“What’s the meaning of this?”
“I’m taking you with me for questioning.”
“I’ve answered questions already.” He tried to rip himself away from her, but he was about as strong as Shannon expected an overweight middle-aged man in a suit to be. “You have no reason to arrest me!”
She ratcheted the other cuff around Gregory Wendt’s wrist. His nephew didn’t move a muscle, even as his uncle’s hand slid off the top of his head.
“Put yourself in my position,” she said. “You won’t give me a simple statement and I’ve got an eyewitness account putting you as one of the first people on the murder scene. You’re smart enough to figure out what I’m getting at.”
“Hold on now.”
She began to march him away between the students, who were either too shocked or too bewildered to try and do anything.
“Just—wait a minute, Detective.” He was trying to keep a lid on his temper, but Shannon could feel the steam escaping his ears. “Can we talk? Please?”
“I tried that with you already.” She marched along the cordon tape, toward one of the marked CPD cars parked on the grass.
“Stop!” he yelled.
She’d rattled him enough. She stopped.
“I couldn’t leave my nephew. I had to stay with him.” Wendt motioned to him. “He came outside a minute before you walked up. He’s catatonic—completely shocked and still processing what happened out here. I didn’t want to talk about things right in front of him.”
“Good,” Shannon said. “Now that we’re outside of his earshot, you’re ready to tell me what you found.”
He grimaced and swallowed. “Yes, of course.” He looked back at his nephew, who hadn’t moved an inch. “If you’d take me out of these handcuffs.”
Shannon folded her arms. It was fun to put people in handcuffs—especially when it got an uncooperative witness talking. “Let’s hear what you have to say.”
“I apologize for being reticent—I was only trying to keep Cooper safe,” he said. “The boy doesn’t need to hear about how I found his mother’s face smashed by a car tire, does he?”
“Of course not. But you could have asked to step away from him before you talked to me.”
Wendt’s mouth pinched. He took a breath through his nose, held it, closed his eyes, and let the air go. “I was wrong,” he said. “I’m sure Officer Gunderheit is more than capable of looking after him while I speak to you for a moment. You have my apology.”
His eyes wandered behind her as he finished speaking. They stopped on something.
“Detective, I—” Gregory Wendt lost the color in his face. “It’s difficult for me to think about how I found Jennica—” His shoulders lurched and he tried to stop himself from gagging.
He wretched. He dropped to his knees. His body let loose with a nice splash of vomit.
Shannon dropped to a knee and undid his handcuffs after he’d finished. She took another tissue out of her work bag, then handed it to him.
“Thank you.” He dabbed at the corners of his mouth. “I can’t get the image of her out of my mind. I fear for what’ll happen to me when I go to sleep tonight.”
Jennica Ausdall’s mangled face would find a nice home in Shannon’s nightmares, too.
“There was something you said a minute ago, about losing a parent.” She sat down next to him. “My father committed suicide when I was sixteen.”
Wendt swallowed. “I didn’t mean to speak out of turn.”
“You didn’t.”
He rubbed the rings around his wrists where the cuffs had bit into his flesh. “Were you close to him?”
“No,” Shannon said.
“Oh.” Wendt was at a loss for words.
The wind blew across the parking lot and into the grass where they sat. It carried a faint whiff of alcohol. Or at least Shannon thought it did.
“But you were right when you said there’s no pain like losing a parent unexpectedly.” She nodded toward the coroner’s van. “I still struggle with it, even though I hated him for nearly as long as I can remember.”
“I think I hated Jennica, too,” a young man’s voice said from behind her.
Shannon looked over her shoulder. It was the tall, dark-haired boy with the olive skin—Gregory’s nephew, Cooper.
CHAPTER 4
“You didn’t hate your mother,” Gregory Wendt said to his nephew, Cooper. “You two had your disagreements, but you didn’t hate her.”
Wendt stood up, then helped Shannon to her feet.
