All the Dead Fathers (7 page)

Sexually he was way ahead of her—who wasn't?—but he was patient and considerate, and with him life wasn't just about drinking and having sex. It was about tenderness, and humor, and interesting, fun things to do …
plus
drinking and having sex. He cared about her as a person, too. She ran out of money and he got her a job in the real estate office, and advanced the security deposit and a month's rent on a tiny condo one of his clients owned as a rental unit. Only later did she realize that she should have talked to the receptionist who was let go to make room for her.

When she got pregnant she was surprised, and terrified. Worst of all, he was enraged. It frightened her to listen to him. He said she'd lied to him about her precautions. But she hadn't. It was just … well … they hadn't always been thinking clearly. He was beside himself, like a person she didn't even know. Didn't she realize that he couldn't afford to be saddled with a baby? He said there was only one choice for her. He'd pay for an abortion and he'd talk to his dad about letting her keep the job … until she got on her feet.

She cried for two days straight and then called home, but they had their own crises to deal with. Her mother was severely depressed and angry at Kirsten and at the world. Her dad, a Chicago cop, had just shot and killed a woman and was entering into a terrible struggle that would eventually make him leave the department. So she told them things were going great with her, and she'd be coming home for a visit any time now.

She stopped drinking, but still she was sick all the time. She missed a lot of work and they had to get someone “more reliable.” She went through two horrible months of pregnancy while she made up her mind, and then she had the abortion. This was followed by some complications that she didn't quite understand, but which kept her too tired and sick to look for another job. After the abortion she never saw the guy again and didn't want to.

She couldn't pay her rent and, finally, after one more long, sleepless night on a sofa in the apartment of some people she barely knew, shaking and cramping up and terrified, she called the only person she could think of—her priest uncle, a man who had once had a drinking problem, and had beaten it.

Michael flew down the very same day, got her to a doctor, paid for a decent hotel room for her. She cried nonstop and eventually told him everything. He listened, and kept telling her that her life was going to work out just fine, and that we all do things we wish we hadn't. At the time, she had no idea just how well he knew that. She
did
know how much he disapproved of what she'd done, especially the abortion, but he never said she was stupid, or selfish, or sinful. He never asked her to go to church, or even to pray. He said God loved her, and she should just try to hold onto that idea, and that would be enough for now. Eventually he took her back to Chicago and never told her parents or anyone else what she had done—or even that he'd gone down there and brought her home.

All her family knew was that she came back. She had a really nice tan, her friends said, and seemed a little more … well … grown up or something.

11.

As she drove away from Villa St. George Kirsten dug out her cell phone and called the Winnebago County Sheriff's Office in Rockford. “Sergeant Daniel Wardell, please.”

While she waited she realized Dugan was right. If she was only providing security, there was no real necessity to talk to the cops investigating the murders. But she was in it now, and she couldn't help wanting to know more about the killings … and the killer. It might help her protect Michael. Besides, Wardell probably wasn't in, and if he was, he probably wouldn't—

“Wardell here.”

She introduced herself and he seemed willing to talk to her. She said she thought maybe the state police would have taken over the case by now.

“No way,” he said. “Those guys would drag a body across the road to get it
out
of their jurisdiction. This one's mine.”

She was fifty miles away, but the body count was growing and she didn't want to waste time. So she pressed him and he said he'd meet her at ten o'clock, at a Dunkin Donuts near the sheriff's office.

*   *   *

At five after ten, Kirsten walked into Dunkin Donuts just as two cops in uniform were leaving. A slope-shouldered, heavyset man in a rumpled gray suit sat in one of the place's two booths, nursing a cup of coffee. She was sure the lone patron was Wardell, but neither of them acknowledged the other. She ordered coffee and corn muffins at the counter, feeling his eyes on her the whole time, and then took the cup and the bag with her to the booth. He didn't stand as she slid onto the seat across from him, just nodded and lifted his hand in a sort of vague salute. He was fiftyish, with intelligent eyes and a confident, world-weary demeanor. She'd worked with lots of cops, and she could pick out the good ones. Wardell was one of them. She showed him her ID and thanked him for seeing her.

