“Can you see his page and get his name?”
“I can see his page but not his real name. He only has fifteen posts. They’re all motivational quotes and outdoors shots with mountains and lakes.”
“I want you to send him a message. Say something like, ‘Need your help with Tinsley Gerrigan. Please reach back to me. URGENT!’”
“That’s easy enough,” Gordon said. “But what do I do if he responds?”
“Call me right away. No matter what time it is.”
26
IT WASN’T EVEN NOON yet, and it felt like an entire day had gone by. That was how it worked with investigations. Some days it was a complete drought, not even a single thread to tug, then other days clues fell from the sky in buckets. Today the skies had graciously opened, and I had intentions of taking complete advantage of it.
Mechanic called me after I had gotten into the office. He’d followed the Ford Taurus west on the Kennedy Expressway and dropped them when they reached the Junction, the point at which I-94 split toward the North Shore / Milwaukee or veered to the left heading to O’Hare and beyond. I texted the license plate number to Carolina.
I was standing at my window looking at the runners snaking their way through Grant Park when there was an urgent knock on my door. I opened it to find two plainclothes cops holding a thin envelope. “From Commander Burke,” one of them said before handing it to me.
“Tell him the next round of golf is on me,” I said.
They quickly turned and left with puzzled looks.
I opened the envelope and pulled out the DVD, then slipped it into my computer’s drive. The techs had taken footage from six cameras and displayed it all at the same time in six individual boxes that popped up on my screen. A time code ran at the bottom of each box. These new cameras were much better than when I was on the force. Most of the film we watched was either too grainy or too dark and contributed little to our investigations. These videos, however, were in high definition, and the clarity was so good you could see the pimples on the faces of passing motorists.
It took me a couple of hours to go through all the video as I checked it against the running timeline. The ME had said that Chopper had been dead between forty and forty-eight hours before we had gotten there, based on the lack of digestion products in his small intestines, the last time he was known to have eaten, and the degree of skin discoloration. I slowed the film to line up eight hours before the ME’s estimate. If my theory was correct, I needed to focus on the two cameras on Sixty-Ninth Street. One had been positioned two blocks east of South Wallace near Paul Robeson High School, while the other was just one block west. As I expected, very few cars turned out of South Wallace. A tow truck exited late in the morning. A white cargo van exited a few hours later, then no car or person exited for the next eight hours.
The next day, three vehicles exited South Wallace. A rusted pickup truck with a heap of metal and fixtures in the bed exited and turned east on Sixty-Ninth Street at 9:17 a.m. A minivan driven by an old woman exited and turned west at 11:05 a.m. The last car to leave was an ’89 four-door Chevrolet Caprice Classic sitting on enormous twenty-six-inch rims and polished chrome that reflected the streetlights like mirrors. It turned west on Sixty-Ninth Street at 11:25 p.m. I played it back again. The windows were completely black, and even the front windshield had been tinted. It drove at a normal speed, waited for the traffic on Sixty-Ninth Street to clear, then turned west. There was a clean shot of the license plate, and I wrote it down. This timing would fit the ME report within a couple of hours of the time of death.
I dialed Burke.
“The ’89 Chevy,” he said as soon as he picked up. “We’re already on it. The other two didn’t check out. The truck was some old guy scrounging for junk. He’s lived on Halsted for fifty years. The minivan was a church lady who had gotten lost and was trying to turn around. She was heading over to Good Hope MB over on Seventy-First for some missionary meeting.”
“And the Chevy?” I asked.
“Registered to a guy with an address in Chatham.”
“Have they picked him up yet?”
“Nobody’s home. We’re combing the neighborhood.”
“What’s his name?”
“Juwan Elrick Davis. They call him JuJu. Where the fuck they get these names, I don’t know. Twenty-seven years old. Lives with his girlfriend and her four-year-old son. Two priors. Small stuff. Weed and misdemeanor battery. No time served. No gang affiliation. Finished a couple of years at Simeon, where he played basketball. Was kicked off the team for disciplinary reasons. Never went back to school.”
“Any connection to Chopper?”
“None we can tell so far, but we’re still digging.”
“The timing is perfect,” I said, feeling lucky. “He comes out of South Wallace almost an hour and a half after the ME had Chopper dying. Opportunity is there, but now we need the motive.”
“We’re looking all over the city,” Burke said. “I’ve put almost a hundred men on it. We need to get him into custody before Ice finds him.”
No sooner had I hung up than my phone rang.
“Impeccable timing,” I said to Carolina.
“You were thinking about how much you missed me?”
“And various other thoughts.”
“All talk and no action.”
“Until it becomes all action and no talking.”
“I have that info on the license plate,” she said. “It’s registered under a business. Lakeview Holdings, LLC. Their address is some fancy law firm on Michigan Ave. Ten names in the masthead. One of them is the managing member of
