“Even with that.”
“He never saw the original one, did he?”
“No,” says Patti. “I actually had a copy, but I burned it.”
“Thank Christ for that.” Her father opens his hands. “You said he’s ‘become convinced.’ So he doesn’t know?”
She shakes her head. “He doesn’t remember. He says it was all a haze.”
Her father nods, takes a deep breath. “He never told us what happened. Never talked about it. Not once, afterward. I figured, maybe the whole thing was like what you said—a haze. Or maybe he remembered it clear as day and just…didn’t wanna tell us.”
Patti had thought the same thing. She and her father talked about it all the time back then. “And even if he did remember,” she says, “he may not now. After, y’know, being shot in the head last year and having those memory issues. That ring a bell?”
He shoots her a look. “We gonna do that now? Or talk about Billy?”
He’s right. She needs to stay focused. “Well, whether the trauma back then fucked with his memory, or whether he’s blocked it out over time, or that gunshot injury from a year ago did it—as of now, he doesn’t remember what happened.”
“Okay, well, that’s a blessing,” he says. “So why the doubt all of a sudden?”
“He’s…he’s got it in his head that some sex traffickers killed her, that some case Val was working on—they had to shut her up. It’s total nonsense.”
“Better than the truth,” he says.
“Not if he’s going to hunt down the traffickers and kill them.”
Her father deflates. “That’s what he’s gonna do?”
“He says so. You ever know Billy not to keep his word?”
“Jay-sus.” His head lolls back. “Tell me about these traffickers.”
“He says they come from Ukraine. A former general, a bunch of ex–special operations thugs.”
He shakes his head. “He’s gonna get his ass killed.” He leans forward, looks at her squarely. “There’s only one choice,” he says. “You have to tell him the truth.”
She knows. Deep down, she’s known it for a long time. But no matter what else she may feel or think, he’s still her father, and maybe she just needed to hear him say it.
“But how in the hell do I do that?” she says. “How do I tell my brother that he killed his own wife?”
Book III
Chapter 85
FOUR YEARS ago. Patti didn’t go far from the house that afternoon.
She wasn’t sure why. She’d sat with Billy in the hospital for more than an hour after it was over, after Janey had been pronounced dead, after Billy had said his final good-byes, after Billy had tried, by her count, twelve times to reach Val by phone.
When she dropped him off at his house, he said he wanted to go in alone to break the news to Val.
But Patti didn’t go far. Just drove to the coffeehouse a couple of blocks away.
And worried.
Billy had just stared off in the distance on the car ride home. The fog of overwhelming grief, though he’d known this day was coming. But more than grief. Anger, too. No—anger didn’t do it justice.
Betrayal—that was it. Billy had held his daughter’s hand as she died, told her how much he loved her. Val should have been holding the other hand, should have been whispering in Janey’s other ear.
“She should’ve been there,” he said on the ride home from the hospital.
“People deal with this stuff in different ways,” Patti said. She felt like a shrink on a TV show, hearing herself, but it didn’t make it untrue.
“She should’ve been there.”
At a stoplight, Patti reached into the back seat for a bottle of Jameson she’d been planning to smuggle into the hospital at some point, to help Billy take the edge off during one of his overnight stays. “Have a hit of this,” she said.
Billy stared at the bottle as if he’d never seen one before. He hadn’t touched the sauce the whole time he’d stood vigil in the hospital, over a month in total.
Then he snatched it from her hand and, like a pro, unscrewed the top, raised the bottle to his mouth, leaned back, and opened his throat.
At least half the bottle was gone before Patti grabbed it from him. “Hey, easy, easy. You’re out of practice.”
Billy wiped at his mouth and looked out the window. “She couldn’t have at least kept her phone by her side in case I called? That was too much to ask?”
She looked at him. Didn’t know what to say. “This is tough for her, too, Billy. She has that depression thing on her best day. Now, with all this—she’s just…dealing with it the best she can.” Patti couldn’t believe she, of all people, was defending Val. Their roles had been opposite over this last month, Patti and her not-so-veiled criticisms, Billy making excuses for Val. But Billy was too far gone for diplomacy now.
“Let me go in with you,” she said when she pulled up to the curb outside Billy’s home.
“No.”
“You think Val’s in there? Or at work?”
“The fuck should I know? Maybe if she’d answer her phone.”
“Let me come in with you.”
“No.” Billy opened the car door, then looked back at Patti. How far he had fallen in this last month, the torture he’d endured, his lifeless, bloodshot eyes rimmed with dark circles, the downturn of his mouth. His whole world had cratered.
“I’ll come by later,” she promised.
And she didn’t go far. She couldn’t. She had to hover, stay close, remain on call. She drove to the coffeehouse down the street, nursed an extra-shot cappuccino. Felt the rush of the caffeine buzz. Worried about her brother.
Her cell rang thirty minutes later. Billy. She felt relief.
Then she heard what he had to say. She rushed out of the coffeeshop, jumped into her car.
His front door was unlocked. She bounded up the stairs and into Billy’s bedroom.
Felt herself slow. Heard faint breathing.
“Billy,” she said for some reason. Some instinctive need to announce her presence. Reached for the weapon at her side. Thought better of it.
