Murder Beyond the Grave, Page 2

  A cop yanks one of Danny’s arms behind his back, fastens a cuff around it, and then pulls his other arm back and locks them together.

  “Ouch,” Danny mumbles.

  “What’s wrong?” a cop says. “Don’t like being locked up? Get used to it. We’re going to lock you up until you’re old enough to collect social security.”

  The police begin searching the office, flinging open drawers on the desk and turning over furniture. Danny watches them search, then raises his eyes to look at Mitch.

  Mitch is glaring at him, his eyes focused and murderous.

  A cold chill slithers up Danny’s spine. Mitch doesn’t say a word, but his expression tells Danny everything he needs to know.

  Mitch’s expression says, I know it was you.

  CHAPTER 5

  DANNY SITS IN the rear of an unmarked police car as it rolls past the welcome sign for the city of Kankakee, Illinois. In the front seats sit the same officers who were in the panel van earlier, his handlers for the undercover operation. They are detectives with KAMEG—the Kankakee Area Metropolitan Drug Enforcement Group. Danny has forgotten their names. Both were friendly to him before, but now things are different. Ever since the bust went awry, they’ve been alternating between cold indifference and fiery antagonism.

  “You know you could have taken these damn handcuffs off me,” Danny says, shifting his body to find a comfortable way to sit in the seat while his hands are still locked behind his back.

  The officer in the passenger seat—a fortysomething man with blond hair, sideburns, and a mustache—shifts around to look at Danny. His eyes glare at Danny with nearly the same rage that had been burning in Mitch’s eyes.

  “You’re lucky we’re not throwing your ass in jail,” the officer says.

  “Hey,” Danny says, shrugging his shoulders, “I did my part.”

  “You were supposed to say the code phrase after you saw the coke. Not before.”

  “He was about to pull it out,” Danny says. “I was sure of it.”

  “It’s our fault,” says the driver, a man about Danny’s age with a buzz cut that makes him look as if he just got out of the marines. “We assumed this high school dropout knew the difference between before and after.”

  “My three-year-old knows the difference between before and after,” says the officer with the mustache.

  “Yeah, but your son’s human.” The driver looks in the rearview mirror and fixes his eyes on Danny. “Not a rat.”

  “Very funny,” Danny says. “You weren’t calling me a rat when I agreed to help you.”

  “That was back when we thought you were actually going to help us,” the cop says. “Not screw us over.”

  “If it was up to me,” the mustached officer says, “I’d put your lying ass in jail. You reneged on your agreement as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Well, it’s not up to you,” Danny says, unable to hide a smile. “The state’s attorney says I fulfilled the terms of my deal.”

  The cop in the passenger seat looks over at the driver. “I told you he was a slick operator.”

  The driver says nothing, and quiet overtakes the car. Danny looks out the window. The car crosses a bridge over the Kankakee River. Its water is gray in the January light, and the trees lining the banks are leafless and lean.

  Soon they’re driving through downtown Kankakee, a short strip of old brick storefronts. With a population of about twenty-five thousand people, Kankakee is a nice little town—quaint, quiet, and close enough to Chicago that residents can get their big-city fix whenever they need to.

  Danny watches the storefronts roll by, remembering growing up here. He’d ridden his bike into town on summer afternoons. He’d gone swimming in the river. He’d snuck into train cars at the old depot and smoked marijuana with his friends.

  His parents were well off, and he’d never been left wanting. As an adult, he’d done well for himself—just not by obeying the law. Up until recently, he’d been making four thousand dollars a week selling cocaine. He’d owned a riverfront house in an upscale neighborhood, and he’d also been making enough to lease a split-level town house for his girlfriend, Nancy. He paid for her place because he didn’t want her and her eight-year-old son, Benji, to be close to his drug-dealing operations.

  Life had been great. He’d been planning to buy a boat.

