Shell Game Read online

  The body had been dumped in the Cap Sauers Holding, part of a chain of woods, sloughs, and small lakes that make up a large set of forest preserves southwest of the city. Suburbs and gated communities had grown up to encroach on the woods, but Cap Sauers remained as close as you can get to true wilderness in the metro area. It’s a minimally manicured remainder of the glaciers that covered the region twenty-five thousand years ago, and the trails are a challenge even in daylight.

  As Felix and I drove home, I wondered about the kids who’d found the body. I wouldn’t write them off as quickly as the sheriff had. Probably white, possibly from influential families, given the wealth in the immediate area. McGivney would go lightly, but for my money, the youths could have had something more secretive in mind than getting high when they crashed through the woods.

  After I left the expressway for the narrow one-way streets near the engineering school campus, Felix began texting. Tension radiated from his shoulders—he was aware of me, but treating me like an outsider.

  “I’ll let Lotty know what happened,” I said. “Do you want to stay with her or with me tonight?”

  “No, just take me to my own place.”

  He didn’t speak again, but hunched over his phone, which kept pinging. I wondered if he was checking on members from his Free State group, all up in the middle of the night, none of them knowing anything about a dead man but knowing they had to be on the alert.

  I broke the silence when I pulled up in front of his building. “The sheriff’s police are likely to get a warrant to inspect your computer. You don’t have anything on your server that suggests violence against the government, do you?”

  “We’re not building bombs! How many times do I have to tell you and Aunt Lotty that EFS is building projects for life, not death.” His voice quivered. “Please, no more questions tonight. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I held up my hands, truce sign. “I don’t have friends in the sheriff’s department the way I do with the Chicago police and so I don’t have any way of getting information about what they’re doing. That makes the situation even more worrying as far as I’m concerned and it’s why I want to make sure we don’t cross any lines.”

  The sheriff’s department handles deaths in the forest preserves. Their police force used to be a byword for corruption of all kinds, including working for the Mob. They’ve become a professional force these days, but it still made me uneasy, having no one I could talk to on the inside about McGivney, or how his investigation was going.

  “I’ll talk to my own lawyer,” I told Felix. “Freeman Carter has added an immigration specialist to his practice, a woman named Martha Simone. You should see if your mother or grandfather can pay her fees, because they won’t be cheap, but you need someone with her skills on your team. Meanwhile, please don’t shut me or Lotty out. We may be hidebound reactionaries, but your well-being is important to Lotty, and her well-being is essential to me, okay?”

  He nodded mutely, squeezed my hand convulsively, and left the car. It was four o’clock now, a good hour for muggers. I watched him up the sidewalk until he was inside the apartment building before retracing my route to the expressway. The White Sox ballpark loomed on the far side of the Dan Ryan Expressway. In between Felix’s apartment and the Ryan were the aged girders to the State Street L. Lotty phoned just as a train was rattling overhead.

  I pulled over, waiting for the train to pass so I could hear her. “We just got done with the sheriff’s police—I dropped Felix off five minutes ago. It was a strange and tiring outing, but Felix couldn’t identify the body.”

  I told her about the scrap of paper with his phone number, but not my worries about Felix expecting to see a particular body. Lotty is my closest friend, my mentor, my conscience; it felt wrong to keep secrets from her, but I didn’t want to worry her when I had only a phantom impression, not evidence.

  “You’re certain Felix isn’t involved in this stranger’s death?” She couldn’t hide a quaver in her voice.

  “I’m sure,” I said steadily.

  I was sure Felix couldn’t have administered those blows. Other things I was less confident of—not just whether one of his team was missing, but also what kind of language his e-mails might contain. I didn’t know if I could trust his constant assurance that they weren’t building weapons. I didn’t know how he and his friends might speak about the United States, forgetting it’s prudent to keep your opinions out of the ether these days.

  “I have surgery this morning,” Lotty said. “I leave in half an hour to scrub. Could you come to dinner this evening?”

