Trigger City

Facts can point to truth, or can be manipulated to point away from it. You search for the facts that support the goal of your client. Could be a civil litigator pressing a defendant to settle out of court. A defense attorney manufacturing some reasonable doubt for some guilty-as-hell client. An insurance company looking to deny a claim that may or may not be fraudulent. Doesn't really matter. You uncover facts until your client is satisfied, send a bill, and move on.

That's the job. That's your goal. Because if your goal is truth, you'll go both broke and crazy.

And if your client's goal is truth, run away screaming, fast as you can.

Joan Richmond died just after 2:00
P.M
. on a sunny Saturday in mid-August. She was in the middle of a telephone conversation with her father, discussing where to meet for dinner that evening, when the doorbell rang. She was not expecting company and told her dad she'd call him right back.

“Probably Jehovah's Witnesses or something,” she said.

She was wrong.

Joan Richmond's condo was on the ground floor of a converted Lincoln Park three-flat. Through the cut-glass window of her front door, she could see Steven Zhang, a colleague from work.

Did she smile as she unlocked the door? In my mind she smiled, but there's no way to know. I'm pretty certain that she didn't see the gun in his right hand. But again, that's speculation, not established fact. Maybe his hand was in his pocket.

This much is certain: Joan Richmond opened the door and Steven Zhang shot her in the face. He put three more bullets between her breasts as she lay on the Spanish tile of her foyer. Dropped a signed confession on the floor and walked away as her brain, no longer receiving a fresh supply of oxygen, began to die.

Steven Zhang drove straight home to his town house in the University Village neighborhood, near the UIC campus. He locked the door, poured a few ounces of Talisker over ice, and phoned his wife at her mother's Chinatown apartment. Or maybe he phoned her first, then poured the scotch. Anyway, he told her that he had done something terrible and that he was sorry and that he loved her. He hung up before she could respond.

Steven Zhang put
ABBA's Greatest Hits
on the stereo, turned it up to full volume. He drank the scotch. He put the barrel of the gun in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and decorated the wall with his brains.

These are the known facts surrounding the death of Joan Richmond. The truth? Shit, I already warned you about thatâ¦

PART I

A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.

âE
DWARD
R. M
URROW

CHAPTER ONE

F
orty-four is too young for a woman to die.”
Isaac Richmond sipped black coffee from a U.S. Army mug, then fixed his ice-blue eyes on the framed photograph in his other hand. He rested the mug on the coffee table. “You don't agree.”

“It's only right for you to feel that way, Colonel Richmond,” I said. “But no, I don't think there's such a thing as âtoo young to die.'” I drank some coffee. It was instant, but I like instant. Guilty pleasure.

Isaac Richmond had been retired from the army for twenty years, but a cursory examination of his study told me a lot. There were photos of Richmond in full dress uniform receiving medals and commendations, shaking hands with generals. In other photos he wore green camouflage BDUsâboarding a transport plane, standing in a mess hall, sitting in a jeep on a downtown Saigon street. There was the framed degree from West Point. And the coffee mugs. Not one thing gave testimony to the two decades of Richmond's life since he retired his commission.

And then there was the man himself. He was harder at seventy-four than I was, still (if barely) a year shy of forty. He held himself in per
fect posture and even his silver hair stood at attention, trimmed just slightly longer than a standard-issue crew cut. Clearly this was a man who defined himself by his military service, so I addressed him by rank and he didn't correct me.

“You have children, Mr. Dudgeon?”

“No, sir.”

“Believe me, there
is
such a thing as âtoo young to die.' If you ever have kids, you'll understand.” He cleared his throat and handed me the photograph. “My daughter. Joan.”

Joan Richmond looked remarkably like her fatherâthe same erect posture, the same blue eyes, the same compact features. Sharp chin, sharper nose, thin lips. On Isaac Richmond, the features conspired to make him look like a hard-ass, whereas on Joan the overall impression was that of a shy librarian. Proper, but not a prude. Not beautiful, but pleasant to look at. Friendlier than her father. And fragile.

Before coming to Richmond's house in Dearborn Park, I'd read over the newspaper coverage of his daughter's murder, six weeks earlier. Joan Richmond was single, lived alone. She was the head of payroll for HM Nichols, a midsize department store chain. The man who killed her, Steven Zhang, was a naturalized American citizen who'd come from China thirteen years earlier. He was a freelance IT consultant Joan had hired to update the employee payroll system and optimize the database. After shooting Joan to death, he'd gone home and killed himself, leaving behind a wife and young daughter. And a written confession that sounded all kinds of crazy. The cops investigated and collected the results of various forensic tests and cleared the case within two weeks.

