My GPS led me to a small house in Oak Park, a near western suburb. A black van sat in the driveway. The same van? I hadn’t gotten the license plate when I was watching Lisa Hobbes, but it had the same dent in the back bumper. I parked across the street and settled down to wait.
I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for. I wasn’t going to confront Czernoff if he came out of the house. I needed more information. But sometimes the best thing a detective can do is to sit and watch, as boring as frustrating as that is.
The second best thing a detective can do is to follow someone. After an hour, the side door opened, and an older man with a limp came walked slowly to the van. His gray hair was tied back in a ponytail. Czernoff.
He backed out of the driveway. The traffic was light, so I was able to stay two or three car lengths behind him. I had a different cap with me, and I hoped he wouldn;t recognize me in a different car.
I admit I fantasized about the rear window of his van exploding from a brick, but I didn’t have one handy.
He drove west to Berwyn, the next suburb over. After driving through the downtown area he turned down a street into a residential neighborhood, and after a few blocks pulled over and parked.
I stopped on the block behind him and turned the Honda off. Czernoff stayed in the van. Five minutes, then ten. Was he staking one of the houses out? It felt kind of meta, doing a surveillance on a subject doing his own surveillance. I waited.
My phone buzzed. A number for IMS. “Tom Jurgen speaking.”
“Jurgen? This is Ryan Ludd, at Illinois Metal Suppliers. I got your number from Alia Melendez here.”
Ryan Ludd, VP of sales at IMS, and Mike Willey’s boss. I’d spoken with him before. He was brisk and businesslike, with a quiet voice that had a hard edge behind it. “Yes, Mr. Ludd, what can I do for you?”
“Would it be okay if I gave your number to Mike Willey’s sister?” he asked. “Her name’s Cindy Rusch, and she’s been bugging me about Mike ever since he disappeared. I get that she’s upset, but there’s not just anything else I can tell her at this point. I don’t know if you can help her, but could you at least talk to her?”
I hid a sigh. Distraught relatives don’t make the easiest clients. They tend to expect immediate action and definitive answers, like a TV private eye with an hour to solve the case. Yeah, she might pay, but I didn’t want to take advantage of anyone’s grief and milk them for the sake of a fee.
On the other hand, I was still curious. Maybe there was a chance I could help. And Melendez would owe me a favor . . . “Sure. Give her my number.”
He breathed an audible sigh of relief. “Thanks. You can tell her everything about what you did for us. I hope she’s okay.”
We hung up, I went back to watching the van. Nothing. Czernoff was definitely watching someone, but who?
My phone buzzed 20 minutes later. “Tom Jurgen speaking.”
“Mr. Jurgen? I got your number from Ryan Ludd at Illinois Metal Suppliers—my name is Cindy Rusch.”
Her voice was calm, quiet, almost too controlled. “Yes, Ms. Rusch, I was told you’d call. How can I help you?”
“Well, my brother—Mike—he was working for Illinois Metal Supply, and he was murdered.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss.”
“Th-thank you.” Now I heard a sniff. “He was—I can send you the police report. They found him wrapped up in some plastic sheeting in an alley. I was—I filed a missing persons on him, and he had a tattoo on his shoulder, a diamond. And they saw that, and then they got dental records. He was—burned all over his body.” She groaned quietly.
“That sounds horrible.” I kept my eyes on the van.
“Y-yeah. He was shot, and there was some kind of, what did they say, blunt force trauma on the back of his head. Bits of metal in his hair. So he was probably already—anyway, they think it was—acid. Or something. Anyway . . .” Another sniff. “I think it’s got something to do with that place he worked, where that Melendez person works, And this place he was visiting, Tomorrow Metalworks.”
“What makes you think that?”
“They had him going out to that Tomorrow place all the time. For weeks that’s all he talked about. I think something’s going on there, and IMS knew about it.”
“Something like what?”
“Like—” She lowered her voice. “Smuggling. Look, I’m going to send you a picture, but you can’t show it to anyone, all right? Just give me a minute—”
“Hold on. Hold on, please.” I was beginning to see why Ludd was wary of Cindy Rusch. “I can’t make any kind of promise. Even if I was formally working for you—and I’m not right now—I’m not an attorney or a doctor, I can’t keep everything confidential.”
