Nicolas gets out, opens the back door for Charlotte. Together, they walk up to the heavy metal door. Nicolas unlocks it, and they go inside.
Disco stays outside, dials his phone.
Inside the building, behind the heavy door, the first whump of contact, followed by a shriek of pain from Charlotte. Disco peeks through the small window. Charlotte is down, her feet trying to gain purchase on the linoleum floor, her hands out in front of her face in defense, Nicolas standing over her, raising his fist, raining down blow after blow.
She’s probably wondering what in the hell is going on. She doesn’t know the test results. Disco gets them straight from the doctor they use for the girls’ monthly STD tests. Charlotte, unfortunately, came back positive. Can’t run a high-end business if the girls aren’t clean. So he not only has to get rid of Charlotte, he also has to scrub her clients from the list; it’s impossible to know which one gave her herpes.
Oh, well. He got six good years out of her. That’s more than most.
One last garbled cry from Charlotte. She’ll be quiet from here on out.
Porter answers on the third ring. “We can talk now,” says Disco.
“SOS is still trying to ID your dead prostitute from K-Town. One of ’em went back to the house where the shooting happened, looking for info.”
“And did he find anything?”
“Sounds like no. He got interrupted, I’m hearing. Is there anything to find?”
“I cannot know this,” says Disco. “Did your people not clean this up? That is your job, yes?”
Dead air. For a moment, Disco thinks the signal’s lost. He peeks through the window again. Charlotte’s body is limp, Nicolas straddling her, hands on her throat, finishing her off.
“First off,” says Porter, “I didn’t know you were gonna use that house for a fuckin’ shooting gallery. I wouldn’t have signed up for that.”
Which is why I didn’t tell you, Disco thinks.
“And number two, the house was never swept. Not for that, at least. The Jane Doe was not the first priority. The solve was.”
“Then sweep it now.”
“No. My people have already stuck their necks out way too far. My guy put down a witness for you. You got any idea what kinda risk that put him in?”
“I don’t care. You are not the only one taking risk.”
“Do it yourself,” says Porter. “You wanna clean up that house, do it your fuckin’ self. And you better do it fast.”
Chapter 55
THE PLACE is called Briona, which probably means something in some language, but here it means a swanky restaurant I could never afford. The appetizers cost as much as the sport jacket on my back. Even the waiters are better dressed than I am.
Glass walls and glass ceilings. A view of the city skyline. Expensive cologne, plastic surgery, cufflinks, diamonds. Viagra, too, I’d wager, had I brought a search warrant with me.
At one of the tables, a man is wearing linen pants and cream-colored loafers with no socks. Dress shoes but no socks? Is that a thing now? Jesus, seriously? I think that might be the fourth sign of the apocalypse.
In the corner, she’s sipping a glass of burgundy and looking pointedly at her companion, a broad-shouldered guy with a lot of hair and a square jawline. I have a seat at the bar where I can watch her. I nurse a glass of bourbon, two fingers of Angel’s Envy with one cube of ice, which came with a price tag that would probably get me the whole bottle at the discount liquor store I favor.
I wait twenty minutes. Then her companion gets up from his seat, drops his napkin on the table, and heads for the john. Before he’s five steps away, a waiter has folded the napkin properly for his return. I slide into the guy’s seat, still warm, a bit of fish and some green sauce smeared on the plate before me.
“Hi,” I say to Angela Dupree. “Mind if I sit?”
She looks at me with a combination of surprise and playfulness. She takes her time looking me over. She’s fifty-two years old, on her second marriage, and wealthy. She doesn’t look fifty-two, but she does look wealthy—the expensive jewelry dangling from her ears and around her neck and wrists, an emerald-green dress with a plunging neckline, some fancy hairdo that allows a few strands of cinnamon hair to caress her impressive cheekbones. She’s had some work done, too.
“I don’t mind one bit,” she says, a twinkle in her eye, suppressing a smile. “But I’m here with someone.”
