Another Dead Teenager

Book 3: Paul Turner Mysteries

by Mark Richard Zubro

Genres: Police Procedurals

Synopsis

When two suburban high-school students are found murdered--both boys who were well respected and liked, with solid family lives and no apparent enemies--Detected Paul Turner is assigned the case. However as a gay father with two teenage sons and a new lover in his life, Paul Turner has trouble bringing his full attention to bear on the case. But as details slowly emergy, he begins to suspect that he is investigating something more deadly and horrifying than a pair of senseless killings, something that could threaten the lives of the people he holds most dear.

Booklist gives Another Dead Teenager a rave review: "As in Zubro's previous books, readers have both campy humor and an action filled plot to keep them entertained. Highly recommended--this one's a good read in every sense of the term!"

Release date: April 15, 1996

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 208

Sample

ANOTHER DEAD TEENAGER (Chapter One)
Paul Turner typed his name at the bottom of the Daily Log, his last act in the paperwork for their latest case. He let out a long breath.

Buck Fenwick tossed his pen on the pile of paper he'd been plowing through all morning.

"You done?" Fenwick asked.

Turner rubbed two fists over tired eyes and shoved himself away from his desk. "Yeah," he muttered. He glanced around the squad room. "Where is everybody?"

"They've been at lunch for hours. Come on." Fenwick's ever-expanding bulk necessitated regular feeding and he did not appreciate being late for meals.

They'd been working all morning on reports that capped a brief but sensational investigation. A couple had claimed they'd come home to their luxury high-rise apartment on Lake Shore Drive and found their eighteen-year-old son shot six times. Since they were rich, white, and lived at a wealthy address, the press had done their best swarm-of-locusts imitation around the grief-stricken parents and harassed cops. They had described their family life as more perfect than a warm-fuzzy sitcom on television. Conversations with the dead boy's friends, however, revealed a bleak but all too familiar picture of a family out of control. The friends told about a kid who flew into violent rages in confrontations with his parents, a kid who spent inordinate amounts of mysteriously gotten money on drugs and parties. The parents dismissed the discrepancy in views of the family's life as "nonsense from drug addicts who weren't worthy of being our son's friends." What the parents couldn't do was cover up the lack of footprints in the pools of blood around the body and the absence of bloodstains on their clothes, which would have been expected if they'd approached the body. As a father Turner knew if he found either of his sons hurt or injured, he'd have rushed to his side and not stood at a distance waiting for the police to confirm horrific news. These two anomalies and the differing family portraits were the starting points in convincing Turner that the parents had killed the kid themselves. Presented with their lack of appropriate parental response and a lot less pressure than Turner would have thought necessary, the father had blurted out the truth. You always looked not only at what the suspects did do, but what they didn't do.

Turner and Fenwick could have walked the three blocks to Dearborn Street for lunch, but Fenwick insisted on using the car. "Why walk when you could drive?" was Fenwick's motto. As he drove, he easily managed to outpace most of the gusts of wind hurrying through the South Loop. Cool early autumn air had replaced yesterday's thunderstorms.

Aunt Millie's Bar and Grill had been popular with cops for years. They packed the place at mealtimes and before and after each shift change, but no matter what time of day or night or even what item was ordered, all the food on the menu seemed to come out as mounds of artery-clogging glop or--on a good day--something akin to stale heaps of crust. The noisy, dim, smokefilled room was usually crammed with cops. The motley mix occasionally got flavored with a lost tourist or two, or a couple of brave or demented locals. Two mystery writers had wandered in once, trying to get information about detective work. Millie told them lies while the real cops grinned and guffawed behind them. Aunt Millie's was the last bastion of a grittier Chicago past in the recently upscale Printers Row area of the city.

Turner and Fenwick joined Harold Rodriguez, Dwayne Smythe, and Ashley Devonshire, three other cops from Area Ten, at a circular booth near the back of the restaurant.

After raucus greetings and orders given to a waitress in a rhine-stone-studded apron, Fenwick asked Rodriguez, "Where's Carruthers?"

Randy Carruthers, curse of the day shift, was Rodriguez's partner.

"Do I care?" Rodriguez said. "Maybe he fell into the lake and drowned or he was kissing ass so hard he died in a gas attack. I can only hope something unpleasant happened to him. If I ever decide to kill somebody, my fondest wish is that they assign the case to Carruthers. I'd never be caught."

Ashley pointed to Turner, then Fenwick, and asked, "Did you guys really wrap up that Lake Shore Drive shooting last night?"

Both detectives nodded.

