The Shoulders of Giants (6 page)

“Yes, we were working on Saturday, finishing up some details on an international deal, and after the whole thing was done we went to a bar near here to unwind. Some of the guys like a drink or two, myself included, I’m afraid. But not Richard, he’s a teetotaler. Always has been. Anyway, he left about five to go home to Marie. That was the last anyone saw of him. You can talk to any of the others, they’ll tell you the same thing.”

I didn’t bother to ask anyone else, as I was sure they would give me the same story. Connors had worked so hard to convince me of West’s fidelity, that he had succeeded in making me think that maybe West had met someone in the bar. Maybe they thought it was best to spare Marie West’s feelings after the death of her saintly husband. Maybe they were right. I certainly wasn’t about to go visit her and say ‘Hey, any idea whether Rich was screwing around?’ Somehow it didn’t seem the sensitive thing to do. I did ask Connors to tell me which bar they had gone to. At first he was reluctant, but I guess he couldn’t think of a plausible reason not to tell me. It was an upscale place just around the corner called Circle. Before I checked it out I had another stop to make.

Scott shook my hand when I arrived at the station to complete my statement. We didn’t usually greet each other by shaking hands, normally a nod and a grunt sufficed, but he was offering me an olive branch. I took it, and sat down to the legal pad I’d been writing on earlier that day.

Once his boss and his partner were both out of earshot, Scott told me that there had been a little progress on the case.

I sat bolt upright. “Really?” I said, “What?”

“Two things. A fingerprint and a hair.”

“That’s good, right?”

“It’s a start. Got to say, I had high hopes for the print, since it’s the only one we found anywhere. Both cars were wiped clean.” Scott was talking low, in conspiratorial tones.

I thought back to the security video.

“That explains why it took him so long to get out,” I guessed. “What do you mean you
had
high hopes?”

“Figured that he was so careful meant he had something to hide. That his prints would be on file. But we ran them and got nothing.”

“Where was the print?”

“Pair of Ray-Bans in the passenger footwell of West’s car. Wife says they weren’t his, and it’s not his print. Figure the guy dropped them and didn’t realize.”

“But they’re not definitely the killer’s, so maybe you’re right about his reasons for wiping. What about the hair?”

“Lab guys found it on the headrest of the Volkswagen the Patterson girl was found in.”

“How much can you tell from a hair?”

“Well, from this one, we can tell that the guy driving the car was African-American.” He nodded, as if this meant I should immediately bow to his obviously superior intellect.

“Have you been able to enhance the security video, to check that? As I remember he had on a hat and gloves so there wasn’t much skin to see.”

“They’re still working on it, but the hair is a dead give-away. Apparently their hair is flatter in cross-section than Caucasian hair. That’s what makes it curl.”

In light of new evidence, I mentally adjusted my profile from ‘white male’ to ‘black male.’

“So even if the print isn’t his, maybe we’ll get a hit from the DNA. At the very least we’ll be able to match the DNA when we find the guy, so we can prove he was in the car.” Scott continued, “Guy must have thought he was being real careful, wiping it down.”

“Any ideas on motive yet?” I asked.

“None. Melissa Adams, the girl we found on the beach, is from Pennsylvania, she’s lived in Chicago less than two months, and she hadn’t pissed anyone off yet, as far as we can tell. Nothing obvious from talking to her family, either. As for Richard West, he’s a fucking Boy Scout. Happy marriage, both kids doing great in school, just got employee of the year at Leitz, and everyone we’ve spoken to about him thinks he should be running for pope. We were kind of hoping you might be able to help us with Susan Patterson, motive-wise, but to be honest, it looks like this is random. Some psycho raging against society.”

“Well, that’s possible, but it makes him much harder to catch.”

“That’s why we look for motives. Gives us something to do until the psycho gives himself up. Can’t wait for the press to get hold of this. They’ll have to come up with a name for him and everything. Do you know how that terrorist Carlos the Jackal got his nickname?” I did, but I let him tell the story. “When the cops raided his place, they found a copy of
Day of the Jackal
. Lucky he wasn’t reading
Silence of the Lambs
. ‘Carlos the Lamb’ doesn’t have quite the same menacing quality to it, does it?”

