Days of Rage: A Smokey Dalton Novel (21 page)

“This one’s newer,” he said.

“How much newer?” I asked.

He shrugged.
“There are a few in here.
They’re not full skeletons yet.
But that could be the effect of being crammed into such a tiny area.”

Then, almost to himself, he added, “This one’s going to be a mess.”

As if the rest of them weren’t.
I glanced at the wall, counted the changes and the marks, and figured we had six more areas to open.

I began removing bricks.

TWENTY

By the fifth opening, I had found that place inside myself that had helped me survive Korea.
It was protected, analytical, cold.
I had a job to do, and I was going to do it, no matter what I came across.

The third opening had had a single body in it again, this one in women’s clothing, both femurs broken, but nothing else obvious—at least until we got the entire tomb open.

The fourth opening held another single body with most of its flesh intact, but seeping and swollen as if it were filled with water.
The fetid smell barely registered for me.
That was when I realized that I had become detached.

“I have no idea how one man could have done this,” I said. “Or why.”

“It’s not my job to ask why,” LeDoux said.
His tone had gone flat, just like mine.
He was just working now, not reacting.

“How is part of your job, right?”

“I don’t speculate.”

I wanted to snap at him.
I needed speculation. I needed conversation, anything to keep my mind from weaving scenarios that made this basement even worse than it was.

“But,” he said, “I do know that these types of things are more common than we like to admit.”

So he did understand.
Or maybe LeDoux needed to talk too, just to keep himself from speculating
,
which was, as he mentioned, one of the worst things he could do.

“These types of things?” I asked, wondering exactly what he meant.

“Mass murderers.
They’re much more common than generally understood.”

“Sure,” I said, not really believing him.
“Hitler, Stalin. You look through
history and you find —”

“No.” LeDoux cut me off as if I were a particularly poor student.
“Killers with more than one victim.
With a dozen, maybe more.
Killers we’ve never heard of.
We’re discovering just how common they are.”

“With no one noticing?” I asked. “I can believe a few victims, but dozens —”

“It’s not a stretch if you think about it.” LeDoux was photographing the third hole, documenting our laborious work.
“Jack the Ripper killed
—
what? five?
—
prostitutes in the space of a few months.
Then what happened to him, hmm?
Was he killed? Did he go to prison for another crime? Or did he move to a new killing field?”

“No one knows.” I knocked some mortar from the side of two bricks.
I was getting more efficient, even though the work was getting harder.
This mortar had a solid texture, and I was finding it difficult to scrape it aside.

“That is the point,” LeDoux said. “No one knows.”

He set his camera down, then looked in the hole again and sighed.
I didn’t know if he felt sadness for the woman inside or if he was just thinking about the work that faced us.

“Jack the Ripper’s famous,” I said.

“Jack the Ripper was a taunter. They’re rare.
Most of these mass killers work in silence, I think, not seeking any publicity at all.”

Some of the mortar toppled inward.
I winced, wondering whose grave I had disturbed this time.

“There are others from all over the country, people you’ve never heard of.”

“You keep saying that,” I said, letting some of the irritation I’d been feeling at LeDoux grow.

“You need something sensational to make the news,” LeDoux said.

“Like a basement full of bodies,” I muttered.

“Like
discovering
a basement full of bodies,” LeDoux said.
“And yes, I remember the agreement.
I’m not going to disclose this to anyone.
If I did, we’d never find out what was down here.”

That wasn’t my priority.
My priority was Laura.
But he already knew that.

“A basement full of bodies,” he said musingly, “or a taunting letter to the editor like that creature in California is doing —”

There was a man who was sending letters to the California papers, claiming to have murdered people in the San Francisco area.

“They’ve lost that battle, by the way,” LeDoux said. “They’ve given him a name.
The Zodiac.
These creatures love names.”

“You said a lot of these people work in silence,” I said.

“I believe most of them do.”
LeDoux rose up again on his haunches, just enough so that he could see the floor of opening number three.

I managed to loosen more mortar.
If I got one more side, I’d be able to remove my first brick of this section.

“And then there are the accidental sensationalists.
Chicago had one a few years ago — what was his name? The young man who killed all the nurses?”

“Speck.” That had been before I moved here, but I’d heard of it.
People still talked about it, with fear in their voices.
“He killed eight nurses in a single night.”

“Like Starkweather in
—
what was it? Kansas?”

That had been in the 1950s.
The case had dragged on for what seemed like forever.

“It was like these men just snapped and took people with them.” LeDoux made some notes on his clipboard.
“But the mass killers who work in silence, they’re the dangerous ones.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because they’re smart.” He leaned back and looked at me. Then he swept a hand toward the wall.
“If we’re right, this man has been killing for decades.
Decades
, Mr. Grimshaw.
And we’re only figuring it out because he’s dead.
The Grim Reaper stopped him.
We didn’t.”

