What Can't be True Page 2

  So Bull worried less about the afterlife, and more about what he might be leaving behind. The possibility that one of his old deals might rise up against his daughter after he was gone… it twisted his insides worse than the damn stomach cancer. She deserved better, and he hoped his past would stay as dead and buried as he would soon be.

  He barked out a laugh at his weak joke. It shook his stomach, sending out a flick of intestinal fire. He rubbed his gut and searched for a pleasant memory to distract from the pain. He found several. Bev pitching her team to the city championship when she was twelve. That was a good one. And their road trip to the Grand Canyon. And that trip to Canada with Ernie and his boy. Seeing those two together always made Bull think of his own son and what might have been if—

  “Mr. Warren! How are you today?” A pink-clad nurse bustled into the room.

  “Fine, Nancy.” Bull pushed himself up straighter in the bed. Eleven different nurses rotated shifts without a pattern he could identify. He knew each nurse’s name and as much about her and her family as she was willing to share. Knowing about people and what they did and who they did it with was how he had been so successful for so long. “But call me Bull, okay?” He’d gotten the nickname during high school football. It suited his thick body and blunt style so much better than his given name—Grant—that it had stuck.

  Nancy merely nodded. She wasn’t a talker.

  “How’re your White Sox doing?” Bull asked. Like most west-suburbanites he was a Cubs fan, but he could talk about the Sox if he had to.

  “Not a World Series year.” Nancy turned away and fussed about the room, filling his water pitcher and checking his machines.

  “I don’t think the boys in blue will be heading back this year, either.” The Cubbies could string together a couple hits for a win if the bullpen didn’t implode, but they weren’t the force they’d been last year. He was damn glad he’d lived long enough to see the Cubs beat the Billy Goat curse and end the hundred and eight year drought. “But you never know.”

  Nancy ignored him, and Bull went back to staring out the window at the day passing him by. Three boys with baseball gloves and a bat jostled each other on the sidewalk along West Street. Above them, a giant bird—some kind of hawk or maybe even an eagle—swooped down and landed on the light pole. Bull had always wanted to be able to identify birds, especially the raptors, but now he was out of time.

  A rattling buzz sounded from the table that spanned his bed. His cell phone. He picked it up and checked the screen. He didn’t recognize the number, but that wasn’t unusual. He had traded a lot of favors over the decades and was still collecting.

  He pulled in a big breath. “Bull Warren here.”

  “It’s Rick Miller.” A tight, hoarse voice. “From the Secretary of State’s office? IT department? You helped me with my—”

  “I remember. It’s my body giving me trouble, not my brain.” Bull put a little truth in all his lies. Sometimes his mind lagged like it was pushing through a fog. But the painkillers caused that, not the cancer. The fog would only get worse when he finally agreed to the morphine Doctor Death kept pushing on him.

  “I… uh.”

  “What is it?” Now Bull remembered the little weasel. Miller’s son had been picked up for possession, and Bull had fixed it. “Spit it out.”

  “Someone ran a search on the Buick.”

  “Hold on.” Bull pressed the phone to his stomach, his pulse accelerating. “We done, Nancy?”

  “I still need to—”

  “I have to take this.” Bull gave her his nice-guy smile, and when she didn’t respond, he threw in a head tilt and a pout. “Please. Just a… few minutes.” He ran out of air, and the last words were an effort.

  “Of course.” She picked up the water pitcher and left the room.

  Bull drew two more breaths in through the cannula, his head lifting with each effort. “Who ran it?”

  “I got that right here, but this is it.” Miller’s voice wavered with tension. “I do this, and we’re square.”

  Bull didn’t have wind to waste arguing about a future he wouldn’t see, so he kept quiet and let Miller stew.

  “Hello?”

  “You done weaseling?” Bull pulled in a big breath. “Spit it out.”

  “Okay. Officer Sean Grady with the Weston Police Department ran the search at eleven thirty-six this morning.”

  Bull knew of Grady. Second-generation officer. Bright bulb in a dim force.

  “That it?” he asked.

  “Yeah, but I wa—”

  Bull ended the call. His heart hammered, and darkness edged into his vision as his open-mouthed gasping bypassed the air supply pumping to his nose.

  The Buick.

  He clamped his mouth shut and concentrated on long even breaths through his nose. Eventually his vision cleared, his pulse slowed, and the pounding faded away.

  He could do this. He wasn’t helpless. He knew people and owned favors.

  He scrolled through his contacts to the numbers for his many relatives. He found the one he wanted and hit dial.

  “Margie? I need to know”—he sniffed in a lungful—“what Officer Grady is working on right now.”

  “He was first on the scene out at Radar Grove.” Margie’s voice hovered above a whisper. “Some kids found a dead body in a car they pulled out of the lagoon.”

  He almost asked her if she had the body count right, but his synapses fired just fast enough to stop him. He needed to focus and fix this, or it would destroy him before the cancer and COPD finished fighting over the job. “Which detective?”

  “Deputy Chief Braff sent Jake out to handle it.”

  “Thanks, Margie. I owe you one.”

