I lean forward, squint. Black-and-white, grainy, the usual.
But I have their faces. Maybe not enough for facial recognition. But I have them.
The first one is white, a small frame, thick hair that seems dark. Young, I’d say, maybe early to midtwenties. The second one, the one who shot at me—also Caucasian, much taller, solid but trim, his hair buzzed short, looking behind him to gauge my progress, running with a handgun in his left hand.
I pause the recording so I won’t be forced to see myself showing up a few moments later, out of shape and winded, catching my breath at the corner.
I rewind and replay. Are they Russian? Could be. Definitely could pass for eastern European. Too hard to tell. Probably too blurry to get facial rec with them.
But if I see them again, I’ll recognize them.
I open the garbage bag I took from the house. The clothes don’t tell me much, though I see price tags on a couple of items, which tells me that Shiv probably bought Evie some clothes to wear. Makes sense. If I’m right and she escaped from the traffickers, she didn’t exactly have time to pack a suitcase.
The only thing I find that could be remotely identifying is a piece of paper with some handwriting on it.
A fost eliberat acum trei luni.
Locatia lui e necunoscuta.
I don’t know the language, much less the translation.
On the desktop, I minimize the POD footage and pull up the internet. I type in the words from this note. Several websites cascade down the screen, all of them in a foreign language, most of them beginning with the familiar “www” but ending not with “.gov” or “.com” but with “.ro,” which I don’t recognize. But it doesn’t take long to figure it out. These are Romanian web pages.
A spike of adrenaline. Evie was from Romania.
I pull up an online Romanian-to-English translator and type in the words scribbled on the note. The translation to English:
He was released three months ago. His location is unknown.
I write that down on a notepad. Okay. Now I just have to figure out who “he” is and what he was released from. Prison? Some government facility?
With nothing else to go on from the trash bag, I head to the inventory room, which is closed this time of night. I can’t get in without an officer signing evidence in and out. It’ll have to wait till tomorrow.
My phone buzzes. I don’t recognize the number.
“Officer Harney?”
Close enough. “That’s me.”
“I’m sorry to call so late. This is Angela Dupree.”
“Oh, you’re fast.” It was only around four hours earlier that we spoke.
“Well, once we talked, I couldn’t really think of anything else.”
“Sorry about that.”
“I looked through some old papers. I think I found the name of the company that my late husband was worried about. It was called KB Investors Group. He called it KBIG. He didn’t want them to invest in the Stratton project. He vetoed them.”
“Vetoed them?”
“He was in charge of due diligence. He had to say yay or nay. I didn’t know a lot about what he did, but that much I understood. He said no to KBIG, and his partners were upset.”
And they wouldn’t have been the only ones upset.
The folks at KBIG, kicked out of a major deal by Nathan Stofer, might not have been so happy, either.
Chapter 60
I LAY it out in the family room, the results from a good night.
Name: Evie
Probably from Romania
Loved one/friend recently released from…prison?
Stratton International Hotel and Tower
KB Investors Group (KBIG)
Nathan Stofer, murdered
Antoine Stonewald, convicted of his murder
Laid out like that, it doesn’t sound like much. Still, I reduced the haystack considerably today.
“Well, you had a busy day,” Patti says into my earbuds as I pace my family room, giving her the update on my evening. “What should worry you is, how did these guys know you’ve been searching that house for info on the Jane Doe?”
“Evie,” I say. “She has a name.”
“Evie, fine, but listen to what I’m saying. Someone tipped them off, Billy. You check out the house this morning, and later that same day, they’re in there trying to scrub the place of any trace of her? That’s not a coincidence.”
“You’re thinking Carla,” I say.
“Of course. Who else?”
“Plenty of others. I checked out the key from inventory to search the house. Any cop could’ve found that out. But listen, that’s assuming a cop tipped off these guys. I’m not sure of that at all.”
“Who else?” she says again.
“If I’m right about this,” I say, “and this shooting was all about Evie and not Shiv, then she must have escaped from them. They found her and killed her before she could go to the police, or the FBI, or whoever. But they don’t know what Evie took with her, Patti. For all they know, she had information that could bring down their entire organization. They’d want it. They could have been staking out the house, waiting for their opportunity. They could’ve seen me go in this morning and waited for nightfall to go in and look for themselves.”
“Maybe so, brother, but the easy answer’s right in front of you. Carla Griffin.”
Carla in bed with human traffickers? I don’t see it. And especially not after what I learned about her today. She’s got plenty else on her mind right now, raising Samuel alone and battling cancer.
“Either way,” I say, “it’s not like I’m gonna talk about this at work.”
“Especially not to Carla.”
“Not to anybody.”
I walk over to the desk in the corner, boot up my laptop. Time to start searching for “KB Investors Group.” It can’t be that hard to find the principals behind it.
“This girl Evie was probably trafficked; you’re probably right about that,” says Patti. “And going after human traffickers—that gets you through the pearly gates any day of the week.”
“Hooray for me.”
“But do me a favor and just keep one thing in mind,” she says. “Just because they’re the scum of the earth doesn’t mean they killed your wife.”
