“Because I wanted to give you time to get out of here.”
“What if I don’t want to leave?”
“The tub back there has been filled with concrete, Marie. When they break it open, they’re gonna find Eddie Ward inside.”
“You think so?”
“I’m sure of it. What I don’t know is how he got there. And whether you had anything to do with it.”
“I didn’t even know the man.”
“He helped you engineer Ray’s escape. That made him a liability.”
“If you believe that, then I’m a murderer. Setting aside the question of how I would maneuver a man into a tub full of concrete and why I would select that method to kill anyone, what’s the motive behind letting me go?”
“Honestly?”
“Isn’t honesty and trust the basis of this wonderful relationship we seem to have struck?”
“I don’t believe you’re a killer. Not yet anyway.” I looked at my watch. “My friend’s gonna be here soon. Head out the back and catch a cab. I’ll call you once we crack open the tub.”
I walked her through Eddie’s kitchen to the back porch. She slipped down the stairs and moved quickly across a patch-work of Chicago alleys. The rain had tapered to a fine mist, and her hair glowed under the damp steam of the streetlights. I watched until she disappeared. Then I went back inside and waited. Rodriguez showed up ten minutes later.
“You clean up whatever you didn’t want me to see?”
“You’re better off not knowing.”
“You think I’m complaining? Where is it?”
“In here.” I led him to the bathroom and leaned up against the door frame. Rodriguez crouched close to the tub and studied it.
“How heavy is this thing?”
I shrugged. “You worried it’s gonna go through the floor?”
“That’s all I need.”
“It’ll be all right.”
“This building’s a piece of crap. What makes you think the floor can handle a tub full of concrete?”
I studied the gray surface. Smooth, flat, and hard. A professional job in more ways than one.
“We’re gonna find Eddie in there,” I said.
“Your electrician, I know. And you think it somehow connects back to Ray Perry?”
“There’s a bigger picture here, Vince.”
“Do me a favor and keep it to yourself.”
“The boulder that crushed Paul Goggin’s car wasn’t a boulder at all. It was a slab of concrete.” I crouched down and rapped the top of the tub. “Just like this one here.”
“You already gave me that theory.”
“It had to be at least a couple of guys who did Goggin. With some serious muscle and a plan.”
“What kind of plan?”
“Someone follows Goggin in his car. Coordinates with the guys on the overpass so they get the timing right.”
“You’re reaching.”
“You don’t think that kid killed Goggin. You’re too good a cop for that.”
“What would you like me to do?”
“Let’s go outside.”
We walked out to the porch, wiped down a couple of chairs Eddie had stashed out there, and sat down. Rodriguez lit a cigarette. I’d grabbed a Coke out of the fridge.
“Someone’s tying up loose ends,” I said and popped open the soft drink.
“Chicago. City of loose ends.” Rodriguez took a drag and blew smoke into the night.
“They also wanted to send a message. That’s why they used the cement. First on Goggin. Then on Eddie.”
“And who, exactly, are ‘they’?”
“The guys who make a living in cement. Beacon Limited.”
Rodriguez stared up at a starless sky and chuckled. “You’re crazy.”
“They donated four million dollars to Ray during his last year in office. More than fifteen million total. Spread out over four or five companies.”
“So what. Beacon’s been doing highway jobs in this state for thirty years.”
“Yeah, but they hit the jackpot once Ray moved into the mansion.”
“Hence, the fifteen mil.” Rodriguez took another drag and flicked the butt over the railing. We both watched the trail of red sparks flare and die as they fell. Then I told the detective about my trip to the job site on the Eisenhower Expressway.
“So you’re telling me you shot one of Beacon’s security goons?”
“If he hasn’t filed a report, maybe not. The point is they came after me. And there has to be a reason.”
“Beyond the fact you were trespassing?”
“You don’t see it?”
