The Skeleton's Knee (26 page)

Sitting in a wooden chair facing me, naked, covered with cuts and cigarette-sized welts, his mouth taped shut to stifle his screams, was Kevin Shilly. There was a neat black hole in his forehead.

The rest of the room and the bathroom were empty. Diaz and Ross stood at the bedroom door, watching me, their arms limp but still holding their guns. Diaz’s eyes were hard on the corpse. Mr. Beautiful, Shilly’s office guard had called him. No longer.

I SHUT MY EYES GRATEFULLY
at the sound of Gail’s cheerful voice, letting it, like the motel bed beneath me, act on my mind like a balm.

“I was hoping you’d call soon. How’re things going?”

“They could be better.”

“Oh-oh.”

I smiled wanly. “That’s one way to put it.”

“Are you all right, Joe?”

“I’m okay.” Having initiated the call, I was now suddenly reluctant—even slightly embarrassed—to turn it into a confessional. “I just got off the phone with Brandt and Klesczewski. Apparently nothing new on our sniper. Ron said they’re looking for other angles, but Brandt’s obviously pretty anxious for me to come home with the goods.”

“I noticed there hasn’t been anything on the news.” There was a small pause. “So tell me what’s really wrong. You sound totally flattened.”

I let out a sigh and told her. “I probably played a direct role in getting a man killed over here—tortured and killed, to be accurate.”

“My God. Who?”

“No one you know, but he was doing fine until I mentioned his name to somebody I was questioning. I’ve never felt like a such a jerk.”

“Who were you questioning?”

“His name is Shattuck—supposedly a retired peace freak turned radical, but now I don’t know… and probably never will.” The last four words were delivered in a flat tone.

Gail picked up on it. “Did the local cops pull the rug out from under you?”

I laughed, although without much pleasure. Leave it to Gail to grasp the political reality immediately. “It’s their case now, and they made it pretty clear they don’t see some woodchuck from Vermont as an asset. In fact, they put me through a four-hour grilling. Pretty hostile session; they don’t make any bones about my having screwed up. One of them’s okay—Norm Runnion—he’s my babysitter. But he’s a few months shy of retirement, and he stuck his neck out by giving me more leash than he should’ve, so now he’s almost as much on the outs as I am.”

“But he’s still your local contact, right? With access to their computers and whatnot?”

I saw where she was headed. “True, except that if the guys running the homicide investigation catch either one of us snooping around their case, there’ll be hell to pay. Besides, why would Runnion risk it? He told me earlier that Chicago averages nine hundred and fifty homicides every year, not to mention a few thousand unsuccessful shootings and stabbings.”

There was silence at the other end: Gail running out of suggestions. “Does that mean you’ll be coming home?”

But suggestions, or at least questions, were finally beginning to stir in my tired brain, despite my own pessimism. “Remember Abraham Fuller?”

“What about him?”

“I’m pretty sure Shattuck knew him. It was the one thing he really focused on during our interview.”

“Who is Shattuck, anyway?”

I explained to her about finding Kevin Shilly, tracing the metal knee through inventory, discovering Shattuck’s name on the hospital records, and what I’d found out about him through the police files. I told in detail of the conversation by candlelight.

“And you’re sure it was Shattuck who killed Shilly?”

I hesitated a moment. “Pretty sure. It was Shattuck who removed him from his apartment building. He used my name at the desk, assuming that would grab Shilly’s attention, and when they finally located the night deskman, his description of ‘Gunther’ fit Shattuck like a glove.”

“But why would Shattuck take Shilly back to his own place to kill him, and even leave the door open? Why kill Shilly at all, for that matter? Shattuck had been so innocuous before this.”

I’d thought a lot about that over the past several hours. “I can’t prove it yet, but I think my telling Shattuck about what we found in Vermont changed everything for him, like I guess it did for whoever machine-gunned us in Brattleboro. We’re looking at all this dispassionately—connecting old bones to old money and trying to make sense of it. But something violent and angry is brewing here, something involving more people than we thought. I think I hit Shattuck’s button without knowing it and set him off like a rocket.

