All the way back across the job site to the gate, I felt as though I had a bull’s-eye painted on the back of my hard hat. It wasn’t until I’d gotten the Mustang safely up the gravel track to Illinois Street that I breathed normally.
Instead of going to my office, I drove the thirty miles down to Lansing, to the address I’d gotten for Jerry Fugher. As the map app had suggested, it was, in fact, a garage behind a single-story frame house. I parked around the corner and walked up the alley to the garage. I had my picklocks out, but the door opened easily—someone had been ahead of me with a crowbar.
Jerry Fugher hadn’t been a warm and cozy guy, and a garage, even one where someone has added insulation, a stove, a toilet and a skylight, is still a garage and not a warm and cozy place to live. This one was made particularly repellent by the level of chaos. Whoever had pried open the door had emptied drawers, the little refrigerator under the countertop and even the garbage can.
I tried to poke through the papers and garbage, using a barbecue fork that I found on the bed. Cockroaches flicked their whiskers at me contemptuously as I upended a sardine tin. When I backed away, more roaches crawled out from under the papers and sauntered to cover under the kitchenette counter. The backs of my legs tingled: I’m not afraid of bugs, exactly, but cockroaches always seem as oily and arrogant as rats.
If seven maids with seven mops swept the place for half a year they might find something of value, but I couldn’t hunt when I couldn’t even guess what I was looking for. Among the papers I turned over were wadded-up printouts from online bets on horses. In the pages I looked at, Uncle Jerry had won twenty-seven hundred dollars but lost over twelve thousand. No wonder he was putting the screws to his niece and nephew over the loan he’d set up for them.
I probably could track the betting losses to dates when he showed up at St. Eloy’s to exchange electrical work for cash, but the gambling seemed irrelevant. It might explain Fugher’s behavior, but it didn’t seem to be a reason for taking his place apart.
Footsteps in the alley made me stiffen and back up to the room’s only exit. A gray-haired man in jeans and a Bears jacket loomed in the doorway.
“What the fuck? Did you do this?”
“Nope. You the owner?”
He nodded toward the frame house. “Yeah, I rent to Fugher. Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“You know Fugher is dead, right? I’m a detective. I’m investigating, but this is too much for one person. When did this happen?”
“I don’t know. My tenants pay me on time, I leave them alone.”
“Then why are you here now?” I asked.
“Lady who lives back of me, she called to say she saw you go in here. We don’t have much crime here in Lansing, but I never heard of Fugher bringing any females home with him before.”
“Who did he bring home—besides every cockroach in Chicago, I mean?” I pulled out my phone and showed him my shot of Fugher and Nabiyev. “This guy? He one of the regular visitors?”
The man looked at the screen. “Never saw him before. You with the Lansing police?”
“I’m from Chicago,” I said. “Fugher died in Chicago. If Nabiyev comes around, call the Chicago PD Fourth District. That’s where the investigation is based.”
“Nothing here for the police to care about.” He stomped across the yard into the back entrance to his house. I followed him, wanting to ask him how long he’d rented to Fugher, and how he knew Fugher. He refused to open the door, crying at me, “Go away! I don’t need to talk to Chicago cops, I live in Lansing, I don’t know anything.”
On my way back to my car I stopped at the faucet on the outside of his house and ran water over my running shoes: I didn’t want to trail cockroach eggs into my own car or home.
When I got back to my office, I opened a case file for the Mesaline twins. There wasn’t much to enter, but I’d learned three things this morning: Sebastian Mesaline wasn’t a hardworking employee. He was a Cubs fan. I’d also learned Nabiyev’s name, and that he had a job at Sturlese Cement. Four things.
I spread out the wadded-up papers I’d taken from Sebastian’s gym bag at the Virejas site. Aliana, the young engineer who’d opened the locker for me, was right: Sebastian was careful with money. The receipts were for sandwiches, pizza slices, candy bars, all from grocery stores or drugstores, where prepared food is cheaper. He’d bought a CTA pass, a monthly gym pass. I entered the name of the gym into his file—it might be worth checking to see if he’d left anything behind in a locker there.