Dante's Wood Read online

  Many hours after I had trashed my bedroom I found myself hugging my knees on the floor of my outdoor terrace, still in my pajamas. There was a gauze bandage pulled tightly around my lower left arm and an old blanket around my shoulders. A bottle of bourbon lay on its side nearby, nearly empty. I vaguely recalled tugging it open with my teeth when I had started drinking late in the morning. My feet were bare and there was a dense fog rolling in from the Lake, pressing against my naked skin like a wet cloth. I was shaking from the damp and the booze and my insides felt as though they had been scoured, wiped clean of everything except a dull, steady ache in the chest.

  I know it’s been said the unexamined life isn’t worth living, but that day I would have given anything to forget mine. For the second time in my sorry existence I had failed someone who was counting on me, an innocent entrusted to my safekeeping, whether I welcomed it or not. I hadn’t just broken my Hippocratic Oath, I had annihilated it. First Jack, then Charlie . . . I had let harm come to both, and all because of my lies to myself. Lies that had kept me from ending my marriage to Annie when it was so clearly a failure. Lies that had me thinking I could still do my job after Jack’s death finally caught up with me. Lies that had me jumping to meet Di Marco’s challenge when I had no business playing courtroom wizard. Lies that, if you went back far enough, had stopped me from returning my father’s flawed love.

  And then there was the biggest lie of them all.

  I couldn’t keep the lies up anymore.

  Except as they might be needed to save Charlie.

  Ten

  The next morning I woke at dawn and cleared my head with two hours of riding and a long, scalding shower. If I’d been a real tough-guy detective, I would have followed this with fried green tomatoes and a steak from the meat keeper, washed down by a pot of strong black coffee. But I’d stopped drinking coffee after medical school and meat always spoils in my refrigerator, so I contented myself with tea, some heart-healthy cereal, and a banana that didn’t leak when I squeezed it. After breakfast I phoned Yelena and asked her to cancel my appointments for the day. Then I dressed and packed a small backpack with a spare cane and my notetaker, a Braille PDA with wireless capability that I’d nicknamed my Blindberry. By 9:00 a.m. I was in the elevator going down with one of my building’s paid dog walkers. One of her charges wrapped his leash around my ankles, but I curbed my hostility and merely wished her a good day.

  Down on the street, I hailed a cab and asked to be taken to the station house where Detective O’Leary worked. When we arrived I asked the driver for directions to the front door. “Right there, bud,” he said, adding by way of elaboration, “in front.” I was weary of explaining that if I was asking for directions to the door it must mean I couldn’t see where he was pointing, so I just paid the fare and went out to map the terrain on my own. There were several police cruisers with honking radios in my way, but I banged through a crevice between them, found the sidewalk, and continued up half a dozen steps. A throng of people were milling around at the top. I waited for things to clear before squeezing through the revolving door.

  Inside a woman was shouting over the din of ringing phones and clacking keyboards. “You muthafuckas! I gotta see my man right now. He holdin’ my check. I got babies to feed.”

  Someone replied, “Ma’am, his lawyer’s on the way. That’s all I can say to you.”

  “His lawyer? Hah! That sonafabitch put a lien on us.”

  The shouting went on, but at least it told me where the reception desk was. I walked over until my cane hit something solid, and said, “Can someone help me?”

  No one answered. I repeated my request, a little louder this time.

  “Kelly,” a gruff voice said, “you’re on Human Affairs duty today. Help out the man in the shades, will you?” The man identified as Kelly came over and asked me what I needed.

  “I’d like to see Detective O’Leary,” I said.

  “You got an appointment with him?”

  “No,” I said. “But it’s urgent.”

  “How urgent?”

  “Well, let me see. A grave injustice has been committed and an innocent man’s life hangs in the balance. Is that good enough for you?”

  “A wiseass,” Kelly commented. “You really blind?”

  “No, I’m actually a sociologist conducting field research into attitudes toward the disabled.” I lifted my cane. “This is just something I carry around in case I get a sudden urge to shoot a game of pool.”