“I see it. You think Beacon was involved somehow in Ray Perry’s disappearance. Why? You have no idea. And now they’re burying people in bathtubs full of concrete and dropping hunks of the stuff on cars, presumably to cover their tracks. Sorry, Kelly, but I’m not buying. Now, answer me a question. Who did you hustle out of here before I came in?”
“Why would you think that?”
Rodriguez shook his head.
“What are you gonna do about the tub?” I said.
“I’m gonna call in a team. Break it open and see what we see. Pleasant way to spend the rest of my night.”
“Here’s something else to pass the time.” I unfolded the police report Elena Ramirez had given me and handed it over.
“What’s this?” the detective said.
“The guy in this report is a Chicago cop. I met his daughter the other day. Not the one listed in the report. His youngest, Elena.”
Rodriguez glanced up, then kept reading.
“Elena says her father put a gun to her oldest sister’s head after she told him she was gonna have a baby. Police whitewashed it as an accidental discharge of a weapon.”
“This was four years ago. What do you want me to do?”
“Elena’s sixteen and pregnant. She believes the old man might go ahead and pull the trigger this time around.”
“And you think she’s right?”
“I think I don’t want to find out.”
Rodriguez held up the report. “Can I keep this?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. Clear out of here. I’ve got to call in a team and dig out Eddie.”
“So you think it’s Eddie, too?”
“It’s Eddie. Probably owed the wrong guy some money. Now, take off. And next time you find a tub full of concrete, do me a favor and lose my number. And Kelly?”
“What?”
“If you’re serious about Beacon, bring me some evidence. A motive wouldn’t hurt either.”
CHAPTER 23
Evidence and motive can be hard to come by, which is why I found myself hiking up onto a highway overpass at three-thirty in the morning. Jack O’Donnell had insisted we meet at the same Beacon job site I’d visited a week earlier, only this time the site was wrapped in darkness. I took out a nightscope and scanned the construction area. The place looked deserted. The scope was equipped with a thermal-imaging lens that told me all of the engines in the cars and trucks were cold. I slipped the scope back in my pocket and stared down at the Ike. The highway uncoiled like a jeweled serpent, stretching west toward the flatlands of Schaumberg and back into the heart of the city. A semi thumped past in a rush of wind and rubber. I walked back across the overpass, got in my car, and drove three exits east. Jack O’Donnell’s blue SUV was waiting.
—
O’Donnell eased through the labyrinth of construction cones and pulled up to a fence emblazoned with a Hi-Top Construction logo. “If anyone asks what we’re doing here, you let me talk.”
“Fine.”
He pulled a thermos of coffee from under his seat. “You want some?”
“No thanks.”
“Suit yourself.” O’Donnell poured himself a cup and sipped. Outside, sodium lamps were mounted on thick poles strung along the perimeter of the work site. The lamps threw chunks of hard white light on concrete dividers and silent lumps of machinery. Beyond th
at, the darkness was absolute.
“The first crew’s scheduled to get here at five,” O’Donnell said. “We’ll be long gone by then.” He was still a young man, in his early forties, with a small square head, anxious hairline, and quick, angled features. He flicked a hand at the world beyond his windshield and sighed. “Want to tell me why you care about this stuff?”
“It might tie into a case I’m working.”
“What sort of case?”
“I got hired by a guy…”
“What guy?”
“Actually I don’t even know if it is a guy. Might be a woman.”
“You’re a private investigator and you don’t know who hired you?”
I described the e-mail I’d gotten, followed by the adrenaline shot to my bank account. O’Donnell whistled. Low and smart. “Sounds like my kind of client. Why does he want you to find Perry?”
“No idea.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
“Not yet.”
“How do you think I can help?”
“Tell me about Beacon Limited.”
“The roads of Illinois are paved in red and white.”
“Excuse me?”
“Those are the colors Beacon uses for all its subsidiaries. Red and white.” O’Donnell cranked open the driver’s-side door and flicked on a flashlight. “Come on. Let’s take a walk.”
