Public Murders

by Bill Granger

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

The heat this long Chicago summer was so intense that the pavement itself seemed to steam. It drove everyone from the streets, day and night. That's why the breeze wafting over Grant Park seemed particularly inviting to the attractive blonde. She didn't know it was an invitation to her own savage murder, exactly eight minutes away. She was to be the first victim, but not the last. And as more butchered bodies turned up in public places, Detective Karen Kovac took the deadliest risk possible for any cop--man or woman. She offered herself as bait to a brutal, unknown killer.

Release date: March 17, 2015

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 272

Sample

The man on the movie screen was reclining on a brown leather couch. He had blond hair and dull blue eyes. He was naked. He smiled now at the blond woman who came into view on the screen; she, too, was naked, except for dark stockings fastened to a thin black garter belt. For a moment she stood awkwardly in front of the man until he made a gesture. Slowly she sank to her knees on the carpet in front of him. He reached for her.

It was nine fourteen A.M.

Outside the shabby theater the streets of Chicago’s Loop were rapidly filling with people. It was Tuesday and for the thirteenth straight day the weather bureau had predicted that the temperature would rise above ninety degrees Fahrenheit. In an hour a half-million workers would have completed their daily treks to the Loop and closeted themselves in the dry coolness of a hundred air-conditioned buildings clustered within and around the mile-square confines of the looping elevated tracks that gave the district its name. It had been hot for so long this June that the sidewalks never lost their heat and the pavement seemed to steam. The overuse of air-conditioners had caused a brownout the day before.

The woman on the screen looked reluctant, even frightened, as she bent forward toward the man’s lap. She began to perform fellatio; the dull eyes of the actor now seemed to glisten. He touched her hair. The sexual act portrayed continued for several minutes.

None of the men in the theater spoke or seemed in any way to react to the scene depicted on the screen.

The woman on the screen moaned once.

Outside the theater a policeman wearing the white cap of the traffic division paused to wipe a long bead of sweat from his forehead. He looked at the billboard on the theater that said: THE FINEST IN ADULT FILMS. He heard an auto honk and turned away and began to cross Washington Street. His name was James McGarrity; he was assigned to direct traffic at the intersection of Washington and Dearborn streets just east of the old City Hall. He was now a half block further east of that intersection.

He walked to the middle of the street and motioned furiously to several drivers sitting in cars waiting to enter a nine-story parking lot. “Double it up, for Christ’s sake,” he shouted, and the cars, slowly and almost reluctantly, formed a double line of autos at the parking-lot entrance. In forming the lines, they blocked nearly half of the traffic on crowded Washington Street Patrolman McGarrity received one hundred fifty dollars a month from the owners of the parking garage for facilitating entry into it during the rush hours. Which is why McGarrity was in the wrong place at nine twenty-one A.M. on this hot June morning in 1973.

On the movie screen the scene had shifted. Now a black woman was on the rug by the same leather couch, and a white woman with black hair was crouched over her. The white woman opened her mouth and placed it on one breast of the woman beneath her.

One of the nine men in the theater got up from his seat. He turned away from the screen and started up the dimly lit aisle to the neon exit sign that buzzed above the door. He pushed open the door to the small lobby without turning back to the screen.

McGarrity removed his white cap and wiped his bald forehead again. As he did this, he glanced across Washington Street and saw the man leave the theater. For a moment McGarrity thought the man looked at him briefly and shuffled nervously east to State Street. McGarrity replaced his cap and smiled. Pulling his wang at nine in the goddamn morning, he thought. Feels guilty. The man shuffled away and McGarrity noticed he had a gimpy leg. Waves of heat shimmered up from the street and strips of tar patching the sidewalks softened in the early intense sunlight.

Several women had caught their shoe heels in the tar strips that morning.

McGarrity swung around and turned his attention back to the double lane of cars waiting at the garage entrance.

McGarrity noticed the blond then.

She was pretty, he decided. McGarrity was no longer married, but he had a girlfriend he kept in an apartment in Elmwood Park. She was a dark-haired woman of forty-five who worked as a waitress in a west suburban restaurant. McGarrity noticed the blond because she stopped on the sidewalk and consulted a small map.

