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Am smiled and lifted off the car when she saw him coming. She ran to him, grabbed him up in a big bear hug, and kissed him on the cheek. “C’mere, Bod. You’re sprung, you idiot.”
Bodie leaned into the hug and squeezed his sister back. Am smelled like paint and plaster, tools of her artist trade. He wished he had a trade, something he was good at. He could have been a doctor or a dentist—or an accountant like . . .
Am gave him the once-over. It didn’t look like she appreciated what she saw. “Good God, you’re a bag of bones. Weren’t they feeding you?”
“It’s not a five-star resort,” he said, sliding into the passenger seat, the smell of expensive leather snaking up his nose. “What happened to that rattletrap Land Rover you had?”
“I sold a piece. Traded up. Hungry?”
“Sure. Congratulations, by the way. On the piece.”
“Thanks. Pizza?”
“Fine.”
She stared at him for a moment, like she was taking inventory. “And?”
He sighed. “And I gave them nothing.”
He didn’t mention his pass. Am didn’t need to know. He gave Westhaven’s gate a final look before Am sped away.
CHAPTER 4
The presence of a half dozen squad cars parked along Upper Wacker with their lights flashing had attracted quite a crowd of curious onlookers along the bridge at Michigan Avenue. Foster ignored the heckling and jeering directed at them as she and Lonergan descended the metal steps to the Riverwalk. A few people standing up top yelled out recriminations and taunts, calling for the city to “defund the police.” There’d been protests all summer, their intensity unabated in the fall. In fact, just the day before, a well-attended march had wended its way through the streets, snarling traffic as protesters made their way with banners waving and horns bleating from CPD headquarters to Daley Plaza. People were angry, frightened. It was better not to engage.
“Sure got here quick, didn’t ya?” an onlooker shouted down. “Wasted no time, matter of fact.”
Foster didn’t look up, feeling the sting of the snide remark about their response time here off the Mag Mile compared to what it was perceived to be in neighborhoods where complexions were darker and bank accounts less robust.
“Defund the police?” Lonergan muttered. “Can you believe that? Who’re they gonna call when some jackhole carjacks ’em? Streets and San?”
Foster flicked him a look. The partnership hadn’t started off great, and it had been a quiet ride over in the car. The less she said, the better, she figured, at least on day one.
“You got nothing to say to that shit?” He cocked his head toward the hecklers.
Foster swept her eyes along the bridge, watching the faces of those who considered her the enemy, knowing full well how the high-profile police shootings and racially tinged arrests had gotten them here, how they had galvanized the us-versus-them battle lines. Most of the heat she could understand; some she even endorsed. No good cop stood for a bad one. So why was Lonergan, the self-proclaimed “old-school cop,” taking the heckling as a personal affront? She had her theories.
“No,” she said, then walked away from him.
A dead body found on the Riverwalk was unusual. Occasionally, there would be a mugging reported down here, some tourist asked to “break yourself” and hand over their wallet by an opportunist who could smell the cluelessness on them. Or there would be a drowning—some blitzed, overgrown frat boy who had tottered out of a bar at 2:00 a.m. and into the river, too drunk to save himself.
The Mag Mile was just up a level, with its high-end shops dotted along the popular ten-block stretch of prime real estate—Nordstrom, the Apple Store, Saks, the iconic Water Tower farther north, and the pricey high-rise mall that sprouted up across the street from it. The exclusivity extended down here to the Riverwalk, too—the multimillion-dollar mixed-use project combining trendy riverside bars and restaurants with public art displays, pedestrian paths, and stone steps for lounging as the water taxis and tour boats slid past under the series of bascule bridges.
Foster eyed one of the tour boats moored beside a canvas overhang and signs announcing the hours of operation and cost per passenger. The promise of festiveness was incongruent to the grim reason they’d been called here. The yellow crime scene tape marking the outer perimeter had a female patrol officer standing at it, but Foster and Lonergan moved through, their stars hanging from chain necklaces around their necks. Foster’s attention slid to a bird-thin white woman in neon-pink running gear crying on a bench a few yards away. Another female PO stood beside her, trying to calm her down. Foster noted, not for the first time during her career, that women were often charged with these duties—guarding the perimeter and comforting frightened children and distraught women. “You gals are better at it,” she’d had a male sergeant once tell her. “It’s the estrogen.” She’d bristled, then, and though things were better today, there were still those bosses, predominantly male, who made it standard practice to consider gender when assigning tasks.
