“That’s honorable work.” Jones added.
“It’s our legacy.” He leaned his arm against the wall, a piece of chipped paint falling away as he did. “I saw… I saw a lot of pain in Afghanistan, families torn apart, and I knew when I returned home, I wanted to help less fortunate families. I wanted to leave some good in the world. Impress the big man upstairs, you know? Give myself at least a small chance of getting into heaven.”
He made the sign of the cross, and then blew a kiss upwards.
“Joan, my wife, is certainly going to heaven. That woman is an angel, and I’m just doing my best to join her up there when our time comes.”
“Then you’re a lucky man. No chances left for me.” Jones smiled. “What more can you tell us about Nina?”
“Nina was such a bright star. She never knew her real family. They all died when she was very young. After she reported her foster father for abuse, she found herself in here. They wouldn’t place her back into another foster home because she was sixteen, but we took her in. Gave her a place to stay. Despite everything she’d seen, she was so lovely. An amazing girl. Honestly, it was like having another volunteer here. She tutored the younger kids in math and history, she helped out in the kitchen, and was always cleaning something. She just wanted to help. But her skill, her real talent was caring for others. She was so warm, and that’s why she would’ve been an amazing nurse.”
Hunter paused for a moment. He loved his city, he loved his state, but it was so easy for someone to fall through the cracks. In this instance, the cracks were as wide as a fault line.
“We do our best, but the gangs offer so much more.” Lynch continued. “The gangs around here have all sorts of killers wandering the streets. They’re angry young men, and it wouldn’t take much to trigger them off. If Nina had looked at one of them sideways, it could have set them off. Yates was always here trying to keep the gangs away from our block.”
“That’s not Detective John Yates, is it?” Hunter questioned.
“It is,” Damien said. “He’s creepy and crooked, but it’s good to have a police presence in a place like this every once in a while. It keeps people on their toes. Detective Yates comes into the shelter to look around. I know he’s probably on the take, but he’s still a cop. That badge is good to have around the block.”
Lynch led them back down the stairs, pulling at a cobweb on his way down, then back to the front door. His presence was calm, a contrast to the unease that seemed to exist in the building. The halls were tidy, but not clean, and the doors to the separate rooms were all shut, perhaps from the anxiety of its residents. Hunter heard the occasional noise from the rooms, but mostly, the noise in the building was subdued. Escaping danger would make most people guarded, he thought.
“Now you mention it, we had two people asking about Nina last month, which was strange because nobody had ever asked about her before.” Lynch opened the front door, letting sunlight into the dark hall. “That might have something to do with the murder.”
“Is this one of them?” Hunter opened a photo of Sidney McCann on his phone.
“Yeah, that’s him. He was asking about Antonina Aisha. I’d never heard her called that. He said he wanted to tell her something.”
“And the other person?”
“Detective Yates. He said he wanted to talk to Nina privately.”
Hunter and Jones exchanged a knowing nod as they stepped back onto the street.
The picture was becoming clearer.
Chapter 19
West Jackson Boulevard was busier than usual. Traffic was backed up block after block, cab drivers were yelling out their windows, and a chorus of car horns rang through the air like an angry Christmas song. Despite all the anger around, despite the constant rage, Tex Hunter was calm. He didn’t have anywhere to be, no deadline to meet, and he was thankful for the thinking time. He stared out the window from the passenger seat in Ray Jones’s truck, watching the world go by, albeit slowly. Ray Jones was also calm, sitting high amongst the sea of sedans, able to see a block ahead, realizing he wasn’t going anywhere quick. When stopped at another set of red lights, Jones reached across, opened his dash compartment, and removed a recently rolled joint.
“I need it for the traffic.” He lowered his window, lit the joint, and drew one long breath. “It’s the only thing that stops me from getting out of this truck and punching everyone in front of me.” He offered the joint to Hunter. “Need some?”
“Not my thing.” Hunter waved him away. “I’d much prefer a whiskey.”
“It works for me.” Jones grinned. “This here green stuff makes anyone enjoy doing nothing.”
That may have been true, but by the time they had reached Hunter’s office, thirty minutes later than expected, even Jones’s drug-induced patience was wearing thin.
They saw the illegally parked car as soon as they pulled up to the curb. Long, black, shiny, tinted windows, spotless and with specialized number plates. Parked directly outside the doors in front of his office building.
“Need me to stay for a while?” Jones nodded to the black limousine.
“I’ll handle it.” Hunter closed the door to the truck, and as he did, the door to the limousine opened.
The sidewalk around them wasn’t busy, but there were enough people to be witnesses. Hunter took a step to his right, directly under the line of the video surveillance camera for his office building. When he first moved into the building, he made sure he knew where to stand to be recorded. If something ever happened to him, they had a record of him at the building; a starting point, at least.
“Mr. Hunter.” As Hunter stepped towards his building, the driver of the car called for his attention. Dressed in a suit appropriate for a driver, complete with leather gloves, the man stood by the open backseat door. The tinted windows were dark, darker than what was legal in the state of Illinois, but Hunter wasn’t concerned. If someone was going to attack him, this wasn’t the place to do it.
