I race to that blood smear, to that corner, cautiously in case he pops back around and fires. I reach the corner, stop, crouch down, and peek around the corner.
A bullet blasts the wood above me, right where my head was supposed to be. This guy can shoot. But he can’t run. He’s limping toward a car, but he won’t get there.
I shoot again and hit him again, this time in the right shoulder blade. The alley lights are enough for me to see that he has two wounds now, one close to the left kidney, the other in the right shoulder blade.
Already hobbled, now with two gunshot wounds, he can’t make it much longer. I’m surprised he’s still upright.
But he’s got nowhere to go.
“You’re done, Disco!” I shout. “You know it. Drop the gun or I drop you!”
Which in his world might be preferable to being caught.
He keeps moving forward, nothing more than an awkward shuffle, but still firing his weapon behind him, a bullet ricocheting off the pavement, another splintering the wood of the garage.
I stay low, size him up, and put one in his left calf.
He crumples to the ground. His gun bounces out of his grip. His hand scrabbles for the weapon, but he’s not going to reach it. Not before I reach him.
I raise a hand as I hear Patti coming around the corner, loaded and ready.
“He’s down,” I tell her.
“He’s not dead.”
“I know. I got him. There was a body back there by the driveway,” I say. “In the bushes. Check it out. And call in a 10-52.”
“You sure you wanna do that?” she asks.
I look at her. She’s got one eye on Disco, as do I, but he isn’t going anywhere.
“My way, right?” I say.
She nods. “Your way.”
“Then do it,” I say. “And hurry back. I need you as a witness.”
She rushes through the backyard toward the driveway.
I walk over to Disco, who can’t move laterally but has managed to roll himself over. I keep a close eye on him, making sure he doesn’t have another weapon.
He doesn’t. He’s done.
“I need…ambulance,” he says.
“You do,” I agree. “No question about it.”
The shoulder wound is survivable. The other bullet probably hit a kidney. So he probably doesn’t have a great deal of time.
And he probably knows that.
His breathing growing shallower now. I reach down and remove the night-vision goggles off his face, toss them. “Who’s the guy in the bushes?” I ask. “Porter?”
He closes his eyes, nods faintly. He grimaces, tries to adjust himself, but can’t prop himself up anymore. His head falls back against the pavement of the alley.
Patti comes jogging around the corner. “He’s dead. It’s Dennis Porter.”
I look at Disco, nudge him with my foot.
“Okay, Disco, it’s just us now,” I say. “Let’s see if you get that ambulance.”
Chapter 109
“YOU HAVE a chance to live,” I tell Disco. “You have a chance to get a deal that will give you witness protection if you help us catch the general. But none of that happens—I don’t even call that ambulance—until you give me some answers.”
He stares at me, fading. He’s out of options. And his fear of self-incrimination can’t be that high. He knows Augustina flipped on him. He must realize we already have him on any number of state and federal human-trafficking charges, not to mention attempted murder charges, that will put him away for decades. He’ll never see daylight again. Admitting to one more crime isn’t gonna make a difference.
The only question is his will to live. Some people in his position would rather bleed out, end it right there, than suffer the penal consequences.
“Ask him, Billy,” Patti whispers. “C’mon, there’s no time.”
I turn on my handheld recorder. “Vasyl Discovetsky, do you know a man named Nathan Stofer?”
“Nathan Stofer?” Patti says. “That’s your question?”
I glare at her. “My way,” I remind her. “My call.”
Disco coughs, sputtering.
“Disco, how do you know Nathan Stofer?”
His head lolls to the side. “I…killed that man.”
“How?” I ask. “Where? Why?”
“I shot him…in parking garage downtown.”
“Why?”
“The general…”
“Give me his name.”
“I need…ambul—”
“Tell me the general’s name!”
“General…Kostyantin…Boholyubov.”
“What about him?”
“This man Sto—Stofer…was stopping the general from being in…business deal. The…Stratton hotel.”
“And what did the general do about that?”
“He…told me…to kill him.”
“And you did?”
He nods.
I nudge his shoulder. “Give a verbal answer for the recording device.”
“Yes,” says Disco, “I did.”
“Billy, what are you doing?” Patti says. “We don’t have time.”
“Do you know why Antoine Stonewald pleaded guilty to Nathan Stofer’s murder?” I ask.
Disco nods. “I threatened…his family…if he did not.”
“Did Antoine Stonewald have anything to do with Nathan Stofer’s murder?”
“No.”
I turn off the recorder.
Just as the faint sounds of an ambulance’s siren grow louder, having responded to Patti’s call for a 10-52—an ambulance.
Disco hears it, trains his fading eyes on me. “You…already called…ambulance.” His words a bare whisper. A small smile crosses his face, as if he admires the deception, one bullshitter conning another.
“Did you kill Val?” Patti shouts at Disco. “Did you kill Billy’s wife?”
She kicks his foot, some boot he’s wearing. Disco faintly grimaces and shuts his eyes. He may not make it to the ambulance.
As he lies on his back, the blood follows the path of gravity back through the entrance wound by his kidney, forming a pool beneath him.
“Did you kill Billy’s wife?” Patti shouts again.