Her voice rose. “I’m just—he was missing, and now he’s dead, and I just can’t think straight right now. I’ve got to make funeral arrangements, and my mother is hysterical, and I’ve got kids, and I don’t know what to do!”
I forced myself to stay calm. “Look, let’s meet in person and talk through this.”
“Okay.” She took a deep breath, and her breathing grew quiet again. “I’m sorry. I can come into the city. Where are you?”
I looked at the van. I could be here all day, and my new client didn’t sound as if she’d
like waiting. We arranged to meet at a coffee shop near my apartment in an hour.
When I hung up I called Rachel. “Everything okay?”
“It’s him. He’s sitting outside a house in Berwyn, except I don’t know which one he’s watching. And now I’ve got a new client to meet. Mike Willey’s sister.”
“Where are you meeting?”
“The coffee shop. I’ll give it a few more minutes here, then come home. I’ll call if anything happens.”
“Don’t wreck that car. Even with the scam insurance.”
I chuckled. “I’ll try not to. Talk to you later.”
After 20 more minutes I gave up. Whatever Czernoff was doing, he’d have to do without me watching.
Cindy Rusch was short and plump, with curly brown hair and teary eyes. She held her coffee with both hands in the middle of the coffee shop table and looked me over, deciding if she could trust me.
“Tell me about your brother,” I said.
“He was an asshole.” The words flooded out of her. “I mean, he’s my kid brother and I love him, but his whole life is one job after another, always getting fired but it’s never his fault, or getting bored after three months and not working for six months. Living off mom and dad, borrowing money from everyone and never paying it back, smoking weed and playing video games all day, breaking up or getting dumped by every girl he ever dated—he just knows how to make people like him. Knew how.” She paused for breath. “Until they didn’t.”
I nodded. “Sorry for your loss,” I said again.
“Yeah.” She gulped some coffee. “It’s how he was good at selling. Most of his jobs were selling stuff—anything, it didn’t matter. He was smart enough to pick up what he needed to know, and then he could just talk and talk until you were practically begging him to take your money. It took me a long time to figure that out.” She sighed, grabbed a brown napkin from the corner of the table, and wiped her eyes.
“What about his job at IMS?” I sipped my own coffee.
She shrugged. “It was one of the longest he ever held down a job, so they must have liked him. He was good at that, like I said. He didn’t talk too much about it. I probably wouldn’t have understood it anyway. Selling metal? I mean, I teach science—middle school—but I couldn’t keep up when he started talking about it. The last week or so he was talking about some place called Tomorrow Metalworks, like they were doing something really amazing, warp drive technology or something like that. He was spending a lot of time with them, especially some chick named Lisa and a guy named Carl.”
“So what was so interesting about Tomorrow Metalworks?”
“I don’t know, but he gave me . . .” She pulled a phone from her jeans. “This.”
She held the phone over. The picture looked like a bar of something gold and shiny, sitting in a shoebox on a wad of crumpled newspapers..
I blinked. “A picture of a gold bar?”
“No!” She yanked the phone back. “A bar of gold! A real bar of gold!”
We both suddenly looked around to make sure no one was listening. She put the phone away.
“When did he give it to you?”
“Last week. Wednesday night. He came by and gave me this box, said not to open it, just keep it for him a few days. It was so heavy, I didn’t think it could be drugs, not that he ever did anything more than weed. A little cocaine, maybe.” She shook her head. “I didn’t open it, until I didn’t hear from him, and yesterday. When I knew he was—dead. So I waited until my kids were asleep and I looked at it. And this is what was in it.”
Wednesday. The night of the dinner at Stromboli with Hobbes, Benson, and Czernoff. No one had heard from Willey after last Thursday afternoon. Today was Tuesday.
Was this some kind of money-laundering scheme? Drug cash for gold? I didn’t know how that would work. “You haven’t told the police.”
She shook her head. “Look, I’m a single mom. I’ve got two kids and a teaching job. I figure Mike gave this to me to take care of me in case something, you know—happened.” She scowled. “Like this.”