  I squeezed my eyes shut. My own day was due to start in a few hours, with appointments I couldn’t reschedule.

  “I’ll call you,” I said. “I don’t think it’s going to be possible, but I’ll see how things shake out by the afternoon.”

  As I put the car into gear, I saw a man heading up the stairs to the L platform. Felix’s thick curls and the long scarf, which he wore dangling like Tom Baker’s Dr. Who, were unmistakable.

  During the day, when the streets are so crowded that the L outruns automobiles, I couldn’t have followed, but at this hour, it was easy. I waited at each stop, looking for Felix’s silhouette among the handful of exiting passengers.

  The tricky part came where the tracks ran underground. I had to watch both sides of the street at each L stop until a late traveler or two emerged. I continued north, following what I hoped was his train. And at the Granville stop, eight miles north of the Loop, he climbed down the stairs.

  I tracked him to an apartment building near Western Avenue, where a young woman opened the outer door. All I could tell from her profile was that she was slender, with a braid that hung below the scarf wrapped loosely around her face.

  She clutched Felix tightly. He clung to her, smoothing her head. The door shut behind them, blocking them from view, but I stared at it for a long moment. Surely this wasn’t the person Felix feared he’d see dead in the woods.

  3

  Sister Act

  I overslept, which meant I spent the day in one of those frenzied routines that Olympic medalists can’t handle: a run around the block with the dogs; in and out of the shower; dressing while collecting files and checking messages; eating while driving to my office; combing my hair and putting on makeup as the L jounced me into the Loop.

  I was still five minutes late for my first meeting—not so good, since it was with my most important client. Darraugh Graham is the CEO of a firm that had started in transportation and ended up with holdings across so many industries that they were hard to categorize. There are days when I think a truly moral person wouldn’t work with CALLIE Enterprises, because it was hard to know what damage its subsidiaries do. There are other days when I look at the outstanding balance on my line of credit and think how lucky I am that Darraugh trusts me to take on some of his private work. Today was one of those grateful days.

  During a break from the meeting, I went out to the hall to call the chief deputy medical examiner to see if they’d identified the body in the woods. Nick Vishnikov answers my questions not because of our relationship—which hovers in that gray area between friend and work acquaintance—but because the chronic fraud and mismanagement in Cook County angers him so much that he makes his own rules.

  “Caucasian male about thirty, in reasonable health, seemed to have a healthy diet, judging by his arteries and liver and so on, but he was a smoker. The one thing I can tell you is that he didn’t die where he was found.”

  “Was the bludgeoning masking something else?”

  “No. Someone with a taste for sadism kicked him in the head until he died of brain trauma. He’d been punched in the gut hard enough to double him over, as I reconstruct it. When he’d gone down, the kicking began. They might not have meant to kill him—impossible to tell.”

  A brutal, mindless murder. I shivered.

  “Did he have any tattoos or moles or anything that would help a close friend ID him?” I asked.
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  “Nothing unusual. We’re prettying up his face—we’ll give it to the media when we can make him look like someone a girl- or boyfriend might recognize. Probably on the evening news. You have any thoughts?”

  “None. When the kid I took out to view the body saw it, he blurted, Where’s he from? Is there anything to indicate he isn’t American?”

  “Did someone issue an edict while I was at breakfast? We can only do autopsies on native-born Americans?” Vishnikov demanded.

  “I’m surprised you missed the memo,” I said. “That makes it all the more urgent to know where the mystery man was born.”

  “Can’t tell you. If he has signs of cholera or dengue fever, that means he was recently in one of thirty or forty countries, but not that he was born there.”

  “Does he have signs of cholera or dengue?” I asked.

  “I’ll check the blood for pathogens. We don’t usually, but—just in case. When you ask, there’s almost always a reason.”

  He hung up before I could think of a zippy comeback. I looked up dengue fever on my way back to the meeting. It sounded like a good reason to stay out of the tropics.

