We drove to Carl Sandburg University. Coach Ranklin was in the locker room. His hair was damp. Sweat stains had formed under his armpits, on his back, and even the crotch of his cotton workout shorts. Must have been one hell of a lot of exercise.
“Hey, you guys,” he said.
“We need to talk,” I said. We moved to his cramped little office. The same one we’d been in earlier in the week. He leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. His posture made his crotch bulge more prominent and enticing, with his prick clear in outline. He twirled a towel into a tight spiral, took either end in a hand, and draped it behind his neck. He might be leaning back and look all casual, but his grip on the towel would have been tight enough to cut off its circulation if it were a human neck.
A movement behind us caught my eye. Shawn Ranklin was in the doorway. He wore tight, blue athletic shorts and no shirt. The young athlete’s gorgeous muscles dripped with moisture. The hair on his legs clung to the skin in tight ringlets. Every muscle looked as if it were singing happiness.
He said, “Dad, I need to borrow some soap.”
“We should talk to you as well,” I said.
Shawn moved behind his dad’s chair. His light gray eyes searched mine. “What’s up?” With casual grace, he leaned against the back wall and hitched his butt atop a two-drawer filing cabinet. His lightly tapping left foot was the only sign that he might be experiencing strong emotions.
I remembered him from when he was a kid, the slight curl to his red hair, the shy smile.
I said, “We know this might be a little embarrassing.”
Without any preliminary, Coach Ranklin launched himself at me. He didn’t have far to go in the small office, so he couldn’t build up a lot of momentum. Nevertheless, he pushed me backward off the chair and half knocked the wind out of me.
I scrambled away from him while trying to gulp down sufficient quantities of air. Shawn grabbed for Scott. The room was too small for broad or rapid maneuvering. The two lamps on the desk toppled to the floor when Scott and Shawn sprawled against them. Shawn aimed a kick at my head. I managed to shift enough so he didn’t get a direct hit. Coach Ranklin threw the chair out of the way. He leapt toward me. His angry grimace distorted his handsome face.
I twisted sideways, cupped my hands, and slammed them against his ears. He screamed. I leapt up backward. This wasn’t wrestling. This was street fighting. Any gouge or punch could mean victory or death. Ranklin leapt toward me. I instinctively raised my knee to blunt his leap. He turned sharply, but I grabbed his crotch, got a tight grip, and pulled, twisted, and compressed all at the same time. He yowled and howled as he sank to the floor, kicking feebly and continuing to scream. I didn’t let go.
The son fought like a madman. While Scott struggled with the son, I had Coach Ranklin nearly incapacitated. I didn’t let go until he ceased struggling.
Shawn Ranklin had a lamp raised high above Scott’s head when three young athletes appeared in the doorway. The distraction was sufficient. Scott grabbed the wrist that held the lamp and twisted the arm high up on Shawn’s back. Shawn yelped and tried to squirm. Scott applied more pressure. The lamp clattered to the floor as the kid sank to his knees. All the fight went out of him. Coach Ranklin whimpered and held his hands over his bruised balls.
Spur-of-the-moment mass murder didn’t seem to be in the cards. We called the cops.
We sat with Shawn Ranklin in the deserted locker room. He and I had our legs straddling a bench in front of a row of empty lockers. Scott leaned against the wall about a foot ahead and to my left. The room smelled of rotting jockstraps from the laundry facility twenty feet away and chlorine from the nearby pool. Shawn was red-eyed but composed. His father had been willing to attack anyone who got near him. We eventually left him tied to a chair, locked in his own office, with a college security person on guard. Before we shut the door on him in his office, he had said, “Keep your goddamn mouth shut.”
While we waited for the cops, we talked to Shawn. In the locker room he looked like a scared kid. After a few moments of silence he began to bawl.
Neither of us touched him. When he calmed down, I asked simply, “Why?”
“It was never supposed to happen. What’s my mother going to think? What’s everybody going to think?”
Scott said, “Four people have died.”
Ranklin looked startled and gazed at Scott for a second, then hung his head. I could barely hear him as he mumbled, “That’s not what I meant. Everybody’s going to know. My mother is going to be crushed. She and Dad divorced years ago. I know murder is horrible, but that isn’t the worst. I’ll never forget what my dad and I did. We …”
“We saw the pictures,” I said.
“That’s so awful.”
I asked, “How did all this get started?”
Ranklin wiped his face on a damp towel. He snuffled mightily, drew a deep breath. “It was after I won the preliminary for the Olympics. A bunch of us had a big celebration in the locker room. Somebody brought champagne. They’re not supposed to. I’d been puking before the final event. I didn’t have anything in my stomach. I drank only a glass or two, but it was more than I should have. I was totally wiped out from the race. I decided to take a sauna. Most everybody was gone. They have separate male and female ones. I just went in my boxer shorts. My dad joined me a few minutes later. He was wrapped in a towel. He had another bottle of champagne with him. We talked and laughed and celebrated and drank. It wasn’t a very big sauna. I could feel his leg against mine. He didn’t move it away.” Ranklin had begun crying softly. “Neither of us meant for anything to happen. I swear. I swear. He squeezed my shoulder to congratulate me. He didn’t pull away. I moved closer.” Ranklin wiped his eyes and nose with the back of his hand.