So why had Mike Angelo sent Richmond my way?

“Colonel Richmond, I am sorry for your loss but I'm not sure what I can do for you. Do you think the police got it wrong?” I set the photograph on the coffee table between us. Isaac Richmond's mouth tightened, twitched once.

“This is a very intimate business between us, Mr. Dudgeon, and I am not accustomed to discussing my personal life with strangers.”

His mouth tightened again and, although I hadn't noticed any room for improvement, his posture got even straighter. “I'm sorry,” he said, “that's not fair. I called you, you didn't call me.”

I reached into my briefcase and withdrew a form, signed it, and handed it to him. “Standard nondisclosure agreement. I'm not in the habit of spreading the details of my clients' personal lives around the schoolyard, Colonel.”

“No, I'm sureâ¦I didn't mean to imply.” He put the form on the table, next to the photo of his dead daughter. “It just goes against my nature to discuss such things. I spent twenty-six years in military intelligence. Our division motto was
Learn All, Say Nothing.
I've been living by that motto since I was a very young man. It made me a somewhat distant husband and father, I'm sorry to say. My wifeâJoan's motherâdied when Joan was only seven years old. Bad heartâ¦genetic. Joan grew up on military bases all over the world, raised really by a succession of army matrons, and I was not there very often. She was like an orphan with a wide assortment of kindly aunts, but we were redeployed regularly and even those relationships never had the time to deepen.”

He sat for a minute saying nothing. The look on his face suggested that he was back in time, on army bases in Germany and Korea and who knows where else.

“I'm sorry, where was I? Yes, right. I was absent for much of Joan's upbringing. She developed into an exceedingly intelligent young woman but very inward, quiet, not as socially confident as she should have been. Eventually she moved stateside, matriculated from Northwesternâdouble major: Economics and Accounting. Summa cum laude.” He drank down the rest of his coffee, which had long since gone cold. “She could've done so much. But she was a whiz at math and I suppose a career in accounting shielded her from having to deal with people, to some extent. And she was good at it.

“My parental failings notwithstanding, Joan welcomed me into her life when I eventually settled in Chicago and we managed to build a friendly relationship. A good relationship. There were boundaries I
could not crossâshe was not going to pretend that we had much history and I was not invited to offer fatherly guidance. And she insisted on calling me Isaac, never Dad or Father. But we spoke on the phone almost daily, and we dined together every Saturday. I suggested that we make it a weekdayâSaturday is prime dating time for young working peopleâbut Joan didn't seem interested in dating. I don't think she was a lesbian, and even if she were, one presumes she would still go out on dates. She just seemed uncomfortable with the idea of romantic relationships of any kind. No doubt a result of her upbringing. Collateral damage of my service, I'm afraid.” Richmond shook it off with a rueful chuckle. “Listen to me. An old man wallowing in his regrets, while you sit nodding politely and wondering what the hell any of this has to do with you.”

I gave him an accommodating smile. “I've been wondering where I fit in.”

“Put simply, I want you to bring me the truth of Joan's death. In answer to your question, I do not think that the police got it wrong. Joan was killed by a mentally unbalanced employee. I can accept that. But I need more. They say that he was schizophrenic. Fine. But what triggered him to go off his meds? And why did he focus on Joan? Were they friends? Was he in love with her? Were they having an affair? I know I said she wasn't interested in romantic relationships but the truth is I didn't know her that well. She must have had needs, even if she didn't want a relationship, so perhaps they wereâ¦involved. He came to her houseâhow did he know her address? Had he been there before? I ask myself these questionsâ¦constantly. They wake me in the middle of the night. They never subside. I need you to bring me answers.”

Isaac Richmond stood and got a checkbook from his desk drawer, ripped the top check free, handed it to me. It was payable to Ray Dudgeon in the amount of $50,000. My jaw must've bounced off my chest.

“It's a lot of money, Mr. Dudgeon, but here's what I want from you: I want the next sixty days of your life. I want you to work on this
case exclusively. No other clients, no vacations. You may take one day a week for yourself. And you will have to cover your own expenses, within reason, out of that money.

“I do not want written reports but I do require biweekly verbal reports. All that you've learned. All. You are not to protect me from any unpleasantness. Joan was my daughter and I loved her but I don't put her on a pedestal. I need to know whatever you learn about her, about her killer, about whatever relationship they hadâpersonal or professional. I want the truth.”

Isaac Richmond didn't really want me to bring him the truth of his daughter's death; he wanted me to bring him the truth of his daughter's life. He wanted me to make up for a relationship they'd never had, and there was no way I could fill that emptiness. Whatever I learned, it wouldn't be enough. It wouldn't be what he really needed.

