Angela's Absence: A Tale of the Arts Department

“Holy f—,” I hissed. The old gal behind Rey’s beefy shoulder emanated Protestant outrage.

Rey grinned. I stared at the pink iPhone wallet he’d plopped onto the faux-walnut tabletop.

The blue-hair had been shooting rays at the burly Latino with the salt-and-pepper pompadour and matching goatee, battered ear stud, and old-school, all-caps Gothic ink wrists to cuffs. The country-fried Stop Inn had seemed an odd and potentially dicey choice for Rey.

I salvaged my fork from the biscuit gravy, wiped it and my Iphone clean, and, using the spare napkin, nudged the cheap Target wallet for a better study of the chipper blonde face in the license window. She’d obviously had a far different high school experience than mine, and the photog at the DMV probably’d had a long-draw on his or her or their Stoli-enhanced Yeti or gummies in the breakroom after Honor Society Barbie.

Unless you watched only Fox or ESPN, quit the anorexic Millington Star-Herald after they’d dumped Garfield, resided under radio-impenetrable power lines, or maybe tripped over Pulitzer short-lister Melissa Urquardt’s Sundance-snubbed documentary Angela’s Absence, if you lived in the five-county area, you knew Angela’s face like Elon the Conqueror’s.

“Do I wanna ask where THIS came from?” I whispered.

Rey grinned. “Cousin of mine likes to repurpose.” As Rey’s former ESL tutor during a fit of societal contrition, I might otherwise have glowed at his grasp of Greenspeak, except he’d mysteriously come to class fluently bilingual from Day One.

“Scavenger,” I supplied. Every Sunday twilight, before Monday garbage collection, overburdened pickups and panel vans cruised our block, leaving carbon emissions and removing blown TVs and microwaves.

“So, my cousin finds this old dresser on the curb. In decent shape, think maybe somebody was refinishing it but gave up. My cousin got a girl, 9, figures he could paint it pink for Cristina to cover with unicorns or shit.”

“So he calls me, and we wrestle that mother into my truck. We’re hauling the thing up his front steps, and his knee goes. Now we got surplus lumber, you know?”

“And that’s, what, when you found...this?” I had some faux-Annie Leibovitz and pompously outraged Morgan Spurlock to grade and the Cannes Consideration piece on the new campus pollinator garden to edit.

“Way I figure, it fell down behind the drawers, whatever. That girl, she was all over the TV for like a year. Just disappears, poof, on the way back from a football game, right?”

“At the high school, West. Easy walk from the Steinkamps’, but if you don’t have a ride, you have to walk by a creepy university corn test field with only a couple streetlights. Angela didn’t get a ride, at least according to the cops.”

Rey smiled again, but this time it only reached the creases that bracketed his goatee. “She got a ride, alright.”

I looked up, and, using my butter knife, flipped the wallet open and depressed the phone’s home button. Eighty-four percent charge. “I’m going to assume the iPhone 13 doesn’t have an 11-month battery,” I breathed.

“I didn’t touch anything, just powered it up. Had to guess the passcode — damn kids don’t know the name of the naranja loco puneta president, but they’re all firewalled and shit. Point is, she got plenty of Football Friday selfies, but nothing night she went poof. Know this case ain’t no red ball any more, but maybe this might help the family.”

“Sooo, you want me to, what, go with you to the cops?”

Rey grinned.

***

After about a half-hour cooling heels, Detective Curtis Mead strolled out like I’d interrupted his mid-morning piss. I’d met Mead a few years back at a post-George Floyd town hall on police abuse, and he was about as ebullient as he’d been on mike that night. Mead didn’t push that hard about Rey or the miraculously charged phone. Within a half-hour, I was out on the sun-kissed pavement staring across at county lockup.

**

“Angela Steinkamp was a math prodigy who believed the stars were no limit for women in science.” Lester Holt strolled down the halls of Millington West. The Dateline piece had aired about four months after Steinkamp’d vanished.

