Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel

by Kris Nelscott

It still gave me the willies. That rot smell made the entire place feel unpleasant — or maybe it was my knowledge that three unknown people had been buried in that basement long ago.

  When I went down the stairs, I found LeDoux photographing the stairs.

  “We’re not even close to the site yet,” I said.

  “I want everything documented,” he said. “We don’t yet know what we’ll need.”

  So he photographed the door to the boiler room, the boiler room itself, the metal cabinet that led to the hidden room. He did a quick diagram of everything, marking the locations, telling me we would get exact measurements later.

  When I opened the double cabinet doors, revealing the secret door, LeDoux whistled.

  “I did not expect it to be so elaborate,” he said.

  Before we went through the secret door, he stopped me.

  “The cabinet itself is evidence,” he said. “Not only will it give us fingerprints, which we may or may not find useful, but somewhere on it, we should find the name of the manufacturer. It should give us some kind of hint as to who felt the urge to hide that door.”

  “If this is the first cabinet,” I said.

  “We’ll look for evidence of that as well.”

  He photographed everything about the cabinet, including the floor, before he let me step inside and open the secret door. As I unlocked the door, he asked, “Are you wearing the same shoes you wore the last time you were here?”

  “Probably,” I said. “I don’t have many pairs.”

  “But you can’t say for certain,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Before the day is out, I would like to measure them, take a print of the sole, and photograph them, just to keep them out of the evidence pile. I’d also like to see any other shoes you might have worn here.”

  I nodded, a little stunned. Previous forensic investigators had asked for my fingerprints (which I wasn’t about to give LeDoux), but not my shoes.

  I nodded, unlocked the door, and flicked on my flashlight. The room was smaller than I remembered, and dust motes floated across the beam of light. The damp, musty smell that I had noticed on my first visit returned just as strong as before, and I had to resist the urge to sneeze.

  Then I stepped back, out of the cabinet, and let LeDoux go in first. He stood inside the door’s frame, examining the entire area with his flashlight, one inch at a time.

  “Think that light will work if we change the bulb?” he asked.

  “We can try it,” I said.

  “Later,” he said, and continued his meticulous examination.

  I sighed, careful not to lean on anything, and waited for him to get done. Finally he turned the light toward the decaying wall, and froze in place.

  “Oh, dear,” he said faintly. “We do have a problem.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “That’s why we brought you here.”

  “No, no.” He sounded fussy. “Your instincts of criminality were correct. That third skull — the one farthest away — has a gunshot wound through the cranium. Unless I miss my guess, someone shot that poor soul in the back of the head.”

  How had I missed that? A crushed or damaged skull was fairly obvious. One with a gunshot wound was even more obvious. Clearly I hadn’t looked at the details as carefully as I thought I had.

  LeDoux leaned forward, a gloved hand placed gently against the crumbling brick, his flashlight all the way inside the hole. The light reflected against his face, making his skin deathly white.

  “Oh, dear,” he said again. “And these poor things were tossed in here like yesterday’s garbage. This probably isn’t the primary crime scene, but it’s a part of it. We’ll have to investigate the house and see what else we find.”

  “The house has been apartments for decades,” I said, “and judging by the look of these bones, they’ve been down here for a long time.”

  “That’s a safe assumption, given the conditions. The walls would have protected them from the worst of Chicago’s heat and cold.” He stuck his head inside the hole. The light pouring out now illuminated the extra bricks and bags of mortar that sat in the only real empty space.

  “Do you have a guess how long they’ve been here?” I asked.

  “Not yet.” He rocked back on his heels, and looked at me. His painter’s cap, which he had forgotten to remove when we got inside, was slightly askew, and covered with mortar dust. “I’ll have to get them out first to give you a real guess.”

  “How about a tentative one?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “They could’ve been killed as recently as two years ago, or back when the house was built. I have no real idea. There are remnants of clothing that should give us an answer.”

  I clung to the idea that the bones could be as recent as two years old. That took Laura’s father out of the picture, and while Sturdy would still have problems from this discovery, Laura herself would not be implicated.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s get them out, then.”

  “Not so quickly. I still have a great deal of work to do.” He sighed. “We both do.”

  “I know,” I said. “Measurements, photographs, footprints.”

  “Bits of trace evidence, seeing if we can find anything that will lead us to the killer, from something caught in the mortar itself to something dropped alongside the bodies.”

  “You’re hoping for fingerprints?”

  “I’m hoping for many things,” he said. “Primarily, I’m hoping that those bits and pieces of clothing include wallets or some sort of identification. Quietly discovering who these corpses belong to without a driver’s license or some other indicator is going to be hard. We’d be looking for dental records and at missing persons reports. Either the authorities will find out what we’re doing, or we won’t identify these corpses.”

  My stomach twisted. Three people had been tossed down here, missing for God knew how long. It would be nice to let their families know what happened to them.

  Unless, of course, the families had put them down here.

  “And then we have another issue.” He stood, wiped his gloves on his coveralls and pulled the cap down on his forehead.

  “It seems to me we have another number of issues.”

