She raises her hands. “I got it; I got it.”
“Maybe take a long weekend. You and Samuel and the mother-in-law get away, go to a water park or something. Maybe the Dells. Tell you what—my treat.”
“C’mon, Porter, you don’t have to do that. I feel like an idiot now for doubting you.”
“Nonsense.” He peels off fifteen bills, fifteen hundred dollars. “You’ve more than earned it, kiddo. We’ve had our eye on Harney for a long time. This is great work you’ve done.”
She takes the money, nods.
“Jesus,” she says. “Just when I was starting to like the guy.”
Chapter 80
VALERIE, THE GUN under her chin.
Don’t come any closer, she says.
I won’t. She’s gone. She just died. I just came from the hosp—
And I wasn’t there.
I called you, over and over.
But I didn’t answer.
Nope—you were busy, looks like. Taking the easy way out.
I’m sorry, Billy, I really am.
I’m not the one needs an apology.
Billy—
Can today be about her? Can at least one day be about our little girl and not you or your sadness or your important cases at work?
I’m…so sorry—
My head pops off the desk in my family room, my arm shooting out, knocking over a glass of water, my other hand gripping paper—research I’ve compiled on Nathan Stofer and Antoine Stonewald and General Boholyubov.
“No,” I say, panting, wiping sweat from my forehead.
No. That’s not what happened. None of that happened. I didn’t say those things and I didn’t think those things and you didn’t kill yourself.
I didn’t believe those things. I never said them to you.
You didn’t kill yourself.
They killed you. They killed you.
Sunlight streaming into the family room. Well past dawn. I fell asleep at the desk downstairs, doing research. A dream about Valerie, once again, serving as my alarm clock.
I grab my phone. Clock says half past seven.
It buzzes in my hand, as if on cue, startling me. Caller ID says Griffin, Carla.
“Harney,” she says, “I hate to do this, but I feel like hell warmed over. I’ve been tossing my cookies half the night.”
I shake out the cobwebs, ignore the icy-cold shiver gripping me, try to get my act together to have a conversation.
“The nausea,” I manage to say.
“Yeah. I have to get the bandages on my face changed this morning anyway, and I was thinking maybe I’ll take today off, make it a long weekend.”
I stand up. “No problem.”
“Well, I know we’re about to reopen K-Town, so the timing isn’t great.”
It’s more than great. The timing is actually perfect. Now she won’t be in my way.
I’ll have the next twenty-four hours to myself.
Chapter 81
A FEELING of dread swims through my chest as I pull onto the campus of Stateville Correctional Center, near Joliet. I’ve had more than my share of visits, usually getting background from inmates, sometimes more vital information from snitches, occasionally flipping a guy who’d refused to cooperate but was reconsidering after his initial stretch in this hellhole. It’s never a joyride, seeing the dilapidated, overcrowded, overburdened facility, where the inmates are scared, bitter, hopeless, mentally ill, or usually a combination thereof.
But this is the first time I’ve felt fear.
Antoine Stonewald looks different from his mug shot. He’s shaved his head, for one, which a fair number of inmates do. Some for hygienic reasons: better to have no hair than unclean hair. Others for safety reasons: one less thing someone can grab or twist.
He’s thicker, too—muscular, not fat, the product of weight lifting, one of the only things to do in here. And he’s older. Not because of the passage of four years, but because of the passage of four years inside Stateville.
“What-choo want, po-lice.” He doesn’t say it as a question. That’s learned behavior. Emotion in here is weakness. Weakness gets you a target on your back.
“I want to know if you killed Nathan Stofer.”
He looks at me as if we’re at a poker table, as if he’s trying to read me and doesn’t want me reading him. “The fuck you sayin’? Said I did. Pleaded guilty.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Yeah, you know. You know a lotta brothers plead guilty to shit they didn’t do?”
“Probably,” I say. “First-degree with a gun? You were looking at forty-five minimum, and that’s assuming the felony murder didn’t stick. Probably would’ve gotten sixty or seventy—black guy kills a rich white guy. So yeah, you took twenty. Doesn’t mean you did it.”
Antoine works his jaw, controlling his emotions. Twiddles his thumbs. The shackles rake against the desk between us.
“Go the fuck home, cracker po-lice.”
“Hey, Antoine, you wanna cut the gangsta smack? You were an honor student at UIC, halfway to an accounting degree, engaged to a nice woman, saving up for a down payment on a condo. You ain’t in B unit right now, looking over your shoulder. It’s just you and me in here. So lose the hard-ass routine and talk to me.”
He chews on his lip, sits back, his expression softening.
“I’m trying to help you, kid.”
He lets out a humorless grunt. “A cop wants to help me. That would be a first.”
Okay, at least now he’s talking to me.
“Help me understand why a kid who worked so hard to make something of himself would do something stupid like shoot a guy in a parking garage.”
He shrugs his shoulders, not in a casual, who-knows sort of way, but a violent way. I’m bringing it all back. He’s worked through it; he’s been dealing it with it for years now, telling himself to keep his time good, get that 15 percent shaved off.
“You pleaded out right after your first lawyer died,” I say.
