“Does it matter, Michael?” she asks me, the grand breadth of her question not that at all. It is narrow to the two of us. Even intimate. “If this leads somewhere, or nowhere, will it mean anything? Katie will still be gone.” She pauses for a moment, and in her eyes I see something rise. An errant vision she has not expected. A morsel of a yesterday that lives only because it is worth holding on to. She brightens lightly at whatever bubbles within and says, “Katie Kat.”
But as soon as she speaks that name, a cutesy moniker that existed only between two teenage friends, maybe only for the briefest of times over a summer of sneaking out to sip beers and tease boys, she slips back from whatever whimsy had lifted her. She fixes on me, wanting, it seems, some affirmation. Wanting to believe that, even if this wondering over Katie’s death is just a fool’s errand, it still holds hope, if not promise.
“I don’t know,” I answer, choosing cold honesty over sunny promises. She considers that for a second, then nods, with acceptance or resignation I cannot tell. In truth, I do not care. I hold no sway over her embrace or ambivalence toward this foray into events of the past. I can only hope that in whatever transpires, she finds what has eluded her since Katie’s death. Solace, understanding, closure, I can only imagine. I only know what it will bring for me if I…if
we
find an open road where before there was only a dead end. I will not say it is justice. For my sister any ultimate answer will bring that, in some measure. For myself, I will find that I have come full circle to a place where a darker decision confronts me. Just as I have now decided to search for a hidden truth, once that is mine to behold I must choose whether to seek redemption with that knowledge. Or vengeance.
Chapter Fourteen
Closed Casket
Chicago plants its forgotten dead south of the city in a plot of county land behind Oak Forest Hospital, the noting of their names in a ledger the only epitaph afforded them. No gravestones are placed to differentiate one from another. Indigent homeless rest next to newborns dumped in alleys.
Criminals next to the righteous.
“He was interred this morning,” Kerrigan tells me. Were he a Deputy Superintendent he would be able to glimpse a sliver of Lake Michigan down East 35
th
from his fourth floor office in the headquarters of the Chicago Police Department. As a Captain in Administrative Services, with a desk responsible for everything from cultural diversity training to liaising with the chaplain’s unit, he has a grand view across the parking lot to the Dan Ryan a few blocks to the west. “No family to notify that we could find.”
Kerrigan tells me this about Eric without emotion. Just the cold facts of how a would-be cop killer was covered by six feet of earth. He has every reason to despise Eric and let all memory of him pass. I cannot abide by the latter for myself.
“This is a delicate area, Captain,” I say, taking a seat facing Kerrigan’s desk. To this point I have stood, near the window, watching my breath paint foggy ovals on the glass. “He mentioned someone during confession that I need to contact.”
Not for an instant is Kerrigan confused by my obliqueness. “We’re not talking a long lost cousin, are we?”
I shake my head to confirm his appraisal. “A friend.”
“Someone he ran with,” Kerrigan corrects me. Men like Eric do not—did not—have friends in the traditional sense. In his world, proximity tainted. Hypes hung with hypes. Runners with runners.
Killers with killers.
“I can’t discuss the specifics,” I tell Kerrigan. He knows this, but he would expect me to remind him, and at this moment, in this charade I am performing, I am mindful to act precisely as I would were this all not a lie.
Kerrigan shakes his head, though not at my request. He looks off toward the expressway, cars and busses and trucks seeming like toys at this distance. Zipping along under the guidance of some unseen hand. “Guy spends his life fucking people over…pardon my language, father…and then decides when it all catches up with him that he wants to spread some sorry around. Is that it? That little cocksucker made you his messenger to deliver an apology?”
I say nothing. Kerrigan’s restrained vitriol rolls right past me. I am not the only person for whom a certain response is expected. He turns from the window and looks to me, not a hint of regret about him for what he has just said.
“I can’t discuss the specifics,” I repeat, and Kerrigan nods. I understand him, his reaction, just as he understands my request. It is true only on its face, but simple enough to defy any need for probing.
