Another Dead Teenager Read online

  Turner, Fenwick, a local beat cop, the medical examiner, and two members of the Crime Lab held a conference next to the broken-out window of the room where they’d found the body.

  What they had so far was evidence of only one killer. The murder had taken place in this room. More lab tests were necessary to check for traces of sexual assault; the victim had fought against his bonds.

  The M.E. said to Turner, “You were right about the funny angle of some of the wounds. Kid was shot up the ass at least twice. Bullets came up and out.” He nodded at the Crime Lab tech. “Fluid tests will tell us a lot. Killer kept shooting him after he was dead.”

  Turner said, “So somehow the killer gets the drop on an athletic teenager and ties him up. Chooses this place because it’s isolated and abandoned so he won’t be disturbed. Obviously picked out carefully.”

  “Homeless and gangs don’t usually hang out in here,” the local uniformed patrolman said. “It’s too ruined even for them.”

  Turner said, “From the looks of this I’d say we’ve got a very angry person who is still able to plan extremely carefully.”

  Heads nodded.

  The patrolman said, “I inventoried everything in the room. The kid’s underwear is missing. I got jeans, socks, shoes, sweatshirt, undershirt, coat, but no shorts.”

  “Gosh, sounds like a clue to me,” Fenwick said.

  “Footprints you saw were definitely from the cop who identified him.”

  “Figures,” Fenwick said.

  “Who’s the security firm for this place?” Turner asked.

  The patrolman said, “Save-Our-Souls.”

  They all chuckled. Save-Our-Souls was their nickname for Illinois Safe Serve, the most notoriously useless security company in the area. Reputedly they hired retired suburban cops who were past the retirement age of any police department within hundreds of miles. Cop lore in the city had it that they gave their guards one bullet for their guns: If they had any trouble, they were supposed to shoot themselves. They were also the cheapest outfit in the city. Your insurance company, assuming you had one for some of these hulks, would see this wonderful firm on paper and assume you were a responsible landlord.

  “We’ll have to talk to the Kenitkamette police and find out where this kid was supposed to be,” Fenwick said.

  “Somebody was going to call,” the patrolman said.

  “I’ll check in a minute,” Turner said.

  “We’ll have to examine the outside of the building before we leave,” Fenwick said. “We can probably get a couple of uniformed cops to go over it inch by inch.”

  “I don’t envy you guys on this one,” the M.E. said. “The dad was famous. So was the kid. You’ll have people oozing out of the woodwork trying to ‘help.’ Ninety-nine point nine percent won’t know shit.”

  “Maybe we’ll even get a task force,” Fenwick said.

  “Gosh, shucks, I’m all excited,” Turner said. He sighed. “I better go find that uniform with the report from Kenitkamette.”

  Turner reentered the room ten minutes later. “We have another call.”

  “Tell them we’re going to interview the parents,” Fenwick said. “They need to find somebody else.”

  “It’s about the other kid. The one that was with Jake Goldstein.”

  “He’s not sobbing his eyes out and confessing to murder, is he?” Fenwick asked.

  “Not unless he’s doing it from some kind of afterlife. They found him on the bottom level of the Columbus Drive parking garage. Single bullet hole through the head.”

  Fenwick glanced back at the shredded corpse in the room. “Killer used two different methods.”

  “Not that different,” Turner said. “Gun in both cases. Maybe our killer just used one bullet there, but he had more time here. Or maybe the Douglas kid killed his buddy and then decided to blow himself away in an inconvenient parking garage.”

  “Or,” Fenwick said, “a third person, maybe more, that we don’t know about was on the scene, and killed them in different locations for obscure mystical reasons.”

  “Mystical?”

  “It’s my day of the month to be philosophical.”

  “I’ve been holding my breath for this moment.”

  “Why were they in town?”

  “Bears game last night.”

  “Never understood that Thursday night shit.”

  “One of those cable television deals. Had them for a couple years now.”

  Fenwick glanced back at the room. “I guess we’ll know more at the other scene.”

