I am, briefly, taken back to Kerrigan’s office, where I watched Katie’s murder play out on a screen half this size. The cold recitation of her last moments of life. Last seconds. Here there is no static view. No all seeing omnipotent eye in the sky. The camera moves and audio flares in and out, sounds mixing—police radio crackling, reporter calling over and over again ‘
Sergeant. Sergeant. Sergeant.
’
And a woman wailing. As if her soul has just been ripped from within and set afire before her very eyes.
A woman. Wailing. Screaming something. A name.
‘
Jimmy!
’
The camera shifts abruptly, follows a female reporter who steps into frame, the view beyond her glimpsing a narrow space between two buildings. Something on the ground there, pulsing lights from a nearby police car revealing the object in bursts of candy-colored brightness, the darkness sliced open among the chaos to clearly show a body.
‘
Jimmy! Not my Jimmy!
’ The voice is familiar. The voice I know.
The body is twisted at a painful angle against a dirty brick wall, legs askew, one arm bent severely behind the head. It is impossible to see the face, which is pressed into the space where wall meets pavement, but from what I can see, and what I do hear, there is no doubt who this is.
Confirmation comes on the monitor, as Moira Gant stumbles toward the yellow tape marking the crime scene. A pair of officers grab her, arms flailing at them as she is dragged back, crying out for her son.
I feel Chris staring at me.
‘
Sergeant!
’ The reporter finally gets the officer’s attention. He turns toward her, light of the camera coming on, washing his ruddy complexion to ghostly white. He holds up a hand against the glare, which softens.
‘
We have no information yet, Sue.
’ It seems a standard response in this game played between cop and reporter. A tug of war seeking to turn hearsay into fact.
‘
The woman says the guy in the alley is her son.
’ The reporter looks through her notes. ‘
Jimmy Estcek.
’
‘
I have no confirmation on a name.
’
Another page in the notebook. ‘
The guy over there who found the body says it looked, quote, beat all to hell, unquote.
’
‘
I have no information on injuries.
’ The sergeant peels away from the reporter as Moira breaks free of the other officers, tries to push past all three now, frantically reaching past the yellow tape toward her son.
That is where Chris freezes it again. Locking the image of the grief-stricken woman on the monitor. And in my mind.
“Look at me, Michael,” Chris says, and I do, knowing now why she wanted this to be a face to face revelation. Understanding, even.
“I didn’t do that, Chris.”
“You said you beat him.”
“I said I hit him.” She looks away, frustrated. Suddenly uncertain as to the who and what of my being. Admittedly I am far from perfect, a fact I have shared willingly with her, but is she now questioning how readily she allowed me into her life, even close to her, after years of distance? “I hit him hard. Then I stopped. I realized what I was doing.” It is me who turns away now, that moment rising in my thoughts. Those few seconds where a nature that may be true overcame all resistance, driving my thoughts, guiding my fists. Still it was a nature I reject, and did even then when regaining some modicum of sense, despite the genesis of my actions. That singular instance of disrespect in which James Estcek, out of his own senses on a mix of booze and drugs, mocked what had happened to Katie. “I’m a man, Chris. Not a superman. The collar doesn’t make me immune from emotion. Or acting upon them.” I look back to her. “He was alive when I left. Alive in his apartment.”
She listens, but I wonder if she is convinced. There is not that sense about her of acceptance. She eyes me coolly, my assurance hanging in the air between us as the weeping mother and dead son tremble in freeze-frame static on the monitor.
Still, when I ask myself honestly, she cannot think this of me. Not in her heart. Something more is at work here.
“You know I had nothing to do with this.”
“Not intentionally,” she mostly agrees, her choice of words creating more questions still. “You sought him out, and now he’s dead. Someone killed him and dumped him in a dirty alley.” She glances at the monitor for a moment, then reaches fast and shuts it off, wiping the visuals of James Estcek and the woman who bore him to black. “If he and Eric killed your sister, and someone paid them to do it, like you told me, then at least one party to all this is out there. Maybe they’re spooked now. They don’t want to be the next one found so they’re getting rid of any link.”