He looks away, remembering. I try not to do the same.
“Right after she died,” I add. “Four days later.”
“So?”
“So? Any judge would give a continuance to someone whose lawyer suddenly died just before trial. There was no rush. Why plead guilty so fast?”
Antoine leans forward, like he’s finally willing to engage. The shackles rake along the table as he opens his hands. “Maybe I was already planning on pleading guilty before she died.”
“That’s not the way I’m hearing it, son. I hear she was going to bat for you. She had some ideas that somebody else killed Nathan Stofer. What was the lawyer’s name? Maybe…Valerie?”
“Val,” he says. “Val Blinderman. She said only her husband called her Valerie.”
I close my eyes, look away. I can’t let him know my connection. I reach into my pocket and pull out my phone, check it, anything to busy myself, to keep him from knowing that he just drove a stake into me.
Don’t think about her. Think about him.
Another reason, too. You ask an inmate what’s the worst part, they don’t usually say the violence, the crap food. First thing they usually say is the loneliness. You put a guy in a nice interview room like this, give him a chance to have a conversation, he’ll usually take it and run with it.
Takes him a minute, while I stall for time, but then he keeps going.
“Yeah, she was a nice lady,” he says. “I mean, she was all business, for sure, but—but y’know, she’d talk to me. Like a human being? Nobody in County would do that. Nobody in here, either. But she did. She made you feel like…like you mattered.”
I don’t say anything. I can’t, the emotion choking my throat.
“Sometimes we’d just talk. Like, she had a sick kid. A little baby girl who had a stroke. She was, like, in a coma, but she wasn’t going to come out of it. She’d spend the nights in the hospital and the days working my case. You could tell how tired she was. I told her, go be with her, get someone
else to represent me. I mean, she was great, I needed her, but…that’s family, man. It’s more important.”
My eyes bore into the black screen of my phone, my body beginning to tremble.
“What did…she say to that?” I say, hardly more than a whisper.
“She said I sounded like her husband.”
I nod, staring into blackness, focusing on anything, anything but the memory. Don’t go there. Stay here, in this room, focus on the job.
“She said, ‘My daughter’s gone. I can’t save her. But maybe I can save you.’ She said her daughter would want that.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. My hand reaches up to my wet face, my shoulders bouncing now, breathing coming in gasps.
She was right. Our little baby girl would have wanted that.
“Hey, man, I didn’t mean to…”
It takes me a minute, trying to regain composure, because I have a reason to be here, and it’s not to blubber and sob like a child, certainly not in front of a man who’s had his life stolen from him for a crime he almost certainly did not commit.
And any chance of hiding my connection is long down the toilet now.
“Oh, shit,” says Antoine. “Her husband was a cop. You’re…Billy.”
I do a final wipe of my face, take a deep breath, clear my throat, and nod. “I was the one who called her Valerie, yeah,” I say.
“Well, you gotta leave, Billy,” he says, his voice different now, stronger, hostile. “I’m sorry, but you gotta leave right now.”
Chapter 82
“I’M NOT going anywhere,” I tell Antoine. “You know what she was doing better than I do. She was looking at alternative suspects for Nathan Stofer’s murder.”
“No,” he says, but he doesn’t mean I’m wrong.
“The sex-trafficking ring,” I say. “You know she was looking at that, right?”
He turns his head away.
“The Ukrainian general’s business, KB Investors Group. The one Nathan Stofer was trying to keep from joining the Stratton Tower project. C’mon, Antoine, you know all this! You know more than I do about—”
“Man, I can’t.” He slams down his fists, the shackles clanging on the table. His words come out as a plea through a choked throat, tears coming now, his turn to cry. “You’re already putting my family at risk, just being here.”
“They threatened you,” I say. What I figured. He pleads guilty four days after Valerie’s death. Someone got to him.
He leans forward, pauses, looks over at the prison guard through the glass door, leans farther forward still, his chin only inches from the table. His words spill out in a harsh whisper. “You think I like sitting in this shithole for something I didn’t do? It’s keeping my family alive.”
“Your fiancée, Cassietta. Your mother and sister. They threatened them.”
He looks at me, defiant, but something else, too. Sympathetic. Apologetic. “How do I know, just being here, you didn’t get them killed?”
“Nobody knows I’m here,” I say.
He laughs. Shakes his head as if he pities my ignorance. Then turns stone cold. “They can kill a cop’s wife and make it look like suicide,” he whispers. “They can waltz into County all official and dressed up, like it’s nothing, and lay it out for me. Cassie’s home address, where she works, how they’re gonna take turns on her before they slit her throat. How they’re gonna dump gasoline on my sister and light a match while my mama watches. Then the motherfucker walks back out like nothing? They got people everywhere, man.”
“It didn’t come from you,” I say. “I’d never give you up.”
“You probably already did, just coming here.”
“I’m gonna take them down, Antoine. Every one of them. They won’t be able to hurt you or your family.”
He pauses. Thinks about it. That thing he’s been suppressing, that has secretly plagued him since the first day they locked him up—hope.
“Don’t you want out of here, Antoine? Don’t you wanna be free? Marry Cassie? See your mother and sister? Have your life back?”