Dwayne, pink-cheeked, with short, brush-cut black hair and perfect teeth, and Ashley, an African-American woman with a pleasant smile and a melodious voice, were the newest additions to the Area Ten detective squad. Their newness did not prevent them from adopting the most blatant attitude of "been-there, done-that" Turner had ever run into. If you had a crime with ten dead bodies, they had one with eleven. If you'd worked eighteen hours, they'd worked nineteen. If you'd solved a case in ten hours, they could have done it in nine.

"Damn, you guys are good," Dwayne said. He reached over and twiddled Fenwick's tie. The older cop growled. "You guys are good, but Ashley and I are good and lucky. That's the combination you've got to have."

Ashley patted Fenwick's hand. "You're cute when you're angry."

"I don't see why you worked so hard on the case," Rodriguez said. "They did the world a favor. It was just another dead teenager. Not enough of those around."

"It was their own kid," Ashley said. "You see it all the time."

Turner knew the source of Rodriguez's sourness on teenagers. Of Rodriguez's four kids, two had been in jail by the age of sixteen, a third was saved from prison only because he could run faster than an overweight beat cop, and the fourth had run away six months ago. Rodriguez's being a cop had protected his kids from prosecution only a little and that only in the beginning. Turner liked Rodriguez, found him affable as a companion and more than competent as a cop. He couldn't imagine the home life that led to such misery.

"All kids are rotten," Rodriguez said.

"You still encouraging teenagers to hang out on street corners and join gangs?" Fenwick asked.

"Whenever I can. More chances to shoot each other that way." For a few more minutes Rodriguez continued on a tirade about how awful kids were while the others ate in silence. Turner tuned him out. He'd heard the litany of teenage sins and perversions innumerable times before.

As their mounds of grease--reputedly burgers this afternoon--were delivered, Fenwick's radio crackled. Fenwick put the portable next to his ear to listen. He moved the mouthpiece to his lips, gave a brief response, and said to Turner, "We gotta go. Grab your stuff."

Turner didn't ask questions. He threw money on the table, picked up his burger and plastic cup filled with coffee, and followed Fenwick out to the car.

Behind the wheel Fenwick said, "We got a dead body in an abandoned warehouse at Twentieth and Lumber Streets." Fenwick drove and ate while Turner balanced his drink against Fenwick's quick starts, rapid acceleration, sharp turns, and abrupt stops. If he had to drive five feet or five hundred miles, he pushed a car as fast as it would go, rarely bothering with what the terrain or road conditions would allow.

"Body will still be dead when we get there," Turner said around several bites of burger.

Fenwick grunted. Turner was mostly used to Fenwick's mad careening, but he didn't relish the idea of a lapful of hot coffee.

They hurried down Clark Street to 20th and turned west to cross the river. A blue and white squad car rested on the pavement in front of a building bounded by the Chicago River, Lumber Street, and 20th Street. Most of the windows were broken out of the five-story structure. Grimy maroon bricks made up the walls of the hopelessly dilapidated outer shell of the old factory. They grabbed flashlights and notebooks and strode toward a uniformed cop standing on the threshold.

"You guys won't believe it," the cop said.

Turner didn't recognize the officer, who was short, blond-haired, and slender, but he did recognize the trembling and excitement. Probably just out of the police academy and hadn't seen a dead body before. The guy was torn between the desire to gape and the urge to toss his lunch.

"How'd the call come in?" Fenwick growled.

The cop blinked. He said, "Huh?"

"Who found the body? Who called it in?"

"Some little kid playing where he wasn't supposed to. That's not the big thing."

"What is?" Fenwick asked.

"The dead guy is Ken Goldstein's son."

Fenwick glared at the guy a moment, then said, "It's still just a dead guy."

Fenwick's attitude was the right one, Turner knew, but still the Goldstein name would bring hordes of reporters. Ken Goldstein had been the coach of two college basketball national championship teams in his years at St. Basil's University in Frankfort, a far south suburb of Chicago. Moving on from there, it took him ten years to win two national basketball championships in the NBA. For several years his name had been almost as magical in Chicago sports as Michael Jordan's. The press circus of the case they just finished would be nothing compared to the mobs around them now.

"How do you know it's Goldstein's son?" Turner asked.

"Driver's license and other stuff in his wallet," the blond said.

"You touched the body?" Fenwick snapped.

"Just for identification."

Fenwick snarled and growled, then said, "Just for nothing, you dumb-shit numb-nuts asshole!" Fenwick enjoyed teaching rookie cops a lesson and Turner let him shout on. The kid had to learn sometime. Fenwick pushed his nose an inch from the young cop's face. "Never touch anything! Never! Don't go near the scene! Just call the detectives and stay away!"

The blond turned pale and gulped. His voice squeaked, "Yes, sir."

