The Third Rail (16 page)

"Lucky, I guess."

"You still meeting Hubert today?"

"Supposed to. Why?"

"I'd like you to run the contents of this letter by him. See what he comes up with."

"You sure?"

"Yes. And get me everything else he's got. Including the stuff on your old crash."

"You buying into that?"

"I'm buying into you being two steps ahead of the field. If the edge lies with Hubert, I'd like to use it, rather than apologize later for ignoring it."

"Fair enough," I said.

"Good. Now, what are your feelings on today?"

"You still have a relationship with the archdiocese?"

"I can handle them, if that's what you're asking."

"That's what I'm asking. Talk to the cardinal. Talk to the mayor. Use whatever pull you have to get into the churches and shut them down until you figure out if the threat is real. And ..."

"And what?"

"And hope whatever this thing is, it hasn't already started."

H
ubert Russell lived in a studio on Division, just west of Damen. The neighborhood was jumping, with new restaurants and bars that actually smelled good. Most of that goodness, however, had yet to float up and into the hotbox apartments, crammed into ancient brownstones perched up and down the block.

"Nice place you got here," I said and put my foot down on a cockroach the size of a small sofa. The beast squirted out from under and looked up to see if that was my best shot. I put my heel into it until I heard a crack, then a snap. Score one for the good guys.

"It's a dump, Mr. Kelly. But it's all I can afford right now." I settled on the edge of a kitchen chair. Hubert sat at his desk. A wooden fan hung from the ceiling. Between the two of us there was hardly room to take a breath.

"You read the letter I sent over?" I said.

Hubert nodded. "I might have something for you."

I pulled a little closer. Hubert had a monitor hooked up to his laptop. Beside the monitor was a bottle of pills. Pain medicine for the kid's face. I watched as Hubert began to open up documents.

"After you called, I started pulling emergency room admissions across the city. Then I ran that data through a program that sorts the information and looks for certain patterns. Actually there are twenty-seven different filters in this program--"

I cut in. "Hubert, we might have some shit going on here."

"Yeah, yeah. What did I find, right? Okay, in the past twelve hours there have been sixteen people admitted to ERs in the city, complaining of scorched red skin, blisters, and"--Hubert checked his computer--"weeping sores. Conditions range from serious but stable to critical."

"So what?"

"So this program also matches symptoms to the signatures of different types of potential threats. These patients, all of them, seem to fit the pattern of an emerging chemical weapons attack. Specifically, a mustard-based agent."

"Mustard gas?"

"Some version of that, yes. Then I expanded the parameters to twenty-four hours' worth of ER admissions. Picked up four more cases."

I stared at the data on the screen. "How sure are you about this?"

"I've had your letter less than an hour, Mr. Kelly."

"So you're guessing?"

"It's a little more than that."

"Print me out the patient list," I said.

Hubert hit a key, and a printer somewhere began to hum.

"What do you think?" Hubert said.

"What do I think? I think we might be fucked."

I picked up my cell and punched in Rodriguez's number. Hubert, however, wasn't done.

"I got a little more, Mr. Kelly."

I disconnected. "Go ahead."

"I pulled background on the twenty victims. Started with the hospital admittance forms and dug from there. Focused on any religious affiliations."

More lines of meaningless text and numbers flashed up on the screen. Hubert highlighted a line of data. "Eighteen of the twenty identified themselves as Catholic. Half of them are registered in Holy Name's parish."

A tingle ran down the back of my neck. "Where are the rest registered?"

Hubert waved a hand around the room. "All over. Still, it's interesting."

"The ones that aren't registered at Holy Name--where do they work?"

Hubert hit a few keys, and the information reshaped itself on his screen. "Eight of them work in the Loop or River North area. Here you go."

Hubert flashed up a map with Holy Name Cathedral at its center and small flags for each person's workplace. The longest distance was eight blocks.

"They could have walked there from work," I said, "which means seventeen of twenty have a possible connection to the cathedral."

Hubert nodded. "Looks like it."

I picked up my cell again and punched in the detective's number. Rodriguez picked up on the first ring.

