Chapter 4
Louise
Sergeant Louise Pratt pulls her coat tight against the morning wind, asking herself why she still puts up with the gray and cold midwestern weather, but knowing the answer, as she approaches the sorting facility on the south end of Grace Park. The air outside reeks of sour trash and diesel fuel.
Even on a Saturday morning, LSK Ventures, nestled behind a strip of warehouses, hums with a low mechanical rumble, the buzz of workers, the whines and clanks of machinery.
She passes under an open-air hangar, her badge on a lanyard around her neck.
The intense overhead lighting seems redundant with the natural light, but it’s their electricity bill, not hers.
She walks along segregated piles of splintered wood, scrap metal, crushed cardboard.
A uniformed officer lifts the yellow tape for them, a young man who was in diapers when she kicked in doors as a rookie in Chicago. She’s seen him before. Marzullo or something.
“Detectives,” he says too formally, but appropriately so as a newbie on the force. “Jimmy Nardulli. I’m the responding.”
Right, that’s it—Nardulli.
“Morning, Jimmy. This is Sergeant Sarkisian. You can call him ‘Cutty’ or ‘Sark’ but not George. You can call me Lou.”
“Lou? Oh, I’m sorry—”
“Not because I’m a lieutenant,” she says. “My name’s Louise. Call me Lou. And take a breath, Jimmy. Is this your first homicide?”
“Yeah, it is.”
“All right, you’re on, kid. Show us the way.”
“Bay Four,” he says, leading them. “Workers found him when they were separating construction debris.”
Bay Four is cordoned off near the back of the hangar. A massive dumpster, forest green in color but in need of a paint job, is opened on one side like a drawbridge, but moved back from the conveyor line. As they get closer, the odor transitions from sour to outright putrid.
“Who called it in?” she asks.
“Facility supervisor. One of the workers noticed something off when the contents got dumped into the sorter. Stopped everything.”
“Good,” she says. “Don’t let them restart until we say so.”
A pair of CSU techs are crouched near the corpse, lying on tattered drop cloths with standard-looking paint stains, ripped pieces of duct tape on each end.
“He was wrapped in the drop cloths?” asks Cutty.
“Yes, sir.”
Louise gives the techies their space but leans over for a look. The deceased is a white male, around forty. Big guy, over six feet, solidly put together. Shirtless, wearing off-white chino trousers. No shoes. Socks are charcoal with polka dots bearing the brand name Ferragamo.
Wedding ring, she also notes.
There is bruising by the sternum, surrounding a puncture wound.
His body is loose, flaccid; rigor mortis has passed.
The facial features are sunken, his skin bluish-gray in color, mouth slacked open, eyes half closed.
There’s a little bloating, not necessarily as much as she’d expect, but that tells her something right there.
The man has probably spent most of his tenure as a corpse outdoors, with ambient temps in the thirties and forties, significantly slowing decomposition.
He’s been dead about three days, her guess, though she’ll wait for the M.E.
“ID?” Cutty asks, running his hand over his balding head.
“No,” says Nardulli. “No wallet, no phone. But we ran it through Missing Persons.”
“Any likelies?”
“One. A Finley Brice. Reported missing yesterday. Lives in Grace Village. One of the beautiful people.”
Louise smirks. Lifelong residents of Grace Park, in her experience, do not always have the nicest things to say about the people in their more affluent sister town of Grace Village.
“All right,” she says. “Hey, Money, what are we thinking for a weapon?”
“Oh, hey, Lou,” says Monique, the lead on the crime scene unit, looking over her shoulder. “Something thin. Ice pick, letter opener, gardening stake, something like that.”
“Mmm-hmm. And…no blood trail?”
“Nope. He’s been dead a while. The fatal wound, you figure the weapon corked it all inside. And gravity helped. All the lividity’s on the posterior.”
Meaning he spent most of his time, while dead, on his back. Louise walks over to the dumpster, just partially full. “Did we trace this load?”
Officer Nardulli flips through his notes. “Jobsite north of here, Grace Park. Picked up yesterday evening.”
“So he was likely in that bin when it left the site?”
“Looks that way. That’s what the supervisor thought, too.”
She puts her hands on her hips. “Bag and tag everything from this load, Jimmy. I want the full route from the hauler—time stamps, drivers, stops. I want to talk to whoever signed off on the pickup. And I want a list of everyone on that jobsite.”
Nardulli nods. “Got it.”
Louise allows a begrudging smile. “She was good,” she says. “Staged it well. Got him away from the crime scene. Bought her some time and distance.”
“Who’s that, Lou?” he asks. “You said ‘she.’ ”
“The wife,” says Louise. “Or the mistress. But more likely the wife.”
