“Such as?”
“We pride ourselves on our work. We’re not the biggest outfit in town, right? We’re not going to compete with your ADTs, your Brinks, in terms of volume. So we specialize in offering the best there is to high-end clients. Your multi-camera closed-circuit systems, complete with interactive video, night vision capability, weatherproofing. The whole enchilada. And Birk went for the best. We had him wired up with eight high-resolution colour cameras outside, plus a hidden dome camera inside, all hooked up to a digital recorder. I’m talking about thirty grand worth of equipment and that doesn’t include the installation or monitoring fees. When a client buys a package like that, and still gets cleaned out by thieves, we don’t look too good. We look like horseshit, in fact. Especially because of what happened to Mrs. Birk. We felt terrible about that.”
“So how did they do it?”
“A security system is like a chain,” Konerko said. “Only as strong as its weakest link. The way the cameras were set up, there’s no way anyone shoulda got into that house. In addition to our monitors here”—he waved an arm at a glassed-in area where a dozen men and women wearing headsets watched closed-circuit feeds—“the Birks had their own monitor right in the foyer of the house. Nice crisp Toshiba twenty-four-inch. They would have seen who was at the door.”
“But?”
“But they let them in anyway,” he said.
“Two guys?”
“Yup. Want to see them?”
“You’re kidding.”
“Hey, it’s all digital these days, not like when you had to erase tapes and reuse them. And like I said, this one really bugged me. She was practically beaten to death, Mrs. Birk was, and on our watch.” He got up from his desk and brought me into the monitoring room, where he eased his great bulk gingerly into a sway-backed chair and searched a hard drive for the recording.
When he had it cued up, he jabbed a thick finger at the screen. “See the time code? It’s just after ten at night. Everything’s working like it should. Cameras are all rolling. And a truck shows up.”
We watched a half-ton cube van pull up in front of the Birk mansion. On the side was a logo that said Carpet Cleaning and Restoration. Totally generic: could have been stencilled that morning. The driver angled out into the street and then backed up the driveway, stopping just short of the side entrance. Then the rear doors opened and two men got out. Both wore faded blue coveralls, ball caps pulled low and wraparound dark glasses. The doors of the truck blocked them from the view of the gate camera.
They obviously knew where each camera was. You could tell by the way they positioned themselves, every move orchestrated to deny full-face views.
They pressed a buzzer at the side door. Konerko froze the tape. “Based on the height of this model van, we estimate the guy on the left at about five-eleven, maybe six feet. The right, a few inches taller.”
“Six-three?”
“Around there.”
About Francis Curry’s height.
He pressed play: the side door of the house opened wide enough to admit them, then closed quickly. “So now they’re in,” he said. “From our point of view, there’s nothing unusual so far. Nothing that would have made our people sit up and take notice. Far as we can tell, two guys showed up to pick up a carpet. Granted, it’s late, but maybe there was a spill, a flood, who knows what. But the inside camera, the dome, should have recorded whatever happened next, because that’s where the Birks were assaulted, right in the front foyer. When the cops came, that’s where they found his wife.”
“And Birk?”
“He’d made it to the den and called the cops from there.”
“What was his story exactly?”
“He said he saw the cleaning truck and assumed his wife had called them. He knew he should have checked with her but he got careless and opened the door first.”
Simon Birk, the control freak, the man who chose every detail of every tower he built, getting careless at ten at night, beckoning into his intensely private life two unknown tradesmen in dark glasses and ball caps.
“So what about the hidden dome camera?”
“That wasn’t on a live feed to us, obviously. Clients don’t want outsiders watching their every move. But it was wired to a hard-drive recorder in a utility closet in the basement.”
“Let me guess. The thieves took it with them.”
“That they did.”
“How did they know it was there?”
“Birk told the cops the thieves knew about the camera and forced him to tell them where the recorder was.”
“What did the cops think about that?”
“The guy I talked to—”
“Tom Barnett?”
“Yeah, that’s him. He took down the details. Said he’d talk to Birk about tradesmen, staff, people who might have had the inside scoop on the cameras. He questioned me and my employees. But no one ever got arrested. And nothing was ever recovered. I wasn’t happy about the whole thing, like I told you. But it wasn’t my job to ask Birk why he let the guys in. And thank the lord, I wasn’t the one who had to hand him an insurance cheque.”
“Who did?”
CHAPTER 34
I called Great Midwestern Life from my hotel room and asked the claims adjuster, Gary Herman, if he could spare a few minutes to talk about the Birks’ claim.
“There’s nothing I can tell you,” he said.
“Because there’s nothing to tell or because you aren’t allowed to tell it?”
“Either way. We signed a confidentiality agreement.”
“You did.”
“An airtight one.”
“Exists on paper somewhere.”
“In this very office.”
“So even if you had misgivings about the claim …”
“Even if I had whoppers,” he said. “I still couldn’t tell you that. I also couldn’t tell you that Simon Birk is one litigious sonofabitch and that it could never on any level be worth the grief to try to deny the claim. Wouldn’t matter the case you had. He would take it to the next level and the next. He’d nuke you if all you had was a baseball bat. That I definitely couldn’t tell you.”
