Hidden Graves Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Titles by Jack Fredrickson

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  A Selection of Titles by Jack Fredrickson

  The Dek Elstrom Mysteries

  A SAFE PLACE FOR DYING

  HONESTLY DEAREST, YOU’RE DEAD

  HUNTING SWEETIE ROSE

  THE DEAD CALLER OF CHICAGO

  THE CONFESSORS’ CLUB*

  HIDDEN GRAVES*

  SILENCE THE DEAD*

  * available from Severn House

  HIDDEN GRAVES

  A Dek Elstrom Mystery

  Jack Fredrickson

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2016

  in Great Britain and 2017 in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2017 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  eBook edition first published in 2016 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2016 by Jack Fredrickson.

  The right of Jack Fredrickson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8664-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-767-8 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-834-6 (e-book)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents

  are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described

  for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are

  fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For Pop

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks again to my exceptional friends at Severn House, to Kate Lyall Grant for her enthusiasm, and to my always (patiently) eagle-eyed editor, Sara Porter.

  And, as always, thanks to my pal Patrick Riley for coping with this Luddite’s website.

  Most of all, thanks to my Susan for her excellent editing and … well, for everything that matters more.

  ONE

  Three minutes and twenty-three seconds before the skeleton came at him with an axe, the candidate for US Senate stood grim, trim and confident behind a mahogany lectern set on the freshly hacked weeds of an abandoned farm. The wind hurled the first of the autumn’s dead leaves across the lenses of the television cameras. A storm approached in the darkening sky. It was to be fine campaign video on the dire plight of the Illinois farmer.

  ‘It’s time to build new farms and barns and silos,’ Timothy Wade intoned rhythmically for the dozens of admirers that had been bused in to applaud for the television news cameras. On script, he then turned and strode purposefully to the crumbling silo, picked up a long-handled sledge and swung it at the discreet green dot painted by a campaign aide.

  The cracked, carefully reassembled cement fell apart precisely as planned, opening a ragged hole on the side of the silo. Clumps of damp, dark grain, the size of fists, began spilling onto the ground. The candidate stepped back to prevent his glossy wingtips getting mucky and eyed the tumbling rotted wheat morosely. Absolutely, it would be excellent video.

  The forearm and hand materialized white in the black cascade of lumpy grain. The flesh, ligaments and muscles were gone; they were now only disconnected beige bones, pressed together by the weight of the rotting wet wheat.

  They clutched a small, shiny-headed hatchet, pointed straight at the candidate.

  It was over in an instant. The wheat and the bones and the tiny axe broke apart, falling to the ground.

  But that instant was enough for the television cameras. They caught the fleshless bones aiming the axe. Worse, they recorded what happened next.

  The candidate panicked. Red-faced, sweating, he bolted through the small crowd to dive into the back of his black Cadillac Escalade, tugging the door shut behind him like a child spooked wild-eyed in the night.

  Though his driver, a fresh-faced young volunteer, had the wits to race after him and speed them away, it was too late. The a
nointed candidate of the Cook County Democratic machine, sure to become the next senator from Illinois and, some said, a future president of the United States, had been recorded melting down.

  The video went viral within an hour. Chicago television stations broke into their afternoon talkers and soaps to show clips. Cable stations and the national networks snagged snippets from the Chicago locals and a thousand Internet sites got it from them. By midnight, twenty million people across the country had seen the candidate in Illinois running from bones, as though fleeing the Devil himself.

  That was the beginning.

  TWO

  Like most Illinoisans, I expected the sleaze of our politics to ooze on as placidly as always that October. Though our most recent ex-governor was in prison, his predecessor had been paroled and was available to advise the newest crop of looters making runs for state office. Available to counsel, too, was the usual number of congressmen facing certain indictment but whom, nonetheless, were considered shoo-ins for re-election.

  All this was viewed as especially acceptable where I live. My turret is in Rivertown, the greasiest of the Cook County suburbs, stuck foul and festering to the west side of Chicago. Crookedness wasn’t going to change there, just as it wasn’t going to change elsewhere in the county or even in the whole corrupt state. It’s too long-standing, too ingrained. So, like most in Rivertown, I paid no attention to politicians that October. I focused instead on heat.

  My turret was the only part of a castle my lunatic bootlegger grandfather got built before he died. I’d moved in a few years earlier – a broke, recovering drunk felled by scandal, thinking to convert the five-floor limestone tube into a saleable residence. I evicted the pigeons, power-washed away the mounds and splatters they’d left behind and began restoring the place, and myself. I sanded, stained and sealed the wide planks of the first three floors, and caulked and painted the slit windows. I built new kitchen cabinets, though as yet I had no appliances other than a leaky microwave oven and a rusting, avocado-colored refrigerator. I built a closet on the third floor, in case I got a wardrobe.

  It was comfortable, cool work in summers. But in winters, I froze. There was no furnace, just monstrous fireplaces on all five floors that required more wood than I could ever afford. I kept warm with sweatshirts, a blazer and a pea coat, often all at once.

  At last, that was about to change. Earlier that summer, one of the insurance company clients I’d lost during my notoriety offered me two months’ work investigating a backlog of false accident claims. Enough money blew in to dream of warm winters. In August I bought tinwork and began building a central duct to carry heat to all five floors of the turret. Now, just days before Halloween, I was about to take delivery of a furnace.

  I was on the first floor, readying the base of the main duct, when the woman called. ‘You trace people?’ Her voice was crisp and hoarse, like she’d had nails for breakfast.

  ‘Actually, I’m doing that for another client right now.’ I was shooting for crisp, too, but the sugar high from my breakfast of Ding Dongs had begun to sag.

