The Enemy Inside (30 page)

Bereft, Berg just stared at him.

He struggled to help her understand. “We’ll be together when the time is right. I can wait. For the first time in my life, I want to. I’m
trying
to do the right thing here.”

Berg, sitting under a tsunami of self-loathing, heard nothing but a rebuff in Jay’s carefully chosen words. “Just get out.”

“Berg . . . Alicia,” Jay replied, trying to catch her hand with his own. “I think I love—”

“Get out!” Berg screamed. His rejection hit her in the chest like a physical blow. “Is this fun to you? Is this some kind of a fucking game you like to play? The women in the precinct are right about you! Get out!”

Jay offered no resistance as Berg pushed him out the door and slammed it shut in his face.

Turning off the lights, Berg embraced the darkness and watched through the window as Jay forlornly climbed into the car and drove away.
 

Walking quickly to her bedroom, she pulled on some jeans and a tight T-shirt. Grabbing her car keys from the bowl on the mantel by the front door, she walked outside, clicking the door shut behind her.
 

Somewhere deep within, her mother’s shadowy voice cackled, gleeful.
Can’t stop! Can’t stop, cantstop, cantstop
.
 

Berg got into her car and turned up the radio to drown it out.

Jay shuddered under a cold shower, the frigid water stinging his goose-bumped flesh as he tried to kill the last of his fervent excitement. He didn’t even bother to try to stop the odd tear that escaped to mingle with the water as he contemplated what a complete mess he’d made of everything.
I should’ve made her listen. I should’ve insisted she know how I felt. You’re a coward, Jay O’Loughlin.

Jay waited impatiently for his partner at the station the next morning, desperate to clear the air and lay his feelings on the table. He had been at his desk for hours, researching Uncle Ted in an effort to forget about the previous night’s disaster. It reminded him of when Renee was on a bender and he would bury himself in work to ignore reality.
 

Old habits
.
 

It was nearly nine when Berg stalked in wearing uncharacteristically casual clothes: jeans and a wrinkled T-shirt, covered by a fitted leather jacket.
 

Jay saw she was holding only one coffee. He tried to catch her gaze, but she refused to look at him, instead sitting at her desk and shuffling through files. “We going to interview Melissa’s uncle and the nurses?” he asked, chickening out of the conversation yet again.

“Sure,” Berg replied, reaching for something on the other side of her desk.

Jay’s breath caught as he saw the fresh, red welts around her wrist.

Her caught her hand and examined the marks. “Why?” he whispered.

Berg wrenched her hand out of his grasp. “It’s not your problem.”

“Berg—”

“Go to hell, Jay. And mind your own fucking business.”
 

Jay felt like crying. Instead, he took a deep breath and got control of himself. “I checked out his arrest file this morning,” he said, giving up trying to get her to look at him. “Shipper’s got a few arrests for previous assaults, no convictions. He owns a cabin outside the suburb of Carpentersville near the Spring Creek Valley Forest Preserve.”

Berg raised her eyebrows. “Really? That’s only a few miles north of the tollway, where five out of the six bodies were found. Let’s go.”

Jay snagged his keys, and they took the stairs down to ground level. He kept talking as they got in the car. “And it gets better. He has a military background as a sniper and was dishonorably discharged in the seventies after over twenty years in the Army.”

“Halwood thought the guy who killed Winchester may have been military,” Berg said, excited. “He said the shot was one in a million.”

“Exactly. He has the skills, proximity, motive, and the background.”

“But how’d he get to Taylor and Dell before us? And what about the woman and the mysterious phone call to Bacic? And why kill Winchester at all?”

“That I don’t know. He’s never been married. But you know these old military networks. He could still be tight with anyone in the service, anywhere. I think we should go with it. It’s all we’ve got at this point.”
 

Sitting in uncomfortable silence, Jay once again tried to explain himself. “Berg, about last night . . .”

“Leave it, Jay.”

“But, I want you—no, I
need
you to know how I—”

“I said, leave it. I’m not angry, but let’s just leave our partnership on a strictly professional level from now on, okay? You and I are never going to be anything else. I’m glad you stopped it before anything irreversible happened. It was stupid to think I . . .”

Jay was surprised at the dead calm in her voice. There was no hint of the fury from the night before. She looked completely shut down.
 

“Your wrists. You need to at least go to a meeting. Please.”

“Jay, conversation over,” she said, her voice hardening.
 

Relenting, he nodded and concentrated on driving.
 

They reached Shipper’s address in a little under an hour. “You ever been out here before?” Jay asked in an effort to fill the silence.

“These woods, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“No, too far to come with Jess. He gets car sick.”

“Your dog gets car sick?”

