Ring of Silence Read online

“He was one of the few who knew how to work a group.”

  “What about Shaitan?” Turner asked.

  “He preferred verbal assaults.”

  “Who’d he piss off?”

  “Everybody?”

  Turner called up the conference brochure on his own phone, turned to the page with the list of attendees, then handed it to Ian. Turner said, “Try to be specific.”

  Ian perused the names for half a minute. He looked up at Turner. “It’s kind of an amalgam of anarchic groups. What you’ve got here is hate groups facing off with no-hate groups, but both sides armed to the teeth.

  “The left-wing hate groups were armed?” Fenwick asked.

  “Can be if they want I suppose. I sort of care about which side these groups are on and then sort of don’t.”

  “How’s that?”

  “As long as I get an article someone’s willing to buy, I don’t care.”

  Fenwick paused a moment then mused. “Why not wait for you and get three of you? Or the killer didn’t know who he was shooting at or care? I refuse to believe a random sniper showed up on just this afternoon and these two people just happened to be here.”

  Turner shook his head. “I think it’s a possibility we’ve got to consider.”

  Fenwick pointed at Ian. “Are we getting all the truth from you?”

  Ian said, “I’m your helpful inside information reporter.”

  Turner realized it wasn’t a real answer to the question. For the moment, he swallowed his suspicion. Ian might have something to say he didn’t want Fenwick to hear. He’d wait, but not long. He wasn’t going to let any past relationship with Ian get in the way of the investigation.

  Ian asked, “Am I a suspect?”

  “You know how this works,” Turner said. “We check everything.”

  “I’m not asking you to cover up. There’s nothing to cover up. I didn’t do it.”

  Fenwick said, “Good to know.”

  Turner asked, “Have you interviewed a lot of conference attendees?”

  “I was just getting started.”

  Fenwick said, “If these are all nobodies and their small groups aren’t going to influence the outcome of much of anything, why bother to fight? If you drag someone else down, maybe your influence grows. You diminish the size of his fish, maybe, but the pond is still minuscule.”

  Ian looked at Turner. “Is that metaphorical or metaphysical?”

  Turner shrugged, “He’s been in a mood since he got shot.”

  “Worse luck.”

  Fenwick said, “It’s poetic.”

  Thursday 8:59 P.M.

  Once the reporter was gone, Fenwick asked, “Is he a suspect?”

  “Mostly not.” Turner sighed. “We can’t dismiss him, but I trust him. We both know him, and he’s helped us before. He understands how this works. He knows we’re going to do our jobs.”

  He checked his phone. He had a text from Fong with the names and addresses of the hotels where the victims were staying. Fong included a brief message that he’d found this information from their credit cards.

  It was now almost full dark. The wind was still up, but for the moment, it had forborne to rain. Turner checked his phone for the local weather radar. The nearest storms had dissipated a great deal in the last hour.

  They trudged across the street. The wind whipped the clothes they wore. The last remnants of sunset didn’t manage to break the gloom.

  They entered another renovated building that was now part of the campus. Half was a floor of dorm rooms, other floors offices and classrooms, the other half parking garage. A beat cop led them to the stairs.

  On the roof, they circled outside the light from the crime scene people. Turner and Fenwick used their flashlights to illumine shadows. The crime scene people were good, but Turner and Fenwick didn’t like to leave the slightest thing to chance.

  Duffy appeared in the light nearest them. He led them to the side of the building facing the one with the dead bodies on top. “Okay, your killer stood about here. We’ve got disturbed movement of roofing tar and small bits of debris all over, but concentrated here. We’ll try to get footprints, but I don’t hold out much hope. Nothing we’ve found yet indicates who it might have been. The manager says the tenants were never given keys to get up here, and nobody ever used it.”

  No buildings in the neighborhood looked down on this rooftop. It was the tallest structure until you got closer to the Loop.

  Fenwick glanced to the street below. “Too far from the edge to be seen from the street.”

