“Why would I take the statements?”
“Fuck,” Mack whispered.
The pink iPad was still in there. Mack pulled it out and, with shaking fingers, powered it up.
They waited in silence until the screen blinked to life, and Mabel’s and Gigi’s sweet faces grinned out at them from a wholesome, child-friendly device with no trace of Sunshine Enterprises anywhere on it.
42.
Given its small size, Bratenahl has had more than its fair share of notable residents: the actress Margaret Hamilton, better known as the Wicked Witch of the West; James Salisbury, inventor of the Salisbury steak; Coburn Haskell, creator of the modern golf ball; a senator; a world-famous opera singer; and even a Kardashian and her basketball-star husband.
Eliot Ness too, legendary adversary of Al Capone, the one who sent America’s favorite mobster down for tax evasion. (There’s a strong lesson there about not leaving a paper trail, hey?)
After his big win against Capone in Chicago, Ness moved to Cleveland to become the city’s public safety director. He lived for a time at 10229 Lake Shore Boulevard in Bratenahl, a 6,000-square-foot Tudor-style mansion with six bedrooms, three ballrooms, and a swimming pool set against the breathtaking vista of Lake Erie.
(Having been Untouchable, it should come as no surprise that Ness was only renting the place; he was a renter his whole life. Capone, once he’d finished his prison term, lived out his years in a 7,500-square-foot mansion in Palm Beach, which he owned outright. There’s another lesson somewhere in there...)
When he got to Cleveland, Ness took over the investigation of aninfamous case: between 1935 and 1938, a serial killer murdered and dismembered at least twelve people in East Cleveland. The Torso Murderer, as he (or she; let’s be politically correct) came to be known, left bodyparts scattered all over the city. The victims came from the shantytowns that had grown up during the Depression, specifically one called Kingsbury Run. This Torso case proved to be an albatross for Ness; the murderer taunted him for years, sending him postcards and once leaving severed body parts in full view of his office window. This must’ve really struck a nerve (Get it?!) because toward the end of his investigation, Ness kind of lost his mind: he ordered his police force to storm Kingsbury Run, and then he had the whole shantytown burned to the ground. The killings stopped after that, but probably only because there was nobody left around to murder.
The Torso Murderer was never caught, and if you ask me, it’s pretty clear that Ness failed because he abandoned the principles that had made his pursuit of Capone so successful. Investigation takes patience. It takes a calm head and long-term surveillance—a slow chipping away rather than grand reckless gestures. My father knew this: Do your digging, he used to say to his reporters, even if it’s through a huge pile of shit. And I do, whether that means trolling through the furthest reaches of the internet (more results like these? Yes please!) or listening to hours and hours of whining about piss-stained floorboards. (That dog wouldn’t last five minutes in any house of mine.) I know more about Mack and Hailey Evans than they know about themselves, and I have my father to thank for that—and Mack’s father too, the dirty crook.
43.
Mack
Ithink we go anyway,” Mack said. “In a way it’s better without the rest of the stuff. We just take this camera, say someone’s bugging our house, since the break-in or maybe before, and then we ask how can they help us.”
And I don’t go to prison—everyone’s a winner,he did not say aloud.
“On Christmas Day?”
“I justsaidthat, and you said yes. Why is it now ridiculous?”
“Because now all we have to show them is a tiny camera.”
“We might have more than one,” he told her. “If we look.”
Hailey sighed the kind of sigh she reserved just for him, and then she waited, like she always did.
“Okay, so talk me through what to do,” he said. “What do we do now, Hailey? The way I see it, we have Christmas dinner and play happy families until tomorrow, or we go to the police on Christmas Day and we try to explain this tiny black box, and why it couldn’t wait twenty-four hours. I honestly don’t know the answer, so you tell me.”
“Why are you yelling at me? I don’t know either.”
“Hailey?” They could hear Eddie shuffling through the furnace room. “Holy hell,” he muttered. “What a mess.”
“We’re in here, Dad,” Hailey called, and to Mack she said, “Maybe we should tell my parents. See what they think.”
But when Eddie appeared in the doorway, both of them were silent.
“That’s a big hole you got out there,” he said to them.
Eventually Mack nodded; he didn’t trust himself to speak. He wasn’t sure how much would come tumbling out.
“Okay, well. Brunch has been saved, so come on up.”
This time Mack and Hailey both nodded, but neither moved.
Eddie’s eyes moved over the computer screen, the tiny camera, Mack’s dusty, can-strewn office. Then he gave a sigh identical to one of his daughter’s and left the room.
