The Innocence Game Part 26

"Good. Let's stop." We drove a handful of blocks in silence. Rodriguez pulled into a hole-in-the-wall Mexican joint called Flaco's Tacos. We got a booth by the window. The waitress brought us menus and left. The way she smiled at Rodriguez told me it wasn't the first time he'd been here.

I took a sip of water. It was warm with a shadow of something floating near the top that might have once been ice. The waitress came back with a bowl of chips and salsa. I ordered chicken tacos with rice and a c.o.ke. Z had an iced tea. Rodriguez got himself a horchata.

"Am I still under arrest?" I said and reached for the bowl of chips. I noticed a clock on the wall. There was no guarantee it was working, but it read 3:15.

"You were never under arrest," Z said and glanced at Rodriguez. "At least not that I heard."

The detective shook his head. "No charges filed. No paper trail of anything that happened today."

"What did happen today?" I said.

Z leaned forward. "Let's start with last night."

"Fine."

"Were you at Sarah's apartment?"

"Did you see the pictures?"

Z nodded.

"Then why do you ask?"

Rodriguez stirred his drink and took a sip. "Calm down, Ian."

"I'm fine."

The waitress brought my food. Rodriguez waited until I'd polished off a taco before continuing. "Why were you at Sarah's?"

"That's my business."

"It would be better if you told us."

"Why do I feel like I'm still being questioned?"

"The detective's trying to help you," Z said.

"All of a sudden everyone's trying to help." I wasn't hungry anymore and pushed the plate away. "How is she?"

"She'll recover," Rodriguez said.

"And why are you convinced I didn't attack her?"

"Who says I'm convinced of that?"

"So you think I raped her?"

"We don't," Z said.

"All due respect, you're not the one with the badge."

The restaurant was empty, just us and the waitress. The traffic outside the open door was suddenly loud in the street and a radio played Spanish music somewhere.

"My guess is you were in the wrong place at the wrong time," Rodriguez said. "And you still might be."

"What does that mean?"

Rodriguez threw a few dollars on the table. "Your professor's heading back to Evanston. You're gonna need to lay low until we can get a handle on a few things."

"Lay low?"

"We'll find somewhere safe." Rodriguez climbed to his feet. "Come on. Let's get out of here."

As we left, I looked back through the window. The waitress was sitting in our booth, munching on some chips under the hard light and drinking whatever was left of Rodriguez's horchata.

37.

"This is somewhere safe?" I said.

We were walking down a short, stained hallway toward a metal door-the business end of the Cook County Morgue.

"There's someone I want you to talk to," Rodriguez said. "And I want to keep it between us."

More games. At this point I didn't care. The morgue was a step up from spending the night in a cell with Randall and his pals. Rodriguez hit a few b.u.t.tons on a keypad and the door opened into a long gray room that looked like an industrial garage. I expected some sort of smell, but all I got was the faintest taste of chemicals on my tongue and a chill that soaked to the bone. Large overhead fixtures cast blue light on three examining tables. Each was made of stainless steel, with a narrow trough running around all four sides and feeding into a drain. There was a large block on one end of the table, presumably to hold the head of the corpse, and a sink at the other. Two of the tables were empty. The third had a body under a white sheet. Sam Moncata stood off to one side of the room, staring at a picture on a light board. He switched off the board as we came in.

"Vince, how are you?" Moncata shook hands with Rodriguez, then turned to me. "I didn't think we'd see each other so soon."

"Me neither," I said.

Moncata showed us into a small break room, just off the main autopsy area but still within sight of the body. There was a table covered with paperwork, some chairs, a coffeemaker, and a row of vending machines. Moncata gestured for us to sit and looked expectantly at Rodriguez.

"I thought you might walk him through it, Sam."

"Fair enough." Moncata brought his fingertips together and turned his full attention to me. "You're probably wondering why the detective brought you here? In the middle of the night, no less?"

"Among other things."

"The last time we spoke, I told you I was busy with an active case." Moncata pointed at Rodriguez. "It's the detective's investigation. A young boy found in a cave inside the Cook County forest preserve."

"I know a little bit about it," I said.

"The detective told me. Your business card being found near the scene. That's not my concern." Moncata paused for a moment. "We've got another victim on the table out there. Male. Thirteen years old. Pulled out of the water six hours ago. About two miles from the first body." Another pause. Whatever Moncata was getting at, he was finding it difficult. "Maybe we should go back into the examining room for a moment?"