  ‘Speak up!’ she shouted.

  My hand was crisscrossed with painful, shallow lacerations, the result of working with sheet metal that had cut me more than I’d cut it. I could only use my left thumb and ring finger to pincer my phone, as one might hold a rodent by the tail.

  ‘I trace people, yes!’ I yelled, to bridge the distance between hand and mouth.

  ‘I’ll see you at one o’clock,’ she barked.

  ‘Let me check my calendar.’ It was a charade and I didn’t bother to set down the phone. My stint with the insurance company had ended and I now had only one client, a sorority alumni club from Northwestern University that hired me, cheap, to update their membership directory. It should have been a simple Internet tracing job, something the ladies could have done themselves if they’d been less rich and less fond of liquored lunches, but the project had become a nightmare. The former coeds had been serious drinkers, even in college, and had simply called each other Bipsie instead of struggling to remember given names. That caused problems now. I was chasing the whereabouts of over a hundred women known to each other mostly as Bipsie. There was a Bipsie from Rockford, a Bipsie from Wilmette, two Bipsies with Zits, several Bipsies with Big Boobs and even more Bipsies Without. It was brutal work.

  I levered the phone closer to my mouth. ‘I’m available,’ I said after a pause long enough to have checked a calendar. ‘Ms, ah?’

  ‘One o’clock.’ She gave me an address.

  ‘Your name?’ I asked again.

  She took too many seconds to answer. ‘Reynolds,’ she finally said. ‘Rosamund Reynolds.’

  Likely enough, she’d needed the pause to make up a phony name. Still, what she’d come up with offered relief. I couldn’t have stood it if she’d chosen to call herself Bipsie.

  THREE

  Rosamund’s address was in one of the old industrial neighborhoods on the near northwest that had half-sputtered into trendy. An odd mix of optimism and despair, a Starbucks and a stained-glass studio were nestled among a discount tire store, a closed-up candle shop, two burned-out bungalows and an abandoned eight-story condominium conversion.

  Her building was a sooty brick and glass-block former factory on the corner, one of the thousands that had once thrummed, three shifts a day, everywhere in Chicago and its blue-collared surrounds like Rivertown until penny wages sucked all that thrum overseas.

  My footsteps echoed loud and alone on new red quarry tile as I walked through the oak-paneled foyer into a glistening hall of empty offices awaiting prosperity. Rosamund Reynolds had said hers, number 210, was on the second floor. There was no listing for that space in the lobby directory.

  The elevator, squeezed in during the rehab, was a wire-caged affair the size of an upright coffin. It groaned as it began raising me to the second floor.

  I checked my hands. The left hand had the fewest Band-Aids, so I left that one out and put the right one in my pants pocket, thinking to saunter in like an old-time movie charmer about to dazzle tight-curled lovelies.

  Room 210 was at the end of the hall. I knocked on the unmarked, frosted glass door and the frosty woman’s voice that had phoned commanded me to come in.

  I stepped into a room lit surgery bright by midday sunshine firing through the eight-paned window at the back. I slipped on my Ray-Bans and offered the shape blurred in the glare a smile.

  She said nothing.

  I stood waiting for a moment, and then another. By now my eyes had adjusted enough to make out a room wallpapered in beige stripes and trimmed with hard, dark oak ceiling and baseboard moldings that matched the paneling in the lobby. The drapes bunched at both sides of the huge back window could have been drawn if Ms Reynolds wanted to be seen clearly.

  Despite the glare, I made out that she was trimmed hard, too, in a starched sort of way. She sat in a wheelchair behind the dark oak desk. She wore thick makeup, perhaps to conceal an unhealthy skin pallor but more likely to disguise features she didn’t want seen. Her hair, if it was hers at all and not a wig, was thick, mostly steel gray, and fell down to eyes hidden by large, tinted glasses. She wore a severely cut dark suit, a white blouse so stiff that it looked bulletproof and white gloves. I supposed the gloves were meant to cover age spots or fingerprints and not wounds suffered from cutting tin ductwork.

  There were no framed photos on the walls, no personal items anywhere. The desk was bare except for a single sheet of paper. A desk chair was pushed into the corner, another tip-off that the space was a daily rental. If she’d used the office regularly the wheelchair-bound woman wouldn’t have wasted space on a desk chair she didn’t need.

  She told me to sit down in a voice so hoarse it sounded like an old man’s. I did, with my right hand still in my pocket.

  ‘What’s the matter with your right hand?’ she asked.

  I pulled it out to show her the patchwork of Band-Aids. ‘It got damaged.’

  ‘Your Band-Ai
ds have cartoon characters on them.’ There was nothing wrong with her eyesight.

  ‘I get these cheap at a discount place.’

  She nodded, uninterested. ‘You spend your time restoring an odd round building?’

  ‘It’s temporary. My business—’

  ‘You forged documents for the defense team in some sordid mayor’s trial. Your business was destroyed.’

  ‘False charges. I was exonerated within days,’ I said.

  ‘That’s neither here nor there.’

  ‘Hard to tell what’s anywhere in this glare,’ I rhymed right back at her. The woman’s arrogance was irritating. ‘How close is “Reynolds” to your real name?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘That will depend on why you asked me here.’

  ‘I want you to look in on three individuals.’ She pushed the single sheet of paper across the desk. It contained three typed names and addresses. All were out west, in Tucson, Laguna Beach and someplace I’d never heard of in Oregon.

  ‘I’m not looking for simple Internet browsing, Mr Elstrom,’ she went on. ‘I want fast, discreet, first-hand visits. Be efficient; verify the current arrangements of each of these men.’