Dirty Fire (15 page)

“I appreciate you coming up here again,” I said, braking to avoid an elderly man with a walker who haltingly inched across the street at my bumper. “But I feel bad that you’re taking your lunch hour to do it.”

“Nah,” said Phil Sozcka, and I could see the color rise on his cheeks again. “I don’t mind.”

He looked out the window of my LeMans at the noontime throng on Devon Avenue. Without turning his head, and trying to make it sound as casual as possible, he added, “I was thinking, maybe…you know Officer Posson pretty good, right?”

I glanced over at the Chicago policeman. A blush was spreading up the back of his neck, and I could not fight down the urge to tease him, just a bit.

“Oh, yeah; good cop, and a great dancer to boot. Too bad she couldn’t come along this time.”

Sozcka made a noise that might have been assent, and was silent for the next few blocks.

“Heard the man walked,” Sozcka said, and the commiseration in his voice was only partly professional. “I’d have been glad to come up and go on the stand, you know.”

I shrugged. “Would have been a waste of time anyway,” I said. “All we really had was him hitting the woman, and she declined to press. And because he was out the window before we entered and announced, the judge tossed the flight charge. All we had left was a material witness warrant that was shaky in the first place, and Sonnenberg could have had a lot cheaper lawyer get that vacated.”

“If it was all that loose, how come you busted the guy?”

“If he hadn’t forced our hand by taking off, we probably wouldn’t have,” I admitted. “As it was, we were lucky. At least the judge didn’t charge us with false arrest.”

“Way you knocked Sonnenberg on his butt,” Soczka said, and the wistful tone of his voice made me regret having teased him about Terry Posson, “the judge might’ve been afraid to try.”

• • •

The door Sozcka had kicked open the previous day was closed, and an unpainted strip of hardwood trim had been inexpertly attached as reinforcement near the lockset. Scocka studied it briefly with a critical eye.

“Not locked— looks like it’s propped shut from the inside,” Sozcka said, “Lady needs a new door as well as a new boyfriend.”

Once again, he automatically stepped to the side, out of the direct line of fire and nodded to me to do the same. He raised his large fist and knocked, hard. The door rattled, loose in its frame.

He listened for a response; there was none.

“I should have called first, made sure she was here,” I said. “Saved us both the trip.”

“Nah, you did the right thing,” Sozcka shrugged. “Usually it’s better to catch ‘em cold, when you want to talk and they—”

He stopped at the sound of footsteps climbing the stairway.

In a moment, a thinfaced man, the gray of his mustache matching that of the hair that fringed his balding pate, stepped onto the landing.

The man looked at us without apparent surprise.

“You have now come to arrest the other one?” he said, his words clear despite the pronounced accent. His hand fished in his side pocket and emerged with a keyring. “Good. Perhaps
this
night I will sleep.”

Soczka looked at him through narrowed eyelids.

“Learned to speak English,” the policeman asked, “since yesterday?”

The man smiled, though there was nothing of humor in it.

“You spoke in Russian. I spoke in Russian.” He unlocked the door across from Katya Butenkova’s apartment, and held it open slightly. “She is shameless whore,” the man said. “You remove her man, yes—so all night then, she has party. New man she can fuck and fight with.”

I frowned.

“Is she home?” I asked.

“
O doma,
he’s saying,” Soczka said, still looking at the man with unblinking eyes. “
Da
or
nyet
?”

“Until long after midnight, she plays her loud music and throws things at her guest. Perhaps she is home. Whores sleep late, do they not?” With a single movement, he stepped inside and closed his door behind him.

Sozcka and I looked at each other. Then I leaned down and pressed my ear against Katya’s battered door.

“No music now,” I said, my eyes closed in concentration. “No sound at—”

My nose wrinkled, and I twisted my head to squint up at Scozka.

“How’s your sense of smell, Phil?”

Sozcka arched his eyebrows. “Okay, I guess. Why?”

I sniffed again before straightening.

“Take a whiff. I smell something in there. Like a gas leak, maybe. You smell it too?”

Dutifully, he bent close to the doorjamb.

“Not really.”

“Try again.” I looked at him, significantly. “You smoke, don’t you? Sometimes that affects the sense of smell.”

“There could be something, I guess.”

“Enough to give us reasonable cause to check it out, you think?”

This time, there was hardly a beat before his reply.

“Absolutely. It’s a question of public safety.”

• • •

Inside, whatever sense of reckless conspiracy that had fueled our action ended abruptly. The apartment was silent in a way that raised the hairs along the back of my neck, and I thought of the weapon I had not brought.