Scott cleared his throat, and looked down at the work on his desk. Sgt. Al Freedman passed me, and sat down opposite Scott.

“Good afternoon, Jake.”

“Good afternoon, Sgt. Freedman.” I said, respectfully. He didn’t say ‘You can call me Al’.

The phone on Scott’s desk rang. All three of us looked at it, then at each other. It could have been anything. It could have been a lab report, the security video, an anonymous tip, the newspapers, or Scott’s mother calling to check he was eating properly. But it wasn’t. We all knew exactly what it was before Scott picked up the phone. Another victim had been found.

Scott and Freedman moved from their chairs as one, without speaking, and headed for the door. I had finished my statement, and I wanted to go with them, but I still hadn’t seen the sketch artist and I didn’t want to get Scott into trouble, so I stayed quiet.

They paused at the door, and spoke for a minute. Freedman closed his eyes, shook his head, and said something to Scott, before turning to leave. Scott motioned for me to follow.

When we reached the car, Freedman stopped and looked me right in the eye, and said “When we get to the crime scene, you stay back. You do not touch anything, you do not ask people questions, you do not speak to anybody, you do not get in the way, you do not try and look like a cop, and you do not repeat anything you see or hear to the press. I do not want you there. If you do anything to jeopardize this investigation, I will personally take out my gun and shoot you in the head. Is that clear?”

“Crystal. Sir.” But at least I got to go along.

Chapter 9

There are 25 police districts in Chicago, each with uniformed beat officers, rapid response teams, plain clothes and gang tactical officers. They do all the protecting and serving, but they don’t investigate the crimes. Districts are grouped, in fives, into Areas and each one of those has a Detectives Division. Scott worked out of Area 3. This time the body had been found outside the Area 3 boundary, but since Scott had picked up the phone when the first victim was found, anything connected to it was his responsibility.

We drove west on the Eisenhower Expressway, in absolute silence, towards Maywood. After about twenty minutes, we came to a lay-by flanked by two squad cars and the Medical Examiner’s familiar black van.

Scott and Freedman got out of the car and started towards one of the uniforms, to get the full story. I opened the car door, and went to follow them. Freedman shot me a look which told me exactly where I stood. By the car.

From where I was standing, I could see most of what was going on, and hear parts of conversations. The young girl lying by the side of the road was black. That made three out of four, and more evidence to support Scott’s theory. She didn’t look real, more like a mannequin. There was no indication of an actual person within the shell of a body. It was different from seeing Susan in the parking garage – I think because I didn’t know this girl. Sure, I didn’t know Susan, but I’d pried into her life, talked to people she knew, read her diary. The fact that she was dead was just the latest piece of the puzzle. But this one; all I knew about her was the dead part. For some reason I couldn’t stop looking at her. I felt like the people who slow down on the highway to look at an accident. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. Similar in age to Susan. I wondered if that was significant. I wondered if maybe she was a student. Then I heard part of Scott’s conversation with the uniformed officer.

“....hitchhiking. We found this a few feet from the body.” He held up a plastic bag with a revolver in it, which looked like a .38 S&W. I looked for blood on the ground around the body. There wasn’t any.

“Send that down to Ballistics, see if there’s a match with the slug found in Melissa Adams’ face. What about I.D. on this one?” asked Scott.

“European Passport. Name is ... Julie Campbell. Age nineteen. From Great Britain. Probably took a year out to travel, and ended up here.”

The smell wasn’t as bad as Susan’s, so I guessed she hadn’t been dead so long, but it was still there. I was glad Freedman was making me wait by the car. I was feeling distinctly nauseous by the time he spoke to the M.E.

“First impressions? Cyanide.”

“Cyanide?” said Freedman, shaking his head.

“That’s right my friend, most likely potassium cyanide, or one of its derivatives.”

The M.E. was a short, round man, with little hair and a Texan accent. I imagined he was glad to be out of Texas, where everything is reportedly big and plentiful.

“Also, she had in her possession a pack of Tylenol Flu capsules” he continued, “The packaging and some of the remaining capsules appear to have been tampered with.”

“Tampered with?” said Freedman, shaking his head.