“Okay. What we got?” Lonergan dug into his pocket and plucked out a package of Juicy Fruit, then popped a stick into his mouth.
Foster watched as the PO straightened up and consulted her notebook. Foster’s eyes flicked over the gold nameplate on the officer’s uniform blouse. Hernandez. It didn’t appear Hernandez had been on the job long. She still looked fresh, clear eyed, eager. Foster knew it was only a matter of time before the streets changed that. The scarring and jadedness were accumulative, years in the making, and inevitable.
“Elyse Pratt, thirty-eight, lives across the river in Marina Towers. Out for her morning run. She’s running east at about zero seven thirty hours, clears the bridge, gets to about the kayak rental hut there when she sees the leaves piled up over by the fence, then the foot sticking out. She loses it and runs. That’s when she sees the young man with blood on his jacket. Her screaming got everyone’s attention up top there. When we arrived, she was a mess. We couldn’t get anything else out of her.”
The three of them glanced over at the weeping woman. “She been doing that the whole time?” Lonergan asked.
Hernandez nodded. “Not every day you jog up on a body.”
He frowned, looking around. “And the second body? Where’s it at?”
“He wasn’t dead, just out of it. Black male. No obvious signs of injury. We checked his pocket for ID, found his driver’s license. He’s Keith Ainsley, nineteen. We also found an NU student ID on him. There was a little blood on his jacket, like I said, but we didn’t find a weapon. He’s been transported to Northwestern. Where we found him is taped off, as you can see.”
“Drunk? High? What?” Lonergan asked.
“I didn’t smell alcohol on him, but we couldn’t rouse him. Could be a medical issue. Could be drugs. We don’t know.”
“Did Pratt call it in, Hernandez?” Foster asked.
The PO gave her a slight smile and a nod, her dark eyes meeting Foster’s. “She couldn’t manage it, she told us.” She referred again to her notes. “A passerby on the bridge, a William Sims, heard her and made the call at zero seven thirty-six. He reported he heard her yell, ‘They’re dead. They’re dead.’ He looked over the side, saw her on her knees, and called it in. Then, of course, that drew the crowd you see up there now. A couple others called in, too, after that, but we were already rolling by then.”
Foster looked up at the bridge. “Nobody saw anyone else but her? No one running away? Not Ainsley?”
Hernandez shook her head. “You can’t see the body from up there or where Ainsley was laying unless you’re halfway down the steps or standing down here on the path. All anyone saw was Pratt screaming her head off.”
Foster glanced over at the second cordon, the area at the base of the steps where Ainsley had been found. It was just a few yards from the spot where Pratt had discovered the pile of leaves. She nodded at the PO. “Thanks. We’ll be back to talk to her in a bit.”
Lonergan nodded. “Yeah, but see if you can get her to turn off all that drama before we get back, huh?”
He didn’t wait to see how his words landed or the puzzled look on Hernandez’s face. Foster sighed, nodded a thanks to the PO, and met up with him at the inner perimeter, the duo ducking under the red tape together to stand next to the leaves and the two male POs guarding them. Some of the leaves, Foster noticed, were wet with dew, while others were as desiccated as old bone. The foot was pale, slightly bluish where blood had settled, the victim’s toenail polish the only sign of vibrancy. It had been cold overnight, barely out of the forties. Foster wondered how long the body had been lying here out in the open, discarded like a tossed-away paper cup.
“You sure she’s dead and not sleeping one off like the other guy?” Lonergan asked the tall officer next to him.