She could already sniff it. She’d smelled it a hundred times.
She leaned forward and peered into the bathroom.
Massive blood spatter on the wall, in the freestanding tub, a pool on the floor.
Billy, sitting Indian-style on the floor.
Valerie, eyes wide and vacant, mouth agape, resting in Billy’s lap. The entry wound under her chin, a clean contact wound.
Billy, his lap and shirt covered in blood, cradling Valerie.
Holding his Glock, his service weapon, lazily in his hand.
“Oh, no,” she heard herself say.
“I…did this.” His voice nothing but a whisper of air, pitched high with emotion.
She didn’t know what to do, what to say. Her feet wouldn’t move.
But her head did. She turned and looked into the bedroom closet. The door open. The gun safe against the back wall. The safe’s door open, too.
She looked back at Billy. “She killed herself,” she heard herself say. “She couldn’t…it was too hard for her. She killed herself.”
Billy, staring at the floor, shaking his head. “I did this,” he whispered.
Patti looked back at the gun safe, its open door.
And she knew he was right.
Chapter 86
LATE MORNING. Carla Griffin locks the front door of her house, wearing sunglasses, a T-shirt, and shorts, looking like summer even with the gauze and tape on her face. She puts the suitcase in the back of her Honda and closes it up. Her mother-in-law, silver-haired and stooped, waddles over to the passenger side and gets in.
The boy, Samuel, belted in behind his grandmother.
Carla jumps in, starts up the car, backs it out of the driveway, and starts heading north. Wisconsin Dells, here we come!
This is the last fucking thing Porter should have to be doing, standing on the periph
ery of a baseball diamond in South Deering, binoculars to his eyes. But this isn’t something he can delegate. Delegating it would be bringing in someone else, and he needs another person knowing about this like he needs a third tit.
He lowers the binoculars.
It’s time. Carla’s out of the way now, taking Porter up on his offer to send her to a water park in Wisconsin. Harney is working alone on this for the time being.
Okay, Harney. You wanted a one-man crusade? You wanted to keep this quiet, do this solo?
Here’s your chance, pal.
He pulls out his burner phone and dials it.
“Let’s fucking finish this,” he tells Disco.
Chapter 87
AFTER TALKING to Antoine Stonewald at Stateville, I get on the Stevenson and head to work. I fit in my earbuds and check my phone for J Crew’s number, dial it.
“Yo yo yo. To what do I owe this great honorary privilege?”
Jay Herlihy grew up down the street from us, a cop’s kid like me. He was built like a linebacker and had the approximate IQ of a football, but he was a good seed overall. Except that one time, second grade, he made the mistake of punching Patti in the mouth. The three Brothers Harney didn’t think that was funny. We tackled him after school and rearranged his face. My mother was livid with us but delegated the punishment, as always, to Pop. Pop pulled the three of us into the study, heard our side of it, but you shoulda seen the color his face turned when he heard about Jay giving Patti, his prized possession, a bloody lip.
You boys screwed up, he said. You shoulda broken his arm.
Water under the bridge. Jay turned out all right. Ran with my crew, drank with us in the cemeteries, but he got a little wild in college and couldn’t make it into the Academy.
So he became a corrections officer.
When the small talk’s over, I get to it, lay it out for J.
“This Antoine Stonewald, he was in for murder—so Division 9, right?”
“Right,” I say. “Had to be. This would have been four years ago.”
“Yeah, well, for maximum—yeah, you’re right, some suit shows up unannounced and wants to talk to a detainee, we tell him to pound sand. Ya gotta schedule ahead, ya gotta be on a list, and that list is small—immediate family or the lawyer. But you’re saying his lawyer had just died.”
“Right.”
“Right, so, yeah, if this guy can show us his bar card, we can be sure he’s really a lawyer, yeah, we’d sign him in and let him talk to the detainee.”
“But he’d sign in,” I say.
“Most definitely.”
“No other way he gets in, J? Maybe he wants to come in quietly. Maybe a guard would help him sneak in, keep his name off the books?”
“Fuck yourself, Harney.”
“Didn’t mean you, J. But you know what I mean.”
“Yeah, yeah. No, here’s the thing. Someone wants to send a message to a detainee, they might try to get to him inside, through another detainee. In the yard or the mess hall. But a visit? No. There’s too much security. You couldn’t just buy off a guard. You’d have to buy off a dozen.”
“Bottom line,” I say, “some suit wanted to meet with the detainee, he’d have to go through the front door.”
“Most definitely. He’d sign in.”
“Good. So can you help me out?”
He sighs. “Division 9? You got an approximate date?”
More than approximate. The date of Valerie’s and Janey’s death is burned into my brain. And I was decent at math, so I can count out four days later, when Antoine formally pleaded guilty. It had to be within that short interval of time that someone waltzed into Cook County Jail and threatened to kill Antoine’s entire family.
“Might take me some time,” he says.
“I need this, like, yesterday, J. No fuckin’ foolin’. Any chance you can put your foot on the pedal for an old friend?”
I punch out the phone. The traffic finally opens up, and I floor it. Gotta make the most of my time with Carla gone.
