“Frank, since Tony first showed up, you’ve been turning a blind eye to him for no reason other than he’s an old friend. I’m convinced he’s our guy. Hell, a few hours with him I could’ve gotten an airtight confession.”
“You’re a better partner than that! You should have given me a heads up on your little plan.”
“And what would you have done?”
“I would’ve called it off!”
“Exactly! Like it or not, Tony is The Bricklayer. The pieces fit: He lived and held jobs in Crown Point and Racine where the locals found bodies wrapped in tarps, and by God, the timelines match.” Sean paused, ran his fingers through his mussed hair, and kneaded the back of his neck like there was a stain there he was trying to rub off. “I’m convinced, too, that he was your squatter! I can picture him sitting on your Dad’s sofa, drinking beer, and planning his next kill. You refuse to face facts!”
Maybe Sean was right. Maybe I had refused to face the facts, or at least I failed to analyze them objectively. But my gut and those damn so-called special gifts of mine continued to nag me: It’s not Tony. It’s not him.
CHAPTER 75
Anthony
The headaches had started again. This time, they retuned with a merciless vengeance. No amount of drugstore meds relieved the recurring and incessant pain. And, then the whispering began—an ever-so-soft whispering in my ear that repeated, “Another one. Another one.” It was the last thing I heard at night and the first thing I heard in the morning. As the whispers grew louder, I would cover my head with a pillow to block the sound, but it was still there. It wouldn’t leave me alone. “Another one. Another one.” It kept me from eating and forced me to the neighborhood sports bar, hoping that a few beers would numb my senses and help me to resist the apparition’s seduction. It didn’t work.
“I will, dammit! I will. Cervantes will be your next one, but I need time to set things up. Need to plan,” I whispered.
No. Today! Now!
“Enough! OK, godammit. OK.” I gave a quick glance around the bar to see if anyone had heard that. No one reacted or looked my way. Maybe I shouted it only in my head. I finished off my beer, pulled my hood up over my head, and searched the bar for “another one.” I felt the weight of my .38 in my hoodie’s pocket.
I spotted him. He looked like all the others I had punished—middle aged, sloppily dressed, with slicked-back black hair. But it was his eyes that revealed himself to me. There I saw what set men like him apart from the rest of us—a combination of perverse lust and unfettered cruelty—just like the others. Yeah, I knew the look. A perfect target, ripe for the picking.
This one was eyeing a small boy in the next booth who seemed to be pestering his father for another Coke. The boy’s father nodded, got up, and set out for the bar, leaving the boy alone. I wanted to shout, No, you fool! Trying to get the bartender’s attention, he shouldered his way through the crowd of raucous Black Hawks fans who created a din each time a Hawk player checked an opponent hard into the boards. Forget the goddamn Coke!
I couldn’t let harm come to this boy. Without pulling my gun from the pocket of my hoodie, I gripped the .38 tight and rushed toward the small boy’s booth, intercepting his would-be captor just as he approached the boy. I thrust the .38 in his side.
“There’s a back door just past the restrooms in the rear. Head for it.”
He hesitated and without taking his eyes off the boy, he answered. “Go fuck yourself!”
“I could kill you where you stand. A gunshot won’t be heard over the roar of the drunks at the bar and the blaring TVs. I’ll be out the door before you hit the floor. Now move!”
He turned, looked me in the eye, and must have realized I was serious. He nervously picked his way through the crowd toward the back door. I followed closely behind.
A full moon spilled light into the narrow alley. I made sure we walked to the side in the shadows. The stench of rotting food from overflowing dumpsters filled my nostrils, adding to the throb of my headache. The only noise came from the clatter of a large kitchen exhaust fan with a bent blade and an occasional muffled roar from behind the heavy metal door that I had shut behind us. After a few steps, I spun the bastard around and stuck my gun in his gut. “You’re done, asshole. No more snatchin’ little boys. No more pleasurin’ youself at their expense.”
