Unsolved Read online

  They slowly move toward the group. She sneaks a look at the lieutenant, wondering why she feels the need to be surreptitious about it. Everything seems different about this patient.

  He’s in a wheelchair, an expensive model with a dark blue shroud, an American-flag decal on the leather armrest, a bumper sticker on the shroud that says RANGERS LEAD THE WAY.

  His hair isn’t the standard crew cut, though. It’s shoulder-length and gray, pulled back into a ponytail. He is relatively young, probably late forties, his face slightly weathered.

  Near his right eye, he has a prominent scar in the shape of a crescent moon.

  “He was in some kind of elite Army Ranger unit,” whispers Tom. “Hard-core stuff. One of those explosives in Iraq blew up a jeep he was in, sent him a hundred feet in the air. He had all sorts of gear on, so the only wound he got was by his right eye, but the landing paralyzed him. Incomplete SCI. A T nine, I think.”

  “Incomplete?” she asks. “Can he walk?”

  Tom shrugs. “A little. He’s made great progress. And he can handle motor functions with his feet.”

  They move closer and listen to the lieutenant talking.

  “…just another way of breaking our spirit. Once we’re dependent, we’re always dependent,” the lieutenant is saying. “Welfare, Social Security—the most deviously unhealthy programs the government could have created. We are puppets awaiting the day—be it old age or unemployment or sickness—that the government will take care of us. The biggest mistake we ever made was promising—”

  He notices Tom, stops talking.

  Tom gives him a theatrical, overdone salute.

  “Always with the jokes, Tommy,” says the lieutenant, the side of his mouth upturned. “And who might this young lady be?”

  “Lieutenant, this is Michelle, your new physical therapist.”

  “Call me Lew.” He turns in his wheelchair, using his joystick, so he is facing her. Whatever it is coming off him, it’s enough to kick her heart rate up a notch. “Let me guess—you’re a basketball player,” he says.

  Michelle tries not to frown at the reference to her height; men always seem to go right to that.

  “You’re gonna be nice to her, right, Lew?” Tom says.

  He fixes his eyes on her. “Tommy, I’m sure Michelle is capable of speaking for herself.”

  She feels a flutter in her heart and clears her throat. “Nice to meet you, Lew,” she says, surprised at the tremor in her voice.

  “See?” Not taking his eyes off her but still talking to Tom. “I knew she could speak.”

  “Lew is here midweek,” says Tom. “Most weekends, he’s traveling around the country as an activist and speaker.”

  Michelle nods, but she’s wilting under the glare of this man, whose eyes have still not left her. She feels something creep up her spine.

  Tom adds, “Yeah, Lew’s been to DC, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Charleston, Dallas. I think your last one was…New Orleans, right?”

  Lew’s eyes don’t move from Michelle, but a half smile slightly alters his expression. “That’s right, Tom.”

  “And you’re going to…where…Chicago next, you were saying before?”

  For a moment, Lew doesn’t answer, probing her eyes to the point of discomfort. “Yes,” he finally says, “Chicago is next on my schedule.”

  37

  THE SIGN on the large storefront window of Cash 4U Quick announces CASH NOW—NO CREDIT NECESSARY! in large, yellow, rounded letters, the kind one might see painted on the windshield of a used car for sale. The accompanying photograph shows an attractive woman in a revealingly snug shirt handing several twenty-dollar bills, fanned out, to a black man and a white woman, both of whom are smiling widely; this is clearly one of the most pleasant, stress-free business transactions in the history of commerce. We had no credit, but this lady gave us a bunch of cash! And she’s pretty too!

  It’s Friday night near six, when the business is set to close. Charlie will need to observe some things but he doesn’t want to stay any longer than necessary, for obvious reasons. The spot is a good one, a location that provides a fine view of the store across Broadway Street.

  In front of him is a Macy’s gift box with no top. Taped to it is a piece of brown cardboard, standing perpendicular to the box so passersby can easily see the words he has scrawled on it with a Sharpie: HOMELESS VET, PLEASE HELP.