"Don't they teach you guys anything at the academy?" Fenwick didn't wait for an answer. "You got a partner in there screwing things up?"

"Yes, no." The cop scratched his head in bewilderment. "He's in there."

"Stay out here." Fenwick jabbed a finger into the cop's chest to punctuate each sentence. "Keep everybody out of here. I don't care if the Police Superintendent, the mayor, and the pope show up. Nobody gets in unless they're from the Crime Lab or the Medical Examiner's office."

"Yes, sir." The blond gave them directions for finding the body inside.

Before entering, Turner and Fenwick examined the pavement for twenty feet on either side of the entrance. Nothing amid the urban destruction jumped up and said, "I'm a clue."

Turner glanced at the buildings across the street. More boarded-up old factories or warehouses. The one on the corner a hundred feet away was a burned-out hulk. "Not gonna be a lot of witnesses in the neighborhood," Turner said.

"Not much traffic either," Fenwick added.

Outside, the gusting wind had whipped autumn cold through every tiny opening in their clothes. Inside, Turner felt the cool and damp cloying at his skin. Light from outdoors filtered through the broken windows from former offices along the west side of the building. Remnants of this glow then seeped into the corridor they were in. They flipped on their flashlights and shone them ahead, then tramped carefully down the center of the structure. Most of the floor and ceiling on this level were still intact. The walls were water-stained and the floorboards mushed under their feet.

"Place should've been torn down," Fenwick said.

"No signs of blood and gore or dead bodies here," Turner said.

The building smelled of mold, urine, and excrement. The detectives passed a bank of empty, gaping service elevators. They encountered the promised stairway at the far end of the passage. They let their flashlight beams linger on each step and railing.

They ascended the stairs, and following the blond's directions, walked down a corridor, past five openings, and turned right.

A frightened voice called, "Who's there?"

They identified themselves. Seconds later another cop, younger than the one downstairs, put a trembling face around a corner. "It's a little spooky up here," he said.

"Where's the victim?" Turner asked.

The cop pointed into the room he'd just left and stepped out into the hall.

The naked male body lay on its back ten feet from the entrance to the room. A broken-out window on the east wall let in oblique sunlight and a slight breeze. Shattered glass and rotting fast-food containers lay strewn across half the floor. The walls had turned gray and brown, with blotches of mold spreading from corners or crevices where the paint had first begun to peel. A heap of clothes was scattered in one corner.

Neither detective made a move to enter the room. They would make preliminary observations and begin their sketches of the scene from here. Then along with the Crime Lab they'd make a painstakingly careful entrance.

"Lot of blood," Fenwick said.

Great gouts and spurts of blood had sprayed halfway up the two walls nearest the body. Vast pools of dark red covered nearly half the floor. The Crime Lab would automatically check for footprints inadvertently left by the killer here, in the hall, and any likely place in the building. One set was readily visible. Probably the cop who checked the identification. The pool of blood could have covered any others, or the killer could have brought a second pair of shoes, showing lots of planning and premeditation. A killer who stopped to clean up his footprints suggested a cool hand.

Turner could make out a gaping hole in the left side of the corpse's head, the blood and brains smeared on the filth-encrusted wall behind him. "Bullet holes in the torso are at a funny angle," Turner said.

"Funny ha-ha or funny weird?" asked Fenwick. The two of them crouched together in the wide doorway.

"Kind of coming up out of the body," Turner said. "I've seen at least a hundred of these and I've never seen holes like that. These aren't like they exploded straight through, one side to the other, but as if they sort of popped up from inside."

Fenwick shone the flashlight on the boy's wrists and ankles. "Round abrasions? Probably tied with a rope." He flicked the light over the body. "Nice-looking kid," he said.

Turner eyed the corpse dispassionately. The face with lifeless eyes staring was undamaged, with a few flecks of red under the chin and bits of interior body parts caught at the throat. It was a handsome face. Both broad shoulders were intact and the parts of the abdomen still recognizable as such were flat and muscular.

"Around fifteen or sixteen?" Fenwick opined.

Turner recalled reading an article in the paper when Ken Goldstein's son won the state of Illinois tennis high school championship a few weeks ago. He told Fenwick what he remembered. He finished, "The paper had a picture of him with this real attractive girl in a cheerleader outfit."

Fenwick played his flashlight on the gaping eyes. "One dead stud muffin," he said.

They stood up and retreated back into the corridor. Fenwick began examining the hallway with his flashlight. He stooped and pointed at a dark smear. "Could be blood," he said.

"We need to get lots more light in here," Turner said.

Fenwick gave a grunt of agreement, then added, "Half the goddamn reporters in the country are going to be sniffing around this one."