“As one investigator to another,” I said, “could you tell me if the police had misgivings?”
“Would have made my job easier if they had.”
“Would have given you traction.”
“If they had done so.”
“Was it Tom Barnett you spoke to?”
“Finally,” he chuckled. “A question I can answer.”
I called Jenn at home and told her about my visit to Simon Birk’s office.
“If he knows you’re there, and he knows your every move, I hope you’re being careful,” she said.
“His bodyguard is a guy named Francis, for God’s sake. And he looks like a mannequin. A Madame Tussaud version of himself.”
“Doesn’t mean he isn’t dangerous.”
Jenn had put together a complete list of the pieces stolen from the Birk house. “I spoke to my friend Patrick,” she said. “He owns a gallery called Arles and he drooled over this stuff. At a legal auction, the stuff would have fetched at least twenty-five million. The Modigliani nude alone would have gone for five or six million, the Monet about the same, even though Patrick said it was a minor variation on the water lily theme. At least a million for Picasso’s sketch of his mistress. And that’s just three items out of dozens taken. If Birk netted even half of what they were worth and collected on the insurance, it was quite the payday.”
I asked her if anyone had called for me.
“Anyone as in a certain homicide detective?”
“For instance.”
“Sorry, chief.”
“What about Cantor? He write up those notes of his?”
“Haven’t received them yet.”
“All right. Turn up the heat if you don’t get anything by end of business.”
“Will do.”
“Anything else on the go?”
/> “No.”
“I’m thinking it might be better if you were down here.” “Chicago!” she said. “I thought you’d never ask.” “Sierra won’t mind?”
“Are you kidding? The Magnificent Mile?” “I’m not asking you down here to shop.” “You also can’t work me around the clock,” she said. “There are labour laws, you know.”
“In the States?” I said. “Get out.”
Nailing Simon Birk for murder was looking more and more like an impossible quest. Unless I found something solid I could feed to Hollinger, the best I could do was blow smoke. I wanted to call her, see if she had turned up anything useful in Martin Glenn’s financial records, or in the forensics on Will Sterling’s apartment. Maybe she was grilling Rob Cantor as we spoke, nodding grimly, taking furious notes, making the connections, saying to herself, “Jonah was right all along.”
Or maybe she was eating her lunch.
The home invasion was my best bet now—if I could find something, anything, to persuade this Tom Barnett to reopen his investigation. It wouldn’t carry the same weight as a murder charge but the sentence for fraud—especially one that had led to near-fatal injuries to his wife—might put him away for the rest of his natural life.
Who else had been in the van? Assuming the driver was Curry, the passenger was about six feet tall, Konerko had said, way too tall for Birk himself. Therefore, a third man: a thread worth trying to follow, either with Tom Barnett or Jericho Hale.
Hale was less likely to eat me alive so I decided to see him first.
When in doubt, I walk. It clears my head, works my lungs and feeds my blood. So instead of getting a cab to the Tribune, I walked up Michigan to Congress and turned right. I took the bridge there across the Metra tracks to Grant Park, its entrance guarded by statues of fierce-looking Natives on horseback.
There were few other people in the park. The apple and cherry trees were bare, the roses already deadheaded. Park workers were raking leaves and blowing debris into bags. The closer I got to the lake, the harder was the bite of the wind blowing in off its waters. Some of the younger runners jogging past me were wearing shorts, their legs bright red from the cold. I was glad I had on jeans and a leather jacket.
Straight ahead was the Buckingham Fountain. Postcards in the hotel gift shop showed its great spume of water rising fifty feet or more into the air but by late October it had been turned off for the season. A city park worker was hosing dead leaf matter off the fanciful marine sculptures that ring the main fountain. A tourist, overweight and overburdened with cameras and other gear, was videotaping his wife as she sat astride a verdigris sculpture of a cavorting sea beast.
At the far end of the fountain are steps leading down to a path that runs parallel to the lakeshore, where waves were crashing against stone jetties. Dead leaves scuttled on the asphalt like crabs. I had just turned north onto the path when I heard footsteps coming up fast behind me, a heavy tread crunching through the leaves. I turned just in time to see him closing on me, a big man in a three-quarter-length peacoat, his right arm close to his body, something held down along there. Something long and black. A lovely pistol-and-suppressor set.
Advantage him.
But to use a suppressor effectively, he needed a smaller-calibre weapon, which meant he had to get close enough for head shots.
Advantage me.
As soon as he raised his arm to shoot, I charged him, my left hand driving his gun arm off to the side. He was a beefy man in his forties, with a wide Slavic face, thick hair and moustache, like a Stalin double waiting for his cue. I grabbed his shirtfront, pulled, and launched a head-butt from my core. Delivering it with neck muscles alone will hurt you more than the other guy. Driving it from your abs gives it shattering force. I broke his nose with the crown of my head. The stunning blow left him dazed enough for me to thumb his wrist into numbness until the gun fell. Then I elbowed the side of his head, felt his knees go wobbly and let him slump to the ground. I threw the gun into a thick bramble of shrubs. Threw him in after it.
