The Black Cage Read online

  ‘This is Chicago. We get customers when it snows.’

  Tonight, there was no answering that.

  Blanchie knew he was a reporter and knew his history. Even in the darkest days of his notoriety following the Stemec Henderson murders, she’d always managed to offer up something to laugh at. But she didn’t try that evening. ‘Those poor girls,’ she said, walking away.

  ‘And poor boys,’ he amended, but only as a whisper inside his head.

  He opened up his laptop and went to the Sun-Times’ latest online postings. GIRLS FOUND NUDE IN WOODS, the headline read in big type, followed by the inevitable hot words, forming a cross on top of her sister, and frozen. And then, at the end, the words most responsible for keeping the usual diners of Lisle locked tight inside their own homes that evening – many similarities to the murders of the Stemec Henderson boys – summoning up the fear that a serial killer had been reawakened, and was out there stalking, ready to strike again.

  He scrolled down to the next Sun-Times headline: $150,000 REWARD OFFERED IN SLAYING OF THREE BOYS. Young Assistant Medical Examiner Feldott’s mentoring group of well-heeled Chicagoans had announced a new reward in the Stemec Henderson killings. Some would see the timing of the offer, coming on the same day that the Graves girls were discovered, as coincidence. Rigg did not. The Citizens’ Investigation Bureau was putting Sheriff Lehman’s department on notice: they weren’t going to let the Graves murders, or any kid killings, new or old, be forgotten.

  He closed his eyes. Most everyone would see the reward as good news, a big-buck goading for a renewed investigation into the Stemec Henderson case. But Rigg, as desperate as he’d been to find the boys’ killer, had always seen the Citizens’ Investigation Bureau as erosion. The organization that several industrialists, two judges and others had formed was a pronouncement that Chicago’s leading players had lost faith in law enforcement and had the means to form their own force. Private cops and vigilantes taking the law into their own hands might be next.

  ‘Want me to wrap it?’ Blanchie asked from nowhere.

  He glanced down at the table and then at his watch. He hadn’t been aware she’d brought his burger. Almost an hour had passed.

  He shook his head. His appetite wasn’t going to get any better.

  ‘Then go home, Milo, find comedies on TV and turn the volume up loud,’ she said. ‘Shut out the world for an hour or two.’

  Judith had said the same thing a thousand times. ‘Look at the TV,’ she used to say, turning on the television. ‘Not at your notes about the horrible killings you have to think about every day. Watch Seinfeld or Lucy or Jack Benny re-runs. Laughing’s like riding a bike. You can learn again.’

  He’d tried. He’d stared at the TV. But it was never Seinfeld or Lucille Ball or Jack Benny he was seeing. It was victims, usually kids, that seemed to be forever strewn about Chicago like spillage from a garbage truck.

  It was that moroseness that made Judith insist they buy the ludicrous railroad caboose that some eccentric had tugged on to the top of an Indiana dune. If television wasn’t going to work, if nothing was going to get his head away from Chicago crime, then, by golly, she’d said, she’d get his head out of Chicago and on to a dune. He’d so loved her for that.

  And, for precious months, it worked. They labored on the old rail car, scraping and scrubbing and painting. And they’d walked – walked into the dunes and down to the shore of Lake Michigan to listen to the waves. She loved the waves, and he loved her for that and for the caboose and for getting him away from the gloom that followed him in Chicago.

  And then she was gone, slammed dead by a random gang-banger’s bullet as they drove south along the Dan Ryan Expressway, the two of them laughing about something he could no longer remember as they headed for their special place of refuge in the dunes.

  He drove east along Ogden Avenue. The snowfall had lessened into a thin, gentle tumble and the road was freshly plowed. Even so, Ogden Avenue was as empty as when he’d set out for the Rail-Vu. No one was driving; no one was out.

  In Westmont, he turned right on to Cass Avenue, headed south and crossed the tracks that split the old railroad town. Two blocks down, past the last of the small storefronts – some empty, some still struggling – unfamiliar faint lights appeared ahead on the right. For an instant, he thought his mind had wandered and he’d taken a wrong turn south. But glances to the right and left showed he was on the right street.

