The service was blessedly short. We were all invited to the Fellowship Room for refreshments, but I didn’t plan to go. Instead, I blended into the background and watched the mourners file out. Johnson saw me, though, and nodded in my direction. I nodded back.
Franklin went over to Brian’s family and spoke to them. Malcolm came and stood beside me. His eyes were red, and it made me wonder how well he’d known the boy.
The Blackstone Rangers walked out in single file. A few of the elderly parishioners greeted them, and some of the Rangers stopped to talk to a few of the parents.
My amazement must have shown on my face because when Johnson reached me, he said, “Close your mouth. People’ll think you’ve never been to church before.”
“Do they know who those boys are?”
“Sure. They’re more welcome here than I am.”
“What?” I turned toward him. He was watching the mourners leave as just as I was.
His gaze met mine and I could see a bit of anger beneath the surface. “You saw the damage when you came in? My white brothers in blue did that. Cops aren’t real popular in this congregation.”
“Because they tolerate the Rangers?”
“Because they’re trying to rehabilitate them.” He shrugged, turned back to watch the mourners. “Long story, and not really relevant.”
“So you don’t think the Rangers had anything to do with—”
“They see themselves as guardians of this neighborhood. They wouldn’t let a child die. I’m sure they see Brian’s death as some kind of failure.”
Malcolm stood silently beside us. He was watching too, listening. I wondered if he agreed, and resolved to ask him later.
Brian’s mother stumbled past, her estranged husband beside her. They were clinging to each other like drowning people.
The minister followed them, staying close, concern on his face. When he saw us, he gave us a sympathetic smile. “There’s coffee in the Fellowship Room.”
A white midwestern dismissal. I was learning to recognize them. Johnson nodded, and let the minister usher us out of the chapel. But we didn’t go to the Fellowship Room. Instead, Johnson and I went outside. Malcolm didn’t follow us.
Johnson seemed to know his way around the church and he led us to a garden hidden from the street by stone arches that only added to the church’s Gothic majesty. Here too were holes in the stone, broken windows, and evidence that someone had tried to start a fire near one of the doors.
“So,” I said when I was sure we were alone, “You were sent to cover the funeral because you weren’t a white boy in blue?”
“Those boys wouldn’t dare cross the threshold. I probably couldn’t come in here in uniform either, not and sit comfortably in one of the chairs.” He sat on a stone bench half-buried behind greenery.
I sat beside him. “I’ve never been in a place like this before.”
He smiled at me, understanding what I meant. “About fifteen years ago, this church decided to be part of the community, not hide from it. They do what they can.”
I hadn’t heard that tone in his voice before. He admired the people here, maybe even envied them. “You’ll have to tell me about it sometime.”
“Not on a day like this.” He sighed and tilted his head back. The sun caught his face. I could feel it warm against my neck. For the first time in weeks, the heat felt cold. The service had chilled me, not because it lacked warmth but because of that small coffin in the front of the chapel.
“So how’s the investigation going?” I asked.
He snorted and sat up. “Just the way I expected it to.”
“Nothing new, huh?”
“I told you not to get involved.”
“I got involved Saturday night.”
He looked at me, measuring me. He wouldn’t have been on the scene if it weren’t for me, and we both knew it.
“Got the autopsy this morning,” he said. “Kid was killed by a single stab to the heart.”
“Was he conscious?”
Johnson nodded.
I closed my eyes against the knowledge, saw the body crumpled against the stairs, the cigarette burns, the fingers, and realized it was better to keep my eyes open. The garden didn’t give me any peace but at least it didn’t haunt me either.
“What else?”
“We have a pretty clear picture of his last few hours.”
He glanced at the door we’d come out of, apparently not wanting to be overheard. And I couldn’t blame him. Brian’s friends and family had suffered enough. They didn’t need the exact details of his death.
“He disappeared in the afternoon.” Johnson’s voice was low. “We know this from an interview with his mother. She fed him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich about noon, called him for dinner about six, and couldn’t find him. The coroner says he hadn’t eaten anything in the interim.”
A bee landed on a bright yellow flower a few yards from me. It walked along the petals, then flew off passing me on its way to something sweeter.
“He was tied up on two separate occasions, in two different ways. First he was tied with his hands behind his back, overlapping, with some kind of thick rope, maybe jute. Fibers got caught in the wounds and they were only on the back of his left wrist and the front of his right. The scrapes were thicker than the later ones. His feet were crossed and tied with the same kind of rope. There seems to be no evidence that he was gagged.”
I frowned. “His lip was split.”
“He’d been hit a number of times across the face. Back-handed, the coroner thinks.”
“So it didn’t matter that he screamed.”
Johnson nodded. “He was taken somewhere pretty isolated. A lot of evidence points to that.”
“The cobwebs,” I said.
Johnson looked at me sideways, that measuring look again. “And the dirt. It was dust and grime, the kind you’d find in a basement.”
“Or an abandoned building.”
Johnson was still studying me.
I shrugged. “You can hear screaming in a basement. Especially in that neighborhood. Those buildings aren’t that soundproof.”