I fought down the sudden heart-pumping rush that accompanies any form of trespass; irrationally, I found that my next impulse was to go to the range and crack open a burner valve for a few seconds.

Instead, I raised my voice and said loudly, “This is the police, Ms. Butenkova. We’re inside now. Are you all right?”

“I guess we were wrong about the gas leak,” Soczka said, in a voice so low it was almost inaudible. “Honest mistake, just doing our job.”

His posture was tense, and his hand rested on the butt of his service revolver.

The room looked much as it had the day before, with two notable exceptions.

The window Sonny Sonenberg had broken through was covered with a piece of plywood wedged roughly into the wooden frame. Sunlight streamed in parallel beams through two fingerholes the size of quarters someone had bored through the panel. The broken crockery had been swept up; parts of the floor were cleaner than the surrounding hardwood, indicating where the blood from Katya’s split lip had been carelessly mopped.

Also on the floor near the doorway was a kitchen clock radio, its short cord plugged into the closest outlet.

“Funny place to put that,” Soczka said, echoing my thoughts.

I walked around the apartment, taking in the dirty utensils in the kitchenette’s sink and the undisturbed layer of dust on the top of the rust-spotted refrigerator. I was, I noticed, being careful to touch nothing, and wondered if it was for hygienic or evidentiary reasons.

“Katya’s not much for housecleaning,” I said and with my foot gingerly opened the door to what I assumed was the bathroom. It too was a mess, with towels carelessly tossed on a floor that had seen far better days.

But I did not notice because something else had now caught my full and undivided attention. I sensed Soczka come up behind me, and heard his sharp intake of breath.

“We need backup, Phil,” I said, and heard the hiss of static as he pressed the button on his shoulder microphone.

It was an old-fashioned bathroom, the kind that still had a claw-footed bathtub dominating the ancient tile of the floor. It had been converted, inexpertly, to include a shower; the black-iron shepherd’s crook of pipe was affixed solidly to the wall alongside. An oversized showerhead, like a lime-stained metallic sunflower, centered over the wide porcelain tub.

From it hung the nude remains of Katya Butenkova, her torn and mottled flesh a curious mix of rust streaks against a hideously blanched pearl-gray. At intervals that appeared oddly regular in placement, I could see the clean white of exposed bone. Katya’s head was thrust back, and her hair hung in damp black tendrils, spiky and tangled. What may once have been a yellow foam sponge bulged from her mouth and lips.

Katya’s hands were fastened high, wrists bound to the fixture with what looked like industrial-strength filament shipping tape; her knees were half bent and her torso hung in a shockingly stiff posture. It appeared, in the eerie calm of my initial shock, like some obscene supplication.

It was a ghastly scene.

But worst of all, I decided, were Katya’s eyes: open wide and fixed forever on something both distant but nonetheless horrifying.

• • •

“The Chicago medical examiner doesn’t want to do much guessing over the phone,” Terry Posson’s voice was unnaturally tight; I was willing to attribute it to the quality of the speakerphone in Gil’s office, though I knew better. “But, unofficially, he’s willing to say it looks like she died sometime after midnight and before five this morning.”

“That fits,” I said. “A neighbor says Katya was ‘partying’ until well after twelve.”

“She was tortured?” Gil asked, unnecessarily, and I for a long moment I fought back the impulse to react with sarcasm, even black humor.

“Yeah, she was tortured,” I repeated, instead. “The killer had music on, loud, to cover the noise of the struggle. He took Katya into the bathroom and taped her wrists to the shower pipe. Then he used a damn kitchen sponge to gag her; she could talk when he wanted her to but not loud enough for the neighbors to hear.”

I took a deep breath. “He slashed the hell out of her, Gil, all over her body. But not like he was in a frenzy; it was definitely methodical, organized. This guy knew what he was doing. After she was dead, he knew to run the shower—to wash away whatever random evidence he might have left. Then he went out the window and pulled the plywood back into place. Probably took a fond look around before he went down the fire ladder.”

Cieloczki was silent for a moment.

“There’s no sign of Paul Sonnenberg?”

“Nothing. Even being generous with the time, he was still in lockup when all this went down,” I said. “There’s no indication he came back here after leaving Lake Tower.”

We were silent for a moment, weighing how little we knew. Terry spoke first.

“Okay—this guy wanted information from Katya,” she said. “My guess is he wanted to know where Sonnenberg was.”