  He looks the part—a Chicago Bears hat, tattered camouflage shirt, stained sweatpants, thick, dark, square glasses to protect against the rays of the setting sun but also giving the impression of blindness. Glasses that are almost, but not quite, large enough to cover the crescent-moon scar by his right eye.

  Broadway Street this far north is commercial and somewhat barren, but there’s enough going on—music stores, a car wash, drugstores, plus a Thai restaurant and a dive bar on the corner—to attract people in happy-hour mode and summer attire along with the joggers and dog-walkers and bicyclists.

  “You can’t be here! You got to go!”

  He turns, startled, though he shouldn’t be. If there is one thing he’s learned about the homeless—and he’s learned a lot, especially in LA, where he eliminated so many of them—it’s that they all have fiercely proprietary streaks.

  The man who approaches is African-American, tall, wearing a green baseball cap turned backward over his dreadlocks and a white long-sleeved shirt, ripped and stained, bearing a faded photo of some rock band in concert. Through the patchy beard on his face, two pale pink spots show on his cheeks—a skin disease or some accident. His eyes are bloodshot and wild with anger.

  “Can’t nobody be in this spot! This ain’t your spot! This is Mayday’s spot!” He thumps his hand against his chest, spit flying from his mouth; the putrid combination of body odor and booze and halitosis is so unbearable as to invite vomit.

  Under other circumstances, Charlie could neutralize this problem in a heartbeat. But there are people around, and he can’t afford to have an altercation.

  “Get on, now! This is Mayday’s spot!”

  Principles of deduction would indicate that this man answers to the name Mayday. “Hold on, my friend.” He raises his hand to the man, a peaceful gesture. “Are you…don’t tell me…Mayday?”

  “You got to go, okay, ’cause this is Mayday’s spot, always is Mayday’s spot—”

  “I understand. I’m in your spot. I’m terribly sorry.”

  The gentle way he speaks seems to disarm Mayday, who presumably is unaccustomed to civil interactions, especially in a turf battle, as this seems to be.

  He could point a gun at Mayday, just as a threat, but the last thing he needs is some wild report of a homeless man with a gun. It would bring half of the Chicago Police Department to him.

  “Mayday’s got Balmoral to Catalpa, okay,” says the man. “Balmoral to Catalpa.”

  “Could I make a deal with you, Mayday? Could I pay you cash for this spot, just for this evening?”

  Mayday draws back, wary. He points down at the sidewalk, his hand shaking for emphasis, his finger like a jackhammer busting pavement. “You got to go—”

  “How much do you want? Name your price.”

  This encounter is obviously playing out entirely differently than Mayday expected. His anger has subsided. He’s realizing that he’s going to get paid. His eyes widen at the prospect, but he doesn’t know how to respond.

  “Sixty dollars, Mayday?”

  It doesn’t make sense to Mayday that a fellow homeless man would be flush with money, but whether it makes sense to Mayday is not a concern for Charlie at the moment.

  It will be later.

  “Sixty bucks, okay,” says Mayday, embracing his unexpected windfall. “Sixty bucks right now!”

  “You drive a hard bargain, sir.”

  Mayday snatches the money offered. “Only for tonight,” he says, his chest puffed out. He walks away to enjoy his surprise bounty, to ply himself with booze or drugs or whatever his self-destructive habit of choice may be.<
br />
  Don’t stray far, Mayday.

  “Spare change,” Charlie says as people pass him along the sidewalk. He hardly looks at them, his eyes on the store across the street.

  At 6:22 p.m., the security guard, tall enough to play professional basketball but with a gut that hangs over his belt like a sack of potatoes, pulls the chain-link security fencing over the storefront window and locks it. Within half an hour, the two remaining employees at the loan company, a man in shirtsleeves and tie and a woman in a jacket and skirt, leave, turning off the outside lights.

  At 7:24 p.m., an armored truck pulls into the alley alongside the moneylending store. The security guard opens the side door, and the cash is transferred into the truck.

  At 8:04 p.m., the security guard calls it a night. The store is empty.

  The passersby are thinning out too, and Charlie’s stomach growls at the smell of Thai food down the street. That’s okay. He’s nearly done.