The entrance to the site had a gate that was latched, but not locked. O’Donnell didn’t seem surprised and eased it open. The highway curved gently to the left. I could see the reporter’s breath in the predawn cold and hear the scrape of his boots in the gravel. We walked for about a hundred yards and stopped.
“Six years ago, this road got a face-lift,” O’Donnell said.
“I remember. Edens, Kennedy. They all got face-lifts.”
“Let’s stick with the Ike.”
“Fine.”
“You know how a road’s built?”
I shook my head.
“The old highway had twelve inches of gravel, called a sub-base, covered over by four inches of asphalt and ten inches of concrete. That’s twenty-six inches deep. Not enough for today’s traffic. Beacon’s people proposed laying in a new surface—twenty-four inches of sub-base, six inches of asphalt, and fourteen of concrete. That’s forty-four inches, as thick and sturdy as any piece of highway ever built in this state. Great, right?”
I nodded.
“Then why are we six years in and it’s falling apart? This way.”
We cut between two dividers and walked past a couple of dump trucks. They were painted in violent shades of red and black and had EAGLE CEMENT, another Beacon subsidiary, printed across their doors in white block letters.
“The Eisenhower project began in 2006,” O’Donnell said. “Ray’s first year in the mansion. Finished up in the winter of 2008. Beacon initially estimated the cost at eight hundred million dollars. The final price tag was closer to one-point-four billion. Springfield kicked, but Perry rammed it through the legislature anyway. Here, take a look at this.”
O’Donnell set his flashlight on the ground and squatted beside a gray tarp that covered a hundred yards of road. He removed a couple of pegs and peeled back the covering. Two parallel cracks, each about five feet long and a couple of inches wide, ran side by side down the middle of the road. O’Donnell peeled back the tarp a little farther. The cracks cobwebbed into smaller fractures and split off in a dozen different directions.
“Beacon claims this is nothing,” O’Donnell said. “Just surface cracks that are easily patched.”
“And is it?”
O’Donnell pulled a steel tape measure from his vest and slid it into one of the main fissures. “This one runs almost ten inches deep. Halfway to the sub-base. It’s a major flaw and an indication the road’s falling apart.” O’Donnell snapped his tape measure shut. “As we speak, Beacon has seven different ‘patching operations’ they’re doing on the Ike.” O’Donnell stood and looked back behind us. “It’s gonna be getting light soon. Let’s get back to the car.”
We didn’t say a word on the walk back. O’Donnell climbed behind the wheel. I got in the passenger’s side. For the first time I noticed a child’s booster seat locked into the seat behind me. We drove back to my car, parked on a dead-end street bellied up next to the highway. O’Donnell took out a laptop and fired it up.
“What’s your e-mail?”
I gave it to him.
“I’m sending you information on three crashes that happened on the Ike. Six fatalities, total. Including three kids.” O’Donnell turned around the laptop so I could see a picture of a ten-year-old girl in her school uniform.
“I visited two of the accident sites myself,” O’Donnell said. “They’d already patched up most of the road, but I was able to get a look at the damage underneath.”
“And?”
“I saw the same cracks you saw tonight. A road essentially coming apart at the seams.”
“And you think it caused these crashes?”
“Clean driving records. No evidence of drugs or drinking. No bad weather. I can’t prove it, but, yes, I’m convinced it was the road that killed them.”
I scrolled through a list of the articles. Then I returned to the picture of the kid. “You’re going to send this stuff to me?”
“I already did.”
“How about evidence? Did you take any photos of the accident sites when you visited them?”
“I shot some videotape, but it won’t help.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not conclusive. Not even close.”
“Can I see the tapes?”
O’Donnell glanced out the window at the heavy chain-link fence that separated us from the expressway. “Let’s wait on that.”
“Fine. So, how did they do it?”
“Do what?”