  In the Chicago Police Department, whoever got the first call on a case investigated all subsequent crimes discovered that had connection to the first. That meant Turner and Fenwick had another body. Not a chance they’d be home before midnight.

  The uniform who had met them at the front door entered the room. “You guys might need to look at this place we found.”

  They followed him out the door.

  “I shouldn’t have snapped at you earlier,” Fenwick said to the young cop. “Sorry.”

  The uniform shrugged.

  Up a flight of stairs to the third floor at the far end of a hall, they found a room slightly smaller than the one with the dead body. The young cop pointed at a tattered sleeping bag, six pop cans, and boxes and wrappers for McDonald’s burgers and French fries.

  “What is this shit?” Fenwick asked. “Somebody said gangs and the homeless didn’t show up here.”

  “Kids,” the patrolman said. “Maybe the ones who found the body.”

  “Sweep it for everything, bag it all, and save it,” Turner said. “Better have all the prints taken. Any other signs of habitation in the building?”

  “This is all we found so far. We’re taking a second look.”

  Before they got in their car, they walked slowly around the north, west, and south sides of the building. The fourth side formed part of the retaining wall for the Chicago River.

  “Must have parked somewhere,” Fenwick said. “Unless they drove up in a boat.”

  They craned their necks around the northeast corner of the building. The wall of the factory plunged straight down into the river. What might at one time have been a loading dock had long since been bricked over.

  “No place to tie up or get in,” Turner said.

  The north side of the building had the entrance Turner and Fenwick had used. Rusting wire mesh covered the windows on the ground floor that faced Lumber Street on the west side of the building. A gangway barely wide enough for a person to walk through ran along half of the south side of the building. The other half faced a field overgrown with years of debris, weeds, and bushes.

  “Hard to get in anywhere back here,” Turner said.

  “Stopping in front risks somebody driving by on the street.”

  They scrambled up the cracked concrete of the loading dock, which ran for the same length the field did. Any of several broken doors and smashed windows could have given the killer access.

  “Better get all these dusted,” Fenwick said.

  “Hard to drag a squirming kid through here,” Turner said.

  “Must have done something. Let’s get some uniforms to go over every inch of this.”

  Fenwick didn’t even bother trying to take surface streets across the Loop. It was after four and it could take them over an hour to make a ten-minute trip through the rush-hour crush. Fenwick eased down Wells Street and took the cutoff to Lower Wacker Drive. They sped quickly along the road which ran between the Chicago River and the bottoms of decrepit buildings, whose nooks, crannies, and shadows housed a large portion of homeless hunkering down against the coming winter.

  The group of people at the Wacker Drive entrance to the parking garage parted slowly to let the unmarked police car inch its way forward. While Fenwick waited for a uniformed male cop to unhook the Police Crime Scene tape, a young female cop leaned in the passenger-side window next to Turner and said, “Down on level three.”

  The tires squealed
as Fenwick raced through the turns.

  “Body’s not going anywhere,” Turner said.

  Fenwick grunted.

  On level three a small crowd of civilians stood near the lighted cashier’s booth. A uniformed cop waved them over. He pointed around a wall that divided the sections of the garage. “That way.”

  “Who’s down there?” Fenwick asked.

  “Couple guys from Eleventh and State.”

  “Double fuck,” Fenwick said.

  Turner saw a knot of police brass and a few uniformed cops gathered about fifty feet beyond the curve to the next level. Among them Turner recognized the director of Research and Development, the commander of the Communication Division, and the deputy superintendent of Technical Services. They slouched and stared at something on the far side of a Chevrolet conversion van. They weren’t going to contribute anything to the investigation. They were only deskbound cops come to gawk at the famous dead.

  Keeping in mind Fenwick’s dislike for brass and his ability to shoot his mouth off at the wrong moment, Turner made sure he got to the scene before Fenwick could make insistent comments about them butting out. “Could you all step over here for a minute?” Turner asked. “We need to make a few sketches.”