The paramedics rush through the backyard and get to work on Disco. Patti and I back up and let them do their work.
“You didn’t ask him,” she says, half question, half accusation.
“Ran out of time,” I say. “I went in order of importance.”
“Order of importance? Suddenly something’s more important than knowing how Val died?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” I say.
Because I can’t bring Valerie back. But I can save Antoine, precisely the thing Valerie was trying to do before she died.
It’s what she would have wanted.
This audio recording, with both Patti and me as witnesses, will exonerate Antoine Stonewald. And help take down General Boholyubov, if he hasn’t escaped to some country without an extradition treaty. Valerie wanted to free Antoine, save these girls, and punish the traffickers. It took me four years, but I finally completed her mission.
“You said you were gonna kill him.” She flips a hand. “Instead, you get him medical care.”
“Right.”
Patti gives me a sidelong glance. “I suppose you’re gonna say Val would’ve wanted that, too.”
That’s exactly right. But suddenly I can’t speak, too choked up with emotion. Patti, using her twin superpower detector, finally gets it, pulls me into a hug.
“She was a better person than I am,” I whisper. “She was stronger than me. God, I miss her so much.”
I say those words without tears, feeling some strength in a newfound connection with Valerie. Regret, no doubt, that I didn’t do more to understand what she was going through at the time. But cognizant enough, objective enough with the benefit of hindsight, to cut myself a little slack, too—I was focused on our beautiful little Janey.
Both of us
, in our different ways, were doing the best we could.
That’s gonna have to be enough.
The paramedics working behind us lift Disco onto a gurney and rush off with him. Maybe they can save him. I don’t love his chances.
“Maybe he pulls through,” says Patti. “And maybe he’ll tell you the truth.”
“That’s a lot of maybes,” I say. “In the meantime, we have work to do. We have to see about all those girls, make sure they’re getting treatment and help them find their way home. Plus,” I add, “tomorrow we go see Antoine in prison and deliver him the good news.”
Patti raises her eyebrows, makes a face. “After all this, you didn’t even ask him the question.”
I watch the ambulance pull away. Police squadrols pulling up, too. This sleepy little corner of the city is about to turn into a circus.
“I didn’t need to ask him,” I say. “I already know what happened to Valerie.”
Chapter 110
THE PRISON just came off lockdown today, apparently, so most inmate visits had been canceled. But when I told them it was official police business, not just some social call, they allowed me a visit.
Patti’s with me, sitting in the private interview room, her legs bobbing up and down nervously.
Neither of us has slept. It was a long night. Every one of the girls we rescued from that basement—official count of thirty-two—is addicted to Oxy, so Social Services has been working overtime, literally, to try to locate any next of kin while making sure they’re going through detox.
The truth is that the path forward for these girls will be rough. Some may never overcome their addictions, not to mention their years of sexual abuse. And many of them may not have any family to which they can return.
All we could do is give them a chance.
The questions last night came from every which way as the department tried to sort out this mess. Principal among them is why a decorated police captain such as Dennis Porter was found dead next to a house linked to a human trafficker, and why the two of them seemed to have so much to say to each other over burner cell phones.
They can’t ask Porter that question, obviously. And it remains in doubt whether Disco will ever answer that question. He’s still in a coma following surgery.
There’s gonna be a lot to talk about today at SOS—not to mention headquarters, at 35th and Michigan. But for now, we’re here in the prison for me to deliver some news.
The door opens. His leg irons drag along the floor. He stops when he first sees me, then Patti. He takes his seat as the guard locks his wrist shackles to the table.
“So you didn’t get yourself killed after all,” my father says to me.
It’s the first time I’ve seen Pop since he was hauled off to prison. He looks like a shrunken version of himself, weak and tired, pale and weathered.
His eyes travel to my lap, to the book resting there.
“I came here to thank you,” I say.
Chapter 111
MY FATHER being who he is, the circumstances being what they are, Daniel Collins Harney is unsure how to respond. “Thank me,” he says.
“I want to thank you for covering up what happened to Valerie. You were concerned that the authorities might think it was a homicide, so you steered it toward a suicide finding. Called in a favor with the medical examiner, right? He was suspicious, but you leaned on him to call it suicide.”
Pop looks at Patti, realizes she gave up that info to me.
“You were the chief of detectives, after all,” I say. “You could control as much as you wanted. So you basically hijacked the whole investigation and drove it to only one conclusion.”
Pop gives me a sidelong glance. “We wanted to protect you,” he says.
“Patti wanted to protect me. Patti did. You had someone else’s protection in mind, didn’t you, Pop?”
He folds his arms. “I don’t know what you’ve cooked up about me, son, but whatever it is—”
“Personally,” I continue, “I feel kinda stupid for not giving it more thought myself. I mean, really, how did that gun safe get opened? But, in my shoes, it never remotely occurred to me that someone murdered Valerie. Never once. I walked in and found her dead, holding my gun in her hand. After everything we’d been going through, and her depression, it wasn’t exactly a huge stretch to believe the wound was self-inflicted, was it? So I never doubted suicide as the cause of death. Which meant I must have left that gun safe open, right?”