  “Plenty of that round the corner, though I wouldn’t advise you to go in there without a long session in Tancun. What’re you doing in this neighborhood anyway? You gotta death wish?”

  “Like I said, I’m here to see Detective O’Leary.”

  “Well, he’s not in. Went out a while back.”

  “When do you expect him to return?”

  “Got me. See, part of being a detective is the hours ain’t regular. If you’d phoned ahead, maybe his personal assistant could have told you that.”

  “Is it OK if I wait for him?”

  “Suit yourself. The guest suite’s over there.”

  I followed the sounds coming from the woman who’d been shouting earlier, who was now snuffling and wheezing on a bench to the left of the door.

  “You sit down right here, honey,” she said when I came up.

  “You crazy, lady?” a basso voice next to her said. “There ain’t enough room on this bench for a jailhouse shiv.”

  “Enough room for your nigger ass. Either move or get up. Can’t you see this man is blind?”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “If there’s no place for me, I can stand.”

  But my new friend was not to be denied. I heard sounds of shoving and grumbling before I was pulled down onto the seat.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, when I was at last squeezed into the six-inch space next to her.

  “Mark. Yours?”

  “Letitia. Letitia Miller. Glad to make your acquaintance.”

  We shook hands. Letitia’s was soft and well-padded, as was her thigh, which was overflowing mine on the hard wooden seating.

  “What you here for?”

  “My dog’s been stolen,” I said.

  “Your dog! You hear that?” she asked our companions on the bench. “Somebody stole this man’s dog. Ain’t no civility in the world no more. He gotta name, this dog?” she asked me kindly.

  “Trigger,” I said.

  “Trigger,” she repeated. “I like that. Why you name him that?”

  “On account of his temper. He’s a pit bull.”

  “You gotta pit bull to take you around? Well I never! But I s’pose a body like you needs protection.”

  I was about to remark that I also had a guide horse named Silver, when I remembered one of my resolutions from the night before. “Forgive me, Ms. Miller,” I said. “I was just pulling your leg. I’m here about a friend. What about you?”

  I listened patiently while Letitia told me her life story. How she’d become pregnant at fifteen by a guy who was now in Pontiac doing twenty-five to life for aggravated assault. How his knack for landing in trouble had been passed on to their son, who was now doing a similar spell in the same institution. How this had left Letitia in charge of an extended family consisting of more sons and daughters by various fathers and a flock of grandchildren. How her current beau had just been picked up for trying to fence a carload of stolen auto parts. Letitia was hopping mad about this, having told him she wanted no more truck with the criminal element in her home. I clucked and sympathized at all the right points, wondering when the cycle would end. She seemed like a nice lady whose only sin was wanting to be loved by someone.

  Around 11:45 I caught the hint of someone standing over me. “You wanted to see me?” It was Detective O’Leary.

  I asked whether there was somewhere we could talk.

  “Sure,” O’Leary said. “We could go back to my boudoir, or we could do it over food. I’ve been out all morning and didn
’t get breakfast. That is, if you don’t mind dining with the enemy.”

  “I’d like to think we weren’t enemies. More like fellow truth seekers.”

  “Truth can be a dangerous thing. Remember what happened to Socrates.”

  “Am I at risk of being poisoned if I accept?” I asked.

  “Only if you chew with your mouth open.”

  “Don’t worry. I’m housebroken,” I said. “I can even eat with something besides my fingers.”

  I gave Letitia one of my cards and told her to call me if there was anything I could do for her. I’d figured O’Leary for an Italian Beef guy, but he drove us to a storefront in Pilsen where they sold homemade tortillas served with carnitas ordered by the pound. “I’m addicted to this stuff,” he told me, “though it isn’t doing my waistline much good. If it weren’t for Lipitor my cholesterol would make you cry.” We each ordered half a pound. O’Leary was hungry and so was I, so it wasn’t until we’d wiped our plates clean that he asked me what I wanted.

  “I want to clear Charlie Dickerson,” I said.

  “And you thought I’d be anxious to tackle such a project, being his arresting officer and such.”

