in a costume? This guy was like whoever it is they’re trying to dress up to be.”
“You said tan, so a white guy. He tall, short?”
“Not real tall, maybe five foot nine. Not big. Pretty broad shoulders I guess, but lean. I mean you look at some guys and you can just tell. This guy, he was in shape. He just looked hard. Gray hair – not like old-man gray, but like Anderson Cooper gray? Hair was pretty short, not a fancy cut.”
“You hear a name?”
“No, which is a little strange. Mr Stein is always introducing everybody. You know, like ‘Ashley, this is my friend so-and-so. We go way back. Take good care of him.’ I’d seen this guy go in, so I stopped to see if they need anything, and Mr Stein was just ‘Thanks, Ashley; we’re good for now.’”
“Like he wanted some privacy, maybe?” Lynch asked.
She nodded, like she hadn’t thought of that. “Yeah, exactly like that.” A look on her face like there was more.
“Something else?” Lynch asked.
“Just this other guy? I could swear I’ve seen him before. At the same time, I’m positive I’ve never met him. That make any sense?”
“Seen him here, you mean?”
“That’s the weird part. I’m real good with faces, and I know I’ve never met him. But his face keeps nagging at me.”
“OK. Something comes to you, let me know. He was the last guest?”
She nodded. “That’s when I went back in to check with Mr Stein, see if he would need anything else. He said he was fine. That was the last time I talked with him.”
“He seem OK then, distracted or anything?”
“Seemed the same as usual.”
“And you never heard anything – shouting, gunshots, anything unusual?”
“No.”
“See anybody up here who didn’t belong?”
“You get a blowout like that, toward the end of the game, you got people leaving, trying to beat the traffic. You got the food service guys and janitorial service guys trying to get a jump on breaking things down – there were a lot of people around. Nobody stuck out.”
“The mystery guest, you see him after he left the box?”
“I saw him get on the elevator. I didn’t see him after that.”
“OK, Ashley. Thanks. If I need anything else, I’ll be in touch.”
Eight blocks west of the United Center, Membe Saturday shivered in the night air, trying to understand why the stars had moved. It had been only eight days since he’d arrived at the shelter run by the nuns he had met in Sierra Leone. His wife and sons had been killed by Taylor’s men during the war, and he had been forced to work at the mines near Kenema – until a stone went missing, and the guards lined up Saturday and the five other men who had been working near him, and cut off their right hands with an ax. Since then, he had begged and stolen and wasted away. Finally, he had gone to the hospital the nuns ran, thinking he could die there – everyone died there. But one of the sisters told him they would take him to a new life in America.
Saturday was beginning to think it had been a bad idea. It was too cold here, colder than Saturday had ever been. And the stars were not where they belonged. Saturday had never listened as a boy when his father would try to tell him what the stars meant, but now he wished he had. Saturday had a bad feeling all the time, and he was sure that these misplaced stars held a message for him.
Then he looked up past the iron fence that ran across the front of the property by the cement path in front of the street, and he saw a man he remembered from Kenema. He knew what the message from the stars was, and that he had learned it too late.
Six months earlier, he had been begging in the streets when this man walked into the house of the courier who worked for the Arabs who sold the diamonds. He had marched the courier and his wife and his two small children – a boy, maybe four, and a girl who could not yet walk – out into the street. The man made them all kneel there, except for the girl, who started to crawl away. The man shot the girl first, and then the boy, and then the woman. All in the head. And then he shot the man. First in both knees, then in both arms, and then in the stomach. He left the man to die slowly in the street with his dead family around him.
Now, the same man was standing on the cement path in front of the house in this strange city under these strange stars, and Saturday knew the man must have come for him. He could not think why, but why else would this man from Africa be here, with Saturday? The man had not yet seen Saturday in the darkness, but Saturday said, “Wetin mek? Wetin mek?” Why? Why? in Krio. He did not even know he had said it until he heard his own voice on the air. And then the man turned and pulled a pistol from inside his coat, and he shot Saturday.
