Текст книги "Penance"
Автор книги: Dan O'Shea
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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 21 страниц)
CHAPTER 13 – CHICAGO
1971
Five men were in the conference room at City Hall when Declan Lynch arrived shortly after 9.30am.
“Sorry I’m late,” said Lynch. “Just got word to come down when I got to the station.”
“No problem, Lynch,” said Riley. “Thanks for coming.”
Riley had his coat off, over the back of his chair, and his cuffs turned up over his wrists. Two almost identical guys in black suits sat across the table with a tape deck sitting in front of them. Crew cuts, that tight-ass look Feds usually had. Bob Riordan, head of Hurley’s Red Squad – an informal police team charged with tracking peaceniks, Reds, the Weatherman, Black Panthers and, Lynch figured, probably Republicans – sat at the near end of the table. At the far end sat a compact man, perhaps five feet nine inches, in a tan summer suit, three-button natural shoulder, a white shirt, and red and blue rep tie.
Riley waved around the table. “Gentleman, this is Detective Declan Lynch. Lynch, Riordan you know. Over here we have agents Harris and McDonald, FBI COUNTERINTELPRO. They coordinate with Riordan on, well, whatever needs coordinating. And over here we have Ezekiel Fisher. Zeke, you wanna tell Detective Lynch what you do?”
“No,” said Fisher.
Riley chuckled. “It’s alright, Lynch. Same answer I always get. It’s OK. He’s a friend of Hurley’s. Anyway, he helps out.”
“So what’s the drill here, Riley?” Lynch asked.
“Couple things. First off, it’s the mayor’s kid we’re dealing with here, so he called J. Edgar, told him he wanted some help on it. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Fine by me,” said Lynch.
“Second, papers are already going bat shit with this, and you know how the old man feels about press, especially around his family. So he wants to play this real tight. Wants to keep it to the players here in this room until we need something else.”
“Again, fine by me, but my captain’s gonna wanna know what I’m up to.”
“Commissioner’s talking to your captain now. You need anything from him, you got it, but he don’t need to know shit,” said Riley.
“Gonna make things ticklish for me, just so you know.”
“Lynch, this turns out, you can get your ticket punched any way you like. It don’t, Captain’s the least of your problems.”
Lynch paused a minute, stared Riley down. Not like he didn’t know that, didn’t mean he had to like it.
“OK,” Lynch said finally, “so what are we doing today?”
“The old man, he was telling me that Junior was catching some shit from this one nigger group – the AMN Commando. Panther types. Wanted that looked into.”
“Yeah,” said Lynch. “Interviewed Hastings Clarke yesterday. He brought them up. Seemed like he wanted to raise the radical black angle and shoot it down at the same time.”
Riley nodded. “Junior was a little sensitive about race stuff. It’s all the rage with these guys, brotherhood of man and all that shit. So Clarke wants to keep the coloreds on his side. The thing, though, is the old man, he hears maybe some of these guys had a hard on for Junior, he checks em out, calls Riordan, who runs things past our buddies from Washington here, and God knows who Zeke runs things past. Thing is, this comes up,” Riley nodded his head at the tape deck, “and we thought you should hear it.” Riley nodded at the Feds, and MacDonald clicked the tape on.
Negro voice, sounded like anyway. Giving a speech in front of a pretty raucous crowd. “We ain’t waitin’ no more. We ain’t askin’ no more. Rights ain’t some scraps we wait for from the massuh’s table. We don’t need them from nobody – we own them. We was born with them. All we need to do is keep Whitey from takin’ them away. Pursuit of happiness? You ask any Black man wants to work for what any white man gets for free. They be takin’ it away. Liberty? You ask our brothers locked up in white jails because they march for their rights or fight for their rights. They be takin’ that away. Life? You ask Fred Hampton bout that when you see him, shot in his bed by the Chicago pigs. Butchered in his bed. They be takin’ life away. But we gonna let them take ours? No. By any means necessary. Fight in the streets if we gotta. By any means necessary. Butcher the pigs if we gotta. By any means necessary–” The Fed clicked the tape off.
