The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [141]
He found another part of the Sun-Times stuck to the bottom of a chair. He saw a picture inside of a husky dude with black hair next to an explanation why that ADA in Las Vegas, the friend of Canada Gold, hadn’t called him back. Damn, he thought as he read the gruesome details. This Wayne Jennings, this person of interest, was nowhere to be found. He hoped that really was Canada Gold whom Della had seen the other night.
Then his mind started making connections, the kind of connections Alberto Cepeda might make. You have Marlena dead, and you got this woman in Vegas. They both have Canada Gold in common. What if these Vegas killings were connected to Marlena Falcone’s murder? Just as quickly, he remembered what his first sergeant had told him twenty years ago. “Every coincidence has got an eyewitness,” he’d said, “and that guy always sees a damn conspiracy.” Bobby knew if you took two random murdered corpses in America, they were bound to have something in common—an acquaintance, a car dealer, a church, diabetes. Didn’t mean it had anything to do with their deaths.
Area 1 was practically empty now except for one sergeant and a couple of exhausted patrol guys looking for a place to crash between double shifts. If the police were making routine arrests today, he didn’t see any evidence of it. Bobby borrowed a computer and searched news stories for Reuben Contreras, and reading the articles, the story came back to him in pieces. He now remembered just a few months ago the bad jokes about an ex–L.A. cop with post-traumatic stress disorder taking his own life in a minivan after offing his family. “Hey, Kloska, you know what LAPD stands for? Left’em in a Previa dead.”
He looked up the division where Contreras reported and after about twenty minutes of wheedling and inquiries over the phone, he found a sergeant who would talk to him.
“Christ, don’t you cops in Chicago got enough to deal with right now?”
“We got everything completely under control,” Bobby said.
“Wiseass. You really want to talk about Ben Contreras?”
“What can you tell me?”
“He was a psych case, what do you want? Killed his fuckin’ wife and kids and did us the courtesy of offin’ himself. The papers all want to blame the job, but the guy had an axle screw loose.”
“Contreras ever talk about something called ‘the Thousand’?”
“He was always talking, that guy. Nine-eleven was an inside job. Kennedy was killed by the North Vietnamese. If this Thousand thing was crazy shit, Ben used to talk about it. This department’s got more black eyes than a muddy potato and the Los Angeles Times reamed us for a month because of that guy. Ben Contreras can go fuck himself in hell.”
Nice.
Bobby turned toward the TV. The stations were pooling their helicopter feeds. One was following an unknown disturbance on the West Side. Blue-and-whites blocking off streets. Fire trucks angling for position. A glimpse of riot gear.
Cut to a shot over the Lincoln Park Zoo, where six animals had died this week, traveling north over the displaced Yuppies—the Whole Foogees, as Della had called them—and then over North Avenue, where dozens of people were agitating in the heat, spilling out into the road, fists pumping in the air. They were right at the gates of the old cardinal’s mansion, practically the only building on the North Side that still had power. “… now the home of philanthropist Gary Jameson,” a disembodied anchor’s voice was saying.
“Gary Jameson?” Kloska said out loud, and he was pretty sure he knew where he had seen it before. Gary Jameson had been one of the vaguely familiar names on the partial list of people Cepeda suspected of being members