“Can you make sure you check Hart’s bowl tonight?” asked Drexel.
Ryan and Drexel were roommates, at the suggestion of their sister, Lily, a few months prior. She thought it would do them both good. Drexel with his perpetual gloom and his inability to move on after his wife’s death and Ryan with his two years at a medium-security Illinois prison for heroin-related charges seemed at best a dysfunctional pair. But, more for his sister, Drexel cleared out the old bedroom he and his wife had shared, and Ryan moved in. The arrangement worked for now.
“Already did.”
“Thanks, bro.”
“Yeah, anytime.” The click of the call ending.
A small conference room next to Victor’s office became a temporary control center for the investigation. Drexel wheeled in a large whiteboard, and Daniela grabbed a handful of markers and magnets. They took a photo of Brittany that Jeffrey had given them to use—her high school graduation photo—and attached it to the whiteboard. Black robe. Mortarboard with a yellow and blue tassel. Her blue eyes beamed out above a bright smile.
Daniela began writing the solid timeline information they had in black.
December 15—2 p.m. phone call to Jeffrey
December 15—2:30 p.m. The Beans coffee shop
December 15—4:30 p.m. university bookstore
December 15—9:09 p.m., video outside O’Neal’s, three seconds
December 15—9:10 p.m., video one block east of the pub
April 20—body found
It was scant information. But it was a start. Drexel thought of his whiteboard on James Praxton, which covered in exact detail the four hours before and up to his murder. That too had been a start.
A knock on the open door startled them both, and they looked around to see a man in a pale yellow oxford with a green and yellow patterned tie. “Benoit Cadenat. Call me Ben.” His accent had a faint foreignness to it, a clipping of the words. He extended his hand toward Daniela, who was sitting closest to him. “From Missing Persons. Lead on the Brittany Day case.” His dark hair was mostly gray, cut short, but he allowed well-trimmed sideburns to reach to the bottom of his ear.
Drexel stood up and shook his hand. “Thanks for coming down. Where’s the accent from?”
Benoit smiled. “I still have a bit, yes? I moved here from France years ago. From Marseille.” He dropped a large file on the table. “In Missing Persons, we say the more pages the worse it is.” The Chicago Missing Persons Unit was one of the very few anywhere in the country that responded to all calls immediately and did not require waiting twenty-four hours.
“So prior to our finding the vic, what was the status of the case?” Daniela asked, gesturing toward a seat.
Benoit sat down. “Stalled is the best I can say. No new leads. We thought she was dead.”
“Why?”
“After talking to the parents, her friends, her professors, and others, she was a hardworking student who mostly kept her nose clean. No saint, no, but good generally, yes.”
“So her parents checked out?” Drexel grabbed the file, opened it, and flipped through the pages with various detectives’ and witnesses’ handwriting as well as typed statements. He pulled out the grainy police security photo.
“Yes. Yes. We found no history of abuse of any sort. The victim lived with them willingly. Her friends pointed that out. The parents were forthcoming about everything they knew, and they weren’t naive. They knew she drank and stuff. None of that ‘my kid is a saint and would never do anything wrong’ sort of stuff we see.”
Drexel stood up and tacked the security photo to the whiteboard. “Who did she hang out with?” He drew a black marker line from the 9:09 p.m. timeline entry to the photo.
Benoit stretched over the table and pulled the file back to him. He flipped a few pages. “Kayla Logenfeld and Carrie Bosworth were the two close friends. Janay Wade and Isaiah McFarlane are also mentioned. We checked with them all. All checked out. Carrie had an underage drinking citation a year or so ago. They liked to hang out at a coffee shop—um,” he ran his finger down the page, “The Beans—and liked a particular pub. Cheap beers on Thursday nights.”
“The night she disappeared?” asked Daniela.
Benoit massaged the back of his neck. “Yes. She returned her books. Met her friends. Did what she normally does on Thursday nights.”
“Except for coming home.”
