No one stopped him when he casually walked around the police barricade. In fact, he was greeted with respectful nods, and friendly handshakes. The way important men should be treated.
The damage from the explosion is worse than he’d expected, but its result was exactly what was intended. Still, he gets no joy from seeing the scattered remains of a perfectly fine house or those of its owner. And the man wishes that Jim Chakowski had been able to understand—no, more than understand—appreciate, his work.
He scans the area, looking for familiar faces, and sees more than a dozen people who know him by his current name, and that makes him feel good. That makes the man feel like a vital member of the community. He’s building something here in this town. And he’s also being more careful about his work. Only one other person knows what actually happened here in this peaceful section of Oakton, and he’s not going to be talking to anybody.
There’s a new person on the scene, now. Someone whom the man recognizes as Alex Chapa, a reporter from the same newspaper as the deceased. Is he here to pay his respects, or just after the story? The man doesn’t know much about Chapa, they’ve never met.
But the man does know about Chapa’s reputation for breaking big stories. And he’s heard that Chapa is popular with readers, but less so downtown, or with members of the police department.
Chapa is talking to that cop Jackson. They don’t appear to agree on much, which means the reporter is here for the story, not for his colleague. The man watches as a child wanders into the area. This is no place for a little girl. She appears to belong to Chapa, but why doesn’t he stop what he’s doing and get her out of here right now?
The man doesn’t like what he sees. He pretends to go about his business, but keeps an eye on Chapa and the child, watches the little girl wander off, sees her frail body tighten as she approaches the bloodstained piece of wall. The man fights the urge to run over and pull her away. There are certain things no child should ever be exposed to. Every parent should know that. Chapa should know that. There’s something very wrong with Alex Chapa and the way he cares for his child.
Maybe this was just a lapse in judgment for Chapa. Or maybe it’s something worse. The man closes his eyes, so tightly that his entire face aches, and drives away his thoughts about Alex Chapa and his daughter.
There’s no room for that now. He must stay focused on the task at hand. Looking back at the house, the man smiles, knowing that another obstacle is gone, and he can go on with his work. He’s so close now. Just five more days. A few more tracks to cover.
He sees Chapa and the little girl walking away, heading back to safety. But then Chapa walks over to that woman across the street and starts talking to her. Still on the job. The man decides that Chapa is not just clueless, he’s irresponsible, and probably unfit.
The man knows how to deal with the unfit. They’re just stick figures pretending to have a mind, a heart, a soul—nothing more. They are less than human. He’ll deal with Chapa, in time, but first he has a more immediate, a more personal goal to achieve. One that he has been chasing for most of his life.
Chapter 9
Laura Simpson didn’t add much to what she had already told Moriarity, though it wasn’t for a lack of trying. She’d seen a man in service clothes around Chakowski’s house the morning before the explosion.
He was tall, no wait, maybe that was just the way he looked because of the shadows. There may have been two of them, but probably not. Must’ve been the same man, but he’d been there for a while so she could’ve assumed there were two. She was sure of that, just about.
After ten minutes of this, Chapa became certain that given enough time Laura Simpson would’ve eventually identified the man she saw as Sasquatch, the Jersey Devil, and Elvis, maybe.
“I probably should’ve been more suspicious,” Laura Simpson had said.
“Why would you have been? It’s a nice neighborhood, doesn’t look like anything bad ever happened around here until now. You couldn’t have known.”
Chapa had spent two decades interviewing witnesses, and this sort of thing was nothing new to him. People’s recollections are tricky, elusive. They can be easily led astray by their own expectations or that of others. This is especially true when the person does not realize in the moment that they’re witnessing something that could be important later on. But the one thing her general confusion couldn’t override was the fact that someone had been at Chakowski’s house just hours before the place blew.
Still, Chapa concluded that there was nothing unusual about the man Laura Simpson had seen. If he had not been wearing work clothes, that might’ve been different. But as it stood, the most likely explanation was that the guy was reading a meter, or there on Chakowski’s request. Chapa felt confident the police would reach the same conclusion.
Chapa was driving over the Mike Ditka Bridge on his way to the part of Oakton where he had grown up, when Nikki started asking questions.
“So do you do a lot of investigating when you write a story? Do you work with the police? Why do other reporters not like you too much?”
“Other reporters tend to like me just fine as long as I don’t lie to them. Where did you come up with a term like ‘command center’?”
“I watch a lot of sci-fi, especially space travel and old alien invasion movies and TV shows. There’s usually a command center.”
He gently, yet forcefully, scolded her about lying and butting in when he was working.
“I’m sorry, Daddy. I just wanted to help. I wanted to be a part of it.”
“I understand. But the next time you want to help out, check with me first.”
Downtown Oakton had undergone a transformation over the past four years. The sort of revival that many towns in the Chicago area had spent a decade or more using their resources to achieve. Rundown buildings, empty storefronts, and crumbling streets had given way to new shopping strips and businesses.
There had been claims of corruption and sweetheart deals as an epidemic of cronyism had swept through the area. But most folks in town didn’t seem to care much about that sort of thing as long as there were places they wanted to go and somewhere to park once they got there.
As they cruised past various landmarks of Chapa’s youth, he wondered what a drive like this with his own father might’ve been like. Francisco Chapa was just shy of thirty, a dozen years younger than his son was now, when he went missing in Havana.
Francisco had said he was going for a walk and left their home in the city’s Vedado neighborhood around midnight, having stopped by his young son’s room to kiss the sleeping child on the forehead. Alex would later say he had dreamt that this father had told him to look out for his mother. This was one in a series of unusual details surrounding Francisco’s actions that night, which, over time, had led Chapa to believe his father knew something bad was going down soon.
But most of Chapa’s recollections and images of his father were second and third hand. The sort of information that, as a veteran reporter, he’d long ago learned to distrust. His own memories were no more reliable. They were as two dimensional and black-and-white as the photos in his mother’s albums. Chapa had tried to color them in from time to time, adding shades and hues to the people and places that filled the four years he spent in Cuba. But Chapa knew he was just guessing. No more certain than an artist who tints a decades-old photo.
A friend of the family told them that he’d seen Francisco in the company of four official-looking men about two hours after he’d left home. Three days later, a member of Castro’s government, a bony man decked out in military fatigues that were at least two sizes too big, showed up at their house. Chapa remembered hearing the knock