Cold Love: A Cillian Canter Mystery (Cillian Cantor Book 1) Read online

  Over the next half year, I managed to interview over two hundred residents of Special Needs Neighborhoods about zero tolerance and got them to appraise Mr. X’s data. Everything was going well, and I was getting some very interesting yet upsetting results. In sharp contrast to Mr. X’s testimonies, virtually all the SNN residents I talked to described zero tolerance as not only counterproductive but unlawful because the police raids mainly targeted low-level criminals and many innocent civilians, and the zero-tolerance officers used ruthless tactics against residents, including extrajudicial killings! A handful of residents had managed to film some of the events they described to me, and the shocking footage I was shown of the police incursions clearly confirmed their stories. Unsurprisingly, when asked to evaluate Mr. X’s interviews, all of my interviewees rejected them as lies.

  But about one year ago, Mr. X unexpectedly informed Dr. Leamington that my report was no longer needed and that I should terminate my research. Obviously I didn’t wish to abandon my investigation at that point, but when I told Dr. Leamington this, she tried to convince me otherwise, much to my surprise. She urged me not to go against Mr. X’s wishes and warned me not to “get on his bad side.” This was the first time that she revealed the gender of Mr. X, accidentally I believe, and the way she spoke of this man strongly suggested that she knew him on a personal level. When I pressed her about his identity, she refused to share it and told me that I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. When I insisted that I simply wanted the truth to come out, she threatened to fire me.

  I was furious and went home to consider my options, but very soon after I had entered my apartment, someone threw a brick through my window with a note on it reading: “Let it rest, Erdmann, or rest in peace.” Ironically, this only helped to convince me that I had to continue my research, so I decided I would do so on my own time and would look for a way to publish my findings without the involvement of the university.

  The next day, I told Dr. Leamington that I would suspend my investigation. She seemed delighted and offered to use Mr. X’s donation to finance a research project in the slums of Bogotá, Colombia, which I had been trying to get funded for years. I accepted the project to keep up appearances, but I honestly couldn’t have cared less.

  That was the beginning of a strange and hectic period. During the weekdays I worked at the university on the Bogotá project, rather apathetically, and in the weekends I carried on with my study of zero tolerance and how it affected the South Side. I no longer visited the SNNs for fear of Mr. X finding out through one of the informants I suspected he had in these neighborhoods. Instead I began working on an extensive analysis of my interviews with SNN residents and of how my findings compared to Mr. X’s data.

  Progress was slow, due to my limited time and resources, but I finished the report after a few months. While analyzing the striking difference between my findings and those of Mr. X during this period, I found it harder and harder to believe that Mr. X had really expected an experienced qualitative researcher like me to buy into his propaganda and mistake the obviously fabricated data he had sent for factual information. One possible explanation was that Mr. X had intended his donation to the social science faculty as a bribe and that in our naivety, Dr. Leamington and I had completely missed the cues that he wanted the faculty to produce a bogus report for money.

  This scenario was not implausible, especially given the background of Pat Gullfay, whose businesses have frequently been at the center of corruption scandals—even though Gullfay himself has managed to escape conviction so far, as I’m sure you know. But this explanation didn’t fully satisfy me, especially because at around the time I finished the report, which was seven months ago, Dr. Leamington came into my office at the university one afternoon and told me, out of the blue, that she was worried about me and that she hoped I had forgotten about the whole “zero-tolerance report ordeal.” I tried to reassure her, but she seemed unconvinced and gave me the name and phone number of a private detective named Cillian Cantor in case I ever wanted someone to investigate a “sensitive matter” for me…

  Here Rose paused the file and looked at Cillian.

  “By the way, you never told me what kind of work you did for Dr. Leamington. Why did she hire you?” she asked quite sternly.

  “Yes, sorry, I didn’t think it mattered before,” Cillian explained. “She hired me to find her son, a drug addict who had fallen in with a bad crowd. I found him in a dump somewhere in the South Side and brought him home to her. That was all.”