“Right,” he says.
“Sure,” I say. “At the time, it was the only reasonable conclusion. At the time.”
A little tic plays at the corner of Pop’s mouth, a trait he always had. Maybe a tell, if I was reading him, and I’ve read a lot of people in my time, but never my father. My father wasn’t someone I read. He was just my father.
“No matter how strung out I was back then, keeping vigil at the hospital,” I say, “I never would’ve left my depressed wife alone in our house with a fucking handgun. Someone got into that safe. Someone who knew that combination. And only three people in the world knew it, because we all had the same one—Mom’s birthday. Ten twelve forty-nine.”
Pop shakes his head.
“I didn’t give it up, and Patti didn’t give it up. That leaves you, Pop.”
“No,” he says.
“Don’t worry—I’m not looking to bust you. You’re spending the rest of your life in prison as it is. You’re never getting out. I’m not wasting my time on you. You’re not worth it to me. I just wanted you to know that I know. And I wanted to see if you’re man enough to admit it.”
Balled into a shell now, eyes downcast, face reddening, my father looks up at me. “You don’t know anything.”
“Tell you what, Pop. Let’s make it easy. Invoke your right to counsel.”
“What?”
“Go ahead, invoke. Say you want a lawyer. Then anything you say to me afterward is a violation of your rights, inadmissible in a court of law.”
“Billy—”
“Invoke, Pop. Protect yourself. I’m not gonna bust you. I just want to hear you admit it.”
“This is ridiculous,” he says. “If this is all you—”
“Look what I found when we were cleaning up the house, getting ready to put it on the market.” I pick up the book from my lap, the red ledger the feds never found, where Pop kept a list of the criminals he was protecting and how current they were on their payoffs.
“I’ve never seen that before in my life,” he says.
“Course not,” I say. “Someone else must have stuck it behind the water heater in the basement, tucked into that little slot where I used to keep my Playboy.”
He works his jaw, fuming.
“Parsing through these cryptic references to clients,” I say, “I couldn’t help but notice one in particular.” I flip to the page I’ve dog-eared, including this entry:
S2607R—V Disc—300
“I couldn’t help but notice,” I say, “that Vasyl Discovetsky ran a prostitution house located at 2607 Rockwell. And I’m guessing this says he paid you three hundred dollars a month for protection. Or was it three hundred dollars a week?”
“This conversation is over.”
“Speaking of conversations,” I continue, “I had a nice one with Mr. Discovetsky last night, after I caught him.”
Pop closes his eyes.
“Disco says he killed Valerie. And you gave him the combination to the safe, so he could use my gun and make the whole thing look like a suicide.”
A lie, of course, that last part. Disco’s still in a coma. So sue me.
“How could you do that, Daddy?” Patti’s voice trembles. She gets to her feet. “You had Val…killed.”
Pop’s expression breaks at Patti’s plea. He always had a soft spot for her, his princess.
We’re doing a version of good cop, bad cop, even if Patti doesn’t realize it.
“Honey, no, it wasn’t like that,” says Pop.
�
�Then what was it like?” I ask.
Pop, cornered, breaks eye contact. Runs a hand over his thinning, snowy hair, the shackles clanging on the table. He takes a deep breath, blows out.
“I want a lawyer,” he says.
As always: more worried about himself than anyone else.
I get to my feet. “That’s enough,” I say. “That’s all I wanted to hear. I don’t want to hear your excuses.”
“Son—”
“I’m not your son anymore. You’re nothing to me. Live with that.”
I push through the door. I don’t look back.
Chapter 112
“DETECTIVE BILLY Harney for the superintendent.”
The receptionist waves me in. Superintendent Tristan Driscoll doesn’t look happy to see me.
“Long time no see,” I say to him, because we saw each other a week ago, the day after the bust, when the superintendent, in all his resplendent glory, announced the breaking up of an international human-trafficking ring on the city’s southwest side. He sold the media some bullshit about a long-running investigation, and I didn’t bother to stop him. I was there at the presser—didn’t have a choice—but I just stood in the background, sucking in my gut.
I drop today’s Tribune on his desk. The story above the fold: US INDICTS UKRAINIANS IN SEX-TRAFFICKING SCHEME. A nice photo of General Kostyantin Boholyubov, in full military garb, back when he ran the secret police.
“Department’s gotten some nice coverage over this,” I say.
“You as well, I noticed,” he says.
“Dennis Porter, too.”
Tristan loses his smirk.
“Captain Dennis Porter, killed in the line of duty, trying to take down a sex-trafficking ring. It’s a nice story to tell. Spares you the embarrassment of having yet another crooked cop in our wonderful Bureau of Internal Affairs. Another scandal on your watch. That’d be kinda hard to explain to the mayor, I suppose.”
The superintendent sits back in his chair, crosses a leg.
“I mean, imagine if that came out, Tristan: one of the chief officers in IAB, protecting a sex-trafficking ring. A lot of us, we were surprised the new mayor didn’t toss you on your ass over the last scandal. But however you managed to survive, you wouldn’t survive another one. So Denny Porter goes out a hero.”
The Red Book Page 27