  It was his building that had changed. Always dark at night, too dark even for shadows to be cast by the single street lamp at the corner, Judith had made a rhyme to mock their penurious landlord: he was too tight for light. It was true enough. Every exterior fixture, save for the ones in front of the first-floor barber shop and dry cleaners, had burned out, likely long before Rigg had moved in, four years before.

  Not this night. This evening, the central, open staircase glowed. Not from major kilowatts, to be sure, but from what he guessed were the smallest available energy-efficient light bulbs. They lit the stairs rising up to the open-air hallways on the second and third floors like the softly phosphorescent spine of some prehistoric dinosaur. The building was still dim, but, compared to before, it was blinding, its mix of beige, brown and blackened bricks now lit in harsh relief against one other. It was a building hunkered, afraid, lighted against the night.

  He parked on the gravel lot behind the alley and climbed the stairs to the third floor, surprised to realize he was actually looking down at his keys instead of fumbling for the right one by feel in the dark.

  Something scraped softly down in the alley behind him. He paused, clutching his keys, sure that any strange sound could frighten in the night after a day that had been so filled with death. Still, he crossed back through the open hall to look down, well aware that he was backlit to anyone looking up.

  Nothing shifted in the strange new pools of light below. It could have been a cat or a rat, but, more surely, it had been his nerves. The night was so still, so lulled by the falling snow, that any sound would be magnified.

  He went back to his door, unlocked it, went in and kicked off his shoes.

  Removing his shoes was one of his necessary post-Judith protocols. The apartment had been his bachelor place for a year before he met her, at the time a newly hired researcher at the Field Museum of Natural History. They’d married just months later, and she’d quickly made his apartment theirs. She covered the dark wood floors with a large, orange and yellow rug with a thick pad beneath. They’d bought sofas, one large and one small, to replace the single La-Z-Boy chair he’d bought used, right after his graduation from Chicago’s Columbia College. And she brought plants, two dozen plants, to add even more new life to his spartan digs.

  They’d lived together in that apartment for less than two years. And then she was gone, for forever. She was only thirty-one.

  In his despair, in the distortion of the first days following her death, he’d sought to rid his life of everything that reminded him of her. He wouldn’t yet dare go to the caboose on the dune to find a realtor to sell that place she loved above anything else, but he could strip the Westmont apartment. He jettisoned almost everything, save for the mattress, one dresser and the small black sofa the furniture salesman had called a love seat. They’d laughed at the sly challenge in the name, for the thing was too short for anything approximating routine physical love.

  The jettisoning hardened the apartment. There were no soft furnishings, no padded rug left to absorb any of his sounds. Each of his footfalls fell loud and seemed to echo the hollowness of his new, widower’s life. Padding around in his socks quieted the apartment some, though never did it quiet his pain.

  He went to the kitchen, took down the quart of Johnny Walker Red from a cabinet that held nothing else, and poured half an inch into a tall glass to make the mildest of sedatives. He’d just filled it the rest of the way with water when the landline phone rang.

  ‘Milo?’ The voice was hushed, a woman’s.

 
‘Who …?’ he asked, like he always did, but he knew who it was. Today was a big news day: girls had been found in a jumble, like her boys had been found in a jumble, the October before last. Normally she called in the darkest of the night hours, when she was deep in the vodka and perhaps clutching the latest crank note or the memory of the most recent, whispered, sick call, when she was most defenseless and he was trapped hardest in the black cage. But today she’d not waited for the darkest hours. Today was not like the others.

  ‘Is it him, Milo?’ she asked, her voice barely a murmur.

  ‘It’s too soon to know.’

  ‘The papers, the television – they said they were naked.’ Like her boys, but she didn’t need to whisper that.

  ‘Yes …’ He pressed the phone closer to his ear.

  ‘You’d tell me, wouldn’t you, Milo? You’d tell me if it was him?’

