Dirty Fire (23 page)

“Look—I might have done some big talking. You know how it is; you were coming down pretty hard on me, and I wanted to maybe make you sweat a little, all right?”

“Not good enough, Sonny. I’m not convinced we need your help any more. See, since you and I last spoke, we’ve done a little homework here. And I’m pretty sure that we can make a case that will have both of you sharing a cell. Maybe even on death row.”

I took a chance. “You might want to start thinking about a motion for separate trials. Judges tend to throw the book at public officials who go this bad. Separate yourself, you might get lucky and avoid the hotshot down in Joliet. Though I hear a lethal injection is supposed to give you a hell of a rush, at least before your heart stops.”

Sonnenberg said nothing for a moment, and I could imagine the wheels that were turning in his mind. When he spoke, his voice was soft as an obscene caller.

“If you want your big-name public official for it,” Sonny Sonnenberg told me, “I can give him to you.”

• • •

The clock on the desk read 8:38, its subdued blue digital numerals somehow calming. Immediately upon ending the discussion with Sonnenberg, Cieloczki had hustled me upstairs to the executive offices. The room resembled a beehive during the daytime, but the assorted queens, drones and workers had left hours before.

Now, Talmadge Evans presided over an empty and quiet fiefdom.

“We’re bringing Sonnenberg in,” I said. “He heard how his girlfriend died. He knows he’s a marked man out there.”

Evans looked surprised, then dubious. “Where is he?”

“In a dark room where people try not to meet each other’s eye,” I said. “He spent the day hiding at The Lace Panty.”

“The
what
?”

“It’s a strip club and peep show emporium over on the west side,“ I said, straightfaced. “Open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

“Davey and I are going over there together,” Gil said. “It’s important to get Sonnenberg in custody immediately, for his own protection. The deal is he opens up completely when’s he’s safe.”

“Should we send a police car?” Evans suggested. “Would that be faster?”

Gil answered as if he was considering the question for the first time.

“Given the situation,” he said, “I think Davey and I should handle it. We can be there in twenty minutes. But, given the nature of the allegations, I felt that you should know the situation immediately. This is all about to become very, very complicated.”

Evans glanced at the clock. “That is an understatement,” he said, and his voice was low and tense. “If any of this is true, we are dealing with a catastrophe.”

“At least Santori will be happy,” Gil said, his eyes studying the ceiling of Talmadge Evans’s office. “He’s finally got somebody who can give his Operation Centurion what it needs: an informant ready to testify that a top public official is involved in multiple homicides, arson and a variety of other assorted felonies. This should make his case.”

“To be frank, that is part of our problem,” Evans said, a dark expression on his face. “We’re talking about an official of Lake Tower—the man who runs our police department. If what you believe is accurate—”

“It is,” I piped up, unhelpfully.

Evans’s look, leveled at me with a minimum of warm regard, was intended to make me reconsider further contributions to the conversation between my elders.

“
If
it is true,” he emphasized, “then, additionally, a substantial percentage of our police force is involved in such illegal acts as armed robbery and extortion.” He shook his head stonily. “This is a disaster for…for Lake Tower. The FBI has its agenda, but we must focus on our own priority. Santori’s investigation is, and must remain, secondary.”

Gil was looking steadily at the city manager. “What are you saying, Talmadge?”

Evans returned the firefighter’s gaze. In the moments before he spoke, I imagined that some kind of complicated mental calculation was going on behind the intensity of Evans’s stare. It puzzled me and was somehow troubling. Then a curtain came down behind his eyes, though whether in defeat or to conceal a hidden resolve I could not discern.

“People have already died, and there is risk that more may,” Evans said, not as if it was what he had considered saying. “If Bob Nederlander is behind this…well, we have no choice but to act in a way to preserve the safety of the public. But my point is that there may be a way to act that will also preserve the image and reputation of this city.”

“Are you suggesting,” I asked, “that we leave Nederlander in a room with his pistol and hope he does the honorable thing?”

“I’m suggesting that we do what we can to limit the damage,” Evans said with heat, “while still removing the bad apple.”

“Nederlander is corrupt,” I told Evans. “He’s been running your police department like he’s Ali Baba and they’re the Forty Thieves. He’s not just a ‘bad apple,’ Mr. Evans—he’s the center of a ring of bad cops. He’s been playing fast and loose with a fake stolen-car insurance scam for at least three years. We’ve found evidence of this insurance fraud, and Mel Bird identified a young woman we think was his accomplice inside the insurance company. We believe she also provided falsified insurance documents to Stanley Levinstein which tie Nederlander to our double homicide.”

Evans looked appalled. “You’ve arrested this woman? She can implicate Bob Nederlander?”

