The next morning Rachel went back to her office, and I started the day sipping coffee and staring at my computer screen, trying to decide what to do next.
It was time to call my client, I figured.
“Do you know what’s going on?” She sounded out of breath. As if was out running. Or sitting at home crying.
I took a deep breath. Cristin Ward deserved the truth. However fantastic it sounded. “I don’t know how he’s doing it, but I think Chad Tyner can send emails that, well, kill the person who opens it. He’s sent them to all the people in that photo I sent you. One other man in the photo got an email and died the same way.”
I expected confusion or disbelief. Instead she simply asked, “Why?”
“It may be connected to a student who was murdered around the date that picture was taken. Look, I know this sounds unbelievable—”
“I think I’ll believe anything right now.” She groaned. “This last week—I’ve never had to try harder to stay sane in my life. Without Jeremy . . .” I heard a sniffle. “Anyway, what is there to do? Anything?”
“I don’t know. If I’m right—well, getting the police to do anything will be difficult, to put it mildly.”
“Yeah.” Another sniff, louder. “All right. Can you bring the laptop back to me? Or send it by messenger or something? There’s stuff on it I want. If it’s safe.”
“I’ll do that right away. Is there anything else?”
“I’m sorry, I just can’t talk right now. I have to make dinner, and—and—”
“That’s fine.” This is the part of the job I hate—delivering bad news to family members. Whether they’re grieving, angry, or in shock, it’s never easy. “I’ll call you if I learn anything else.”
“Thank you.” She hung up.
As I was packing up the laptop I realized that today was March 20. Almost 13 years to the day since the triumphant trivia contest. And Miranda Sherman’s murder. Was that significant? I didn’t have any hard evidence that the murder was related to the killer emails, or Chad Tyner, but it was an interesting coincidence. After scheduling the pickup I decided to take a second look at the case.
The Evanston police didn’t officially want to talk to me, so I looked online and found the name of the lead detective on the case in 2011. Edward Baer had retired five years ago. I managed to find a phone number for his house in Lake Geneva, and he picked up the phone on the second ring. To my surprise, he was willing to talk to me. “I can’t share anything confidential, you know, but I don’t think I remember anything really seriously secret. I remember the girl. I remember the boy. His name was Delvecchio. He cried, but in the end, he didn’t care.”
“What was his motive?”
“What do you think? He spent a week doing—things to her body. Sex t5hings. That was his motive. Even though—well, his story was, he found her, and she was already dead. So he spends a few minutes looking at her, and then he shoves her into his car and takes her home. And does—stuff.”
“Wait—so he didn’t confess to killing her?”
“His story was that he was driving along and spotted something along the side of the road. She was dead. And yeah, for everything else he did to her, there wasn’t any sign of blunt trauma, or fatal wounds, or even drugs in her system. Her heart gave out, probably because of everything he did to her, and that was enough to get him convicted.”
Her heart gave out. Just like Jeremy Ward, and Larry Larsen. More coincidence. “Did she have a laptop with her? Or a phone?”
“They found her phone on the ground near a bench when she went missing. It was open to her email. Why is that important?”
I couldn’t answer without telling him what was going on, and that would make him dismiss me as a lunatic. Instead I forced myself to ask hium another question: “Does the name Chad Tyner ring any bells with you?”
My question triggered his cop’s instincts. “What’s going on here, Mr. Jurgen? You say you’re a private detective. Is there some kind of lawsuit I should know about?”
I had to be careful. “No, sir, no lawsuit. It’s about—well, a series of suspicious emails was recently sent by Chad Tyner to several other men who were students at Northwestern during the time frame that Miranda Sherman was killed.”
“And you think that’s connected? How?”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. I’m just trying to locate Tyner, if that’s possible.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that. That is an unusual name, and I have a pretty good memory for names, so I will say that his name was on Miranda’s contacts list on her phone. So they must have known each other. But as far as I’m concerned, the case is closed.”
“Even though Delvecchio didn’t actually confess to the murder? “
“The girl’s body was—well, if you saw it, if you looked at the medical report, you wouldn’t care, Jurgen. You wouldn’t care one bit.”
