Chapter 4 - The Man in the Fourth Bag
Detective Ruiz nearly dropped her mug of precinct coffee when I met her in the corridor outside the pediatric unit.
“A man’s foot?” Ruiz repeated, her voice dropping into a tense whisper. She pulled me down the hallway, away from the nurses' station and the uniformed officer posted at Emily’s door. “Are you certain that’s what she said?”
“She saw a brown leather dress shoe and a black sock through the torn plastic,” I said, my chest heaving. “Elena didn’t own men’s oxfords. And Emily knows what her mother looks like. Detective, if that fourth bag wasn’t Elena, whose body did you pull out of that pool?”
Ruiz didn’t answer immediately. She rubbed her eyes, looking around the sterile corridor before leaning against the drywall. “The preliminary autopsy from the medical examiner arrived twenty minutes ago. The torso recovered from the fourth bag was severely disfigured with chemical burns, but the pelvic structure... Mr. Bennett, the medical examiner confirmed the skeletal frame is biologically male.”
The hallway seemed to tilt beneath my shoes. “Then where is Elena?”
“We don’t know,” Ruiz said grimly. “Julian’s phone went dark on Friday at 8:00 PM, but cell tower pings show Elena’s vehicle—a dark gray Toyota Highlander—leaving the suburban grid at 11:30 PM Friday night, heading west toward the rural forest preserves near DeKalb. Julian was seen on a tollway traffic camera driving that vehicle.”
“He dumped her out in the woods,” I said, the horror dawning on me in cold, suffocating waves. “He killed her in the house, drove her out to the middle of nowhere, dumped her body, and came back to clean up. But then who is the man in the pool? Why put someone else in the water behind his own house?”
“That’s the question,” Ruiz said, pulling out her smartphone. She tapped the screen and showed me a mugshot of a middle-aged man with thinning hair and wire-rimmed glasses. “Recognize him?”
I squinted at the photo. “No. Who is he?”
“Arthur Vance’s senior paralegal, Peter Caldwell,” Ruiz said. “Caldwell managed the private trust accounts for Julian Croft’s financial consultancy. On Friday afternoon at 4:30 PM, Caldwell filed an internal whistleblower report with the Illinois Attorney General’s office, alleging that Julian had siphoned four point two million dollars from an estate fund belonging to an elderly heiress with dementia. Caldwell never made it home to his wife for dinner Friday night.”
The puzzle pieces snapped together with a sickening, metallic clatter.
Julian hadn’t just been covering up a domestic homicide. His entire life had imploded within a twelve-hour window. Elena had found the embezzlement paperwork in the garage. Caldwell had blown the whistle at the firm. Julian had killed them both—one out of domestic rage, the other out of corporate self-preservation.
“If Caldwell’s body was in the pool,” I whispered, “what was the point of the bleach? What was the point of the cage?”
“The cage was to keep Emily from talking while he finished the job,” Ruiz said, her voice laced with venom. “Julian didn’t plan to leave those bags in the pool forever. He put them in the water to cool the bodies and slow the post-mortem bacterial bloom while he spent Saturday hunting for an industrial incinerator. Mrs. Harris seeing him toss the bags was the only reason his timeline collapsed. But now we have a catastrophic legal hurdle.”
“What hurdle?” I demanded.
“Julian’s attorney just obtained an injunction from Judge Miller,” Ruiz said, looking sick to her stomach. “The court ruled that because you entered the property unlawfully without a warrant, your discovery of the cage and the pool bags constitutes fruit of the poisonous tree. Vance is moving to suppress all physical evidence recovered from the backyard.”
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“You’re joking,” I choked out, grabbing Ruiz by the lapel of her blazer. “My daughter was dying in a dog crate! I broke in to save her life!”
“Under Illinois law, an ex-spouse has no legal standing of exigent entry on private property owned exclusively by the current husband,” Ruiz muttered, gently removing my hand from her coat. “Julian’s bail hearing is set for 2:00 PM today. If the judge grants the suppression motion, Julian Croft walks out of county jail on a fifty-thousand-dollar bond before sunset.”