“He used my name because it was efficient and practical to do so; he used his place to torture Shilly for the same reason; and he killed him either out of pent-up frustration or because he feels he has nothing more to lose. Whether it was consciously done or not, leaving that front door open served notice to everyone that he’s come out from under a peaceful-looking twenty-four-year-old rock.

“All of which,” I concluded, “also helps explain the paranoia that made whoever it was shoot at the hearse on I-91.”

Gail played devil’s advocate. “Wasn’t that because the shooter wanted to protect his new life? You said yourself that he did it to stop you from tracing the knee.”

“I know, but setting up a machine gun and firing at the local police seems a little drastic. It would’ve made more sense to liquidate his assets quickly and quietly and then disappear without a trace—just like he’d done once before. Having seen what happened to Shilly, I no longer think the Brattleboro Police Department was this guy’s biggest concern.”

“You think he did it to stop Shattuck from finding out?” Gail said, her voice slightly incredulous.

“Why not? There were three people at the very least who were involved in all this—Fuller, the guy with the knee, and the person who both stole the astrological chart and opened fire on us on the interstate. If I’m right that showing Fuller’s picture was enough to get Shilly killed, then our local shooter has bigger reasons than the police to stay hidden. It’s got to make you think the money alone is not the issue here.”

“Revenge, then? Setting an example?”

“It sounds right, judging from what I’ve seen.” There was a long pause while I mulled that over. Unfortunately, that was about all I could do.

Gail apparently sensed that impasse. “None of which gets you anywhere if they’ve frozen you out of the investigation.”

But I was no longer feeling so hopeless. Our conversation had kindled an enthusiasm that this afternoon’s third degree had almost extinguished. “Maybe not. The investigation is on who killed Shilly—or maybe just on locating Shattuck. But it’s not concerned with putting a name to that goddamn metal knee. I might still be able to do that without getting in their way.”

“Isn’t that a little like sharing a meal with lions?”

“Maybe, but with a routinely high homicide rate, you go for the obvious solutions. Assuming Shattuck did knock off Shilly, and that the local Mounties get their man, that’s where it’ll end, and it still has nothing directly to do with why I came here.”

Gail’s silence was skepticism itself.

“Hey—wish me luck.”

“I wish for you to stay out of prison, or at least alive.”

· · ·

The woman guarding the archives room in the basement of the University of Chicago medical center was less than thrilled to see me, even though I’d made sure to appear just after opening time.

“Again?” was all she said as I smiled and walked by, hoping that Hoolihan’s order to cooperate was still in place.

“You don’t need me to show you where that file is again, do you?” she added, establishing her conscientiousness for the record.

“No, ma’am. All set.”

In fact, it took me quite a while to ferret it out again, the rows of shelves being similar and the files themselves all but identical to one another. I took it to the same table we’d used before and, page by page, photographed its contents with a secondhand camera I’d bought an hour before at a pawnshop.

What I was doing was more a threat to the case than to my liberty; in legal parlance, Hoolihan’s grumpy blessing the first time had amounted to a consent search, and this second visit was, in essence, riding the coattails of the first. Indeed, the archivist, by letting me in, had implied consent. Still, Hoolihan didn’t know about this second visit, nor had he ever agreed to our removing the files, which I was in the process of doing photographically.

But I was running out of time, Brandt was running out of patience back home, and this was the only clue I had in this city that might get me beyond a single metal knee and the dead surgeon who’d implanted it.

Two hours later, after spending a reasonable sum at a While-U-Wait processing lab getting my roll of film developed, and a small fortune having eight-by-ten enlargements made, I was parked once again in Dr. Milton Yancy’s office at Northwestern, hoping he could shoehorn me in between patients.

“Lieutenant,” he said, his expression beaming and his hand outstretched. “Nice to see you again. Is the plot thickening?”

“You could say that. You read the papers today?”

“No. I wait until I get home for that, assuming the rest of the family has left any of it intact.” He made a scissors motion with his two fingers.

“Kevin Shilly was found murdered yesterday.”

Yancy’s face fell. “Oh, my Lord.” He unconsciously groped for a chair and sat down heavily. “Did it have anything to do with what you’re investigating?”

