“What about him?”
“I’m pretty sure Shattuck knew him. It was the one thing he really focused on during our interview.”
“Who is Shattuck, anyway?”
I explained to her about finding Kevin Shilly, tracing the metal knee through inventory, discovering Shattuck’s name on the hospital records, and what I’d found out about him through the police files. I told in detail of the conversation by candlelight.
“And you’re sure it was Shattuck who killed Shilly?”
I hesitated a moment. “Pretty sure. It was Shattuck who removed him from his apartment building. He used my name at the desk, assuming that would grab Shilly’s attention, and when they finally located the night deskman, his description of ‘Gunther’ fit Shattuck like a glove.”
“But why would Shattuck take Shilly back to his own place to kill him, and even leave the door open? Why kill Shilly at all, for that matter? Shattuck had been so innocuous before this.”
I’d thought a lot about that over the past several hours. “I can’t prove it yet, but I think my telling Shattuck about what we found in Vermont changed everything for him, like I guess it did for whoever machine-gunned us in Brattleboro. We’re looking at all this dispassionately-connecting old bones to old money and trying to make sense of it. But something violent and angry is brewing here, something involving more people than we thought. I think I hit Shattuck’s button without knowing it and set him off like a rocket.
“He used my name because it was efficient and practical to do so; he used his place to torture Shilly for the same reason; and he killed him either out of pent-up frustration or because he feels he has nothing more to lose. Whether it was consciously done or not, leaving that front door open served notice to everyone that he’s come out from under a peaceful-looking twenty-four-year-old rock.
“All of which,” I concluded, “also helps explain the paranoia that made whoever it was shoot at the hearse on I-91.”
Gail played devil’s advocate. “Wasn’t that because the shooter wanted to protect his new life? You said yourself that he did it to stop you from tracing the knee.”
“I know, but setting up a machine gun and firing at the local police seems a little drastic. It would’ve made more sense to liquidate his assets quickly and quietly and then disappear without a trace-just like he’d done once before. Having seen what happened to Shilly, I no longer think the Brattleboro Police Department was this guy’s biggest concern.”
“You think he did it to stop Shattuck from finding out?” Gail said, her voice slightly incredulous.
“Why not? There were three people at the very least who were involved in all this-Fuller, the guy with the knee, and the person who both stole the astrological chart and opened fire on us on the interstate. If I’m right that showing Fuller’s picture was enough to get Shilly killed, then our local shooter has bigger reasons than the police to stay hidden. It’s got to make you think the money alone is not the issue here.”
“Revenge, then? Setting an example?”
“It sounds right, judging from what I’ve seen.” There was a long pause while I mulled that over. Unfortunately, that was about all I could do.
Gail apparently sensed that impasse. “None of which gets you anywhere if they’ve frozen you out of the investigation.”
But I was no longer feeling so hopeless. Our conversation had kindled an enthusiasm that this afternoon’s third degree had almost extinguished. “Maybe not. The investigation is on who killed Shilly-or maybe just on locating Shattuck. But it’s not concerned with putting a name to that goddamn metal knee. I might still be able to do that without getting in their way.”
“Isn’t that a little like sharing a meal with lions?”
“Maybe, but with a routinely high homicide rate, you go for the obvious solutions. Assuming Shattuck did knock off Shilly, and that the local Mounties get their man, that’s where it’ll end, and it still has nothing directly to do with why I came here.”
Gail’s silence was skepticism itself.
“Hey-wish me luck.”
“I wish for you to stay out of prison, or at least alive.”
The woman guarding the archives room in the basement of the University of Chicago medical center was less than thrilled to see me, even though I’d made sure to appear just after opening time.
“Again?” was all she said as I smiled and walked by, hoping that Hoolihan’s order to cooperate was still in place.
“You don’t need me to show you where that file is again, do you?” she added, establishing her conscientiousness for the record.
“No, ma’am. All set.”
In fact, it took me quite a while to ferret it out again, the rows of shelves being similar and the files themselves all but identical to one another. I took it to the same table we’d used before and, page by page, photographed its contents with a secondhand camera I’d bought an hour before at a pawnshop.
What I was doing was more a threat to the case than to my liberty; in legal parlance, Hoolihan’s grumpy blessing the first time had amounted to a consent search, and this second visit was, in essence, riding the coattails of the first. Indeed, the archivist, by letting me in, had implied consent. Still, Hoolihan didn’t know about this second visit, nor had he ever agreed to our removing the files, which I was in the process of doing photographically.
But I was running out of time, Brandt was running out of patience back home, and this was the only clue I had in this city that might get me beyond a single metal knee and the dead surgeon who’d implanted it.
Two hours later, after spending a reasonable sum at a While-U-Wait processing lab getting my roll of film developed, and a small fortune having eight-by-ten enlargements made, I was parked once again in Dr. Milton Yancy’s office at Northwestern, hoping he could shoehorn me in between patients.
“Lieutenant,” he said, his expression beaming and his hand outstretched. “Nice to see you again. Is the plot thickening?”
“You could say that. You read the papers today?”
“No. I wait until I get home for that, assuming the rest of the family has left any of it intact.” He made a scissors motion with his two fingers.
“Kevin Shilly was found murdered yesterday.”
Yancy’s face fell. “Oh, my Lord.” He unconsciously groped for a chair and sat down heavily. “Did it have anything to do with what you’re investigating?”
“I think so, yes.”
He shook his head. “How sad. Was he shot?”
“Yes,” I said without elaboration. Given Yancy’s sensitivity, I saw no point in becoming more graphic. I handed him the pile of photographs. “I was wondering if you could look these over and help me decipher them a bit. They’re the patient file on that skeleton I introduced you to the other day.”
He spread them across his examining table, shaking his head. “First the skeletal X-rays, now the patient file. It’s like seeing a life in reverse. You do this a lot, I suppose…”
His voice drifted off as he read, so I saw no need to respond. It was an interesting point, though, and one I’d never thought about. “I was reading this with a colleague earlier,” I said to the back of his head. “He mentioned something about reports from other doctors?”
Yancy’s voice was back to normal, the shock of Shilly’s death having yielded to professional curiosity. “Oh yes.” He pawed through a few of the photos. “Doctors Butterworth and Yamani; vascular surgeon and neurosurgeon, respectively. I met Yamani, actually, a few years ago. I think he’s in California now.”
“Why did Shilly bring them in?”
Yancy straightened suddenly and gave me a large conspiratorial grin. “To cover his ass. Proceeding the way he was, he knew the risks, so he brought in the other two during surgery to back up his opinion and get more names in the file. It’s just the kind of thing that eventually landed him in hot water.”
He turned back to the pages. “Not in this case, though. The wound was straightforward. Butterworth reports no traumatic damage to the major vessels posterior to the knee, and Yamani says roughly the same thing about the tibial, the peroneal, and the saphenous nerves.”