McGarrity hitched up his gun belt and sauntered from the middle of the street to the sidewalk where the blond stood.

“Need help, honey?” he asked and smiled.

She looked up at him, annoyed. “No.” There was a trace of an accent.

“You from outta town?”

“Yes.” Clipped.

McGarrity thought she was an unfriendly bitch. He looked at her breasts.

“Where ya going? I can help ya find it.”

She shrugged to him and started to walk rapidly away. McGarrity smiled after her. Nice ass too, he commented to himself.

It was the last he would ever see of Maj Kirsten. Months later, it would occur to him who she was. But by then, of course, it would be too late.

McGarrity turned back to his double line of cars.

Maj Kirsten was a Swedish schoolteacher on her third independent tour of the United States. She had decided to fly home tomorrow night on an SAS flight from O’Hare Airport to Kastrup Airport at Copenhagen. From there she had already arranged to take the early morning ferry across the sound to her native Malmö. She had also decided it would be good to be home.

The tour had gone badly. An unusual heat wave in the eastern part of the United States helped defeat her plans to travel more extensively. She hated the sultry, lingering heat; it drove everyone from the streets, day and night; it created an apathy in her and in the country she was visiting. The heat pervaded everything.

Maj Kirsten was twenty-seven and an independent woman.

This was her first visit to Chicago. On the two previous tours she had gone to New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New Orleans. She had even spent a week on a ranch in Wyoming.

In Chicago she went to Old Town and rented a room at a cheap hotel near the section that was often used by foreign visitors. The night before she met a man in Butch McGuire’s bar on Division Street. The bar was a meeting place for young, single people, and Maj Kirsten had felt oddly lonely that night. After several drinks she had agreed to go with him to his apartment; he was not unattractive. Her hotel on Rush Street might have frowned on his company; Americans were difficult to understand in this area, swinging erratically from official puritanism to public lasciviousness.

He had a small, messy, expensive apartment. They drank wine and then made love. He told her he was an accountant in the Loop. In the morning, after they had eaten breakfast together at a restaurant near his apartment, he had driven her to her hotel on his way to work. At first she had wanted to sleep and then decided against it. She took a long shower instead and then dressed; she took her map and purse and walked the short distance near the near North Side to the Loop.

Everything was dirty, she thought. The streets were littered with newspapers and broken bottles. The walls were covered with graffiti. The dirtiness of the city offended her and excited her. She could not explain why.

The young man had suggested that they meet again that evening. She decided she did not want to see him again.

She turned down Washington Street, going east, toward the Art Institute; the guidebook had recommended it as a very good museum.

Near State Street she stopped for a moment to get her bearings. Then she noticed a policeman coming across the street toward her. She instinctively did not like policemen; policemen in Chicago were like policemen in Malmö, she had decided. They were venal, and they practiced their petty tyranny on the young and poor.

The policeman smiled at her and asked to help her in a crude accent. The people of New York and Chicago—even those in places of authority—spoke English so badly. She answered him in monosyllables and walked quickly away from him. She was aware that he was watching her.

The Art Institute was on Michigan Avenue, according to the guidebook. Maj Kirsten always made it a point in her travels to America to visit the cultural attractions of each city; on her first visit she had even found a Picasso and a Renoir in a small museum in southern Ohio.

Maj Kirsten taught English in Malmö, and she was probably an Americanophile.

At the corner of Michigan Avenue and Monroe Street she paused again. Two blocks further south she saw the bulk of the Art Institute with its great stone lions guarding the entrance. The sun was halfway to the top of the sky. Maj Kirsten felt tired and hot.

A noxious-smelling bus belched at the curb in front of her. She was nauseated. The traffic light turned green, and she crossed the street, away from the heat of the buildings, to the grass and shrubs of Grant Park.