He said he promised Larry Candle he'd talk to her if she asked, because he appreciated what Larry had done for him. “Twenty years ago,” he said, “I was a Cicero cop and my career was in the toilet. He saved me.”

She shook her head. “I haven't heard that many favorable stories about Larry. What happened?” She asked because Wardell seemed to want to tell her about it, and it was a way to get the conversation started.

“I'll make it the short version,” he said. “It's three
A.M
. one night and I'm solo and I pull over this drunk who's driving half on the sidewalk. The guy's belligerent and tries to pop me one. He missed, but I was young and stupid and I totally lost it. Beat the shit outta the mope. Turned out later he was mob-connected, but I didn't know that. So I rough up my uniform and rub dirt on my face and call for backup, and we take him to the E.R. to get him patched up first, and then to the station and charge him with resisting arrest and battery of a police officer. The usual. The next day, though, he's got witnesses. Two guys, also low-level Outfit, saying they were in a car behind me. Total bullshit, but they claimed they saw it all. I was going down for sure, but one of my buddies was a cousin or something of Larry Candle. The guy was mostly an ambulance chaser but he had got my buddy out of a jam. So I went to see him. I'd have swore he stepped out of a cartoon, but he got the job done for me, too.”

“Really,” Kirsten said. “Larry doesn't strike me as having … I don't know … a keen legal mind.”

“Yeah, well, he fucking saved
my
ass, pardon the expression. The mayor of Cicero at the time—not the woman who went to jail—but one of the ones before her, he was supposedly mobbed up, too. And Larry claimed he knew somebody who knew the mayor. All I know is, pretty soon the police brutality charge got dropped, the charges against the mope got dropped, and everyone was happy. Except that Larry … ah …
suggested
I better leave the Cicero department. So here I am. Best move I ever made.”

“Damn,” Kirsten said, “just when I think I have Larry Candle figured out—like he's an obnoxious, little loudmouth shyster—I discover some new something he's done that I hadn't—”

“Uh-huh.” He looked at his watch. “I don't have a lotta time, y'know?”

He told her that after Larry Candle's call he'd checked her out through some contacts he had … Chicago cops. He didn't say what responses he got, but they must have been at least halfway favorable, because he agreed to share “a few of the facts” with her “off the record,” things not given to the media about the killing of Thomas Kanowski on I-90.

She had the clear impression that as they spoke he was trying to make up his mind how far he could trust her.

He said his supervisors were stressing the lack of similarity between his case and the murder of the ex-priest Stanley Immel in Minnesota. “Still,” he said, “some people—including
you,
or you wouldn't be here talking to me—think the two killings are connected, and that they're just the beginning.” He paused. “Some people also think the priests on that list are animals and deserve whatever they fucking get.” He leaned toward her, staring. “Guess you don't feel that way, huh?”

“My feelings, and yours,” she said, “aren't on the table.” She leaned forward then, too, and kept her eyes fixed on his. “Some cops—including
you,
or you wouldn't be here talking to me—do their jobs the best they can, Sergeant Wardell, regardless of their feelings.”

She waited, and finally he nodded, just slightly. “The name's Danny,” he said, and leaned back in his seat.

She did, too.

12.

“The Minnesota killing,” Kirsten said, “Stanley Immel. That was a stabbing, right?”

“Don't have all the written reports yet,” Danny Wardell answered, “but ‘carving' sounds more like it. Victim stripped naked and tied to a kitchen chair, then sliced repeatedly with a large knife. Skin hanging off in strips. Bled to death.” He paused. “Oh, the guy had a small dog, some kind of mutt. Dog got it, too, but not the same treatment. Just laid out on the kitchen table and smothered under a sofa cushion. The thing is, although it beats the shit outta me how they can tell, they say the dog was done before the
man.
”

“God,” Kirsten said, “he made the victim watch his dog die first.” She put down the corn muffin she'd been buttering and took a deep breath. “But anyway, Kanowski's murder was brutal, too. So that's a similarity.”