“Butcher the pigs?” said Lynch.
“Thought that might ring a bell,” Riley answered.
“Who’s on the tape?”
Zeke Fisher sat forward in his seat, folded his hands in front of him on the table. “He calls himself Simba now, which is Swahili for lion. His real name is Harold James, Jr. Born August 3, 1948 to Rosa and Harold James in Mobile, Alabama. Moved to the south side of Chicago in September of 1955. He was a player with the Black Panthers here, mostly with some of the social programs they were running around the South Side. After the Hampton shooting, he turned severely militant.”
“He’s organizing the gangs,” Riordan said. “We got some informants on the inside of that. Hampton had that supposed gang truce, all that crap about the niggers gotta stop fighting each other, gotta fight us instead, so this James guy knows that crowd. What’s he’s doing now is trying to turn that into his own little army.”
Harris, the FBI guy, spoke up. “We’ve obtained tapes of other speeches in which this butcher the pigs rhetoric has come up. He’s very hostile to the police – to any authority, really.”
Lynch felt like he was sitting through a sales job – everybody in the room adding his piece to the pitch.
“The thing is,” Lynch said, “why would some guy who’s known for this butcher the pigs line go and paint it on a wall?”
“That’s a valid question,” said Fisher. “I don’t think we can look at this like a traditional crime where the intent is to avoid detection. This was a political act. I believe that James wants to create a direct conflict with the political authority, and especially with the more liberal politicians that, in essence, are his competition. He wants to create an unbridgeable barrier between the radical movement and traditional political solutions. In essence, he wants a rebellion.”
“Sounds like a death wish,” said Lynch.
“Hey, he wants to die, I want him dead, I got your racial harmony right here,” said Riordan.
Lynch stopped Riley in the hall outside the conference room. “Listen, couple of things I want to run past you without the audience.”
“OK,” said Riley, pushing open the door to the men’s room. “Step into my office.”
Riley walked over to a urinal and started taking a leak. “So what’s up?”
“ME found something on Hurley once he got him in the shop. No easy way to put this. Looks like Junior was a fag. He had semen in his ass. Stefanski’s semen, so far as the ME can tell.” Lynch was watching closely to see how Riley took this.
Riley kept pissing. Finished, zipped up, turned around.
“This on paper?”
Lynch decided to play a little dodge ball on that one. “Not in the ME’s report. He wasn’t sure this had anything to do with the murder. Didn’t want it out there if it doesn’t need to be. Kind of a hard thing to overlook, though.”
“Yeah. Jesus. Fuckin’ Stefanski. I mean, I knew he was a goddamn pervert, but a turd burglar? Damn.”
“I know. So this colored shit? Could be. But then I got this fag thing, and I gotta wonder.”
“Yeah. I can see that. So where you going with it?”
“Gotta run it out.”
“Yeah. Old man know?”
“Haven’t told him.”
“Let’s hope you don’t have to. He’s got a little kill-the-messenger streak in him.”
“Anyway, wanted you to know, just so nothing comes at you out of leftfield. You can decide what the mayor needs to know. Speaking of which, you want me to fill in the Fed twins or your pet spook?”
“The Feds are just here to help out with the nigger shit. Don’t tell them nothin’ on this other stuff. Fisher? Don’t even talk to that bastard you don’t talk to me first. That son of a bitch makes my sack shrivel up. As far as what the mayor needs to know, I ever gotta tell him the kid was taking it up the ass, we’re both screwed.”
Later, Riley and Ezekiel Fisher walked through the plaza, past the Picasso statue.
“ME got the fag stuff,” Riley said.
“We had to figure that was possible,” said Fisher. “Is it being pursued?”
“This Lynch guy, he’s got the bit in his teeth. I’ll leave that with you.”
“I understand,” said Fisher.
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.”