The idiot looked up and down the alley. There was panic in his eyes. I knew what he was doing. He was trying to figure a way out of this. “Oh no! Don’t even think about it,” I said. I pressed the barrel of my gun hard against his ribs and leaned into him until I could smell the whiskey on his breath.
With a sudden and careless move he pushed me backward. I lost my balance. He started to run, but stumbled after only a couple of steps. I regained my footing and grabbed him by the shirt collar, spinning him around to face me. Now his eyes burned with fear. Instinctively, I hit him full force on the side of his head with the butt of my gun. He collapsed.
“Hey you! Stop right where you are!”
I twisted to my left, holding my gun at my side, out of sight of the tall figure standing just outside the bar’s door, no more than twenty feet away. He looked strangely familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He held a gun pointed at me.
“Don’t move!”
“What da’ya want?”
“Last couple of days I’ve been following you. Waiting for you to make a mistake. I figured out what you were doing. Deep down, I believed in your mission. But now I want to be the one who brings you in. It wasn’t easy tracking you. This is my first real opportunity to get you alone.”
“You think this is your opportunity?”
“Yeah, and when I turn you in, I’ll be a fucking hero.”
“You got the wrong guy. Go back in the bar and spy on someone else.”
“Oh, no! You’re the one.”
“And who are ya? Some kind of vigilante?”
He reached into his sport coat and was distracted momentarily as he fumbled with what looked like a wallet. Seeing an opening, I went to one knee and fired. I got off a clean shot. He staggered and fell to his knees, moaning in pain. As he struggled to get up, he shot wildly over my head. My second shot finished him off.
“Fuck!”
This had gone bad, very bad. With all the others I always followed a well-planned routine, even down to logistics—obviously, for good reason. I turned and looked at the creep from the bar. He wasn’t moving. Now what? I had to think fast in case someone heard the shots. I wiped down my gun and placed it in the child molester’s hand, making sure that his prints were on the grip and trigger. I raced to the man I had just killed, grabbed his gun, and fired a shot that blew a gaping hole in the neck of the molester who lay no more than ten feet from him. I watched a slow stream of his blood ooze onto the pavement. It would look like a bar fight that had gotten out of control when it moved to the alley. They had shot each other. Yeah. That’s right—in a mean twist of fate they had shot each other. I left them there, crossed the alley, and cut through a narrow gangway between a liquor store and a boarded up old three-flat and then out to the next street. I calmly headed for the camper, confident that no one saw what happened, and hoping that the scene would fool the police.
I scoured the papers the next morning looking for a mention of the shooting. It was a short article in the Trib’s Metro section below the fold. I was proud of my little scheme—it had worked. The article reported that it was a shoot-out between a bar patron whose drivers license identified him as Samuel Thayer and a Chicago cop—Detective Michael I. Johnson.
CHAPTER 76
Anthony
Several days after the shooting in the alley, the press reported that the police had concluded that Thayer, who had a record of small-time drug arrests, had opened fire on Johnson and the cop returned fire, killing Thayer but not before suffering a gunshot wound just below the heart that proved lethal. The police found twelve dime bags of coke on Thayer and had surmised that Johnson, who was off-duty that nig
ht, must have seen a drug buy and was trying to make an arrest.
I had been lucky. Nonetheless, I had made a stupid mistake that I couldn’t repeat if the message was to be delivered. Early on I had learned the lesson to shun spontaneity. Never again would I deviate from my routine.
The apparition resumed its seemingly never-ending demands, this time denying me any rest. For the solace of a night’s dreamless sleep, I had to comply. The headaches had grown worse and had become debilitating. I returned to the hunt and my careful planning.
Posing as someone who was interested in renting an apartment on Lawrence Avenue next door to where Cervantes lived, I stopped his landlord early one morning as he was leaving for work. I asked about the neighborhood, and told him I was considering renting a two-bedroom apartment in his neighbor’s three flat. He was an older obese man who looked like his oversized gut reached his destination a full five seconds before the rest of him, but he proved to be friendly—and talkative. He told me it was a quiet area, a lot of young people moving into the neighborhood, renovating houses. “We got no spics, no gays, and no blacks. Just mostly Polish and German and a few dagos.”