I make it to headquarters in less than an hour. Vitrullo, at intake, nods to me. “Someone to see you or Griffin,” he says. “Griffin took a sick day, you probably know.”
“Right. Where?”
He juts his chin. “Over there. The girl.”
I turn. It’s a girl, probably late teens. Dirty blond hair back in a ponytail. A tank top, shorts, sandals.
And on her ankle, a tattoo of a black lily.
Chapter 88
I WALK the girl to an interview room. I say girl, because I’m guessing late teens, even though she looks more like early twenties. Heroin does that to you. It ages you, weathers you, beats the shit out of you while it loves you.
This girl has user written all over her. Undernourished. Dark, dead eyes. Bad skin.
She has nice features, though, a pretty girl. A party girl, if you tease that hair up, apply some makeup, put her in a nice dress. Sure, she’s a hottie, a top-drawer prostitute, when dolled up.
No tracks on her arms, which means she probably smokes, doesn’t shoot. Makes sense, if you’re projecting glamour. Evie had needle tracks on her arms, but she’d also escaped the clutches of her traffickers for at least the week she spent with Shiv and maybe longer, and it’s easier to inject than smoke.
I sit next to her, not across from her, because these interview rooms don’t project warmth. This isn’t a friendly atmosphere. We want our suspects intimidated, which we can use either way—scare them with our attitude, or be sugary sweet and ingratiate ourselves with them.
I’ve always known which way to play it. One of my strengths, reading people.
This time, I don’t know what to do. So I default to letting it play out.
“My name is Sadie,” she says. A thick accent, eastern European.
Not likely, but okay. “Last name?”
“Do I have to tell you that?” She’s nervous, fidgeting, scared or upset or both.
“No. That’s okay.” I put my hand on the table. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re here?”
Why don’t you tell me who put that tattoo of a black lily on you?
“My…friend,” she says. “My roommate. She…”
“Something happened to a friend of yours?”
She nods, bites her nails, which are long, manicured, dark purple.
“Okay, what’s your friend’s name?”
“Evie,” she says. Just like I’ve heard it. Evie-rhymes-with-Chevy.
I hold it back, best I can. “Does she have a last name?”
The girl nods. “Her name is Evalina Vacaru,” she says.
I don’t write it down. I don’t have a pad of paper in front of me. Didn’t want to spook the girl, make this seem too official.
Evalina Vacaru. Evalina Vacaru.
Our Jane Doe has a name.
“She is from Romania,” she says. “Timisoara.”
And so is this girl, Sadie—or not far from it. She pronounced the name of the city like a pro.
“I think…she is dead.”
“Why do you think that, Sadie?”
She nods, swallows hard. Looks away. “I saw…there is website for missing persons and unidented…unidentif…”
“A website for missing persons and unidentified bodies?”
“Yes, yes.”
It’s true. When the county doesn’t have ID on a dead body, they give out all the information they can—race, gender, height, weight—and post photos from the morgue. You have to go to a different page, after a warning that what you’re about to see will be graphic and shocking, but yeah, usually photos of the dead person will be on that site.
My name would’ve been posted there, too, as the lead detective. If you have any information that could lead to the identification of this individual…
“Evie was on…” Her voice shakes. She wipes away a tear.
Emotion, but this girl is well practiced at the stone expression, suppressing her hurt and fear and sadness.
�
��You saw Evie on that website? Photos?”
She closes her eyes, nods.
The county would have mentioned the tattoo on Evie’s ankle as well, maybe even posted a photo of it. Wouldn’t be hard for Sadie to confirm it was her friend.
I grab a tissue and a pen and notepad off the counter at the side of the room. Give her the tissue and slide the paper in front of her. “Could you write her name down?”
She does.
There’s no point in my playing totally dumb here. She knows from the website that I’m the lead cop and that Evie was murdered. But I don’t have to tell her everything I know, either.
“She was killed when the…little girl was killed?” Sadie asks.
“Yes, she was. Do you know why Evie was in K-Town?”
She shakes her head. “No. She left and did not come back. We did not know.”
“We,” I say. “Who’s we?”
“We…live with two other people.”
“Who?”
“Friends,” she says. “They are friends. Men, but…not boyfriends.”
Two men. She and Evie live with two men. The hookers and the pimps.
This prostitution ring is more than two girls. Maybe they house them separately. Not what I figured, but no reason that it couldn’t be true.
“Where do you live, Sadie?”
“I just…” She sighs again. “I just wanted you to know her name. So she could be…so the burial…”
“I understand, Sadie. I understand. Can you tell me where you live?”
“I do not…is that…do I have to tell you?”
“No.” I try to smile. “No, that’s okay.”
Sadie. No last name. No known address.
“How can I reach you?” I ask. “If I have questions about your friend?”
She hands me a slip of paper from her pocket. A phone number written in pen. Bogus, no doubt, but she was ready for the question. She doesn’t want me calling her.
“Sadie, can I help you in any way?”
“Me? No, is okay.”
“You’re an addict,” I say.
“No.” Like she expected that question, too.
“It’s okay. You’re not in any trouble. But I could help you get treatment.”
The Red Book Page 22