The Bricklayer of Albany Park

by Terry John Malik

  Shit! “No. I got it covered.”

  “Sir, I do this all the time. It’s easier if the two of us tackle it together.” He walked closer and squatted near the wheel well. “Nothing to it.” He walked back toward me, slapped the trunk saying, “Pop it open. I’ll help you with the spare.”

  “I’m good, Officer. Really.”

  “We’ll get the spare on in a jiffy and get you on your way on this frigid night. Go ahead. Open the trunk.”

  I had to come up with something—quick. “You know officer, I already called AAA. Their truck is supposed to be here in ten minutes. But, thanks anyway.”

  I wasn’t sure if he heard me. He seemed to be distracted and focused on the trunk as he rapped his knuckles on the trunk lid a couple of times. “Open the trunk, sir.”

  Jesus Christ, I thought. “Really Officer, I pay good money for my AAA membership. Might as well use it once in a while.”

  I had regained his attention. He shook his head and with a knowing smirk, explained, “Sir, at this time of night and in freezing temperatures, it could be hours before they get here. Just open the trunk—”

  I quickly scanned the alley. It was empty—just the meddling cop and me. Dammit! I had left the .38 in the glove compartment of the camper. What if—

  At that moment his radio came alive, squawking out, “Car 211, a 10-10, fight in progress, two blocks north of your 20.”

  He looked at the trunk again and then turned his attention to me. No doubt, he was sizing me up. His radio repeated the call.

  “Sorry, sir, but I’ve got to take that. Looks like you’ll have to wait for AAA after all.”

  He returned to his cruiser, slamming the door and speeding away, his blue strobe light piercing the darkness of the night and bouncing off the buildings lining the alley.

  I wasted no time. I slid behind the wheel of Anders’s car, quickly pulled the door closed, started the car’s engine and eased out of the lot.

  OK, faggot, I thought. We’re going for a short trip just to the other end of the alley and then to my garage. I’ve answered the questions of “how and when.” Now the question for you, Mr. Anders, is how much pain can you endure before you beg me to put you out of your misery— and misery it will be, Mr. Anders. Misery it will be.

  CHAPTER 46

  Detective Frank Vincenti

  Sean and I hadn’t said much to each other since the morning I refused to take the call from his mother. He wasn’t upset with me. He was just letting me work through it, knowing anything he might say would only make it more complicated. We each had leads to run down and calls to make about Edwards’s whereabouts the night he was killed, and there was always the paperwork. I was ashamed that I had avoided talking to his mother, but I was too embarrassed to explain we wouldn’t be coming for Christmas dinner. Mrs. Kelly would be too polite to ask why. She wouldn’t need to, of course. She would know it was all about Beth.

  Beth and I had been fighting more and more lately. She claimed it was always about my job, but I knew it was more than that. According to Beth, I had a job while she had a career. Our fighting started in earnest about two years earlier with the Carlton family murders. My constant “brooding” as she called it, had pushed her over the edge.

  On a bright spring Sunday afternoon, Mr. Carlton’s sister had paid a visit to drop off a birthday present for the Carltons’ youngest daughter, Daniella. When no one answered the door, she let herself in, and to her horror, found the partially clothed body of Mrs. Elaine Carlton in a pool of blood on the living room floor.

  Sean and I arrived at the scene about fifteen minutes after an assistant Cook County medical examiner had begun his preliminary assessment. As we walked in and pulled on our evidence gloves, the M.E. called to us, “Guys, you better come see this.”

  Sean asked, “What d’ya got?”

  “This is the wife, Elaine Carlton. She was accorded special treatment, different from the other victims.” Pulling back what was left of her blouse, the M.E. asked, “Did you ever see this before?”

  Carved into her chest just above her bra were the bloody letters, “N-I-G-G-E-R.”

  “I saw something like it when I was in the Army, stationed in Camp Shelby in Hattiesburg, but that victim survived—the word was etched into his forehead. Was it made post-mortem?”