I deal with demons a lot, but humans can be just as evil—sometimes worse. “I understand. Thanks for your help.”
After we hung up I put the boxed-up laptyop outside the door of my apartment for pickup. Then I pulled up the photo of the six. Smiling, faces flushed with victory and beer. At least two of them dead. I hadn’t heard from Matt Arreguin, and I still couldn’t track down Dan Getty. Just to be thorough, I sent a follow-up email to Arreguin and took another shot at Getty.
After 10 minutes I still hadn’t tracked down Getty—I’m not that good—but I got a call while I was searching. “Tom Jurgen speaking.”
“Mr. Jurgen? This is—I’m Matt Arreguin. You emailed me? I’ve been out of town, so I didn’t see it until today. I just—I got one of those emails. From Chad.”
“What’s the date on it?”
“Last week. Wednesday. Do I delete it, or what?”
“Yes,” I said reassuringly. “Delete it and empty your trash. Do it right now. You should be safe.”
“Deleting, and—there. Okay.” He gave a sigh of relief. “What’s going on?”
I gave him the story about the nasty computer virus. Then I said, “There’s one person I still haven’t been able to get hold, Dan Getty. Do you happen to know how to contact him?”
A long pause. “Dan? Yeah. He’s, uh, right here. Dan?”
Huh? I hung on a moment, surprised, and then a new voice came through. “Hi, this is Dan. You’re—who are you again?”
“Tom Jurgen. I’m a private detective, working for Cristin Ward, Jeremy Ward’s wife.” I had a dozen questions, but I needed to focus on the most urgent one: “I’m trying to locate Chad Tyner.”
“About the email Dan got?”
“And other things. Do you have any idea where I could find him?”
After thinking for a few seconds, Getty finally said, “Well, why don’t we talk about it in person?”
“That would be fine. Where can we meet?”
He gave me the address of a house in the Ravenswood neighborhood. I told him I could be there in an hour.
The townhouse was small and cozy, with vines over the wall sand a tidy little front lawn. Arreguin answered the door; he was tall and lanky, like a cowboy, in jeans and a button-down shirt. “Hi. Tom?”
Inside he led me to the kitchen, where Dan Getty sat at a small square table with a cup of coffee in front of him. “Hi.” He stood up, and we shook hands. Getty was short, with a mustache and a thick chin, in a T-shirt and khaki shorts.
Arreguin poured me some coffee, and we sat down.
“We were friends at Northwestern,” Getty said. “Just friends. Not close friends. Matt wasn’t out yet, and I was just—barely out. We didn’t really get together until later.”
“It was at a football game.” Arreguin seemed embarrassed. “An alumni event. Free beer.”
“Anyway, we’ve been together for 10 years.” He patted Arreguin’s shoulder. “I’m a sculptor and painter. I sell my stuff mostly through friends and networking.I use Matt’s email and internet, but I don’t really do anything online, so I didn’t look at his email whle he was in Phoenix. Some kind of work project?”
“I’m an architect.” Arreguin shrugged. “Helping with a new office complex. Danny is kind of a Luddite.” He grinned teasingly. “Except he loves his Fortnite and Minecraft.”
“Lots of people do.” Even me, sometimes. “About Chad Tyner?”
Getty sighed. “Yeah. I didn’t know him real well. He was in a couple of my classes. Computer classes. See? I’m not a total Luddite.” He poked Arreguin. “He was always kind of—odd.”
“Odd how?”
“Smart. Really smart. But sort of—out of it? Like he wasn’t really paying attention to what was going on because he was thinking about more ‘important’ stuff. And he was also into some new-age stuff. Like crystals, and weird books. Lovecraft stuff. He carried them around in his backpack. He had them that night at the bar.”
“The night you won the trivia contest?”
Arreguin laughed at the memory. “We weren’t really all together, just sitting close to each other and chatting, and then they announced the contest, and we all kind of looked at each other, and then we were raising our hands and we were a team. He had a lot of right answers, maybe more than anyone else. And we won! The prize was like, a free pitcher or something like that.” But his face turned sour. “Then . . .”