“There’s no evidence he stayed in the neighborhood.”
“Is there evidence that he left?”
Johnson’s lips thinned and he leaned back. My speculations interfered with his own notions of the crime. It was clear he didn’t like that.
“What’s the rest?” I asked.
He seemed to gather himself, as if remembering where he was. “The second time, he was tied to a chair. His legs were tied separately around the ankle, and his arms were bound in two places. Around the center of the forearm, which gave his hands some mobility, and around the bicep. This time, the perp used some kind of thin rope, maybe clothesline, and tied it tightly enough to bruise. There was no burning because struggle wasn’t possible.”
I let out a small puff of air. I recognized the position. In my last few months in the service, I’d been assigned to assist the Intelligence Unit in San Diego. They were practicing interrogation techniques they’d learned from the North Koreans.
One of the things they had done was tie subjects twice around the arm, on the bicep to hold the arm in place, and around the forearm to give the hand mobility.
So that the fingers could be broken, if need be.
“You okay?” Johnson asked.
I nodded. “What else?”
“There was also a bruise on his chest in the shape of a belt buckle. We figure the perp used that to bind Brian’s torso to the chair.”
“What kind of buckle?” I asked.
“Standard, square, open so that the belt can weave through it. We’re having it analyzed—at least that’s what I’ve been told.”
He didn’t sound like he believed it.
“The autopsy sounds pretty thorough. Maybe you’re wrong about the way that this case will be handled.”
Johnson shook his head. “We’ve got the Feebies looking over our shoulders now. All the pape
rwork will be done properly, evidence properly filed, autopsy by the book. Lack of follow-up will be blamed on caseload, the convention. Your choice.”
He seemed so sure, and it made a curious kind of sense. Dot the i's and cross the t’s so no one looks too closely at the actual investigation. Or lack of one.
“What about the cigarette burns?” I asked.
“Our perp gets off on torture. First he hits the kid, then he burns him over a period of hours. Finally, he breaks his fingers.” Johnson swallowed. This part clearly made him uncomfortable. “They weren’t broken in the same pattern. The little finger was broken at the base. The middle finger at the top knuckle. The thumb was twisted and nearly pulled out of the socket.”
His voice was dispassionate. His eyes weren’t.
“One at a time then.”
He nodded.
I stood, unable to sit with the news. My sudden movement disturbed a butterfly. It left a small purple flower and headed out of the garden.
A monarch. I hadn’t seen one of those in a long time.
“Is that it?” I asked.
“Knife wound,” Johnson said as if reminding me about it. “Very efficient. Almost no blood around the wound at all. Quick, sudden, and lethal.”
“This isn’t a quick loss of control,” I said. “It was a very methodical torture and kill.”
“That’s my take,” Johnson said.
“Was there anything similar on the other bodies?” I asked. “Indications that this is some kind of escalation, maybe?”
“No. The other bodies had bruises, but no burns, no broken bones.” Johnson’s response was curt. “I no longer think the cases are related. This one is in a class of its own.”
“Because of the torture?” I asked.
“Because of this.”
I turned. He was holding a small blue evidence bag between his thumb and forefinger.
His expression was different now, wary, and I realized he hadn’t been sharing information out of the kindness of his heart. He’d been setting me up for this moment. He wanted to see my reaction to the contents of that bag.
I walked over to him. The heat suddenly felt stifling. A bead of sweat ran down my spine.
I took the bag from his hand and opened it. Inside was a matchbook.
“You can take it out,” he said. “It’s already been dusted. It’s clean.”
I stared at it, still not wanting to hold it. “How clean?”
“Too clean. No prints at all.”
My stomach clenched. Very few people understood how fingerprints worked, and those who did often forgot that paper carried prints as easily as doorknobs did.
The lack of fingerprints on a matchbook told us we had a pro.
“Where’d you find this?” I asked.
“In Brian’s right pants pocket. Deliberately placed, we think since his shirt pocket and left pants pocket were ripped open. And the right pocket had nothing else in it. Not even lint.”
I handed the bag back to Johnson. “I don’t feel comfortable touching evidence.”
He raised his eyebrows, then reached inside the bag. He took the matchbook out carefully, holding its sides with his thumb and forefinger.
“The Haymarket Lounge” it said on the front. I knew what the back said without even seeing it. Tiny flowing script read: “A place where good guys take good girls to dine in the lusty, rollicking atmosphere of fabulous Old Chicago.”
For the longest moment, I didn’t breathe. I could hear the bee buzzing near me, and cars passing on the nearby street. Voices, muffled, came from inside the church.
Johnson was watching me. “You want to tell me,” he said, “what Brian Richardson’s connection to the Conrad Hilton is?”
A trick of sweat ran down my back. So far as I knew, Brian Richardson had only one connection to the Hilton Hotel.
Me.
FOURTEEN
“THE WAY I SEE IT,” Johnson said into my silence, “there’s a lot happening here that I don’t understand. See if you can help me with this.”
I hadn’t moved. My gaze was still on that matchbook, my body cold despite the heat.