  But then KAMEG agents raided his Aroma Park home, seizing ten thousand dollars in cash and two hundred grams of cocaine—with a street value of twenty thousand. The story of the narrow escape that he told to Mitch was a complete fabrication. The truth is he’d been busted red-handed.

  A month ago, he’d had the world at his feet. Now he’s sleeping in Nancy’s town house, trying to figure out how to make the monthly payment. All the money he had in the world is gone. Life as he once knew it is now over.

  “Why are you looking so gloomy?” the officer in the passenger seat says to him. “You just lucked into a get-out-of-jail-free card.”

  “It doesn’t feel that way,” Danny says. “What am I supposed to do now?”

  As the police car rolls up in front of Nancy’s town house, the two officers look at each other, incredulous. The driver turns around and glares at Danny.

  “Why don’t you try getting a job like everybody else.”

  CHAPTER 6

  August 1987

  DANNY SWINGS HIS hammer and drives a framing nail into a two-by-four. He stands inside the skeleton of a house under construction, sweating in the summer humidity. He reaches into his tool belt, pulls out another nail, and lines it up. He takes a swing and misses the nail—hitting his thumb instead.

  “Damn it!” he shouts, throwing his hammer down onto the plywood floor.

  He shakes his hand, trying to wring out the pain. He checks his watch. It’s not quite quitting time, but close enough.

  He collects his hammer and heads over to the foreman, who hands him a check. Danny stares in disbelief at the numbers on the paystub.

  “Uncle Sam sure takes a bite, don’t he?” the foreman says.

  And people say I’m a crook, Danny thinks.

  He almost opens his mouth to ask for more hours. He sure could use the money. But he hates the work. There’s got to be an easier way to make money.

  He climbs into his van and heads home. At a stoplight, he examines the palms of his hands. The soft flesh is full of blisters. He keeps waiting for calluses to form and for his skin to toughen up, but it hasn’t happened yet.

  I’m not cut out for this type of work, he thinks.

  The only problem is that the one type of work he is cut out for is illegal. He’s been walking the straight and narrow since January because he knows that another bust will put him in prison for who knows how long. There will be no leniency this time. No deal.

  No get-out-of-jail-free card.

  He pulls up in front of the town house, which is in need of a new paint job.

  Inside, he finds Nancy crouched in the kitchen behind the dishwasher, which she’s slid out from the counter. A slick of soapy water covers the linoleum floor. Her son, Benji—oblivious to the difficulties of the world—is playing in the puddle. Nancy has a roll of duct tape and is wrapping it around a pipe.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Danny says.

  “The damn thing’s leaking again,” Nancy says without looking up.

  Nancy Rish is a knockout. Twenty-five years old. Petite. Platinum blond. When she dresses up for a night on the town, she looks like a Barbie doll.

  But right now, her hair is damp and hanging in her eyes, her sweatpants are soaked with soapy water, and she has grease on her hands and forearms like she’s an auto-shop mechanic instead of a stay-at-home mom.

  “That should do it,” she says, and stands up.

  She presses the button to start the dishwasher again. The motor begins to hum, and they watch for more water leaking out. It appears she fixed whatever was wrong.

  She grabs a mop and starts to clean up the floor. Danny knows
he should help, but he’s dog tired after working all day, so he just watches her.

  When she’s finished mopping, she leans against the handle and says, “You know, I’ve been thinking. It’s time I go back to work.”

  “No,” Danny says without considering it.

  “Honey,” she says. “We need the money.”

  Benji is walking around the kitchen, searching for puddles. There’s no more water for him to splash in, but his shoes are wet and he keeps leaving dirty footprints on the linoleum.

  “I’ll think of something,” Danny says. “I’ll get back on my feet. I promise.”

  Nancy approaches him, and even in her soaked sweatpants and dirty tank top, she is still beautiful. She puts her arms around his neck and pulls his face down for a long kiss.

  “I’m so proud of you for not dealing anymore,” she says. “Times are tough right now, but they’re going to get better. You’re doing the right thing. Let me help you.”