“I think so, yes.”

He shook his head. “How sad. Was he shot?”

“Yes,” I said without elaboration. Given Yancy’s sensitivity, I saw no point in becoming more graphic. I handed him the pile of photographs. “I was wondering if you could look these over and help me decipher them a bit. They’re the patient file on that skeleton I introduced you to the other day.”

He spread them across his examining table, shaking his head. “First the skeletal X-rays, now the patient file. It’s like seeing a life in reverse. You do this a lot, I suppose…”

His voice drifted off as he read, so I saw no need to respond. It was an interesting point, though, and one I’d never thought about. “I was reading this with a colleague earlier,” I said to the back of his head. “He mentioned something about reports from other doctors?”

Yancy’s voice was back to normal, the shock of Shilly’s death having yielded to professional curiosity. “Oh yes.” He pawed through a few of the photos. “Doctors Butterworth and Yamani; vascular surgeon and neurosurgeon, respectively. I met Yamani, actually, a few years ago. I think he’s in California now.”

“Why did Shilly bring them in?”

Yancy straightened suddenly and gave me a large conspiratorial grin. “To cover his ass. Proceeding the way he was, he knew the risks, so he brought in the other two during surgery to back up his opinion and get more names in the file. It’s just the kind of thing that eventually landed him in hot water.”

He turned back to the pages. “Not in this case, though. The wound was straightforward. Butterworth reports no traumatic damage to the major vessels posterior to the knee, and Yamani says roughly the same thing about the tibial, the peroneal, and the saphenous nerves.”

“So only the bone was damaged? Isn’t that a little unlikely?”

Yancy shook his head. “Not particularly. They usually don’t get away scot-free—there is commonly some bruising of the nerves, as there is here—but that takes care of itself. Mr.”—here he referred back to the ER sheet to find the patient’s name—“Shattuck was a lucky man, comparatively speaking.”

“My understanding is that he disappeared five days after the surgery—faked being dependent on the bedpan so nobody would realize he could get around.”

Yancy returned to the file. “Really? I hadn’t gotten to that yet.”

“My question is, Could he have done that without help? I mean, he did just have his entire knee replaced.”

“Oh, he could have done it. The pain would be excruciating—no doubt about that—and he’d have had the stitches to worry about later, but it’s certainly possible.” He waved his hand at the photos. “There’s the proof, after all.”

“True, but that doesn’t say he walked out on his own. He could have been rolled out in a wheelchair by someone else.”

Yancy’s eyes widened. “Oh, I see what you’re saying. Well, he could have left the hospital on his own. There’s a physical write-up on him somewhere in here—they do that to see how fit a patient is for surgery—and he passes that with flying colors: athletic build, no medical problems, good chemistry… Apparently as healthy as a horse, barring the leg, of course.”

“Does it say whether he was right- or left-handed?”

Yancy looked surprised. “No. Why do you ask?”

“The skeleton was a lefty. How about any other personal information?”

He picked up a single sheet of the file, offering it to me doubtfully. “You didn’t see this? The Social Services report?”

I took it from him, remembering how Runnion and I had become sidetracked by the question of a gunshot wound being reported to the police. We’d never gotten this far into the file. I found myself reddening slightly as I looked it over now.

Yancy had the sensitivity to cover my awkwardness. He pointed to midway down the sheet. “It’s not complete—barely filled out, actually—but it has a couple of things you might find handy. These forms are usually done when more time is allowed before surgery; in fact, if I interpret this correctly, Social Services started the process without Shilly’s okay. See where it says ‘incomplete per phys’? Shilly obviously shut them down when he found they’d started the form; that’s his signature underneath the notation.”

“Why not just throw it out?”

“Turf. Social Services obviously didn’t want to catch flak later for failing to do their job, so they forced him to take responsibility. I can almost smell the animosity when I read something like this.”

“That’s not unusual?”

“Oh yes—the Social Services report is standard and useful, and it can sometimes be quite extensive. Depending on the physician, they’ll go so far as getting the names of pets and favorite pastimes, favorite vacation spots, all sorts of things.”

“What’s the point?” I asked, ruing Shilly’s interruption.