Berg smiled slightly. “Yeah. Any trips of more than ten minutes or so and I’m wearing partially digested dog food. Also, he doesn’t want to sit in the back of the car. He thinks he’s a much smaller dog than he is and tries to sit on my lap. It’s hard to drive with one hundred pounds of dog on you.”
 

Jay laughed.
 

“You?”

“My father brought me and my sisters out here once. I think it was to see the deer.”

“See any?”

“You kidding? With six children running around screaming? Any deer in the vicinity disappeared before we even got out of the car.”
 

Berg smiled and looked out at Shipper’s home.
 

The battered prefab home was located on the west side of the woods. Even though it was light, the detectives could still see lights blazing in the home. They had no arrest warrant, so they had to rely on the fact that Uncle Ted might talk voluntarily.
 

They stepped up on the old wooden porch and knocked on the screen door as birds chirped around them.

“What?” a rough male voice yelled from inside the house.

“Ted Shipper?” Jay shouted through the wood.

“Who’s asking?” he replied, his aggressive tone already indicating the meeting was likely to go south.

“CPD, Mr. Shipper,” Berg called. “Detectives O’Loughlin and Raymond, we interviewed you recently. Can you open up, please?”

“Oh yeah, the commies.” He was quiet for a moment. “Got a warrant?”

Jay and Berg looked at each other, and Berg shrugged.
 

Jay pounded on the locked door again. “Mr. Shipper? We don’t need a warrant. We just want to talk to you—”

“If you don’t have a warrant, you can fuck right off!”

Breaking glass and footsteps on the back porch interrupted Jay’s rejoinder. Immediately, he and Berg drew their weapons, split up, and ran around either side of the ramshackle dwelling.

“Fuck! He’s running,” Jay yelled to Berg as they each arrived just in time to see the disappearing figure vault a rusted lawn mower like an Olympic athlete, then leap over a dilapidated fence, and run into the black woods.
 

They made an abortive attempt to follow, but the man knew the forest and simply melted into the foliage without a sound.

“I think a fleeing suspect gives us probable cause to search his place. What do you think?” Jay asked.

“Definitely.”

They approached the house and waited a beat to ensure it was empty before holstering their weapons. Using the back window Ted broke in his haste to get out, the pair entered the house and stopped in shock.
 

Every spare wall and flat surface in the home was adorned with military memorabilia.

“Creepy much?” Berg said as she took in the medals, painted plastic planes, tanks and ship models, Uncle Sam posters, old news clippings about the Vietnam War, camouflage clothing, and assorted items scattered about the room.
 

In a distant corner was a pile of feminine clothing on a camp bed. Berg checked them out. “I bet they’re all Melissa’s.”

“Get a load of this,” Jay replied as he walked into another room.
 

Berg followed, and the pair was assaulted by the sight of an array of dead, stuffed animals. At least forty animals, heads and carcasses, were stuffed and mounted on the walls or hung from the ceiling.
 

Bears, moose, deer, and other animals Jay couldn’t identify stared at him through glassy, fake eyes. Several were hung from the roof in makeshift nooses and some had knives protruding from the overstuffed skins.
 

Berg wrinkled her nose, and Jay knew why. There was a chemical smell, like the taxidermy had been carried out in or near the room in which the unfortunate animals would be displayed.

“Fuuuuuuck,” Jay said, dragging out the expletive to several seconds. “What a fucking freak show.”

The detectives were so caught up in the horror of the room they almost missed the firearms display case in the corner. Catching sight of it, they walked over, their feet clunking on the bare floorboards of the space that they assumed was Ted’s living room, judging by the heap of foam and fabric that used to be a couch in the corner.

 
“Bingo.” Berg eyed the cabinet that included several long-range hunting rifles with laser sights and telescopic viewfinders, plus a vast array of hunting rounds, including bronze-points. “One similar to these could have been used to take out Winchester.”

“There are enough weapons here to supply a band of African revolutionaries,” Jay said. “Consiglio’s going to crap himself when he hears about this. We need to call in some backup.”

Chapter Thirty-One

At six that evening, nine detectives, including Jay and Berg, sat in a deli local to their station, hugging their various caffeinated brews to stave off the cold.
 

All were dressed in coats and scarves against the cold and none bothered to remove them as they sat at a corner booth listening to tinny Christmas carols being piped through the worn speakers. Tinsel long past its prime drooped around the large windows, a wilting testament to the establishment’s early holiday spirit.

Jay and Berg had left Shipper’s house of horrors intact and spent part of the day making phone calls and having clandestine station conversations to organize the meeting.
 

The precinct detectives, including Cheney and Rodriguez, were intrigued and had been pleased to meet outside the station and away from Consiglio’s watchful eye.

The other part of the day was spent interviewing nurses at Chicago hospitals. Jay and Berg had split up, each interviewing the admitting nurses for their suspected injured hitchhikers.