  Danny shakes his head. When he first met her, Nancy had been working two jobs and somehow taking care of Benji in what little free time she had. She’d gotten pregnant and married as a teenager and ever since she divorced her husband, she’d worked odd jobs: waitressing, selling makeup, cleaning houses. He’d been able to take her from that life. He’d be damned if he was the reason she had to go back to it.

  He wraps his arms around her and embraces her. She closes her eyes and rests her head on his chest.

  They hear Benji splashing in a puddle.

  “I thought I got it all,” Nancy says, opening her eyes.

  The dishwasher is leaking again.

  CHAPTER 7

  DANNY DRIVES DOWN the tree-lined streets of the tony neighborhood where his parents live. His van’s window is down because even though it’s only midmorning, the day is hot and humid.

  Danny parks his van in front of his parents’ home, a big two-story house with a large front porch with columns flanking the front door. He cuts through the grass and takes the porch steps two at a time.

  He raps on the door and waits. He can hear a lawn mower down the street and somewhere kids are playing and laughing. He feels a pang of nostalgia for his own childhood, a time when life was simpler and easier.

  When his father comes to the door, Danny expects to be invited in, but instead George Edwards steps out onto the porch and closes the door behind him. His hair is grayer than the last time Danny saw him. His eyes look weary.

  “What do you want, Danny?”

  Danny frowns. “How about a ‘Hello, son, it’s good to see you’?”

  His father crosses his arms and leans against the porch railing. He repeats his question. “What do you want, Danny?”

  Danny huffs. “It’s nice to see you too,” he says sarcastically.

  When his dad doesn’t say anything else, Danny says, “Look, Dad, I need a loan. I just need some help getting on my feet. I promise I will pay you back.”

  “No.”

  “I’ve cleaned up my act,” Danny says. “I’m staying out of trouble, making important changes in my life. Nancy and I need a little help, that’s all.”

  “No,” his father says. “I’m done helping you.”

  Danny opens his mouth to object, but his father doesn’t give him the chance.

  “I offered you a place in the family business,” his father says. “But you didn’t want to be an electrician. Then I offered you a job at the grocery store I own. You didn’t want anything to do with that either.”

  Danny doesn’t have a defense. He’s always preferred easy money to hard work and started selling marijuana in high school.

  “May I also remind you,” his father says, “that when you dropped out of high school and married Peggy, I gave you a house—a house, Danny!”

  Danny lowers his head. After he divorced his wife so he could be with Nancy, he and his ex-wife had sold the house, and he’d used his share to get in the door of the cocaine business.

  “Look,” Danny says, trying to sound sincere, “I understand why you don’t want to help me. I’ve screwed up in the past. But I’m really trying to do the right thing here.”

  His father takes a deep breath, and Danny feels relieved that he’s finally gotten to the old man.

  “I hope that what you say is true, Danny. I hope you’ve cleaned up your act. But I won’t help you anymore.”

  Danny’s hope evaporates.

  “You’ve hurt me too many times in the past,” his dad says.

  With that, his father opens the front door and walks back inside. Danny can hear the click as his father throws the dead bolt.

  “Well, to hell with you,” Danny mutters, “you old son of a bitch.”

  He climbs back into his van and begins driving through Kankakee. He isn’t ready to go home and face Nancy. He knows the city well, and he guides the van through the nicest neighborhoods. He looks at the big houses, with vast green front yards and shiny sports cars parked in the driveways.

  His parents were never millionaires, but they were well off. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He wishes now he could reverse the decisions that led him to where he is today. If he had finished high school, he could have gotten his electrician’s union card. He could be running the business with his older brothers. Or the grocery store—he could be managing it now.

  But selling drugs was too easy.

  He passes a particularly opulent house with an expansive front yard and a wraparound front porch. There is a red Ferrari parked in the driveway in front of a detached garage. Three barefoot boys are running through a sprinkler, a teenager and two younger boys who look like twins.

