Michael Harvey - The Chicago Way

“Take your gun,” I said. “Leave the badge. We’ll go in through the back door. Shouldn’t take me more than thirty seconds. Once inside, we make sure the house is empty. Work each room together, back to front.”

I gave Rodriguez a final look.

“Crossing a line here, Detective.”

“I know.”

“I can do this alone,” I said.

“Let’s go.”

We moved along the side of the house and up to the back door. It was made of cheap wood with an even cheaper lock. Twenty seconds later we were in. Light filtered in from the street and cast shadows on a small and spotless kitchen. Rodriguez led the way, gun drawn, barrel up. The living room was also empty, no television, no couch. Just a single leather recliner in the middle of the room, facing the front windows, and a wooden chair beside it. I moved up to Rodriguez’s ear.

“Not big on furnishings, is he?”

The detective shrugged and pointed to a short hallway leading off the living room. Three doors fed off the hallway. Two were open, the rooms beyond were dark. The third door was closed, a thin strip of light showing from underneath. We stacked on either side of the door. I went through first, gun up, breathing evenly, moving left and scanning to my right. Rodriguez was behind me, moving right, providing an overlapping field of fire.

Daniel Pollard was sitting up in a bed, shirt off, eyes open, two bullet holes in his chest. To his left was a night table. On it was an unfinished line of coke, a package of condoms, a bottle of whiskey, and some glasses. I could taste a whiff of cigarette smoke. Otherwise, the room looked empty. Rodriguez felt for a pulse.

“Dead.”

I nodded.

“Let’s check the rest of the house.”

Outside the bedroom, the flat hardly seemed lived in. I wondered what Pollard did with all the garbage he collected. I also wondered what we might find under the house. We returned to the bedroom. There was a basketball in one of the closets, and I thought about Jennifer Cole. Rodriguez sat down on the bed and looked at the corpse.

“Goddamn,” he said.

The detective wanted answers, had looked forward to them. I pulled out a DNA kit and swabbed blood off a leaking bullet hole.

“Run this. Tell you some of what you need to know.”

Rodriguez stuffed the sample into a jacket pocket.

“What do you think happened?” he said.

I looked down at the nightstand.

“Looks like he had one party too many.”

“Tried to take another girl,” Rodriguez said.

“Maybe. She surprised him.”

“That’s for sure. I have to call this in.”

“How are you going to explain finding him?” I said.

“Will be a lot easier if you’re not with me. Take a few minutes to look around. Then you have to split.”

“Okay. But do me a favor. Tell your guys to keep it off the scanner. No press until tomorrow.”

“Diane?” Rodriguez said.

“I promised her an exclusive.”

“Fair enough.”

Rodriguez returned to the body. I took a look at the nightstand. The bottle was half-full, the shot glasses beside it still wet with whiskey. There were six cigarettes in the ashtray. Two of them were Lucky Strikes. The other four had filters, two with smudges of lipstick. I looked over at Rodriguez. He had pulled out a small camera and was beginning to snap photos. I slipped one of the smudged butts into a plastic bag and then into my pocket.

“I’m going to take another look in the living room,” I said.

“Sure.”

I walked down the hall, sat in the recliner, and looked out over Warner Street. A row of houses made of cheap red brick. Identically poor. Identically depressing.

I kicked the recliner back and let my hand trail to the ground. A piece of carpet, the “588-2300 Empire” stuff, crumbled underneath my fingers. I got to my hands and knees and flicked on a small flashlight. It was a burn mark, probably from a cigar. I used my vast experience with burn marks to figure this out. That and the fact that the brown butt was still there, less than a foot away. I scooped it up and into another plastic bag. Put it in my pocket beside the cigarette butt and figured it was well past time to get out of Dodge. I had committed at least five or six felonies that evening, only half of which Rodriguez actually knew about.

“Okay, Detective. I’m gone.”

“Hold on a second.”

Rodriguez came out of the bedroom. He had a shoe box in his hand.

“What is it?”

“Letters. Up on a closet shelf. Just sitting there.”

The letters were stacked neatly. Identical in appearance. I took a look at the top envelope. The preprinted return address read “Lockbox 711, Menard, Illinois.”

“Grime,” I said.

Rodriguez nodded.

“Advice on how to pick victims. When and where. How to tie the best knots. What to do with bodies. Shit, here is a primer on DNA from 1998. Grime tells Pollard to start using condoms.”

“How do you think he got the letters out?” I said.

“How did he get his semen out? Who the fuck knows? But this is gonna be a major-league shitstorm.”

“Better run Pollard’s DNA. Quick.”

“First thing tomorrow.”

“Know what else?”

“Huh?”

“I’d take a look under this house if I were you.”

Rodriguez dropped his eyes to the floor, then back at me.

“Yeah.”

“Call me tomorrow.”

“Yeah.”

I slipped out the back door and down the street. I walked three blocks and hailed a cab. The first cruiser flew up behind us a couple of blocks later. My cabbie pulled to the side and grumbled.

“Fucking cops. Always in a hurry for nothing.”

I grunted in assent, closed my eyes, and let the world fall away, if only until I got home.

Walk along Chicago’s lakefront, past the North Avenue Bridge and then across a couple of baseball fields. In a hollow just south of the Lincoln Park Zoo you will find a small lagoon, a walking path, and a shade of trees. I got there at a little after three in the afternoon, staked out a comfortable bench, and pulled out Elaine’s street file one more time. I had scrawled Pollard’s name across the top. Below it were five more names. All of them dead. John Gibbons was first; followed by a second cop, Tony Salvucci; the ER nurse Carol Gleason; an EMT named Joe Jeffries; and Gibbons’ immediate boss, Dave Belmont. I was running through it a couple more times when my cell phone buzzed. It was Masters.

“You know the file you sent over to me?”

“Hello to you, Sergeant.”

“Yeah. You know that file?”

I circled Carol Gleason’s name.

“The one from Phoenix?”

“Yeah, Gleason. Is that going to cause me problems?”

“You tell me.”

“I ran the tests you wanted.”

“Against the Gibbons shooting?”

“And Salvucci.”

“Right.”

“The ballistics are a match,” Masters said. “Same gun, nine millimeter, that killed Gibbons was used on Salvucci two years earlier and the Phoenix woman two years before that.”

“There’s one more you’re going to need to run.”

“Already did it. Same nine was used on the EMT, Joe Jeffries, in 2000."

“In San Francisco?”

“Yeah. What else you got in that old file?”

“Just Dave Belmont,” I said. “He died of a heart attack.”

“I might check the autopsy on that one,” Masters said. “So, tell me you know the whereabouts of our gun?”

“I think I do.”

“And would it be attached to the hand of our shooter?”

“I might need a little time on that.”

Silence. Then Masters’ voice came back over the line.

“Let me ask you this. You think there might be anyone else in danger here?”