“I know.” I flip out my badge long enough for her to see it, for her expression to falter, before I snap it shut discreetly. “You’re not in trouble, Mrs. Dupree. Nothing like that. I just have a few questions for you about the murder of your late husband, Nathan.”
She recovers, embarrassed that she took me for a flirt, before embarrassment turns to annoyance. “And you came here?” she says, cutting that last word with enough force to slice a steel bar.
“You’re right,” I say. “This is probably the wrong time. You and Mr. Dupree”—I nod behind me—“are entitled to a nice night out. How ’bout—is it okay if I wait till he gets back from the bathroom? And we get out our calendars to find a good time to talk?”
If I touched Angela Dupree’s face, it would feel like stone. All except her eyes, shooting daggers at me. “My husband,” she says, “doesn’t know anything about Nathan’s murder. I hadn’t even met him yet when Nathan…died.”
“I hear you. It’s protocol, though. I have to talk to everyone.”
She works her jaw, drumming her fingers on the white tablecloth. “Why don’t you wait over there?” she says, gesturing toward the corner. “And I’ll be with you in a minute? I’d rather not upset my husband about this. I can assure you he doesn’t know anything about Nathan’s death.”
“Sounds like a plan,” I say, getting up from the table. She’s still pretending that the man with whom she’s having dinner is her husband, Matthew Dupree, who is at least twenty years older than her handsome dinner companion tonight. And I’m still pretending that I don’t know otherwise.
I head toward the restrooms, which are one flight down, taking the stairs halfway to a landing. Angela Dupree makes me wait a good fifteen minutes. Probably to punish me.
I make a point of enjoying the view as she comes down, because she seems open to that kind of base flattery. I shake my head. “Believe me, I wish this was a social call. Your husband’s a lucky guy.”
Seems like that got me halfway back in her good graces, but she’s still feeling some heat. That’s right about where I want her.
I give her a quick rundown. Some follow-up on a closed case, the murder of Nathan Stofer. She comes back quickly—they found his killer, convicted him. He’s still in prison, right?
That convicted killer being Antoine Stonewald, Valerie’s last client before her death.
“He confessed,” she tells me. “He pleaded guilty.”
“Right. Let me ask you, Mrs. Dupree—”
“Angela.”
“Angela, can you think of any reason why someone would want to hurt Nathan?”
She blinks. “They said it was a robbery. They said it wasn’t personal.” She’s still struggling with why I’m bringing up a subject that she assumed was long closed.
“Humor me.”
“I…” She shields her eyes. “I didn’t expect to be thinking about this tonight,” she mumbles. Her eyes closed now, shaking her head, she says, “Nathan put together big deals. Millions of dollars involved. So—I guess money’s always a motive. Isn’t that what they say?”
“Any deals in particular, before he died?”
She nods, remembering. “Well, the Stratton Tower, obviously.”
Stratton. One of the words Valerie had written in her notes. “The Stratton Tower?”
“The…you know, the Stratton International Hotel and Tower. By the river.”
Oh. Right. That new skyscraper built just north of the Chicago River.
“Every time I walk past that gigantic hunk of steel, I think of him,” she says. “He wo
uld’ve loved to have been a part of it. He worked for years on it.”
“He was, what, an investor?”
She sighs, like she’s talking to an unschooled child. “He was part of an investors’ group. They were trying to bring on more investors. He oversaw the due diligence.”
My knowledge of high finance begins and ends with Save what you can, pay your bills on time, and max out your 401(k). But even I know what due diligence means.
“Was Nathan running into any problems?” I ask.
I’m taking her back more than five years, and it’s not a fun return trip for her. I might have copped an attitude with her, catching her stepping out on her second husband with some young eye candy, but who knows what happens to people? For all I know, her life turned upside down after losing Nathan.
The frown on her face, the teary glaze in her eyes, makes that seem likely. So now I’m feeling guilty for ruining her night, but it’s too late to turn back now, and I need this information. And she deserves to know, just as much as I do, what happened.
