The Shoulders of Giants (12 page)

“On my way home.” I said.

“Yeah, me too. Listen, you feel like going for a beer? Maybe shoot some pool? I need to relax, take my mind off this case for a few hours.”

“Sure, meet me at my place, about half an hour.”

At my apartment, I changed out of my suit, and put on a white muscle shirt, with a Budweiser logo on it. Not because I have muscles, but because it was clean, and I hadn’t got round to doing any laundry recently. It was getting to the point where I would have to buy some more socks.

I covered my lack of sleeves with a dark blue shirt, which I left unbuttoned, and then I saw my guns on the chair. If I wore the shoulder holster over the shirt, I would need to wear a jacket on top, which would make it harder to play pool, and if I wore it under the shirt, it would be really uncomfortable with the muscle shirt. I thought about changing altogether, but the doorbell rang, and I decided to take the Glock out of its holster, and tuck it into the belt of my jeans, so it sat on my right hip. My shirt hung down and covered it nicely. In truth, I was only allowed to carry the guns when I was ‘at work’, but since my agency was open 24 hours a day, I had a nice get-out clause.

Scott left his car outside my building, and we walked half a mile down Halsted to The Corner Pocket. A rerun of
Friends
was on Channel 9 on the television by the bar. After a short wait for a table, we got down to business. We decided to play nine-ball, because you can fit more games into an hour, and that was how long we had the table. Three games later, I was on my second beer, and Scott was having a cappuccino and a pastrami sandwich. We hadn’t discussed the case at all. Actually, we hadn’t discussed anything at all. But we were both thinking about it.

“Hey man, I thought we came here for beer.” I said, more to break the silence than for any other reason. “You getting old or something?”

Scott tapped his temple. “Got to stay alert. I’m on call. We don’t know when the next body will show.”

“How much sleep have you had recently?”

“I’m fine. I slept an hour or two on Tuesday.” He said, smiling.

“What are you doing here with me? If you’ve got tonight off, you should be resting.”

“I can’t just go home and shut off. This is good for me, I’m relaxing. Trust me. It’s your shot.”

I hit a lovely cannon off the four ball, onto the nine, and the nine dropped in to the middle pocket without touching the jaws. “That’s three - one. Your break.” I said.

“Rack ‘em.”

We played out the hour, neither of us giving the game our full attention, and in the end I won by five games to three.

“Loser buys dinner.” I said. I was trying to make it a tradition, since I usually beat Scott, even when his mind was on the game.

The beer garden was a little cold, so we sat at the bar and watched the goings-on. I had another beer. Scott had switched to club soda.

“I don’t know how you can drink that stuff.” I said. It was a feeble attempt at putting off what we both knew we would end up talking about, and it didn’t work. I’m not even sure he heard me.

“We should be getting the profile from Virginia tomorrow.” Said Scott, absently.

“They finally got around to it, huh?”

“Yeah, I think when you collect six victims, they put a rush on it. And you get a free set of steak knives.”

“What are you expecting from it. Motive?”

“My opinion? There’s still no motive. I don’t even think he’s connected to the victims. Maybe they ‘symbolize’ something from his childhood that he’s angry about. I don’t know. Who the hell knows anything about criminals?”

“Remind me again what it is you do for a living.”

Scott smiled. “What I mean is, you think you know. You think you’ve seen the motives that people have for killing other people. And then something else comes along.”

“Lust, loathing, and lucre.” I said. “J.B. Priestley once wrote that those are the three motives for murder. Lust, loathing and lucre.”

“Yeah well, he didn’t work homicides. He didn’t, did he?” I shook my head. “I didn’t think so. If he did, there would have been a fourth. Loopiness.”

“Loopiness?”

“Yeah, you know, insanity.”

“I know what it means, I’m just not sure it goes. Lust, loathing, lucre and loopiness? It doesn’t sound right. How about lunacy?”

“Okay, good. That sounds better. Lust, loathing, lucre, and lunacy.”

I was on my fifth beer, and this conversation was making complete sense.

“But what I’m saying is,” Scott continued, “Sometimes there’s just no good reason. Sometimes they’re just crazy. Do you know how Jeffrey Dahmer started?”