  Of course Braff had sent Houser. The DC thought Jake Houser was God’s gift to detection.

  “You don’t owe me anything. You just focus on getting better.”

  She hung up without a goodbye, and Bull smiled. Margie understood family. Claire Warren had, too, but then she’d married Frank Houser, a nobody from nowhere with nothing.

  Bull had pegged Frank as bad news from the very beginning. And Jake looked so much like his dad that seeing him always put Frank in Bull’s mind.

  He still had his family contacts open on his phone, and he caught himself about to call Houser. Damn pain medication! He pushed the nurse call button. Time to back off the drugs. He deleted Houser from his contact list so he couldn’t make that mistake again. If only it were so easy in real life.

  He lay back to wait for Nurse Nancy’s return, his pain-muddled mind clearing as he focused on the Buick. He would need help with the car—and with Houser. And he’d get it. Radar Grove was a county forest preserve, and his county ties were still strong. Bev didn’t yet understand the full scope of her power as sheriff, but even playing it straight, she had a lot of influence. And they both had Hogan. Ernie’s boy was working out great as Bev’s right hand. She appreciated his loyalty, and Bull liked having someone he could trust looking out for his daughter. Besides, the kid had deserved a break after that mess back in Newark.

  Maybe the Buick turning up now was for the best.

  While he was here to handle it.

  And to take the heat, if he failed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Paget County Sheriff Bev Warren clicked from one spreadsheet to another and back again. According to her source, the county board chairman planned to cut her department’s budget by another five percent this year. Five percent probably didn’t sound like much to the chairman, but he didn’t have to find where to make the cuts. Bev had already cut the department’s fixed costs to the absolute bone with last year’s budget, which left her with—

  Her desk phone rang. She stared daggers at it. She had told her secretary to hold all calls.

  After three rings it went silent.

  She stabbed another forkful of salad and stuffed it in her mouth, the raspberry vinaigrette tangy on her tongue. A droplet of dressing landed on her notepad, and she wiped it off with her thumb, leaving a purple smear. What ever happened to going out to lunch? This job, that’s what. It chained her to this desk fourteen hours a day. But here, sitting behind this desk, was where she did her best work. She had risen through the administration division, and the things a sheriff did from behind a desk—crunching numbers and planning and scheduling—were her strengths.

  Her dad always said to focus on your strengths.

  She clicked through the spreadsheets again, but there was no getting around the obvious. The only line items big enough to handle a five percent cut were fuel and deputy salaries. If she cut those, she’d have fewer deputies on the street, and they’d be covering less ground when they were out there. Reducing deputy visibility always resulted in more street crime. That couldn’t be the solution.

  She rolled the problem around, looking for an angle of attack, and smiled when she found it. Her department received eighty-nine percent of its budget from the county fund, and the other eleven percent from fees it charged for its services. Simple math said she could make up for the funding cut by raising all her department’s fees by fifty percent. She didn’t want to raise those fees, but if she played it right, she wouldn’t have to. Most fees were charged to lawyers—to serve court papers and evict tenants—and lawyers were a vocal group. If she leaked the potential fee increases to a friendly reporter—with a finger pointed at the county board chairman, where the blame belonged—she might be able to kill the budget cut before it happened.

  A sharp knock sounded on her door as it swung open. Deputy Hogan stepped into her office and closed the door behind him.

  “Why
don’t you just come right on in, Deputy?”

  Hogan’s aftershave wafted across the space, a leathery citrus like Bev’s dad always wore. Hell, it was probably the same brand. She hadn’t realized how tight those two were until her dad went into hospice and she saw how often Hogan was there. He even brought her dad the Eucharist on Sunday afternoons, in a shiny container that looked like a brass coin purse.

  Hogan leaned against the wall by the door and crossed his thick arms, stretching his suit jacket to the limits of its flexibility. His eyes drilled into hers, but he stayed silent. His intensity—and the rumors that had followed him from Newark—unsettled some people. But he was loyal, and a deal was a deal. She’d made Hogan her assistant and her dad had gotten her the Republican nomination for sheriff. Which meant he’d gotten her the job. The Republican nominee always won the election in Paget County politics.

  “Did I forget an appointment?” She pawed through the papers on her desk, found her planner, and confirmed she had the afternoon wide open. She pushed back from the desk and was about to ask Hogan what he wanted when her cell phone rang from the depths of her purse. She fumbled through the big bag and finally found the phone. Her dad. She pulled on a smile and fought back the sadness she felt every time she talked to him. His voice had been reduced to a trembling shadow of its former strength.

  “Hey, Dad.” She swiveled her chair to hide the tear threatening to spill from the corner of her eye. Her mom and brother had both died when Bev was nine—leaving her alone with her dad—and knowing she would soon lose him, too, hurt through to her core. “How are you?”

  “Hogan with you?”

  Her dad’s voice held some of its old vigor. Oxygen hissed into the phone, and the machine pumping it thumped away in the background.

  “He just walked in.” She wiped the tear away.

  “You’re going to need him.”

