Penance: A Chicago Thriller (9 page)

 

CHAPTER 14 – CHICAGO

 

1971

 

Declan Lynch pulled up the alley behind the house on Neenah and parked the Impala next to the garage. He was working on the upstairs bathroom with his boy and had all kinds of crap in the garage. His wife Julie was kneeling down, facing the house, working at the strip of flowers she always kept along the wall. Her butt sticking out at him in a pair of tight plaid Bermudas.

“Damn, yard looks better already, long as you stay bent over like that.”

She sat back on her haunches, flicked her dark hair out of her face, and turned to look at him over her shoulder.

“You are just a fiend, Declan Lynch.”

“Trust me on this one, doll, I’m way down on the fiend scale.”

She got up and walked across the small yard, meeting him at the gate, quick hug and peck.

“So, big shot, how’s life down at City Hall?”

Lynch blew out a long breath. “Baby, month from now I’m either gonna be commissioner or I’m looking at life on traffic duty.”

She gave him a quick squeeze, just letting him know how things stood with her. Felt good.

“You should get upstairs and see the kids. They’ve got a surprise for you.”

“That good or bad?”

She smiled. “I haven’t checked yet.”

 

Lynch walked past Missy, their old black lab, sleeping against the fence next to the dog house he and Johnny had built a couple years back, went in the side door and up the stairs. House was the typical quasi-bungalow that filled up the whole northwest side. Upstairs had one big unfinished room when he bought the place, with two bedrooms, kitchen, one bath, and a parlor down. Last summer, he’d roughed in the plumbing to put another bath upstairs, Johnny working right there with him. Kid had a real talent for it, picking up stuff just watching. Through the winter, he and Johnny had roughed in the walls, turned the rest of the upstairs space into the new master bedroom, put the shower and toilet and sink in. All that was left was getting the tile down on the bathroom floor and painting.

As Lynch went up the stairs, he could hear Johnny talking to his sister.

“That’s it, Collie. Just run that rag along there and get that extra grout up before it dries on the tiles. You’re doing great.”

He heard Colleen giggle. “It’s cold.”

At the top of the stairs, Lynch could see the boxes from the tile place, couple of corner pieces Johnny had snipped off sitting in an empty box.

“Fe, fie, fo, fum,” Lynch rumbled, turning the corner toward the bath. “I better not find things screwed up by no bums.”

“Daddy!” Colleen squealed, running out of the bathroom. She was only seven. Johnny walked out behind her, wiping his hands on a shop towel. Smile on his face told Lynch all he needed to know – kid had done things right.

“Hey, Dad.”

“How’s it going, buddy?”

“Got the floor in. Collie’s just helping me finish up. Gotta seal the grout tomorrow.”

“Let’s have a look.”

Lynch stuck his head in the door. Floor looked perfect. Couple more cut-up tiles outside the door than there should have been for a floor this size. Figured the kid measured wrong, or they cracked on him. But that’s why you got extras, and that’s how you learned.

“Damn. Looks real nice.”

“Didn’t we do a good job, Daddy?” asked Colleen.

Lynch scooped her up. “You did a great job, Collie. Your brother teach you how?”

Great big smile spread across her little round face. “Yep.”

“Is he a good teacher?”

Suddenly, she looked serious. “Daddy, he is the best brother in the whole world.”

Lynch reached out and tousled John’s hair. “Guess I’m a lucky man.” He buried his face in Colleen’s neck and blew a loud raspberry. She squealed again, Johnny smiled, and Lynch heard his wife coming in the back door.

“If the construction crew will come downstairs, I’ve got a great big bunch of weeds I’ve pulled out ready for dinner.”

Colleen laughing. “Mom, we can’t eat weeds!”

His wife shouting up the stairs, “Well, I might have something else for the picky eaters.”

Johnny smiling at him like he got it, like he understood how much it meant to be part of all this. Lynch thinking so what if he got traffic duty for life.

 

Later, Lynch was in the kitchen grabbing a beer from the fridge when his wife called him from the living room where she was watching the news.

“Honey, you better get out here. You’re going to want to see this.”

Lynch walked into the living room just in time to see Simba or whatever his name was standing on the street in front of several of his followers almost screaming into a row of microphones, looking a little washed out in the lights for the cameras.