“If she knew anything,” I said, “she told him.”

“What do you want to do next?” Gil asked.

“I’m on my way out to Joliet,” I said. “My source knows Sonnenberg and his habits. Maybe he can help us find Sonnenberg before somebody else does.”

There was a curious silence on the line; I had no doubt all of us were once again picturing a horrific image that had been seared into our individual minds.

“Well, for Christ’s sake drive fast,” Terry said, finally. “Our guy has a couple of hours’ head start. And we already have three dead people in this case.”

“Mel Bird just called in, too,” Gil said. “He thinks he’s found number four.”

There was a cat. It had jumped up and walked across Mel Bird’s lap, raising its tail and sniffing delicately at the notebook he held. Then it had looked at him with its unblinking predator’s eyes.

Sizing me up like I was a goddam canary,
Bird told me later, and I could still hear the near-shudder in his voice.

Mel Bird did not like cats. Even if he had not been allergic, he told me, he would not have liked cats. He also had strong opinions about people who did, particularly people who lived in a house with a nice-sized yard and could easily have had a dog instead. Or any kind of pet that neither clawed, nor hissed, nor made a man break out in hives.

But here, facing him like an anaphylactic nightmare, was undeniably a cat.

“Pepper likes you,” the woman said, smiling indulgently at the beast perched on Bird’s thigh.

He could feel his eyes beginning to itch, and knew in a minute he would have to sneeze. Instead of drawing his gun and shooting the animal, Bird smiled back at its owner, covertly twitching his leg in an attempt to dislodge the feline.

In retaliation, Pepper steadied him- or her- self—Bird’s expertise did not include the gender characteristics of housecats—by flexing his or her toes. Bird felt the needle-like tips of Pepper’s claws through his trousers and took it as a warning.

“Nice cat,” Bird observed, as a man who appeared to be in his early fifties entered from the kitchen. He was carrying a china cup filled with an opaque fluid that smelled somewhat like coffee. Carefully, almost fussily, he placed it on a cork coaster at the lamp table next to Bird.

“It’s
Taster’s Choice
,” the man said, a nervous smile on his face. “We don’t drink much coffee, I’m afraid. We prefer tea.”

“It’s fine, thanks.” Bird reached for the cup, using the opportunity to push an elbow against Pepper, hard. The cat hit the floor and stared daggers at Bird for a moment. Then, as Bird pretended to sip at the cup, the cat leaped weightlessly onto the table and then to the living room windowsill. It sat, looking out the picture window intently, motionless but for the twitching tip of its tail. Bird put his cup down and leaned forward in his chair.

“Mr. Hunt, Mrs. Hunt—I appreciate you talking with me,” Bird said. “I know it must be hard—”

Claire Hunt interrupted. “Becca has been…gone…for two months now.” She reached over and took her husband’s hand and squeezed it momentarily in a way Bird thought must have been painful to him. “We want to do whatever we can to help you arrest whoever did this, Detective.”

“I’m plainclothes, not a detective,” Bird said. “Can you tell me a little about her, please? Was she social? I mean, did she have a lot of friends, go out a lot?”

“She was very popular,” Mrs. Hunt said firmly. “She was always going out with girls she knew from school, to football games or movies and such. People liked Becca—loved her, you know. She was so pretty and bright. How could they not?”

“Can you give me the names of a few of them?” Bird asked. “I might need to talk with them, maybe about her job and—”

“Well,” Mrs. Hunt frowned, “I don’t know how much her friends would know about her job.”

The husband spoke up. “Our daughter moved away from home right after she graduated from high school,” Albert Hunt told the policeman. “She lived in the city, in Lincoln Park. I don’t think she saw many of her friends from here very often, any more.”

Bird wrote in his notebook. “How about friends in the city, then?”

Hunt looked embarrassed. “She had two roommates when she first moved to the city, I know. They shared rent and expenses. We never met them, I’m afraid. Then she got a big promotion, a big raise, and moved into her own apartment, alone. We never really met any of her city friends.”

“She was very busy,” Mrs. Hunt interjected, her voice insistent as she overrode her spouse. “Especially after her promotion, her job kept her busy all the time. She had a
lot
of responsibilities to deal with there.”

Bird nodded. Before he had left the TransNational offices to drive here, a far southwest suburb of mainly middle- and lower-middle-income tract homes, he had reviewed Rebecca Hunt’s personnel file carefully. There had been no major promotions, and a look at the salary for a TransNational coding clerk had failed to impress even a man accustomed to the civil service pay grade for a plainclothes policeman.