Hunter walked to the car, leaned down and looked inside the backseat. “First Deputy Superintendent.”
The man sitting on the back seat grunted his response.
There was no handshake between them, no pleasant introduction. John Steven Whaler had greying hair, a pleasant face, and a smooth Irish charm, however he was showing none of that to Hunter. Whaler was a sniper’s dream—even for a man who was six-foot tall and carrying too much extra body fat, his head looked oversized.
“I’m disappointed they sent you.” Hunter stepped into the comfortable back seat of the limousine, the dark leather squeaking as he sat down. “I would’ve expected the Superintendent, at least. If not, the Mayor.”
“You think you’re funny?” Whaler snapped. “This city is on edge and you’re making jokes. I don’t have time for your games.”
“You seem to have enough time to wait outside my office.”
“I know your every movement right now, Hunter. I knew you were at the Shelter for Young Women in Bridgeport, and I knew when you were returning. The department has eyes all over this city.”
“I guess that should be reassuring.”
“For you, it’s not.” Whaler looked out the window. Dressed in a uniform that was perfectly pressed, he chewed his gum aggressively, like a baseball coach in the middle of the World Series. “We need to talk.”
“That’s no surprise. I was expecting it.”
“Then you know what I’m going to say.” Whaler turned to him, shifting his whole body to stare at Hunter. “Don’t do it. Don’t go opening the wounds of the police department because you want to reopen your father’s case. You have to look at the bigger picture. You have to see what impact this case will have on this city.”
“I’m going to do my job defending Nina Aisha,” Hunter stated. “And if that involves uncovering the corruption of Sidney McCann, then that’s what I’ll do. I won’t step away from this.”
“Police corruption has already been dragged through the headlines. We cannot, and wil
l not, let this happen again. We won’t give you the opportunity to dispute cases in court because of Sidney McCann’s past. Can you imagine what it’ll do to the courts? There will be hundreds of cases that will have the potential to be reopened.”
“That’s not my fault.” Hunter’s fist clenched. “That’s the fault of your department. Your corrupt cops.”
“Don’t you dare!” Whaler moved closer to Hunter. “You’ll clog up the system for years with criminals seeking exonerations! The floodgates will open. After what happened in Watt’s case, you might as well just open the doors to the prisons. Let them all out.”
“That’s not something I can control.”
“So you would choose to let the guilty back out onto the street, risking the lives of innocent people, because you see an opportunity to exploit a dead man’s past? All because you want your killer father out of prison? McCann is not even a cop anymore! He’s not even alive! Let bygones be bygones. It’s the past. Let it go.”
“And what about Detective Yates? Or Carson? You still have a lot of corruption in your ranks. You still have people willing to take bribes. Don’t preach to me about how clean your department is.”
“My point is…” Whaler paused, staring at Hunter for a few long moments. “Don’t send this city into riots because you want revenge.”
“Revenge? That’s what you think this is about? You know as well as I do that Sidney McCann took money for bribes from people on the street.”
“You’ll never get a cop to talk about it. The code of silence is real.” Whaler’s tone became flat. “You won’t be able to prove anything.”
“If you really thought that was true, if you really thought I couldn’t prove anything, you wouldn’t be here.”
Whaler sighed, turning his attention out the window again, staring at the cars that were passing them. He rubbed his thumb and his forefinger together, angry he had to be negotiating with a defense lawyer.
He had spent much of his life proud of being a cop, proud of serving his community, but in the previous ten years, the force was beginning to lose the public relations battle. There had always been bad eggs, and there had always been people that hated the force, but the numbers of both camps were growing at an alarming rate. There was a corrosive level of cynicism towards his department, and it was one that they were struggling to turn around, even with a hard line on corruption.
There was change happening in the department—change in the attitudes, change in the training, and change in the transparency—but the hangover of the past was still clear to see. The days of bribing, harassing and dishonesty had left their mark for the next generation to overcome.
That change, that movement towards a new PD, couldn’t come quick enough for people like Whaler.
“I guess the question is,” Whaler sighed, defeated. “What does the girl want?”
“A clean record.”
“We can’t drop the charges. We can’t do that.” Whaler grunted again, shaking his head. “You know she can’t have that. You know she killed a retired cop and we can’t let that go. If we did, we’d have revolts in our ranks.”
“The head of the fish rots first.” Hunter stared at the man. “You’re trying to cover it up again. Even if this had nothing to do with getting Nina off the charges, even if McCann didn’t arrest my father, I would still be chasing this path. You can’t cover up the past any more. The truth about corruption has to come out.”
“We can’t let her off.”
Hunter reached for the door, and attempted to open it, but it was locked. He looked at Whaler, who exhaled loudly through his nostrils, before providing a nod to the driver standing outside the door. After a moment, the door clicked open.
“You’ll need to double the people in your Police Integrity Unit, because they’re going to get busy.” Hunter stepped out, before turning back to Whaler. “This is just the start.”
“Tex. Don’t go after revenge. Think about your city, about what it’ll do to Chicago.” Whaler leaned across the seat, his face heavy with fear. “Because an eye for an eye will leave everyone blind.”