  “Do you really believe he’s guilty?”

  O’Leary thought this over before saying, “Doesn’t matter what I think. Only thing that matters is the department’s clearance rate.”

  “Don’t give me that Claude Rains, round-up-all-the-usual-suspects routine.”

  “And don’t you go thinking this is going to be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

  “I’d settle for a temporary cessation of hostilities while you hear me out.”

  “OK,” O’Leary said. “I’m listening. But it’s gonna have to be something really good to override a videotaped confession and DNA evidence pointing the finger directly at the kid.”

  “I’ve listened to the confession. It’s garbage and you know it. Charlie hadn’t been allowed out of the room for three hours and was frantic he’d wet his pants. It’s right there on the tape. I’m told he was squirming in his seat like a fish on dry land.”

  “I dunno. We’d have let him go to the potty if he insisted.”

  “But he wouldn’t. That’s my point. People like Charlie are intimidated by authority figures. By everyone of normal intelligence, for that matter. They’ve spent their whole lives being told what to do and when to do it. Your guys filled him up with pop until his bladder was ready to detonate and then kept telling him ten more minutes. Just agree to what we’re saying, Charlie, and we’ll let you pee.”

  “At least you’re not accusing us of withholding food and water.”

  “That would have been too obvious. But to a boy like Charlie who’s been taught that soiling himself is shameful, something retarded people do when they haven’t been trained properly, your tactics couldn’t miss. He didn’t stand a chance.”

  O’Leary said, “Just for the sake of argument, let’s say I agree with you. What do you make then of the fact that he was there, covered in the victim’s blood?”

  “Pure coincidence. Anyone could have killed Shannon Sparrow in that alley and walked off. The fact that Charlie was the first on the scene doesn’t prove anything. No one’s ever found the murder weapon. You have Charlie’s testimony that he didn’t understand at first. Her blood was on him because he did what any curious, not very intelligent kid would have done—he reached down to touch it. Then, when it dawned on him what it was, he got scared and tried to wipe it off on his shirt. The stains were consistent with that. And there wasn’t any blood spatter.”

  “So?”

  “So how did he knife Shannon in the chest without making a bigger mess?”

  “Medical examiner said the blade went in under the sternum and right into the endocardium. Death would have been almost instantaneous and the wound was small enough to internalize most of the blood flow.”

  “Which by itself is suspicious. They don’t give anatomy lessons to kids like Charlie. Whoever did it knew just how to kill Shannon, quickly and efficiently. And why didn’t she scream?”

  “You saying she was strangled first? Or drugged? ME didn’t find any signs of that.”

  “There are other ways to do it. Like this.” I reached both hands across the table until I found his neck. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m not trying to find out what you look like.”

  “Good,” O’Leary said. “‘Cause I guarantee you won’t like what you see.”

  I located his carotid arteries just below his ears and pressed down hard. “If I keep this up for thirty seconds you’ll pass out.” I pressed harder to drive home the point.

  “All right, all right,” O’Leary said, removing my hands. “I’ve heard of this. Isn’t it a martial-arts move?”

  “Yeah. It’s called a sleeper hold. But it’s something anyone with a medical background would know about. Hell, you could probably find out how to do it on Answers.com. But not Charlie. He wouldn’t understand.”

  “OK, so your theory is someone put the victim under and then knifed her? But why not just slip a blade into her right away? She was a little thing—it’s not like she would have been hard to overpower.”

  “Maybe she knew her assailant and he was trying to keep her from crying out his name.”

  O’Leary grunted. “Sounds like a stab in the dark, if you’ll excuse the expression.”

  “And why did you change your mind about it being the same person who killed those nurses—the Surgeon?”

  “Physical evidence didn’t match up. And I’ll let you in on a little secret, if you’ll promise not to blab it to the reporters. We’ve been holding something back about those other deaths. We knew all along Dickerson couldn’t have done them.”

  I gaped at him. “That’s not what your friend Di Marco said at the bond hearing. Charlie would have been free today if he’d said so. You heard about what happened to him at the jail?”