“Of course I hated her,” Cooper said. “I don’t even care that she’s dead.”
People say a lot of weird things when they’re under stress, such as when a family member is found murdered, but what Cooper just said was a new one for Shannon.
“Maybe we should go inside for a minute,” Wendt said. “You’ve been through a lot today.”
“No, I’m staying out here. I’m going to tell the detective about how horrible Jennica was. About how she pushed me around, and pushed you around, and how she pushed her boyfriend around, too.”
“I don’t think Detective Rourke wants to hear about what happened between your mother and Leigh,” Wendt said. “She has better things to do with her time.”
“No, I don’t,” Shannon said. “I want to hear what Cooper has to say.” She turned to him. “What did they do to each other?”
Cooper smiled at her. He was taking his mother’s death rather well. “Jennica and her boyfriend, Leigh, were terrible people,” he said. “Jennica would never admit it to me, but I think she loved watching people become as unhappy as she was. Leigh was the same. You can probably figure out how they treated each other.”
A murdered woman in a dysfunctional relationship. It wasn’t difficult for Shannon to put a new suspect at the top of her list. Murders were almost always over drugs, money, or love.
“They argue over anything in particular?”
“No,” he said. “Just the usual, dumb stuff. She didn’t like how much time he put into his cars, he didn’t like that she went out with her friends on the weekends.”
“Did he ever hit her?”
“I don’t know. Probably. I didn’t see it if he did.”
“Probably?” Shannon asked. “How old are you again?”
“Just turned eighteen last week.”
There was something off about this kid. About how unbothered he was. Sure, sometimes it’d take a day or a week, or even a month for shock to really set into somebody in his position, but the way he acted seemed to go beyond that.
She approached him and put her hand on his arm, looking deep into his eyes, probing for anything to tell her he was full of it and he was wearing a facade in front of his uncle and all his classmates. He had to feel the pain of his mother’s death somewhere inside of him. Even if he hated her.
“I believed you when you said you hated your mom,” Shannon said. “But right now, hearing about what happened to her hasn’t sunk into you yet. It will. Maybe not tomorrow or next week or a year from now, but I know that it’ll come.” She let go of his arm. “I’ve been exactly where you are.”
Nothing. No subtle reaction, no nervous tic. Cooper was gazing past her. He must’ve been looking at Jean DiMarco and her coroner’s van, at the portable tent she’d set up to keep anyone from seeing his mother’s remains.
“What are they going to do with her?” Cooper didn’t seem to be coming from a place of concern, but rather morbid curiosity.
“They’ll take her body to the morgue. Try to find anything that’ll give us information about who killed her, then release it back to your family.”
“Are they doing an autopsy?”
“That’s the department’s standard procedure, yes.”
“Will they check for drugs?”
“Yes,” she said.
Cooper never took his eyes from the white curtain. “They’ll find plenty of those. Jennica never said no to a good time.”
“Was your mot
her’s boyfriend a drug user also?” Shannon asked.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. He was still looking past her, watching the tent.
It was hard to fight the distinct feeling that Shannon was no more important to Cooper than any other adult in his life. She was the same as an annoying guidance counselor or a gym teacher that took his job a shade too seriously.
“Do you think your mother’s boyfriend killed her?”
He focused his eyes on her. A shadow of confusion fell over Cooper’s face. Without being inside his head, there was no telling if it was uncertainty from the prick of Shannon’s question, or if it was just a boy trying to ferret out the answer to something which could easily elude an entire department of paid professionals. “I heard it was his car that did it.”
“We don’t know that,” his Uncle Gregory added before anyone could speak.
Shannon shot a look at him. “Where did you hear that?” she asked Cooper, but didn’t break eye contact with Wendt.
“Mr. Mayes told me.”