Like those around her, she developed the habit of walking with her eyes focused straight ahead on some middle distance, ignoring the flotsam of religious salesmen and Hare Krishna dancers and the black men in three-piece-suits selling Muhammed Speaks and the giggling Puerto Rican boys and—

Her white blouse was stained with perspiration, and beneath her cotton skirt her nylon panties felt damp and uncomfortable. The elastic edges chafed her bare legs.

Suddenly she detoured away from the sidewalk that led to the museum and began to walk on the cool grass of the park. She smelled the lake on a sudden cool breeze.

Her map marked a little harbor just over the railroad bridge, across the park. She hesitated again but then she smelled the breeze a second time and decided to cross the park to the lakefront to refresh herself with the sight of water and boats.

She had eight minutes left to live.

She took her shoes off on the grass and carried them in her right hand, holding her purse in her left. She felt her bare feet sink deeply into the carpet of grass, which still carried a trace of the morning’s dew. The bead of sweat forming across her forehead was blown away by a steady new wind from the lake. She felt much better now; it had been so hot in the Loop’s prison of buildings.

For a third time Maj Kirsten paused.

She had a sudden, overwhelming need to urinate. It had been this way—the sudden urge—since her long infection six years before. She glanced around; she had crossed the railroad bridge over the Illinois Central commuter tracks and now stood next to a broad field. The neat geometry of the field was fringed with thin trees and bushes and the center of grass was sectioned into four softball diamonds. About a quarter mile diagonally across the field she saw a wooden lavatory; a sign reading WOMEN pointed toward it. As she started across the field, she saw a group of black children playing softball on one of the diamonds.

The city noise churned on beyond the trees.

She thought about these things as she walked: her boyfriend, Sig Mansson, would not know what ferry she had decided to return on. The traffic from Kastrup to the old harbor could be very slow in the morning in the narrow streets of Copenhagen. If she were lucky, she could catch the nine o’clock ferry and be in her apartment by eleven. They could have lunch together if she did not feel too tired. Sig was a teacher too. He had broad shoulders, the broadest she had ever felt. When she returned, it would be cool in Malmö. It would be a relief to speak Swedish again. Sig would come to see her right away, after she called him. Then…

The hand pulled her backward.

She landed heavily in the bushes at the door of the lavatory.

She clutched her shoes in her right hand and still held her bag tightly in her left.

She was startled. Adrenaline shocked her body awake; her muscles tensed. She smelled the earth around her. She could not scream. She smelled sweat and felt the fear rising in her throat.

She couldn’t see clearly. The bushes scratched at her eyes. She twisted her head violently.

He had pulled her back on top of him and then rolled on top of her, all without removing his hand from her mouth.

His hand smelled of gasoline.

She wanted to scream, and then she wanted to vomit.

That was when she saw the knife.

It was an ordinary butcher knife. The kind her mother cut bread with when they had all lived in Gothenburg before Malmö and before—

He seemed angry and muttered to her; but his words weren’t English or Swedish.

She forced herself to become calm.

It was familiar to her, like the sound of her own voice, like a dream before waking.

He pushed her skirt above her waist, tearing the zipper.

She felt him pull at her blue panties. She thought his eyes were open, but she could not see. There was only light and flashing of the sun.

She smelled many things: bread, coal, earth, a glass of Scotch whiskey she had first drunk when she was sixteen at a party in Helsingborg. Scotch whiskey like smoke.

She did not struggle against him. She lay on her back and tried to count. He forced her legs open. She smelled his sweat. It would be over soon. He was very heavy on her. When he penetrated her, roughly, the pain arched down in her legs, across her back. She stretched her back.

Soon it would be over.

Now she could see. There was the knife only. She could see her own terrified eye reflected in the blade. She watched her own eye staring at her.

When he pushed the blade of the knife into the side of her neck, severing the jugular, it did not surprise her. She was very calm. And then the spurt of blood foamed over her eyes and blinded her again in redness. The calmness surprised her.

Again he slashed down and plunged the blade to its length above the left breast, pulling it down through the skin, muscles, veins, and arteries, scraping against the ribs and then cracking them, ripping her heart.

Maj Kirsten was dead then.

“Who found her?”

“Kid.” It was Sid Margolies.

“Kid? What kid?”

