The Black Cage

by Jack Fredrickson

  ‘But bigger than Stemec Henderson, the girls, and that Richie Fernandez you’ve been harping about? Why are you calling me?’

  ‘I lost my trumpet. I’m done at the Examiner. Donovan won’t publish me.’

  ‘Those pictures of you in this morning’s Curious Chicagoan at the hot Mrs Henderson’s? You were set up. Maybe we could give you a freelance trumpet here at the Trib.’

  ‘I think McGarry had money in the Examiner,’ Rigg said.

  ‘I heard that,’ Theodore said, sounding not surprised, ‘but I can’t get confirmation.’

  ‘Not important. Glet’s the story. He left traces.’

  ‘Of his fireworks case?’

  ‘People are already coming after me for what I know. Yours to use, Greg, just not until after noon.’

  ‘I’m being used?’ Theodore asked.

  ‘More to follow,’ Rigg said, and clicked him away. He crossed the street.

  ‘I think Mr Feldott is in conference,’ Beige Jane at the front desk said.

  ‘Try him anyway,’ he said.

  She checked and told Rigg the department secretary said he could go up. Rigg moved toward the stairs, but got snagged by a thought before he got to the first step. He turned around. Jane at the desk was busy on the phone. He walked straight ahead, went through the swinging doors and took the stairs down to the basement.

  He’d never been down there. The morgue was on the first floor, the offices were on the second. But the basement was reserved for storage. All sorts of storage.

  A corridor ran down the center, lined on both sides by the same beige cinderblocks that lined the first floor. The doors in the basement were much more utilitarian, made of gray steel with identifications stenciled in red letters, all connoting what was being kept behind them. Most had ordinary, key-locking doorknobs, but the one marked Specimen had a hefty bronze keypad lock attached to it.

  ‘Help you?’ a male voice asked, irritated and sounding not at all eager to help.

  Rigg turned. A short, bald man in a white lab coat, black trousers and gray athletic shoes had come up.

  ‘Cornelius Feldott,’ Rigg said.

  ‘You’re two floors too low,’ the man said. ‘Take the stairs you came down on. Keep going up.’

  ‘That door marked Specimen – is that for DNA storage?’

  ‘Take the stairs you shouldn’t have come down on. Keep going up.’

  Rigg took the stairs he came down on and kept going up.

  Feldott met him at the top of the stairs. A slender, bright orange necktie descended down his blue, spread-collared shirt.

  ‘I was getting worried, Mr Rigg,’ he said. ‘I was told you’d be right up.’

  ‘Curiosity got the better of me. I went down to the basement.’

  ‘Not very comfortable down there.’

  ‘That door marked Specimen – is that where the DNA samples are kept?’

  ‘Have I heard right, that you’re done at the Examiner?’ Feldott asked as he led them down the hall.

  Word had indeed traveled. ‘I’m tidying up,’ Rigg said. ‘That Specimen door?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Feldott said, stopping at a different door. He’d moved into McGarry’s old office. Rigg had only been in the office three or four times, but what he remembered most was its barrenness. No papers had lain on the mahogany back credenza. No papers, pens or pencils lay scattered on the matching desk. It had been the office of a man with nothing to do except wait for better opportunities, and, as McGarry had undoubtedly learned, to do as he was told.

  Feldott was waiting for nothing. Two leather cups held pens and pencils, four piles of papers were neatly stacked on his desk. A laptop computer was open on the back credenza, below the antique Northwestern University print.

  ‘You cleaned him out quickly,’ Rigg said.

  ‘Sadly, there wasn’t much to clean out, though I doubt we’ll ever completely clean away the stain of him.’ He sat behind the desk, Rigg sat opposite. ‘Sheriff Olsen called me yesterday morning. Woke me up, actually. He told me about the fire at Mr McGarry’s estate. He wanted to know if you were capable of such a thing, but he didn’t sound serious.’

  ‘I got an anonymous phone call to go out there. I parked, waited, and was noticed by one of Olsen’s deputies staying in my car, doing nothing. The fire started right after I left.’

  ‘By whoever called you?’