“I saw ya got a little attic apartment. Is it for rent? I don’t need two bedrooms. I could better afford something small like that.”
“No mister. It was originally intended for my son when he got out of the service, but he got wounded in Iraq—a real hero, don’t you know. He got a Purple Heart. He’s disabled and living in the Hines veterans’ facilities in Melrose Park.”
“A real hero. Does that mean it’s available or not?”
“Aren’t you listening? I just told you, mister. It’s not for rent. See, a good friend of mine asked if I’d put his father up there. I did it only as a favor, conditioned on his father finding another place within ninety days.”
“Why ninety days? It’ll be available after that?”
“Well, at the risk of being nosey, let me ask you: Do you have kids?”
“Just a son. He lives with his mother during the week. I get him every other weekend. Is that a problem?”
“I’m not supposed to say anything, but my border, well, he just got released from Menard, you know the prison, where he did time for trying to screw a little girl. I didn’t want to have someone like him any where near this neighborhood, but I owed a favor to his son who’s been a friend to my boy.”
“Jesus! I mean, how do ya put up with that?”
“The guy’s a loner. He’s got a job at the senior living facility just a couple of blocks away. He usually takes his meals with his son—”
He stopped abruptly, mid-sentence, and checked his watch. I wasn’t sure if he was on to me, afraid he had given out too much information, or if he just lost track of time and didn’t want to be late for work. “Got to go.”
Didn’t matter. I had what I needed.
I began monitoring Cervantes and discovered that Cervantes was a creature of habit, probably some kind of prison conditioning. Each night at precisely 9:30 p.m., Wednesday through Sunday, he haltingly navigated the old steep, rickety, wooden staircase down two flights from his apartment, followed the uneven sidewalk that led to the alley, and seemingly painfully walked north three blocks to the urgent care center to work his 10:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. shift. He never deviated from his routine. His regimen would betray him.
At 9:35 p.m. on a cool spring Saturday night, Luis Cervantes closed the small chain-link gate at the end of the back yard’s sidewalk and stepped into the empty alley. I’m certain he didn’t notice the small camper parked on a garage apron one door south. And equally certain he never saw me charge toward him from behind, wielding a chunk of brick wrapped in a blood-stained chamois.
CHAPTER 77
Detective Frank Vincenti
I found myself back at my father’s house just before midnight. Although my instincts led me to suspect that Tony’s reappearance in my life was somehow connected to the string of mutilated bodies that had begun to haunt me, I still wasn’t convinced that Sean was right about Tony. I was penetrating deeper and deeper into the killer’s consciousness, but it didn’t lead to Tony. It may have been that my imagination was being blocked by my past friendship with Tony. I wasn’t sure.
I didn’t even try to sleep. Sitting at my dining room table and staring past the clutter at the red and green pushpins on the maps, I pictured the dumpsites and saw the faces of each victim. Around 1:00 a.m., I decided I needed to talk to Foster, and it couldn’t wait until morning. I headed out the front door to where I had parked my car on the street in front of my father’s house. Before I pulled away, I scanned the street’s shadows for any indication that Tony was lurking about, or that nut job Allison was stalking me.
About thirty minutes later, I leaned on Foster’s doorbell, knowing that he wouldn’t turn me away regardless of the hour. I figured I would be waking him, but he quickly answered the door. I must have interrupted him, because, oddly, he wore old work clothes and held a dirty towel in his hand. He stood in the doorway momentarily and then said, “Francis, you look terrible.”
“I haven’t been sleeping.”
“It’s more than that. Come in. Come in.”
He tossed the dirty towel on the dinning room table and pointed to his couch. “Francis, this is the first time in years you have visited in the middle of the night. I assume Protettore’s emergence as a suspect is not sitting well with you.”