"Yeah."

"It's me. What's going on?"

"Lawson and the mayor have been on the phone with the cardinal. Archdiocese wants us to sit on it until we have something solid."

"Not too worried about their parishioners, I take it?"

"It's called damage control, Kelly."

"Yeah, well, I got something that might get things moving."

"What's that?"

"Hubert's gonna send you some data. Shows a pattern of hospital admissions over the past day or so. Bottom line is, we have twenty cases of what might be mustard agent exposure. Seventeen with connections to Holy Name Cathedral."

"What sort of connections?"

"The sort that makes me think you got a hot spot, Detective."

"Holy Name, huh?"

"It fits, Vince. Remember the letter referred to the cardinals' hats? Holy Name has the hats of Chicago's dead cardinals hanging from the ceiling."

There was silence, then a sigh. "Fuck me. Send over the data, and I'll get a team down there. Hold on." Rodriguez paused, then came back on the line. "Lawson wants everything the kid's got sent to her computer. And she means everything, Kelly."

Hubert tapped me on the shoulder and flipped his monitor around so I could see the screen of text he had pulled up. I nodded and continued talking to the detective.

"Not a problem. Just one more favor to ask." Then I told him what I needed.

"Why don't we let the feds handle that?" Rodriguez said.

"Because I'm concerned the feds will roll over and play dead."

"And you're going to go in there and bust balls."

"I'm going to go in there and explain the situation. Then I'm going to get the information I need."

Rodriguez didn't like it, but finally agreed to make the call. "Just don't piss this guy off."

"Why would I do that?"

"Yeah, right. Head down that way and I'll call you back."

I hung up. The text Hubert had accessed still glowed on his screen. It was a newspaper article. Page 3 from yesterday's
Trib
. The headline read:
CHICAGO ARCHDIOCESE SETTLES SEX CASES FOR $12.3 MILLION
.

Hubert watched as I read, then offered up one word. "Motive."

"Maybe." I slipped my cell back in my pocket and picked up my coat. "I gotta go. Send everything you have to Lawson's computer. Include whatever you found on the old train crash. Then just hang tight." I looked around the flat. "You okay here?"

Hubert nodded. "I'm good."

"You're a little better than good, Hubert. You sniffed out what might be a chemical weapons attack against the city and gave us our best lead on this guy."

"Guess that was pretty cool, huh?"

"Bet your ass. Keep it up. We're getting close to something. I'll call you in a couple of hours."

And then I left the kid, alone in his apartment, tapping away at a mountain of information, fishing for a shark in little more than a rowboat.

I
t's called the House of 19 Chimneys. I thought about trying to count them, but didn't want to besmirch the romance of the place with anything as ordinary as fact. Instead, I got out of my car and walked a complicated path to the cardinal's doorstep on North State Parkway.

It had taken a couple of hours, but Rodriguez finally angled me the invite--not entirely surprising given the church's desperate need to put a lid on whatever was brewing inside their whitewashed walls. I was about to lift a heavy brass knocker when my cell phone buzzed. I stepped back to the sidewalk. It was Rodriguez again.

"You in yet?"

"On the precipice."

"We just ran some field tests at Holy Name."

"That was quick."

"Our guys kept things quiet and went in as a cleaning crew. Got a preliminary positive for some sort of mustard agent. Fucker spiked the holy water."

I wasn't surprised, but still felt a chill. Strange days, indeed.

"Does the archdiocese know?" I said.

"Not yet. Lawson's got the cisterns sealed off and wants to run some more tests first, so keep it to yourself."

"Fine."

"You really think our guy's an abuse victim?"

I looked up at the residence, swore I saw a curtain twitch, and, for just a moment, was back on the South Side. "I think it's worth a conversation."

"Guess it can't hurt."

"What about the press?" I said.

"What about them? They don't know a thing about the letter or Holy Name."

"What about Alvarez?"

"She'll be our mouthpiece. We get the story out the way we want, when we want. And she gets her exclusive."

"So you got that handled?"

"You worry about the cardinal, Kelly. Let me worry about Alvarez. Call me when you get done."