  A man wearing glasses, a polo shirt, and a pair of khaki shorts steps out on the front porch. The guy has a smile on his face like he has it all.

  “I wish I had that guy’s life,” Danny says to himself, and he drives on.

  CHAPTER 8

  STEPHEN SMALL DOESN’T even notice the white panel van driving past his house, let alone the scraggly haired man behind the wheel who is leering covetously at his home. He only pays attention to his boys, who are taking turns running through the sprinkler.

  His twins, Barrett and Christopher, are laughing as they dart through the water. His older son, Ramsey, tries to do a cartwheel over the spray, but slips and falls into the grass, howling with laughter.

  Stephen chuckles to himself and heads toward the Ferrari parked in the driveway.

  “Oh, Stephen,” his wife, Nancy, calls from behind him.

  Stephen turns to see his wife holding up a set of keys.

  “Forget something?” she asks.

  Stephen laughs and heads back toward the porch. His wife of eighteen years has a bright friendly smile that he fell in love with early in their courtship.

  “Thanks, hon,” Stephen says, giving her a hug and a kiss on the cheek.

  “Where are you going, Dad?” Ramsey calls out to him.

  “I’ve got to go to the boat shop and pick up a few things,” he says.

  “Then can we go out on the river?”

  “You bet,” Stephen says.

  He fires up the Ferrari and pulls out of the driveway. The two-hundred-thousand-dollar car has a V8 engine, but Stephen doesn’t push the car too fast, especially in residential areas. He is a careful driver.

  He takes a slight detour on his way into town and cruises down Kankakee’s Riverview Historic District. He slows and creeps past a large, unusual-looking house on a spacious lot. There are a handful of workers going into and out of the building.

  The twelve-thousand-square-foot house is a historic fixture in the community. Built in 1901, the house was designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright. It has twelve bedrooms and more than a hundred windows.

  Just this month the house was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. In Stephen Small’s view, the house is the jewel of the Riverview Historic District.

  But Stephen isn’t just another sightseer slowing down to admire the house.

&n
bsp; He owns it.

  A year ago, he bought the house with the intention of renovating it and perhaps one day turning it into a bed-and-breakfast. The B. Harley Bradley House, named for the original owner, is Stephen’s passion project.

  He doesn’t stop the Ferrari, just slows down, checks to make sure the house is okay, and then speeds along toward his destination.

  He has faith in the workers, but he can’t help himself. Stephen keeps an eye on the house whenever he’s in the area.

  If anything happened to the house, he isn’t sure what he would do.

  CHAPTER 9

  DANNY PULLS HIS van into a parking space at the local boat shop and strolls in through the door. The air-conditioning feels refreshing on his clammy skin.

  “Hey there,” the manager says. “What can I do you for?”

  Danny explains that he needs his deposit back on a boat he put a down payment on.

  “I don’t have the riverfront property I did when I planned to buy the boat,” Danny explains.

  After his arrest, Danny moved out of the river house he had used as the base of operations for his drug deals. Not only could he not afford it anymore, but he was also afraid that Mitch would find him there and exact revenge for Danny leading police to his restaurant. He hoped Mitch wouldn’t hold a grudge since he’d led the police astray. He’d known Mitch didn’t keep any drugs in the restaurant, but he wasn’t sure Mitch would see what he’d done as a favor.

  “You want your deposit back?” the manager asks. “You know you don’t get all your money back, just a portion. It says so in the agreement you signed.”

  Danny scratches his head and reluctantly says that he understands.

  “I need the money,” Danny says. “There’s no way I can buy a boat any time soon.”

  The manager walks into a back office to collect the paperwork and write Danny a check, and Danny stands and waits, looking around. He studies the selection of skis, life jackets, and boat-maintenance tools. He feels a wave of depression come over him. There is such a difference between the life he lives now and the life he had a year ago—the life he thought he would continue to have forever.