by Jude Hardin
“You’re crazy,” Mark said to John. “We were all in it together, and you know it. Anyway, it was your idea to—”
Mark stopped mid-sentence and looked at the floor. He threaded his fingers into his hair and started sobbing.
“Kevin Ward?” I said. “In Northbrook?”
Mark looked up, his puffy red face suddenly a shade whiter. “He knows, John.”
“He doesn’t know a damn thing,” Boggan said.
“I beg to differ,” I said. “I know a lot of things. Like the exact location of a house fire twenty-six years ago, and the exact name of a homeless woman who died in that fire.”
Mark stood there trembling for a few seconds, and then he turned to John. “I can’t do this,” he said.
“You need to keep it together,” John said. “Now more than ever. Don’t flake out on me, brother.”
“We’re going to be arrested. There’s going to be a trial. Jail. I can’t put my wife through that. And my kid.”
Mark started walking backwards. By the time I realized his intention, it was too late. He flipped over the railing of John’s balcony, his feet disappearing before I had a chance to grab him.
Behind us, the apartment filled with police officers, all with weapons drawn.
“It’s over, John,” Jack said.
John laughed, his voice tinged with hysteria. “It’s funny. We were kids. We fucked up. But it was an accident. We went on to live good lives.”
“What are you talking about?” Herb said.
John’s hand began to shake, but he kept the gun on Jack’s head, finger on the trigger. “In our freshman year at the University of Chicago, Bill and Mark and I lived in an undergrad dormitory called Broadview Hall. It’s a nice dorm, but it’s about a mile from the main campus. Kevin had a car, and he would give us a ride sometimes. That’s how we got to know him.”
“Kevin?” Herb asked.
“Kevin Ward,” I said. “I’ll fill you in later.”
John continued, apparently oblivious to our exchange. “The four of us were playing poker in the rec room one night, and Kevin hit us with a proposition. A relative of his had died recently, a great aunt or something, and she’d left Kevin a piece of property in her will. He described the place to us, told us where it was and all, and then he said he would give us each a hundred dollars to go out there one night and set it on fire. He really wasn’t interested in owning the place, and he figured he could get a few grand from the insurance company if it burned to the ground. A hundred bucks seemed like a lot of money to us at the time, and we didn’t see any harm in torching a crummy little cottage out in the middle of nowhere.”
“So before you were a murderer, you were an arsonist,” Jack said. “You’re a real asshole, Boggan.”
“Everything would have been fine. It would have gone off without a hitch if it wasn’t for that old woman squatting at the place. How were we supposed to know she was in there? She came running out the front door with her clothes on fire, screaming and dancing and running around. I guess she didn’t know that you’re supposed to stop, drop, and roll. She just kept running around until she finally collapsed. Bill and Mark and I didn’t know what to do. We hadn’t planned on having to put out a fire. We didn’t have any water with us, or a fire extinguisher or anything. We took our coats off and tried to snuff her out with those, but by then it was too late. She was dead.”
“Let me guess,” Herb said. “The three of you made a pact to never breathe a word of what happened to another living soul. You dragged the woman into the woods and buried her, and—”
“And that was that,” Boggan said. “Until a few months ago when some backwoods hick found the old lady. It was still okay, really, until we heard her daughter had identified her. But Kevin took care of that. He has money, and he has connections. He fixed it so the woman would go back to being a Jane Doe. Everything would have been perfect if Bill hadn’t freaked out.”
“He wanted to come forward and confess?” I asked. I was slowly bringing the .38 up, drawing a bead on his head.
“Thursday afternoon at the office, he told us he’d made up his mind. We talked about it some more that night at Genario’s, and he was determined to go through with it. Said it was the right thing to do. Said it had been weighing on his conscience all these years. He was convinced that we would get lighter sentences if we came forward and told the truth.”
“But you and your buddy who just took the Nestea plunge didn’t want to have anything to do with it,” I said.
“It would have ruined us. Even if we’d somehow managed to get out of going to jail, we would have lost our licenses to practice medicine. My wife already hates me. I didn’t want my daughter to, as well.”
“You made a mistake when you were a kid,” Jack said. “This isn’t a mistake now, John. This is intentional. Both your friends are gone, and you’ve got a gun to my head.”
“You’re right, Lieutenant. I wish I had the guts to jump like Mark did, but the funny thing is, I’ve always been afraid of heights. I’m living in a penthouse condo, and I’ve always hated the view.”
He smiled, tears in his eyes, and in one fluid motion took the gun away from Jack’s head and stuck it under his chin and fired.
DEL CHIVO
SUNDAY, 11:59 P.M. CST
F Dover’s relief, an off-duty patrolman from the Cook County Sheriff’s Department, walked into Sergio’s hospital room at one minute before midnight. The new guard’s name was Andrada. He appeared to be of Asian descent, Filipino maybe. He was shorter than F. Dover, and not nearly as well built. Andrada was about Sergio’s size, only he had a belly that oozed over the top of his gun belt. His fat stomach reminded Sergio of the Pillsbury Dough Boy. He looked soft and weak.
Perfect.