  From Darraugh’s, I went to another bread-and-butter client, a small law firm that uses me from time to time. At the end of the afternoon, bloated with meetings, I picked up my car and drove to the building Felix had visited the night before. I’d tried phoning him during my lunch break, to see if he’d had any further visits from the Cook County sheriff, but he let me roll over to voice mail.

  The building was in a part of town that typically has a lot of traffic, both foot and car: Pakistani and Indian immigrants have clustered here, and Devon is a South Asian restaurant and shopping hub. This afternoon, the area seemed quiet—too quiet, as immigrants stayed away from any place where ICE agents might be lurking.

  It was a neighborhood of bungalows and tidy gardens, with a sprinkling of apartment buildings. These tended to be small, six to ten units, but Felix’s friend lived in one of the few larger blocks, with perhaps sixty or seventy units. I sat for a minute, watching adults return from work or shopping, children from school, some in soccer gear, others hoisting younger siblings on backs or hips. I saw men wearing kufis or Sikh turbans, women in hijab, bareheaded women with long braids or short curls, thin women, heavyset women. When people saw me watching the building, they moved fast: only an immigration officer would be staring at them so intently.

  I felt a flush of shame, shame that I was inspecting people as if they were specimens, shame that my government could create such fear in people. I drove off. Even if I could bring myself to conduct more subtle surveillance, I would never identify Felix’s friend in this throng.

  None of your business anyway, I snarled at myself on the road home. It took almost forty minutes to cover the four miles to my apartment on Racine: a just punishment for wasting time on voyeurism. Except for that nagging worry that Felix had been expecting to see a foreigner buried in the tree trunk.

  Around half of IIT’s student body was international. Ever since Felix had become involved with Engineers in a Free State, he’d gone out of his way to be part of the lives of the African and Middle Eastern contingents. I was sure he was worried about a missing friend, but until he felt like confiding in me, there was little I could do.

  I changed into jeans and drove the dogs to the lakefront. A bitter winter had lingered through late March, but today was unexpectedly warm. While the dogs swam, I rolled up my cuffs and waded into the water, but jumped out—the cold froze my bones almost instantly.

  The day had been too long: I texted Lotty, saying I couldn’t manage dinner; we’d catch up tomorrow.

  Mr. Contreras, the first-floor neighbor with whom I share the dogs, came out to collect them. When he started to talk about a visitor, I sketched a wave. “Later, please.”

  “Ain’t no ‘later,’ doll; she’s waiting for you in here.” He jerked his head toward his front room. “Says she’s your niece. I didn’t know you had any, but she don’t seem like a con artist.”

  “I don’t have any nieces,” I said. If a woman was young and pretty, she could con my neighbor out of his undershorts.

  “Auntie Vic?”

  A woman, young, with hair the texture and color of corn silk, appeared behind Mr. Contreras. She looked at me doubtfully: Was I going to throw an orphan out into the howling gale? It was a good act—Mitch trotted to her and rubbed his head against her thigh, while Mr. Contreras patted her shoulder. Peppy stayed next to me—the two of us aloof, untrusting.

  “Auntie Vic, I—I know it’s been forever since I’ve seen you, but Uncle Dick—”

  “Reno?” I stared at her doubtfully.

  “I’m Harmony, Auntie Vic. Reno has disappeared.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said politely.

  “Doll, that ain’t no way to talk. Miss Harmony needs your help looking for her sis.” Mr. Contreras glared at me, arms akimbo. Even Peppy looked at me mournfully.

  “Can we talk about this in the morning? I was up all night looking at a murder victim in the western suburbs.”

  “But, Auntie Vic—” Tears sparkled on the ends of Harmony’s lashes. “This is serious. I flew here from Portland because I knew Reno was in trouble, but when I got to her apartment, she was gone.”

  All I wanted was my bed, three flights above me, as remote as the top of Everest. My brain had all the thinking power of a bowl of stale oatmeal. I collapsed on the bottom stair, leaning against the stairwell wall.