“Did she call you a lot?” he asked.

“I would call her,” Mrs. Hunt corrected. “At her work, usually. Becca was very busy with her job, and that meant that she couldn’t visit us as often as she would have liked to. She was very ambitious, you know. She would be working nights, weekends—all this, as well as going to…that place…before dawn.” Claire Hunt’s eyes closed for a moment. “I used to call her apartment first and leave a message—but after a while, it was easier simply to call her at work when I knew she would be there.”

Bird almost sighed in frustration.

“Was there anything she mentioned about her coworkers you found unusual? Anything about her work that struck you as out of the ordinary?”

“She handled insurance claims on cars that were damaged or stolen or destroyed,” Mrs. Hunt said. There was an undertone of irritation in her voice, as if she was dealing with an incompetent waiter. “She dealt with people whose roofs had been blown off in a storm or caught fire or had their basements flooded. There wouldn’t be much to say about that, would there? We just talked, mother to daughter, like we always had.”

“I don’t know if this is important,” Albert Hunt said, and Bird thought there were more than a few people who might have thought the half-apologetic tone in his voice rang less than true. “About two years ago, I had a minor accident—not much more than a fender bender, really. It was my fault, I’m sorry to say, so I put in a claim with my insurance company and everything was settled. It was so minor that I didn’t even think to mention it to Claire. She gets upset over things like that, you see.”

Bird glanced at Mrs. Hunt. She was looking at her husband as if he was a distasteful task scheduled but not yet completed. Then Bird nodded to the man—partly to encourage him to continue and partly in sympathy.

“Well, Claire happened to call Becca one Saturday at her office,” he said. “And my daughter sort of…made fun of the fact that I had had an accident. She told her mother that she was working on the claim right then. Joked that she was going to make it a really big settlement for the other driver.”

Hunt shook his head. “Oh, Claire was very upset that I hadn’t told her about it. I guess Becca teased her about that, too. Quite a bit, didn’t she, Claire?”

Bird, reading between the lines, was beginning to develop a new image of Rebecca Hunt, devoted daughter and hard-working employee.

Rebecca Hunt,
he thought,
is beginning to sound like a
mean
little package
.

He tried to make light of it.

“Guess that’s what happens when you insure your car where a relative works, huh?” Bird said with a wry smile.

“That was the oddest part, you see,” Albert Hunt said. “We don’t insure our car through TransNational. Apparently, the other driver put in a claim to them for the accident, too. That’s how Becca knew about it.”

He glanced over at his wife and said in a guileless voice, “I didn’t know one could present a claim for an accident that another insurance company already paid.”

And then Hunt looked directly at Bird.

Deep inside, Bird thought he saw a flash of something that should not have been in the eyes of a grieving father. It might have been a measure of satisfaction, or even glee at a payback for some carefully stored litany of slights, humiliations and other casually inflicted injuries, the nature of which Bird could only imagine.

On the ledge of the picture window, Pepper was lost in the intensity that places felines among the most relentless of predators. A few inches away, on the other side of a barrier that could be seen through but not penetrated, something was fluttering amid the foliage, as enticing as it was maddening. It was a finch, and Bird could see it hopping from branch to branch in the hedge.

Pepper was motionless in a way that, for a reason he did not quite understand, raised a chill on Bird’s neck. He watched as prey and predator each eyed the other from different sides of an invisible barrier that negated the usual rules of the game.

Bird knew how both felt. His sympathies were normally with the hunter, but he was beginning to understand how the prey felt, too.

• • •

“I still don’t get the insurance angle,” Posson said, her voice a cautious near-whisper over the cellular telephone connection. “Why would anybody go to so much trouble to fake the coverage?”

“What if Levinstein insisted?” Bird pressed. “He probably did. But insuring the artwork would have documented its existence and placed it in Levinstein’s possession. So somebody couldn’t let that happen.”

“And Levinstein’s other insurance coverage was through TransNational,” Posson said. “That could work. It let the killer bring in Rebecca Hunt. She made sure nothing got into TransNational’s databank, and she issued the phony confirmation letter.”

“Might be a stroke of luck for us,” Bird said. “The bad guy didn’t just pull Hunt’s name out of a hat. Whoever it was, I’d bet our little Rebecca had worked with them before, on other insurance scams.” He paused. “So where do we go with this now?”

Terry Posson thought for a moment, then made one of the worst decisions of her life.

“Nothing else I
can
do,” she said. “I’ve got to fill Nederlander in on this.”