“She’s dead too, Mr. Evans. Her name was Rebecca Hunt, she was twenty-two years old, and she died in a parking garage with a nylon cord knotted around her throat. This was within a couple of weeks of the Levinstein murders.”

“That’s not all, Talmadge,” Cieloczki interjected. “We have strong circumstantial evidence that indicates Nederlander might be directly involved in the arson itself.”

“Evidence? What kind of evidence?”

Gil looked at me.

“Davey has…obtained…records that detail Nederlander’s use of the municipal gasoline pumps,” he said. “Specifically, it shows that Nederlander filled his car’s tank with almost thirty gallons of gasoline the morning of January 23.”

Evans looked puzzled. “He put gasoline in his car. And that proves
what
? That he drives a car with a large gas tank?”

“It would have to be a hell of a gas-guzzler, Mr. Evans,” I said. “You see, according to the records, he used the municipal gas pump to put in virtually the same amount—before midnight, later on the same day.”

“That’s the day of the Levinstein murders,” Cieloczki said. “It’s approximately the amount of gasoline our investigation indicates was used as an accellerant in the arson. We’ve verified he spent most of January 23 in his office, at least through midafternoon. That makes it hard to explain two fill-ups in one day. My guess, Talmadge, is that we’ve discovered why there were no gas cans found at the fire.”

“All he would need was a bucket and a length of plastic tubing if he knew how to siphon gasoline from a car tank,” I said.

Gil Cieloczki looked out Evans’s window at the Municipal Center’s parking lot. He could just make out the sign that reserved a space for the
DIRECTOR - PUBLIC SAFETY
. Tonight, no shiny black Navigator filled the parking slot.

“He knew how,” the fire chief said. “He told me.”

“This is just a thought,” I said. “But does anybody know where Nederlander is, right now?”

Gil looked puzzled. “I haven’t seen him all day.”

Evans shook his head, impatiently.

“Me neither,” I said. “And somebody’s been tracing Sonnenberg’s calls today. Whoever it is may know where to look by now.”

Evans looked at Gil for a long moment.

“Do whatever you must,” he said. “End this disaster.”

As we left to bring in Sonny Sonnenberg, I looked back over my shoulder at Talmadge Evans. He was staring out the window, his eyes unblinking and his face deeply furrowed. Slumped in his chair, he looked very old, almost ancient. I could almost hear the intensity of his thoughts.

But his features revealed nothing: at least, nothing I knew how to read.

• • •

In hindsight, perhaps Gil should have called for a patrol car to pick up Sonnenberg. At the least, he could have had one dispatched to stand by as backup outside The Lace Panty.

As it was, he did not. And so, by 9:11 p.m. when we arrived at the sprawling complex, there was no possibility of a witness—someone who might have seen what had happened, or recognized a familiar face among the patrons there.

All we had, as we fought through the crowd of firefighters and theater patrons milling around outside the theater, was a nineteen-year-old transvestite name William Poplouski,
aka
Fawn Lopez,
aka
Kimberly Clark,
aka
Poppie Tart,
aka
a dozen other entries on her computerized rap sheet.

Her face was smudged with soot and ash, and the beaded flapper’s dress she wore was burned through to singed flesh in several places. She also had second-degree burns on her hands and arms, which were being dressed by paramedics from the ambulance parked next to the fire pumper at the curb.

“I was standing at the urinal,” she was telling one of the medics. “Then this guy in a suit—big fellow, but not fat, you know?—he comes in and tosses something over the door of one of the stalls.”

She winced at the dressing the other paramedic was placing on her burns.

“Damn, honey—this your first night? Next thing I know, something goes ‘poof,’ and this little guy comes running out of the stall, all on fire. What else could I do? I tried to chase him down and put it out. I just couldn’t get to him fast enough.”

Gil pushed his way to the tableau.

“Where’s the other victim?” he asked the lead paramedic, but it was William Poplouski who answered.

“Where you think the poor fucker is?” she asked, and a tear washed a clean streak down her cheek. “Even when I got the fire out, I couldn’t do nothing for him.”

Gil and I looked at each other, and moved through the crowd.

Inside, the large room was dominated by a shabby, spotlighted stage. Some of the small tables and most of the chairs here had been overturned, as if the audience had left in a panicked rush.

Several firefighters were standing in a loose ring to the right of the stage, staring down at the floor and oblivious to the stench that permeated the air. As we neared, they separated and we could see what had focused their attention.

Tendrils of smoke still rose from a body, twisted and hideously charred. Bright shards of glass glinted under the spotlight’s harsh glare like sharp-edged jewels, welded by fierce flames to what had been his head and face.

There, amid the debris of the Molotov cocktail that had burst and ignited against him, lay the lifeless remains of Paul “Sonny” Sonnenberg.