  “You live in Portland?”

  Harmony nodded.

  “And Reno is here in Chicago? Visiting?”

  “Doll, you ain’t listening,” Mr. Contreras said. “She told you Reno has an apartment.”

  “If she’s living here, how come I haven’t heard from her? The last I heard, Becky—the girls’ mom,” I added to Mr. Contreras, “took them out west to a commune. Wyoming, was it?”

  “Montana. We only lived there six months, waiting for the guy who supposedly was our father, but he never showed. Then we went on west and stayed out in Oakland. Reno came here by herself over a year ago.”

  “Why didn’t she call me?” I asked.

  “She didn’t know you and Uncle Dick were divorced until she called out to his house and talked to his second wife. Reno called her ‘Auntie Vic’ and the lady blew up at her, like we were supposed to know Uncle Dick and you had split up. And then, it wasn’t until later she found out what your last name was. We didn’t know Grandpa Tony’s last name. Anyway, Uncle Dick sort of helped Reno find a job, but he told her that was it, not to come around bothering him again.”

  Becky Seale was my brief husband’s younger sister. When Richard Yarborough and I divorced, the girls were five and six. Linda Yarborough, Dick and Becky’s mother, couldn’t conceal her delight at the divorce. Both her children had married disastrously: Becky to Fulton Seale, a heroin-using drifter, while her beloved Richard had been seduced (in her mind) by the daughter of a Chicago cop and an Italian refugee.

  And then a miracle, at least for my mother-in-law: Dick left me for a petite, femmie woman with a rich father. Teri didn’t want a career—she was happy to work in the local hospital’s charity store two days a week and to shop or golf with her friends the rest of the time.

  I was happy, too: the fights between Becky and her mother had ruined two Thanksgivings and one Christmas for me. My second Christmas with Dick, unable to bear another Yarborough family brawl, I took Reno and Harmony to South Chicago to spend Christmas with my dad. To his mother’s delight, Dick stayed at her side in Lake Forest.

  The girls and I played hide-and-seek in Bessemer Park, we went to a Blackhawks game—my cousin Boom Boom was still alive, leading the NHL in goals—we roasted marshmallows over the stovetop in my childhood home’s minute kitchen. At night I tucked them into the pullout bed in the front room, crooning the Italian lullabies my own mother used to sing to me.

  When I returned them to their grandmother’s North Shore h
ome, they’d clinched her dislike of me by begging me to take them back to Grandpa Tony. And then I’d forgotten them.

  “Anyway, Reno was doing fine,” Harmony said. “The finance company where Uncle Dick helped her find work liked her, she got a promotion, and they sent her to the Caribbean for some kind of Mardi Gras party. But when she got back to Chicago, she was upset by the things that went on at the resort they sent her to. All she’d say was she should have known better, but she seemed to get more and more, I don’t know, agitated maybe. Depressed.

  “I decided to fly out to see her. We were always each other’s closest friend, we’d been through so much together that no one else knew about. This was the first time in our lives we’d been apart for more than a day.

  “My boss, he agreed: ‘Don’t let your sis suffer alone,’ he said. ‘We’ll be fine here without you for a few days.’ Only when I got here—the janitor, he let me into her apartment, and she wasn’t there. I texted her, just said, big surprise waiting for you when you get home! and didn’t hear back from her. I couldn’t sleep: I kept waiting for her to come in.”

  “Traveling for her firm,” I suggested. “Staying at her boyfriend’s place.”

  “She doesn’t have a boyfriend and she’d tell me if she was going out of town. We always tell each other everything.”

  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that sentence, usually from someone whose partner is cheating on them. This might have been the first time I’d heard it from a sibling.

  “Did you call her office?”

  “I did, but they gave me this huge runaround. They have a ton of branches in Chicago and they never did tell me which one she was working at.”

  I sat up straight. “Who does she work for?”