He wags a finger at me, cocks his head. “Don’t do that, man.”
“I can make that happen, Antoine. All I need—”
“Go on now!” he says, slamming back from the table, the shackles sliding off the table as he bounces to his feet. “I got nothin’ to say to you, cracker po-lice! I took my twenty cuz I shot that damn fool. I didn’t like the look on his smug-ass face, know what I’m sayin’?”
“Just a name, Antoine,” I say. “Just a location.”
He bangs on the glass window. “Man, I got nothin’ to say to this guy!” he calls out. “Let me the fuck outta here!”
I drop my head. It’s over.
Two corrections officers enter the room. “Sorry, Detective. If he doesn’t want to talk to you…”
…then he doesn’t have to. I know.
“What a waste of a morning,” I say, loud enough for the guards in the room, and probably the ones outside, to hear. “I come all this way, and this kid doesn’t tell me squat.”
Antoine, back to his cocky prison-yard attitude, catches my eye. He knows my last comment was for him.
But in fact, Antoine did tell me a couple of things.
One: those dreams of mine are wrong. Valerie didn’t kill herself. I wasn’t there when she did. They killed her. They did this.
And two: the person who delivered the threat to Antoine? The man who waltzed into county lockup in a fancy suit, as he said?
Only a lawyer could have done that.
Chapter 83
THE LAST thing Patti feels like doing today is heading to the prison.
She takes a personal day. No way she could justify this trip as official police business.
No way she can justify it, period.
Last night was another restless one, full of nightmares and, worse still, the reality of what happened four years ago.
She can’t sleep. Can’t do her training runs. Can’t eat. Can’t focus at work.
All she can think about is Val. And Billy.
And a gun, Billy’s service weapon.
The trip to the prison feels like a life sentence itself. She pulls off the highway at one point and retches by the side of the road, but there’s no food to vomit. Her body is feverish, though she doubts she’s sick.
Her hands tremble on the steering wheel. But she focuses on Billy.
She’s doing this for Billy.
She parks in the designated spot and looks up at the imposing structure. “I can’t do this,” she mumbles. But she doesn’t have anywhere else to turn.
She shows her credentials at intake, gives up her weapon and cell phone, endures the pat-down and wanding and warnings, which even cops have to undergo.
They lead her into a private interview room. She finds herself hoping, praying, that the guard will say there’s been some glitch, that inmate number 28507-024 isn’t available.
She begs for such a glitch.
Then the door opens. She hears the leg irons dragging along the floor, the guard’s calm but stern directions. The snap of the lock when the shackles are affixed to the table.
She cries. She swore she wouldn’t. Once it comes, there’s no use fighting it. She lets it go, covering her face in her hands, shaking so hard she can hardly stay seated in the chair.
She can’t bear to look.
But she’s doing this for Billy.
“At some point,” says the prisoner, “are you going to look at me or say something?”
It sends a chill through her. The voice. The voice she once trusted, the voice that soothed her and guided her.
She looks up at former chief of detectives Daniel Harney.
“Hi, Daddy,” she says.
Chapter 84
PATTI HAD tried to get it all off her chest before she came. Even spoke it aloud in the car as she drove from Chicago to Terre Haute, Indiana, the federal supermax.
How could you do that to us?
How could you
betray us?
We trusted you.
I trusted you.
Variations on that, over and over during the three-hour trip. The man she worshipped, the man who made everything right, in reality a bent cop, corrupt to the core.
She’d hoped to tire herself out on the ride over, have her first—and last—visit be focused on Billy.
But it all floods back, all the hurt, all the insults she wanted to hurl, all the pain she wanted to inflict.
“It’s good to see you, honey. I wasn’t sure you’d ever come.”
Dirty snow atop his head, far whiter than before. He’s lost considerable weight, sunken eyes, a skinny stalk for a neck, shoulders drawn tight. Like someone put him in a dryer and shrunk him two sizes.
He was always larger than life to her, the proud, commanding chief of detectives, the baritone voice and erect posture, the man who took over any room he entered. Now he’s a soft-spoken, stooped, broken man.
“You look slimmed down,” he says. “You’ve been running again.”
“No,” she hears herself say, steeling up. “You don’t get to do that.”
She looks at him. His eyebrows dance. “Okay,” he says tentatively. “At least tell me how you’re do—”
“No.”
“Right, right, I get it. Patti, listen, there’s so many things I’ve wanted to say—”
“No!” She pounds the table. “This isn’t a reunion, okay? You can’t just…” Her throat chokes up.
Her father gives up, crosses his arms, waits her out. The hurt on his face—so unfair that he can look hurt, that he gets to be the victim.
He coughs into his fist, a nasty sputter, deep and wet, the shackles connecting his hands jangling. He doesn’t look well. He probably isn’t well.
But he doesn’t get her pity.
“I’m here about Billy,” she says.
He clears his throat, cocks his head. “He okay?”
“He’s been talking about Val. He’s become convinced she didn’t commit suicide.”
He brings a hand to his forehead. “Oh, Jay-sus, no. Even with the autopsy report.”
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