"Okay."

"And, Kelly ..."

"What?"

"Don't be an asshole."

I cut the line and walked back up the cardinal's path. This time I picked up the brass knocker just as the door swung open. On the other side was a nun, dressed entirely in white and looking at me like she knew better. Behind her were three more nuns, hands tucked into their starched sleeves, faces cast in perpetual shade. The nun at the front door stepped aside without a word, and I walked in. The head of Chicago's two million Catholics swept around a corner with a smile and a handshake.

"Mr. Kelly."

Even at seventy-three years old, Giovanni Cardinal Gianni was still a bit of a rock star. On his seventieth birthday,
Newsweek
had dubbed the sturdy dark Italian "America's Own Pope." I wasn't sure how well that went over in Rome, but Gianni was here, smiling and, best I could tell, still in one piece. He ushered me into what I guessed to be a study and gestured to an armchair wrapped in velvet. "Please, sit down."

Like most Chicagoans, I'd driven by the cardinal's residence and wondered what the elegant pile of red brick and sandstone might look like inside. It was about what I'd thought. Floors of polished wood interrupted by hallways of polished marble. Large rooms cluttered with furniture no one used and pictures of saints no one knew. Bunches of flowers, bloodred and bone white, lurking in distant corners and sucking all the air out of the place. To my left and right, walls of books. Most of them, I was betting, Bibles.

"Can I get you some coffee, Mr. Kelly?"

"Thanks, Your Eminence. That would be nice."

Gianni raised a finger without turning his head. Somewhere behind him I heard some movement. A nun, I guessed, in search of a cup of joe. "We've already served lunch. But if you're hungry, I'm sure the sisters would be happy ..."

"No thanks," I said. Gianni nodded and waited, one leg crossed over the other, dark face loose and relaxed, entirely empty of any sort of clue.

"I suppose you're wondering why I'm here?" I said.

Gianni spread his hands, palms up. "I spent most of the morning on the phone with the mayor and the FBI. They ask me to spend my afternoon with you, who am I to refuse?"

The cardinal's stick-on smile mirrored my own. He got up and walked to a picture window that looked out over a half acre's worth of bare trees and front lawn.

"So much for keeping things under wraps," the cardinal said. I followed his gaze out the window. A TV truck had just pulled up in front of the mansion. A camera crew scrambled out and began to shoot pictures. So much, also, for Rita Alvarez's exclusive.

"You know this town, Your Eminence. There's very little that remains secret for very long."

"We're not asking anyone to keep secrets, Mr. Kelly. Just a little discretion."

Gianni had been a rugby player in his day. I could see the game in the heft of his shoulders and the small, rough scars around his eyes when he scowled.

"So what happens next?" the cardinal said.

"We're checking out Holy Name, as we speak. Depending on what we find there, we'll develop a plan to sweep the rest of your churches."

"You know how many parishes there are in the archdiocese?"

I shook my head.

"Three hundred fifty-nine. You're going to check them all?"

"I don't know, Father. But we'll try to keep disruption to a minimum."

Gianni's laughter stopped just short of derision. "We're not a business, Mr. Kelly. People look at their church as a sanctuary. A place where they feel safe."

"Yeah."

The cardinal circled away from the window. "Not a fan of the church?" His Eminence could smell the lapsed Catholic in me clear across the room.

"All due respect, Father, how safe were the parishioners at Holy Name this week? How safe would they have been next week if we'd kept a lid on this thing?"

A moving statue of a nun emerged from the mists, carrying a silver service of coffee and momentarily saving me from eternal damnation. Gianni sat back down and poured us each a cup. The nun disappeared from whence she came.

"What is it I can help you with, Mr. Kelly?"

I took a deep breath and dug into it. "We'd like some information. About some of the sexual abuse claims from the past."

Gianni ran a thumb across his lower lip. "Go ahead."

"It's a natural line of inquiry, Your Eminence. Someone takes their revenge on the church for a wrong that was done to them as a child."

The cardinal looked past my shoulder, at his church's version of original sin, a history for which there was no simple act of atonement. No easy way to erase the stain.