Foster slipped into a pair of nitrile gloves, moving cautiously around the leaves, noticing where they’d been brushed away from the woman’s neck and chin to reveal long red hair. The responding officer, Giannis, according to his nameplate, had likely checked for a pulse and hadn’t found one. She was sure they wouldn’t have gotten called up if someone here had found signs of life. No one wanted to be that cop. Foster had an idea what was coming and didn’t have to wait long for it.
“Detective,” Giannis said, his voice as cold as a headstone in January. “We made sure she wasn’t just ‘sleeping one off’ before we elevated the call. Then we sealed off the area, as you see it now. The young man, who was breathing when we arrived, was taken for medical eval. The body we left in situ.”
Lonergan’s eyes widened. “In what?” He checked for the name. “Jaynus?”
Giannis stared at him straight faced. “Giannis. Gee-ah-nis. In situ, meaning we left the body where we found it, undisturbed, except for me checking for a pulse.”
Lonergan grumbled, then moved around the body. Foster hid her smile. The other POs stood close, doing the same. So it wasn’t just her, she thought. Lonergan was an equal-opportunity pain in the ass.
Foster squatted down and pressed her fingers lightly to the woman’s neck to confirm. She checked her eyes, frozen, fixed, the irises blue with a grayish tint. Brushing leaves gently away as though she were lightly pushing back a wayward strand of loose hair, she found the woman’s left wrist and gently felt for a pulse there, too, but again there was nothing. She was gone. But there was something there—a red ring, paint or something—circling the wrist. She didn’t dare explore further, not yet.
As the heels of her ankle boots sank into the damp grass, Foster brushed more leaves away, uncovering the woman as far as her chest. She appeared to be naked. Just past the corpse’s sternum, Foster saw the uneven edges of a bloody gash and was hit by the tang of fresh blood, like rusted pipe or wet coins, mixing with the musty earthiness off the river. She pulled her hand away.
For a moment, she simply squatted there, marking the woman’s passing and the loss of life. Then she stood up and backed away, mindful of where she placed her feet. She’d gone as far as she dared, just far enough to confirm that this was homicide, not a lie-down after a wild night. She looked over at Lonergan and then to the somber POs, including Giannis. “Okay. Let’s get the techs in here. Find out what we’ve got.”
This was going to be bad. She could feel it.
“Yep. This is bad.” The ME tech, Sal Rosales, looked grim as he knelt beside the body, gently flicking back the leaves with gloved fingers.
Foster stood well back along with Lonergan and the POs, now playing the part of observers. The case started here with Rosales. He would confirm manner of death, though it only took a single look to venture a guess. An approximate time of death would also be important. It would establish their timeline. The rest she and Lonergan and the team would have to work out with shoe leather and experience over countless sleepless nights. Foster watched as Rosales went in for the body temp, then she turned away to glance up at the bridge at the people gawking, their phones recording Lord knew what. What was the communal fascination with violent death? What did they gain from watching it, filming it? Maybe if they saw the body from down here instead of up there, where they were safe and removed, they’d think differently. This woman, whoever she was, had belonged to someone. Someone would mourn her, miss her.
The evidence tech moved around, photographing the scene, circling the grim tableau to document every angle, every bit of whatever had been left behind. A solemn wind blew through as Foster listened to the lap of the river against the smelly bank. The sound of the water was a reminder that rivers never stopped, wind never ceased, and despite this horror or the next, no matter who died or when, the sun would always rise and set. Foster turned back to Rosales and watched as he did what he needed to do for someone’s daughter, sister, friend, lover.
A half hour went by as they watched the tech ballet take photos, measurements, and notes. Finally, Rosales’s head popped up. “These wounds are deep. Jagged edges to the cuts. You’re looking for a serrated knife. Fairly big. Hunting variety. Did they find one?”
“No,” Foster said.
“It’s likely in the drink. Perfect dump site,” Lonergan said. “He killed her and tossed it right in. Now we gotta get divers out. First killer I ever had, though, who does it, then lays down and takes a nap. How about you, Foster?”
She slid him a look out of the corner of her eye. “I’ll wait and see before I start calling people killers.”
Lonergan grinned. “One of those cautious types bent on takin’ the long way home, huh?”