  “You, Mr. McMillan, and Miss Hathaway, perhaps. But only one concerns me as well.”

  I waited.

  “We’re going to have to look behind each different bit of brickwork.”

  “You’re afraid there’s more bodies down here.”

  His gaze met mine, his pale blue eyes already tired and red-rimmed.

  “Isn’t that why you brought me here?” he asked me quietly.

  “I didn’t bring you. Drew did.”

  LeDoux shrugged a single shoulder. “But Mr. McMillan told me that a forensic examiner to remove the evidence was your idea. You brought me here because you were afraid.”

  “Afraid?” No one who had just met me had ever accused me of being afraid before. Usually it took someone years to realize that I felt fear, just like everyone else. “Of what?”

  “Don’t toy with me, Mr. Grimshaw,” LeDoux said. “You think this is some uncaught killer’s favorite burial ground.”

  “I’m hoping it’s not,” I said.

  LeDoux nodded, then crouched, pulling his camera up to his face.

  “I hope so too,” he said as he got to work. “Three corpses are certainly easier to deal with than a dozen.”

  THIRTEEN

  LeDoux’s meticulousness drove me crazy. I thought I was a detail-oriented investigator, but compared to LeDoux, I was as sloppy and careless as Jimmy.

  LeDoux photographed everything in that back room using only his flash and flashlight for illumination. He then went over the light socket itself before allowing me to try a new bulb. Once I put that in — and it worked (miraculously, I thought) — he photographed everything again, going through several rolls of film without focusing on the corpses at all.

  Next he measured the entire area and
drew his map, marking the measurements exactly. He showed me how precise he wanted me to be, then sent me into the boiler room as if I were a little kid assigned my first important task in life.

  I felt that way; I had no idea how all these measurements and maps could be important, but LeDoux said they were, so I followed instructions.

  He finished first, of course. He had a smaller area to cover. Then he oversaw what I was doing for a few short minutes before asking me if I wanted to break for lunch.

  We went outside. The air was muggy, and it felt like thunderstorms loomed on the horizon. The low-hanging clouds confirmed that feeling.

  We had agreed the night before to bring bag lunches, which we had left in the van. I opened the van’s back doors, hoping the interior hadn’t gotten too hot for our lunches, and was relieved to find that it hadn’t.

  I left the doors open, and we sat on the thin carpet, our legs dangling over the bumper, brushing on the gravel as we ate.

  The hotel had prepared LeDoux’s lunch. It was spectacular — a sandwich piled high with thinly sliced ham and cheese, celery and carrot sticks, an apple, and a thick piece of chocolate cake that looked almost perfect. My peanut butter and jelly looked like something Jimmy would hate, and out of pity (I think) LeDoux handed me the other half of his sandwich. I shook my head, but did take some carrot sticks when he offered them, and a bite of that wonderful cake.

  “This is a nightmarish scene,” he said as he wrapped up the plastic wrap the hotel had used for the vegetables. He stuck it into the bag, then grabbed the apple, obviously saving it for last. “You realize that, if my suspicions are correct, this might be too much for us.”

  “Too much how?” I asked.

  “I’ll need a place to store the evidence — somewhere cool enough and dark enough. Your friend the —”

  I waved a hand so that he didn’t say the word “coroner” or “mortician” or whichever version he was going to use. I wanted us to be careful outside, just in case a neighbor eavesdropped through an open window.

  “— your friend,” he said, understanding me, “will have to have a place to store his — um — things — as well. And this might take a long time. Longer than I have. I have two testimonies scheduled this fall, with another pending.”

  “We’re in no great hurry,” I said. “At least, not at the moment. Unless something you and I find will make us hurry. So if you need to come back, I’m sure we can do that.”

  He nodded, as if he expected me to say that. “It’s the organization I’m most worried about.”

  “I’ll see what we can do.”

  “And the hotel,” he said.

  I looked at him.

  “That riot we observed last night was most unnerving. I’m told by the hotel staff that these kids plan more such things all during this trial, so I should expect occasional lock-downs and warnings. I looked in the phone book this morning; it seems most of the good hotels are either near Lincoln Park or downtown, and neither seems safe. I was wondering if you or Miss Hathaway knew somewhere better, perhaps closer to this place.”

  I shook my head. “The hotels down here aren’t places you want to stay.”

  He sighed. “I’m not sure I want to stay anywhere in this city.”

  “I’ll talk to Laura,” I said. “She might have a few ideas. After all, Sturdy does rent apartments. Would that work?”

  “If I’m here for the duration, it might.” He ate his apple slowly, lost in thought.

  I put the rest of the food wrappings away, then glanced sideways at the neighborhood. So far, no one seemed to be watching us, and nothing seemed amiss.

  Still, my stomach was a knot of tension, and the food hadn’t helped.

  “Do you mind if I ask you something?” he said.

  “Go ahead.” I adjusted my cap. It made my head itch.

  “You and Miss Hathaway. You seem quite…familiar with each other.”

  I froze. I didn’t know how this man would react to the truth — or even to a partial truth. He seemed open-minded for a man his age, and had shown no real objection to working with me. Yet some of the things he’d said the night before had grated on me.