  “Not sure. There’s sign of a non-fatal blunt force trauma on the back of her head. Hopefully, she was unconscious. There appears to be a bullet exit wound about four inches below her right breast. I’ll tell you the cause of death for sure when I complete the autopsy.”

  Elaine Carlton’s husband, Daniel, and their two daughters had been shot multiple times at close range in the dining room while they ate their Sunday dinner. They were all pronounced dead at the scene except for the oldest daughter, Daniella, a twelve year old. The first-on-the-scene patrolman detected a slight pulse, plugged the bleeding, and administered CPR until the EMTs arrived. Perhaps unmercifully, she survived.

  I had to look past the horror of the mutilation, and although I could probably have conjured up empathy for the girl’s pain, it would serve no purpose—it would only cloud my feel for the scene and the killer.

  The Carltons had lived in their house for only two years. They were the first black family in a mostly white, middle-class neighborhood, but they were well liked and had made friends quickly. It wasn’t enough that the killer had carved the word “nigger” on Mrs. Carlton’s chest, he had also spray-painted the word “niggers” on the dining room wall. Sean figured it to be a hate crime. I didn’t. It seemed contrived, too obvious. Sean spent long hours interviewing the neighbors, several of them three or four times. He got nothing.

  I returned to the crime scene several times on my own. Daniella’s birthday cake was still in the refrigerator. Candles lay on the kitchen counter. I sat in each of the dining room chairs where the family members sat when they were gunned down. Because they were shot at close range, the killer had to be someone they knew. I removed my evidence gloves and pressed my hand against the spray-painted epithet and studied each letter, picturing the killer stopping after each letter to shake the can and start the next letter. I sensed the writing lacked the passion that spawned racial hatred. I felt the same way about the carvings on Mrs. Carlton. When I had examined Mrs. Carlton’s body in the morgue, I ran my finger over the letters, tracing each and imagining the killer kneeling over her, knife in hand. The cuts weren’t deep and appeared to be made with a hesitant hand. Like the epithet on the dining room wall, I believed it was a contrivance to deflect the investigation in the wrong direction.

  Daniella spent six weeks at Lurie Children’s Hospital undergoing seven different surgical procedures. At first, she refused to speak to anyone except her favorite aunt, who had driven straight through from Georgia and was at her bedside when Daniella regained consciousness four days after the shootings. It took her aunt more than a week, but she finally succeeded in convincing Daniella to see me. I spent two days with her, talking about her school, her friends, and whatever else I could think of before I eased into the topic of “that afternoon.” She turned away from me and claimed that she must have fainted when the first shots were fired and couldn’t otherwise remember a thing. The doctors ascribed the loss of memory to PTSD-induced temporary dissociative amnesia. I wasn’t so sure. There was terror and fear in her eyes that belied a lost memory.

  I re-read statements from neighbors and community leaders and reviewed post-incident surveillance reports. I studied the crime scene photos; they were no worse than what I had seen before, but I couldn’t reconcile the terror in the girl’s eyes with memory loss. It just didn’t feel right to me. I knew that Daniella was the key, but I just couldn’t break through the girl’s barriers.

  I tossed and turned so badly at night that Beth exiled me to the living room couch. I stopped eating. I paced. Beth grew impatient with my blank stares as she related her frustration with new assignments at the firm. I became sullen and moody—even more than usual.
She became angrier and angrier. Losing track of time, I went for long walks trying to piece it together. I was a good cop. I was trained for this work—why couldn’t I get through to Daniella? I went to see Foster. He told me I was both too close and too far from the girl’s experience to see past the obvious.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “Draw on who you are, not what you are.”

  For several days, I sat at her bedside while she slept. I stopped asking her questions and started telling her about where I grew up, where I went to school, and about my first love. I talked for hours about Beth. And then I told her about my father. Finally, sitting up in bed and looking out the hospital room window, she described months of sexual abuse suffered by her eight-year-old sister at the hands of their next-door neighbor, Herbert R. Straus. She had been forced to watch.

