“I thought I saw your face on the news. If you’re involved in a murder investigation, that isn’t the most stable leadership for girls who live in high-risk neighborhoods.”
“Seeing Ms. Fouchard rise above that level of trauma will be a great leadership example for the girls,” I butted in. “This is V.I. Warshawski; I’m Ms. Fouchard’s lawyer and I’ll be glad to meet with you to discuss the situation. Just give me your address and I can be there in half an hour.”
There was a pause on the other end and then a grudging, oh, very well, as long as Bernie showed up tomorrow.
Bernie made a face as the call shut down. “Really, what she knows is that no one else will go to Humboldt Park for the tiny money this program pays me.”
16
Found?
The iron gates in front of the parking lot at Forty-seventh Street were padlocked, with yellow crime scene tape draped lavishly around the entrance. A couple of squad cars sat in the lot, inhabitants chatting with each other through the open windows.
I took side streets and parked west of the train tracks at Forty-first. The streets here rose steeply above the tracks. A crumbling limestone wall was supposed to keep people from tumbling onto the trains below. Standing there, I could see the landscape laid out in strips: first four sets of tracks, then the narrow wildlife park, the wide lanes of Lake Shore Drive, and beyond them the lake, glittering under the sun, begging me to stop detecting and start swimming.
Directly below me, plants had been bulldozed to create a staging area for construction refuse and equipment. A steam shovel sat in the middle of a gravel and dirt clearing, broken concrete, rebar, and ordinary dirt piled behind it. A freight train was lumbering past, filled with the oil tankers we’ve been told are banned from heavily populated areas.
It was more fun to watch the lakefront and the beach. From this perspective it looked as though everyone was having a good time, frisking with dogs, with children, with beach balls and volleyballs. On Olympus, you don’t hear the quarrels.
I didn’t know if the police had searched for a weapon this far north, but they didn’t have any presence here. I went back to my car for my day pack, then scrambled down the hillside. I waited as the long line of freight cars rumbled by, waited for a little commuter train to zip north, then picked my way across the rails to the park.
Past the construction area, the park continued north in a halfhearted way until it ran into the giant parking lot that served the McCormick Place Convention center. Near the north end I came on a set of wicker huts and benches. A sign told me this was one of the “gathering places” in the park, where local artists had been invited to create installations. A trio of cyclists had stopped there to repair a wheel.
I looked in the huts but didn’t see anything—like Lydia, or Coop, or a murder weapon. I showed the cyclists the photo of Coop on my phone, but they didn’t recognize him. As I worked my way south, I checked around the dirt mounds and other rubble in the construction area. There was plenty of rusting metal, but nothing with the highly polished finish the weapon supposedly had.
I didn’t really expect to find the weapon, but I hoped for a trace of Coop and his dog Bear. They were so liable to show up around any excitement in the park that I wondered if he might have a campsite hidden in the bushes.
The day was hot. At the north end of the park, little restoration planting had been done and most of the ground cover was the kind of tough scraggly weed that attracts ugly biting insects. I’d brought a water bottle but had worn only a baseball cap, not a hat with a protective brim. Light glinting from the windshields of passing cars on the Drive made my eyes ache.
I found a number of hidey-holes in the shrubbery where people had staked a claim. The hideouts were filled with blankets and old shopping carts, Styrofoam containers holding half-eaten food, shaving supplies, one with five cartons of tampons. Most were empty, the inhabitants off doing their daily routines, whatever those were. I stumbled on a sleeping man with a large shepherd, who growled and flicked his tail when I came too close.
I hadn’t brought gloves with me. I didn’t want to touch the stashes I came on with my bare hands, but I poked at them cautiously.
At one point, I passed a clutch of birders. They were happy to chat but they didn’t recognize the photo of Coop on my phone. The bright sun made it hard to see the screen, but even tenting it under our hats didn’t produce oohs of recognition. The birders also hadn’t heard about the murder in the park—they’d wondered why the cops had the south end cordoned off, but they hadn’t asked, just walked along the shoulder of the Drive and come into the park through the brush.
A quartet of German tourists showed up as I was talking to the birders: they were walking the eight miles from the Loop to the University of Chicago campus and seemed undaunted by the heat, the insects, and the possibility of a killer in the weeds—indeed, they seemed to think that killers were a routine part of Chicago life, almost a tourist attraction.
I left the two groups chatting about crime, restaurants in the area, and the American or German names of the birds flitting through the high grasses.
Farther south, prairie grasses, milkweed, and other new plantings made the landscape less grim. The park widened. I crisscrossed it from train embankment to road, swatting at flies and mosquitoes, not seeing anything that looked more out of place than the usual array of cigarette butts, empty snack bags and bottles, until I came on a place on the embankment where the grasses and bushes were mashed down and ringed with crime-scene banners.
Flies were sucking greedily at a dark blotch among the leaves and grass stems. The remnants of Leo’s blood and brains. Bernie had seen Leo lying here, the terrible sight of blood and splintered bone and brain, just as Lydia had seen Hector. You never put that vision behind you; I hoped, in time, it would stop being the central image in Bernie’s mind. I was less optimistic for Lydia.
Broken grasses fanning out from the murder spot showed the search area. I was surprised that the police hadn’t stationed an officer to protect the crime scene, but maybe, even though they’d been searching at night, aided only by arc lamps, they’d found everything they needed. Besides, unless Leo’s phone showed up, or some other concrete evidence, finding the killer would be almost impossible.
The broken grasses went all the way up the embankment. The techs probably searched the tracks if they’d climbed this far, but they’d been searching at night. I climbed the hillock to the tracks, following the trail left by the scene of crime team.
Every time a chipmunk ran through the undergrowth, the skin on my back prickled: I kept sensing someone behind me swinging a smooth blunt instrument, one that was missing microscopic paint chips. I would twirl around, but never saw anyone behind me.
The limestone wall I’d seen at Forty-first Street continued down here. It wasn’t much of a wall anymore—after a hundred and fifty years or so of Chicago winters and no maintenance, large sections had collapsed. When I clambered over the tumbledown stones, I loosed a small avalanche of dirt.
I stayed close to the wall, despite the rough terrain, not trusting my balance if another freight roared along. Scrubby trees grew along both sides of the wall, giving enough shade to keep the worst of the sun at bay. The birds kept up a bright chirping as I moved along. The insects, too, buzzed happily as they helped themselves to my blood.