  ‘It was a clumsy, desperate attempt to get me blamed for destroying evidence of killing Richie Fernandez, I suppose, put in play by someone who fears what I know. I didn’t notice any of your security personnel.’

  ‘There was a mix-up. They didn’t work that night,’ Feldott said. ‘Anything new on those traces from Glet?’

  ‘I found three pages of scribbled shorthand, torn from a wirebound notebook, taped beneath a drawer. I have to decode them.’ He’d decided to keep the lie vague. Specifics might trip it up.

  ‘What do they say?’

  ‘As I said, they’re coded – some numbers, some jumbled letters, no whole words,’ Rigg said.

  ‘Want me to have a look at it?’

  ‘I’m headed to my dune to try to figure it all out. Glet was a simple man. It shouldn’t be hard.’ He paused, then said, ‘I suppose you’ll have to tell Lehman.’

  ‘He’s in charge. He’ll want those pages.’

  ‘I’ll hand them over when I come back.’ Rigg stood up, looked around the office. ‘Folks wondered why a hugely wealthy fellow like McGarry would leave his money machine to become county medical examiner. I guess he was after power, aiming for a seat on the county board, and, from there, the mayor’s office or the state house.’

  ‘He thought wrong, poor fellow,’ Feldott said, standing too.

  ‘The CIB has put you in motion toward the sheriff’s department, Cornelius. Be careful of Lehman.’

  ‘I may be starting my own investigation, but he’s still the sheriff. I have to tell him about those notes you found.’

  Rigg wondered, now, if Corky understood. It was why he had come.

  Pancho Rozakis had texted while Rigg was in Feldott’s office: Three units in the trees, motion-activated by larger, human-sized shapes. Batteries good for three days. Recorder underneath the caboose. Driving back now.

  He’d lied a little to Greg Theodore and a lot to Corky Feldott. There was one more lie to make. He called the sheriff’s headquarters. ‘Milo Rigg for Sheriff Lehman,’ he said, not expecting to be put through, because the sheriff would already be on the phone, taking Feldott’s call.

  But Lehman, and perhaps Feldott, by not calling him right away, surprised him. Lehman picked up. ‘Arson, these days, Rigg?’

  ‘I’ll bet Sheriff Olsen had more to say than that, Sheriff.’

  ‘He told me you think I killed some mysterious witness—’

  ‘Richie Fernandez, to be precise,’ Rigg interrupted.

  Lehman tried a laugh. ‘A mysterious witness that nobody has heard of but you.’

  ‘And everybody who’s read me in the Examiner. And Olsen – I also told him you killed McGarry, but I’m not calling for a comment. I want to give you a heads-up for what Feldott will confirm. Glet left traces.’ Rigg was beginning to love the word. It was so perfectly innocuous and vague.

  ‘Traces of what?’

  ‘Actually, they’re more than traces. He left behind coded notes.’ He hung up. Lehman would call Feldott.

  And he’d hear of the dunes.

  FORTY-THREE

  Rigg got the text message while he was still in Illinois, stuck in traffic heading eastbound on the tollway. Theodore’s piece had posted on the Trib’s website. Rigg exited the snarl to read it.

  GLET RUMBLES, RIGG TUMBLES, DONOVAN FUMBLES, EXAMINER CRUMBLES?

  Greg Theodore, Chicago Tribune

  Milo Rigg, the Chicago Examiner’s on-again, off-again premier crime reporter, is apparently off-again, suspended following the Curious Chicagoan’s publication of purportedly licentious photographs showing Rigg leaving the home of
Carlotta Henderson in the wee hours of a couple of recent mornings. Mrs Henderson is the mother of brothers John and Anthony Henderson, who were found murdered, along with Bobby Stemec, in a forest preserve along the Des Plaines River fifteen months ago. Kevin Wilcox, manager of the nearby Happy Times Stables, is currently under federal arrest for gun charges, but is expected to be charged with the boys’ murders soon.

