up. The tiny cracks between the boards were their biggest problem. The
cracks were tight, but not tight enough to stop the blood seeping in.
But they were too tight to get a brush down in there. They had to
sluice them out with water and rag them dry. The boards were turning a
wet brown color. The women were praying they wouldn’t warp as they
dried. Two of them were throwing up. It was adding to their workload.
But they finished in time for the commander’s inspection. They stood
rigidly to attention on the damp floor and waited. He checked
everywhere, with the wet boards creaking under his bulk. But he was
satisfied with their work and gave them another two hours to clean the
smears off the corridor and the staircase, where the body had been
dragged away.
The car was easy. It was quickly identified as a Lexus. Four-door.
Late model. The pattern of the alloy wheel dated it exactly. Color
was either black or dark gray. Impossible to be certain. The computer
process was good, but not good enough to be definitive about dark
automotive paint standing in bright sunshine.
“Stolen?” Milosevic said.
McGrath nodded.
“Almost certainly,” he said. “You do the checking, OK?”
Fluctuations in the value of the yen had put the list price of a new
Lexus four-door somewhere up there with Milosevic’s annual salary, so
he knew which jurisdictions were worth checking with and which weren’t.
He didn’t bother with anywhere south of the Loop. He put in calls to
the Chicago cops, and then all the departments on the North Shore right
up to Lake Forest.
He got a hit just before noon. Not exactly what he was looking for.
Not a stolen Lexus. But a missing Lexus. The police department in
Wilmette came back to him and said a dentist up there had driven his
brand-new Lexus to work, before seven on Monday morning, and parked it
in the lot behind his professional building. A chiropractor from the
next office suite had seen him turn into the lot. But the dentist had
never made it into the building. His nurse had called his home and his
wife had called the Wilmette PD. The cops had taken the report and sat
on it. It wasn’t the first case of a husband disappearing they’d ever
heard of. They told Milosevic the guy’s name was Rubin and the car was
the new shade of black, mica flecks in the paint to make it sparkle,
and it had vanity plates reading: ORTHO 1.
Milosevic put the phone down on that call and it rang again
straightaway with a report from the Chicago Fire Department. A unit
had attended an automobile fire which was putting up a cloud of oily
smoke into the land-side flightpath into Meigs Field Airport. The fire
truck had arrived in an abandoned industrial lot just before one
o’clock Monday and found a black Lexus burning fiercely. They had
figured it was burned to the metal anyway, not much more smoke to come,
so they had saved their foam and just left it to burn out. Milosevic
copied the location and hung up. Ducked into McGrath’s office for
instructions.
“Check it out,” McGrath told him.
Milosevic nodded. He was always happy with road work. It gave him the
chance to drive his own brand-new Ford Explorer, which he liked to use
in preference to one of the Bureau’s clunky sedans. And the Bureau
liked to let him do exactly that, because he never bothered to claim
for his personal gas. So he drove the big shiny four-wheel-drive five
miles south and found the wreck of the Lexus, no trouble at all. It
was parked at an angle on a lumpy concrete area behind an abandoned
industrial building. The tires had burned away and it was settled on
the rims. The plates were still readable: ORTHO 1. He poked through
the drifts of ash inside, still slightly warm, and then he pulled the
shaft of the burned key from the ignition and popped the trunk. Then
he staggered four steps away and threw up on the concrete. He retched
and spat and sweated. He pulled his cellular phone from his pocket and