  Turner asked, “Was the door to the roof locked?”

  “The building manager says any junior high kid could have picked it. He has no idea where the lock went to. We found no lock or debris from one. Beat cops are canvassing the tenants. So far, nobody saw or heard anything. It’s a quiet building.”

  One of the techs called Duffy over. He left them.

  Turner said, “It would have been full daylight when he shot them, but it’s been off and on overcast all day. Could he have known for sure who he was killing?”

  Fenwick said, “If he was stalking them, and he knew people met up there. With a reasonably good sight on his gun, he could see them as if they were standing right next to him.”

  “But he couldn’t be sure they would be the only ones up there.”

  “Maybe he didn’t care.”

  “And risk someone running over here?”

  They gazed across the way.

  Fenwick said, “Maybe he waited for a particularly cloudy moment?”

  “Or he took a chance.”

  Fenwick said, “Or he didn’t care who he shot.”

  “Does that make sense?”

  Fenwick asked, “How many murders do we have where everything makes perfect sense?”

  “You want a guess or accurate statistics down to each and every bullet hole and stab wound?”

  Fenwick shrugged. “I’m not picky.”

  Duffy returned to them. “We just found something a little odd. Sally Bentine has the boxes of evidence from here and the roof across the street.” They walked over to a young tech who was taping a box shut.

  The woman looked up, pointed to a second box, and said, “It’s in there.”

  With gloves still on, Duffy reached into the box and pulled out a Taser.

  Turner and Fenwick bent over and aimed their flashlights at it.

  Fenwick said, “It looks like department-issue.”

  Duffy turned to Bentine. “We get a check back on the serial number?”

  She was a woman in her mid-twenties. She looked at the display on her phone. “Just came in. It’s been checked out to one Buck Fenwick, and is presumably the one used earlier today on the stupidest man on the planet.” She pointed at Turner, “Used by you on Carruthers.”

  Fenwick said, “How the fuck did it get up here?”

  Turner felt a chill down his back the humid air could not ease.

  Thursday 9:16 P.M.

  Duffy and Bentine had the good sense to keep quiet.

  After a few moments, Turner asked, “Where was the damn thing?”

  Bentine said, “Way in the back, kind of hidden.” Using her phone she showed them the video and pictures they’d taken earlier then led the aggregation to the far end of the roof, more than a half block away.

  Fenwick said, “’Kind of hidden’ means what?”

  “It was in a plastic bag.” She pointed with her flashlight. “The bag with the Taser in it was wedged in that spot where the roof tar is coming undone.” She waggled her flashlight over the spot then moved it about six inches to the left, “And that vent.”

  Turner said, “Why hide it at all? Or put it up here at all, and then sort of hide it?”

  Nobody had answers to any of that.

  They returned to where the marksman had stood. Fenwick asked, “We know any expert marksmen in the city?”

  Turner said, “I don’t.”

  Duffy shook his head.

  They ex
amined the distance. Fenwick said, “I think you’d have to be good, but not that good.”

  Turner nodded agreement.

  Thursday 9:43 P.M.

  Turner and Fenwick sat on the edge of the balustrade on the roof of the building from which the shots had been fired. Their feet dangled over the street five stories below. They’d gotten sandwiches from a sub shop on the first floor of the same building.

  Fenwick gnawed at his avocado, turkey, bacon, and garlic concoction, slurped on his diet soda then asked, “What the fuck?”

  Turner finished chewing a bite of his salad, swallowed, said, “This is nuts.”

  “Adds a lot of spooky and eerie to the case. Hate when that happens.”

  Turner said, “Either the killer just randomly picked it up, and he or she just happened to be at the Carruthers’s idiocy scene, or someone at the crime scene randomly picked it up, and gave it to the killer, or a series of someones deliberately handed it off to the next someone until it got to the killer. Hell of a lot of planning.”

  “Not a lot of time between that scene and the dead bodies.”

