“Who runs the porn site now?”
“I do, okay. I have the passwords. I’ll shut it down if you want me to.”
“We just want to know if what’s on it will give a clue to the murder.”
“Basically right now I’ve got it set on permanent loop. It’s not live anymore. We advertised it that way, but, Christ, that takes a lot. There is nothing on it anyone would kill for.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” I said. “Two people are already dead. If you won’t talk to the cops, then you’ve got to at least have protection. We know a private detective who can help.”
“You really think I’m in danger?”
“Don’t you?”
“I hadn’t thought so.”
“The killer is desperate about something. The model releases are missing. Do you have them?”
“No, I swear.”
This time I didn’t sense he was lying. I said, “You’re the last link. Josh Durst ran again.”
“He called me,” Burnes said, “Monday morning. He said people were questioning him. He didn’t say it was you guys. I told him not to trust anybody and that he’d better run. He didn’t tell me he had a copy of the records. I didn’t know the records are what was getting people killed.”
I said, “When we talked to Durst, he claimed that he had tapes of Scott pitching. We didn’t see Scott’s name in the athletes’ list we saw.”
“Durst never told me about them. If he had them, he never added them to the collection that I know about.”
We used the cell phone to call Miller. He agreed about the need for protection. While we waited for his arrival, I asked, “Was there anyone significant in his life named Michael?” I told Burnes about Ethan’s last words.
“Nobody I can think of,” Burnes said.
“I can’t figure out what it was he wanted to come to the wedding to talk to me about.”
“I can’t tell you that. I don’t know. He would talk about you on occasion. He always said he wanted to apologize to you. When I asked him what for, he only ever said he was a shit to you when you were kids. He said he could always trust you. I can’t tell you how many times he showed me that goddamn little brown football with your initials carved on it. You do know he kept little souvenirs of many of his conquests?”
I shook my head.
Burnes continued, “He said you were the one person in his life who was honest. As for me, I never got a good impression of you from Ethan’s descriptions. You seemed like someone who couldn’t let go. The last time you called, he found it embarrassing. Who would cling to memories long since past and best forgotten? From what I heard, you were pretty pathetic.” Burnes shrugged. “But he was desperate to apologize. I think that’s why he came to town. He wanted a fresh start. I thought it was kind of silly.”
When Miller arrived, we filled him in on what we’d learned, especially about Murphy and Fariniti.
As Miller was escorting Burnes away, the private eye said, “This one won’t get away.”
Back in our car I said, “I want to talk to Murphy and Fariniti.”
“Got that right,” Scott said. “I’m not sure I trust Burnes all that much.”
The cell phone rang. The service said, “It’s one of Mr. Carpenter’s nephews. He says it’s urgent.”
I put it on the speakerphone expecting it to be Donny. It was Brent, Scott’s sister’s oldest. He sounded scared. “I just a got call from Donny. He’s in trouble.”
“Where is he?” Scott asked.
“I’m not sure. He said I should meet him at the corner of Clark and Diversey. I can’t get there. I don’t know where it is. I think he was out of his mind. He didn’t give me time to say I couldn’t make it. I knew I should call you.”
“You could have taken a bus or a cab,” Scott said.
“I don’t know the city. I’ve never been in a cab.”
“Where’s your mom?” Scott asked.
“I think she’s gone out with Grandma and Grandpa to talk with the private investigator.”
“Stay there,” Scott said. “We’ll call the police. You wait there until one of the adults comes back and give them the news.”
I asked, “Was he staying with you?”
A very soft, “Yes.”
I decided family units closer to the kid than I could go over the stupidity of not revealing that Donny was hiding there. At least Brent had the sense to call now.
“Did he tell you to call us?” Scott asked.
“No, but after talking to all of you earlier, I realized I had to tell. I would have told him I was going to.”
We called the police. The candy shop is mere blocks from Clark and Diversey. We rushed over. In the car on the way to the intersection we phoned each of Scott’s relatives still in town. None of them was in. We left messages for each.
Since finding a spot on the street in that neighborhood is nearly impossible, we parked in the Century parking garage up Clark Street. We walked quickly to the intersection. We saw no one we recognized until Rohter and Hoge parked in the bus zone on Diversey west of Clark. We hustled over to them. We all scanned the never unbusy intersection.