“No.”

“He was eighteen, he picked up this hitchhiker, liked the look of him, and took him back to his place, on the promise of some dope. The guy smoked his dope, and it seems he wasn’t gay. Dahmer didn’t want him to leave, but he couldn’t think of anything to say to make the guy stay, so he picked up a barbell, and caved his skull in. Then he cut him up and put him in a few garbage bags. After a couple of days, he took him out to the desert and buried him. It was seven years before he killed again. In the end, he killed sixteen people. And it started because he wanted to spend some time with a guy who was going to leave.”

We sat, once again in silence, and thought about what it takes, to make someone capable of killing. Are we all capable, given the right circumstances? Or the wrong ones? Then I remembered what I wanted to ask Scott.

“I went to Calvin Walsh’s factory. Spoke to a man named Pez.”

“Real upbeat kind of guy, isn’t he?”

“Did you go there?” I asked.

“Spoke to him on the phone. Find anything out?”

“Do you know of any gangsters called Vincenzo or Vittore?”

“Boss or soldier?”

“What do you mean?”

“How high up is he?”

“High up enough to have a chauffeur driven town car.”

“Vittore Castelletti. He mixed up in this?”

“Could be,” I said. “Who is he?”

“You know Castelletti’s Restaurant on Taylor Street?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s his, and he owns part of about twenty other legitimate restaurants and nightclubs. Blue wisdom says he also finances ninety percent of the city’s cocaine, but he stays well clear of the business end and nobody’s ever been convinced to testify against him.”

“Is he dangerous?”

“Lot of people are prepared to do time for him. I don’t think it’s because he’s got a good dental plan. What’s his connection?”

“Probably nothing. Calvin Walsh was seen talking to him a couple of months ago.”

“Not exactly a smoking gun, is it?”

My cell phone rang. I closed off one ear with my finger and put the phone to the other. It was Lucy, with the list of incoming phonecalls to Susan’s apartment and calls to and from her cell phone. I had to cradle the phone between my ear and shoulder so I could write down the short list of numbers. Then Lucy volunteered a piece of information I hadn’t thought to ask for. The last known location of the cell phone.

‘”That’s interesting,” I said, as I pocketed my phone.

“What is?” asked Scott, taking the bait.

“At 10.16am on Saturday, Susan Patterson’s cell phone was on the corner of 154th and State.”

“154th? That’s down in Calumet City. That’s way outside our search area. I’ll have to check if any of our suspects have connections down there. This from the phone company?”

“Via a contact of mine,” I confirmed. “That’s the last location they have. Does that mean someone made a call?”

“Just means it was switched on. They track you the whole time so they know where to send your calls.”

“But they just know what cell you’re in, right? And those transmitters must cover a huge area.”

“Yeah, about 10 square miles each,” said Scott. “But in a city you’re always in range of at least three, and by comparing the signal strengths they can narrow it down to a few hundred meters. Even less if you’ve got GPS.”

“GPS in a phone?”

“Yeah. Since 2005 pretty much all new phones have GPS. It’s the law.”

“How come?”

“911. Nearly half of all 911 calls are made by cell. The dispatcher needs to know where to send a car. Do you know if Susan’s phone had GPS?”

I confessed I did not. The news came on the television at the end of the bar, and my attention drifted towards it. The lead story was from the University of Illinois. The local news crew had somehow arrived on the scene before the police. I could see the reporter polishing her Pulitzer Prize in her mind’s eye. Apparently, the body of a girl had been found, strangled, next to the bizarrely shaped Art and Architecture Building. Details were still coming in (obviously the reporter herself couldn’t do any actual work, for fear of breaking an expensive nail) but the information so far was that the girl had been strangled with a piece of electrical cable, and her face had been cut several times. She also had one shoe missing, and some cuts on her foot...

I twisted round in my seat. Scott was out of the door. I threw a bill on the bar, and followed him.