Benoit sighed and nodded at the same time. “The last people to see her alive were her friends in the bar: Kayla, Carrie, Janay, and Isaiah.”
“We saw the tip line on a flier.” Drexel sat back down in the chair.
“Yes. We set that up quickly. And the parents put up half the money. And the other half the sororities raised.”
“We’ll need the logs from those calls.”
“I’ll have them sent down. Hundreds of them. Hundreds upon hundreds.”
“Yeah. But maybe the killer called in.”
Drexel gestured for the file, which Benoit handed to him. “Thanks for this and your time. If we have other questions, we’ll know who to contact.”
Daniela smiled.
Benoit nodded and left the conference room. Drexel and Daniela sat in silence. He looked at the whiteboard, and she examined the Missing Persons folder on Brittany.
Drexel asked, “So what do you think?”
She shook her head. “Based on what little we have, I would say Brittany was targeted.”
“Why?”
“I’ll have to look more, but it seems like she had a bit of a pattern. The pub for Thursday night beers at least. She doesn’t seem to have moved in dangerous crowds.” She rubbed her wrists and then her hands. “And I mean by ‘targeted’ that someone could have seen her in the bar every Thursday night maybe. And he fantasized about her and then saw an opportunity. Plus, boss, I mean, Jesus, he chopped her up and left her like she was an exhibit at a museum. I don’t think that’s random. You don’t decide on the spur of a moment to kill someone and dice ‘em up and present them.”
“Right. Doesn’t mean she was targeted though. Our guy could have fantasized about his display, and she was a target of opportunity.” Drexel took the video surveillance photo of her on the street corner and used a small, round purple magnet to attach it to the board to the right of the 9:10 timeline entry. “I don’t know. What came first? The design or the victim?” He tapped the image. “I’d bet a lot of money she was abducted right at this time. And it was quick. I think that meant he was prepared, which probably means we’re both right.”
She tapped the Missing Person’s folder. “At first glance, Benoit did a thorough job.”
He rubbed his chin and then put his hands together and pressed them to his chin. “We need more information about the cameras in that area.”
“I’m sure they started checking them when they found her.”
“No doubt, but how many are there? Where are the blind spots? When she’s last at the corner, if she turns one way or another, which camera is next?”
Daniela nodded.
Victor walked in carrying two Styrofoam cups. He handed a cup of coffee to Drexel and took a drink from the other. To Daniela he said, “I don’t know where you get that energy drink stuff of yours.” To them both, he said, “So where’re we at?”
Drexel gave him a rundown of their conversation with the Days and Benoit. Victor nodded along the way, rocked back and forth in the chair, and asked questions they had already asked. After they were done, the captain said, “So tomorrow the ME should start her work on the vic. I hope we can also get some of the forensics back.”
“Yep. And we should get the tip line logs by then.”
Victor nodded. “Sounds good. This Brittany Day case is now out of Missing Persons and yours. So what about the circles and stuff we found with the bodies?”
Daniela rubbed the edges of her
fuchsia-colored nails. “Could be any number of things. Could be meaningless except to the killer.”
Drexel said, “Means something to him at the very least. But I haven’t a clue. We’ll need to see if we can find anything about it.”
“Hmmm.” Victor took a drink. “I don’t like the looks of this.”
“There’ll be more. We’re not going to catch this guy that fast unless we’re lucky or if he’s gone into spree mode.” He pursed his lips. “There’ll be other chalk circles.”
The captain nodded. He stood up and frowned. They followed him out and locked the conference room behind them. Victor went to his office and closed the door. Daniela and Drexel walked out of the station together into a cool Chicago night.
Chapter 5
After jumping on the Blue Line at LaSalle station and riding through the Loop, Drexel called his longtime friend, Ton Nax. Years ago, they had met on a case Drexel was canvassing as a beat cop. Much debate between them remains about how they connected, Ton claiming Drexel wandered into his pawn store in search of jewelry for Zora. Drexel recalled their first meeting after a break-in at Ton’s store, the Pawn Shop. Regardless, they had formed a friendship over the years, one so close that Drexel often forgot they did not grow up together.
