“Mind if we have a look?”
“I do mind. I’m not letting you rifle through someone’s personal stuff. Ask Gordon yourself.”
“I don’t think he’s in,” Kovac said. “But let’s go see.”
Rucker led the way down the hall, turned the corner, and knocked on a door.
“Hey, Gordon? You in there?” he asked, and knocked again, frowning at the implication that Kovac knew something he didn’t. He tried the doorknob and breathed in relief when he found it locked.
“Can we have a seat in your office, Mr. Rucker?” Kovac asked. “I have a few questions.”
They went back the way they had come, and into the assistant director’s small office, where music was playing over the computer speakers and the desk was awash in files and forms.
“I had the evening group session,” Rucker said. “I decided I’d stay and catch up on some paperwork.”
He took his seat and turned the music down, motioning Kovac to a chair. “What’s this all about?”
“Mr. Krauss recently did some work for Handy Dandy Home Services. We need to ask him a few questions about that job.”
“You don’t think he’s done something wrong, do you? I’ve known Gordon for two years. He’s a good guy. I trust him enough to have him here overnight.”
“Do you know any reason he would feel the need to run from us?” Kovac asked. “Because someone just did, and I think it’s him, and now I’ve got half the cops on the North Side coming here to look for him.”
“What? I don’t understand any of this. What do you think he did?”
“Has he been in trouble with the police before?”
“Not since I’ve known him.”
“Do you have an address on file for him?”
“This is his address.”
“The sign says this is an outpatient facility.”
“It is. Gordon was staying in a shelter downtown before he came to us. The director is a friend of ours. We try to take a couple clients out of the shelters for every thirty or so paying customers.”
“You get some kind of county money for that?”
Rucker shook his head. “Not for that. We take a certain amount of clients from the county. The rest are private clients, men and women from all walks of life. Our big boss foots the bill for our shelter guys through his own charitable foundation. Less red tape. Plus, he’s a veteran himself. He knows the last thing some of these vets want is to deal with the government. They’ve been screwed over too many times as it is.”
“That’s decent of him. Then you hire some of these guys after they make it through the program?”
“We’ve got connections all over. We try to hook the vets up if we can.”
“So Krauss is employed by Rising Wings—”
“No. It’s a straight-up trade. He helps us, and we help him.”
“Uncle Sam would be unhappy to know he’s not getting anything out of that deal.”
“He already got everything he’s getting out of Gordon. I’ve seen too many of these guys come back from this or that hellhole and get jack shit for their trouble. It’s disgraceful. We ought to send Congress to war and treat them like how these kids get treated when they come back.”
“If we sent Congress to war, we’d all be speaking English as a second language,” Kovac said.
Rucker laughed. “True, that!”
“So, tell me about Mr. Krauss. What was his self-medication of choice?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Sure you can,” Kovac said. “You’re not a doctor or a priest, and he’s not a patient or a penitent. This is not a medical facility or a church. And I’m not looking to bust him for drugs, anyway. I just want to know who I’m dealing with.”
Rucker looked unhappy, but he answered anyway. “Whatever he could get. Oxycodone, weed, booze. Whatever he could get his hands on to dull the pain.”
“He has physical problems?”
“The worst pain isn’t in the bones, Detective. It’s in the heart. It’s in the mind.”
“Is he clean now?”
“As of his last drug test.”
“When was that?”
“Five weeks ago.”
“Has he stayed clean since he got here?”
“He was clean for almost a year. He fell off the wagon around the holidays last year,” Rucker confessed. “You know, it’s a tough season. Short days, long nights, the weather, all the Happy Holidays bullshit. It’s hard for people who don’t have family.”
And here they were again a year later, Kovac thought. Short days, long nights, shitty weather, Christmas ads running roughshod over Thanksgiving, all the pressure to be happy and nostalgic and part of a loving family unit. He hated it himself.
“So I was told you had a couple of break-ins and that prompted you to have Mr. Krauss stay here nights? What was stolen?”
“Electronics. Some cash out of people’s desks. Stuff that could be sold quick and easy.”
“For drugs.”
“Probably.”
“You reported these break-ins?”