by Conell, Zach
“Cillian…” Rose’s voice quivered. He had been gazing at the floor but now raised his head to look at her. She observed him closely, with a pleading, almost desperate look in her eyes. “That man at the station… do you think he killed my father? I already thought he resembled my father’s description of the man that followed him, but I wasn’t sure before…”
Cillian folded his arms across his chest in an unconscious attempt to shield himself from Rose’s pain, which he to a certain extent recognized due to his own misery over Amanda’s disappearance. “It’s possible,” he said in almost a whisper, while subtly nodding his head, “probable even. And if he didn’t do it himself, he is likely to know who did.”
Tears sprung in Rose’s eyes, and she buried her face in her hands, but to Cillian’s surprise she did not start crying. Instead, she wiped her face, took a deep breath, and then jumped up from the edge of the bed on which she had been sitting.
“Goddammit!” she screamed fiercely. “If I had known that that freak, that bastard, was the man who murdered my father, I would have shot him right there at the station, or at the very least thrown him in front of the train!” Her eyes spewed fire as they searched the room for some object on which she could vent her anger, like a fox in a henhouse targeting a prey. The closest thing she could find was a pillow, which she snatched from the bed only to bring it down on the desk with tremendous force as if she were striking the head of her father’s murderer with a hammer. Her action startled Cillian, who was sitting very close to the desk and for an instant thought that she was aiming for his face. But before he knew it, Rose raised the pillow again, flung it against the headboard of his bed, turned back to Cillian, and grabbed him by the shoulders.
“Tell me, Cillian,” she huffed, “will you help me catch this miscreant and any accomplice or accomplices he may have, whatever it takes?”
“You know I will,” he answered resolutely, looking her straight in the face, “even if there is a whole damn battalion of them.” He was dead serious.
Rose’s grip on his shoulders loosened, and she let out a chuckle.
“You are amazing, Cillian,” she said, gently pressing the palm of her right hand against his chest. “Thank you. I really needed to hear that.”
As Rose sat down on the bed again, Cillian suggested that they could actually use the apparent interest of the Fedora Freak in following her around, in order to get to him. He proposed that he would follow her to the funeral home the next day, but at a distance, so that he would be able to notice if the pursuer in the bomber jacket showed up again. If he didn’t, they could go on to her father’s apartment in the same manner or to Erdmann’s office at the university in hopes of getting him on Rose’s tail again. While Rose rejected the idea of visiting the office where her father’s body had been found, which was probably also the room where he was killed, she liked the plan of visiting her father’s apartment. She had briefly been there on Thursday already, looking for clues or signs of someone having been there other than her father, but finding nothing. They both agreed that it wasn’t necessary for any of them to visit her father’s office as it had been thoroughly inspected by the police, so any possible hints left by Professor Erdmann about the identity of his murderer in his last moments of consciousness would have been erased by now.
Cillian asked about her father’s laptop, but Rose didn’t know where it was. In his testimony, her father had mentioned that he brought it to his hotel on Tuesday. He could have brought it to campus on Wednesday or Thursday, but even if he had, it was no longer there. Rose had asked the police about it, but they said that the officers who had first inspected the office after receiving the anonymous call about Erdmann’s death had not found it there.
“I don’t think the police have it. My father probably chucked it in the Chicago River after he had left me the USB to make sure no one could access his file but me,” Rose answered with a melancholic smile when Cillian asked her what she thought had happened to it.
Rose didn’t leave Cillian’s hotel room that evening. After discussing their plan for the next day, she proceeded to bring herself up to date on the case by going through all the professor’s files. In the meantime, Cillian went over his notes again and afterward browsed through various local news websites for stories about Mayor Gullfay and his policies, in particular zero tolerance, as well as any articles covering news from the SNNs and the South Side generally.
The first thing he learned was that the receptionist at the Chicago Transparent had told the truth. The CT website contained no new articles, but there was a special message on the homepage about Lucy Tiller’s passing under a page-wide photograph of the late editor-in-chief. The memorandum commemorated Mrs. Tiller and described the decision of her staff to take the weekend off in order to process the loss of their beloved supervisor and friend. No details of her death were mentioned other than that she had “passed away unexpectedly.”
When Cillian did an elaborate search for “Brian Mulvaney,” he didn’t find any articles mentioning the alderman’s possible disappearance or death, so Cillian guessed he was still with them, even if he didn’t pick up his phone nor returned their calls. From the looks of it, Mulvaney was simply scared shitless like Duncan and had made the same choice of trying to save his ass by shutting up.
Virtually all news websites reported that the temporal “CCFF police task force” announced by Mayor Gullfay a day earlier had already set up a number of checkpoints at various “vulnerable” locations in Chicago. When Cillian pinpointed these locations on a map, he noticed that all of them “just happened to be” along the dividing lines between the South Side and the West Side and between the South Side and downtown, aka the Loop. Meanwhile, the mainstream media reported that after a quiet period, the zero-tolerance unit was gearing up for a major “game-changing” operation in the SNNs to take place sometime next week. The alternative news outlets speculated about the potentially disastrous consequences for South Side residents of the impending zero-tolerance “onslaught” and hypothesized that this radical move might be intended as a kind of diversion, to prevent the people and the press from noticing how badly the citywide preparations for the CCFF were behind schedule, which an anonymous source inside city hall was quoted as having said earlier that day.