Chapter 61
PATTI PUTS her forehead against the window, looks down onto State Street, traffic already gnarled, early morning pedestrians clumped at the corners or kamikaze-ing through cars.
“You haven’t answered my question,” she says.
“That’s because we’re supposed to be here about you. Not your brother.”
She closes her eyes, feels a bit of vertigo. She hasn’t been sleeping. Not hard to figure why.
“We never talked about it,” she says. “After Val died. I mean, looking back—we all tried to tell Billy it wasn’t his fault. We pulled out all sorts of literature about depression and the lack of warning signs, and suicide during times of grief—you name it.”
“Sounds like you did talk about it.”
“No, but that’s the point—it wasn’t a conversation. We talked. Billy never did. We told him to get counseling; we told him he shouldn’t blame himself. But I can’t remember a single time when Billy said anything in response. I mean, he’d say, ‘I’m fine,’ or ‘I understand,’ that kind of thing.”
“He wouldn’t discuss his feelings with you.”
“Well, that’s Billy—he keeps it inside. What I’m saying is, he never talked to us about what happened. Never.”
“He must have told the police. He must have given a statement.”
Patti blows out air harshly, dismissively. Opens her eyes. Watches the pedestrians below, normal people with normal lives, normal concerns—making the mortgage, keeping their kids on the straight and narrow, saving up a little for retirement.
“We’re not normal people,” says Patti. “We are the police. I didn’t want him anywhere near a statement.”
“You
were afraid of what he might say.”
“Obviously. So we kept our hands in the investigation and made sure it came out only one way—suicide. We even got the medical examiner to go along.”
“So Billy never once told you what happened in that bathroom with Val?”
“Not once. I felt like I was holding my breath for…God, for a year, at least. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. It never did. He eventually got better, moved on.”
“Seems like you’re holding your breath now, Patti.”
She turns around. “You still haven’t answered my question. Is it possible?”
Dr. Francis Almond, in his standard button-down oxford-cloth shirt, legs crossed in a leather chair, his bony fingers adjusting his eyeglasses, the overhead light in the office shining down on his considerable forehead. “Do you really expect me to say it’s impossible?” he asks. “Is anything impossible when it comes to the human brain?”
She looks him over, thinks about it. “We can talk about this, right?”
“We can talk about the past, Patti. I’ve told you that before.”
But she needs to hear it again. “Even if it’s a crime,” she says.
“Even if it’s a crime. A crime in the past. I can’t reveal it. I’m obligated to report it if a patient tells me she’s going to commit a crime in the future. And please don’t tell me you’re planning on doing that.”
He smiles as he says it, lets out a nervous chuckle. Watches her.
She doesn’t answer. She walks away from the window and sits in the leather chair across from him. Incredibly comfortable, like a soft, warm blanket. Intentionally so. It’s hard not to relax in this euphoria of cow skin.
“Well, it sounds like you want a fuller answer,” says Dr. Almond. “It’s not my area of expertise, but I’ll take a shot.” He removes his glasses, rubs his eyes. “Patti, the more we learn about memory, the more we learn how unreliable it is. You gave an example yourself about Billy, that Santa Claus story.”
She nods. “To this day, he insists it was our father he caught getting into that Santa Claus costume when we were kids, not Uncle Mikey. He swears by it.”
“Exactly. He replays it in his head and makes an adjustment for whatever reason, and then that adjustment becomes the memory. Then he keeps replaying it as adjusted, and it gets cemented in his brain that way. He’d swear on a Bible that it happened the way he remembers it. But it didn’t.”
“But this is a little different from being a kid and seeing your uncle dressing up as Santa,” she says. “Billy was an adult. And it was the death of his wife.”
“Sure, but now you’re adding trauma to the equation, too. Not just having your illusions about Saint Nick shattered. We’re talking about the death of his wife. Immediately preceded, of course, by the death of his daughter.”
She breaks eye contact, looks over at the ego wall—the diplomas and certifications, the photographs. Feels the knot in her stomach tighten.
“Billy was like a ghost when he walked into his house that day,” she says. “You should’ve seen him. I drove him from the hospital. It was, like, an hour after he’d lost Janey. He sat there in the passenger seat, shaking his head. He just said one thing. ‘Valerie was supposed to be there.’ He said it so quietly I almost couldn’t hear him. Like he didn’t want to say it out loud. Like…he felt like he wasn’t supposed to be thinking that way about Val, but he was anyway.”
She looks down, sees her hands trembling.
“We’ve only begun to touch on the effects of trauma on memory, Patti. And don’t forget Billy’s brain injury last year, the gunshot wound. We will probably never fully know the impact on his long-term memory of that injury. You put all that together…”
“Right,” she says, her voice rough now.
“So you ask me, Patti, as of this moment, today, is it possible that he doesn’t remember what happened with Val that day? My answer can only be yes. It’s certainly possible that he doesn’t remember.”
“It doesn’t seem like he does,” she says. “He’s all about these Russian sex traffickers. It’s ridiculous, but he’s got it in his head. Is he…projecting or something?”