“If Hanley is the one who killed them all.”

“That stairway and your discoveries today suggest he was.”

“But that’s an assumption.” I got the last brick free.
More bodies, crammed into the space, flesh still on the bones.
A waft of rot came toward me and my eyes watered.
“I thought you weren’t going to speculate.”

“I wasn’t.
I’m sorry.” He sighed. “More?”

I nodded.
“Right up close.”

I moved away, then stopped at the sixth section of wall.
It looked different too — the bricks were small and evenly made.
Machine-made bricks instead of handmade bricks.
None of the previous sections had used them.

“Do we need to open these last three?” I asked.
“We know what we’re going to find.”

“Now
you’re
speculating,” LeDoux said.

I brushed the back of my glove over my face.
The fabric, which wasn’t white any more, came away a dull gray.

“How could anyone live with this stink?
There were apartments in here.”
I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine any of it.

“The brick blocked a lot of the smell. If you’ll note, he even thought to brick the ceiling of each crypt.
But this building does have an odor.
I noticed it when we first arrived.”

“I blamed it on Hanley dying in here and rotting for a couple of weeks.”

“
Me, too
.” LeDoux finished marking the clipboard.
Then he picked up the camera and took shots of section four.
“Although it stands to reason that the place always smelled slightly foul and the tenants blamed it on each other. I’m sure you’ve been in a building that had awful cooking odors or tenants who didn’t bathe much.”

I had, and recently too.
The stench of urine in some of the buildings I’d inspected had been overpowering.
And those places had been uninhabited for months, sometimes years.

He was saying, “People don’t question much, especially if they have no other choice.”

“I suppose.”
I stood.
My knees cracked. I’d been crouching too long.
“You haven’t answered my question, so I’m going to make the decision. Those remaining sections’ll have to wait.”

He let the camera fall against his chest.
“Probably wise.
Each one of these sections has brick behind it.
Different brick.”

I had noticed that and then put it out of my mind.
I still didn’t want to think about it.

“If we don’t report this,” LeDoux said, “this work could take months.”

I nodded. It was up to me now.
I had some outside investigating to do.
If I could find out Hanley’s history, figure out — with Minton’s help — who these bodies belonged to and what had happened here, at least with the ones we’d found, I would have enough answers.
I would know if Laura could bring the police in.

“I think if we excavate all of this at once, we’ll be overwhelmed,” I said.

LeDoux crossed his arms over his camera strap, clinging to the clipboard with one hand.
He did not look happy, and I didn’t blame him.
I wouldn’t want to be responsible for all of this on my own either.

“Besides,” I continued, “we might lose a lot of evidence in all the brick and mortar debris if we go t
o
o fast.
Let’s see what we can find out about what we’ve already found and go from there.”

“I have days just on this area alone,” LeDoux said, “not counting what your pathologist will do with these corpses.”

“I realize that,” I said.

He sighed.
“What are you thinking?”

“If it was Hanley all alone, like you mentioned, then Sturdy’s off the hook,” I said.

LeDoux shook his head.
“He was their employee.”

“But when would they have gotten the chance to inspect this? Besides, I suspect most killers are someone’s employee.
The employer doesn’t get blamed when a man murders his wife.
Sturdy won’t get blamed for this.”

“In their building? Right under their noses?”

“Their PR people should be able to handle it,” I said. “People will be more caught up in the whos and hows than the employer.”

“He’s dead,” LeDoux said. “Someone will have to take the fall.”

“And you think one of Chicagoland’s greatest companies, with ties to the mayor and the city, will take that fall? Especially considering how many employees it has and how many pies it has its fingers in?”

“Put that way, I see no reason to avoid the press now,” LeDoux said.

“Stock prices,” I said.
“And uncertainty.
At the moment, you and I suspect Hanley acted alone.
If something proves otherwise, if this does go back into Sturdy’s past, then the situation could become more dire.”

“And what if Hanley knew nothing?” LeDoux asked.

“Tell me how he knew nothing with that staircase,” I said.
“And the keys to this back door.”

LeDoux nodded.
“It does point to him.”

“It does,” I said.
“Now let me prove it.”

TWENTY-ONE

We quit for the day soon after that.
I think neither of us could continue, although we both made noises about being tired, needing showers, wanting time to complete some outside tasks.
Even though it was only three in the afternoon, I needed to be shed of that place.

So did LeDoux.
Instead of driving back with me, he offered to take the El.
I didn’t want to be in the van with myself either — not with that rotting stench still on my coveralls, on my skin — but I had no choice.

I drove LeDoux to the nearest El stop.
He had taken off his coveralls.
In his blue jeans and
T
-shirt, he looked younger than he was.
I convinced him not to carry his cameras or his cases — he was going through a few bad neighborhoods as the El took him back downtown — and then I waited until he boarded the train before driving to my apartment.