“What difference will it make if we call the police now or if we call them at five o’clock?”
“I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer,” I snapped, suddenly losing patience. “I am an officer of the court and I won’t be a party to any deception. I’m willing to do everything in my power to see if we can’t get this handled as quietly as possible. If we can get the local cops to play ball, there’s a chance we can keep it from Takisawa. But the only way you’re going to keep me from calling the police is to lock me up with Childress right now.”
Stephen fixed me with such a murderous look that for a moment I honestly thought I was going to be spending the day with a dead man.
“Just handle it,” he said finally. Then he turned and walked away, leaving me alone in the basement with the body.
I called 911 from the phone in the crystallography lab and told the dispatcher to direct the police to the back of the building by the loading dock. Then I called Elliott Abelman and told him what had happened. He said he was on his way. That done, I went outside and waited for the police.
As I shivered on the loading dock I found myself wondering, not for the first time, whether it was Elliott’s inquiries into Childress’s past that had frightened him into suicide. Coming on the morning of the Takisawa visit, it might have been just the kind of dramatic “fuck you” to Stephen I imagined Childress to be capable of.
Unburdened by serial killers and afflicted with no crime more serious than shoplifting, the Oak Brook police responded quickly to my report of a dead man in the freezer. Two incredibly clean-cut officers who looked like they’d just graduated from bible college arrived within five minutes of my call.
As succinctly as I could I told them what had happened. I also explained that the building had been closed over the weekend with the power shut down for the new transformers. I described how the temperature had been turned down in the cold room and about its being taped shut in order to help keep cold air from escaping.
“Did anybody check to make sure there was nobody inside before it was taped shut?” the older officer asked.
“I don’t know if they checked,” I replied, “but I was there while it was being taped. Believe me, if there was somebody inside who wanted to get out, we would have heard them.”
“And nobody missed this guy Childress over the weekend? Not even his wife?”
“He wasn’t married. Besides, we all thought he was in Boston attending a conference.”
“What kind of work did he do here?” the younger of the two officers asked while the older one pulled on some sort of plastic gloves that looked like baggies with fingers.
“Dr. Childress was a chemist,” I replied, balking at the prospect of trying to explain X-ray crystallography under these circumstances.
“You want to show us where the body is, ma’am?” the one with the gloves asked with a nod.
I led them to the cold room. They opened the door and stepped inside. Through the open door I watched as they squatted down beside the body. The younger officer pulled a set of plastic gloves from his pocket as the other uniform briskly touched Childress’s neck, no doubt making sure he was dead.
“You’d better get on the radio and call it in as an accidental death slash possible homicide,” he said to his partner. “Then you better page Jerry and tell ID to get the hell out here. Tell them we’re going to be needing the morgue wagon.”
As he talked I took another look at the dead crystallographer. I’m not sure that even in life Childress had been much to look at naked, but the cold certainly hadn’t helped. He was a skinny little man with pale skin and pubic hair that had begun to turn gray. The skin on his face was a dusky shade of red, and even though his arms were folded over his chest, I could tell that, like his knees, they were badly bruised.
“What’s all this in here with him?” asked the younger officer, pointing to the bulky Styrofoam containers that lined the shelves and were stacked up on the floor. “They’re research supplies,” I replied.
“No food? Nothing to eat or drink?”
“I don’t think so.”
He got up and examined the inside of the door carefully without touching it.
“That’s funny. It looks like the emergency release handle is broken. Do you have any idea how long it’s been that way?”
“I have no idea,” I replied, seeing my suicide theory evaporating before my eyes.
“You mind telling me who actually found the body?” asked the second officer, pulling a notebook from his pocket and starting to write.
“Dr. Dave Borland.”
“Is he a medical doctor, ma’am?”
“No. He’s a chemist.”
“Just like the dead guy?”
“Yes. This is a pharmaceutical company. They’re all chemists here.”
“Where is this Dr. Borland, ma’am?”
“He’s upstairs.”
“We’re going to need to speak to him and get his statement.”
“I’ll be happy to go get him for you if you like.”
On my way up to the first floor I took the stairs two at a time. If things were proceeding on schedule Stephen should have just finished his presentation. I opened the door of the first-floor lunchroom. Partitions had been erected to block the refrigerator and sink from view. A podium had been brought in and a large screen for slides set up in the front of the room. Chairs, which Stephen had personally selected so that he could be sure they were comfortable, had been rented and arranged in rows.
Lou Remminger was at the podium speaking with great authority about her theory that ZK-501 consisted of two distinct regions—binding and affector. The Japanese scientists were taking notes so furiously that the tables in front of them shook. I slipped into an empty chair beside Borland.
“The police are here,” I whispered. “They want to talk to you.” From across the room Stephen shot me an inquiring glance, which I chose to ignore. Borland rose to his feet with a little grunt and together we slipped out of the room.
“Do you know if anybody checked to make sure the room was empty before they taped it shut?” I asked once we were out in the hall.