  Sweat broke across her forehead. After her dad went into hospice, he’d tried to tell her about some of his old “deals”—in case something came up after he was gone. Some might look bad if taken out of context, he’d said. But halfway through his first story, about how he’d convinced a key councilman to vote in favor a new youth center, she’d stopped him. She didn’t want to know. He’d accepted that, eventually, and told her he’d left her the tools to deal with things—whatever the hell that meant—and to work with Hogan if something came up.

  She shot a look at Hogan then turned back to the window. “What is it?”

  “Remember when the Bears looked at building a new stadium in Paget County?”

  “Vaguely.”

  Thirty years ago, maybe more, the Chicago Bears had talked about relocating to a large piece of then-empty land just outside Weston in unincorporated Paget County. The county went crazy with excitement, but instead of moving out to the suburbs, the Bears rebuilt Soldier Field into something that looked like a UFO landing on the lakeshore.

  “I worked that hard. Behind the scenes.” He wheezed and his machine hissed. “Would have meant a lot of jobs for Paget County.”

  “And?”

  Bev’s mind cartwheeled through what he might have left out. His involvement in the stadium deal was news to her, but it wasn’t surprising. He had always been working one deal or another.

  “Some of what I did wasn’t completely on the straight and narrow.”

  Hiss.

  Bev gulped and turned her chair back toward her desk, a hand reaching out and flicking the corner of a stack of manpower reports.

  “Five years ago a guy found a document that would have dredged it up.” Her dad coughed. “We set up a meet so I could… buy it. He showed up, but something spooked him and he took off…”—hiss—“… before the exchange. I never heard from him again.”

  “And?”

  “The car he was in that night just turned up on the bottom of Radar Grove Lagoon.”

  Shit! The skeleton in the trunk.

  Bev’s face flushed, and sweat beaded on her arms. “For Christ’s sake, Dad.” She took a few seconds to gather herself. “You sure this is the same car?”

  “I’m sure. We—you—need to get ahead of it.” Hiss. “Right now.”

  “Who was the guy?”

  “A nobody named Donald Silva. He’s been missing since then.”

  “But if he had the document when he went into the water, it would be dissolved by now, right?”

  “We can’t be sure of that. He could have had it in something.”

  Bev said nothing.

  “I didn’t do this, Bev.”

  Of course not. Her dad swapped favors and pulled strings. He didn’t kill people.

  His machine hissed and thumped in the silence.

  “But Bev, see how it might…”—hiss—“… look if that document is found in that car?”

  It would look like you killed a blackmailer. But that couldn’t be true.

  Bev glanced at Hogan, stoic against the wall. “Hogan knows the story?”

  “Everything.”

  Her dad’s tone stretched Hogan’s knowledge far beyond hers.

  She heard him suck a tight breath between his teeth; it was the sound he made when the cancer was stabbing fire through his gut. “You need to take over the investigation so you can find the document and not Houser.”

  “Jake got the case?”

  “He can’t be the one to find it.”

  Her dad ended the call as abruptly as ever, leaving her with the phone still pressed to her cheek. She put it back in her purse and spun her chair to look out into the glare of another hot day. She closed her eyes against the brightness, then squeezed them tight as the pain of her dad’s approaching death spread through her. Putting her dad in hospice was supposed to have allowed them both time to prepare for his death, but that had turned out to be bullshit. It had been three months, and nothing about it was easier.

  She forced her mind back to the problem her dad had dumped on her. There was a document that would reveal some effort he’d made to acquire the stadium for Paget County that—out of context and with the twenty-twenty vision of hindsight—would look bad. Even if all it did was link her dad to the body… that was bad enough. It would spur his enemies, and he’d made plenty over the years, to try to score a few headlines before his death took away their opportunity, to hell with the truth.

  Whatever her dad had done with the stadium deal, he didn’t deserve that.

  Her eyes sought the photo on her credenza. She and her dad at a Cubs game, the bright green field behind them. They went to one game every year. Even during her teens, when their relationship was rocky. Even when the Cubbies were terrible. She took a moment to let the memories of that day—it had been her birthday, and the Cubbies had won—fill her. She could handle this. She would handle this. But she’d do it her way, using the tools her job and the law gave her.

  “Jansen owes us,” she said to Hogan. “I’ll send him out to the scene personally.”

  “Good. Controlling the cause of death is half the battle.”

  She picked up her desk phone and dialed the number.

  “Coroner Jansen here.”

  “Did you get the call out to Radar Grove?”

  “Sheriff? I did, but I’m golfing with Mayor Dietz. We’re on the twelfth hole.”

  “I need you—”

  “One of my deputies will handle it. Skeletonized remains in the trunk of a car. The body has obviously been in the water for many years.”

  Bev changed tactics. “My dad thought you were the man for this job. I’ll call him back and—”

  “Hold on a minute now, Sheriff. There’s no need for that.” Jansen’s voice now had that whine she hated. “I’ll head down there as soon as we’re done.”

  “Now,” she said, with more bite in her voice than she’d intended. Having to invoke her dad always pissed her off.

  Silence.

  Then Jansen’s voice came faintly through. “I’ve been called to a crime scene, Mr. Mayor. We’ll have to play again another time.”