The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [140]
But that was true of everybody in Chicago.
Bobby had just hung up the phone with Alberto Cepeda, who really did sound like he was having a panic attack. After explaining unnecessarily that he’d tried to call Cepeda back but that the cell towers in Chicago were overtaxed and he couldn’t get a signal and he’d dropped in here at Area 1 to use the phone because the power was still out up at Belmont and Western, he let Cepeda try to tell his story in a long, hysterical exhale. The professor claimed to have proof that the Thousand had killed Marlena Falcone. Well, not proof, exactly, but he knew it was true. They’d killed another man, too, an ex-cop in L.A. The papers said it was a murder-suicide, that this cop, Contreras, after being kicked off the force, drove his wife and three kids down the coast in a minivan, parked at the beach, and shot them all before shooting himself, but it was really the Thousand who’d done it, and the Thousand who’d made it look like murder-suicide. They’d killed him and they’d killed his wife and kids and they’d killed all those people on the airplanes, and Cepeda was scared now, really scared, and Kloska should be scared, too, because this cop had been a cop exactly like him, a cop who’d picked up a case just like the Falcone murder and the evidence had led him to the Thousand, too close to their secrets, and so they’d killed him and they’d killed his family and who knows how many other people they’d killed.
Bobby told Cepeda to calm down, but Cepeda told him more, that he knew the name of one of these mathematici—his name was Russo and he was a doctor in Chicago. When Bobby stopped him and asked him to repeat the name, Cepeda said he’d been told to forget the whole thing but that he didn’t know if he could because they had used him—“These assholes used me and tossed me aside while no-talent kiss-asses like Prentiss get feted in Oslo”—and he was scared it might be too late for him in any case, but he wanted to warn Kloska, because Cepeda had been right all along about the acusmatici and the mathematici, that they were killing each other, they’d killed Marlena, and they were killing innocent people, too, women and children. Then when Bobby asked him how he knew all this, Cepeda told him he shouldn’t say, he couldn’t say, and Bobby told him again to settle down and he asked him if he was going to do anything rash—because at this point, Bobby thought he might be a suicide case—but Cepeda said no, and Bobby told him he’d look into it, and Cepeda said no, he was just trying to convince Kloska it was true, that he should walk away so he didn’t end up like Contreras, but Bobby told him a third time to calm down, and finally Bobby hung up.
Kloska rubbed his face. An expert on TV was explaining that the area that was now Lincoln Park had been used as a refugee camp after the Great Chicago Fire. A newspaper had been disemboweled and left in pieces across four different desks. The Cubs had moved the next day’s game against the Pirates from Wrigley, which was right in the middle of the northern blackout zone, to Sox Park, which was dormant now with the White Sox out of town. Baseball. In the summer, he was normally obsessed with it. He hadn’t watched a White Sox at bat or even glanced at a box score since Marlena Falcone had been murdered. Baseball seemed unimportant to him now, like the collection