“Sorry to hear about your father, Frank,” Caleb said as Frank returned to the office the next morning.
Frank nodded quickly and sat down at his desk. He could feel his energy building again, and he wanted to take it at its peak. “Fill me in on everything.”
“Well, the department didn’t exactly let things go stale while you were gone.”
“I didn’t expect them to.”
“And Gibbons, he was hot to trot the whole time. I figure that if you hadn’t got back today, they’d of turned it all over to him.”
“What did they do?” Frank asked.
“Well, the first thing they wanted to do was arrest Stan,” Caleb said.
“Based on what?”
“They’d blood-typed the fetus Angelica was carrying,” Caleb said, “and it was the same as Stan’s. Gibbons was hot to move on that.”
“What happened?”
“Brickman wouldn’t buy it,” Caleb said. “Too circumstantial. Gibbons said they could use it to break a confession out of the kid. But Brickman said no.”
“Good for him.”
“Brickman thinks the daddy theory is all wrong,” Caleb said. “He thinks it’s a drug thing. Maybe a burn that went real bad.”
“Any evidence of that come up?”
“No.”
“What about Davon Little?”
“Nothing to connect him but that car.”
“Anything in that?”
“Not a hair. Lab said they’d never seen a car that clean. Little did everything but vacuum the exhaust pipe. After the lab boys got back to me, I asked Little if he’d scrubbed the car. He said yes.”
“So there was nothing in it at all?” Frank asked unbelievingly.
“Frank, if all we had to go on was what we found in that car, we’d have to swear that nobody but Davon Little had ever been in it.”
“Anything else?”
“I checked out the kid.”
“Clean?”
“As a whistle,” Caleb said. “Good grades, fair athlete, all-around nice boy.”
“So we’re back at square one.”
“Not exactly,” Caleb said. “Because that kid did give us a little something to go on.”
“What?”
“The fact that Angelica seemed to know the Southside.”
“Yeah,” Frank said. “I talked to Karen about that.”
“Karen?”
“Karen Devereaux.”
“When did you talk to her?”
“Last night,” Frank said, as matter-of-factly as he could.
Caleb smiled slightly. “Oh.” He cleared his throat softly. “And what did … uh, Miss Devereaux have to say?”
“She had no idea that Angelica knew about any part of town other than around West Paces Ferry.”
“Which makes it not one bit less odd that she did, right, Frank?”
“Yeah.”
“Why would Angelica know her way around Grant Park?”
“Caleb, if we knew that, I think we’d know a lot more.”
“Me, too,” Caleb said. “And the only thing I can figure is maybe drugs.”
“And where would you go with that?”
“I already took it a little ways,” Caleb said. “While you were back home, I went over to Northfield and talked to a few of the kids around there. They were a little jumpy at first, but after a while they started talking. Pot came up, then other things, like cocaine.”
“What’d they say?”
“Well, practically everybody does a little pot,” Caleb said, “and a few do more than that.”
“And Angelica?”
“What I hear is that she was clean, at least at the time she died,” Caleb said. “That’s the funny part.”
“What is?”
“Well, Angelica was like a lot of these kids at Northfield. She had the money and she had the cravings. Put those two together and it means she got the stuff.”
“Pot?”
“And coke, a little.”
Frank took out his notebook. “Go on.”
“Well, at first I figured I was close to something,” Caleb said. “I had it all mapped out. Angelica was a junkie, and that meant she had to have a connection. I mean, she wasn’t muling it in with that BMW, you know?”
Frank nodded.
“So I figured her connection was in Grant Park, and that’s why she knew the area.”
“Sounds good,” Frank said.
“To me, too,” Caleb said, “but as the talk kept going, things fell apart.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, there’s no doubt that Angelica had done a few drugs in her time,” Caleb told him. “About three months before she died, this one kid spots her at one of these fast-food drive-ins. He goes over to her, and smoke just about keels him over.”
“Three months ago?”
“That’s right, and that’s about the last time anybody saw Angelica with drugs.”
“She just stopped?”
“Dead in the road, Frank,” Caleb said. “Went totally off everything, as far as they know. Everybody agrees on that one.”
Frank wrote it down.
“And that’s not all,” Caleb added. “She cleaned up her diet, too.” He pulled a chair over to Frank’s desk and sat down.
“Diet?”
“Angelica was a junk-food freak, the kids say. Always with the Fat Freddies and potato chips.”
“She stopped that, too?”
“Dead in the water,” Caleb said.
“And at the same time?”
“On the button. And this was
Frank leaned forward slightly. “What was happening to her, Caleb?”
“She acts like somebody who all of a sudden got religion.”
“So what was it? A change of heart?”
Caleb looked at Frank doubtfully. “When have you ever seen a case of that?”
Frank smiled.
“No, you were right the first time,” Caleb said. “Something was happening to her.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s the Grant Park stuff I can’t figure,” Caleb said after a moment. “I mean, everything is backwards. She should have met Grant Park on the way down. But it’s like she met it on the way up. You know what I mean, Frank? She met it when she was going off drugs, not when she was going on them.”
Frank shook his head wearily. “I have the strangest feeling about this one, Caleb.”
“That’s because nothing fits.”