He caught me off guard and saw that I was surprised that he knew about Tony. He dragged over a dining room chair and sat directly opposite me. “Oh, don’t look so surprised. Eddie called and briefed me. He’s concerned you’ve lost your objectivity because this Protettore fellow was a friend—”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Still . . . Eddie says Sean is convinced that your old friend is our serial killer. Tell me about Protettore, and I do not mean the information that M’Bala dug up. What do you remember about him?”
“He always looked out for me, and growing up, I ate more dinners at his house than I did at my own. ”
“No. No. No, Francis. That tells me nothing about the person. What was it about him that does not allow you to believe he is a killer?”
I struggled to explain. “The Protettores had four children: three girls and Tony. They said grace before every meal, and I remember his Papà—that’s what they called him—always ended his prayer thanking God for his children.”
I hesitated, and Foster jumped in. “A contrast to your household, is that it? You don’t believe good families can produce monsters?”
“Studies show—”
“I do not care about studies, tendencies, or propensities. I care about a man’s soul.”
Distracted, I looked past Foster to the dining room table behind him where he had thrown his towel. Next to it was his laptop, several notebooks, and a set of car keys. Turning back to Foster, I continued. “Tony was a bully—the worst kind of bully. He only felt important when he was protecting me; otherwise, he was a misfit and failed at everything he tried. These killings are well organized by a person with imagination. Tony isn’t capable of either.”
“Few people are, Francis. But there is more, isn’t there?”
I was reluctant to tell the entire story. “I was, and maybe still am, ashamed that I had to rely on a bully for protection. I never really liked him, but I couldn’t risk alienating him. By the time his family moved, I was glad to be rid of him.”
“He carried with him all your secrets—he still carries them.”
“I never told him any.”
“All the same, he knows.”
CHAPTER 78
Anthony
Mr. Luis Cervantes, convicted child molester, suffered a painful death. I had perfected my methods and routine. Looking back, too many of my early targets had died too quickly—before I had figured out how to make them pay for their crimes. But now I smiled as I recalled Cervantes’s pleas for mercy. Like so many of the others, he claimed he never touched the chil
d—it had been a misunderstanding. Each time Cervantes claimed to be innocent, I tore at another piece of soft tissue. As I told the others, admit your sin and the pain will end. Only a few understood how the pain would end.
As I hosed down the garage floor with a strong stream of water and watched his blood and other residue swirl into and down the drain, I reconsidered the dumpsite I had identified earlier in the week. Because of Vincenti’s failure to acknowledge the note I had left for him on the blog’s message board, I decided to abandon the site—a condo conversion near Elston and Montose—but hadn’t yet identified a more effective substitute.
I needed a site that could no longer be ignored. The kill itself was not enough. The message was paramount. The world had to know that victims of child abuse would be avenged.
After I added my souvenirs to the freezer’s inventory, I left a memento with the body, and wrapped Cervantes in his blue shroud. Then the two of us set out in the camper in search of a location that would draw the attention of the press and public to my mission.
After hours of driving through the side streets and alleys of my old neighborhood, my headache returned, and I decided I needed to clear my head. I’d hoped that spending time there would rid me of my headache. It didn’t. In fact, it made it worse. So, as I had done countless times as a teenager, I headed toward O’Hare. This time, on a whim, I parked in the middle of a sea of cars in one of the airport’s massive long-term parking lots. I knew I risked showing up on security camera footage later, but was sure that the camper would appear as just a blur in the thousands of cars in and out of O’Hare on the holiday weekend.
My three-hour retreat to the airport provided the inspiration I had hoped for. Instead of dumping Cervantes’s body, I would deliver it to a “friend”—on an altar of concrete.
CHAPTER 79
Detective Frank Vincenti
The Area North detectives’ rolling duty schedule broke my way for a change. A holiday weekend away from the station provided a welcomed respite. During the week I relied heavily on the Internet for timely news and watched both the early morning and the 10:00 o’clock local television stations’ coverage. But Sunday morning brought me a half-day’s reading of the Sunday edition of The New York Times.
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