  Rigg, viewed by many as overzealous in his criticism of the murder investigation back then, was transferred a year ago from the Examiner’s downtown offices to its supplement’s suburban outpost following the scandal that ensued over the Chicagoan’s publication of almost identical photos of him leaving the Henderson house. Rigg, very recently widowed back then, was rumored to have wasted no time in carrying on with the comely Mrs Henderson. In a brief phone interview this morning, Rigg stated that he’d never had an affair with Mrs Henderson and that now he’d been set up to be silenced about what he’s learned of recently deceased Cook County Deputy Sheriff Jerome Glet’s investigation into the Stemec Henderson murders and of other matters of corruption and county foul play—

  His phone chirped before he was done reading. ‘Greg Theodore just posted a piece on the Trib’s website,’ Aria said.

  ‘“Rumbles, tumbles, fumbles and crumbles”?’ Rigg forced a laugh to sound unconcerned. ‘I’m reading it now.’

  ‘Theodore says you’ve got secret documents that will crack all sorts of things wide open.’ She was in her car. He could hear traffic noise.

  He held his phone out the window so she could hear his traffic noise, too.

  ‘Cornelius Feldott said you’re heading to your dune to decipher them,’ she said.

  ‘Why are you talking to Corky?’

  ‘I’m doing a piece on him,’ she said. ‘Bring the notes in. We’ll figure them out together.’

  ‘I had a visitor, a surreptitious sort in the kind of car cops drive. He searched my apartment.’

  ‘Lehman?’

  ‘I don’t think my apartment’s safe,’ he said.

  ‘Bring those damn notes in, Milo. We’ll decipher them and then you’ll be safe.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow. I need to figure them out, and I need to think.’

  ‘Think? Think about what?’

  ‘Basement door locks,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not making sense. Lehman will come for you. It will be bombs away. You understand, right? Bombs away?’

  ‘Bombs away, indeed,’ he said, for it was what he hoped, but it was to a dead phone. She’d hung up.

  He pulled back on to the tollway, slogged through another forty minutes of early rush-hour congestion into Indiana, and exited on to Route 12. He and Judith had always loved the way the old, narrow, two-lane blacktop followed the curve of the dunes and the tall grass beneath the southern edge of Lake Michigan. They’d marveled at the change of colors in the trees, season to season, and laughed at how they had to dodge and weave along the ancient bumpy surface that only rarely got repaved, and then only in spots. They’d delighted in imagining the history of that long-ago bootleggers’ route, the fear drivers must have felt almost a hundred years before, running hootch in the darkness from Canada into Chicago, eyes peeled for hijackers hiding in the tall grass. But, most of all, they loved the anticipation of getting to their odd little caboose some dreamer had seen fit to drag up on to a dune. It had been well over two years since Judith had been cut down by a random bullet, two years since he’d felt nothing but despair as he drove along the old route, accompanied only by memories that blurred his eyes with tears, two years of being sure he’d never feel hope again.

  And then had come Aria, and now, doubts about yellow cards miraculously discovered, and basement door locks on specimen freezers, and paper coffee cups and soda pop cans left at a DNA lab. Now, he wasn’t sure about anything.

  He arrived while it was still light enough to see. He’d been gone just over two weeks, but January had changed the landscape as it changed into February. The dunes were thawing. The ice running inward across the frozen water of the small lake at the base of his dune still looked to be thick, but now there was a small hole in the center. And the snow that had cast a pristine blanket over the dunes was turning to heavy slush, toppling branches into tangled litters on the ground, unremoved because there was nobody left to remove them. It was what the ecologist sought when they’d scraped away the old cottages to revert the dunes to their natural marshland.

  Their dune was just beyond the eastern edge of the Great Marsh Project and they’d taken comfort in that, believing that the caboose would be theirs for a long lifetime. They’d figured wrong, then. Now, as the sun was beginning to sink behind the trees, Rigg supposed he might have been figuring wrong about all sorts of things.

  He left his car at the sweep-out at the base of the ancient, railroad-tie stairs, where it would be easily seen, and climbed up to the caboose. He took little time inside. He wouldn’t run his generator to power the lights to show that he was home. It would make too much noise and he needed to hear. He refilled their six oil lamps, lit them and placed them by windows, so they would light the ground around the caboose enough to be seen by Pancho’s cameras. He only needed a snippet of video, a fast clip of breaking and entering, coming for Glet’s traces.