Freedman’s entire interview technique appeared to consist of repeating the last words spoken, and shaking his head. I hoped he didn’t go this easy on suspects. I suddenly didn’t feel so bad about not knowing the right questions to ask when I’d been interviewing witnesses. After all, he’d been doing this for thirty years, and this was the best he’d come up with. I decided that perhaps I should watch and learn.

“I’ll do a tox screen, obviously, but at the moment I’d say cyanide. There’s a certain amount of reddening of the skin, and one of the boys said he smelled bitter almonds. Myself, I can’t smell it. Not everyone can, you know. She’s been dead around ten to twelve hours. I’d say she was killed here, or close to here and then dumped. She has a laceration in the shape of a Z on the sole of her left foot, inflicted peri-mortem with a very sharp blade. The cutting was almost certainly done here.”

I realized at this point that it might have been useful if I’d been taking notes. I got out my notebook and pencil, but it was too late. Scott and Freedman had finished their respective interviews, and were walking towards me. I got back in the car.

I had stayed by the car, asked no questions, stayed out of the way. I had an odd feeling that Freedman was grudgingly pleased with me. I was not a loose cannon. I respected authority, and followed orders. I hoped he felt he could trust me not to screw up.

“Tylenol,” he said as we pulled away. “Goddamn Tylenol.”

“What’s wrong with Tylenol?” I asked.

“Where were you in 1982?”

“I was three.”

“Didn’t you read the papers, listen to the news on TV?”

“I was three,” I repeated.

“Well, you know how there’s ways to tell if jars of food have been opened before you buy them?”

“Those little buttons that pop up, yeah. What’s that got to do with this?”

“Before 1982, there was no way to tell. Not with food, not with drinks, and not with medicine. Nobody had ever heard of product tampering. Then seven people in the Chicago area died suddenly after taking Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide. Someone had taken the bottles from a store, replaced the medicine in five or so of the capsules with poison, and put the bottles back on the shelves of different stores. The youngest victim was a seven year old girl.”

“So, is the killer out of prison, or what?” I asked.

“We never found him. Case was never solved. Johnson and Johnson, who make Tylenol, offered a $100,000 reward. There have been a few similar cases over the years since then, but we’ve never been able to tie them in conclusively.”

“Did you work the case?” I asked Freedman.

“Sure. Everybody worked it. It was the biggest thing around.”

“Have any suspects?”

“Not really. There was a guy who tried to cash in on the publicity, but it turned out he couldn’t have done the actual poisoning. He was put away for extortion, served thirteen of a twenty year sentence in a federal pen in Reno. He was released in ’95. We never really had any leads. There seemed to be no motive, the victims were random. Far as we know, the killer never even met the victims.”

“Not like our guy.” said Scott.

When we got back to Belmont and Western, Scott ushered me to the interview room and left me there for a minute or so. When he came back he had a laptop under his arm.

“Right,” he said. “Let’s talk about the guys who attacked you.”

I looked around. “Aren’t we waiting for the sketch artist?” I asked. Scott smiled.

“Don’t use them anymore. Well, there’s a guy in the Cook County Sheriff’s Office who comes in if we’re having trouble. He qualified as a forensic artist a couple years ago. But mostly we just use this.” He opened up the laptop and launched some software called FACES. It looked like an electronic version of those identikit images they use to show on
America’s Most Wanted
in the 80s.

“And this works?” I asked, trying not to seem too skeptical.

“Pretty well, actually. There’s about 4000 different facial features in here and you can change the sizes and positions of everything, so we can get pretty close to what a forensic artist can do. There’s about a hundred of us trained to use it, so it saves a lot of time and money. Now, tell me what happened last night.”

I told Scott everything I could remember about the attack: the guys waiting against the car; my hand being cut; my gun falling as I was punched; the gun to my head; and the warning to stay out of the Patterson case.

“I can’t help noticing you haven’t taken their advice.” Scott said.

“Yeah. I noticed that too,” I said. “Thing is, this is my first case. I figure doing this job I’m probably going to piss some people off, so if I give up when one of them complains then I’m not going to be much good at it.” Scott nodded. He understood.