  “Yeah, and I’m none too happy about it myself. If it’d been up to me, I would have let the kid go home with his folks. But Di Marco gets to call the shots in court. There was nothing I could do.”

  “Tell yourself that often, do you?” I said, not even trying to disguise my anger.

  “Don’t get pissy with me or this tête-à-tête will be over faster than the Cubs can lose a one o’clock start. I’d like to help, but you gotta understand how the system works. I’d be in trouble if anyone knew we were even having this conversation. The only reason I’m here is because I respect you. Can’t be easy . . . I mean, with your handicap.”

  I shook my head with impatience. “Save the sympathy for Charlie. He’s the one who needs it. What was different about those other murders?”

  “I was being a tease when I brought up Socrates before. The Surgeon left a calling card at his crime scenes—a sprig of hemlock. Probably got it from a cheap thriller. But it makes sense in a screwed-up way. The vics were all hospice workers, and a couple were known to be sympathetic to assisted suicide, may have even helped a few folks along. The prevailing theory is that the Surgeon is some sort of right-to-life advocate. We figure he—or she, since it could be a woman—may be trying to send a message about mercy killing, taking an eye for an eye, if you’ll pardon my saying so. Sparrow worked with some pretty messed-up people, but as far as we know she never pulled the plug on anyone.”

  “And you didn’t find any exotic plant matter nearby?”

  “No. We took that alley apart and there was nothing like it.”

  “It could have blown away,” I said. “And how do you know it wasn’t a copycat killing, someone trying to make it look like the Surgeon’s work?”

  “I don’t for sure. But we couldn’t find anyone besides your friend who had a motive to kill her. You’re a psychiatrist. You should know that nine times out of ten violent deaths are committed by someone close to the victim.”

  “OK, but that still doesn’t rule out other people. What about her friends and family?”

  “We asked around but di
dn’t find much. She lived alone, had a roommate up until December, but they had a falling out and the girl moved away. Most of her family’s down in Carbondale. Only one sister lives up here. The two didn’t get along, rarely saw one another.”

  “Would you be willing to give me their names?”

  “It’s a matter of public record. But what do you think you’re going to find out? Hell, man, I hate to point this out, but you can’t even see the people you talk to. You think you can spot something we didn’t?”

  “Maybe I won’t just accept the first theory I happen to walk into.”

  “Are you always this winning? The fact is, I don’t have time to chase down every possibility in creation when I’ve got DNA evidence proving the kid knocked her up. Even you have to admit it looks bad for him that they were sleeping together.”

  Since we were in such an amicable mode I told him my idea.

  O’Leary was sharp. He caught on right away. “Interesting,” he said when I’d finished. “You want me to find out if the fetus was a girl?”

  “That would be a place to start.”

  “All right. It’s seems like a long shot, but I’ll do it, if only to keep you from wasting your time. On one condition.”

  I nodded.

  “After that, you leave this thing alone. If you’re right and there’s another killer out there—the Surgeon or someone else—he’s gonna be none too happy about you sticking your neck out. Last thing I need is some blind shrink screwing up an investigation.”

  “So you’re saying you won’t give up—on trying to find the real killer, that is.”

  “I’m saying that if I find out you’ve been playing the vigilante Charlie won’t be the only one enjoying the hospitality of the taxpayer. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Sorry, my lip-reading skills aren’t what they used to be.”

  O’Leary’s tone grew cold. “OK, pal, do it your way. Only don’t say you weren’t warned.”

  Eleven

  Shannon’s sister lived on the far South Side in a neighborhood called Brainerd. I had the cabbie take me around the block several times before dropping me off in front of the house. I scraped my way up a short concrete walk bordered by a wooden fence. It had warmed up some from the weekend, but the day was still stormy. When I rang the bell there was no one about. Rain pelted the aluminum awning overhead like a sack of loose marbles, and a freight train hooted mournfully in the distance. Inside, something like a vacuum whined steadily. On my third attempt a woman called out, “OK, OK. I heard you. Keep your pants zipped while I shut this thing off.”