They met at Harry’s Burger Palace a few blocks up from the Division stop on Milwaukee Avenue. Ton owned several pawn stores in Chicagoland, but the one on Milwaukee northwest of Polonia Triangle in the heart of the old Polish downtown was the original store, and the one Ton held most dear. In his last divorce, Ton had been forced to give up the store in South Shore. He would have given up all the others to keep the one on Milwaukee. He had four other stores, which he often joked were reserved for future ex-wives.
Ton had grabbed two seats at the bar because of the crowd. Drexel thanked him as he sat down. Ton waved him off and pushed a beer over. “That’s a brew from someplace in Indiana. Gumballhead.”
Drexel took a sip. He raised his eyebrows and took a drink. “Tasty.” He savored it a bit. “Shit, that’s good. Very good.”
Ton nodded. “Bartender says it disappears fast whenever they get it.”
Drexel flipped open the menu. “How’s it going?”
“Just fine. Doing the normal. Eat, sleep, work.”
“Baseball’s almost back. I think getting Jon Lester was a good thing. Hoping he brings sixteen wins this season. The big win is Maddon though. That guy can make a playoff team out of high schoolers.”
“Slow down there, big fella. Don’t you know? The Cubs’ve already been eliminated from contention.” Ton chuckled. “Well, maybe not this year, but I won’t keep my hopes up.” He was an inveterate doubter of the Cubs, no matter how good the prospects were. The scars reached back to his childhood and watching the Cubs lose a whisper away from returning to the World Series in 1984 and 1989. Like a knee that aches with oncoming rain, the doubts climbed as the season opener approached.
After the bartender took their order, Drexel said, “So I’ve got a new case.”
“Yes.” Ton had always served as a sounding board for Drexel, whether relationships, police work, or politics, and Ton—never shy with an opinion—heartily obliged. Particularly now after Zora’s death, he had become an ever more important confidant.
While Drexel left out specific names, he told Ton about the delivery of the photos and—without gruesome details—the shape of the crime scene.
Ton shook his head. “That’s whacked. Ritualistic or some shit.”
“Very. But it’s probably some crazy ritual in the guy’s head.”
The bartender slid a plate of food each in front of Drexel and Ton. Drexel gestured for two more Gumballheads as he unwrapped the cloth napkin from the silverware.
Ton flipped open the ketchup bottle and squirted out a large pile next to the steak fries. “I tell you, the craploads of antidepressants and other drugs in water are messing with people.”
Drexel bit into his well-done, barbecue bacon burger with cheddar cheese and onion strings. “If you ask me, feels like the guy is acting out some religious thing.”
Ton shook his head as he set down his burger topped with lettuce, tomato, bacon, and a fried egg with a large bite gone, the pink of the interior angry looking. “What did it look like?”
Drexel pulled out his notebook, re-drew the circle with the Star of David and added the location of the body and the sliver of her brain in a jar. As he ripped the paper out, Ton wiped his hands and took the sheet from Drexel.
Ton held it up and looked at it, squinted even. “I can do some research at the library and on the Internet. Might turn up something. Not much to go on, but maybe there’s something about the Star of David that might help.”
Drexel nodded. “You’d be willing to do that?”
“Why not? I get to help you out, and I might even learn something. The Star of David—well, really the Shield of David—is part of the Kabbalah. Spells and rituals.” Ton drank a large gulp of beer and finished off a fry.
Drexel shook his head. Ton engaged freely with conspiracy theories, and anything related to the Illuminati, Masons, and other secret societies he drank up like a man lost in the desert who has found an oasis. Ton flipped back and forth between believing in their existence and exposing them as fakes, for his relationship with conspiracy theories was complex. He referred to the people who believe the moon landing was fake as “nuts,” but indulged in Shakespearean authorship questions with gusto and sincerity.
