‘The cops suspected this?’
‘They allowed people to stomp all over Poor Farm Road, and they actually directed that the grass be cut along the Devil’s Backbone. Whatever evidence might have existed in both places was destroyed.’
‘A cop,’ Mac said.
‘Any one of several?’ Ridl grinned, but there was no mirth in it. ‘Could have been, but there again, not necessarily. It could have also been the coroner or the doc, or someone else with authority.’
‘What about all the leads that fizzled, the couples and pairs of brothers and others, old boyfriends and old girlfriends?’
‘You’re asking if that, too, was the work of a cop, deliberately misdirecting? You’re thinking Sheriff Milner and Clamp Reems kept everyone running around, chasing their tails, to obscure any real leads?’ Ridl shook his head. ‘I always thought Milner was the most intriguing character in the melodrama.’
Mac read aloud from the Sun-Times article on his lap. ‘“What did Sheriff Delbert Milner suspect? And how did Milner die?”’
‘I think Milner was a good man, but a politician in over his head, trying to direct career cops. Did you read of a car seen speeding south from Poor Farm Road, being driven by an older man struggling with a younger woman?’
It had been mentioned in the Chicago papers. ‘About the time Pribilski was killed? Clamp Reems said it was a hoax, a false lead,’ Mac said.
‘I think Reems was right. It was a false lead – made up by Milner.’ Ridl stood up, reached to pull two new beers from the cooler, and sat back down. ‘One of those cabins down by the river would have been a fine destination for a man abducting a girl. But Milner didn’t have cause for warrants. He couldn’t send people inside those shacks. I think he did what he could do in a hurry, and set off a ground search to send a message to whomever might be holding her in one of those cabins: “We know she’s there, we’re closing in. Release her while you can still cut a deal.”’
Mac saw the horror of where Ridl was heading. ‘But sending people down to those cabins had the opposite effect? Instead of triggering Betty Jo’s release, it forced the killer’s hand because he knew the searchers would be back soon with warrants?’
Ridl lit a cigarette, looked down toward the road for a minute. ‘Sometime before dawn on the morning she was found, he took her to the Devil’s Backbone and shot her.’
‘That would have triggered Delbert Milner’s heart attack, for sure.’
Ridl coughed fiercely, smoke and spit and maybe a little blood. ‘Who the hell said it was a heart attack?’
‘The current sheriff, Jimmy Bales.’
Ridl wiped his mouth with a stained handkerchief. ‘I got to Milner’s house early that Friday morning. Milner’s widow was hysterical, insisting that her husband be taken out of town to a mortuary in DeKalb. I followed the ambulance, went in after they left…’ Ridl stopped. A tear ran from his eye.
‘How did Milner die, Jonah?’
‘Gunshot to the head,’ he said, in a whisper.
‘Suicide? Grief at what he set in motion with that false tip?’
‘I’ve always wondered. Now that you’ve told me about Dougie Peterson, I’m thinking maybe not. Maybe it was murder, for what he suspected.’
They sat for a time, saying nothing, and then Ridl asked, still in that same whisper, ‘Is she tall? Is she almost too skinny? Fair complexion, coal-dark eyes, brown hair?’
‘Jen Jessup is beautiful. She’s in her early forties now.’
Ridl looked away. ‘I egged Laurel on with the promise of a shared byline. She had an extraordinary source, someone who told her about Betty Jo getting slapped just a few days earlier. And about having an abortion – likely it was her killer’s baby – some weeks before that.’
He turned to Mac. ‘Supposedly Laurel fell asleep driving home from Grand Point, and I’ve so wanted to believe that, but I could never convince myself.’ He reached to touch Mac’s wrist. ‘Do you see what your next step must be?’
‘Yes,’ Mac said.
THIRTY-FIVE
Mac was at the courthouse the moment it opened, and went first to the county clerk’s office. Part of Ridl’s story, one of his questions, seemed too incredible.
The mouse-like woman who handled vital records brought him a thick ring binder. It only took a minute to find Delbert Milner’s death certificate. Dr Romulus Farmont, M.D., certified that the cause of death was a coronary embolism.
Not a gunshot wound.
That didn’t prove anything, unless it pointed to a conspiracy to shroud Milner’s cause of death, as Ridl had said.
He went down to the recorder of deeds office. ‘I’d like to check land titles,’ he told the orange-haired woman behind the counter. She was sixtyish, quite heavy, and looked to be unhappy about both.
Her eyebrows, dyed unnaturally to match her hair, moved closer together in confusion. ‘You’re thinking of staying?’
‘I am,’ he said, trying to beam. ‘I’m thinking about buying a little weekend place, something along the river.’
‘Don’t you think you ought to wait…?’ She let the thought trail off.
‘Until my indictment is dismissed?’
‘There is that; yes.’
‘We’re countersuing,’ he said to her, and to the dozens of people she’d tell. ‘Things are going to get interesting.’
‘I heard that restaurant of yours is in difficulty.’
‘Thank God for my trust fund,’ he said, as though he had one.
Her eyebrows were almost touching in consternation now. ‘What property do you have to see?’
‘All of them along the river, south of Poor Farm Road.’
‘Them old fishing cabins?’
‘Some have been fixed up.’
‘That area has changed some,’ she allowed. ‘Used to be that nobody wanted them old shacks for anything except to keep bait and maybe a fold-up cot for napping. You got a particular property in mind?’
‘I might approach more than one owner.’
‘I surely don’t have time to guide you, property by property. You can do your own research.’
She left and came back with a large book held together with aluminum screw-posts. Flipping halfway through the pages, she turned the book so Mac could see. ‘Every one of them’s on this one page.’
She disappeared around the back row of shelves. A moment later, a chair groaned as her voice began murmuring. Jungle drums were beating; Mac Bassett was countersuing.
The left side of the ledger showed a drawing of irregularly shaped land parcels running parallel to the Royal River. A faint note at the top showed that the land was first subdivided twenty years before the Civil War. The first parcels had been large, but as the years went by, the parcels were divided, and divided again.
For over a hundred years, the dollars they fetched at sale were small. No one wanted to pay much for land that must have routinely flooded. But in the 1950s the dollars went up, and so did the assessments. Mac guessed that was when the dam was built, twenty miles up-river. No longer would the land along the river flood with every strong rain.
There were twenty-one properties, of which twenty had been developed with some sort of structure. Some of the names on the titles were familiar, doctors and dentists and druggists and merchants, sons and grandsons. But the names he was looking for, Wiggins or Farmont or Wiley, weren’t there. Clamp Reems owned a property, but he’d bought it in August, 1982, six weeks after the murders.
Also that year, late in November, the largest of the parcels, a property at the extreme southern end of the string, had been reclassified and its taxes substantially reduced. ‘Country Club Partners’ was its listed owner.
‘Excuse me?’ Mac called to the murmuring woman.
‘What is it now?’ she yelled back, invisible.
‘A question, and then I’m done,’ he shouted.
‘Hold your horses.’ She materialized from behind the shelves.