“White fear-mongers tryin’ to incite hatred, say it’s the Black man you have to fear. It’s the Black man gonna break into your house, gonna kill you in your sleep, gonna rape your women. When Fred Hampton tried to say the Black man don’t have to live in fear, don’t have to live in shame, it wasn’t no Black man came for him. It was the white cops come and shot him in his bed. The white pigs come and murdered him and then walked away smiling while the white judges and white DA all say, ‘Yah suh, dat’s fine. You go on and shoot down that black dog.’ And now I hear dey coming for me, saying I killed the mayor’s pet boy, pretty boy walking around talkin’ how only the fine white man can save us poor Black folk. You pigs all come on. But don’t expect me to be lyin’ asleep in my bed. You want war, we be warriors.” He thrust his fist into the air, holding it there, and the line of black men behind him did the same. “By any means necessary.”
All of them shouting in unison. Then he turned and walked back through the middle of the pack.

 

CHAPTER 15 – CHICAGO

 

Present Day

 

When John Lynch got to the Olfson plant, the mobile lab was pulled up near the east end. Meat wagon from the ME’s office after that, couple more units from technical services. Somebody’d set up a generator near the door, buzzing along like a power mower, couple of lines running inside. Lynch saw one of the lab guys coming out the door. Skinny guy with glasses and hair that was always falling in his face. Lynch trying to think of his name, then it coming to him. Novak. Kind of a grump. Lot of the guys called him No Sack because he’d lost a nut to testicular cancer a couple years back.

“Novak, how’s it going?” Lynch asked.

“You sure can pick em, Lynch. There’s like a billion square feet in this place.”

“Room work out? This the place?”

“Looks like. We got fresh gunshot residue on the inside of the window. Not much else. No prints that we can find, at least not upstairs. McCord call you about the stiffs?”

“Yeah. What’s that about?”

“The gangbangers you were looking for, ones that hung out here? Found four of them in the basement.”

“I’m assuming dead?”

Little smile from Novak. “Why don’t you go on down and have a look. Hate to spoil it for you.”

“OK. Hey, where’re we at with ballistics from yesterday?”

“You know, Lynch, I was going to check on that this morning, but then I got a call about how I had to get out here and toss an entire abandoned factory. Then it turns out we got a multiple in the basement, and, with the factory being the likely shooting location and being better than half a mile from the DOA yesterday, that gives me a crime scene about the size of Rhode Island. Ballistics is working on it. You want to call in, be my guest.”

 

One of the lines from the generator ran up the stairs. The other snaked down the hall and into a doorway on the left. Lynch followed the second line down the basement stairs. The tech guys had shop lights set up every twenty feet. Long hallway, doors leading out, all on the right side. What was left of some old furnaces, couple of rooms with machinery in them. Where the building turned in was a large room. Somebody’d set up some furniture down here. Green plastic chairs, a beat up old table with a big ass boombox on it. Three of the chairs were knocked over. Couple of ice chests under the table. Popeye’s wrappers and quart Beck’s bottles everywhere. Lynch saw three of the numbered yellow plastic tents the crime scene guys liked to set out to mark stuff. One was just to his left, inside the door. He could see a piece of brass on the floor next to it. Lots of gang graffiti. At the far end of the room was a dark area that ran back under the wall. Just outside that, four body bags were lined up on the floor. Lynch had seen plenty of the ME’s bags, these looked different. McCord was crouched near the end of the last bag on the right, had the zipper open. He looked up.

“Hey, Lynch. Welcome to Pee-wee’s playhouse.”

Lynch nodded. “You guys get new bags?”

“Nope. Perp must have bagged them for us. These look military. Bagged the bodies and shoved them back up under the wall here. Figure it’s that Keep Chicago Clean shit Hurley’s always pushing. Even your criminal element’s getting with the program.”

“Got a perp with his own body bags?”

McCord just shrugged.

“See we got some brass. They shot?”

“Haven’t unbagged them yet, figured you’d want to see everything in situ. But we’ve got no blood on the floor, no splatter on the walls. You want to help me unwrap them?”