In fact, dropping Kabbalah for Shakespeare, Ton pushed the case that Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford, was the author of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. “Look, Shakespeare died in 1616, but he didn’t eulogize the death of Queen Elizabeth or the coronation of James. Oxford couldn’t because he was dead. And, come on, if Shakespeare had been alive, he would’ve said something. The fact that in none of the plays attributed to Shakespeare does he mention the coronation of James is a clue that he didn’t write them.”
Drexel sat and listened, drank his beer, and replied with the only sally he could think of, one Zora had stated years ago in the same debate. “I won’t limit the ability of the human imagination to conceive of things they don’t know or have never experienced directly. There’s all sorts of stuff in his plays he had to imagine. That’s true of authors today. Hell, that’s true of the Surrealists. No one ever saw melting clocks like that.”
“Watches.”
“What?”
“Dali painted watches, not clocks.” Ton pushed a few more points in support of the Earl of Oxford and then ordered two last beers. They reverted to the Cubs and their likely season. Ton the skeptic and Drexel the optimist. Which of the two suffered more for their perspective could not be measured.
The big man picked up the tab, waving off Drexel’s protests by citing his friend’s public servant status on a limited budget—a typical stance, though he did not always get away with it. As they turned from the bar, Drexel grabbed Ton’s arm. On the wall above one of the booths was a framed black-and-white photograph. He guessed it was six inches square.
Ton said, “What?”
Drexel squinted and leaned over as if that would help him see it better. “I think that’s Zora’s.”
“That?” Ton pointed at the photo.
“Yes. I’ve seen it someplace before. That’s Zora’s. That’s her photo.”
* * *
Drexel sat in his apartment in Ukrainian Village, holding the framed photo in his hands, staring at it. At Burger Palace, Ton had negotiated its purchase after taking it off the wall and finding Zora’s artistic signature where part of the image folded around to the back. The manager had been reluctant, but Ton had forked over enough cash to bring him around. Responding to where the restaurant obtained the photo, the manager shrugged and walked off, stuffing the money into his pocket.
The plush green sofa in the livi
ng room held him upright as his mind and body felt like they separated. His body, sitting there, holding the photo, with Hart—the deep-gray, short-haired cat Zora and Drexel had bought a few weeks before her death—snuggling in next to his leg. His mind groping with this sudden appearance of his dead wife’s art as if he were seeing a ghost, wondering where it came from, how it had ended up in that restaurant.
The dominant feature of the black-and-white photo was of a brick building, at least two-stories tall, and a man entering a door positioned right of center. The man’s head was cut off by a band of darkness descending across the top part of the doorway and what looked to be an address marker next to the door was cut off as well. All Drexel could see was 221 Beau. The man was caught in mid-stride, the bottom of his trench coat flaring out. Puddles of water and wet pavement meant it had rained. Drexel could not distinguish the make or model of the back of a car that occupied a sliver of the bottom of the photograph, as if Zora had been crouching down behind the car and rose up enough to snap the image.
Regarding who the man was—Drexel assumed it was a man—he could not be sure. Something struck him as familiar, but he could not put a finger on it. He set the photo down on his legs and rubbed his chin. He kept an inventory of the artistic photographs Zora had done. When his brother had moved in and taken over what had been the master bedroom, he had sorted through the stacks of her photographs and paintings that had leaned against the wall, the place he had left them since abandoning the room the day she died. When Ryan moved in, he had removed several mementos to his room, including her phone with all her music and her favorite books of poetry, packaged up the prints she did have, and put them in storage. He had found a few he had not inventoried, but assumed they had been recent works she had not shared with him yet.
Ton and Ryan walked in from the balcony, both carrying beers, as the song from the stereo shifted from Thelonius Monk’s “Ruby, My Dear” to Elliott Smith’s “Bled White.” Ton looked over at Drexel, took a detour into the kitchenette, poured two fingers of Bulleit whiskey into a tumbler, and handed it to him before sitting in the brown, faux-leather recliner. Ryan turned down the volume on the small stereo and sat at the kitchenette bar on a stool.
Kill Them All (Drexel Pierce Book 2) Page 4