  I sat and listened. When she finished her story, she cried uncontrollably until exhausted, laid back, rolled over, and slept. I wanted to hug her and tell her everything would be alright. I couldn’t do either. I sensed she carried the guilt of failing to run to her parents and tell them of the abuse. I was sure she blamed herself for the death of her family.

  We made the collar the next morning. The first time Sean had interrogated Straus, he had put on a convincing act. With Daniella’s statement in hand, it didn’t take Sean long to break him. Straus admitted it all. Daniella had threatened to tell the entire story to her father, and Straus couldn’t let that happen. He showed us where he had tossed the gun, knife, and paint can into the south branch of the Chicago River. He had won the girls’ trust because he was a high school teacher who helped them with their homework.

  When I got home that night, I found Beth sitting up in bed wearing her Northwestern sweats that doubled as pajamas, her reading glasses balanced on the tip of her nose, her laptop propped up against her knees, and surrounded by legal pads. As I undressed, I began to tell her about the breakthrough. She took off her glasses, pointed them at me, and said she didn’t want to hear another word about the Carlton family, the shootings, or the girl.

  “Ever since you joined the VCS, I have had to listen to stories of death and mutilation, stories of abuse, and stories of cruelty that I never thought possible. I’m tired of you planting those images in my head! I’ve had enough.”

  “But, Beth, there’s a happy ending—”

  “Are you fucking kidding me? How is there any kind of happy ending in anything you do? The girl’s entire family is dead, and she’s left with memories of the brutality of that afternoon, abject guilt, and she’ll never get over her sister’s abuse!”

  I started to explain that, with counseling and the love of her aunt, she could recover. I thought Beth would understand, but she screamed, “Stop!”

  She tossed her glasses on the floor, pushed her laptop aside, threw off her covers, then marched toward her closet. “Enough already! I’m going back to the office. End of discussion.”

  Blurting out “end of discussion” and retreating to her office had become a habit. Whenever we argued, it was her way of shutting down. It had happened again last night when I insisted that we spend Christmas afternoon at the Kellys’. But last night it had been me who stormed out. I woke up the next morning in one of the beds in the station’s bunkroom.

  CHAPTER 47

  Anthony

  Chicago woke Christmas Eve morning to temperatures hovering around six below zero. The wind chill factor rendered the weather dangerous. Some businesses had issued blast emails the night before advising employees that nonessential personnel need not report to work. Metra communter trains were delayed while the blue and yellow flames of gas-fired switch heaters danced in the blistering wind as weary, bundled-up railroad workers struggled to keep the trains running at all. Chicagoans who relied on public transportation crammed into CTA bus shelters equipped with electric heaters. IDOT closed Lake Shore Drive from North Avenue to Division as spray from the crest of Lake Michigan’s waves had covered the road with a sheet of ice.

  At one time, Christmas Eve had been special for me, but not anymore. Now I took perverse pleasure watching mindless last-minute shoppers jam into crowded stores. It was always the same. Suburban shopping mall parking lots would fill up quickly; suburban shoppers would drive their salt-stained cars up and down the aisles looking for the last best parking spot. Walmart stores would offer valet parking for senior citizens, and Macy’s would run closeout sales on Christmas decorations. O’Hare and Midway airports would be jammed with holiday travelers carting carry-on luggage stuffed with unwrapped Christmas presents. Stylishly dressed young women from Gold Coast high-rise apartment buildings, wearing full-length mink and sable coats, would scurry between exclusive men’s boutiques along the Magnificent Mile, swearing they would never again wait until Christmas Eve to finish their shopping. Carefully wrapped presents would be placed under Christmas trees already shedding dried-out pine needles. But this year was different. This year—as a gift to all Chicagoans—a special present, artfully wrapped in a blue tarp, lay under a pile of bricks near Karlov and Kelso.