“Cheat the system? Spend a billion dollars and build a substandard highway without anyone catching on?”
“It’s not as hard as you think. In this case, they probably did a couple of things. First, there are the state’s weigh scales. Trucks filled with cement would be weighed as they left Beacon plants in the morning. The state would then be billed for raw materials based on those readings.”
“Beacon messed with the scales?”
“Most likely they rigged the computers that recorded the weights. Five tons of material get recorded as six, and the state gets overbilled. Every single day. Every single truck. Adds up pretty quick.”
“What else?”
“They cheat on their mix. A contractor has certain specs he’s supposed to follow in creating asphalt and concrete mixes. If they skimp on the recipe, throw in a little more sand, too much water, the mix gets compromised. And the contractor saves money.”
“How much money?”
O’Donnell chuckled. “On a project like this? The final price tag to the state was roughly one-point-four billion. Based on the quality of work I’ve seen, I wouldn’t be surprised if Beacon skimmed fifteen, twenty percent of that.”
“That’s almost three hundred million dollars.”
“And that’s just the Ike.”
“Why haven’t you written a story on any of this?”
O’Donnell jerked his head toward the child’s seat in the back. “My youngest was three years old last month. You think she deserves a dad? ’Cuz I do.”
“It’s like that, huh?”
“I first got onto Beacon when I was with the Trib. My editor killed every investigative piece I ever pitched. One night he took me out for a drink. Said he wanted to talk about my work. So we had our drink. Actually, a few drinks. Then he pulled out an envelope. Inside was a picture of my oldest. Six, seven years old at the time. She was holding the hand of a man and smiling. The man was cut off at the shoulders so I couldn’t see his face.” O’Donnell’s voice was even, but there were the faintest tracings of pink in his face and a froth of spittle at the corner of his mouth. “I grabbed my boss by the throat and was ab
out to put my fist through his teeth. Job be damned. He pulls out a second photo. His kid. Same age as mine. Same guy holding her hand. My boss told me we wouldn’t run anything on Beacon. Now or ever. Not if we loved our kids. I agreed. We had another drink and never talked about it again.” O’Donnell pulled the thermos out from under his seat and unscrewed the cap. “You sure you don’t want some?”
I nodded and he poured us each a cup of coffee. I took a sip. It was hot and strong.
“Why are you here, Jack?”
“You’re supposed to be a hard man. And you don’t have any family. I figured maybe you could do something about it.”
“Who owns Beacon?”
“If I knew, I’d tell you.”
“Can you give me anything else?”
“I’ve already given you too much.”
“How about the tapes you made of the roads?”
“I’ll think about that.”
I took out one of my business cards and stuck it on the dash. “Thanks, Jack.”
“Good luck. And don’t call me again.”
I climbed out of O’Donnell’s SUV and watched him drive away. Then I got in my car and headed back to the job site. I figured I still had some time and wanted to get another look under that tarp. So I got out and picked my way across the work zone. There was a fresh wind at my back, and the first fingers of sunlight brushed the highway in delicate shades of blush. I found the section O’Donnell had led me to and walked a bit farther. Then I crouched down and peeled back the thick canvas. The cracks here were wider and deeper. I took out a small flashlight I’d brought with me and positioned it so it lit up one of the largest fault lines. I was about to snap a photo with my phone when I heard the hard crunch of gravel behind me. I reached for my gun and looked back. Just in time to see the dark shape of a shovel dropping out of a sky frosted in pink.
CHAPTER 24
The water was cold and dirty, forcing its way up my nose and sluicing between my teeth. I knew better than to struggle. If the person leaning on the back of my head wanted to drown me, my resistance would only accelerate the process. And why drown me in the first place? A gun was easier. The hand seemed to read my mind as I was pulled free of the bucket. I coughed and retched. Someone dragged me to a chair and cuffed me. Then a black bag went over my head. I never saw the shovel coming this time.
The Governor's Wife Page 11