The Illinois State Crime Laboratory is located at 1941 West Roosevelt Road, a modern brick building on Chicago’s West Side—as the pigeon flies, only a few miles from the impressive, glass-and-steel wedding cake architecture of the James R. Thompson State of Illinois Building in Chicago’s downtown. Both are relatively new buildings, though the Crime Lab’s roof is rumored to leak significantly less.

Overall the State Crime Laboratory has benefited from its relative proximity to the State of Illinois center. But there are also a few disadvantages, including the tendency of visiting state legislators to drop in at a moment’s notice. Legislators like to know where the money is being spent, in the unlikely event a taxpayer ever has the opportunity to ask. And, being more or less human, they share the public’s general fascination with seeing the latest technological marvel on which so many tax dollars had been spent.

One such technological marvel was BMRS, an acronym that stood for Ballistics Mapping and Retrieval System. Among the forensics staff, it was pronounced “bummers.” This was not an affectionate nickname; BMRS was a fickle beast, as evidenced by the relative lack of hits the system had produced to date. While everybody expected that to change as more crime-scene samples were scanned into the system, BMRS had not yet engendered wild enthusiasm among the division’s forensics experts.

Which was why, on this fine April morning as Ballistics Division Supervisor Darnell Whitrow stood before a visiting contingent of Downstate legislators to detail the workings of BMRS, he reminded himself to refer to the system by its formal name rather than the unofficial pronunciation.

“I thought all you guys needed was a bullet,” said one of the visiting lawmakers, a prosperous-looking short man with a shiny balding head, “and you could trace it all the way back to the lead mine it came out of.” His Legislative District included Galena, the erstwhile hometown of U.S. Grant and, not by coincidence, once one of the premier lead-producing areas in the United States.

Darnell smiled politely.

“That’s not quite the way it works,” he said. “You probably know this from TV: a gun leaves distinctive markings on each bullet it fires. Basically, the rifling that’s cut into the barrel of a gun presses groves and leaves lands—the raised areas—on the surface of the projectile.

“Each bullet is just like a fingerprint—unique to the gun that fired it. Aside from some relatively minor differences related to wear inside the barrel, every bullet fired from a specific gun will all have the same markings.” Darnell was into his patter now, enjoying himself.

“Traditionally, we’ve used what we call ‘comparison microscopes’ when we’re trying to see if a certain gun fired the bullet. That involved optically placing two bullets side by side and examining the markings to see if we had a match.”

The forensics technician made a face. “Problem is, that meant you had to have the two bullets—or, even better, a crime-scene bullet and a suspect gun. In real life, bullets can fragment or mushroom, leaving you with only a partial pattern to work with.”

“I thought you test fired the guns in the lab,” one of the legislators spoke up.

“That’s right—and you can get a pristine bullet from a test firing in the lab,” Darnell agreed. “Even with that, finding other crimes where the same gun had been used meant a lot of time digging through records and manually comparing any suspect bullets. Ballistics identification has always been labor-intensive—harder than actual human fingerprints to work with, from a forensics point of view.”

Darnell patted the computer screen with a confidence he sincerely wished he felt.

“Bummers”—
shit!
Darnell winced at his slip—“pardon me, I mean our new Ballistics Mapping and Retrieval System, changes that equation because it does most of the work electronically,” he said. “Using an ultraviolet laser, it scans the surface of a bullet and creates a digital map of it. If the bullet is mushroomed or even fragmented, the system uses sophisticated logarithms to enhance whatever markings are discernible. Finally it files that record in an electronic database.”

“Here’s the payoff for Illinois law enforcement,” Darnell said. “We—and all participating Illinois police departments—can access that databank. When the database is completely set up, we’ll be able to compare any bullet to every other bullet in the system in seconds.”

“The database is inclusive statewide? You get a bullet from, say, Peoria; you can tell if the same gun was used in a Chicago shooting?” This from a studious-looking man in a sports jacket. In one hand he carried a Palm Pilot on which he was making notes.

Ah, a techno
buff,
Darnell thought to himself.
One in every crowd.
He made his face light up in an encouraging smile.

“That’s it, exactly,” he said. “For the first time, ballistics comparison becomes a
proactive
crime-solving tool rather than a technique that can only react. We’ve already scanned in recovered bullets from a number of crimes.”

“Really?” the boyish-looking senator asked. “How far back do your records go?”

“Only for the past six months,” Darnell replied, apologetically. “As you can imagine, there are a lot of bullets flying around these days. We’re kind of swamped trying to keep up. But over the next year, we hope to expand the ballistics files dramatically.”

He hesitated, then decided to take a chance.

“Maybe you’d like to see the system work?”