Getty said nothing. Finally I asked, “Then what?”
Getty looked away from me. “We were all pretty drunk, and bragging about stuff we were doing, and Chad was pretty quiet. I remember he looked kind of pissed off that we weren’t paying attention to him. And then he brings out his phone with this funny smile on his face. And he punches it for a minutes, and puts the phone down, and says, ‘I just killed someone.’”
Arreguin sighed and shook his head.
“We didn’t know what he was talking about,” Getty said after a moment. “It was just so out there, you know? So I guess we—me, anyway, I just forgot about and went on with whatever we were talking about, and then the next day . . .”
“Miranda Sherman disappeared,” I said.
They nodded together. Arreguin said, “I couldn’t really believe Chad had anything to do with it, but the way he said that, the look in his eyes—it was just sort of cold. Proud, almost. I couldn’t forget it. I wanted to tell someone, but what could I say? Then they found her body, and they arrested someone, and I figured it was just a sick joke. But it’s always stayed with me.”
“With both of us,” Getty said. “I don’t know, there was just something weird about Chad.”
“Do you know where he is now?”
They looked at each other. Finally Getty said, “I think I saw him. A month ago. Downtown, at a gallery. He was looking at a painting, something with fire and ice and a frozen face, just staring at it. I think he saw me. We didn’t say anything to each other. He just walked away. I saw him talking to the gallery owner before he left. I suppose they might know where he is.”
“Where was the gallery?”
It was called Vivian Gallery, in the River North neighborhood. I looked it up on my phone. “Okay. Thank you.”
Getty stared at me. “Is this really about a computer virus?”
I hesitated. Telling the truth is usually less complicated, so I took a chance. “No. Two people in that photo of you at the trivia contest are dead. At least one of them got an email from Tyner. And I had an expert examine it, safely, and it looks like the email is somehow—fatal to whoever opens it.”
Arreguin clutched Getty’s hand, looking at me. “You think he was telling the truth?”
“I don’t know. Not for sure.” I stood up. “I’ll have to talk to Chad Tyner in person, I guess.”
There was no one named Vivian at Vivian Gallery as far as I could tell. I spoke to a middle-aged man named Liam with gray hair and a black blazer over a white T-shirt, showing him Tyner’s picture.
“Y-yes,” he said warily. “He comes in here sometimes. I’ve talked to him.”
“Does he live nearby?”
He shook his head. “I do not know.”
“Do you have any contact information on him? A phone number, a mailing list?”
His eyes were gray and skeptical. “May I ask what this is about?”
“Some of his friends from college are trying to get in touch with him.” Not exactly the truth, but it would do for now.
“Well, I can’t just give you his information.” Liam frowned.
Not surprising. “Well, maybe you could ask him to contact me.” I gave him my card. Then I snatched it back and scribbled over the email address until it was completely unreadable. “New email, I forgot. Just ask him to give me a call.”
He took the card carefully, as if it had been dipped in arsenic or something worse. “If I see him.” He wasn’t going to go out of his way to help me.
I nodded. “Right. Thanks for your help.”
Outside I sat in my car for half an hour, just in case Tyner happened to walk up for a look at the art inside. He didn’t, of course, but I had to try the long shot. Finally I started up, and just as I hit the first red light, my phone buzzed. Unknown number, but you never know who might be calling.
I pulled over and hit the flashers. “Tom Jurgen speaking.”
“Tom Jurgen? My name is Chad Tyner. What’s going on? Why do you want to talk to me?” He sounded angry.
That was quick. What to say? “It’s about Jeremy Ward.”
“What about him?”
“And Larry Larsen. They’re both dead.”
“Yeah? So? I don’t know anything about that.”
“So why did you send them an email right before they died? Why are you sending emails to everyone else you were with the night Miranda Sherman was killed?”
I waited. After five seconds Tyner said an abrupt, “Fuck you,” and hung up.
I rubbed my eyes, then saved the number. Maybe I should have tried to make friends with him? You never know. Sometimes the direct approach is the best. Other times, not so much.
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