She moved carefully around the body, taking another look from all angles. “It’s often the safest route.”
“Great. Griffin puts me with an i dotter.”
“I also cross every t,” she shot back. “Lucky you.”
It took more than two hours before Rosales was ready with preliminary findings. “Based on body temp and conditions, I’d put time of death somewhere between midnight and three a.m. Can’t be more exact until I take her in,” he said. “White, female, twenty or so, as you can see. Some of the knife strikes are very deep. I’d say that’s a lot of meanness.” He glanced over at Foster. “Want to step closer? Get a better look at what I’m talking about?” He slid Lonergan a look. “You too. You might want to brace for it. She’s pretty sliced up.”
Lonergan moved forward while Foster took another moment or two to prepare. “I’ve seen dead bodies before,” he said. “What kind of greenhorn do you . . . holy shit!”
Foster eased forward again, standing far more calmly than Lonergan had. The woman’s chest and abdominal cavities had been torn open, her organs and intestines spilled out, the guts tumbling off onto the grass beside her like a string of sausages cascading off a butcher’s counter.
“Told you,” Rosales said. “Once I got all the leaves off, I could see what I was dealing with. Massive blood loss. Won’t know which cut was the fatal one until Grant has her on her table.”
Lonergan rolled his eyes at the mention of the ME. “Of course not.”
For a moment, Foster’s mind sputtered as she willed herself to take it all in and not turn away. She had no idea how many seconds passed before her brain reset and her mind cleared. It was then that she noticed the red lines drawn around the young woman’s ankles, similar to the red ring around her left wrist she’d discovered earlier. She squatted down beside Rosales, recognizing now a familiar waxy smell.
“Lipstick.” She looked around for the photographer to make sure she’d gotten close-ups of the rings. She had.
Lonergan stood over her shoulder. “Lipstick? What’s that about?”
She turned to look for Giannis. “Nobody’s found her clothes, a bag?”
Giannis shook his head. “Nothing like that. We’re still looking, though.”
She stood and moved back, sweeping her eyes along the pedestrian path the cops had closed off from foot passage east and west, then across to the north side of the river, where restaurants and bars faced the south bank where they stood. Foster wondered if their victim had come out of one of the bars there.
“We’ll wrap up now, transport her,” Rosales said. “We’ll know more later.”
“Thanks,” Foster said. “Appreciate it.”
She took a small flashlight out of her bag and shone it along the grass where the body lay. “No defensive wounds. No drag marks, so she fell here or was placed.” She turned to Lonergan. “The leaves have to be from someplace else.”
“Yeah,” Lonergan said. “These are some puny trees. For show, nothin’ else. No way they account for the pile used to cover her up. So where’d he get ’em?”
Foster looked up, remembering that all crime scenes were three dimensional. Above her the bridge loomed, the hecklers still around. She turned and checked the sidewalk along Upper Wacker, but there were only uniforms up there now, keeping foot traffic moving.
She stepped onto the path, her heels slightly muddy from the spongy grass and dirt. She noticed the shoes of the others—Rosales, Lonergan, the POs—were all in the same condition. Foster found Giannis. “Did you notice if there were cuts to Ainsley’s hands?” she asked him. “Blood anywhere else besides the spot on his jacket? Bruises to his face, maybe?”
Giannis consulted his notes. “Ah, he looked fine.” She watched as he flipped through pages, but she had a feeling he wouldn’t find a notation there. In the rush to wake Ainsley up and ID him, they’d likely failed to notice anything but him lying there and the blood on him. “No,” he said, definitively.
She thanked him and turned back to the body, Rosales, and the techs.
“We sent a tech to the hospital for all that,” Rosales said. “You two good for now? We need to finish up.”
Foster and Lonergan moved back, and Lonergan snapped his fingers at the closest officer. “Clear that friggin’ bridge? If they want to heckle, let ’em do it down at the superintendent’s office.” He turned to Foster. “My money’s on the drunk guy. Something sets him off, and she’s the first person he comes across. Wrong place, wrong time for her.”
