The Unspoken by Smith Ian K

Author:Smith, Ian K.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-10-01T00:00:00+00:00

26

IT WASN’T EVEN NOON yet, and it felt like an entire day had gone by. That was how it worked with investigations. Some days it was a complete drought, not even a single thread to tug, then other days clues fell from the sky in buckets. Today the skies had graciously opened, and I had intentions of taking complete advantage of it.

Mechanic called me after I had gotten into the office. He’d followed the Ford Taurus west on the Kennedy Expressway and dropped them when they reached the Junction, the point at which I-94 split toward the North Shore / Milwaukee or veered to the left heading to O’Hare and beyond. I texted the license plate number to Carolina.

I was standing at my window looking at the runners snaking their way through Grant Park when there was an urgent knock on my door. I opened it to find two plainclothes cops holding a thin envelope. “From Commander Burke,” one of them said before handing it to me.

“Tell him the next round of golf is on me,” I said.

They quickly turned and left with puzzled looks.

I opened the envelope and pulled out the DVD, then slipped it into my computer’s drive. The techs had taken footage from six cameras and displayed it all at the same time in six individual boxes that popped up on my screen. A time code ran at the bottom of each box. These new cameras were much better than when I was on the force. Most of the film we watched was either too grainy or too dark and contributed little to our investigations. These videos, however, were in high definition, and the clarity was so good you could see the pimples on the faces of passing motorists.

It took me a couple of hours to go through all the video as I checked it against the running timeline. The ME had said that Chopper had been dead between forty and forty-eight hours before we had gotten there, based on the lack of digestion products in his small intestines, the last time he was known to have eaten, and the degree of skin discoloration. I slowed the film to line up eight hours before the ME’s estimate. If my theory was correct, I needed to focus on the two cameras on Sixty-Ninth Street. One had been positioned two blocks east of South Wallace near Paul Robeson High School, while the other was just one block west. As I expected, very few cars turned out of South Wallace. A tow truck exited late in the morning. A white cargo van exited a few hours later, then no car or person exited for the next eight hours.

The next day, three vehicles exited South Wallace. A rusted pickup truck with a heap of metal and fixtures in the bed exited and turned east on Sixty-Ninth Street at 9:17 a.m. A minivan driven by an old woman exited and turned west at 11:05 a.m. The last car to leave was an

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