Cut to a beaming Angie, maybe two years younger than her DMV photo, fresh from her latest Math Olympics win, hanging on her widowed sociology prof dad’s hand. “Science will change the world, and I want to be part of that change,” Angela enthused.

“Geesh,” Jae muttered. I jabbed my grad assistant.

“Three months later, she was distant, moody, disinterested. When we return, we’ll examine the complex dynamics within the Steinkamp family…”

“Girl,” Jae sighed as they paused the video.

“Rey was in a tough spot – he wanted to do the right thing.”

“Roping you into a murder case?”

”You gotta admit it’s weird the girl’s stuff turns up after all this time, practically right under her dad’s nose.” Where had that dresser been the last year? Mead and his crew would have ransacked the Steinkamp place. Had it been in storage? If so, how and why did Angela’s kidnapper leave the phone behind. Why not toss it in Lake Millington? Which seemed to suggest Angela herself had left it. Maybe with some contact or text to ID her kidnapper.

“So I guess I’m on monarch butterfly duty,” Jae sulked, turning back to the editing bay.

**

“Yeah, it is weird,” Brian Steinkamp allowed, ushering me into a tight, tidy kitchen with only a pair of better-times photos on the fridge. “But weird seems to be the new paradigm. I got this morning’s coffee. That work?”

“Sure.” Steinkamp located a mug from some conference or another, and nuked a cup from below the last pale pot ring.

I could feel the ghosts – the first fridge photo’d caught his late wife Brigit in some third or fourth stage, pink knit cap and ringed blue eyes; the other featured Brian, Angela, and a second sturdier, better-fed Brian in some winter wonderland. I’d pegged Dean Steinkamp as an asshole – he’d refused comment for the documentary, then contributed a graphic comment about my lady parts. Uncle Dean was a supremacist asshole – they’d questioned him about some state senator murdered a few months back. Brian’s sister’d told me Brian had severed ties after Dean pulled some unknown shit on a family trip neither apparently wanted on Netflix.

I declined an Oreo. “Any idea how Angela’s wallet wound up in that dresser?”

Brian winced. “The day Angie disappeared, we’d had a real scorched earth confrontation. I told you she’d dropped the math team and informed me she wasn’t going to college. I suggested she take a year to recoup. We both said some horrific things, and she stalked out for the game.

“The dresser was Angie’s before Brigit died, and I’d planned on refinishing it for her college apartment. But at that moment, I hauled it to the shed out back. I had some lingering hopes, or I would have hauled it to the curb. I finally did a few days ago.”

“You wanted Angela to take a year to recoup from what?”

Steinkamp took a long, delaying swig. “The spring before, Angie was in the Illinois Council of Math Scholars algebra finals at Bradley. She took third, for Angie an utter humiliation. First place went to Fariya – one of Angie’s best friends. I suppose that made the loss even more painful.

“She spent most of the summer alone, reading, on her phone, binge-ing TV after midnight. I was happy when she started going to football games again.”

He began to add something, but thought better. I should have taken the cookie.

**

I grabbed a gyro and a smoothie in Campustown. In the studio, the butterfly piece was finished and Jae absent. I fired up Lester Holt instead.

The sweetly geeky girl in the azure hijab was self-assured, confident seemingly without a sense of elevation or arrogance.

“Being a Muslim teen in modern America can be tough,” Fariya Yosuf noted. “But Angela helped empower me through our shared love of algebra and her enthusiastic spirit. I think she’d lost that spirit lately, but I pray Angela can be found and that spirit rekindled.”

**

I tapped the photo on the fridge.

“I assume this is digital.”

Steinkamp froze, then placed a different university mug on the table and dropped into the opposite chair

I sipped. “Ever heard of the rule of thirds? A major formulas for great photos — you position your subject in the left or right third or the center of the shot, leaving the other two thirds more open. And vertically align the picture accordingly.

“Now, this one’s a trainwreck. The vertical composition sucks — everybody clipped midriff, four-fifths sky.”

Steinkamp stared out the back window. “I’m guessing you’ve heard all about Dean’s, uh, views. After Brigit died, Dean took us on a trip to Canada. After a day of his hateful rhetoric and then… Well, I didn’t want him around Angie.”