But what I really needed was money. In the previous months, I'd been x-rayed and arthrogrammed and MRIed and cortisone injected. I'd learned terms like
ruptured supraspinatus
and
neural foraminal stenosis
and
acute osteophyma.
It was Greek to me.

Bottom line: I needed surgery to fix the damage. My crappy health insurance plan only ensured that I could plan on personal bankruptcy if I went ahead with the surgery, so I'd been putting it off. But the shoulder was getting worse and I'd have to do something soon. The previous week I'd asked Sasha Klukoff to find a buyer for my '68 Shelby. The car had been a gift, and it was worth a bundle. It easily constituted over 80 percent of my net worth. I could barely afford the insurance on it.

And now I held a check for $50,000. All I had to do is take a case that had zero chance of success. A case I should turn down cold.

“Colonel Richmond, I understand that grieving is not easy. But my poking around in the residue of your daughter's life is not going to bring her back. And it's not going to bring her closer to you. You had the relationship you had. I think you need to make peace with that.” I held the check out to him.

He didn't take it. Instead, he put a set of keys on the table in front
of me. Attached to the key ring was a little LED flashlight with the HM Nichols logo printed on the side.

“Joan's apartment keys. Don't refuse me, I can think of no better use for the money. I have cash in the bank, investments, a pension, and no heirs.” His right hand moved in a sweeping gesture, taking in the room. “I bought this house for $600,000. It is now worth more than two point four million. After my service, I did extremely well as a consultant and I have more than I could ever spend. So take the money, I won't miss it.” He fixed me with a steady look. “And I know you need it.”

“Oh?”

Isaac Richmond smiled, said, “Even with the recommendation of a CPD lieutenant, you don't think I'd hire you without some due diligence. I'm an old army spookâI don't go into anything without a little recon. Your reputation is one of honesty and persistence, to a fault.”

“Perhaps to a major fault,” I said.

“Yes, you were quite the newsmaker a little while back. I do admire the way you handled yourself, but you made trouble for powerful people and I know your business has suffered as a result.”

“A little slow for a while but I'm doing fine now. Thanks for your concern.”

“No need for sarcasm, Mr. Dudgeon, I meant no offense.” Isaac Richmond stood and motioned toward the door. “Please sleep on it tonight, decide in the morning. Take the check home with you. And the keys. If you decide not to help me, return them here. You can do that much for an old man.”

I awoke to the sound of my own voice screaming, felt my body shaking from the adrenaline surge.

Fuck. Not againâ¦

I rolled onto my back and took a few deep breaths to bring my heart rate down, pressed my palms against my chest to stop the shak
ing. Then came the tears. I let myself cry for a minute or two, then cut it off. I tried to push the images from my mind, but some images push easier than others.

And this particular memory slideshow was insistent. I was tied to a chair while a couple of very bad cops wearing very bad aftershave did very bad things to me. To call them cops is really an insult to cops. More like sadistic crooks with badges. They'd whipped me with an electrical cord, pried off a fingernail, knocked out a couple of teeth. And then they'd dislocated my shoulder and stomped on it.

That was almost ten months ago. They were both dead. But the images remained.

Get over it, Dudgeon.

I got up and stripped the sweat-soaked sheet off the futon. It had become such a common occurrence that I kept a fresh sheet and pillowcase on a nearby chair. The bedside clock read 3:23
A.M
.

The nightmare had been triggered by rolling over in my sleep, onto my right side. Onto my shoulder, which now felt like someone had sunk a hot ice pick deep into the joint. I left the bedsheet in a heap on the floor, went to the bathroom mirror, and opened my mouth. No blood. I didn't expect blood, knew that the taste of it was just a sense memory, but I always checked anyway.

The taste of blood, sudden sweats, and flashback images sometimes happened when I was wide awake. Sometimes triggered by pain in the shoulder or neck, sometimes by the smell of diesel fuel or Aqua Velva. And sometimes I couldn't identify the trigger. The episodes had diminished during the months I'd spent with my grandfather down in Georgia but when I came back to Chicago they were right here waiting for me.

Chicago was full of triggers. Chicago was Trigger City.

I swallowed a couple of Percocet and took a cool shower. My doctor had insisted that painkillers were not a long-term solution and warned that my supraspinatus tendon was at risk and the shoulder would continue to deteriorate until I got the surgery. But I already knew. I'd read the MRI reportâit was a mess in there.

I toweled off and put the new sheet on the bed, thinking
You can't live like this much longer, it's just too exhausting. Get the surgery. Take Richmond's money. He's a grown-up. He said it himself, he's got loads of money and he won't miss it and you gave him fair warning besides. If the case is a loser, so be it.

So be it.

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