  “When was this?”

  “I think somewhere between the end of February and the beginning of March, so a little over seven months ago.”

  “Then it was only just before Dr. Leamington told my father about you,” Rose deduced from what she had just heard her father mention.

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “Do you think the timing was a coincidence?”

  “I don’t know, maybe not,” Cillian reflected. “I got the impression that her son had been out of touch with her for a while, and yet she presented the case to me as very pressing, as if there was barely any time to lose. I always reckoned that was a little odd. But then again, I thought she was a peculiar woman in general, with her over-the-top manners, clothes, makeup, and accent.”

  “Yes, I can relate to that,” Rose concurred. “That’s why it’s not easy for me to believe that my father and she were ever as close as she implied earlier. Well, whatever.” She shook her head, as if to get the idea of her father being on intimate terms with Dr. Leamington out of her mind. “Let’s listen to everything first, before we jump to conclusions.” She unpaused the file.

  …While it seemed to me that Dr. Leamington genuinely wished to protect me from something, the incident strengthened my belief that she knew more about the identity and intentions of Mr. X than she was willing to share with me. I realized that it would be smart to start working on getting some of my findings published, so instead of contacting this PI, I contacted Lucy Tiller from the Chicago Transparent, a small Chicago news website that had published a handful of articles about the violence used by officers of the zero-tolerance police unit during its increasingly frequent incursions into the SNNs.

  As it turned out, Mrs. Tiller was overjoyed to hear about my research, because she was working on a series of critical, in-depth articles on the SNN police raids and was struggling to gather sufficient data. She agreed to publish my interviews with SNN residents without mentioning my name. However, she was reserved about mentioning Mr. X and his attempt to get an academic report written on the basis of fake data, because I didn’t have any evidence due to the fact that Dr. Leamington had handled all communication with him. This was understandable to me, but frustrating nonetheless.

  Over the next couple of months, the Chicago Transparent published various elaborate articles, largely on the basis of my investigation, as well as two videos I had obtained from SNN residents that showed the police violence during one of the raids. In the meanwhile, I had begun investigating the identity of Mr. X. In this period, Mrs. Tiller and I developed a pleasant professional relationship, and despite the fact that I was not an employee, she kept me up to date on all developments relating to the subject of my original investigation.

  But while the CT publications got quite some attention, especially for such a small news outlet, the results were not altogether satisfying since the mainstream media hardly picked up any of the stories, and some op-ed pieces actually attacked the CT for fearmongering on the basis of unsubstantiated reports from an anonymous source and two videos of one isolated incident. The only tangible result of our efforts was the conviction of three zero-tolerance police officers for battery over the two videos. The policemen were given a fine and sentenced to community service in the neighborhood where the raid had taken place.

  Three months ago things seemed to change for the better when Mrs. Tiller was approached by Brian Mulvaney, a member of the city council with a strong dislike of Gullfay, who cl
aimed to have contacts within both the mayor’s office and the police department and who was willing to share classified documents and internal communication transcripts that proved not only that the CT’s stories about the unlawful, violent tactics used by the zero-tolerance police unit were true, but that Mayor Gullfay and some of his aides knew about these practices and supported them.

  Over the next two months, the CT obtained a lot of telling evidence from Mr. Mulvaney that incriminated Mayor Gullfay and some of his senior staff, and Mrs. Tiller began preparing the publication of a series of exposés. However, a few days before she wanted to publish the first article, which was about one month ago, things suddenly became more complicated.

  One of Mrs. Tiller’s reporters, who had entered the SNNs undercover to acquire more video footage of the police raids, returned with a story that added a new dimension to everything. While talking to residents of the SNNs, this reporter, a young man named Oliver Duncan, had learned about a strange development in the neighborhoods that had started about half a year earlier, when a new synthetic drug had entered the scene. The drug known as “glacier” was a psychostimulant that temporarily boosted physical and mental performance. It had been rapidly gaining popularity in the Chicago South Side, especially among the youth. The strange thing was that the people dealing glacier were heavily armed, unknown thugs called “headhunters” because they had begun forming their own battle groups by recruiting “glacier fighters” among their hyped-up clientele, purportedly to resist the zero-tolerance police force during its neighborhood raids.