“What kind of idiot do you take me for?” he answered. “Michelle and I both looked. Believe me, there was nobody in there when we closed it up. Besides, if he somehow got shut in there by accident all he’d have had to do was use the emergency release to open the door. It wouldn’t be hard to push through the duct tape, even for a wimp like Childress.”
“The cops say the emergency release was broken.”
“Broken? Since when?”
“I don’t know,” I replied as we arrived in the basement.
During the short time I was upstairs more police had arrived. The team from the county crime lab was there in their Day-Glo jumpsuits with their tackle boxes full of equipment. While Borland gave his statement to the two uniformed officers I lingered in the hallway and watched the forensics team go about their business. No one objected to my presence. Indeed, they all seemed happy to accept my being head of the company’s legal department as a valid reason for staying.
The plainclothes detectives arrived just as two jump-suited attendants wheeled a stretcher into the cold room. I couldn’t help but notice that on top of the sheets was a neatly folded body bag. The two detectives were as clean-cut as the uniformed officers, though older and not as good-looking. They ambled down the corridor, each carrying a steaming Styrofoam cup of 7-Eleven coffee. From where I was standing it sounded like they were talking about last night’s Bulls game.
While television may have given us the myth of the raging pursuit and the high-speed chase, I knew that the real business of solving murders was much more leisurely. After all, by the time the homicide cops show up, the bad guys are long gone. Not only that, but the victim sure as hell isn’t going anywhere.
The two detectives’ names were Rankin and Masterson. Rankin was the taller of the two, with a whippet build and a buzz haircut. He seemed to be ac
ting as the primary investigator. They ignored me and immediately made a beeline for the uniformed officers who were busy questioning Borland. From what I could see, the protein chemist did not appear to be enjoying himself at all.
Elliott, having no doubt hit the worst of the rush-hour traffic, arrived a few minutes later. I was ridiculously glad to see him. He came up and put his arm around me, and I must admit, I clung to him.
“You’ve got to stop killing people, Kate,” he whispered into my hair. “I think the cops are beginning to catch on.” I made a face and pulled away from him. “So Michael Childress turned up dead. No wonder he missed his plane. Any chance of it being suicide?”
“If it is, he hid in the cold room before it was taped shut on Friday afternoon, broke the emergency release handle, took off all his clothes, and then lay down to make snow angels before he died.”
“You didn’t tell me he was naked.”
“I was saving the best for last.”
“Any chance he got locked in there by accident?”
“I guess it’s possible. No one would think to look for him because we all assumed he was on his way to Boston, but two different people checked the room before it was sealed up.”
“How do they keep track of people?”
“It’s a swipe-card system. You have to run your ID card through a magnetic card reader when you enter or exit the building. The information is automatically logged into the computer. Friday afternoon before they locked down the building, the security guards were supposed to make sure that every person who had entered the building that day had also exited.”
“Maybe they made a mistake.”
“Maybe they did,” I said. “Do you think there’s some connection with Danny Wohl’s death? I mean, you start poking around Michael Childress’s past, and two days later he turns up dead. That would be quite a coincidence.”
“You realize this means giving up Galloway to the cops.”
“I can’t.”
“Then I’m going to have to do it.”
“Blades is going to be pissed at me, isn’t he?”
“I’m assuming that right now Blades is the least of your worries. Why don’t you tell me what it is you want me to do?”
For the rest of the day Elliott ran interference with the police. Stephen’s assistant Rachel acted as his handmaiden, spending the day slipping discreetly in and out of the presentation room delivering whispered summonses. By this method the detectives were able to interview everyone who’d been involved in finding the body or who’d worked with Childress without attracting the attention of the Japanese.
I ended up spending almost two hours with the detectives, telling them not only what I knew about the discovery of the body, but about Azor in general and the rough outline of the deal with Takisawa. Throughout it all, they were not only courteous and professional but, I came to realize, very sharp. While their questioning of me was painless, it was so thorough that I felt physically drained when it was over.
I went upstairs to rejoin the group in the conference room and sent Stephen downstairs to take my place. He spent most of Michelle Goodwin’s presentation being questioned, which was not an entirely bad thing. I doubted that even under the best of circumstances Michelle was particularly good at the lectern, but today, struggling with Childress’s slides, she seemed painfully bad.
Things seemed to pick up somewhat after lunch, with Stephen moderating a question-and-answer session between Takisawa’s scientists and his own. I took the opportunity to slip away to look for Elliott. I found him alone in the modeling room, poring over a computer printout of Friday’s card swipes.
“Where are the cops?” I asked from the doorway. “Gone for now,” he replied, looking up with a smile. “You look tired.”
“I feel dead. Speaking of dead, where’s Childress?”
“They took him away hours ago. I spoke to Joe. He’s going to see what he can do about getting Julia Gordon to do the post. He says he figures she owes him after how Danny Wohl’s autopsy was handled.”
“What do the cops think?”
