Vic investigates Nancy’s murder scene and related leads

V. I. Warshawski investigates Nancy Cleghorn’s murder by retracing Nancy’s last known concerns and examining the marsh where her body was found. The inquiry joins intimate questions about whom Nancy trusted to public conflicts over a recycling project and industrial pollution. Its clues are concrete—a Tuesday visit, a crime-scene boundary, threads snagged on a fence—but none immediately resolves who killed Nancy, and a later lineup underscores the limits of identification under stress.

Questions about Nancy’s last days

At the Cleghorns’ house, V. I. Warshawski asks Ellen Cleghorn whether Nancy had said what she wanted when she tried to reach her. Ellen has not spoken to Nancy for several weeks. Warshawski explains that she keeps returning to the missed contact because Nancy may have thought of her as a detective who could help with a problem. The request is not merely professional: Warshawski feels that identifying whoever caused Nancy’s suffering might give her some way to act on Nancy’s behalf after the fact.

Ellen and Nancy had shared an easy, informal closeness that Warshawski contrasts with her own more intense relationship with her mother. Ellen had been someone Nancy could talk to about friends and lovers, even if Nancy had not brought her the details of the recycling-center dispute. From Ellen, Warshawski learns that Nancy had once been in love, had become pregnant, and had an abortion. Since her breakup with Charles five years earlier, Ellen knew of no special man in Nancy’s life, and Nancy had no close women friends in the area. Ellen thought Caroline Djiak might have been an exception, but Nancy regarded Caroline as too quick-tempered to confide in unless she was certain of what she wanted to say. Ellen winces at her own description, made painful by Nancy’s death.

Warshawski considers whether Nancy had spoken to someone in the State’s Attorney’s Office or to the lawyer connected with SCRAP. Ellen supplies the name Ron Kappelman: Nancy had gone out with him a few times, but they had not suited one another. The apparent romantic lead quickly loses force when Ellen dates their brief relationship to about two years earlier, when Kappelman first began working with SCRAP. The detail gives Warshawski a name to pursue, but not a persuasive explanation for the murder.

The marsh and the murder scene

After considering the sensible option of calling John McGonnigal and returning to her investigation of industrial fraud, Warshawski drives south instead, toward Dead Stick Pond. The route itself marks a passage into a neglected industrial landscape: at Stony Island, the road becomes a rough track used by heavy trucks entering and leaving nearby factories. The pond, an overflow of the Calumet River, is bordered by contradictory signs—one identifying a federal clean-water project, another warning of hazardous waste. Its fallen wire fence makes the marked boundary easy to cross.

The contrast between restoration and damage is visible in the pond’s condition. It had once fed migrating birds; now its water is dark and tree stumps stand above the surface. Although fish have returned to the Calumet River and its tributaries since the Clean Water Act, fish found in the pond have tumors and rotted fins. Warshawski passes a couple fishing there. The polluted water and the precarious lives around it make the murder site part of a wider landscape of harm, rather than an isolated patch of wilderness.

At the south end, yellow police tape and signs still mark the place as an active investigation, but no officer has been left to guard it. Warshawski assumes the rain has washed away evidence the investigators did not collect and ducks under the tape. She reconstructs the route the killers may have taken: they parked near where she left her car and dragged Nancy along the path past the fishing area, apparently in daylight. Whether they relied on chance or on the likelihood that people there would not attract attention remains an unanswered question.

The police have marked Nancy’s position with stones. The outline indicates that she was dumped from a blanket, landed on her side with her head partly in the water, and drowned in the pond. The rain has erased visible traces around the marked spot. Warshawski searches the path and surrounding vegetation, but finds no useful clue among the discarded bottles, bags, shoes, and clothes. The litter makes the site seem less like a place where one body was abandoned than a place where things, and people, could be overlooked.

Physical traces and official leads

Before leaving, Warshawski searches the fence near the road for the place where Nancy may have been carried over. About twenty feet from her car, she finds green threads caught on the wire. Broken grass from the previous year suggests where the attackers’ feet had passed. Because the ground is relatively undisturbed, she suspects the police may not have searched this end of the site. She examines the undergrowth and litter, but the search yields no further result. The threads and broken grass therefore remain small, suggestive traces rather than proof that identifies a killer.

Warshawski continues to the State’s Attorney’s Office, where Hugh McInerney meets her privately and retrieves his file on Nancy. He says Nancy came to see him on Tuesday because she thought someone was following her. She had not named the person, and McInerney says he had no concrete information to give the police. The visit establishes that Nancy’s fear preceded her death, while the absence of a name leaves Warshawski without an immediate suspect.

Warshawski presses McInerney about Steve Dresberg. McInerney had spoken with Dresberg’s attorney, Leon Haas, who said Dresberg was satisfied with conditions in the area. Warshawski challenges the reassurance by recalling that Dresberg had prevailed in court over an incinerator dispute and asking whether anyone had considered how he might view the recycling center Nancy was working on. Her argument connects Nancy’s reported fear to the conflict around SCRAP, but the exchange supplies suspicion, not confirmation of Dresberg’s involvement.

A later test of identification

A later lineup provides a related investigative thread without settling the murder. Bobby Mallory explains that the men can be held on lesser allegations, including loitering in a private building and carrying concealed unregistered weapons, but that they may soon be released unless the case can support an attempted-murder charge. He asks Warshawski to say whether the men are the ones who sent her into the marsh. The lineup thus concerns the danger to Warshawski and the identity of a man she encountered, not a demonstrated identification of Nancy’s killer.

Warshawski knows that eyewitness memory can fail under stress: a witness may be certain of a broad description and still misremember the person. She also recognizes that a gesture or other detail can remain vivid. With Bobby, she watches six men and asks to hear them speak, recalling words associated with the earlier encounter. The second man from the left attracts her attention, but his voice does not match the one she remembers; the lineup voice has a South Side twang, whereas the remembered voice had seemed emotionless. Warshawski tentatively indicates the second man while stating that she cannot be certain. The distinction between a suggestive visual impression and a conflicting voice keeps the identification provisional—and preserves the investigation’s central uncertainty.