He gulped and shook his head. “We never, never, talked about sex, never. Sure, when I was a kid, I thought my dad was the best-looking guy. I never thought about him sexually. I thought all kids were curious about their dads. Even as a teenager, sometimes I’d go in and take a piss while he was shaving. I wanted him to look at me. God, I’m sick.”
I didn’t have a clue about what to say to a guy who was confessing to incest, and we hadn’t even gotten to all the dead bodies. No amateur sleuth I knew of ever had this many bodies nor the depth of sexual darkness.
“After that first time in the sauna, neither of us ever talked about it. Ever.” Ranklin drew a deep breath. His whole body shuddered. He didn’t bother to dry the tears. “When I took trips to Chicago, I stayed with him. It was like they say about having an elephant in the living room that nobody will discuss. Yet, I knew … Christ, who cares at this point … I knew I wanted it to happen again. One night I came home late. He was sleeping downstairs on the couch.” Ranklin stopped. “We did it more than once.”
“When did Ethan tell you he had the videos?” I asked.
“Pictures and videos. It started with Macintire. It was blackmail all right. Macintire wanted cash. He lost a fortune in the dotcom crash. Ethan wanted more than money. He wanted to put us on the Internet, on one of those live things they were doing. He approached me first. I told my dad. He said we had to put a stop to it.
“We offered them money. It was Ethan who said that a real incest thing could make them a lot of cash. He assured us that it would be totally anonymous. What a stupid thing to say. As if anything could be anonymous on the Internet. Even if there was a way of guaranteeing anonymity, we weren’t about to permit it to be public. We had to get those photos and videos back.
“We threatened to have his whole world come crashing down on him, to expose him. He demanded sex with the two of us at the same time. We did threat and counterthreat. We burned the warehouse they moved from to send a message.”
Ranklin leaned over so that his head rested against a locker. He shut his eyes. He mumbled to the floor, “We figured the pictures were in St. Louis. We got into Cormac’s office before the warehouse. Cormac was easy to subdue. We kept him in our hotel room. We made him tell us where their new offices were. It took several days before he would tell. At that point we weren’t into violence. We brought him with us to that storage place. We looked for a day and a half before we found anything. When my dad saw the pictures, he went nuts. We never planned on killing anyone. Cormac got free. We struggled. He managed to grab one of our guns. My dad got behind him and got hold of the gun hand. I’ll never forget watching the gun inch toward Cormac’s head. Another inch or two in either direction and my dad or me could have been killed. The gun went off. Cormac fell back on top of my dad. Cormac was dead. My dad got gore all over his hair and face.” Ranklin began crying again.
It took several minutes before he resumed. “This was Friday night. We cleaned ourselves up. Then we kept looking. We had to. We had to find if they had anything else. We should have just burned the storage facility with Cormac in it. We had to be sure the threat was gone. We searched for hours but couldn’t find what we were looking for. I looked through all the computer records. We stopped late Saturday morning. My dad was going to the wedding, so we decided to go up here and get the information out of Ethan.”
“You worked with the body there?” Scott asked.
“We didn’t have any choice. We discovered that, besides the stuff we found at the warehouse, Josh Durst had one set of pictures and discs and Ethan had another. There were actually three discs in each set. Once Cormac was dead, we knew we had to kill the other two. Durst was at a sport event in Oakland, California. It would have been a logistical nightmare to try to kill him out there. Anonymous plane tickets, finding out where he was staying, staking him out, hoping for an opportunity, not being noticed while we were doing it, all on turf we weren’t familiar with. We had to make sure Ethan didn’t come back unexpectedly and find the body. We came up to Chicago. We found Ethan. My dad was going to the wedding. He saw Ethan there and insisted on a meeting. He called me before the dinner began. I arrived after the dancing had started. My dad told me where they’d agreed to meet. I got there first.”
“If Ethan was so frightened lately, why did he agree to meet you?”
“They’d been threatened by others. I know Coach Fariniti for one. We heard there was some custody shit going down. He thought he had us cornered.”
“Why not threaten to expose him if he didn’t give you the tapes?” I asked. “He was the one with the most to lose.”
“You’re wrong there. Incest? Think about it. He might lose money, but we could lose, well, everything. What would people think?” Ranklin shook his head.
“What happened in the washroom?” I asked.
“He thought he was finally going to get it on with us.”
“In a public washroom?” Scott asked. “Why not a bedroom?”