I looked north up the path. Saw no one but two young women joggers, both wearing iPods and blissfully unaware of their surroundings. Looked south: an older man who was picking up after his dog.
I set a quick pace north toward the stately Tribune Tower, walking, not running, trying to put some distance between me and my assailant in case he had backup somewhere.
He had worse.
I had taken maybe ten strides when a black Ford Interceptor drove off Lake Shore Drive onto the sidewalk, blocking my path. The driver’s door swung open and a burly towheaded man charged out of his car with a gun in hand. But he opened the car door with such force that it swung back at him, knocking him down into his seat, and I had the choice of trying to disarm my second gunman of the day or listen to Eidan Feingold for once and run.
I turned tail and ran for my life.
CHAPTER 35
At a glance, the second man looked a dozen years older and a lot heavier than me. He had a gun, but handguns aren’t nearly as accurate as cop shows and westerns make them out to be. Anything over a hundred yards would be a crapshoot.
I was in shape and built for speed. I ran back into the park, along the one stretch I knew, the oak-lined path that led to the fountain, arms and legs pumping like a wide receiver with a safety on his tail.
I heard no footsteps behind me. Took that as a good thing. Glanced behind me and saw no one. Turned back, heard an engine roar and saw the black Interceptor bouncing up a narrow paved path reserved for park vehicles, cutting me off again. Once more the gunman spilled out of the car, this time steering clear of the swinging door. He crouched and pointed a semiautomatic pistol at me. No suppressor on it; nothing subtle about this dude.
“On the ground,” he barked. “On the motherfucking ground.”
I stayed where I was.
“Now!” he yelled. “Or I’ll drop you where you stand.”
I raised my hands high in the air and turned my back on him.
“I didn’t say turn around,” he said. “I said get on the goddamn ground.”
I lowered myself slowly into push-up position. The pavement was cold against my hands, then my chest when the gunman kicked my hands out from under me. Then he knelt on my back, not being shy about forcing my spine down, and told me to put my hands behind my back.
“You a cop?” I asked.
“I’m your angel of fucking death, you don’t do what I say.”
I put my hands behind me. He cuffed them in metal, not plastic. Then he grabbed the collar of my jacket and pulled me to my feet, shoved me against his car, forced my upper body down on the hood.
“Do I get to see an ID?” I asked.
His gun muzzle pressed into my neck. “This is all the ID I need right now.”
He reached into my jacket and found my wallet. His gun pushed farther into my neck when he saw my investigator’s licence. “A PI?” he asked. His free hand moved over every part of my body that could conceivably have hidden a gun. “Where’s your piece?”
“I don’t carry one.”
“What kind of PI goes around Chicago without a gun?”
“A Canadian one.”
“Weird.”
“You know, if you’re a cop, this would be the ideal time to identify yourself.”
“Shut up.”
“I was attacked,” I said. “All I did was defend myself.”
“I saw you beat a guy down and throw a gun in the bushes.”
Then I heard a woman call, “Excuse me.”
He looked up. Even with my face pressed down against the hood of the car, I could see the tourist couple who had been filming near the fountain walking hesitantly toward us, the woman the more assertive of the two, urging her husband forward. He seemed more interested in protecting his cameras.
When they were within ten feet of us, the gunman told them to stop and said, “Chicago PD,” and took out a leather ID case, flipped it open so we could all see his badge and his name, wh
ich I had pretty much guessed already.
Detective Thomas Barnett, Bureau of Investigative Services, Chicago Police Department.
“We saw it. Dennis,” the woman said, her breathing laboured from the fast walk over. “Tell him what we saw.”
Dennis was about fifty, also out of breath, with fine sandy hair and a great spur-shaped cowlick in the back. “This fellow was attacked,” he told Barnett. “The other guy—”
“What other guy?” Barnett asked.
“A big guy with dark hair and a moustache,” I said. “Think Stalin.”
“It looked like he was going to shoot this fellow but then this fellow—”
“Jonah Geller,” I said, wanting my name out there.
“Then Mr. Geller here knocked him out and ran. And then you showed up.”
“I got a call,” Barnett said. “An assault in progress.”
That had to be steaming bullshit. He had arrived on the scene too fast to have been responding to any call. The couple were the closest witnesses and they obviously hadn’t phoned it in.
I walked Barnett and the tourists to where the assault had taken place. The gunman was gone but there was a blood spatter on the pavement where his broken nose had gushed. The gun was in the bushes where I said it would be, and Barnett made a show of sealing it in a plastic bag and locking it in a case in the trunk of his car. Having been educated in these matters by Dante Ryan, I guessed it was a .22, either a Colt or a Field King.
“What about these handcuffs?” I asked Barnett.
“What about them?”
“You heard it from them, I defended myself.”
“In fact,” the woman said, “we got it all on tape.”
“You what?” Barnett said.
“On tape,” she said. “Play it back, Den. Show him the part you filmed.”
Dennis sighed and unfolded the viewer from his camcorder. He played back footage of the fountain: you could hear him instructing his wife to move out of the way so he could get a close-up of the plaque that told who it had been named after. Then you saw me in the background, walking along the path behind the fountain; the other man coming up swiftly; and my counterattack, which I thought even Eidan would have admired.
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