  Oliver Duncan showed me and Mrs. Tiller video footage of one of these “headhunter squads” during a training session, all pumped up after using glacier. We were both baffled by the apparent expertise of the headhunters and the high-quality equipment and weapons they distributed among their recruits. This got us to wonder who those men were and more importantly, who they were working for, because their unmistakably well-funded and highly coordinated operation had to involve at least one and perhaps multiple powerful players with large financial resources.

  Mr. Duncan eagerly volunteered to return to the South Side in his undercover role to investigate this curious case further, while I offered to do some research in my spare time and compile a list of wealthy and powerful Chicagoans who could possibly be behind the scheme. Mrs. Tiller would meanwhile contact Brian Mulvaney to ask him about these developments. However, a week later Mrs. Tiller found Mr. Duncan’s resignation letter on her desk and was not able to contact him for an explanation.

  This happened only three weeks ago. After that, things started getting very eerie for us. Both Mrs. Tiller and I began to receive anonymous threats in the form of emails, letters, notes on the windshield, and the occasional brick through the window, telling us to “stay out of the South Side.” The threats resembled the one I had received from Mr. X months earlier, but it was impossible to determine if the sender was the same because none of the messages were handwritten. In any case, we didn’t want to go to the police because we had more reasons to distrust law enforcement than to expect assistance from it.

  After Mrs. Tiller talked to Mr. Mulvaney—who didn’t know anything about glacier or the headhunters but promised to look into the matter—he also began receiving threats. Consequently, he urged Mrs. Tiller to start publishing the finished articles targeting Mayor Gullfay, because he hoped that if Gullfay and his buddies would be openly confronted with the CT’s allegations, they would not have a reason to care about our activities anymore, for the same reason that someone would no longer fear a bee after it has already stung that person.

  But Mrs. Tiller and I doubted that it was only Mayor Gullfay and his friends whom we had to worry about, especially since we didn’t know who was behind the headhunters and their glacier-fueled battle groups. Furthermore, I still had not been able to discover anything about the identity of Mr. X. Therefore we decided that we would continue looking into these matters before publishing anything. Mr. Mulvaney agreed to cooperate, but last week he informed Mrs. Tiller that he had trouble getting information from his contacts because someone had started following him, which limited his freedom of movement. He once again requested Mrs. Tiller to begin publishing the exposés about Gullfay. As had happened with Duncan, Mrs. Tiller was no longer able to get a hold of Mr. Mulvaney after that.

  This Monday, Mrs. Tiller found her cat on her doorstep with its neck twisted at an impossible angle, after which she called to tell me that we might be better off abandoning the glacier/headhunter story for now. I refused and asked her to give me some more time to try to find a lead. She agreed to give me until the end of the week, but if I wouldn’t have anything substantial by then, she would begin publishing the exposés incriminating Gullfay the following Monday. I agreed and went to the South Side by myself later that day to contact some of the people I had interviewed months earlier.

  It was a disheartening experience. While most SNN residents welcomed me much the same way as they had before, they clammed up as soon as I brought up the headhunters or the new drug. It was like the entire South Side was under the spell of these thugs and their drugged-up soldiers.

  My experience was the same on Tuesday when I returned. In the end, I decided to give up and go home, despondently. But on my way there, I noticed that I was being followed. I wasn’t able to see the man’s face, but he had long yellow-gray hair and wore a dark hat and a dark jacket…

  The description struck Cillian like a lightning bolt, but he suppressed the feeling and continued to concentrate on the voice of the professor.