The two guards chatted for a few minutes, and then F. Dover left the room. His shift was over. He was done for the night. He walked away, only to return a couple of minutes later. The key to the shackles. He’d almost forgotten. What a shame that would have been. He passed it to Andrada, and then he exited Sergio’s hospital room for good.
“Adios, F. Dover,” Sergio said.
A few minutes later, a young woman wearing dark blue scrubs came and took Sergio’s blood pressure and temperature. It wasn’t his nurse. An aid, he guessed. She asked him how he was feeling.
“Much better,” he said. “I’m just really tired now. If I could only get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, I think I would be a new man.”
She smiled. “It’s hard to get any rest in the hospital. You know that.”
“Yes. Unfortunately.”
“I think you’re due for some more blood work at three, but we’ll try to let you rest until then. How does that sound?”
“Wonderful.”
She peeled the blood pressure cuff from Sergio’s arm, wrapped it around the bedrail so it would be there for the next time.
“You try to get some rest now,” she said. “I’ll see you around three o’clock.”
“Thank you,” Sergio said.
She switched the light off and walked out of the room. She left the door wide open—another one of those pesky rules for prisoners in the hospital—but there wasn’t much activity in the hallway this late, so it didn’t really matter. Most of the patients were settling in to sleep for the night, or at least for several hours, and the staff liked it that way. Sergio had dated a nurse in Colombia for a while, and she’d told him all about it. The more your patients sleep, she’d said, the less of a pain in the ass they were.
The way Sergio understood it, nurses used the hours between midnight and five A.M. to catch up on their paperwork—or, in some cases, their own sleep.
The cute little aid had promised to leave him alone until three.
More than enough time.
“These cuffs are hurting my wrists,” he told Andrada.
“There’s nothing I can do about that.”
“They’re too tight. You can loosen them just a little bit.”
>
“Call the nurse,” Andrada said. “She can put some gauze between the metal and your skin.”
“The cuffs are so tight, there’s no room for any padding. Please, senor. I’ve been incarcerated before, and I know you can do this for me.”
“Not without another guard in the room.”
“Look at me,” Sergio said. “I’m helpless. What am I going to do?”
Visibly irritated, Andrada rose from his chair and walked over to Sergio’s bed. When he got close enough, Sergio quickly slung the chain around the back of the guard’s neck, jerked him forward and kneed him in the face. There was a sickening crunch when kneecap met nose, followed by a gush of bright red blood. Before Andrada could call for help, Sergio wrapped his fingers around his throat and held on with all his might. It took a few minutes, but the young Asian officer finally stopped struggling. He went limp, and he was gone.
Sergio uncuffed himself, yanked the IV line out of his arm, dragged Andrada to the bathroom and undressed him. Sergio set Andrada’s clothes up on the sink, pulled the tactical folding knife from a compartment on his gun belt, slit his throat and cut his face off.
There was a lot of blood.
Sergio rinsed off in the sink, quickly dressed in the pig’s clothing, and wrapped the pieces of the face in toilet paper, balling it up into his front pocket.
Then he walked out of his room, took the stairs to the main floor, and left the hospital.
Three blocks away he waved a motorist down. When the woman pulled over and rolled down her window, Sergio used Andrada’s gun to shoot her in the head. He pushed her over to the passenger side, got in the car, and drove to the abandoned house he’d been staying at.
When he climbed into the house through the window, he saw it was full for the night; at least eight homeless people, including Shorty and Lawrence, all passing around a big jug of wine.
He was pretty sure at least a few of them would have ID. Four of them did. But he took all eight faces anyway.
When he was finished, he stripped out of the uniform, managed to cobble together another outfit from everyone present, and then dragged the dead woman out of the car and into the house and took her face, too.
Then he burned the place down. For Papa.
An hour later, he was checking into a motel in Indiana. Some really shitty place, with a checkout desk behind bulletproof glass.
“Is there a Federal Express shop nearby?” he asked, after paying cash for three nights.
“There’s one in town.”
“When does it open?”
“How the hell should I know?”
Sergio went to his room and took a long, well-deserved shower. When he was finished, he counted all of his money. Among the pig, the lady driver, and all the homeless people he’d robbed, Sergio had almost a thousand dollars.
He sat down at the cheap desk in the room and composed a letter to Mendoza, saying he needed a new passport and plane tickets back to Columbia, and the address of the motel. In the morning, he would rent a post office box and FedEx the letter, along with the faces and the IDs, to his boss.
With a bit of luck, he would only have to spend a few more days in Los Estados Unidos.
COLT
MONDAY, 3:41 A.M. CST
Herb and I spent the next few hours at the twenty-sixth district station house, him typing out a report while asking me sporadic questions. It was less of a deposition, and more like getting our stories straight for Sanchez’s trial.
That turned out to be unnecessary, because we got word at 3am that Sanchez had escaped police custody.
To say I was pissed off was putting it lightly. I wanted to put my hand through the wall.
“I should have killed him when I had the chance.”
“Then you’d be behind bars now, Nicholas.”
“Maybe. Or maybe I would have just waltzed out of jail, like he did.”
“I understand that you’re angry. I would be, too. Anger is part of the grieving process.”