  It’s time to pay the moneylending store a visit.

  38

  THE ALLEY that the armored car occupied earlier, adjacent to the moneylending store, is appropriately disgusting and smells of hot, rancid trash. The alley door to the store is large and wide and presumably thick. On the door, in square red letters, are the words THERE IS NO CASH INSIDE THIS STORE AFTER BUSINESS HOURS.

  This is true enough, though there is a functioning gas line.

  The door has no knob. The only access to the store from the outside is via the keypad next to the door, which has a lid over it.

  From his bag, he removes a small, round, black device, a few centimeters wide, with the logo of a company called InterLock Secure. He wheels himself up to the alley wall, locks the wheelchair, and peels the back off the device to reveal an adhesive surface. He reaches up and sticks the device on the lid covering the alarm pad, careful to center it so it appears to be nothing but a harmless logo.

  An hour later, after he has settled himself up the street, no longer across from the moneylending store, the cleaning service arrives. The white truck parks by the curb. Two women get out of the truck and carry their supplies into the alley. He can’t see them, but he knows they type in the pass code to enter the store, because a few minutes later, the store’s interior lights up.

  Shouldn’t take them more than an hour. He unwraps a power bar and devours it.

  It takes them ninety minutes, actually, but then they are gone, the place locked up and dark again.

  He returns to the alley, motors his wheelchair up to the wall, reaches up to the alarm pad, and carefully peels off the InterLock Secure device. He flips it over and pushes the tiny button.

  The number 5424 smiles back at him.

  The street address for the company. Logical enough. An easy password to remember.

  “Until tomorrow,” he says.

  He returns to his van, parked several blocks away on a residential street that doesn’t have zone parking—a rare thing these days in the Windy City, apparently. He enters through the rear, the hydraulic ramp lowering for him, as always.

  The van’s spacious interior is less so tonight. The items he’s purchased are spread out carefully in the back with a tarp thrown over them.

  He pulls back the tarp and examines everything: the acetone and sulfuric acid, the bottles of hydrogen peroxide, the bags of salt, the test tubes and glass vials and thermometer, the wristwatch and batteries and wire, and, of course, the aluminum catering pan.

  Good enough. Saturday morning will be busy.

  Saturday night will be fun.

  But the remainder of tonight—Friday night—will be for his new friend Mayday.

  “Where did you run off to, old sport?” he whispers.

  39

  AT FIVE o’clock on Saturday night, the Cash 4U Quick moneylending store closes for the rest of the weekend.

  At 6:04 p.m., an armored truck pulls into the alley and removes the cash from the store.

  At 6:11 p.m., the security guard locks up the store and leaves for the night.

  At 9:26 p.m., the cleaning-service people finish their nightly housekeeping and leave through the side door.

  Near midnight, a Dodge Caravan pulls into the alley and goes up to the store’s side entrance. It leaves less than thirty minutes later.

  At 2:59 a.m., the wee hours of Sunday, the 5400 block of North Broadway Street is lazy and quiet. Everything is closed and shuttered and dark. Everyone is asleep.

  One minute later, the store bearing the name Cash 4U Quick explodes in a ball of fiery orange, glass shattering forward, the sides bursting outward.

  Above the moneylending store, the twelve-story building buckles and then collapses, its brick-and-mortar walls crumbling, floor after floor succumbing to gravity, crashing down one on top of the other, filling the air with black smoke and dust.

  Rescue workers—firefighters, paramedics, police—rush to the scene, the fire blazing, searing heat and toxic dark smoke. The building, what can be seen of it, is reduced to a pile of bricks in a hole in the ground.

  The first order of business is extinguishing the fire and rescuing victims.

  But the question amid the chaos, through the choking smoke and the blazing furnace that was the building, is this: Are there victims? It’s the middle of the night in a predominantly commercial area. Was the building empty? A patrol officer assigned to this precinct arrives and supplies the information.

  The bottom floor was a business, surely closed at this hour.