Whenever possible, the Commander of Area Ten put Turner and Fenwick on the cases that could involve lots of publicity. He knew the two detectives wouldn't be stampeded into making an arrest, and that they had an over 95 percent conviction rate on those they did bust. The commander wanted seasoned veterans who could ride out a media feeding frenzy, and he had them in Turner and Fenwick.

They heard noise behind them and turned to see members of the Crime Lab. Turner and Fenwick began making sketches of the scene in their regulation blue folders. Turner drew the body, noting the wound sites he could see without shifting it. He'd add more sketches when the medical examiner turned the body over.

Three hours later they'd learned a couple of things. They confirmed that the Kenitkamette police, where the dead boy lived, had a missing person report on Jacob Goldstein, the famous coach's son, but they also had one on a friend of the teen's, Frank Douglas, son of a former Olympic track and field star.

Turner, Fenwick, a local beat cop, the medical examiner, and two members of the Crime Lab held a conference next to the broken-out window of the room where they'd found the body.

What they had so far was evidence of only one killer. The murder had taken place in this room. More lab tests were necessary to check for traces of sexual assault; the victim had fought against his bonds.

The M.E. said to Turner, "You were right about the funny angle of some of the wounds. Kid was shot up the ass at least twice. Bullets came up and out." He nodded at the Crime Lab tech. "Fluid tests will tell us a lot. Killer kept shooting him after he was dead."

Turner said, "So somehow the killer gets the drop on an athletic teenager and ties him up. Chooses this place because it's isolated and abandoned so he won't be disturbed. Obviously picked out carefully."

"Homeless and gangs don't usually hang out in here," the local uniformed patrolman said. "It's too ruined even for them."

Turner said, "From the looks of this I'd say we've got a very angry person who is still able to plan extremely carefully."

Heads nodded.

The patrolman said, "I inventoried everything in the room. The kid's underwear is missing. I got jeans, socks, shoes, sweatshirt, undershirt, coat, but no shorts."

"Gosh, sounds like a clue to me," Fenwick said.

"Footprints you saw were definitely from the cop who identified him."

"Figures," Fenwick said.

"Who's the security firm for this place?" Turner asked.

The patrolman said, "Save-Our-Souls."

They all chuckled. Save-Our-Souls was their nickname for Illinois Safe Serve, the most notoriously useless security company in the area. Reputedly they hired retired suburban cops who were past the retirement age of any police department within hundreds of miles. Cop lore in the city had it that they gave their guards one bullet for their guns: If they had any trouble, they were supposed to shoot themselves. They were also the cheapest outfit in the city. Your insurance company, assuming you had one for some of these hulks, would see this wonderful firm on paper and assume you were a responsible landlord.

"We'll have to talk to the Kenitkamette police and find out where this kid was supposed to be," Fenwick said.

"Somebody was going to call," the patrolman said.

"I'll check in a minute," Turner said.

"We'll have to examine the outside of the building before we leave," Fenwick said. "We can probably get a couple of uniformed cops to go over it inch by inch."

"I don't envy you guys on this one," the M.E. said. "The dad was famous. So was the kid. You'll have people oozing out of the woodwork trying to 'help.' Ninety-nine point nine percent won't know shit."

"Maybe we'll even get a task force," Fenwick said.

"Gosh, shucks, I'm all excited," Turner said. He sighed. "I better go find that uniform with the report from Kenitkamette."



Turner reentered the room ten minutes later. "We have another call."

"Tell them we're going to interview the parents," Fenwick said. "They need to find somebody else."

"It's about the other kid. The one that was with Jake Goldstein."

"He's not sobbing his eyes out and confessing to murder, is he?" Fenwick asked.

"Not unless he's doing it from some kind of afterlife. They found him on the bottom level of the Columbus Drive parking garage. Single bullet hole through the head."

Fenwick glanced back at the shredded corpse in the room. "Killer used two different methods."

"Not that different," Turner said. "Gun in both cases. Maybe our killer just used one bullet there, but he had more time here. Or maybe the Douglas kid killed his buddy and then decided to blow himself away in an inconvenient parking garage."

"Or," Fenwick said, "a third person, maybe more, that we don't know about was on the scene, and killed them in different locations for obscure mystical reasons."

"Mystical?"

"It's my day of the month to be philosophical."

"I've been holding my breath for this moment."

"Why were they in town?"

"Bears game last night."

"Never understood that Thursday night shit."

"One of those cable television deals. Had them for a couple years now."

Fenwick glanced back at the room. "I guess we'll know more at the other scene."