“Do you have any idea how much it’s worth?”
“It’s 12 ounces. That’s about $21,000. I looked it up online.”
Wow. “And he just gave it to you.”
She nodded. “Yeah.”
“You should tell the police.”
She stiffened and shoved her chair back. “Are you going to?”
“Relax, I get it. You want to keep it.” I rubbed my head. “I’m not sure exactly what I can do. You probably don’t want me asking anyone at IMS or Tomorrow Metalworks about gold bars—”
“I want to know what happened to Mike.” She leaned forward, her voice a fierce whisper. “Yeah, I want to keep this, but if I have to give it up to get whoever burned him to death, I’ll do it.”
“Do the cops know when he died?”
She bit her lip. “They sent me the report. I can send it to you.” She picked up her phone. “They said—Thursday night, Friday morning, based on—stuff.” She gulped some coffee.
Sitting back, I crossed my arms. “Okay. I can’t make any promises, but if you want to hire me, I’ll look into it. At Tomorrow they think I work for IMS. I can keep that up for a while and maybe find out if there’s anything going on with them. But to be honest, this might not ever get solved. You have to be prepared for that.”
She looked out the window. “At least I’ve got that gold bar.” Then she looked me over again and apparently decided to trust me, at least for now. “How much do you charge?”
Back home I told Rachel about Cindy Ruisch and her gold bar. Her eyebrows rose. “Nice. Think someone knocked over Fort Knox?”
“Maybe.” I looked at the police report on Mike Willey’s death that Cindy Rusch sent me. He’d been wrapped in a canvas sheet stained with chemicals and blood. The back of his head had suffered blunt force trauma, and bits of as-yet unidentified metal were embedded in his scalp. And he’d been shot in the chest.
Maybe somehow had bashed his skull in with a bar of lead?
I thought about driving back out to check on Czernoff and his van. But I couldn’t think of anything to do if he wasn’t there, except go back to his house and wait again. For that matter, I didn’t know what to do if he was still where I’d left him.
The answer had to be at Tomorrow Metalworks. That was the connection. But what were they all doing? Two marketing executives and an alchemist—
“Wait a minute.” I turned to Rachel. “What if—”
But my phone started buzzing. “Just a minute. Hello, Tom Jurgen—”
It was Cindy Rusch. “Someone—broke into—my house.” She was having trouble breathing. “They took—they took it. The thing I showed you.”
“Have you called the police?”
“They’re on their way. But they took the thing! The thing! What do I do?”
“Tell them everything you know. Call the Chicago police, whoever’s handling your brother’s case and tell them—”
“I’m not telling them about the thing.”
Telling the cops everything up front meant fewer awkward questions later. Unless you’re being arrested. But I could understand her hesitation. “Do what you think is best. Did you tell anyone else about the gold bar?”
“No. Even my kids don’t know about it. I mean—some guy at IMS asked me if Mike gave me anything. I thought he meant his laptop or something. It was weird. I didn’t say anything about the gold.”
“What guy? Who?”
“It was—I think his name was Ryan something.”
Ryan. “Ryan Ludd?”
“Yeah, that was it. When I called the day after Mike went missing. I was too upset to think about it—”
“Where do you live?” I had a funny, spider-like feeling.
“Berwyn. Why?”
The black van. “When the police get there, get their names. I might want to talk to them later.”
“All right. Where are they? They should be here by now.”
I hung up and dug her check from my wallet. It was right there, and I hadn;t noticed it. A Berwyn address, on the block Czernoff had been watching.
“What is it?” Rachel asked.
“Someone broke into her house and stole that piece of gold.”
“Huh.”
“It was Czernoff. He was watching her house when she called me. Damn it.” I pounded a fist on my knee. “I left, she left, and he went in and stole. I was right there!”
“Not your fault.” She rubbed my knee. “You’re not psychic, are you?”
“No, that’s your department.” I kissed her. “Anyway, I think I know what’s going on.”
“Do tell.”
“It’s gold,” I said. “They’re not cooking meth or laundering money. Czernoff’s an alchemist. They’re making gold.”
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