Since Cillian had always perceived Pat Gullfay as someone whose head and heart were as empty as his rhetoric, he was inclined to believe that the mayor would be fine to start a brutal war against the underprivileged merely to distract people from the slow-burning train wreck of an event the CCFF was anticipated to end up being, if it was going to take place at all. But the reports of Professor Erdmann about the headhunters complicated this scheme in a way that Cillian could not get his head around. He had the feeling that he was staring at an incomplete puzzle of a painting depicting the dystopian future of the City of Chicago, knowing neither how many pieces were missing, nor what the final picture was supposed to look like. So far he could only surmise that it was probably going to turn out a hideous and gory fresco.
“You missed someone.” Rose’s voice derailed his train of thoughts.
“What do you mean?” he asked, turning around to look at her. She was sitting on the bed, leaning against the headboard with a laptop on her lap amid the scattered pages containing his notes. She held up one of the papers, but he couldn’t make out what it said.
“Here you listed the people mentioned by my father that we could consider contacting, but you didn’t include one.”
“Who?” Cillian racked his brain but couldn’t come up with anything.
“The unknown SNN resident who slipped a USB drive into my father’s pocket containing the videos of the headhunters and their training routine,” Rose answered assuredly.
“But you just said it yourself, we don’t know who did that,” Cillian retorted.
“True, but I made a list of suspects.” Rose gave him a self-satisfied smile as she crumpled up a piece of paper and tossed it over to him. He caught
it with a puzzled look on his face.
“Open it. I’m too sleepy to bring it over to you, that’s all,” she giggled.
He unfolded the page. On it, Rose had written five names with addresses in two different SNNs.
“Those are the people my father visited in the South Side last Tuesday, the day that my father found the pen drive,” she elaborated. “It was in one of his files.”
“I’m pretty sure I checked that file, but I thought there were more than a dozen people on his list for Tuesday,” Cillian recalled.
“True, but I was able to bring it down to only five because of my familiarity with my father’s ‘organized chaos.’ When I noticed that the names on the list all had a plus sign or an asterisk behind them, apart from one case which had a minus sign, I was sure this had to mean something, because everything my father did always meant something, even if it appeared to be completely random.”
Cillian remembered seeing these symbols, but he hadn’t paid attention to their meaning as this matter had seemed an utterly insignificant detail in the sea of information he had emerged himself in last night.
“I remembered my father mentioning that he abandoned his plans to interview SNN residents on Tuesday halfway through, because no one was telling him anything useful,” Rose continued. “That got me wondering if the symbols told something about which residents he did visit and which ones he skipped. And sure enough, they did, because I found a list of SNN residents from his original round of zero-tolerance interviews, with the same symbols written behind the names, and luckily, a footnote to explain their meaning. A plus sign meant that he visited the resident, an asterisk that the visit was ‘pending,’ and a minus sign that he decided to exclude the resident from the research. There were only five names with a plus sign.”
“That’s some nice detective work,” Cillian commented somewhat indifferently. “But there are no phone numbers here, only addresses, so we can only contact those people by actually visiting the South Side, and that would be way too dangerous, like your father mentioned.”
“To hell with that,” Rose snapped. “Didn’t you just promise me that you would do anything to solve this case and track down the scumbags who were behind my father’s death? I don’t care if it’s dangerous. If we don’t have a decent lead by Monday, I’m going to the South Side, with or without you.”
While she gave a general impression of being in complete control of her senses as she said this, Cillian noticed that her little monologue was accompanied by a subtle trembling of her lower lip and a slight narrowing of her eyelids, which he recognized as signs that there was a hurricane of vengeful fury raging inside her. There is no way she is ever going to give this up; she is hell-bent on avenging her father and will not rest until she has accomplished that, he thought as a cynical smile played on his lips. So I might as well help her.
“You’re right. Screw it all—I’m with you,” he said.
“Glad to hear it, Mr. Cantor,” Rose responded ostensibly calm as ever, but Cillian saw that her lip had stopped trembling, as if his answer had reassured her.
In what remained of the evening, Cillian informed Rose about the news regarding the upcoming large-scale incursion of the zero-tolerance unit into the South Side; the supposed setbacks suffered by the city administration in preparing for the CCFF; and the lack of news regarding Mulvaney, after which Rose insisted on carrying on with her analysis of all the files and videos they had at their disposal. She made one more potentially significant observation that related to the rather convenient timing of Dr. Leamington’s decision to hire Cillian. When closely scrutinizing the timeline of events he had made the night before, Rose noticed that Dr. Leamington had recruited the unlicensed PI to find and retrieve her son from the South Side right before the headhunters had begun entering the SNNs. Rose wondered whether this wasn’t too much of a coincidence and if it could in fact be an indication that Dr. Leamington had insider’s knowledge about the forces at play in the South Side, perhaps owing to an intimate relationship with Mr. X.