Her nerves jangling, she doesn’t wait for an answer, pops out of the chair and starts pacing, pulls on her hair. “You have any idea how hard it is to sit there and listen to him speculate that Val might’ve been murdered and not say something? Not tell him?”
“Very hard, I’d imagine. You feel like you can’t?”
She glares at him. “Course I can’t.”
“Have you considered the possibility that he has a right to know?”
“Have you considered the possibility that he’d never speak to me again? That I’d lose him forever?”
Hearing the words, just speaking them aloud, sends a shudder through her.
“So maybe this isn’t about Billy after all,” says Dr. Almond. “This is about you.”
Chapter 62
SEVEN TWENTY, bright and early. Sal Argurito’s just getting the inventory office open. He seems annoyed that I’m standing there waiting. Like the federal employees at the post office who always loiter in the back, leaving customer-service windows vacant and avoiding the glares of customers piled up in line, he’s ignoring me.
“Morning, Sal,” I say. He doesn’t answer. Or answers differently—by glancing at the clock, which hasn’t yet hit half past seven.
I’ve known Sal since I was a pup in the department. He had his twenty put in even back then. Nobody knows why he’s stuck around to do this back-office work when he could be sitting on his porch sipping iced tea with his wife. The only thing we can figure is that he doesn’t want to sit on the porch all day sipping iced tea with his wife.
“How ’bout this weather we’re havin’?” I say.
Nothing. He puts some forms up on the shelf and busies himself with something, God knows what, out of my sight.
“I need the personal effects for Dwayne Sears,” I say. “The Moreland homicide.”
He passes by me, stooped and grumpy, with nary a glance in my direction.
“C’mon Sal, I’m on the clock here. I’ll buy you some new body wax.”
“Hold your damn horses,” he mutters.
“I can’t remember which scent you prefer. Lavender or Apricot Morning?”
He doesn’t think I’m funny. “Moreland?” he calls out.
“Yeah, the multiple homicide. K-Town.”
A few minutes later, he returns with a large box. “The one got your name in the papers, you mean.”
“Spelled my name right,” I say.
“Like that’s hard. Try having my name.”
“I tried being Italian once, Sal. I felt an overwhelming desire to eat spaghetti and lose a war.”
“Sign the receipt, you filthy Mick. If you’re sober enough to use a pen.”
I sign out the box and take it to an interview room. The box is half full, but all I want is Shiv’s cell phone. It’s an iPhone like mine, so I assume my charger will work. A tag next to the phone shows the password, which some enterprising officer must have had the foresight to get from somebody, probably LaTisha’s mother. The password is 8474, which after a brief game of word scramble tells me spells “Tish.”
The phone is dead, but with my charger, it only takes a few minutes before the white Apple icon pops onto the screen. I run through the call history to search for the calls Shiv most recently made. He wouldn’t be dumb enough to do drug deals on this phone. He had a burner for that, if he used one at all, but his normal phone is the best bet for what I need.
Most of the recent calls have IDs assigned to them—Mo, Eddie, KJ, Sheila—but the ninth and tenth ones stand out, calls made two days before the shooting. They are longer numbers, both beginning with 01140256, followed by different six-digit numbers.
International calls.
I carry the phone and charger to my desk, where I plug the charger back in and jump online on my desktop. Takes me two minutes on a search engine to
confirm that 011 is the US exit code for international calls, and 40 is the country code for Romania.
Evie was using Shiv’s cell to call home.
Chapter 63
AT MY desk, I google the time difference. Romania’s eight hours ahead, so it’s not quite four in the afternoon there. Then I return to the online English-to-Romanian translator for the phrase “Hello. I’m a police officer in Chicago, the United States. I am sorry, but I only speak English.” God bless technology: it spits out a translation, along with a sound icon that speaks the words to me, in robotic Romanian. It seems to be phonetic, so I’ll get by.
Then I call the first number, chronologically, that Evie called in Romania.
A woman answers, speaking quickly, presumably in Romanian.
“Bună ziua,” I say. “Sunt ofiţer de poliţie în Chicago, Statele Unite. Îmi pare rău, dar vorbesc doar engleză.”
“Chicago. American?” the woman says, decent English.
“Yes,” I say, relieved.
“You look…for prisoner?”
“Prisoner? I’m calling a prison?”
“Timisoara Penitentiary,” she says.
I glance at my notepad, the translation from Evie’s piece of paper. He was released three months ago.
“Yes,” I say. “I’m looking for a prisoner who was released three months ago.”
“I give you number to call…for English?”
She gives it to me. I read it back to her for confirmation.
Good. Good start. Now I dial the second number that Evie called.
A man answers—more Romanian I couldn’t possibly understand. I read him my greeting. I’m a Chicago cop: does anyone speak English?
He says something to me I don’t understand, then says, “Wait.”
Thirty seconds feels like an hour. Then another man’s voice comes on the line. “Hallo? You are from America? You are police?”
“Yes. I am from the police department in Chicago. What is your name, sir?”
The Red Book Page 16