Kerrigan stands behind his desk and steps away from the chair, motioning me around. I rise and do so, settling into the chair as he nods to it. He leans forward, taps a command on the keyboard before me, a window opening on the computer screen. I have not watched carefully, but I assume he has just entered some password to summon what is before me—a single text box labeled ‘Search Query’. To this point I have known the man whose confession started me on this endeavor only as Eric, but as Kerrigan’s fingers flit across the keys the rest of his name is made known to me.
“Eric Ray Redmond,” Kerrigan says, straightening as the electronic search trundles for a moment, a screen of particulars and offenses appearing next. “You can look back through anybody he was pinched with.”
“Thank you,” I say to Kerrigan. He nods and steps around his desk, heading for the door.
“I’m going to go hit the bag for a half hour,” he says, his back to me. He never looks back, the door closing behind him. In a few minutes he will be in the on-site gym, pummeling a sand-filled leather sack. If he is true to his word. Or he might just cross Michigan avenue for an early chicken dinner. Intent does not always equal result.
Shouldn’t have shot her…
Particularly after the fact.
I focus on the screen and sample the criminal life of Eric Ray Redmond. His first arrest, for petty theft, came at the age of eleven. His final affront to justice, the shooting of Officer Luke Benz, near the end of his thirtieth year. In between are a laundry list of offenses—robbery, possession of narcotics, possession with intent to sell, public disturbance, simple assault, fraud. I scan the collection of his misdeeds and find those committed in or near springtime five years ago.
A click opens a complete report of Eric’s arrest for possession of methamphetamine. There are booking photos. Links to evidence logs. Others involved.
None. In this case.
I work my way backward through his other crimes, paying specific attention to ‘others involved’. Like most petty criminals, Eric did not run alone. He shared his time with several associates, all male, all about his age, but one more than others.
James Estcek.
I move forward in time through Eric’s record, past the time of Katie’s murder. For a year after this he drops off the radar of law enforcement. Was the remorse he expressed as he lay dying wracking him even back then? Guilting him to live a more righteous life? Was he scared straight? What is shown me on the computer screen cannot answer those questions.
But it might have answered the one which brought me here.
My eyes track to the top of the screen. To the button labeled ‘new search’. Instinctively I look over the monitor to the closed door. Kerrigan will not return for another twenty minutes if he is true to his word, which I have always known him to be. But it is a habit the guilty share—looking over their shoulders. I am guilty of deception. That is the limit of my transgression in the earthly realm. I choose not to consider my offenses against God at this time, though they certainly overshadow what I have done. And what I am about to do.
I click the button and the search box appears again. The flashing cursor drags the name James Estcek into the box as I type it and hit enter. The face that pops up stares out at me vacantly. Blonde hair. Foggy blue eyes. A week’s growth of stubble. It is a booking photo, taken six months ago after a drunk and disorderly arrest outside a restaurant. The typical argument inside becoming fight in the parking lot. There is not a scratch, not a bruise on James Estcek, which indicates a worse outcome for the obvious other in this altercation.
The photo disappears with a click and I turn to his record. It intersects Eric’s in the places I have just seen, but other than that their criminal histories are tellingly divergent. Where Eric’s life spiraled into offenses driven by the need to feed a myriad of drug addictions, James’s coming to the criminal life began later. After high school and a stint in the Navy. It was also less petty, and quite a bit more violent. Assault. Assault with intent. Attempt murder. Kidnapping. All crimes of force. Even rage. Incidents that should have put him behind bars for decades.
If he had been convicted.
I puzzle at this fact. James Estcek seems only to have paid for his most innocuous offenses. A three month drug sentence. A two month stay in the Cook County Jail for domestic battery. Beyond that, nothing. There is no indication that he was ever officially charged for the most serious crimes for which he was arrested, much less brought to trial. Explanations in his record for these free passes reveal only the most broad possibilities. Insufficient evidence. Lack of witness cooperation. He is either very lucky or…
Or he is no common thug with a temper.