  The ramshackle woodshed was twenty feet from the door. It was small, the size of a privy, but he and Judith had spent an entire weekend strapping it together from fallen tree limbs and branches, laughing at its crooked rusticity when they were done. They filled it with more fallen wood they cut to fit the tiny pot-bellied wood-burning stove that heated the caboose. They’d joked they had enough to heat the caboose for a lifetime.

  The shapes of the surrounding trees were now smudging into blackness, darkening the road below the dune into invisibility. He hurried to pull out the wood at the very back, the first that he and Judith had cut, and began restacking it toward the front. It took but a few minutes to create enough space at the back to hide. He was cold, despite the three layers of fleece beneath his down jacket. He would get colder, waiting. It was the only thing left to do.

  An automobile engine sounded somewhere far off. Headlights flickered through the trees and then switched off, but the engine grew louder. The car was being run without lights – dangerous in the deserted, branch-littered roads. No benign driver would take that risk.

  The engine stopped. He strained to listen, but heard no car door open and ease shut. The car was likely too far away, down by the shore of the mostly frozen lake.

  He hurried to slip behind the stacks of wood, moving a few more pieces so he could see out. The glow from the oil lamps cast the ground around the caboose in light bright enough to see. Two of Pancho’s three cameras were aimed at the door. With luck, the break-in would be quick, a fast look around to see that there was nothing inside, but the image would remain in Pancho’s cameras, damning enough to expose.

  The dune had gone silent. No bird chirped, no raccoon rustled. The creatures knew that someone was on the move at the base of the dune.

  He took the Glock from his pocket and rested it in his hand on top of the wood. With luck, he would not be seen. With no luck, he would have to fire.

  Footfalls began beating slowly up the slush on the railroad-tie steps. The climb was long. It took a couple of minutes. And then shadows reached into the light cast from the caboose.

  They were two, both shrouded, both wearing hoodies and long coats. It was no surprise, not after seeing the solid keypad lock on the specimen-room door, not after accepting that his intruder had not been merely lucky to get out of his apartment just in time. There’d been an accomplice, a lookout who’d spotted Rigg pulling up. They’d gotten nothing from Rigg’s apartment. Now they’d come to his dune.

  He crouched lower behind the stacked wood. Pancho’s cameras would record their faces as they tried the door, found it locked. They’d knock. There would be no answer. They’d have to break in. It would all be caught by the cameras.

  They
stepped farther into the light. He’d feared them for having drawn guns, but their arms were low at their sides. He sucked in his breath. Each was carrying two red plastic, five-gallon gasoline cans. Soft thuds sounded as they set them down in the snow.

  Twenty gallons of gasoline would turn the caboose into a pyre that would burn to nothing in minutes. The dunes were deserted, the surrounding cottages scraped and gone. Even if somebody did spot the fire through the barren trees from a distance, it would take at least a half-hour for the fire department to respond, and that would be futile, anyway. The caboose was high up. No fire nozzle from a truck had force enough to reach the top of the dune.

  The Glock shook in his hand. The caboose was Judith’s, the only place where he could still smell her perfume, the only place from which he could retrace their steps to Lake Michigan to hear her laughter in the sound of the waves.

  They bent to uncap the gasoline. They thought he was inside. It would go down as murder by arson, by nameless perpetrators who would never be found. They would get away long before anyone came to those deserted dunes.

  They splashed the gas against the aged wood by the door, the stench fouling the air. Rigg pushed his way out of the rickety shed, aiming his gun at the taller of the two.

  ‘Damn you!’ he shouted.

  They both spun to the sound of his voice. The hand of the taller reached into a coat pocket.

  The other jumped in front of the taller shadow.

  The taller’s gun fired, and fired once more. The smaller shadow slumped.

  Rigg fired once, and again, and again, each pull of the trigger kicking the Glock up wildly until the clip was empty and the night went silent.

  FORTY-FOUR

  The thaw had warmed much of the Midwest, from Ohio to well west of Winthrop County. Warm for late February, the weather people said.

  Revealing, Sheriff Olsen hoped. He deployed a dozen of his men to McGarry’s estate. Four of them had cadaver-sniffing dogs. The thaw had melted the snow, showing no place where dirt had been disturbed. Richie Fernandez was not there.