“Murder's
always
brutal, but these two were very different. Kanowski died of a bullet through the brain. Entering at the back of the neck, angling up and exiting out the top of his forehead.” He demonstrated with his hands. “Except by that time he had no forehead, because it was blown away. No slug found. Weapon probably an automatic, maybe nine millimeter, possibly silenced. I say that because he was probably shot not far from where he parked his car at the rest stop, and even if there were no other cars there at that time of night, it would have been risky to fire a gun. The trail isn't entirely clear, but it seems the body was dragged about thirty yards to an area not visible from the parking area, then laid out on its back and cut up with some kind of knife.”

“The mutilation was post mortem?” she asked.

“Doc says no question.”

“Was there any … you know … pattern to the cutting?”

“Pattern?” Wardell shook his head. “Whoever it was opened the victim's jacket and shirt to expose his skin, pulled his pants and underwear down to his knees, and went to work. Throat, chest, stomach, lower abdomen, down to and including his genitals. No pattern. Not the sort of careful strips it sounds like there were in Minnesota. Just a mess of blood and organ tissue all over.”

“With the victim already dead,” she said, “so he couldn't suffer any more, anyway. And maybe the killer's in a hurry because it's a public place and just slashes away, maybe to make a statement, and then takes off.”

“Maybe, but they're not the same.”

“Even so,” Kirsten said, “there's the stripping of both victims, and an expression of a certain … hostility, toward both.”

Wardell shrugged. “I'd say so.”

“If the killer was waiting at the rest stop he must have known Kanowski would stop. Maybe they were meeting there.”

“Maybe,” Wardell said. “Or maybe the killer followed him there from somewhere. Or maybe they were two ships bumping in the night.”

“He lived near Rockford, right? With … what, an aunt?” The sergeant lifted his cup and nodded, and Kirsten went on. “He was on the southbound side of the interstate, just inside Illinois and coming out of Wisconsin. So, possibly on his way home. Any idea where he'd been?”

“You know I can't share the fucking fruits of my investigation.” Wardell sipped at his coffee. “But it's no secret Kanowski worked maintenance at a factory in Rockford, or that he clocked out at midnight the night he was killed.”

“So he wasn't coming home from a fishing trip.”

“The body was found about five, and time of death was two to four hours prior.” Wardell stared at her. “If you go north on I-90, there's a crummy late-night bar called Bunko's and two twenty-four-hour adult book stores along the road. About twenty miles. On the Wisconsin side.”

“And if I had a picture and I went to these establishments and showed it around?”

“You might get nowhere,” Wardell said. “Or you might get lucky and find out he was at all three places that night. But no sign of anyone paying any attention to him. Like … stalking him or something.” Wardell crumpled a napkin into a ball and stuffed it in his empty cup. “I'm about out of sharing mode.”

“Okay.” She paused. “But … Emmett Regan? Not yours, but you heard about it?”

Wardell's eyes widened a bit, as though surprised she already knew of the murder of the third man from the
Sun-Times
list. “Heard about it, yeah. Body found in his apartment early today. That's all I know so far.”

“Anything else I should know? I mean, before you're
fully
out of ‘sharing mode'?”

“Just this,” he said. “Another similarity between Minnesota and here—and Chicago, too, so far—is there's not one fucking sliver of evidence tending to lead anywhere. This bad guy is—or all of them
are
—either very lucky or very smart.”

“It's one guy,” she said.

Wardell checked his watch. “My wife's gonna be pissed as hell, and I believe I've repaid whatever I owed Larry Candle … and then some.” He put his palms flat down on the table, hefted himself to his feet, and looked down at her. “You come highly recommended,” he said, “and not just by Larry Candle.”