“Why here?” Scott asked. “What the hell is he thinking? What the hell is going on?”
A bus drew up across the street on the south side of Diversey. When it pulled away, Donny was leaning against a no-parking sign. He was clutching his side. Scott began to run across the street. Car brakes squealed. I grabbed his arm and yanked him back. A southbound car turning right onto Diversey from Clark missed him by inches.
Traffic cleared. The cops, Scott, and I dashed across the street. I watched Donny stumble. He had both hands holding his jacket tightly to his torso. He saw us and tried to move in the opposite direction. As soon as he let go of the sign, he began to fall. A pedestrian stopped and held out a hand toward him.
By the time we reached him, the kid was on the sidewalk and gasping for breath. Rohter called for an ambulance. Hoge ran back across the street and hopped into their unmarked car. At the time I didn’t pay much attention to him. Later I found out that he was chasing the bus so they could talk to the passengers about Donny.
Scott and I knelt next to the kid. He breathed heavily. When he pulled his hand away from his side, we saw that he was rapidly losing blood. Scott tore off his own jacket, ripped off his shirt, and used it to apply pressure to the wound. The blood quickly soaked it through.
“This must have just happened,” I said. “He couldn’t have gone far for long on a bus without someone noticing.”
Donny cried out in pain. He was panting hard. He tried to push Scott’s hands away. The most bleeding seemed to be coming from a gash just below his rib cage on his far left side. I had no idea which organs were directly under that spot.
“What happened?” Scott asked.
Donny gazed at us and mumbled, “Help me.” I realized this was the first time I’d heard his voice without a trace of teenage hostility. That was neither a helpful nor a comforting thought. He sounded eerily like Ethan. He put his bloody hand on top of the bloody shirt on top of his bloody wound. “Help me,” he said again. I tore off my shirt and added it to the rapidly spreading red mass.
Scott cradled Donny’s head and torso and murmured, “Everything’s going to be fine. Just hold on. The paramedics are on their way.” The kid shut his eyes. I couldn’t tell if he remained conscious or not, but he was still breathing.
The paramedics did show up pretty quickly. As they worked, Scott phoned his parents’ hotel room. He got hold of them. Hiram and Cynthia were with Scott’s parents. We found out what hospital they were taking the kid to and told them. The paramedics loaded Donny into the ambulance. We ran to our car and raced after them.
At the hospital Donny was rushed into the emergency room. Hiram, Cynthia, and Scott’s parents hurried in moments after we arrived. For once Hiram did not bluster or fulminate or foam at the mouth. He saw us, came over, and asked, “Is he all right? Where is he?”
Hiram and Cynthia were allowed to rush to the back where they’d taken Donny. We stayed in the waiting room. Hoge and Rohter arrived. The news they had was unhelpful. No one on the bus had noticed anything. It had been crowded. Six or seven people had gotten off at the stop. A number had gotten on. No one could say for sure if Donny was even on the bus or if he’d come to the corner at the same time the bus pulled up. No one claimed to remember seeing anyone approach Donny. They had found a knife in an alley half a block away.
While we waited, we told the cops about Murphy and Fariniti. “Who’s your source?” Rohter demanded.
“For now, we’d like to keep confidence,” I said. “We may be able to get more out of him if we need it. If his information is any good, you’ve got two people to question. He claims he’ll deny everything he told us if you come to talk to him. He’s had some unfortunate experiences with the police.”
Rohter said, “We are the murder police and this is a murder investigation. You are not going to play some goodhearted amateur-sleuth crap and not tell us. Spill it or get ready to come down to the station.”
I wished I had my lawyer around to consult. I said, “Call my lawyer.”
Rohter swore, but refrained from arresting us. They left to pursue the leads we’d given them.
Half an hour later, Hiram came out. He nodded to us. We clustered around him.
“How is he?” Scott asked.
Hiram said, “They aren’t sure he’s going to make it. He hasn’t regained consciousness. They don’t know if he will.”
Scott’s father put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “We’ll stay with you for as long as it takes.”