Wendt sighed at Cooper. “A moment, detective?” He put his hand on Shannon’s elbow and ushered her a few steps away from Cooper—just outside of earshot. “I know Cooper isn’t my son, but I want to preface this by saying I don’t have any children and he’s my only nephew.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is I spend more time involved in Cooper’s scholastic life than the typical uncle. I know of Mr. Mayes. He’s one of the custodial staff members at the school. He claims he saw a blue sports car peeling out of the parking lot.”
The same as Dakota Van Etten. “Was that in your statement to Officer Gunderheit?”
By reading his face, Shannon somehow got the feeling it wasn’t.
“Detective, you know how people get when—”
“Did you tell Officer Gunderheit about the car?”
“I didn’t think it was credi—”
“Mr. Wendt, I don’t like arresting people before I have all the facts. Some of my colleagues do, but I try to set myself apart from them. But looking at you—listening to you—right now, I think I was right when I cuffed you.” Shannon reached in her back pocket, where she’d stuffed her handcuffs after she took them off him.
“Wait a moment.” He put his hands out. “Let me explain.”
“I’m getting tired of waiting for you to explain.” She slapped the broad side of the handcuffs against her palm. “In fact, it feels less like waiting for an explanation and more like I’m waiting for you to make something up.”
“Detective, please.” He looked seconds away from dropping to his knees and begging her not to cuff him. “The man who said he saw the car—he’s unreliable.”
“How is he unreliable?”
Wendt leaned toward her and lowered his voice. “I happen to know he came to Northern Cardinal on a work program. A community-building measure.”
“I don’t follow.”
“It’s charity. To keep him busy and off the streets. He’s not all there in the head. Sometimes I’m not sure if he’s in our reality or another. He’s fine for keeping the campus tidy, but otherwise he’s not mentally competent. On his very best days, he has the mind of a child.”
“He says he saw a car speeding away from here. Even a child knows what that looks like.”
“Yes,” Wendt said. “A dark-blue car. A sports car. That’s the best description he gave Principal Tutler.”
“A better description than you gave me.”
Wendt smiled at her so tightly, he could’ve popped his teeth out of his jaw. “Suppose he’s right,” he said. “How many dark-blue sports cars do you think are in the city of Chicago right now? A thousand? Ten thousand?”
“More than enough to keep me busy for a day or two,” Shannon said. “It’s my job to separate fact from fiction.”
“Detective Rourke!” Someone in the direction of Jennica Ausdall’s body called for Shannon. She turned and saw Jean DiMarco waving at her. At least she thought it was Jean. It was difficult to see whose face hid behind the mirrored visor of the yellow biohazard suit.
“Don’t go anywhere,” Shannon said to Wendt.
He nodded. “I’ll not leave Cooper’s side. I promise you that.”
That wasn’t what she wanted to hear from him, but it’d do. Even if he did leave, Shannon would get his contact information from the school’s front desk. And Cooper’s, too.
She walked back under the cordon tape and through the parked cars. Flies had begun zipping in and out of the scene like scouts returning to their comrades with good news. They’d be everywhere within a couple hours if the scene wasn’t thoroughly cleaned.
“I’ve found something you’ll want to see, Detective.” It was Jean in the yellow suit.
“If it’s drugs, I already know.”
“What?” She cocked her head at Shannon, and the suit crinkled. “No, it’s nothing like that. I can’t run a proper toxicology test out in the field like this. This is something I think you’ll find far more useful.”
Shannon stepped into the tent. Most of Jennica Ausdall’s body had been moved and readied for transportation back to the morgue.
Except one of her legs.
That was almost enough to make Shannon pop. She had to look away and cover her mouth a moment. Then, she turned back to the leg.
“Do you see it?” DiMarco pointed at the leg. “Right there, just above the knee.”
There was bruised flesh, bone, and things Shannon wasn’t qualified to identify. She shook her head.
“Right there.” DiMarco squatted down. She touched a gloved finger to an oddly shaped bruise around the pit of Jennica’s left knee. It was deep purple and wound up and down the flesh like a parasitic vine. “Here.” DiMarco lifted the leg. For a moment, Shannon thought she was going to hand it over to her. She didn’t, thank God.