“He might have thought it was just a meeting to come to an agreement, but almost as soon as I got there, he started groping me. Then my dad showed up. Ethan wanted to do it with both of us right there. He must have had like a spontaneous orgasm. I held him while my dad threatened him. Ethan was pretty scared by this point. He tried to argue and then fight. I hit him first. His head snapped back against the tile wall. Then my dad banged Ethan’s head a bunch of times. There wasn’t that much blood, little enough so I could just wash it off.”
I remembered that most of the blood had been on the floor.
“My dad went back to the reception. I was present at the first death, but this was the first time I’d done any hitting. It scared the piss out of me. Ethan had the discs with him. I dropped a CD on my way out. I already had three of Cormac’s with me. I didn’t know it at the time, but the kid saw me.”
Scott said, “He lied to us when he said he didn’t see anyone.”
Shawn said, “He picked up the CD I dropped.”
“How’d he manage to have time to rob the corpse and leave a fingerprint and catch up to you?”
“I couldn’t run. I had to move casually. I had to conceal little flecks of blood on the hem of my coat that I’d missed in the washroom. The hotel was jammed. I had to make sure I didn’t draw attention to myself. Finding obscure ways out was not easy. He found me as I was at the corner of Wacker and Michigan. The line to get the car out of the parking garage was immense.”
“How’d he know the CD was valuable?”
“What difference does the CD make? That must have been a bonus. He knew I’d killed someone.”
“Ethan carried the CDs with him?”
“He’d made extra copies. We went to the condo here. We found an envelope with discs and pictures. He was right to be paranoid. He said if we killed him, someone would have copies of them to reveal to the press.”
“What about Josh Durst?”
“Ethan told us he had copies as well. He thought we wouldn’t kill him if we knew somebody else had copies. My dad was too angry.” He added in a whisper, “So was I.”
“How did my nephew figure out it was you guys who killed Ethan?”
“He told us he was listening at the door and heard the whole thing. I guess we were louder than we thought. That corridor is pretty quiet. He heard the fight. He heard my dad say we had to get out of there now. He told us he hid in one of those storage closets. He kept the door opened a crack. That’s how he saw me leave. When we were gone, he ran into the washroom. He came back out and ran after me. He’d seen me on the Olympics coverage last time. I’d carried the United States flag in at the opening ceremonies.”
“How did he figure out where to find you?”
“We found him. You let it slip when you were talking to my dad. You talked about not being a suspect and your nephew possibly providing an alibi. You said you were confident about not being arrested. Then the press reported that your brother and sister-in-law and nephew were at the station for questioning. Why would they bring them down? The parents were in Georgia at the time of the wedding. It had to be the nephew.”
“How’d you find him?” Scott asked. “We couldn’t.”
“I called each of your relatives staying in town. We knew which hotel. It wasn’t a secret. I pretended that I was a reporter for a tabloid and I knew he was there. It was a bluff. The second one I talked to gave him away. I told your nephew I knew he had a CD and that as a reporter for a tabloid, we’d pay a lot of money for it. He agreed to meet. He caught on pretty quick that we were the ones in the pictures. We were pretty stupid to think that he wouldn’t. He was pretty stupid when he tried to blackmail us. The little fuck. We went to the meeting expecting trouble. We’d done so much killing by that point, what did another matter? We were talking in an alley off Diversey. We told him we’d meet him again. My dad got up to let him out of the car. He stabbed him, jabbed upward as hard as he could, twisted the knife into Donny’s insides, and shoved him out of the car as we started up. We thought he was dead.”
“You broke into our cars trying to find out if we’d found anything,” I stated.
“We weren’t sure if we had everything from Ethan. We were going to have to try his home. We were outside Ethan’s house when you first went in on Sunday. That’s how we knew you were there. We broke into his house after you guys left. We searched the house after you did, but we couldn’t find anything there. We couldn’t be sure what you had. We couldn’t break the computer codes. We’d have to hire a computer expert to teach us how to break into them. That would take too much time.”
“You didn’t attack Donny until Wednesday.”
“After you talked to my dad, our suspicion turned to the kid. He was a creep. He tried to be all clever. He was snarly and rude.”
“Why kill him?”
“He knew we were the killers. He had the disc to hold over our heads. That was a dangerous game to play with my dad. The kid thought he was too clever by half. He had to die.”
“Then why’d he still go to meet you?”
“We offered him money. He wanted that. We also told him we’d come after him. Turns out he didn’t even have the disk. He told us it was in a safe place.”
“He hid it in our penthouse.”
We heard voices coming toward us. Detectives Rohter and Hoge arrived in the locker room. Out in the hallway, we told the cops what we knew. We gave them the compact disk with the pictures and live-action shots. They cuffed the two of them. Coach Ranklin was still cursing anybody who got within shouting distance. They took father, son, and disk away.
We were quiet in the car as we drove to my place in the south suburbs.