  …I was able to shake him off before I got home, but I didn’t stay there for long, as I feared that he had my address. So I took my research notes and laptop and went to a hotel. After checking into my room, I discovered a USB drive in the pocket of my coat. It wasn’t mine, and it hadn’t been there in the morning, so I concluded that one of the SNN residents must have slipped it in during my visit. I was amazed to find a number of video files on the pen drive documenting the training sessions, or military drills rather, of various headhunter squads.

  I wanted to show the files to Mrs. Tiller, but she didn’t pick up her phone. I realized that she may have been followed as well and that I couldn’t be sure she was safe. That was the first time I fully grasped the danger I was in. I stayed calm, however, and decided that my first priority should be to record the full story of everything that had happened and find a way to get the recording and all my data to someone I could trust and who was not yet involved in any of it. Of course the only person I could think of was you, my hyperintelligent daughter.

  So that is why I’m recording this now, in my hotel room, in the middle of the night. I have already thought of way to get this to you through a puzzle only you can possibly solve. It’s a surreal experience to be planning how to send you a message in case of my… death. I have just written you an email and scheduled it to be sent on Thursday morning, so you will receive it only if I am not willing or able to postpone the sending time by then. Finally, I plan to contact that detective, Mr. Cantor, sometime tomorrow to see if he can help me shed light on this complex and unnerving case that reeks of corruption at the highest levels. I found out that Mr. Cantor used to be a reporter and even did some investigative journalism for a small newspaper in Indiana, so he seems trustworthy and experienced enough…

  At this, Rose gave Cillian a bittersweet look.

  …I guess that Dr. Leamington was sincerely trying to help me when she gave me his info. I will add it in a text file on the USB drive so you can contact him in the event of my disappearance or worse… I will also add the contact info of Mrs. Tiller and Mr. Mulvaney, in case they turn out to be luckier than me. You could even try Mr. Duncan.

  But I am forgetting something very important now, namely that you don’t have to do anything with this information. You can destroy it, if you think it best. It is not worth risking your safety over this, or your sanity for that matter. The most important thing for me is that you will b
e safe. Just please honor my wish that whatever you choose to do, you will not ever go to the South Side with any of this. It is far too dangerous there.

  Now all that is left for me to do, my dearest Rosalie, is to say goodbye…

  Erdmann’s voice cracked as he said this. In response, Rose’s hands began to tremble again.

  …I love you and I hope you can forgive me for everything. I so wish that I had shown more initiative to reach out to you after our falling out. That is what any decent father would have done, and I am terribly sorry if that’s not who I was to you. I hope to have the chance to tell you this in person, but if not, just know that I have loved you more than anything in the world. Please be safe.

  When the file had finished playing, Cillian searched for Rose’s eyes. She looked up at him and tried to say something, but her voice immediately broke and she buried her hands in her face. The moment Cillian realized Rose was crying, he forgot all about his pledge to keep her at a distance. Instead, he put his arm around her and drew her closer to him.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

  “Thank you,” she said in between sobs. “It’s just that it’s a lot and I don’t get it. I don’t understand…” Rose muttered incoherently, seemingly saying her thoughts out loud as she attempted to process her father’s somewhat convoluted narrative and find a way to deal with the emotionally charged aspects of his account. Cillian remained silent and gently rubbed her back with the palm of his hand.

  “I mean, why? Why did he choose to do this and for what?” Rose suddenly almost shouted, sounding quite outraged. “Why did he have to go and play the hero, risking his life trying to unravel some kind of conspiracy? What the hell was the point of that?” She looked angrily at Cillian, and for an instant he thought she was actually demanding an explanation of him for her father’s actions. But then she burst into tears once more, and even though there were countless ways in which he wanted to reassure her, and numerous topics he couldn’t wait to discuss, he kept his thoughts to himself and wrapped her in his arms again. He felt quite ready to hold her like this and patiently wait for her to cry and shout and complain and question things for as long as she needed to.