  The brass ambled a few feet away. Making preliminary sketches was a good excuse to get the brass to move and better than Fenwick bellowing at them to move their butts.

  The Columbus Drive underground garage had only recently opened. The lines marking the parking spaces still gleamed bright yellow in their newness. The gray cinder blocks in their thousands held up tons of darker gray poured concrete. The neon lights interrupted and intruded upon the shadows, but seemed more to be in an armed truce with the darkness than conquering the night.

  The body lay between the front of the van and the wall. Shadows hid nearly everything but the outline of a human form. Turner could barely make out the gaping hole in the left side of Frank Douglas’s head. A shaft of light a few feet behind and above caught smears of blood and brains on the cement wall behind him. The feeble light managed to catch the white of the lifeless eyes. Even after so many years on the job, the open, staring eyes of death caused Turner to pause.

  Two

  Twenty years earlier Frank Douglas’s dad, Andy, had won gold medals in track and field at the Olympics. Turner recalled reading that Frank, eagerly following in his father’s footsteps, won three heats at the state track meet late last spring.

  Turner motioned over a blue-uniformed cop. “Who found him?”

  “I did.” He was overweight, sporting a graying mustache and the hairiest knuckles Turner ever saw.

  “What happened?”

  “Didn’t see a gun. Didn’t hear anything. Drove down here for a routine check. This underground parking garage is less than a month old and seldom filled. The van could have been here all night.”

  Turner glanced around the deserted area of the parking garage. Maybe the cop came down for a quick nap.

  “Body wasn’t visible from any angle. I saw the vehicle sitting by itself when I pulled through first thing this morning. Couple rumors around that drug guys use this area for deals now and then. I haven’t seen any. When the van hadn’t moved by this afternoon, I called it in and checked it out.”

  “How’d you know to have someone contact us?”

  The overweight cop said, “It’s been on the police radio about the Goldstein kid and that his buddy was missing.”

  “That tears it,” Fenwick said. “One of the overzealous cops at the first scene decided to make a friend of a reporter. You can bet one of them already told the parents. Goddamn reporters suck on those scanners like a teenage boy on his first tit. Someone wanted to be able to tell the parents the bad news and get the scoop of a lifetime.”

  “That’s how they found out about the van,” the blue-uniformed cop said. “That was on the radio, too.”

  “Glad somebody told us,” Fenwick said.

  “Do you think I’ll get to meet Coach Goldstein?” the cop asked.

  Turner and Fenwick assigned him to get a list of all the police personnel who were there, when they got there, and who called them. In short order the Crime Lab van pulled up and the medical examiner put in his appearance.

  A whole lot of police personnel, some the same as on Lumber Street, showed up to perform their ritual dance at a death scene. Turner ordered every inch of pavement on the entire floor of this level of the parking garage vacuumed on the off-chance a microscopic piece of the criminal had been left behind. The youngest guy on the Crime Lab van groaned as he started the Augean task.

  In his notebook Turner began drawing the crime scene, placement of the body, the van, and any other detail he observed.

  They took pictures. Every inch of the interior and exterior of the van was dusted for fingerprints. After the fingerprinting and vacuuming of the van were done, Turner and Fenwick turned every knob, probed every crevice, opened, looked under, and did everything short of rip up the seat cushions, which might be done later after their exterior was examined for microscopic traces of anyone who might have been in the van.

  They found and catalogued a set of golf clubs missing the putter, a Chicago Cubs baseball hat, three different brands of tennis racquets, the spare tire and equipment for changing it, a condom still in its foil packet stuck in the folds of the back seat, but no gun and no hint about the murderer or why these boys died.

  Three hours later Turner, Fenwick, and the forensic experts, the M.E., and members of the Crime Lab huddled twenty feet from the van.

  “What’ve we got for sure?” Fenwick asked.

  The M.E. said, “Kid got blasted where he fell. Probably dead before he hit the pavement. No blood inside the van. Won’t know if the other kid’s blood was here until we get test results back, but my opinion is, we won’t find any of Goldstein’s. This blood came from this kid. Probably the same caliber of gun both places—tests will tell us for sure.”