“You cropped the bottom third of the photo instead of just cropping him out? Look, I’m the whacko lib at family gatherings. My guess is Dean couldn’t resist the temptation to troll or humiliate you. Whatever he did in the photo was something innocuous. Can I see the original?”

He plucked his phone from the table. “I’d underestimated his cruelty. One of my students spotted it. He’d done a thesis on rightwing dogwhistles and symbology the previous spring.”

As I’d predicted, Dean wore a familial grin with his watch cap and parka, but his right arm hung at his side, his gloved thumb and index finger forming a circle and the others fanned out, in what once was the symbol of good times and goodwill but now was in the Anti-Defamation League’s catalog of supremacist code signals.

I scanned the rest of the Steinkamp clan, and fully understood Dean’s cruelty.

**

State Sen. Jesse Acuna, D-Chicago, had met his end a few months back in the Illinois Statehouse parking deck, yards from his customary slot. Acuna, 42, was a first-in, last-out guy, and the shooter somehow had managed to operate in a shadowy blindspot between security cams.

The no-frills website, in the spectrum between Hannity and a Proud Boys pig roast, had “obtained” a silent snatch of CC video showing the senator tossing his computer bag in the backseat of his Expedition, then turning toward the shadows with a smile. He wandered into the blind spot.

Passersby heard three shots in quick succession. The site administrator had also obtained a police photo of Acuna sprawled on his back — one shot to the upper left chest, one to the right and several inches south of the first, and a third gutshot. The Sangamon County coroner’d concluded the initial shot to the heart had killed Acuna.

The lovely folks on the comment thread speculated the assassination had been the act of some great “patriot” outraged that the South Chicago special ed teacher “had declared a coup against the Second Amendment.”

“This nation’s chronic fascination with guns has created an acute crisis that requires acute action.” Acuna’d argued in a video from one of the Springfield TV affiliates. The cops and the FBI had weeded through regional hate groups, but aside from a buttload of poorly spelled and structured letters, emails, and posts leveled against Sen. Acuna, nothing beyond the usual stench stuck. Even now, the shooting was fading from the downstate news cycle. Like Rey’d said …

**

“What is a red ball?”

Mead grunted as he retrieved a bag of Fritos from the City Hall vending machine.

“Rey called Trump a puneta, a son-of-a-bitch,” I noted. “But here’s the thing — that’s Puerto Rican slang, not Mexican like he represented when he was my ESL student. And when Rey gave me Angela’s phone, he mentioned how after all this time, her case was no longer a ‘red ball.’”

Detective Mead popped his Pepsi. “Big-ticket, high-profile 24/7 case. So he knows cop lingo. So do many of your career felons. But it is curious your buddy knew exactly how to preserve evidence. Phone screen and case were covered with Steinkamp’s prints, but no partials or signs anything was wiped. And why turn in the thing in the first place?”

“Well, he is a dad.”

Mead blinked. Literally blinked. “Ah, shit. My office.”

**

“Bout seven years ago, undercover narcotics cop went missing in Newark, right before a multi-agency raid on a major cartel distributor. When they bust into the dealer’s apartment, they find him and his girlfriend with their throats cut, cartel signature all over it.

“Street video led the local PD to the dead guy’s lieutenant, who’d been doing the girlfriend — turned out he’d OJ’d the pair, and the theory became he’d also taken out the undercover guy. So skip ahead a few months, and the prosecutor starts pushing the death penalty. Loverboy blurts out he could have wasted the baby, too, but he has principles. And the prosecutor says WHAT baby?”

“Whoops,” I ventured.

“Yup. Cops had no knowledge of any kid. Cartel guy was, well, cartel guy, and his condo neighbors kept their distance. Then one old lady remembers getting stuck on an elevator with the girlfriend, who was maybe six or seven months along and trying to hide it. Four months before the raid.

“So now the Newark folks are looking for a baby. He’s looking at triple murder if the baby doesn’t turn up, which it doesn’t. Neither does Moreno. It’s likely Loverboy put the body where it’ll take an archaeologist to find it.”