It took a moment for Shannon’s eyes to decrypt it, but when they did….
“Is that the number eight?” She couldn’t believe it. “That’s a partial license plate number, isn’t it? 8JT—”
DiMarco nodded. “Left by a vehicle striking Jennica Ausdall’s body at a high rate of speed.”
CHAPTER 5
“None of them trust me anymore. Not my son, not my daughters, not my husband.”
In the basement of The Church of St. Anthony, Michael watched the woman with the dark, wavy hair and the small-town Indiana twang in her voice stand in front of their group and fidget. She picked her fingernails and tugged at the bottom of her pilling T-shirt. Her feet traded the weight of her body after every other sentence.
It was her third time coming here. She didn’t wait nearly as long as most people before she took her chance to stand up. She’d come to share.
That was good.
“Can’t blame nobody for not trusting me,” she said. “I was a cheat, a liar, and a terrible mother. They’d been stupid to put any trust in me. My addiction would’ve just taken everything it could from them.” She cleared her throat. “That’s to say, it did. I came from a broken family. Fights and hard alcohol were a staple at home when I was growing up. Naturally, rather than learning from the mistakes my parents made, I did the same thing again and passed all that onto my children.”
There were a couple chuckles from the group.
She popped her knuckles and smiled nervously while her eyes jumped back and forth in their sockets. “When my son turned eight, I’d been in and out of drugs for a couple years—meth, coke, crack—whatever. I was in and out of his life just as much, and I knew it. So I promised I’d make it up to him. He had his eyes on this Lego set. A real big one with, like, construction stuff and this crane that’d pick the little Legos up and sit them down. I was thirty-two years old, and even I thought it was a pretty neat thing, I guess.
“His birthday was in two weeks, so I starting saving up my money. I couldn’t keep a secret, so I told him I was gonna get it for him, and when he heard that, his face—” She squeezed her eyes shut. Tears seeped
from the corners. “His face lit up. He couldn’t believe it.
“So I saved the money. I was living on my own—my husband kicked me out a few months prior when he’d caught me snorting something I can’t even remember in the bathroom. So anyway, at that time, I worked nights at the dollar store to make ends meet. I had to do more to get that Lego set for my son. I picked up a couple more hours, hustled a little bit outside work, and put away every dime I could. For about a week.”
Her eyes darted to her chewed-up Chuck Taylor shoes.
A few groans came from the other members in the room.
“Yeah,” she nodded. “Y’all know where that money went.” She laughed at herself and shook her head. Then the laugh frayed. “I showed up at his party late, without a gift, high as I’d ever been. Soon as my son saw me, he gave me this look. It was like he was saying to me, ‘this is what I knew would happen, mom.’ At eight-years-old.” She swallowed hard, and her mouth bent into a grimace. “None of my kids trust me. Nobody does. The worst part of it is, I don’t even know when my own children lost their faith in me. Was I around when it happened? Did they tell me? Did I forget because I was high?”
There was a long silence in the room as she searched for the right words to use next. Michael heard someone getting pots and pans out of the kitchen on the floor above them. He looked up at the exposed pipes in the ceiling of the church basement.
“I guess what I’m saying is, I know I’m an addict. Ain’t any amount of meetings or books or medicine that can change that about me. I get that. But I know, from being with y’all the last couple of times, that an addict can be sober.”
Tears formed in her eyes. She wiped them out.
“I have to believe there’s a way back to getting my family to trust me again. If there is, I know it starts with sobriety. That’s why I’m getting sober today.”
The other dozen people at the meeting burst into applause for her. They’d all done the things she’d done—they all knew what it was like to lose their family’s trust.
She shuffled back toward her metal folding chair in the front row—right in front of Michael. The group continued to clap for her as she sat down and hunched over, her shoulders shaking with her breaths.
Chicago Broken: Detective Shannon Rourke Book 2 Page 3