“Marvella told me you have a ten-year-old boy, but she hasn’t seen him for about a week. Yet you don’t seem very concerned about that.”
I took a shallow breath. At some point I had slipped into my usual passive role, the one I often took with cops. White cops. I had never dealt with a black cop before. I didn’t know where his loyalty lay—to his people or to his job.
But he was smart, and he knew I was too.
“Marvella also says that you’ve been being followed.” He put the matchbook into the evidence bag and closed it, slipping it into his pocket. “And then there’s that notice I received a while back from Memphis. You remember. I told you about it.”
I watched each movement closely, not sure what was coming next.
Johnson put his arm over the back of the stone bench, as if he were having a dinner party conversation. “So here’s what I figure. Brian Richardson, who is ten, gets snatched because someone took him for your kid.”
The conversation Brian and I had over the sun tea. From far away, that might have looked a lot more personal.
“The perp finds out pretty quick that he has the wrong kid. Which puts him in a dilemma because he probably snatched Brian out of the yard, tied him up, and threw him in the back of a car. No kid is going to stay silent about that.”
I could almost see it. A hand, snaking around Brian’s middle, another covering his mouth. But I couldn’t imagine throwing him in a car or finding a place to tie him up. Not in that neighborhood. Not that close.
But people carried children all the time, sometimes in awkward positions, especially if the kid had been misbehaving. No one would have had second thoughts about that.
“So he takes Brian to his lair, and tries to find out more about your kid. Where he is, what he’s doing. Poor little Brian tells him what he knows—”
HE SAID YOU SAVED HIS LIFE.
“—and our friend double-checks that information by breaking a few fingers. No one—especially a ten-year-old—can lie under those circumstances. Young Brian is rewarded for his honesty by a knife blade through the ribs. What do you think so far?”
I still hadn’t moved, hadn’t even changed expression. But I thought that Johnson was probably right.
“This is where it gets interesting.” Johnson spoke in calm tones. He sounded bemused, as if the entire case intrigued him. “Instead of dumping the body, he brings it back and leaves it on the steps in the middle of the night with a little message for you in the pocket. The message intrigues me. You see, it could go a variety of ways. He could have left it for you to find, which suggests that he didn’t know you very well. You were very careful not to touch that body or to tamper with the evidence. Which I appreciate, by the way.”
A car door slammed in the parking lot, and voices carried in the humid air. The meeting in the Fellowship Room had broken up.
Johnson didn’t even look in that direction. “Or it suggests that he planned to frame you. Or perhaps he wanted someone, like me, to give you this information. Maybe he knew you’d be resourceful enough to find it out on your own.”
More voices. I wondered if Franklin or Malcolm would try to find me. I prayed that they wouldn’t. I didn’t want them interrupting this conversation.
“I don’t think he expected the police to show up as fast as we did. And, frankly, I don’t think we would have if Sinkovich hadn’t been following you. I think you might have done some investigating on your own before we arrived. Maybe you would have seen the bulge in the pocket. Maybe you would have carefully—using a stick, a pen—pulled that matchbook out.”
I swallowed. I just might have.
“My bet is that he expected you to take off then, maybe lead him to your kid. But you’re smarter than that, aren’t you? You’re not going to lead anyone to that kid. Not even me.”
I was holding my breath again. I made my
self exhale.
“So what I’ve been asking myself is: Why all the interest in a ten-year-old? Can’t be for what he’s done. Gotta be for what he knows. Maybe he’s seen something. Maybe something illegal. That would get the FBI after to him, maybe to testify, and that would get the perps after him too.”
My heart rose. A plausible lie.
“But that doesn’t entirely figure. If that were true, there wouldn’t be a simple notice. There’d be a material witness order, something to let us know that he’d seen a crime. And then there’s the torture itself.”
More car doors slammed. Female voices, bidding good wishes, floated into the garden. I allowed myself a glance at the church doors, but no one came out.
“It’s textbook. Too precise, as if the perp was looking for information, not trying to get his jollies.”
Johnson rested his elbows on his thighs, dangling that evidence bag carelessly between his knees.
“And then there’s you. You’re not an average security guard. You have an education you don’t try to hide, and you know way too much about police business. I’ll bet your name isn’t Grimshaw like Marvella thinks it is.”
There was no place for me to go and nothing for me to say. All I could do was wait for the last of it, the part that was going to ruin everything.
“But here’s the thing that really bothers me,” Johnson said. He was speaking even softer now. “Brian’s death had a lot of similarities to the other two murders. Enough so that my white colleagues assume that this is just an escalation. They’re not going to pay those similarities a lot of mind.”
This wasn’t what I expected. In spite of myself, I leaned forward to catch his words. He didn’t seem to notice, but I knew he had. He was too good not to.
“I pay them a lot of mind,” he said. “That body was placed just like the others. The arms, the feet, the entire picture. Posed, in much the same way. The problem is the detail used in that pose was known only to the members of the Chicago Police Department and the FBI. And I don’t like what that makes me think.”
I met his gaze. I wasn’t going to say anything. I didn’t dare confirm or deny.
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