“Kid over there with Jackson. We already talked to him. Kid named Wallace Washington. He says he was playing softball with a bunch of other kids, by that diamond over there. He had to pee, he says, and he came across her. That’s when he found her. He says he went back to the other kids and they split. So he called the poh-leese.”

“Public spirited.” Matthew Schmidt, the tall, cadaverous lieutenant of homicide, looked at the black kid; the boy was staring at the covered body. The lieutenant spat then on the dry, hard ground. The grass around the body was bloody.

“Who talked to him?” asked Schmidt.

Margolies took out his little notebook. “I did.”

“You happen to ask him if he could read?”

“No,” said Margolies, scanning his notes. He was imperturbable, even in the face of Lieutenant Schmidt’s frequent sarcasm.

“Why do you suppose he wanted to take a leak at a women’s lav? The men’s room is over there.”

“Oh.” Margolies studied his notebook. “I did ask him that. I just didn’t know what you meant by reading. He said he was going in the bushes.”

“Bullshit,” said Matthew Schmidt. He wore a blue suit despite the heat, and a light straw hat. The brim shaded his dark blue eyes.

Schmidt turned away from Margolies to the plainclothes sergeant near the body.

“Who was she?”

“You’re not going to like this.”

“I don’t like it already. I don’t like people being killed in broad daylight in Grant Park. It’s enough to ruin my week.”

Terry Flynn consulted the notebook. It was smaller than Margolies’s notebook, and the handwriting in it was not as neat. “I can’t pronounce this first name. Looks like Madge or something. Her last name is Kirsten. K as in Kitty, I Ida, R Robert, S Sam, T Thomas, E Edward, N Nellie. I got her name out of her passport. She was carrying it. A Swedish passport, Matt.”

“So she was a tourist, right?”

“It looks that way. There were some letters in her purse, also in some foreign language that looks like the stuff in the passport. Little dots above some of the letters—you know. I guess it must be Swedish. I saw ‘Sverige’ on the passport, that’s Swedish, I think. She lived in—wait. M-A-L-M-O.”

“Malmö,” Schmidt repeated. “It’s across this bay from Copenhagen. I was there once. Three years ago when Gert and I went to Europe.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, let’s look at her.”

Matthew Schmidt had been in homicide for nineteen years, and he hated dead bodies. The sight of them always startled him. He avoided wakes as well. And he did not like the smell of flowers.

He pulled back the rubber cloth covering her head. Her eyes were open. There was dried blood on her face, and her neck and her blouse was still wet with soaked blood. Her face was white.

“It looks like he raped her too,” said Terry Flynn slowly. “Her panties were torn off. He must have been huge. There are bruises around her pussy.”

Matthew Schmidt pulled the rubber open, revealing the lower part of the body. The moment of panic at the sight of her—it was always the same for him and he was ashamed of it—was past. He looked carefully at her torn and bloody sexual organ.

After a little time during which they said nothing, Matthew Schmidt pulled the cloth carefully back over the face of Maj Kirsten and stood up. His knees crackled.

“Flynn. Call First District and ask for Dalby himself. Tell him I would appreciate it if he could send a couple more uniformed men over here. I want to find that knife or whatever it was. The blood on her blouse is still wet. I want to search the park, thoroughly, now. He might still be around. I want one sweep starting at the Field Museum on the south end and working north on both sides of the Outer Drive. Get a second sweep working south from the parking lot. Include the west side of the park, on the other side of the IC tracks, all the way to Michigan Avenue. Flush all the bushes—winos, lovers, muggers, everyone. Take the obvious ones over to First District, but get the names of the others. Tell Captain Dalby this is priority, Flynn. If Dalby doesn’t respond to your usual pleasant approach, tell him he will talk to the superintendent this afternoon. This is not a cheap murder, and his help is not open to negotiation.”