  “No sign of a struggle here,” Fenwick said. “Could this one have killed the other and then come back here and shot himself?”

  Turner asked, “If they parked here for the game, why come back here to off yourself, and if he killed himself, where’s the gun?”

  A young Crime Lab tech said, “Gun could have been stolen. Somebody homeless, gangbanger, whatever, sees it, takes it. Free gun that can’t be traced to the taker.”

  “We’ll have to find if they had access to guns,” Turner said.

  The M.E. said, “Can’t rule out homicide and then suicide, but do you really believe a bum-takes-the-gun deal here?”

  “I don’t,” Fenwick said. “Wallet with fifty bucks in this kid’s back pocket. Rolex still on his wrist. Didn’t rob the other kid, either. I think it’s a double murder.”

  Heads nodded.

  “Mob hit, drugs?” the Crime Lab tech asked.

  Turner said, “They’ll check the van for traces of commonly controlled substances. No booze around. We didn’t find anything suspicious in the van.”

  Another Crime Lab tech opined, “Kids this age getting shot. Gotta be drugs or gangs.”

  “Kids like this don’t do drugs.”

  They all stared at the youthful member of the Crime Lab unit who had made this comment. “What’d I say? These guys were athletes. Their dads are famous.”

  “Who is this guy?” Fenwick asked. “You take stupid pills or does it come naturally?”

  The guy turned red.

  The M.E. said, “Is this the if-you’re-an-athlete-you’re-a-saint theory of police work?”

  “Why don’t you go help your buddy vacuum?” Fenwick said.

  The young guy shuffled off.

  Turner said, “Whoever shot the Goldstein kid was really angry. You don’t fire that many shots into somebody unless you’re completely out of control. This one looks like it might have been impulse. One shot, real quick, get out. Lots of danger of somebody driving through.”

  “Why these kids?” Fenwick asked. No one had a
n answer, but often major hints to the killer came from figuring out why he or she had picked these victims.

  “We’ve got to move on talking to the parents,” Turner said. The meeting broke up.

  The blue-uniformed cop they’d met on first entering this level gave them the paperwork he’d compiled. “You going to meet the coach?”

  Turner nodded.

  “I heard from one of the reporters upstairs. The families know their kids are dead,” the cop said. “Reporters told them. Both sets of parents are at the Goldsteins waiting for news. Cops from Kenitkamette are at the house with them now. Think it’s the Chief of Police. Said they’d wait for you.”

  “How do they know all this?” Fenwick asked.

  “Cops called down here. Everybody wants to be part of this,” the blue-uniformed cop said. “This is one of the biggest murders ever in Chicago.”

  “How lucky for us,” Fenwick said.

  It was just after eight when Turner and Fenwick started for Kenitkamette to talk to the parents. They took the newly reconstructed Kennedy Expressway to the Edens. Rush hour was over, but Fenwick managed to use most of his kamikaze tactics on the way up. They exited east on Lake Cook Road and picked up Sheridan Road into the exclusive North Shore suburbs. In Kenitkamette no home cost less than five hundred thousand to build and no lot was less than ten acres.

  Using their Rand McNally Chicago & Vicinity 6 County Street Finder, they located the Goldsteins’ address at the end of a long, winding drive called Crescent Lane. The two Chicago cops took in the circular drive with a Rolls-Royce and a Bentley parked amid a scattering of Kenitkamette police cars.

  Fenwick glanced at the vast expanse of the house behind a porticoed front porch that ran the length of the building. “My entire year’s salary couldn’t pay for this front porch or for me to live on it,” he said.

  “They’ll let us walk on it,” Turner said.

  A butler with wispy gray hair and a face crisscrossed with age lines opened the door before they could knock. He ushered them silently down a hall with a pale purple marble floor adorned only with three chairs set equidistant from each other. Turner had never seen the like. One chair was made of horseshoes and a tractor seat, another of black steel tubing and wood, and a third was adorned with kitchen utensils.