Cillian acknowledged that they could not rule out this possibility, but at the same time he emphasized that her supposition was fairly far-fetched and was based solely on circumstantial evidence. He warned Rose that they should be careful not to let their mutual dislike of the dean cloud their judgment about her. The detective related how he had made that mistake in a previous case where he had been so eager to believe the incriminating statements of one man about his no-good older brother and the latter’s wild extramarital affairs, that Cillian had struggled for weeks to find any evidence supporting the man’s implausible theories about his two-timing brother’s obscene activities, while overlooking the obvious signs that his client was the one with the unhealthy adoration of his brother’s wife. In the end Cillian had not uncovered a sex scandal of any kind, but merely one man’s pitiful jealousy of his older brother, who in the eyes of Cillian’s client had gotten more out of life than he deserved, while the younger brother himself had been dealt a bad and unfair hand.
Rose admitted that she found it challenging to remain objective about Dr. Leamington’s potential role in everything due to her profound aversion to and distrust of the dean. To Cillian’s amusement, she subsequently adopted a theatrical tone and posture and solemnly swore that she would from then on be prudent in making judgments and would get to the bottom of their case through research rather than guesswork. Despite the bombastic delivery, her promise seemed far from meaningless, since Rose followed it by immediately delving into the case files once more.
Cillian meanwhile decided to write a short report outlining all information pertaining to the case which they had obtained that day. He therefore not only summarized their interactions with the CT receptionist and Oliver Duncan as well as his own chat with Dr. Leamington, but also mentioned their failed efforts to reach Mulvaney, described their encounter with the Fedora Freak, recapped the relevant news stories they had discussed, wrote down Rose’s new observations based on her close examination of the case files, and finally Cillian recorded their discussions about all those matters.
When Cillian had finished his report, he got up from his desk to ask Rose for how much longer she planned to work. However, as he turned around, he was pleasantly surprised to see that she was no longer toiling restlessly as she had been all evening and currently lay fast asleep on his bed, next to her laptop and a pile of his notes. She looked so peaceful, so beautifully serene that Cillian simply couldn’t bring himself to wake her. Instead he moved her laptop and his notes a little to the side to give her more space, pulled the blanket over her, wrote a few words on an empty page in his notebook that he then left open on the nightstand, took her room key out of her purse, got his toothbrush and some clothes, and left the room. The note he left her read:
Dear Rose,
I didn’t want to wake you, so I went to your room to sleep there. Sweet dreams and see you in the morning,
Cillian
After a quick shower, he dressed himself in a brand-new shirt and a fresh pair of underwear, brushed his teeth, and got into the bed. He didn’t know whether it was the warmth of the blankets, the softness of the sheets, or the subtle, pleasant smell of the pillowcase that reminded him of the gorgeous, enigmatic woman asleep in the adjacent room. But lying there in Rose’s bed, Cillian Cantor felt more comfortable and at peace with himself than he had in years, and he swiftly fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Chapter Fifteen
After waking up wonderfully rested thanks to a long, reinvigorating sleep in Rose’s bed, Cillian spent his Sunday encountering disappointment after disappointment. The only thing he was happy with was the law enforcement authorities releasing the body of Reinhart Erdmann as promised, so that Rose got to see her father alone for the first time since his passing. After the body had been delivered to the funeral home and tentatively prepared by the staff there, Rose and Cillian were given the opportunity to look at it from up close. Cillian first let Rose enter the room where
the deceased was laid out. She went in cautiously while holding her breath and, before long, came rushing out in tears. He tried to console her, but she asked him to “go in and get it over with,” by which she meant his examination of the professor’s body for marks or signs of any kind that might indicate the true cause of death, assuming that it had not been heart failure.
Cillian hesitated on the doorstep for a moment but then went on about his business with the tranquil air and determination of a professional coroner. While obviously being far from that, he was attentive and thorough enough to have fooled most people who weren’t in the business themselves. It made no difference, however, because he found absolute no traces of foul play. In fact, Erdmann’s body was remarkably, almost suspiciously clean, like that of a newborn baby. This greatly disconcerted Cillian, since all the circumstantial evidence Rose and he had uncovered came down to nothing if there was no way to prove that Erdmann had died from anything other than natural causes.
Standing beside the body after his fruitless examination of it, and observing Erdmann’s peaceful face, Cillian was overtaken by a strong feeling of doubt. Is there really a case here? he asked himself. Or have I just been too eager to believe a beautiful woman and have consequently made the same beginner’s mistake I warned her against, by assuming what I wanted to be true rather than what the facts supported?
Although Erdmann’s audio recording pointed to an unnatural death, Cillian knew that it only did so indirectly. For instance, if he looked at the case from a different perspective, and supposed the official story that Rose’s father had died from heart failure to be true, the unnerving experiences described by the professor could actually be interpreted as evidence to support this account as well. After all, it was not at all unlikely that the threats Rose’s father had received in the days before his death, together with the unsettling experience of being followed, had caused him to be subjected to dangerously high levels of stress which had taken a toll on his heart until it had ultimately given out. While Erdmann’s heart may have been in good shape, Cillian did not want to overlook the reality that a human heart, no matter how strong, was never indestructible.