“There was…maybe one thing,” she says.
Chapter 56
I LEAVE the restaurant with the promise of a name. And a return promise, given as Angela Dupree clutched my arm, her voice full of emotion, to let her know whatever I learn about her husband’s death.
Stratton, she said to me.
Stratton, Valerie wrote in her notes.
The Stratton International Hotel and Tower is just a hop down Michigan Avenue from the restaurant where I met Angela Dupree. Pedestrians are everywhere on the Mag Mile tonight, with the early taste of summer in the air. Chicagoans clutch good weather like it’s rare oxygen.
There it is, a massive structure of steel and glass towering over the north bank of the Chicago River, with gold-plated awnings, a semicircular drive where valets jockey Jags and Mercedes, where limos unload beautiful people in beautiful clothes.
“Guess it got built without you, Nathan,” I mumble.
More to learn about that. I have somewhere else to be right now. A mission I didn’t finish, interrupted by Carla. Time to return to K-Town.
There’s no more dangerous time on the West Side of Chicago than summer nights. Shootings increase exponentially as people venture outside. It ain’t quite summer yet, but it’s over eighty degrees, and it’s almost ten o’clock.
Clusters of people, mostly young, mostly male, populate the corners, sit on stoops smoking or drinking, laughing and goofing around. Everyone notices my ride, and if they look closely enough, the color of my skin. Am I a cop? If you live on the West Side, you don’t have to be committing a crime to fear the police.
I hit Kilbourn and take it down toward the expressway, toward the crime scene, the bullet-riddled house where four people died only days ago, including my Jane Doe, who went by Evie. Just north of that house and across the street, several bouquets of flowers lie against the front door. Someone else died recently, on the same block?
I park my ride, check the house. Dark, of course. Nobody living there since the shooting. I check my surroundings as I walk up the porch, snap on rubber gloves, and slip the key into the lock.
I open the door and hear something inside. Not so much movement as…the abrupt stopping of movement.
Or are my ears playing tricks on me?
Silence.
Then the unmistakable sound of something hitting the floor and breaking.
No tricks. Someone’s inside this house. And just heard me enter.
Chapter 57
IN THE blink of an eye, every possibility tidal-waves past me. Squatters escaping the elements. Crackheads, preying on vacant property. Low-rent thieves, picking at the carnage of a fallen beast, whatever they can grab and sell for drug money.
Or worse. Much, much worse.
“Police!” I call out as I reach for the weapon at my hip. “Who’s there?”
With the window boarded up and the front door closed, the streetlight outside doesn’t help. I’m in full darkness. I shuffle along the couch, the one where LaTisha Moreland drew her last breath, but I don’t make it to the hallway before I hear violent footfalls, the product of a quick decision to make a run for it.
I turn left toward the kitchen, hoping to cut off whoever it is from the opposite side, running my hand along the wall for a switch, catching it on the thermostat, racing into the small kitchen. A narrow beam of yellow light hits the wall in front of me—
I slam into something, a chair by the kitchen table, and fall forward, face-first, onto cold tile, as the wood above me splinters with multiple impacts. I turn in the direction of the gunfire, the back room, a flashlight now rolling on the floor, a roaming beam only inches off the surface.
But enough to light up the room a little. Enough to see a man, tall and lean, tight haircut, racing out the back door.
He’s gone before I can raise my weapon, much less return fire.
I pop to my feet and head toward the back door. There’s a window in the back, and I can see two figures running across the lawn, heading south. I stay low, in case they get any ideas about shooting me through the window, but they’re in full retreat now. I run through the back door and follow their direction toward the alley, the lighting better, at least, helped by a streetlight and someone turning on a light a few stories above me in the neighboring building.