  CHAPTER 48

  Detective Frank Vincenti

  On the Monday morning after the four-day Christmas weekend, I again found myself in one of the bunks in the station’s bunkroom. I was curled on my side with my eyes half-open, facing a wall where other detectives had scrawled their star numbers, a tradition by which they announced they had sought refuge in the bunkroom after their wives had kicked them out for good. I had no intention of adding my star number to that wall. After I spent another late night at my cubicle, sorting through FBI databases looking for similar signatures and patterns, I crashed in the bunkroom around 4:00 a.m. I tried to convince myself it had nothing to do with Beth.

  By pure happenstance, I had avoided another confrontation about Christmas with the Kellys’. Two days before Christmas, the unit sargent had stopped at my desk and informed me that one of our detectives had been involved in a civilian shooting and that the “dicks” in Internal Affairs had directed he be placed on administrative leave.

  “I need someone to cover his Christmas Day shift. I’ve been making the requests by reverse seniority, consistent with department directives, and haven’t got any volunteers yet. I’d hate to order someone—”

  “I’ll take it. No problem.”

  “You sure? Don’t you want to check with your wife first? I hate to disrupt family Christmas plans, especially on such short notice.”

  With just a slight smile, I replied, “Trust me. I’m glad to do it.” Beth wasn’t happy that I had taken the extra shift. She curtly advised me she would go to the Four Seasons brunch anyway and would invite a friend to take my place. Although I was on duty Christmas Day, I tried to placate her by showing up and joining her and another associate from the firm for a sweet roll and a quick cup of coffee. She seemed embarrassed that I showed up and tried to make excuses to her fellow associate for my appearance. I politely excused myself, pleased with the brevity of my stay, and thankful, for the first time, for the guys in Internal Affairs.

  As I stared at the scribbled star numbers, I heard metallic rattling. I thought it had been part of a dream from which I was slowly waking. I usually couldn’t remember dreams anyway, so I put it out of my mind. The rattling started again. I jerked my head off the pillow to listen more closely. “Damn, that’s my phone!”

  Before I had crawled into the bunk I had absentmindedly turned off my cell phone’s ringer, and placed it into the small metal locker attached to the bunk’s frame. I must have left it set on vibrate. Instinctively, I checked my watch. It was 9:10 a.m. already!

  By the time I retrieved the phone, it had stopped vibrating. I scrolled down through the log where I found a string of calls from Sean starting at 7:40 a.m. I listened to the last couple of messages. Another body wrapped in a blue tarp and buried under a pile of bricks had been found at Sacred Cross High School, near Karlov and Kelso—again in the Albany Park neighborhood.

  Showered, shaved, an
d wearing my cold-weather gear, I sped toward the school. As the flashing blue strobe and wailing siren cleared my way, I recalled Foster’s warning of ten days earlier that our guy would kill again. This second body confirmed we had a serial killer on the loose in Chicago, and my problems with Beth shrunk in relative importance.

  Patrol cars with their light bars flashing were parked at both ends of Kelso, blocking all vehicular and foot traffic. I entered the school’s parking lot from an alley entrance at the southeast end of the lot. The on-scene patrol bureau supervisor had seen to it that his officers had placed blue wooden “Police Line” barricades along the northern edge of the school’s parking lot immediately across the street from the school property. Despite the bitter cold, the lot had already filled up with reporters, police-scanner groupies, and curious neighbors.

  Two patrolmen helped me push through the crowd, past reporters and television camera crews, and around one of the parking lot barriers. As a third officer lifted the yellow crime scene tape, I spotted Sean and Dunbar just outside a doorway of a partially completed cinder block building.

  I was surprised to see Dunbar. He was now Area North Commander. His career had advanced by leaps and bounds since the days when he headed the North Area’s VCS. The last time I had seen him was at the ceremony at which Sean and I were awarded commendations for breaking the Carlton case. Unlike Foster, Dunbar was showing his age. There was gray in his eyebrows and moustache, plus a paunch above his belt.

  With some trepidation, I approached Sean and Dunbar and asked, “Same guy?”

  “Where the hell have you been?” Sean snapped. “I’ve been calling you for hours.”

  I pulled out a pair of evidence gloves. “I want to examine the area around the body and then I need to—”

  Dunbar put his hand on my shoulder. “Detective, slow down.”