Scott’s sister, her husband, and Scott’s nieces and nephew hurried off the elevator and joined us. As Hiram explained what was going on, Cynthia hurried down the corridor. She was crying. We all rushed to her. She clutched Hiram. She said, “They’re taking him up to surgery. They couldn’t stop the internal hemorrhaging.”
A nurse joined us. “What’s happening?” Hiram asked.
The nurse, an older woman in her fifties, said, “The doctors are going to try and …” She listed a series of medical things that needed to be fixed.
“Is he going to make it?” Cynthia asked.
“We’ll have to see. There’s been a lot of damage internally.”
Hiram held Cynthia. They were both in tears. Scott’s mom and dad did their best to comfort them, but they, too, looked stricken. I didn’t like the kid, but there is nothing worse than losing a child.
We waited for hours. I stopped in the gift shop to pick up a book to read. When I came back, I saw Scott in a corner with Hiram. Their heads were close together. I read for half an hour. I looked up to see them hug briefly. Scott came and sat next to me. His thigh and knee leaned against mine. He took my hand. He was teary-eyed. He said, “We had a good talk. Better than we’ve ever had as adults.”
“I’m glad,” I said.
When the doctor finally emerged, she looked grim. We gathered around. She said, “We did everything we could. Several vital organs were lacerated. We’re going to have to wait and see what happens in the next few hours. He’s going to be in the intensive care unit.”
“Will he make it?” Cynthia asked.
“I don’t know. There’s nothing more we can do medically. I’m sorry.”
Cynthia and Hiram went to sit with their son up on the intensive care floor. Only two people were allowed in at a time. Scott’s mom and dad said they would wait outside. We stayed for another hour. Scott’s sister, brother-in-law, and I decided to go down to the hospital cafeteria to eat. Mr. and Mrs. Carpenter said they weren’t hungry.
Scott’s brother-in-law, Mary’s husband, is the manager of a convenience store in East Nowhere, Georgia. He’s got an odd sense of humor. We all picked at the hospital food. They asked what we knew about the background to the attack on Donny, and what it might have had to do with the murder. We told them all we knew.
Scott’s pager went off as we were busing our trays. Scott dialed the number. He talked for a few moments, then hung up. He turned to me. “Josh Durst is dead.”
“Son of a bitch,” I said. “Where is he?”
Scott said, “Miller went to Ethan Gahain’s condo. He found Josh there.”
“Have the police arrived?”
“Yeah.”
I hesitated. “I’ll stay here,” Scott said. “You go and check out what’s going on.”
“I’d prefer to stay with you.”
Scott said, “If you’re in the hall with us or checking this out, it’s not going to change Donny’s condition.”
His sister said, “Finding out what happened might be helpful to all of us. These killings must be connected to Donny in some way.”
I hurried over to the condo. The night was cool. I had on only my T-shirt under my jacket. My shirt had gone with Donny into the emergency room.
I looked for a space to park in one of the best spots left in that part of the city, on School Street or Aldyne about twenty feet in from Broadway on the north side of the street. Two spaces are not metered, and no signage forbids parking at any time or requires a sticker. It’s the perfect spot and seldom available. A Toyota’s fading brake lights told me I’d been fifteen seconds too late for the space. I drove around for the more traditional fifteen minutes hunting for a spot. I finally found one right in front of Unabridged Bookstore, where Scott and I had first met.
I saw Miller on Buckingham just east of the condo. There was a crime scene van, lots of cop-looking officials hanging around, and a group of gawkers milling nearby. We stood apart from all these groups. Since Miller had found the body, a young uniformed cop hovered nearby.
I told him about Donny. He said several sympathetic things.
“What have you found out?” I asked.
“The cops still can’t find the model releases. Ethan and company paid these people in cash. They didn’t bother to submit any ten-ninety forms to the IRS for the people they hired. They did, however, report their own income to the IRS. They were actually pretty scrupulous about that. Remember, all they got Al Capone on was income tax evasion. Even if you’re a crook, the government wants theirs.”
“So there was no cadre of employees helping out?”
“There may have been a few helpers here and there, but nobody has any names. Cormac, Ethan, and Josh were kind of it as far as anybody can tell. Burnes seems to have been more hanger-on than any kind of employee.”
“You can do thousands of dollars’ worth of business with only three people?”