We shuffled into the next room and stopped in front of the autopsy table. I looked down at the covered corpse. The boy's arm peeked out from under the sheet. I could just make out an L and a U tattooed in green spider scrawl across the inside of his wrist. I thought Moncata was going to pull the sheet and give me the full cook's tour. Instead, he walked over to the light board and turned it on. "Over here, Ian. There's something I want you to see."

I moved closer. Rodriguez was on my shoulder, watching both of us. Moncata had two photos on the board. Tight shots of dead flesh.

"Do you know what you're looking at?" he said.

"I'm guessing some kind of autopsy shots?"

"These are bite marks." Moncata pointed with a pencil to first one photo, then the other. "This one is from the boy we found in the cave. This is from the one on the table. Now, come over here."

Moncata led me to a small workstation and a computer. He clicked on the Cook County logo, then a desktop file. The two bite-mark photos appeared on-screen. Moncata hit a few more keys, and one image lifted, then laid itself over the other. "This is some of the bite-mark software I was telling you about the last time we talked. As you can see, when we sharpen these up and compare them, the bite patterns are nearly identical."

I glanced at Rodriguez, who pushed my attention back to the scientist's presentation.

"You and your friend brought me two more bite marks the other day," Moncata said. "The files were roughly fifteen years old." Moncata pulled up the photos we'd given him, fiddled a bit, and then layered them, one after the other, over the first two. Again, the match was nearly perfect.

"I was also able to get a photo of the bite mark found on Skylar Wingate." Moncata glanced at me for a reaction, then pulled up a final shot and laid it over the first four. "Voila."

"Are you saying all these marks were made by the same person?" I said.

"That's what the evidence is saying, son."

I turned to Rodriguez, who was continuing to study me.

"What do you think?" he finally said.

"I have no idea."

"What's your first impression?"

"It doesn't seem possible."

"Why?"

"Skylar Wingate was killed fourteen years ago. Where's this guy been?"

Moncata took that as his cue to shut down the computer. We went back into the break room and took our seats again.

"You're right," Rodriguez said. "None of this makes sense. But remember what I told you about facts. We go where they take us. And right now this is where we're at."

"How good is the science?" I said. "I mean, the bite marks?"

Rodriguez raised an eyebrow. "Sam?"

"It's not DNA," Moncata said. "But it's not garbage either. There are some discrepancies, but the overall similarity is very strong in at least four of the five cases. It would be hard to imagine those bites not coming from the same person."

"We can't afford to ignore it," Rodriguez said. "Right now, I have to a.s.sume there's at least a fair chance that whoever this guy is, he killed those boys years ago and, for some reason has gone active again."

I shook my head. "Maybe you're right, but I still don't understand why I'm here."

"Sam told me he gave you and Havens some background on the Needle Squad."

"He told us a little bit."

"You think the Squad framed James Harrison? And the other two you've been looking at?"

"We can't prove a thing."

A soft smile touched Rodriguez's lips. "Sam?"

Moncata cleared some s.p.a.ce on the table and unrolled a white sheet of paper. It was a graph with different-colored lines and numbers running across the top and bottom.

"After you and your pal left the other day, I had our lab do some testing on the blood swatch from Harrison's jeans," Moncata said. "We ran what we call a gas chromatographyma.s.s spectrometry test. Got some interesting results." Moncata pointed to a green line spiking in several places on the chart. "See this, here and here? It tells us that the blood on the jeans, the victim's blood, was loaded with citric acid."

I stared at the jagged lines and shrugged. "What does that mean?"

"Citric acid doesn't occur naturally in human blood, Ian. At least not in these amounts."

"So how did it get there?"

"Citric acid is a preservative. It's often used to preserve blood samples taken at autopsies."

"Someone took this blood from a test tube," Rodriguez said. "Most likely one of Skylar Wingate's autopsy samples."

"And they planted it on James Harrison's jeans," I said.

"That's what they're worried about," Rodriguez said. "That you might get hold of a swatch. And someone like Sam would be smart enough, and curious enough, to run the right test."

Despite everything else, I couldn't help but enjoy the moment. We'd done something. Actually proved something. When no one believed we could.

"What about the other two cases?" I said. "Scranton and Allen?"

Moncata spread his hands. "Bring me some evidence to test."

I looked at Rodriguez. "There's more to this than just Harrison."

"I agree."

"You do?"

"Let's talk about your arrest today."

I felt a slow, cold rumble in my stomach. "Okay."

"Did the detectives mention any sort of DNA evidence?"

"Detective Coursey did, yeah."