Ridl lived on a narrow road shaded with old trees. His house trailer was set on blocks in the middle of a clearing that had gone to the same sort of tall grass that grew along the Devil’s Backbone.
An old yellow Volkswagen convertible was parked on the ruts that served as a drive. It was splotched with red and gray primer as though badly afflicted with two kinds of measles. A bicycle pump leaned against the flat front driver’s side tire. The rear hood was up. An emaciated gray-haired, gray-bearded man was bent over the motor, doing something with a screwdriver. The last inch of a cigarette dangled from his mouth.
He didn’t look like he’d ever been the round fellow Eddings had described.
Mac got out of his car. ‘Jonah Ridl?’
The man straightened up with effort. He was only five foot five and looked to be at least seventy. ‘I suppose,’ he said.
‘I’m the mayor of Grand Point, Illinois. You remember Grand Point?’
Ridl took the cigarette from his mouth and stubbed it into the dirt next to a thousand others. He coughed, deep and wet, spat onto the ground and lit another cigarette. ‘Why are you here?’
‘You dug deeper than the other reporters.’ Mac told him about the waitress hearing men laughing behind a closed door about a dead girl, and of the current sheriff who didn’t give a damn about an investigation that had gone no place at all. ‘I came to Chicago to look at newspaper microfilms,’ he said, ‘and that got me to the piece you did for the Sun-Times.’
‘The crowning glory of my journalism career,’ he said. He coughed again and bent back to the car’s engine.
Mac took the chance. ‘There’s only one person who’s followed up on the crime.’
‘Go away.’
‘A part-time reporter named Jessup. She would have been a kid back then.’
Ridl took a long time to straighten up, as though he were shouldering all the pain in the world.
He suggested a beer.
THIRTY-FOUR
The old man had begun wheezing like he was panicked for breath. They went to the front of the trailer where a lone webbed lawn chair was set next to a dented aluminum cooler. Ridl motioned for Mac to take the chair, reached into the cooler for two blue cans of Point Beer, handed one to Mac and sat on the lid.
‘Not a damned thing has happened?’ he asked when his breathing calmed.
‘I didn’t even know about the killings until a waitress mentioned them a few days ago.’
‘It validates things, I suppose.’
‘What?’ Mac asked, startled.
Ridl offered up a weak smile. ‘Sorry. I meant my rationalization for not hanging around your crooked little burg. I figured those murders would never be solved, and right now, I’m looking for all the rationalizations I can find.’ He took a pull on his beer. ‘Your waitress didn’t give you the names of those men?’
‘Maybe she didn’t know them. She’d only been working there a few weeks.’ Mac offered up his own weak smile, ‘I didn’t ask. I thought she was paranoid.’
‘Why not ask her now?’
‘She’s gone. She grabbed some clothes and took off. Left an apartment full of food, bed sheets and towels.’
‘She got threatened.’
‘Or worse.’
‘Or worse,’ Ridl agreed. ‘You could hang around that restaurant some morning, see who comes out of that private dining room.’
‘I’d be noticed. These days I’ve become quite conspicuous.’
Ridl didn’t ask what he meant. ‘No matter. I’ll bet I can still tell you who those men are: the newspaper publisher, the funeral home director and his nephew, any one of the number of sheriff’s deputies who controlled the crime scene, perhaps a couple of bartenders from back in the day, some guys who gambled at the Wren House and anybody who conducted any autopsies, like the coroner or that local doctor, what’s-his-name.’
‘Romulus Farmont.’
‘It’s been some time. Everybody’s still alive?’
‘The funeral director drank himself to death.’
Ridl made a laugh that turned into another cough.
‘You posed very specific questions.’ Mac said, pulling the folded copy of Ridl’s Sun-Times article from his pocket.
Ridl glanced over. ‘I’ve never seen that.’
Mac held it out.
‘No need, I remember.’ Ridl closed his eyes. ‘First, I questioned why the cops weren’t bothered about Pribilski being shot multiple times in the groin. That indicated a crime of passionate rage, a shooter with an emotional tie to one of the victims. Neither Milner nor Reems expressed much interest in that line of inquiry.
‘Next, I asked why the mortician was allowed to wash Pribilski and trim his nails without a forensic examination being conducted.’
‘To destroy evidence, or can it be innocently explained as preparing the body for burial?’ Mac asked.
‘Either way, Bud Wiley had to get approval first. A bartender named Peterson was at the funeral home. He told me the place was crawling with people. Maybe Pribilski was thoroughly examined, though I doubted it.’
‘Peterson?’ Mac asked, recalling the name from his meeting with Jimmy Bales and Jen Jessup. ‘Dougie Peterson?’
‘“Dougie” it was,’ Ridl said.
‘He drowned, a month after the killings.’
Ridl closed his eyes again, and for a moment, Mac wondered if the man was breathing. He opened them, finally, and looked down toward the road. ‘Poor, stupid Dougie. He saw the body and told the tale. His buddy, Luther, was the funeral director’s nephew, and he snuck him in for a peek at the body. Dougie was the one who told me Pribilski had been shot in the groin multiple times.’
‘Betty Jo was washed carefully, too?’
‘No doubt, and her nails clipped as well. They hurried her into the ground the day after she was found, saying they were sparing the family since she was so decomposed.’
‘You challenged the sheriff’s department’s belief that Betty Jo’s body had been lying beside the Devil’s Backbone since that Tuesday morning.’
‘Search teams combed that exact area on the same morning Pribilski was found. I was with them on Wednesday, when they searched it again. She wasn’t lying there then.’
Mac looked down at the Sun-Times article. ‘You questioned why only one crime scene photo was taken of Betty Jo Dean. I’ve seen that photo.’
‘Then you know her head was completely obscured by the leaves that had fallen off that tree. The photo was worthless, deliberately.’
‘A cop directed that only one be taken?’
‘Or the coroner, or someone from the funeral home. Or Wiggins might have taken several, but reported that only one turned out.’
‘Blackmail?’
‘Or he kept better ones in reserve, thinking he might need them to protect his own ass someday.’ Ridl took a short pull on his beer. ‘One more thing about those leaves: how could her body have laid on the ground for all of Tuesday and Wednesday, and through the night into Thursday morning, without those leaves getting disturbed by an animal attracted by her decaying, odiferous flesh?’
‘It all adds credence to your belief that she was dumped after the search teams had been through on Wednesday, and those leaves were used to conceal evidence in a photograph.’
‘Then again,’ Ridl said slowly, ‘covering her with those leaves could have been an act of tenderness.’
‘My God,’ Mac said.
‘Remember how she was found? Her slacks were folded neatly on top of her, not just tossed down, as you’d expect from a killer. Those leaves might have been placed just as carefully to cover her head, her wound.’
‘An act of passion, of consideration, like folding the slacks?’
‘Pribilski’s was a passionate kill as well, only that was rage.’