  Above it, a single-room-occupancy hotel, the Horizon Hotel for Men. A hotel for vagrants, for the homeless, subsidized housing—a single room to sleep in for eight dollars a night.

  It will be hours—hours spent extinguishing the fire, combing through the rubble to find bodies burned to ashes or crushed beyond recognition—before the extent of the disaster is known. The hotel’s twelve floors had a capacity of sixteen people per floor, and it was at full occupancy last night.

  The final body count, which includes the hotel’s meager staff, is 197.

  40

  I RUSH into the office, still foggy, my legs rubbery, my stomach hollow, operating on little sleep and no food, nothing but nervous energy.

  The bombing happened at four in the morning eastern daylight time, an hour after I’d gone to bed. I was awakened by the call ninety minutes later, after an agent in our Chicago office arrived at the scene and noted that the commercial establishment on the bottom floor of the building was a payday-loan store, one of the frequent targets of Citizen David’s ire.

  Bonita Sexton, who’s beaten me here, pops up from her cubicle.

  “Talk to me, Rabbit,” I say, dropping my bag and booting up my computer. “Was this David?”

  She looks terrible, but we all will today, having been roused from our beds at dawn. It’s more than that, though. She looks pained. And it’s not hard to see why. This was different. Up to now, Citizen David has taken great care to avoid casualties, to direct his violence at institutions, not people.

  “No way this was David.” The answer comes not from Rabbit, who seems stunned into silence, but from Eric Pullman—Pully—who appears above the wall of his cubicle, puffy-eyed, his hair wild. “He wouldn’t kill innocent people.”

  “Not intentionally,” says Rabbit. “But this…I don’t see how he could’ve thought the blast wouldn’t bring down the entire—” She pushes her hair back from her face. “Oh God.”

  “Do we even know it was intentional?” I ask. “Buildings blow up. Gas lines break. Come on you, you stupid thing!” I bark at my computer, which is still booting up.

  “We don’t know anything yet,” says Pully.

  “Okay, well, until further notice, we’re treating this as David. Start with the CCTV cameras, both of you. A ten-block radius. This is Chicago, so they’ll have plenty.”

  “Got it, boss.”

  I look at my watch. “I have to go see Dwight Ross,” I say.

  41

  SOME OF the team is already there when I arrive at
the conference room that serves as our war room for Citizen David; there are people on the phone barking commands, and a few are huddled by the television mounted on the wall. The TV has a live overhead shot of Chicago, where the crime scene looks like a gigantic fireplace, smoke still billowing out, fire trucks and rescue vehicles everywhere, water spewing into the charred remains, although, from what I can gather, the fire itself is extinguished.

  Dwight Ross, sleeves rolled up and no tie, looks haggard but as fierce as always. Near him is a woman dressed in a sharp pinstripe suit, her hair pulled back immaculately, looking better than anybody has a right to look after being summoned from bed before sunrise.

  Dwight, looking down at some notes, draws a line in the air between the two of us. “Emmy Dockery, Special Assistant Director Elizabeth Ashland.”

  She gives me a cool stare and a strong handshake. “Manhattan, huh?” she says to me. “Well, you were off by only eight hundred miles.”

  That didn’t take long, and it came from someone I’ve never met. Nice to meet you too. I look at Dwight, our fearless leader, who lifts his eyes from the paper he’s reading.

  “Arson?” I ask. “Confirmed? Couldn’t be, not this quickly.”

  Dwight removes his reading glasses and rubs his eyes. “Dockery, why are you always asking questions and then answering them yourself? No,” he says, “not confirmed. The scene is still hotter than Venus. They’re still pulling bodies out of the rubble. Our arson guys tell me it’s possible it could be a gas-line break, and then once there was the first explosion, more gas spilled on top of it—a series of explosions, ultimately, fuel on the fire.” He stretches. “It could be an accident. But not likely.”

  “I don’t think it was David,” I say. “Not his style.”

  “It’s exactly his style,” says Elizabeth Ashland. “One of these short-term loan companies. David hates them. He says they prey on the poor, charge outrageous interest—you’ve seen his rants.” She cocks her head. “So, tell me why this isn’t his style.”