  He wanted to remind her – like he’d tried to remind Glet and like he’d so wanted to remind himself – that he’d been reassigned to meaningless, suburban, safe little stories, that the story of her boys was no longer his burden. But she, of all people, wouldn’t believe. She knew it would always be his story, as surely as it would always be hers. And so he said nothing, and, after a moment, she hung up when the strain of hearing him say nothing was too much to endure.

  He held the glass up to the light. The whiskey had barely colored the water. He spilled out an inch of the watery mix, replaced it with Scotch and went to the front window.

  Someone was standing across the street, in the falling snow, next to one of the old thick trees, making no move to disguise that he was looking up at Rigg’s window. He was the first person Rigg had seen out on a sidewalk that snowy night.

  He remembered the unsettling sound from the alley when he’d come home. Nerves, that had been. And nerves it surely was now. No one was out on such a night, simply to stare at his window. The person was waiting for a ride, or walking a dog that Rigg could not see.

  He took the Scotch to the small sofa, sat, and stared at the boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling against the opposite wall. Files and notes on the murders of Bobby Stemec and Johnny and Anthony Henderson, they defined the life that had begun for him just weeks after Judith was killed. He’d put his fury into untangling the mess Lehman, Glet and the others had made of the investigation, chasing down every lead he could wheedle out of any cop that took his call or that he badgered in a hallway, and making notes of everything. None of it led anywhere.

  He never took the Stemec Henderson files to the caboose – unlike the apartment, it had become a comfort how close Judith felt to him there – but he pored through his boxes every evening he was in town, Tuesdays through Thursdays. Still, worries over what he’d overlooked in the files followed him to his dune, though the incessant nightmares of being trapped in a black cage, unable to reach through the thick, flat bars to grasp Judith’s beckoning arms, never found him there.

  He sipped the Scotch and thought of what he hadn’t said to Carlotta Henderson. There were similarities between the boys’ and girls’ cases and there were not. The kids were all roughly the same age. All had been found naked, stripped by a killer, or killers, perhaps to leave no usable evidence behind, though Cook County Medical Examiner Charles McGarry had found foreign DNA, still unidentified, on two of the boys. It was too soon, yet, to know what, if anything, was left on the girls.

  There’d been no sign of sexual trauma on any of the boys – though, unlike the Graves girls, their bodies bore strong signs of violence. Bobby Stemec’s fingernails had been torn ragged; he’d fought back, ferociously. Johnny Henderson had been killed by several blows to the abdomen. His brother, Anthony, had been garroted.

  As with the Graves girls, the boys’ bodies appeared to have been dumped hurriedly, mere feet from a winding road in a forest preserve. A psychologist Rigg had interviewed offered the theory that certain kinds of degenerate sex murderers do little to hide their victims, as if leaving them to be discovered quickly was a sort of last kindness, a gesture of redeeming tenderness.

  The boys had been discovered soon after they’d been dropped, having been missing for only two days. Not so the girls. They’d gone missing on December 28, a night that had been rainy, turning into snow as it got colder. Depending on how much snow had fallen that night, they might have been lying where they were discovered, concealed by snow, for almost a month.

  Or, more horribly, not. They might have been kept alive somewhere for that missing month.

  Both the boys and the girls had gone to the movies right before they disappeared: the boys to a theater in downtown Chicago, the girls to a neighborhood movie theater.

  Rigg stared at the boxes stacked against the wall. They contained similarities to the Graves case, and things that were vastly different. The only thing he was sure of was that he was too tired to do what he always did on his nights in that apartment – to take a box at random and pore through notes he’d already read a hundred times.

  He finished his Scotch and headed off to try to sleep. And, almost surely, to face the black cage that came for him in the hours before dawn.

  FIVE

  AUTOPSY ONLY DEEPENS MYSTERY

  Harold Benten, Chicago Examiner

  Despite bringing in a team of three renowned forensic pathologists, Drs Kemp of St Francis Hospital, Hennessy of St Michael’s Hospital and Robards of Stroger Hospital, Cook County Medical Examiner Charles McGarry announced inconclusive results in the autopsies of Beatrice Graves, 15, and her sister, Priscilla Graves, 12.