  “We’ve worked together for a long time,” I said.

  “So you’ve become friendly,” he said.

  “We’re friends.” My voice was tight, even to my own ears.

  He put the apple core in his bag. “That’s quite unusual, don’t you think?”

  “A white woman and a black man becoming friends?” I asked, with too much edge in my tone.

  “I was actually thinking of the head of a company and one of her employees.” He sounded bland, as if he hadn’t realized he could have offended me.

  “I’m not an employee,” I said. “I work for myself. I knew Laura before she took over Sturdy.”

  “As a friend?” That bland tone again. I was beginning to become wary of it.

  “As a customer. She hired me for some personal work, and was satisfied with the job.”

  “I see,” he said, even though he didn’t.

  His brain was meticulous, and this didn’t fit. So he would noodle it until he came up with an answer he liked.

  “She met my son during that period,” I said. “She adores him.”

  “Ah,” LeDoux said, as if he’d discovered the secret of the universe. Maybe he had. That fit for him. Women couldn’t help but like children.

  My fist clenched, and I willed it open. I was going to have to work with him for some time. I couldn’t let his attitudes infect me the very first day.

  But they had. I couldn’t hold back the next question. “Are you going to need an assistant for all of this ‘duration’?”

  “You, you mean?” He set his bag beside mine near the wheel well.

  I shrugged. “That’s who you got.”

  “I thought you were planning to go in whatever direction the evidence leads us.”

  “If I can,” I said.

  “Then you won’t be here all the time,” he said, as if I hadn’t figured that out.

  “But what about having someone else here with you?” I asked, hoping he would say no. I had no idea who I’d bring in if he did need someone. Malcolm Reyner, who used to be the person I brought in to help me on cases, had been drafted. If his timing was anything like mine had been when I went to Korea, he would be just finishing up Basic Training now, and would be shipped to Vietnam within the month.

  “Most of this I can do alone,” LeDoux was saying. “In the beginning here, I’ll need you — we need to bring down enough of that wall so that I can get into the area where the — um — you know — are. And we’ll have to see the extent of what we’re looking at. Once we know that, I suspect I’ll only need help at certain designated times, and I can let you know when that will be.”

  “You’re still hoping that this is limited,” I said.

  “Aren’t you?” he asked.

  I nodded, feeling overwhelmed. If that basement was a standard Queen Anne, it was huge. And we were only looking at a small portion of it.

  “You note that the basement windows are blocked,” LeDoux said, his voice lowered.

  “I noticed that the first time I was here. They are all the way around the house, except for the windows in the boiler room.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not a good sign.”

  “I know,” I said.

  He sighed. “I’ve come to scenes like this once or twice to double-check the police work. I’ve never done a multiple on my own.”

  “Is that what these are called?” I asked. “A multiple?”

  He nodded. “The more gruesome the find, the more clinical the description.”

  I was silent for a moment. A multiple. Somehow that sounded worse to me.

  “When should I bring in Minton?” I asked.

  “He’s our third?” LeDoux asked.

  I nodded.

  “Tomorrow,” LeDoux said. “At the earliest. I’ll be more concrete when we’re done for the evening.�
��

  Tomorrow. We weren’t going to move those bodies until tomorrow — at the earliest. Which meant that we had part of today and probably part of the next doing some meticulous thing that I was terrified of screwing up.

  “So you won’t need me right away,” I said.

  He studied me for a moment. “Not for the walls.”

  “Good,” I said. “I’d like to have a look at the rest of the house.”

  “You haven’t done that yet?”

  I shook my head. “The boiler was running on a day like today. So I went to the basement first.”

  He raised his eyebrows slightly, as if imagining what that was like. “I’m not sure if that was a lucky break or not.”

  “Me either,” I said.

  “I wonder what you’ll find upstairs,” he said.

  “Empty apartments, I hope.”

  He gave me a sideways glance, as if he thought I was being naïve. “Rap on the walls. Make sure they’re not hollow.”

  “I plan to,” I said, even though I hoped I would find nothing. No more hidden places, no more bodies. No more potential for bodies.

  “And measure things,” he said. “Sometimes the best hiding places are quite creatively concealed, particularly in buildings this old.”

  I shuddered. What an unpleasant way to spend my afternoon.

  And it looked like my future might hold a dozen afternoons just like it.

  FOURTEEN

  I knew I should start my search in Mortimer Hanley’s apartment, but I also knew it would keep. I was off-balance enough from the morning’s investigation and the lunch conversation. I wanted to reassure myself that the gruesome work was limited to the basement.

  When I went back inside, I grabbed my building inspector’s clipboard and Hanley’s thick wad of keys. I made sure that LeDoux didn’t need me for the next few hours. After he had reassured me — again — that he didn’t, I went back outside, since the front door seemed to be the only way to get to the other apartments.

  As I walked around the building, I looked at the windows, hoping that I had misunderstood what I had seen the first time. I wanted them to be merely dirty instead of boarded over from the inside, but it soon became clear that they were both dirty and covered.