In the Chicago Police Department, whoever got the first call on a case investigated all subsequent crimes discovered that had connection to the first. That meant Turner and Fenwick had another body. Not a chance they'd be home before midnight.

The uniform who had met them at the front door entered the room. "You guys might need to look at this place we found."

They followed him out the door.

"I shouldn't have snapped at you earlier," Fenwick said to the young cop. "Sorry."

The uniform shrugged.

Up a flight of stairs to the third floor at the far end of a hall, they found a room slightly smaller than the one with the dead body. The young cop pointed at a tattered sleeping bag, six pop cans, and boxes and wrappers for McDonald's burgers and French fries.

"What is this shit?" Fenwick asked. "Somebody said gangs and the homeless didn't show up here."

"Kids," the patrolman said. "Maybe the ones who found the body."

"Sweep it for everything, bag it all, and save it," Turner said. "Better have all the prints taken. Any other signs of habitation in the building?"

"This is all we found so far. We're taking a second look."

Before they got in their car, they walked slowly around the north, west, and south sides of the building. The fourth side formed part of the retaining wall for the Chicago River.

"Must have parked somewhere," Fenwick said. "Unless they drove up in a boat."

They craned their necks around the northeast corner of the building. The wall of the factory plunged straight down into the river. What might at one time have been a loading dock had long since been bricked over.

"No place to tie up or get in," Turner said.

The north side of the building had the entrance Turner and Fenwick had used. Rusting wire mesh covered the windows on the ground floor that faced Lumber Street on the west side of the building. A gangway barely wide enough for a person to walk through ran along half of the south side of the building. The other half faced a field overgrown with years of debris, weeds, and bushes.

"Hard to get in anywhere back here," Turner said.

"Stopping in front risks somebody driving by on the street."

They scrambled up the cracked concrete of the loading dock, which ran for the same length the field did. Any of several broken doors and smashed windows could have given the killer access.

"Better get all these dusted," Fenwick said.

"Hard to drag a squirming kid through here," Turner said.

"Must have done something. Let's get some uniforms to go over every inch of this."



Fenwick didn't even bother trying to take surface streets across the Loop. It was after four and it could take them over an hour to make a ten-minute trip through the rush-hour crush. Fenwick eased down Wells Street and took the cutoff to Lower Wacker Drive. They sped quickly along the road which ran between the Chicago River and the bottoms of decrepit buildings, whose nooks, crannies, and shadows housed a large portion of homeless hunkering down against the coming winter.

The group of people at the Wacker Drive entrance to the parking garage parted slowly to let the unmarked police car inch its way forward. While Fenwick waited for a uniformed male cop to unhook the Police Crime Scene tape, a young female cop leaned in the passenger-side window next to Turner and said, "Down on level three."

The tires squealed as Fenwick raced through the turns.

"Body's not going anywhere," Turner said.

Fenwick grunted.

On level three a small crowd of civilians stood near the lighted cashier's booth. A uniformed cop waved them over. He pointed around a wall that divided the sections of the garage. "That way."

"Who's down there?" Fenwick asked.

"Couple guys from Eleventh and State."

"Double fuck," Fenwick said.

Turner saw a knot of police brass and a few uniformed cops gathered about fifty feet beyond the curve to the next level. Among them Turner recognized the director of Research and Development, the commander of the Communication Division, and the deputy superintendent of Technical Services. They slouched and stared at something on the far side of a Chevrolet conversion van. They weren't going to contribute anything to the investigation. They were only deskbound cops come to gawk at the famous dead.

Keeping in mind Fenwick's dislike for brass and his ability to shoot his mouth off at the wrong moment, Turner made sure he got to the scene before Fenwick could make insistent comments about them butting out. "Could you all step over here for a minute?" Turner asked. "We need to make a few sketches."

The brass ambled a few feet away. Making preliminary sketches was a good excuse to get the brass to move and better than Fenwick bellowing at them to move their butts.

The Columbus Drive underground garage had only recently opened. The lines marking the parking spaces still gleamed bright yellow in their newness. The gray cinder blocks in their thousands held up tons of darker gray poured concrete. The neon lights interrupted and intruded upon the shadows, but seemed more to be in an armed truce with the darkness than conquering the night.

The body lay between the front of the van and the wall. Shadows hid nearly everything but the outline of a human form. Turner could barely make out the gaping hole in the left side of Frank Douglas's head. A shaft of light a few feet behind and above caught smears of blood and brains on the cement wall behind him. The feeble light managed to catch the white of the lifeless eyes. Even after so many years on the job, the open, staring eyes of death caused Turner to pause.

ANOTHER DEAD TEENAGER Copyright © 1995 by Mark Richard Zubro