“Yeah, and how ‘bout this weather?” I put my drink down by the bar. Small talk. She might as well be sticking pins into a voodoo doll of me.
She appraises me, and I don’t like what she’s seeing. I can’t decide what reaction I want from her. I don’t want this. Not pity. I want to shake her up, watch her struggle.
But that’s not Shelly. One of the sweetest, most generous people I know, devotes herself to helping children in legal jams, but she spent most of her life nursing wounds and became an expert in facades. No show, no tell.
“You’re making this awkward,” she informs me.
“You’re right. I wish I could say it’s great to see you.” I step closer to her. “I don’t want to talk to you like this. If you want to really talk to me-any time. You have my number.”
She smiles, just a bit, and I go find Lightner. He’s talking to a guy who works for the state police, but he’s more than ready to head out.
“Did you find her?” he asks me.
“I wasn’t looking for her.”
Lightner hits my arm. “Have it your way, Riley. Can we get that steak now?”
13
DETECTIVE MICHAEL McDERMOTT navigates the Chevy onto Carnival Drive, where an entire neighborhood has turned out on this mild evening, mingling in groups outside their homes. A blue truck is parked in the driveway, with COUNTY ATTORNEY TECHNICAL UNIT stenciled on the side.
The call came in at two minutes to five-two minutes before McDermott and his partner, Stoletti, were off for the night. Carnival Drive is on the near north side, close to the neighboring suburbs, and, more important, only one block within the jurisdiction of his squad.
Two minutes, one block, and McDermott would be home by now, eating dinner with his daughter, Grace. Life is a game of inches.
“I’m getting nostalgic over here.” Detective Ricki Stoletti bends a stick of gum in her mouth as they pull up. Stoletti has been his partner over three years now, since her transfer from the Major Crimes Unit, a multijurisdictional squad in the northern suburbs.
She could have griped at the last-minute call, could have begged off the assignment. Grabbing a homicide costs at least three hours, up front. Mr. Frederick Ciancio has just ruined both of their evenings.
A uniform, a beefy Irish guy named Brady, breaks away from a neighbor interview and approaches. “Hey, Chief. Hey, Ricki.”
McDermott stifles his preferred response, raises his eyebrows.
“Frederick Ciancio,” Brady says, flipping a notepad. “Sixty-two. Retired from a security gig, Bristol Security. Worked as a guard at Ensign Correctional before that.”
“Ensign. Huh.” Stoletti chews her gum with enthusiasm. Ensign Correctional is a max security prison on the west side of the county. “When did that end?”
Brady holds a look on Stoletti. A lot of men don’t like women who are taller than they are, and Stoletti, five-ten and physically fit, carries quite the profile. Major point in her favor, that she can handle herself physically. She brushes her bangs off her face. Another major score, she doesn’t color her hair, light brown, but with healthy streaks of gray.
“Neighbors tell me it was late seventies,” says Brady. “Said he worked security like twenty-five years after that.”
McDermott stores away that information. Prison guards are known to make both enemies and friends with the inmates. But twenty-five years off the job is a long time. “Multiple stab wounds?” he asks.
“Multiple is an understatement. My guess for a weapon is a Phillips screwdriver.” Brady nods to the crowd. “A neighbor stopped by when Ciancio was late for poker. His car was still in the garage, so he used the spare key he has to go in and look around. Found him in the bedroom.”
McDermott lets his eyes run over the neighborhood, still bathed in light at nearly six o‘clock on a June evening. There are cops who live up here, people who are required to stay within the municipal boundaries but want something as suburban-read low crime-as possible. The street is humble, mostly bungalows with quarter-acre lots and single-car garages, but it could be plucked out of any number of suburbs. A nice, quiet place.
“Is the M.E. here?” Stoletti asks.
Brady shakes his head no. “But it looks like he died last night. Less than twenty-four hours, I’d say.”
McDermott glances at Brady but lets it go. The uniforms are always looking to impress.
“Good job, Brady,” he says. He ducks under the crime-scene tape, Stoletti following, and enters the home.
There is a burglar alarm pad on the ground floor, which makes sense for a former security guard. “Need to see if the alarm company got called,” he says to Stoletti. Occasionally, intruders will come in on an alarmed house and force the homeowner to give up the password. If that were the case, at least they could pinpoint a time of death.
Another uniform in the kitchen, guy named Abrams who is standing with a County Attorney Technical Unit member, tells McDermott that the back door lock was picked. “And the alarm company hasn’t gotten a call from this house for over a year,” he tells McDermott.
“Good job, Ronnie.” Saved him a phone call. Three possibilities. One is that Ciancio didn’t use his alarm-not likely for someone who worked security, in one form or another, for most of his life. Second, the offender knew the alarm’s password. Third, the offender broke in when the alarm was turned off- middle of the day, for example, while Ciancio was in the house but unsuspecting-then the offender surprised him later, probably in the middle of the night; the alarm wouldn’t matter because he was already in the house. But that would mean the offender got the alarm password out of Ciancio before he killed him, because he must have deactivated it before leaving.
The CAT unit is dusting for prints on the staircase as McDermott and Stoletti climb. McDermottreminds the technician to check the alarm pads. The stairs are carpeted in thick, white industrial. Splotches of the carpet have been removed on several steps.
McDermott feels it, like always, the flutter of his heartbeat as he approaches the scene, even as he reminds himself: The victim is an elderly male, dead from multiple stab wounds and a broken neck. Not his thirty-four-year-old wife, his high school sweetheart. Not Joyce, splayed about the floor, dead from a single gunshot wound.
The bedroom is right at the top of the stairs. The scene looks contained to the bed. Fred Ciancio is lying on his back, mouth and eyes open. He is wearing a pajama top, a solid white that has now been peppered with dark stains from where the incisions were made around his body. The deepest, most obvious is right in the Adam’s apple. His head rests on the pillow. The bedspread is still gathered around his ankles. The smell of bodily fluids, including urine and feces, is made worse by the thick air coming through the open windows. Someone probably thought it would help to air it out, but when there’s humidity it makes it worse.
“I counted twenty-two,” says a CAT technician named Soporro, emerging from the bathroom. “Twenty-two wounds. Fatal one in the neck.”
But the other stabbings came first, before he died. Too much blood spilled out of too many holes. If the wounds had been postmortem, his heart would not have pumped blood and little would have escaped from the body, even due to gravity. McDermott gets up close to the body, looks at some of the wounds that aren’t covered by the pajama top, in the upper chest and shoulder. Small, circular