Chapter 20
“Esther,” Hunter stormed into his office, slamming the door, his movements fueled by anger. “Give me everything we’ve got on Nina’s case. We’re taking this one all the way.”
His assistant knew that tone; she’d heard it so many times before. That tone, that driven determination, that tension, meant something, or someone, had pushed his buttons.
Within twenty minutes, the boardroom was filled with papers laid out across the large glass table. Although all their files were on computers, stored on disks and in the clouds, Hunter still worked so much better with the paper copies in front of him. It frustrated Esther to print so much paper, to inadvertently cut down so many trees, but she was younger and more computer savvy, and screens were a part of her life.
“This is all we have,” Esther circled the table. “And there’s not a lot to go on. All the information leads to dead ends, and I can’t find anything that might help you. There are no other witnesses that saw McCann after Nina hit him, and Ray has said there’s no video footage that looks down the street, or any other footage that shows McCann alive after his interaction with Nina. We have nothing that casts doubt about her guilt.”
“That’s not what I want to hear.” Hunter leaned on the table, pushing two pieces of paper apart. He stared at the papers, wishing the answers would jump out at him, hoping he had missed a vital clue. “There has to be something that proves her innocence. Something that shows she didn’t kill this man.”
“An eighteen-year-old homeless girl beats a retired cop, and then drags his body two blocks in a trash bag, ties rocks to his hands and feet, and then dumps him in the river—and nobody saw anything after they fought? I would question that, and I think the jury will have questions as well. All the prosecution has is three witnesses that saw her beat McCann, the fact she used his credit card and admitted to taking his wallet, and the information that she was the last person to see him alive. Sure, he was asking about Nina the week before he went missing, but that doesn’t prove anything. There’s nothing to prove she dumped the body.”
“They’re not going to let her go.” He sat down, almost defeated, and then turned his chair to look at the view of Chicago out of the floor to ceiling window. The boardroom was roomy, an empty space that was barely used, filled by a long glass table, a whiteboard, and leather office chairs. Hunter didn’t like working from such a vast space. The view of Chicago from the boardroom, however, was something he did enjoy. “They’re going to make sure she goes down for this. Even if we have the perfect case, even if we have the evidence that proves her innocence, they’ll find a way to convict her. They’re not going to let the killer of a retired cop back onto the streets—the State’s Attorney’s office and the police department are already on the brink of war with each other, and if they let her go, this would be one of the final wedges.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“We have to take it to court, and that’ll be my opportunity to prove how corrupt McCann was. If we can prove in court, on the record, that McCann was corrupt, then we can at least throw doubt over the case. Did you find anything about his wife and the son’s financial records?”
“I haven’t had the chance to look at the information yet, but the file of Rhys McCann’s financial records is on the table.”
“Which file?”
“It’s in the open-your-eyes section.” She tapped the folder directly in front of him.
He smiled. “What would I do without you, Esther?”
“Probably die in a pile of printed folders. I still don’t see why you have to print all these files. There are trees to save, you know? The world is burning, the population is increasing, and we have to start planting more trees, not cut them down.”
“In two weeks,” He turned and leaned his arms on the table. “They’re conducting a tree planting day outside the Morton Arboretum. Why don�
��t you come out there with me? We can plant some trees and you can feel better about all that printing.”
“That’s a deal.” She brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. “But only if you talk to Nina again about the deal that’s still on the table.” She reached across and picked up the offer from the prosecution. “Ten years. It could be her only option to get out of this mess. She’ll only be twenty-eight by the time she gets out, and she could still build a life after that. You have to talk to her about seriously considering the deal.”
Hunter ran his finger over the first page of information again. He read the offer; however, he knew what Nina’s reaction would be.
“Abraham Lincoln once said that character is like the tree, and reputation is like the shadow.”
“What does that mean?”
“The shadow isn’t consistent and changes with the sources of light, growing longer or shorter, or moving left to right. But the tree, that solid trunk, it doesn’t change, it always stays strong. That’s all a person can control.” He rested in a chair at the head of the boardroom table. “And that’s what Nina has to do now. She has to stay strong. That’s her character. No matter what the light does, no matter what the sky does, she has to stay true to her character.”
Esther understood what he meant, but that wasn’t her outlook on life. In Nina’s situation, she would prefer to take the easier option, the path of least resistance. Ten years seemed like a number she could manage, a period of time she could get through, even counting down the days. But twenty years behind bars, possibly more, seemed like an insurmountable period, a peak too large to climb, almost a lifetime lost to prison.
“If we took McCann’s corruption out of the picture, what’s the best option for Nina?” Esther asked.
“It’s 50/50. If Nina was a white girl that had grown up in a nice home, and McCann was an average Joe, the answer would be to take it to court and fight. A jury would have a hard time convicting her on the basis that some witnesses saw her punch him. In fact, I’d be surprised if they even arrested her.” He took a moment to shake his head. “But that’s not our situation—what we have is a homeless African American orphan that’s charged with killing an award-winning retired cop. We can cast doubt on the fact she dragged the body two blocks to the river, and nobody saw her do that, but that doesn’t prove she didn’t kill him in the first place.”
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