He turned to the attractive Asian woman who had been working at an BMRS console in a corner of the room.

“Cathy, what do you have that we can run right away?”

Cathy Li had been listening to her supervisor’s practiced patter. She had heard it before. In fact, she had contributed to it, adding her comments and criticisms and suggestions—often as she lay beside Darnell in the Near North Side apartment they had shared since the previous Christmas.

She tried not to look surprised at her boyfriend-supervisor’s request. A real-time demo of the system was definitely not part of the standard presentation—and shouldn’t be, she thought,
not until the database was firmed up enough to provide a reasonable chance of a match. So now I get the opportunity to look like a boob
.

Cathy made a mental note to make Darnell pay for that transgression when the two of them were alone.

All right, Bummers—try to make me look good, okay?

She called up the most recent file, a bullet that had arrived at the lab in the morning delivery from the Cook County Sheriff’s office.

“This bullet was fired at a police officer this week,” she said, her hand moving over the trackpad as the digitized image rotated on the screen. “As you can see, BMRS has mapped out all the surface characteristics and generated this screen image. It’s pretty precise as an image, already. But let me assure you, the digitized information is even more exact. That’s the data the computer is working with. It’s accurate enough to be used as evidence in court, though our current practice is to confirm every BMRS match through traditional ballistics-comparison techniques.”

She moved the pointer to a menu line and tapped the pad lightly, twice. “We are now searching through the files to see if this mapping duplicates anything there.” She looked up at the group of visitors. “It’s not very likely we’ll have a match,” she cautioned them. “We still have a relatively small database to work with, and there’s—”

“That was fast,” the young senator said, impressed.

She stopped, blinking in surprise. The image had switched to a split-screen mode that looked much like what you’d see in the old-fashioned comparison microscopes, except this image was much more colorful. On the left was the original green-shaded graphic of the first bullet; on the right, in shades of red and yellow marking the grooves and lands, was an image identical to it.

In capital letters, centered and flashing across both, was a single word.
MATCH
.

“Well, well,” she muttered softly. “I’ll be damned.”

• • •

“I’ll be damned,” I said. “Tell me that again.”

Gil spread his palms in a ‘what can I say?’ gesture.

“The State Crime Lab says that the bullet that killed Erlich in Sonnenberg’s apartment came from the same gun that killed Stanley Levinstein,” he repeated. “There’s no mistake, Davey. After their computers picked up the match this morning, they did a test fire of the gun. A manual comparison confirmed the match. Kolchenk’s gun killed Stanley.”

I sat upright in the chair, thinking furiously. “So that locks it; everything happened just as Sam Lichtman told it. Nederlander is tied to this Russian thug,” I said flatly. “That links him with the Russian Mafiya. Or maybe it was some kind of contract job, with Nederlander—”

“Davey, stop for a minute,” Gil Cieloczki interrupted, and his voice was a mixture of placation and exasperation. “Listen to yourself. This is evidence that points
away
from Bob Nederlander. I’m not saying there isn’t a connection of some kind, somewhere—but dammit, I’m concerned that your first inclination is to assume as indisputable fact that there is a connection.”

I stared at Cieloczki, feeling my anger rise.

“We have Chaz’s statement that Nederlander was tanking the investigation,” I said tightly. “We’ve established his involvement in the car insurance scam—it’s only a matter of time before we find his link to Rebecca Hunt’s murder. We have the receipts for the gasoline he used to torch the Levinstein place. Are you saying Nederlander isn’t our primary suspect?”

“I’m saying that I won’t have this investigation run into a ditch simply because you dislike Nederlander,” Gil said, his own tone matching mine. “Davey, every damn thing doesn’t incriminate him. If you keep acting as if it does, trying to make everything fit a preconceived notion, we are going to miss something important.”

I nodded stiffly, my lips a thin line on a face I struggled to make impassive.

“So how would you like me to proceed…Boss?” I asked.

Gil looked at me for a moment. Then he glanced at his watch; it was almost noon.

“I’m going over to the hospital to see Terry and Mel,” he said. “How do I want you to proceed? I want you to act like a trained investigator. Like a professional.”

I pivoted back to my desk, feeling a pulse pound hot in my ears. I knew Cieloczki was right, a fact that did little to temper my emotions.

I wanted payback on Nederlander, badly; I ached to see Nederlander force-fed the same flavors of hell I had been through. I was livid, but I had seen other investigations derailed by that motivation.

What we needed were facts—incontrovertible evidence that Nederlander had led a badge-wearing band of thieves, grifters and strong-arm thugs deep into a scheme that had spread to include multiple murder.

We needed evidence.

I had a good idea where we might, with luck and a little help from the Feds, find some.