Flynn was writing it all down; Schmidt spoke in a purposely flat voice that seemed to carry a shrieking edge. Four years before he had been operated on for lung cancer. One more year and he could say his body had been free of cancer for five years. The doctor assured him that his chances for survival were very good. But it frightened him all the time to think of the death that had been in his body and might still be there, waiting to fool him. Almost as a reaction to it, to the fragility of life, he had become quiet, slow to speak, introspective. Or perhaps he had always been that way and was now aware of it and exaggerated those traits. Of course, he did not smoke anymore. Once in a while, when the shrieking edge threatened to overwhelm the calm, he sat at home alone and consumed a bottle of bourbon. Those were the times when he was very frightened.

Flynn folded his notebook and shoved it into his sweat-stained shirt pocket. “I’ll tell him, Matt. He’ll know what you mean.” Flynn turned and walked to his car parked on the grass behind the wooden public lavatory. The sun was almost directly overhead, and because he did not want to sit on the hot vinyl seat, Flynn reached through the open car window and took his radio microphone in hand.

Terry Flynn was glad to be working with Schmidt again. He liked the older man. They had met when Flynn was just a uniformed tactical cop working out of Area Two on the South Side. Normally a lieutenant did not direct a murder investigation—let alone a sergeant; but a murder in Grant Park—any murder so public, so fraught with ramifications beyond mere life and death—called for investigators with clout inside the department. Flynn called First District on the radio.

Matthew Schmidt strolled over to the coroner; like everything else, the coroner’s office had changed its designation in recent years to the more technical sounding “medical examiner’s office.” But the same red-faced coroner’s man who had examined the body on Schmidt’s first murder case was waiting with the two policemen who would remove the body in the squadrol to the county morgue on West Monroe Street.

“You got everything, Mattie?” asked the coroner, whose name was Watson.

“Yeah, Doc.” Schmidt looked back at the rubber-covered body. “Must have been a butcher knife.”

“Or a bayonet. But something big,” agreed Watson.

“About noon?”

“Oh, Christ, I don’t know. Noon. Eleven. Even ten o’clock. The colored kid told Margolies he found the body at twelve fifteen. Precise little bastard. I’d say eleven or thereabouts off the top of my head.”

Schmidt bit his lower lip. Everything had been taken care of, but he was reluctant to close up a “scene,” as the homicide detectives called it. They had an almost magical faith in the scene of the crime and its power to extract an emotional confession from the killer then and there. But there was no one to question except one young boy, and it was indecent to leave the remains of this young woman in the sun, covered by a rubber bag.

“You got all your photographs?” said Schmidt.

One of the young policemen volunteered that the police photographer was already back at Area One Homicide with his roll of film.

He nodded. “All right. You can have her.”

“Thanks, Mattie,” said the old coroner. “I’ll see you down at the morgue later.”

But Schmidt had turned away, back to the small crowd of spectators standing a few feet from the body, held in check by a surly traffic patrolman. Schmidt looked at the faces of the curious. Did any of you kill her? The faces told him nothing. Then he spotted the young reporter from the Chicago Daily News.

“What do you want here?”

“Can you tell me who was she? What happened? We got on the radio that she was shot down—”

Schmidt glanced at the name he had copied from the passport.

“Her name was Maj Kirsten,” he said. He spelled it. “Twenty-seven. She was stabbed at least once in the neck, several times in the breast.”

He waited while the reporter copied down his words. Unlike some of his colleagues, Schmidt talked to reporters. Along with his mystical faith in the power of “the scene” was a belief in the ancient practice of raising the hue and cry: a murderer is at large among us.

“She was from Sweden. Correction. She carried a Swedish passport and we assume now she was a visitor in the city. It appears there was a possibility of rape. Her clothes were in disarray, but they had not been removed from her body.”

“Were her panties torn off?”

Schmidt looked at the reporter. He guessed he was about twenty-two. “Yes.” He made a face. “They had been torn off.”

“Got the murder weapon?”

“No.”

“Any motive?”

“Of course. But we don’t know what it was. Some money may have been taken from her purse, but there’s a ring on her finger. Also her wristwatch was left.”

“Can you give me a description?”

“Not very well beyond her age. She was blond.” He felt sick to his stomach, and the old wound across his chest flared. “She had blue eyes.” They h. . .