“How many minimum-wage people do you think you have to hire to stuff boxes and put on mailing labels?” Miller answered his own question: “Not a lot. You figure one or two employees for a couple hours a day, the videos get sent. Before I left St. Louis, I found out about the condo from a loan officer I know at the bank that handled a lot of Ethan Gahain’s accounts.”
“Are they supposed to give you that kind of information?”
“No. One of the great truisms in a murder investigation is follow the money. I was trying to do that. I make it a habit to develop as many contacts as I can. I had one in the bank they used. Ethan Gahain was worth well over a million dollars. In his will it is divided equally among his children. The wives don’t get a penny. The kids don’t get a cent until they’re twenty-one. The business was doing very well—shipping hundreds of units a week in tapes alone. They were making more money on credit card receipts from the Web site. Customer costs were fairly typical on it. Three ninety-nine per minute. People would pay a fee to join the club and another charge for every minute they watched.”
“How’d you get to see the will?” I asked.
“I called wife number four and asked. She read it to me. It was a very simple thing really.”
We could have done that.
I said, “His kids aren’t old enough to think about killing him, are they? The oldest is only twelve or thirteen.”
“The oldest is twelve. As we know, that’s certainly old enough to accomplish a lot of mayhem. In this case I think it’s unlikely that a kid is going to be able to do this much traveling and this much planning.”
“Scott’s nephew did.”
“But he’s fifteen, not twelve.”
“It could happen.”
Miller said, “Why would a twelve- or fifteen-year-old kill all those people? I think all these murders are connected. You don’t get this much random coincidence in the universe I live in.”
“When we were in the condo, we didn’t find any clues.”
“I walked in. He was dead. It looked like his head had been bashed against the wall. He wasn’t a very big guy. It wouldn’t have been hard to nail him.”
“He was in good shape,” I said. “He wasn’t huge, but he was muscular. It has to be somebody pretty strong who’s killed Ethan and Josh Durst. Durst claimed there were two intruders in his house in St. Louis. Maybe there are two killers. You can’t just take someone’s head and bash it against something. Some of these people have to be fighting back.”
“Donny got knifed, not bashed.”
I said, “I still don’t get how he fits in.”
“If everybody is looking for something, maybe Donny knows something about it. If he was actually at the scene of Ethan’s murder, maybe he took something. Maybe he knows something.”
“The killer’s gotta be looking for the missing data: the pictures or the model releases.”
Detectives Rohter and Hoge joined us.
Rohter said, “We examined the condo just before we got the call on Donny Carpenter. Obviously, he wasn’t there at the time. You guys were right about not finding anything.”
“At least I didn’t find this body,” I said.
“You could have left it there,” Hoge said.
“At this late date I would start leaving instead of finding the bodies?” Nobody else responded to the tone of light amusement I was going for in this crack.
Rohter asked the obvious: “Why was Durst here? Why did he come to Chicago? How come he knew about the condo?”
I said, “It was a staging place for homemade videos. He was part of the crew. Durst, Gahain, and Macintire were in on something illegal, or at least it was something lethal. You’ve got to assume the danger extends from the connection between them, or at least it makes a great deal of sense to assume so. The connection we know about is pornographic.”
“How does Mr. Carpenter’s nephew fit in?” Miller asked.
Rohter said, “The kid was at the first murder scene. I don’t believe in coincidences. Although the kid also might have gotten knifed by somebody who thought he was an asshole, which could be just about everybody he ever met.”
I asked, “Who gains by having them dead? Blackmail gone bad has a nice ring to it.”
None of us knew.
“How’s your nephew?” Rohter asked.
I told him the latest.
“Did he get a chance to tell anybody what happened to him?” Hoge asked.
I shook my head.
Rohter said, “The medical examiner is reasonably certain that if Donny had called when he found Ethan Gahain, they might have been able to save him. If the kid lives, the state’s attorney will probably charge him. If he didn’t actually commit the murder.”
The cops left.
“Did Josh Durst have family in Chicago?” I asked.
Miller said, “He’s from St. Louis. I talked to his mother, a brother, and some friends. They all claimed to know nothing of any of this.”
I stopped at the hospital. There was no change in Donny’s condition. It was nearly dawn by the time Scott and I got home and into bed.