  Turner said, “Well, a couple of hours.”

  “But if it was random finder or finders then at least one other person knows who the killer is. Or is in league with the killer.”

  Turner riffed on a bit of the old Joe McCarthy bombast. “A conspiracy so immense, as it were.”

  “And a little unnerving.”

  Turner added, “Or a lot unnerving.”

  “But there were a million cops at that scene.” Fenwick paused. “The killer then knows one of us, both of us, is one of us.”

  “All possible. It can’t be random chance.”

  Fenwick said, “Or one of ours did it as a joke.”

  “Even you don’t have a sense of humor that sick.”

  Fenwick sighed. “I guess I do have limits.”

  “For which I am thankful.”

  “I’m having a hard time with it being one of ours who did it deliberately.”

  Turner nodded. “Remember, Rodriguez got his car keyed, and it is possible that one of ours is the killer and did all this deliberately.” The breeze helped control the sweat that wanted to escape from his every pore.

  Fenwick asked, “Can we fight our own and the bad guys?”

  “I guess we do what we have to. We just have to remember, convoluted as it may be, our own could be the bad guys in both cases. Or the same guys in both cases.”

  Fenwick said, “Why?”

  Turner said, “I have no idea, but I think as we follow the threads of our murder case, we have to keep in mind, odd as it seems, that the threads could overlap with the Carruthers bullshit.”

  Just as they finished eating, they heard steps behind them and turned to the noise. Molton was silhouetted against the crime scene lights. He took a seat next to them and looked down on the street below. The three of them watched a bus just miss a pedestrian and an SUV as it pulled away from the curb.

  The detectives had called Molton instantly with the news of the Taser being up here and then decided to grab a quick dinner while they waited for him. It didn’t do to keep Fenwick from regular provender.

  Molton gazed at the lights of the city for a moment. He said, “My guess is they will find no fingerprints on the Taser.”

  Fenwick and Turner nodded.

  Fenwick said, “If the killer wanted to implicate me, us, he’d have had to be planning far enough ahead to bring gloves to the Carruthers scene. He couldn’t have known it would be there for the taking.”

  Molton said, “We can all imagine scenarios about why the killer would bring it with.”

  Turner said, “It also means, has to mean, he was a witness to the Carruthers fiasco, and that somehow, the two events are connected.”

  Molton said, “We got how and why issues, timing.”

  Fenwick said, “Have to try and get every bit of security cam footage between here and there.”

  “That’s presuming he or she took a direct route. I’m guessing we’ve got a smart killer. He could go any number of ways around.”

  Fenwick said, “And then the killer just strolled up here to randomly kill some activists? Why bring the Taser? And why not just dump it from where he took shots?”

  Turner said, “All to screw up the investigation?”

  Molton said, “To implicate you in this?”

  “But how would this do that? He couldn’t know we’d be assigned to the case.”

  Turner said, “Maybe he didn’t care if we were assigned to the case. Maybe it was just to implicate us.”

  Fenwick said, “And to make any case against Carruthers suspect. He can scream about chain of evidence.”

  Molton said, “I’m not sure that holds much water. Taser here, and the lock from here missing. Strange.” He shook his head, swung his legs, then gripped the balustrade with his hands, and looked at them. “Maybe it was to scare you guys.”

  “Take more than that to frighten me,” Fenwick said.

  “No, not scare in terms of make you frightened. Sure some of that, I suppose, but to make you uncertain, to make sure you’re nervous. With all the police shootings, maybe somebody is targeting you specifically.”

  Fenwick said, “So why not just shoot at us? Why kill two activists?”

  “Makes the investigation more complicated,” Turner suggested.

  “It does that,” Fenwick said.

  Molton said, “Or it could have been one of ours.”

  The detectives nodded. Turner said, “We discussed it. Didn’t get us closer to the killer.”

  Fenwick said, “Made us more determined to get the son of a bitch.”

  Molton nodded.