“Unless Moreno finds the cartel guy and his girl dead after Loverboy flees the scene, the baby safe in the next room,” I said. “But wouldn’t Moreno already have known they had a kid? Why didn’t he tell his guys? Because he planned to take the baby all along. Moreno – Rey -- wanted to get both of them out of that life.”

“My new Newark BFF says Moreno was showing signs of burnout those last few years. If he’s in the wind playing daddy, nobody’s losing sleep. How’s this apply to Angela Steinkamp?”

I wound up for the pitch. “Remember the state senator who got murdered? Acuna?”

Mead tapped his Fritos bag into his mouth. “Vaguely.”

“Think there’s any chance I could get a look at the police file on the shooting?”

He crumpled the bag and tossed it to me. “You seem like somebody enjoys recycling. Knock yourself out.”

**

It was three days before Mead called.

It was a real soiree by the time we reached Dean Steinkamp’s farmhouse three county roads off 74. The Stars and Stripes and the Confederate Stars and Bars flanked the scabby porch. A Gadsden snake fluttered on a PVC pole in the even scabbier lawn, admonishing those who tread on butt-hurt white guys.

A multi-jurisdiction battalion was killing said grass. Mead rolled in under a dying poplar and registered the casual stance of the tactical guys on the lawn before turning to me.

“Fella dropped a garbage bag at the City Plan Commission office with a note for me two days ago. Used toothbrushes, vape sticks and butts, red Solo cups, pre-owned feminine products. Five sets of prints in the trash — three from what our president calls ‘fine people’ with about 50 nuisance and assault arrests between them, and another matching Dean Steinkamp’s prints from a hate crimes sting two years back. You probably know who we turned up on the fifth. Now, you.”

“Acuna’s killer lured the senator away from his car, shot him, and got away without appearing on video. What if the shooter had the skills to calculate the angles and coverage of every camera in the parking deck? And didn’t seem to pose any threat to the senator?”

“Then there was the precision and speed of the shots themselves, plus what seemed to be the overkill. I mean, the first shot to the heart was the killer, right? The other two shots seemed unnecessary, but given that Acuna was already dropping, highly skilled.”

“Maybe the shooter just unloaded on him,” the cop grunted.

“Nah. You know what they called Acuna, beyond all the usual shit? To him, every issue was ‘acute’ — education reform, police abuse, racial justice, and especially gun violence. On Twitter, on Facebook, he’s known as Jesse ‘Acute’ Acuna. Each of the internal angles within that shot pattern measured less than 90 degrees — a textbook acute triangle. The killer’s inside joke.”

I thumbed through my texts and zoomed the Steinkamp family photo — Dean and Angela flashing the supremacist low sign. “I’m going to guess the boys in the militia didn’t realize the point of the ‘joke.’ And that was the shooter’s point. After Angie lost the Math-a-Lympics to a Muslim girl, Dean saw the perfect Islamophobic grooming opportunity. Angie planned to kick off her new life with a grand gesture – leaving the old Angie where her dad would find ‘her.’ But Brian unwittingly deprived her of that gesture.”

I heard the farmhouse screen slap as a cluster of feds escorted Sen. Acuna’s zip-cuffed assassin and her uncle onto the plank porch. The former mathlete glared defiantly ahead.

**

The video popped up in my Messages a few months later. It wasn’t a live call — he’d attached the .wmv as a gesture of respect or perhaps out of playfulness.

It was more attaboy for the professor than anything resembling an apology. Rey’d saved a child from a life of ugliness. He wanted closure for Brian Steinkamp, even if it took a dark turn.

He’d recorded his farewell in a cheap, sparsely furnished living room somewhere anywhere but Millington. A slice of an adjoining bedroom could be seen on the left third of the image — a splash of pink that popped out of the oatmeal decor. Rey’d restored Angie’s childhood dresser.

Beneath the carefully scripted, gilded legend ‘Cristina,’ a unicorn appeared to be winking.