I stop just short of the alley, stay low, spin, and turn to my right—west—with my weapon up. They’re faster than I am, well ahead, nearly out of the alley. The first one turns to his left onto the next street over from Kilbourn. The second one, not far behind him, does a quick half turn and fires a stray shot in my direction, not aiming, just trying to slow me down, but I’m in full chase mode now, as he follows his buddy onto the next street, whichever one of those K streets it is—I can’t keep them straight.
It hits me as I’m running. I know which K street. It’s Kolmar.
By the time I reach the end of the alley, the two men have hit the next street south, Van Buren, and turned right, increasing their distance. I make it to the intersection of Van Buren and Kolmar; by then, the two men have put far too much real estate between us for me to have any chance of catching them.
I put my hands on my knees and catch my breath, my injured ribs screaming at me. My knee is banged up, too, something I didn’t notice during the chase, with the adrenaline flowing, the result of tripping and falling over that kitchen chair. It probably saved my life, probably was the difference between the intruder’s bullets hitting the wall and hitting me somewhere from the neck up.
I don’t call it in. It’ll be too late. And I’ll have to answer too many questions.
I have plenty of questions of my own. But I may have an answer or two as well.
I look up at the intersection, at the POD camera, corner of Van Buren and Kolmar.
“I got you, bitches,” I whisper.
Chapter 58
I HEAD back to Shiv’s house, shaky from the adrenaline, limping a bit, but I’ll live.
The flashlight the shooter dropped is still on the floor by the back door. I flip on lights as I make my way to the kitchen. I find a brown lunch bag in a cabinet and carefully use it to scoop up the flashlight, just in case he was dumb enough to leave prints. I don’t want to touch the flashlight’s on-off switch and smudge a possible thumbprint, even with my rubber gloves, so I carry the bag around like it was a luminaria on Christmas.
The bedrooms, not surprisingly, are where the action is. In the first one I enter, the drawers have all been pulled out of the dresser. The bed has been moved, too, no longer aligned with the heavy impressions on the carpet.
But they didn’t whip everything out from the drawers willy-nilly or flip the bed over. They didn’t ransack the place. They were searching, but they were planning on tidying up afterward. They were hoping for an in-and-out without any sign they’d been there.
They were being careful.
On the floor is a garbage bag containing clothes and papers and effects. I lea
f through the items. They are women’s clothes.
I work quickly, combing over the bedroom, looking for anything else that might belong to my Jane Doe, anything they hadn’t already tossed in the garbage bag.
No, I remind myself, not Jane Doe. Evie, LaTisha’s mother said. She went by Evie. Evie-rhymes-with-Chevy.
Then I head to the next bedroom, where there is another garbage bag, this one empty. Apparently they hadn’t yet found anything in this bedroom. I check for myself and find nothing. This was obviously Shiv’s bedroom, whether he slept here or used it for some other purpose.
So I return to the first bedroom and pick up the garbage bag, look through it again. Some paper with handwriting, clothes, a bottle of women’s cologne, a hairbrush.
They weren’t squatters or crackheads. They weren’t common thieves. They were looking for the same thing I am.
They were trying to remove any evidence of Evie from this house.
Chapter 59
IT’S A start. Now let’s see how much of a start.
The overnight at SOS is quiet. We don’t have much in terms of round-the-clock staff, because we aren’t a normal police district. We don’t punch a clock. We don’t stay in one neighborhood. We go wherever the action is, and we work whatever hours necessary. Only a few detectives and officers are in the squad room when I enter.
I find the room with the POD footage and start working the desktop, searching for the POD camera at Van Buren and Kolmar. I’m not great with this stuff, but the techies are all long gone for the day.
It takes me a while, but I finally find the right camera. I click on the recorded footage for today. Fast-forward through a lot of nothing, a few people walking along sidewalks, one couple making out, all but ripping each other’s clothes off. Some car traffic. Mostly an empty intersection at that time of night, in that part of town.
There. The two men, sprinting south down Kolmar, then pivoting, turning onto Van Buren, running right toward the camera.
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