I ease back from the screen as a realization hits me. James Estcek is muscle. Paid muscle.
Did it for the money.
The quiet of Kerrigan’s office roars around me as I contemplate James Estcek. The distant hum of the expressway. The trundle of CTA busses on the street below. The hissy growl of heat breezing through a loose vent in the ceiling. Hushed noise that I hear, but tune out as all that was Katie’s death spins off on a new tangent, like a pinball batted askew in some twisted arcade machine.
A dying man said she was killed ‘for the money’. A dying man said there was another with a hand in her murder. If James Estcek is that man, he had clearly brought violence upon others for compensation before. The pay to satisfy him would have to come from somewhere.
From someone.
The only conclusion in my brief search for reason is that there is none. To accept any of this I would have to comprehend that Katie’s murder was not only intentional, but also
desired
.
I shake my head openly at that impossible likelihood and lean toward the screen again, fixing my attention on the particulars about James Estcek’s whereabouts, known and suspected. I strip the top page from a legal pad on Kerrigan’s desk and note all that I can about Estcek. The page is half full with quickened scribbles when I fold it and check the time. Kerrigan has been gone twenty five minutes. It is time to clear the traces of my activities. I slide the cursor to a button which will close the window with a simple click of the mouse. Just one click.
My finger rests still on the mouse. The window stays open. Instead of closing it I drag the cursor to a spot it has been before and click there, opening a new search box. The keyboard clicks with each tap of my fingers. A name appears in the box. Her name.
I press enter and the whole of Katherine Jerome, victim, spills onto the screen. The minutia of the crime that took her from me. From my parents. From the world. Case file. Notes. Links to evidence. I glance to the clock. The time when Kerrigan might return is close, but there is one particular link I know I must follow, despite what I might see. Determined dread compels me. I move the cursor and click the link labeled simple: store surveillance video.
That there is such a recording is no surprise to me. Dave Benz himself kept my parents and me apprised of the investigation into Katie’s murder. His characterization of what had been captured by security cameras in the market was contained in a one-word summation: useless. No identifying features of the assailants were visible. No unique mannerisms or clothing. Nothing of value.
I know this all as a video player window opens on the screen. In some frame of mind I might expect a magical moment where I see something the police did not, bringing clarity and closure to this horror once and for all. But that is not where my head is as the first wash of electronic snow spills onto the screen. I have been there for every turn, every high and low of the aftermath of Katie’s death. The act itself has existed in shadow for me. Around a corner I have never been able to look.
Until now.
I fix on the image as it become remarkably clear, the view from a camera mounted high, looking down, an omniscient eye revealing the store not in grainy monochrome, but in crisp, almost brutal hues. There is no sound. Just the clerk to the right, at the register, a newspaper folded in half on the counter before him, the rest of the smallish neighborhood store empty. Aisles of candy and cold cases and sundries unbrowsed.
And then she enters.
I do not pause the video, but in my mind it freezes there. This is Katie, I think, in her last moment. She is as I remember her, blonde hair loose, just touching the shoulder of her white tee shirt, Northwestern wildcat snarling from the big blue N on its front. In a universe where I was ruler, this is the point at which I would still the world, and roll all things backward until Katie was absent from this place, never to be here so that life would go on. Blissfully on.
But I am not some faux God, and the seconds of that night more than five years ago spin out before me with a timestamp marking every step Katie takes down an aisle toward a display of wine. She reaches for a bottle, the clerk glancing her way, his gaze lingering in the way men’s do when cast upon women like Katie, young and beautiful. Attractive by happenstance, with little effort necessary to seal the allure. He looks away from her and to the door as two men enter quickly, their faces lost in the shadow of hoods on oversized jackets. The clerk takes an instinctive step back from the register, sensing trouble maybe, having been, in his line of work, the victim of robbery before. But the hooded men do not move toward him. Do not even look his way.