Chapter 19

Scott and I made the half mile run back to my apartment in three or four minutes. I was breathing hard when I got in to the passenger seat of his car. Scott was hardly breathing at all. I felt the five beers as a dullness in my head, and I wished I’d had the presence of mind to follow his example, and abstain.

As we sped down Halsted, Scott took out his cell phone and phoned Freedman, who was apparently also on his way. When we arrived, there were already two squad cars at the scene, and one patrolman was putting up the crime scene tape, while three others were herding reporters and possible witnesses away from the immediate area. Next to arrive was the crime scene division, which consisted of two guys in coveralls who put latex gloves on as soon as they got out of their car. One was heavy set, with sandy hair and a moustache that covered the entire lower half of his face. His companion was tall and thin, and his coveralls didn’t cover his wrists, but stopped halfway down his forearms, where they nearly met the beginnings of latex gloves. These two were followed closely by Freedman and finally, the M.E., Dr Odin. I stayed out of the way, and paid attention.

The body was partially hidden in some bushes by the path. She was a young, blonde, white girl. She was dressed in sports clothes, as if she had been jogging, and she was lying on her back, spread-eagled on a small area of grass by the Art and Architecture building. Her face and neck were covered in blood, and cut several times, and there was some blood on her sweatshirt. The ground around the body was churned up and a little muddy.

Everyone went about their specific allocated tasks, without interfering with each other, and the whole effect was like a well-choreographed ballet. First of all, the crime scene investigators started photographing everything. The body, from every conceivable angle, the area around the body, and then, using right-angled rulers to show scale, the shoe prints in the mud around the scene. Then the tall one marked out the areas where they would be taking casts of shoe prints, allowing the M.E. to move in and examine the body, avoiding the marked areas. At this point, he was the only other person allowed within the tape. The evidence had already been hugely contaminated by the reporters, as I gathered from some choice words the heavy set crime scene guy muttered under his moustache, and now they were doing their best to salvage what they could.

Finally, while Moustache took some measurements and made a rough sketch of the scene, his friend began to prepare the shoe prints for making casts. He sprayed the surface of the mud with some kind of fixative, and then mixed up some plaster in a bucket, and put a portable wooden frame around each of the prints. He then poured the plaster carefully into the prints, using his stirring stick to break the flow, and added some twigs from the surrounding area to reinforce the plaster. While he left the plaster to dry, he took a sample of the soil from the scene, and put it in a paper evidence envelope.

In the meantime, Dr Odin was examining the victim. The first thing he did was look at his watch, and make some notes. He was probably pronouncing her officially dead. Next he felt the movement in her jaw, to check for rigor. He bagged her hands, to protect any material under the nails in case she had managed to scratch her killer, or pull some hair out. He examined the cuts on her face and neck, and on her feet, making more notes as he went.

He then took the temperature of the air, and the core temperature of her body. To do this, he made a small puncture in her abdomen, and inserted the thermometer. The reason for the puncture, I discovered later from Scott, was that an oral thermometer would have been useless - mouth temperature after death gives no indication of core body temperature. A rectal thermometer would be more accurate, but in a case like this, the use of one could damage potentially valuable evidence, and confuse the investigation.

When he was finished, a pair of emergency medical technicians lifted her into a body bag, and loaded her into the van.

Scott and Sgt Freedman, during this time, had been interviewing possible witnesses and reprimanding reporters. Both were furiously taking notes. They finished up almost simultaneously, and came towards where I was standing to talk to Odin.

“I’d say the cause of death on this pretty young thing,” said Odin, “was asphyxiation, due to ligature strangulation. Electrical cable we found round the neck looks like the murder weapon, there are contusions on the back of the neck where the killer pushed against it for leverage. Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if the thyroid cartilage is fractured.”

“What about the cuts to the face?” asked Freedman.

“Well, there’s a lot of them. At first count, it looks like seventeen or eighteen, most likely made with a slashing motion from left to right.” He demonstrated the motion, and he looked like he was trying to swat a fly.

“Were they part of the attack, or after?”

“I don’t see any defense wounds, so I’d say they were post mortem, and likely made with the same knife as the incision on the foot, which is the same as the others. The wounds are consistent with a scalpel or a craft knife, something like that.”