“And how would they know I’m even looking?”
“That we’re looking,” she corrects. It is only three words, but the past few moments of unease between us seem to evaporate. She focuses on me, a mix of grit and wariness in her eyes. “You used a police computer to access records about Katie’s murder. You talked about it with the man who investigated it. I asked a reporter with deep ties to the department about the same thing. Actions are easier to conceal than intentions sometimes, and someone showing interest out of the blue can set off alarms.” She remembers something. Unease overtaking determination. “Did you go to Hammond?”
“He was off in DC, but his wife was there.” I relate the exchange to her. My stumbling abruptness in choice of words. “She was not inclined to help. In any way.”
Chris considers this, processing it the way she would facts and innuendo about stories or investigations which cross her desk daily. Then she asks a question which seems out of the bluest blue to me. “Did she seem surprised to see you?”
“I don’t know if that’s the word.” I think back to the visit. To the volleys of probe and parry between us. Almost… “Predictable.”
Chris nods soberly.
“Thinking about it now, she seemed prepared.” I am the one surprised, by a realization which would have escaped me had Chris not led me to it. “Like she’d been expecting a visit.”
“She was expecting
you
,” Chris tells me, jumping straight from theory to certitude. I absorb the implications of what she is suggesting.
“What are we getting at here, Chris?”
She looks to the door of the editing workspace we have appropriated, making sure it is closed. Her voice softens as she responds. “You dug up a past someone tried hard to bury.”
My spine straightens reflexively. I reach inside my coat and remove the bundle of anonymous cards Katie had kept. Nameless expressions of affection which have outlived her. I hold them out and Chris takes them, opening a few, puzzled at first until what she sees finds its place in the scenario becoming clear to her.
“He was a powerful man,” she says, still looking at the cards. “Even before he was elected to congress.” Her gaze lifts to me as she hands the cards back. “This secret could have ruined him.”
I had initially thought these two realities unrelated, naively it now seems. Hammond had driven Katie to the market on Tyler Street, speeding away when James Estcek and Eric Ray Redmond pumped bullets into her in service of another. Doing it for the money, to mostly quote Eric as the life slipped from him.
Now, fact and revelation are pointing to my sister’s murder as a convergence of these disparate threads, a possibility which should frighten me. It does not.
It enrages me.
“He had her killed because she was a liability?”
Chris draws a breath, deep and fast, a single hand coming up, palm to me. A signal to slow down. Maybe stop altogether. “This is what I was afraid of.”
“What? That I’d be pissed off to learn that someone killed my sister after he was done fucking her?!”
My outburst is loud. It is also so out of character that it seems a different person entirely has invaded my being to loose it upon Chris. No sooner has the last word slipped past my lips than I am filled with regret, Chris bearing the full measure of the rage. “I’m so sorry.”
“Michael, listen to me.” She eases close. “One of the men who killed Katie is dead in an alley, maybe because you sought him out. Who’s next, Michael? If we keep pushing.” A genuine worry fills her gaze, not born of fear for self, but for another. For me. “You wanted to know why Katie was killed, and now you do.” She glances to the cards still in my hand. “Maybe James Estcek deserved to die, but will the next person?”
The possibilities we are considering here are the stuff of ranting conspiracists. Plot fodder for late night B movie reruns. The powerful protecting themselves by pulling strings and making others do the deeds which they cannot. Have the police shut down the investigation of a murder. Eliminate those who have become inconvenient. Risks no longer worth accepting. Maybe we are wildly off base. Maybe the logic we have applied to the situation, to the events which construct and color it, is not that at all.
Maybe.
There is one way to know.
“Can you find Hammond’s schedule?” I ask Chris. She steps back a bit, the worry about her spiking. “Where he’s going to be tomorrow. In Washington or wherever.”
“Anyone can.” And she stands there, not moving, the words that could follow plainly apparent.
“But you won’t.”
“Michael, what’s left to gain here?”