“Anger is also part of the scumbag-who-shot-my-girlfriend-just-escaped process.”
“We’ve got every available man looking for him.”
My shoulders slumped, and I felt like a deflated balloon.
“We don’t even know why he did it,” I said. “It was senseless.”
“I got a voicemail, from a colleague in the gang unit. Some Central and South American gangs cut off faces as part of an initiation. We found two more faces at the vacant store where we caught him. He was obviously saving them. And cops are worth double. I think… I think our boy Sanchez was trying to get into a cartel. Jack and I saw him at Shipman’s murder scene. I think he stalked us. And I think he killed Laurie because he thought she was Jack.”
I rubbed my eyes. Herb’s explanation fit, especially with Laurie’s new haircut. But the meaningless crime suddenly having meaning didn’t make me feel any better.
Herb wanted to follow-up on Kevin Ward. I explained everything, along with my intentions.
Herb frowned. “I don’t like the idea of this guy getting off.”
“He’s not getting off, Herb. He’ll pay. Dearly.”
“He’s a killer, Nicholas.”
“He’s an arsonist who hired a bunch of kids in an insurance fraud scam. He may not even have known about the murder.”
“We should still bring him in.”
“I’ll make you a deal. If he admits to homicide to me, I’ll call my new homicide detective friend. If not, let me deal with him.”
“Don’t screw me on this, Colt. I want your word.”
“You’ve got it.”
Herb seemed to think it over, then nodded. “Okay. But I need the gun.”
“What am I supposed to threaten him with?”
“You go over there, get hot, and shoot him, and you get both me and Jack in deep shit.”
I considered it, then handed him the .38 Jack loaned me.
“You need a place to stay?” he asked.
“No, thanks. I guess I’ll go ahead and check into The Valiant later this morning.”
“Try to get some rest, Colt. Give me a call later if you want to. I’ll be at the office.”
“Okay.”
When we finally finished up, I took a cab to the airport. Not that I was planning to fly anywhere just yet. I needed to stop by Avis and get a replacement for the stolen Altima. I wondered how much of a hassle that was going to be.
Jack had been admitted to the hospital for observation. On the way to the airport, I called to check on her, and the nurse said she was stable and resting quietly.
As I might have expected, the rental place wasn’t happy about their car being stolen. Especially since I hadn’t taken out the extra insurance.
They wouldn’t loan me another one, so I had to go to a competitor and rent one there.
I took out the extra insurance this time.
Then I made a call.
Forty minutes later I was at his condo. Harry McGlade was in his pajamas—bright blue with booties on the feet—holding his .44 Magnum.
“I’m sorry about Laurie.”
He handed me the Smith & Wesson, along with his shoulder holster.
“How much do I owe you?”
“This one’s on me. Do what you need to do. Bring it back when you’re finished. Unless you kill him. Then dump it in the river and lose my phone number. You need a place to crash? You look… tired.”
“No. But you have a computer and Internet?”
“Of course.”
“Can I use the Internet, really quick?”
McGlade nodded. I followed him inside, to his home office. His computer monitor was larger than the television I’d been watching at Laurie’s place.
Harry logged me in. “If any really weird porn pops up, ignore it. Unless it’s really weird. Then use the screen capture and save it for me.”
He clapped my shoulder and left. I did a Google search for TRACKERS, the evidence logging program Dr. Hitchcock mentioned at the morgue.
“Springfield my ass,” I said, after reading up on how it worked.
McGlade came back with two Sam Adams. He handed me one. “You find what you needed?”
“Half of what I needed. Too bad there isn’t a way to go back in time and save things on the web that got deleted.”
“Actually, there are two ways. Google cache and the Internet Wayback Machine. Both of them save websites in previous versions. What are you looking for?”
“Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office, Unidentified Persons.”
“How long ago?”
“A few months.”
“Let’s take a peek.”
Harry took over, his fingers a blur on the keyboard. Suddenly the screen was filled with a pornographic image so obscene it made me wince.
“Yikes,” Harry said. “Gotta save a copy of that.”
“Is that…?” I asked, pointing.
“I think so.”
“That’s gotta be fake.”
“BrassClown.com. The clown nose looks real. But you can do anything with Photoshop. Have you met Jack’s partner?”
“Detective Benedict?”
Harry clicked on a folder, and there was a picture of Herb’s face, blended seamlessly onto the body of a hippopotamus.
“I take it you two don’t get along,” I said.
“Want to see what he looks like as a walrus with a micropenis?”
“I’d rather check that Wayback Machine thing.”
McGlade got onto Google, and then clicked on an icon next to the search results. “We’re in luck, Google has cached it. What are you looking for specifically?”
I took the mouse and scrolled down, searching for Jane Doe’s. I found the picture of Wanda’s bones, but the necklace wasn’t there.
“Let’s try the Wayback Machine,” Harry said. He typed a few search phrases and soon we were looking at the Unidentified Persons section, as it appeared three months ago.
“That’s it,” I said, pointing at the necklace. “Do you have a printer?”
“Of course. Copy coming right up.”
Harry printed the necklace pictures for me. He also printed up a picture of a chimpanzee with Herb’s face on its ass. I left that one in the tray.