Lynch pulled on a pair of latex gloves and helped McCord slide the bags out from under the stiffs. Four black males. As McCord and Lynch worked the last one out, his head lolled around like it was attached to the body with a piece of string. Two 9mm Smiths clanked in the bottom of the bag under the body.

“So these the gangbangers you were looking for?” asked McCord.

“They got the right tattoos, they’re wearing the right colors, looks like my boys. Guess they won’t be answering any questions. How long you think they’ve been down here?”

“They’re limp, so rigor’s come and gone. Bags kept the bugs out, so we didn’t get any help there, but based on some of the discoloration, a couple days anyway. Your guy must have run into them while he was casing the joint and decided he didn’t want their company.”

While McCord looked over the bodies, Lynch slipped a pen through the trigger guard of one of the pistols and sniffed the barrel. Fired recently. Tried the other. That one, too. He checked one of the pieces of brass on the floor. 9mm.

“Sure nobody got shot? Somebody got off a few rounds in here. Cement walls, had to be like a fucking pinball game.”

“No gun or knife wounds on these guys. Number four, clearly a broken neck. Way broken, completely dislocated. Number two here? Got some blood from the nose but not much. You’ve heard of that shoving a guy’s nose into his brain shit? Think somebody may have done it. This nose is way out of whack, and that should have bled like hell. Unless, of course, you die and somebody lays you on your back. Bet I find a mess of blood in his sinuses. Number three here, he almost looks like a strangulation. You got your cyanosis and such, but no ligature marks on the neck. Do got what looks like blunt trauma to the throat, though. Somebody may have crushed his trachea for him. Number one here? Not a clue. I don’t see a thing.”

“Somebody threw some shots down here.”

“We’ll test these guys for residue. Maybe they were shooting while your guy was busting them up.”

“Some guy walks in here, takes on these four – and they all look like they’ve been in a few scrapes – snaps the one guy’s neck, shoves the other guy’s nose up his head, crushes a trachea, and, what, scares this last guy to death, and they’re shooting at him, and he walks out?”

“I keep telling you, Lynch, I just do the science.”

“You wanna switch jobs?”

“That mean I get to date that reporter chick you took home last night?”

“That on CNN or something?”

“Or something.”

“No. I keep the reporter chick.”

“Fuck it, then.”

Lynch stripped off the gloves and shoved them in his pocket. “OK, I’m outta here. I’ll tell Novak to go ahead and process the room. Once you get anything solid on our friends here, let me know.”

 

CHAPTER 16 – RESTON, VIRGINIA

 

“Fisher’s first mistake,” said Chen, handing Weaver a manila file.

“He doesn’t make them,” said Weaver.

“The Post Office’s mistake, actually,” said Chen.

“OK. What have you got?”

“We found a bill for a post office box rental from a UPS store in Fredericksburg at Fisher’s house.”

Weaver shook his head. “That’s a plant. Fisher wouldn’t leave anything he didn’t want us to find. And he stopped his mail service before he took off.”

“This item was delivered to the wrong address. One of Fisher’s neighbors found it in their box and dropped it in his slot after Fisher stopped his mail service.”

“You check the envelope?”

“Prints and DNA. Fisher never touched it.”

“OK. So what did we get?”

“We checked the box in Fredericksburg. Fisher closed it the day he left town, but it has not been re-rented. One piece of mail was left in the box. Based on the postmark, we believe it was delivered the day Fisher closed the box. A promotional mailing from American Express to Thomas McBride. This is not an identity Fisher pulled together in recent weeks to support his current activities. He has been building McBride for years. It is his failsafe.”

Weaver flipped through the file. McBride owned a townhouse in Reston. He had an account with Citibank. He’d filed tax returns for the past eleven years. He had the Amex card and a Visa. Virginia drivers license and a US passport, both with Fisher’s picture on them. Some activity on the Visa after Fisher’s disappearance but prior to the Wisconsin shooting. Nothing recent on the Amex. But Fisher had made electronic payments to keep the accounts alive.

“He hasn’t been using these since the shootings started. He has to be using something.”

“Paravola theorizes that Fisher has established some one-offs, accessing the cash lines for some, using the others for one or two days, then switching. We are researching that now.”

“But if he feels us getting close, he’ll switch to McBride.”

“Yes, sir.”