Lynch was halfway through the people the uniforms had penned up in the next couple of suites. The rich and powerful and their friends, most of them not taking kindly to being detained. Nothing useful from any of them, most of them so self-absorbed that they probably never noticed anything that wasn’t going in or out of their own pockets.
McCord stepped out of the bathroom while the uniform went to fetch the next asshole. “You want the quick and dirty?”
“Sure,” said Lynch. “What’ve you got?”
“Three entrance wounds, small caliber, probably a .22. No exit wounds, so the slugs bounced around inside the skull like lotto balls, figured to puree the brain pretty good. Mob likes to do that, but it’s been on every CSI episode since the dawn of time, so it’s not like it’s a secret. No sign the body’s been moved. Perp made the victim kneel by the toilet and put his head down on the floor, then popped him. Evidence points to pretty much a contact wound, but we got less singeing in the hair than usual, which means something trapped some of the gas, so you’re probably looking at a suppressor. We’ll see what’s left of the slugs when we get him in to the shop, but they’ll be a mess.”
“Suppressors usually don’t work that good,” said Lynch. “Not to where you wouldn’t hear something in the next box.”
McCord shrugged. “With a .22, you can silence it up pretty good, especially if you load shorts. For this kind of work, you’d want shorts. Just enough to punch through the skull, not enough to punch back out again. Game going on, you’d have a fair amount of background noise here. I could see it.”
“Three shots? That over the top at all?”
Another shrug from McCord. “With a .22, you can put a lot of holes in somebody and leave ’em breathing. Better safe than sorry, I guess. What’s a .22 short cost you? A dime, maybe? Not like a little insurance is gonna break the bank.”
“So a pro. You got anything else?”
“Got a shitload of prints in there,” said McCord. “Some from the victim; mess of others. Got at least ten different sets in the can so far, who knows how many out here in the suite. It’ll take a while to sort that out. Have to get prints from whatever guests we can track down, from the staff. Gonna be a hairball.”
“Plus, if we got a pro who can get in and out of here without being seen, has a .22 with a suppressor that actually works, then he’s probably not leaving prints anyway.”
“Probably not,” said McCord. “But we’ll run it out. One other thing that’s a little weird. Stein’s got some kind of dirt rubbed into the r
ight leg of his pants. His suit costs more than my car, so you gotta figure he keeps it clean. Dirt looks fresh. We’ll see what that’s about, just in case. Listen, I’m gonna have to let the techs wrap up here. Somebody popped some guy a couple of blocks west up Madison. Drive-by or something. I’m not gonna get any sleep tonight. You either, from the looks of it.”
“Job security, McCord.”
“Damn straight,” said McCord. “World ain’t ever gonna run out of evil.”
CHAPTER 3
Two days earlier, Dr Mark Heinz rode his horse on his New Mexico ranch, guiding it into the narrow arroyo that led from the higher country down toward the stables next to his home. He had purchased the land five years ago, built his dream house. Every morning, he rode the palomino for an hour, enjoying the early morning, the solitude, the views.
Time to think. He had always been a man of thought.
Today, he thought about whether his conscience should bother him. Well, not his conscience, he supposed. He’d realized long ago that he didn’t have one of those. Not didn’t have, really. Didn’t need. He was a creature of pure intellect and understood that one shouldn’t base ethical reasoning on feelings. One considered the facts of each situation, the causes and effects of each potential course of action, and one acted accordingly. Right or wrong should be the product of thought, not emotion. On the current matter, his thoughts were this:
Yes, the devices he had sold could, and in all likelihood would, result in great harm. And yes, selling those devices, even for the considerable sum he had received, would, by most standard definitions, be considered evil.
But he had invested the early part of his career in defining exactly this evil. In warning against its dangers. And he had been ignored.
And yes, those to whom he had sold the devices were agents of an anachronistic pox on the peace and order of the human society. They had repeatedly demonstrated their implacable intent to impose their horrid, backward barbarism on the rest of the world, to plunge mankind back into superstitious medieval suffering. And how had the world responded to this virulent threat? How had his own country responded? With half measures and the weak will of a society that elevated tolerance and political correctness to the level of policy.