  The sisters had not been sexually molested, the statement released by McGarry’s office stated. They were not strangled or poisoned, nor were there any signs of violence on their bodies. They appeared to have been subjected to cold temperatures for a number of days, though neither the doctors nor McGarry would hazard a guess as to how long that was without studying the weather records for the 25 days since the two sisters disappeared.

  Three puncture wounds were found on Priscilla’s chest. They are of unknown origin, but were only one quarter of an inch deep, and thus too superficial to have caused death. The doctors believe they were inflicted post-mortem.

  Beatrice’s stomach contained particles of food that indicated she’d eaten four to five hours before she died.

  The doctors concluded that, because the bodies showed insignificant deterioration, they had been kept in some previous cold place between the hour of death and the time they were dumped where German Church Road crosses Devil’s Creek in unincorporated Cook County. Since that road is well traveled, the doctors theorized that the girls were dropped or placed there not much earlier than the night of January 2, when a foot of snow fell over parts of northern Illinois and drifts accumulated to two feet or more, covering their bodies. Last weekend’s thaw melted the snow and revealed the bodies.

  Cook County Medical Examiner Charles McGarry postponed plans to open an inquest today, citing a need to spare the parents the strain of testifying so soon after the girls were discovered. His statement reads: ‘After all they have been through, they need time to be left alone. They have a tough enough cross to bear as it is.’

  Cook County Sheriff Joseph Lehman announced he’d invited eight law enforcement agencies to plan a unified and integrated investigation into the murders, to be directed by his office. Lehman said this will forestall any inefficiencies between Cook County’s Lehman and McGarry and the heads of other agencies during the investigation into the murders of the Graves sisters. State’s Attorney Benjamin Bronkowski offered his support for Lehman’s move, stating that a lack of cooperation between law enforcement units had helped bring a dead end to the investigation of the Stemec Henderson murders, and cautioned that a repetition of such a lack of cooperation could bring a similar result to the Graves case.

  Benten finished reading Rigg’s piece and turned away from his screen. ‘It’s two o’clock. When can we post to our site?’

  ‘Four o’clock. Glet made me promise when he called with the hea
ds-up that I’d hold back until both Lehman’s and McGarry’s statements are released.’

  ‘He’s currying favor.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Glet had called at eight o’clock that morning. Judith’s arms had already awakened him three hours before, beckoning from beyond the thick grid of black, flat iron bars. Every night, before he drifted off to sleep, Rigg begged the darkness to make her show him what she wanted. But, every night, she showed him nothing but her arms, gently beckoning.

  ‘No formal presser?’ Benten asked now.

  ‘They’re just releasing the written statements. They don’t want to answer questions.’

  ‘You contact these other agencies Lehman’s invited to join his investigation?’

  Rigg laughed. ‘I spent the morning calling around. Nobody’s interested in being dragged into another mess of Lehman’s. They see it as a phony ploy, a way for Lehman to pass off blame in case his investigation collapses into another Stemec Henderson. They’re relieved it’s Lehman’s jurisdiction. They’re going to let him rise or fall alone with it.’

  ‘McGarry?’

  ‘He’s weak. Lehman will make him get on board,’ Rigg said. ‘Even worse for McGarry, he’s got young Corky breathing down his neck and reporting his every move back to the CIB. One false step and they’ll find a way to replace him with the kid.’

  ‘You think McGarry will run for re-election?’

  ‘Maybe if his ego demands it, but this case could threaten that. It’s a bomb, set to explode. That’s why he pulled in those three other doctors, to cover every inch of his ass. But that failed. The three wise men came up with zero, and that’s going to come down on McGarry. Too many false steps and the county Dems will boot him out of office, no matter how much money he gives to the party.’

  ‘You mean how much of his father’s money he contributes to the party.’

  ‘Inheritance buys its privileges,’ Rigg said.

  ‘CIB just upped the Stemec Henderson reward,’ Benten said.