  They sat silent for a few moments. Then Molton said, “You guys want off the case?” He’d never made such an offer before.

  “Should we?” Turner asked.

  “I’m leaving this up to you.”

  Fenwick said, “Bullshit. We’re not in danger because of this case. The Taser was left here as a message about us, not about solving the murder.”

  “I think you’re right,” Molton said.

  Turner nodded.

  Fenwick said, “I’m in.”

  Turner said, “Me too.”

  Molton said, “For now, treat your murder and the Carruthers incident as one thing. If they’re connected, that means deep shit is going on. If not, fine, we’ve done extra work, but we need to be thorough. Until it’s proven they aren’t connected, we assume they are. We can’t take a chance they are and we missed it. It might be a long shot, but we have no choice. That Taser at least is a cause for a suspicious and even deadly connection.” He took a deep breath. “What’s next?”

  Turner said, “We go to where each of the dead guys were staying.”

  Molton turned to Fenwick, “How are your wounds?”

  Fenwick grumbled. “Arm and head are still attached.”

  Molton said, “Good thing it was your arm and your head and not your wrist. You don’t need more excuses to tell that stupid ‘wrist joke.’”

  Fenwick said, “You begged me to tell.”

  “And I’m still sorry.”

  The three of them stood. Molton said, “Good luck. Be safe.” He left.

  Turner and Fenwick sat in the air-conditioned car and each phoned home. They reassured respective spouses and children that all was well. Neither went into details.

  Turner said to his older son Brian, “You don’t have to cancel your plans and sit in a chair waiting for me.”

  “I already did. It’s what you’d do for me.”

  “Ben can handle it.”

  “Dad, I made my choice.”

  “Thanks.”

  Thursday 10:21 P.M.

  They walked into the Hotel Stevenson on Blue Island Avenue just south of Roosevelt Road.

  Fenwick took one glance and said, “Hôtel Modière.”

  Turner knew Fenwick was making reference to the hotel where Melissa McCarthy stayed in Paris in the movie
Spy. Turner knew Fenwick had a collection of all of Melissa McCarthy’s movie work. Fenwick claimed to the unwary that Spy was one of the top three comic movies of all time.

  Turner thought the movie was funny, too. He also glanced at their surroundings: woodpanel wallpaper wainscoting with paisley wallpaper above. Both upper and lower deeply faded with gray tints from not enough or excessive cleaning. Turner thought the tile on the floor might originally have been bright yellow festooned with masses of daises. Now it looked like amorphous dirty flowers surrounded by swaths of mud.

  Turner said, “We never see the lobby of the hotel in the movie.”

  Fenwick was undaunted. “This is what it should have looked like.”

  The clerk behind the thermal glass at the counter didn’t meet their eyes or deign to look at the IDs they held out. He snapped, “We’re full.”

  Fenwick said, “We’re cops.”

  Still ignoring them, the clerk picked up his phone, and said, “Arnie, you need to get out here now.”

  Turned out Arnie was the manager, thin, sharp faced, with hair dyed bright blond. On a teenager it might look trendy. On this guy, well into his fifties, it just looked odd.

  Arnie spoke with a nasal twang. “We’re full.”

  Fenwick repeated, “We’re cops.” Once again they held out their IDs.

  Arnie glared at the clerk. “Why didn’t you say so?”

  Fenwick asked, “You’re full?”

  “Is that a crime?”

  Fenwick said, “I’m not much in the mood to harass managers of seedy motels, but I can be convinced.”

  Arnie answered the original question, “Yes.”

  Turner said, “With all the activists for this week’s meetings?”

  Arnie said, “I guess.”

  Extracting a tooth from an angry rhino might have been easier than getting answers from him.

  Fenwick said, “Double the rates to make a profit?”

  “Being in business isn’t a crime.” Arnie glanced at the lobby. “They’re in here all hours arguing about individual communities creating angst. I don’t know what half the shit they say means.”

  “You listen?” Fenwick asked.