“They’re pros, which means they’re not saying. But I think it’s pretty obvious they’ve ruled out suicide. The emergency escape handle looks like it was deliberately tampered with. The cuts and bruises on his fingers and hands correspond to bloody fingerprints on the inside of the door where it looks like he tried to claw his way out.”
“Any chance he died someplace else and his body was dumped in the freezer in order to astonish us when we opened the door?”
“It seems unlikely.”
“I don’t know,” I mused. “The whole thing is just too bizarre.”
“You know what puzzles me is this computer log. Granted, it’s difficult to decipher because there are so many different individual entries. With three-hundred-plus people working in this building, it’s amazing the number of times people come in and out. Still, I’ve gone through it item by item twice now and everybody’s accounted for. Childress arrived at eight fifty-six in the morning, and he swiped out at three thirty-two in the afternoon.”
“Does anybody remember seeing him leave?”
“No. But the guard who was doing duty at the security desk said that wasn’t necessarily unusual, especially if he didn’t have a briefcase or any other kind of bag that needed to be checked out.”
“What time was his flight to Boston supposed to leave?”
“Five-ten.”
“That’s cutting it close. I would have guessed he was the kind of guy who liked to get to the airport early. I know things were sort of crazy with the big breakthrough in the crystallography lab, but everyone was pretty well out of there by quarter to two. So I guess the question is, what was he doing between one forty-five and three thirty-two?”
“Well, for one thing he called my operative and told her all about his big discovery.”
“What time?”
“She doesn’t remember exactly, but she says she thinks somewhere around two.”
“Maybe there were other people he called as well.”
“The cops’ll subpoena the company’s phone records if they think it’s important.”
“Do you?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But I’ll tell you a couple of things they’re definitely going to want to know.”
“What?”
He ticked them off on his fingers. “They’re going to want to know what happened to his car. It’s not in the lot and it’s not at his house. They found his plane ticket to Boston in the pocket of his pants, but so far his keys haven’t turned up. They’re also going to want to know what happened to his ID card. They looked everywhere for it, and it didn’t turn up.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah. They’re going to want to know why he was naked.”
CHAPTER 26
Mother was unable to join us at the Everest Room for dinner that night. The Art Institute was having their quarterly trustees meeting. It had been scheduled months ago, and Mother had no choice—they were voting on the budget, and she had to go. As I drove downtown to the restaurant I could not remember a time, not even when I was a little girl, when I felt like I needed her more.
I told myself it was just lack of sleep. After all, I’d worked on cases, some of which had dragged on for months, that were so emotionally difficult they made finding a dead body in the freezer look like a harmless April Fools’ joke. Staying unruffled was what I got paid the big bucks for.
There was no denying I was irritated with myself. I’d had clients throw furniture, break down in tears, and start throwing punches—and I’d never taken any of it personally. After all, when you came right down to it, it was always the client’s ass that was on the line—not mine. But as much as I’d believed I would be able to keep our business and professional lives separate, I had to confess I was feeling not only furious with Stephen, but hurt as well.
Stephen hadn’t spoken to me since our argument that morning outside the cold room. Not one single word. A
t lunch he’d taken pains to ignore me and when I’d come to his office after we’d shoveled the Japanese into their limos and sent them on their way, he’d actually gotten up and closed the door in my face. This was petty, junior-high-school stuff, but after what I’d done for him—-coming to work on the Takisawa deal full time, trying to squeeze in work for my clients at night and on the weekend, putting myself into my mother’s debt in order to enlist her help on his behalf—I felt I deserved better.
On the passenger seat beside me was the folder with Mother’s explicit instructions regarding the night’s arrangements, including a copy of the contract with the restaurant spelling out the menu, and a seating chart she’d faxed over to Cheryl, who’d in turn faxed it out to Oak Brook for me. I was hoping the arrangements had all been carried out according to plan. Otherwise I was going to have to give Mother’s recipe for catharsis— chewing out the catering staff—a try.
I pulled up to One Financial Plaza, the gleaming home of the Mid-America Commodity Exchange, behind the Board of Trade Building on LaSalle Street. Ignoring the bemused expression of the valet at the sight of my car— this was Bentley and Testa Rossa territory—I handed over my keys and took the exterior escalator to the entrance of the building. Walking through the lobby to the bank of express elevators that would whisk me to the fortieth floor, I could not fault my mother’s judgment for choosing the Everest for dinner. Perched atop the city’s financial center, it not only commanded one of the most spectacular city views to be found outside a tourist observation deck, but the entire restaurant had been conceived of to please the palates—and egos—of powerful men.
The manager met me as I stepped off the elevator. One tuxedoed waiter took my coat while another offered me a glass of champagne from a silver tray with the chef’s compliments. The restaurant was elegant and masculine without being clubby. Crystal chandeliers, white damask tablecloths, and the stiff formality of the waiters were offset by the whimsical faux leopard-skin carpeting. The food, I knew from experience, was uniformly excellent— adventurous but seldom daring—like the financial high rollers who were the mainstay of their clientele.
Fatal Reaction Page 26