I could fabricate an answer, or attempt something approximating a truth, if not the entire truth. But I don’t. I can’t. In a way I am at the same place right here that I was when first beginning this journey. When first taking action, against my vows, based upon the confession of a dying man. I could not imagine what the end would be. What it would look or feel like, or whether it would bring me the slightest bit of satisfaction or relief. I did not even know if the end would be that at all, or just another milepost that would mark how far was yet to be traveled. The reality, which I find impossible to convey to Chris, is that if Hammond is what passes for finality in all this, it doesn’t matter.
What matters is that I do not turn away when that moment may be at hand. The moment which has been denied my sister since her death—to have her killer know that their deed no longer lies hidden beneath layers of surrogates and lies.
I step past Chris and open the door. There is no animus as I leave her. Not on my part or hers. She is as concerned as I am committed. We both want the same thing—for this to be over. Our perceptions of what defines that is what separates us now.
Chapter Twenty Two
Protector
I am racing toward the sunrise, thirty thousand feet over clouds and pastures and tan-gray shapes that are cities and towns, black ribbons of highways connecting them, crossing rivers and valleys. No obstacle too great to bridge. No geography too vast to traverse. No distance too daunting to span.
At the rectory after returning from the studio I opened my laptop and made reservations for the early flight to DC, and in the lounge at O’Hare I used my smallish computer to find what I needed—the schedule for Congressman John Hammond this day. He was to speak at a luncheon as the guest of a trade group concerned with proposed restrictions on Great Lakes shipping. A matter of great importance to some, I presume, but once I had the time and place my interest in the matter ceased.
But not my interest in him. I spent the time waiting for the plane to begin boarding searching for all I could find concerning John Thayer Hammond, downloading pages and pages of articles and reports and biographies of the man. Speeding east I read on my laptop what I have saved, educating myself with all things John Hammond. Place of birth, Chicago, in the old Cook County Hospital. His education, Northwestern and Yale. Age, just turned fifty. Children, none. Wife, the former Michelle Harris. They met at Yale and she followed him back to the place of his birth, playing the dutiful wife as he started and grew a successful electronic component company. By all accounts he was an upstanding, hard working business executive who made the leap from the corporate world to government with ease. And by the same accounts his union with Michelle was solid and honorable. The words on the screen tell me so.
The plane lands at Dulles just before ten, the morning sun high above the alabaster temples of government as the taxi brings me into DC proper, depositing me at the Mayflower Hotel. I tip the driver and exit with my laptop bag, all that I have brought with me, shouldering it as I move through the gilded front doors. I ask at the desk for the location of the luncheon and am directed to a host table outside a meeting room. Through open doors I can see a sea of tables already set, waiters filling water glasses and arranging flatware, placing baskets of bread and small plates of chilled butter.
And I see her. Michelle Hammond. She moves about the space with a managerial air, the hotel staff person trailing her snapping waiters over to fix this and rearrange that as the congressman’s wife points each flaw out. Flower vases are centered. Chairs more properly spaced. And it strikes me that this is not even ‘his’ event. It arranged by and paid for by a group hoping to influence the congressman by being attentive and solicitous of his words, yet she is leaving nothing to chance. She glides from table to table, molding the event to her standards, if only on the surface. Controlling what she can.
“You’re early,” the attendant seated at the host table informs me, eyeing my attire, coat over blue shirt, khaki pants and dark leather shoes. No tie, no suit. He doesn’t quite sneer at what he sees, but would if my back was turned. “Your name?”
He flips open a book, already filled with printed pages. Registered attendees listed, menu choices noted, boxes left to check off once they arrive.
“I’m not registered,” I explain. I reach for my wallet. “Can I register at the door?”
Now he sneers, regarding me as several rungs lower on whatever ladder of class he sees as pertinent. “This event is for Great Lakes Shipping Association members only.”
I ease my wallet back into my pocket. My eyes search the host table for information on the event. A flyer. A schedule. Something. “Can you tell me when Congressman Hammond will be done speaking?”