Three
Chicago, October 10, 2007
The Miami police department didn’t even bother to be polite when Luke called to inform them that he’d seen the supposedly dead Ron Raven eating dinner in Herndon, Virginia, a week earlier. Dismissed by a bored clerk—his call never made it as far up the hierarchy as a real cop—he tried again with the Chicago police.
Smarter this time around, he directed his call to a detective sergeant whom he’d met eighteen months earlier when Luciano’s was being remodeled. The cop had been assigned to find out who was stealing construction materials from the restaurant site and Luke figured the two of them had a good rapport.
Their rapport apparently didn’t extend far enough for the cop to believe Luke’s claim to have seen Ron Raven. His tale was received with greater politeness, but with the same bored disbelief demonstrated by the police department in Miami. The bottom line was that cops in both places had fielded hundreds of reports alleging that Ron Raven was alive, and the fact that Luke described himself as an old friend and business acquaintance of the deceased carried no particular weight.
“Has it occurred to you that maybe you’ve received so many reports because Ron Raven is alive and people really are seeing him?” Luke finally asked, no longer bothering to hide his frustration.
“No,” the cop responded baldly.
“That’s it?” Luke asked, incredulous. “Just no?”
“What do you want me to say?” The detective sighed. “We receive reports like this every time there’s a murder that attracts a lot of TV coverage. And when there’s no body to be buried, you can guarantee that half the weirdos in the state are going to claim they’ve seen the deceased.”
It was sobering to realize that from the detective’s point of view he was simply one more wing nut craving notoriety. “But you’ve dealt with me before!” Luke protested. “You know I’ve met Ron Raven because it was right in your report about the thefts from the construction site. You needed a record of who was providing financing for the restaurant and I told you then—almost three years ago!—that I had a revolving line of credit with Ron Raven.”
“That’s true.” The cop’s voice added a layer of impatience to existing boredom.
“And it isn’t as if I’m calling you when Ron Raven’s disappearance is being hotly reported by the media. They moved on to fresh meat weeks ago. Months ago, in fact.”
“I’m sure you believe what you’re telling me, Mr. Savarini—”
“But you don’t believe me, and you have no interest in conducting any sort of follow-up investigation.”
“No, I don’t.” In view of their past acquaintance, the cop relented enough to expand on his reply. “Look, here are the facts. I pulled up the case notes while you were talking and I’m reading them right off my computer. In the three months the investigation was on active status, we took reports from a hundred and twelve people claiming to have seen Ron Raven. Do the math. That’s around ten supposed sightings a week. Miami police have taken hundreds more. On top of that, six callers told us they’d committed the murder, and another three identified themselves as the woman who’d been in the hotel room with Mr. Raven. We followed up on all six confessions and interviewed all three women who claimed to have been in the Miami hotel room. Our detectives concluded the closest any of those people had come to seeing Ron Raven was via the TV screens in their living rooms. That was your tax dollars at work, Mr. Savarini, from May until the end of July. A complete waste of time and police resources. Be grateful the case has been put into inactive status. Except for the warrant outstanding against Julio Castellano, of course. Now, if you thought you’d seen him, I’d be more interested.”
“The fact that crazy people like to confess to murders they didn’t commit proves nothing about whether I saw Ron Raven in Virginia last week.”
The cop no longer sounded bored, only impatient. “We have forensic evidence that proves Julio Castellano, a twice-convicted murderer, was in Ron Raven’s hotel room,” he snapped. “We have bullets and blood-spatter patterns in the hotel room, in the exact places forensic experts would expect if the victims were shot while they were running from the bed. We also have security video of two bodies being wheeled onto a yacht. Based on discrepancies between the ship’s log and data collected from the yacht itself, experts have calculated that the boat traveled a total of thirty-five nautical miles that night without knowledge or permission of the owners. Trust me, Mr. Savarini, we know exactly what happened to Ron Raven the night he disappeared. He was murdered. He’s dead and his body—what’s left of it—is at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.”
It was depressing to hear Anna’s arguments repeated more or less point by point. Luke realized that announcing he had the number of the car in which “Ron Raven” had driven away from the restaurant was going to get him nowhere. The chance of the Chicago police department agreeing to run the numbers was somewhere south of zero. He cut short what was clearly a useless exercise by thanking the cop for his explanations and hanging up.
It was approaching 11:00 a.m., almost time for him to leave for work, and way past time for him to stop obsessing about a sighting that apparently nobody cared about except him. He was sweaty after his morning run, and he retreated to the bathroom to take a shower in preparation for the long hours ahead. He’d be lucky if he was back in his Lincoln Park condo before two or three in the morning, and that was assuming the night produced no major crises at any of his restaurants.
Luke let the water pound in a scorching stream over his head and body. The cops were convinced they had the case of Ron Raven’s disappearance wrapped up, despite the minor detail that they hadn’t actually managed to arrest the alleged murderer. Who was Luke to persist in the claim that he’d seen Ron eating dinner in Herndon, Virginia, when the rest of the world was happy to accept that the guy had long since become an all-you-can-eat buffet for the Atlantic fishes?
Even if he was right and the rest of the world was wrong, he had no good reason to hurl himself against the brick wall of police indifference. The eight months he’d spent dating Ron’s daughter didn’t justify sticking his nose into Raven family business months after his affair with Kate had ended. God knew, he had enough problems within his own family to keep him occupied for the next lifetime or two. He sure as hell didn’t need to take on anyone else’s family problems.
But, dammit, he’d seen Ron Raven! The annoying conviction remained, despite his efforts to wash it down the shower drain. Luke reminded himself of all the reasons why this was a totally lousy time for him to set off on some idiotic quest to convince the world that Ron was alive. The sous-chef at his newest restaurant in suburban Winnetka had sliced open his thumb yesterday, which meant that Luke would be putting in ten long hours of intensive labor tonight, instead of merely checking in for a couple of hours before transferring to his flagship restaurant in downtown Chicago. The Food Network had called yesterday and asked him to tape a show for their upcoming series on America’s most exciting new chefs. Somehow, his already crammed schedule for next week had to be expanded to include eight hours of interviews, with a camera crew trailing him while he cooked and the network expert analyzed everything from his fall seasonal recipes to his underlying technique.
Luke turned off the shower and shook water from his body. Clearly, he didn’t have time right now for pursuing ghosts, literal or metaphorical. Nevertheless, he found himself grabbing a towel and padding wet-footed back into the spare bedroom that served as his home office. Tucking the towel around his waist, he grabbed his Palm Pilot and retrieved a phone number for George Klein, a private detective he’d hired over the summer to identify a dishonest Luciano’s employee.
George greeted him warmly, a soothing change after the indifferent cops. “Luke, it’s good to hear from you again. How are you?”
“I’m fine, but I need your help. Nothing to do with the restaurants, thank God. Either the security systems you put in place are working or I’ve managed to hire some really loyal and honest employees. I hope it’s the latter.”
“I