Officer Nardulli lowers his notepad, reading her.
She winks at him, then smirks at Cutty. She’s kidding. Kinda.
The three of them stand under the humming fluorescent lights in the hallway of the Cook County Morgue.
Cutty bends a stick of gum in his mouth and checks his phone.
Allison Brice, dressed in a cotton shirt and stretch pants, folds her arms and tucks her chin.
Perhaps a defensive posture, but even Louise must admit, the morgue is always so damn cold.
Allison reported her husband, Finley Brice, missing yesterday, April 3.
They were estranged, she’d told the officer, negotiating the terms of a divorce.
She stayed in the house in Grace Village.
He was living in their downtown condominium on Erie Street.
Louise looked up the condo online; fancy place, rich-person place, floor-to-ceiling windows with unobstructed views of the lake.
Not surprising, considering Finley was wearing Ferragamo socks, for Christ’s sake, when they found his body.
Not that Allison’s identified him yet. But she will. Louise looked up Finley on social media, on a website regarding some start-up venture capital opportunity. No doubt he’s the man they found this morning.
The door opens. The attendant acknowledges them.
Allison pushes herself off the wall and enters the viewing room.
Too composed, Louise thinks to herself. Too still.
True grief wears many faces, takes many different forms, no two the same, but there is always an element of struggle—struggle to maintain control, to tamp down the roiling chaos, to keep one foot moving in front of the other despite the pain.
Allison Brice is focused. She is concentrating. But not struggling. Not trembling. Her voice does not shake. She hasn’t so much as blinked hard. No, she is in complete control.
Louise glances toward the morgue attendant, who slowly peels back the top portion of the sheet. Allison leans over from the waist. She holds her stare on the body, her arms still folded. Her lips part. Maybe a quick intake of air; Louise isn’t sure.
She remains still as a statue, long enough that the attendant eyeballs Louise, who shakes her head.
Finally, Allison straightens. She turns to the attendant and nods.
The attendant makes a note on the clipboard.
Louise waits a beat, then steps forward. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Brice.”
She studies Allison’s profile—the stiff jaw, the tension in her neck.
“Mrs. Brice, in your missing-persons report, you said you last saw Finley on April first at approximately three o’clock in the afternoon?”
“That’s right.”
“Can you think of anyone who might’ve wanted to harm him?” she asks.
Allison blinks her dry eyes. Works her jaw. “He was being erratic. Difficult. Very worried about money. Very.”
That’s not really an answer to the question. But Louise will let that go for now. “Money, as in, after the divorce?”
Allison’s shoulders lift slightly. “We weren’t communicating well. It was a…contentious split. We were not getting along.”
“Mind me asking why? Why so contentious?”
She takes a breath, like she’s holding something in, then releases it. She turns and looks dead-on at Louise for the first time since they met. “You ever been divorced?”
“Me? No, can’t say I have.”
Allison’s eyes shut. “I have to go tell my son his father is dead.”
“I’ll need to follow up. I’m sorry to ask you these questions.”
“I understand,” says Allison. “I’m the estranged wife. I’m suspect number one.”
“I didn’t say that, Mrs. Brice.”
Allison tries a smile. She turns for the exit. “I’m sorry, but I’m not answering questions.”
“I understand you have to attend to your son right now. Maybe tomorrow?”
“No.” Allison turns back toward Louise. “I mean I’m not answering questions, period. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”
She disappears out the door.
Louise looks at Cutty. “Did I just hear that right?”
He leans into her. “Well, now she’s definitely suspect number one,” he whispers.
“We got a singular prominent incised wound to the left anterior chest, approximately four centimeters in length.” Still in her lab coat, Dr. Roberta Boyd, a forensic pathologist with the Cook County Medical Examiner, snaps open a can of Diet Coke outside her office.
“Nine millimeters in diameter. Penetrated the left ventricle.”
“Stab wound to the heart,” says Louise. “That’s the cause of death?”
“Stab injury to the left ventricle prompted hemorrhagic shock and cardiac tamponade.”
“You took the words right outta my mouth, Bobbi.”
Bobbi smiles. “The blade pierced the heart. The heart bled into the sac that holds the heart. Sac fills with blood, heart has no room to pump. Circulatory functions collapse.”
“Homicide, no question?”
“No question. No chance of self-infliction. No chance of accident.”
“Okay, so what about time of death?” If you can believe Allison’s missing-persons report, Finley Brice was alive at three in the afternoon on April 1.
Bobbi sighs. “Based on decomp, progression of rigor, livor mortis fixation—I’d say forty-eight to seventy-two hours, but closer to seventy-two.”
“So that would be last Wednesday.”
“My best guess,” says Bobbi. “Your victim died on April Fools’ Day.”