“Would you mind if we spoke to you about Colm, Mrs. Keane?” Dedrick asked.
“It’s Tiller now,” Jill said. Forty years away from the Irish isle, and she still carried the specter of an accent.
“Pardon?”
“It’s Mrs. Tiller, now. I married David two years ago,” she said.
“Oh,” Dedrick said. “Of course.”
“Can we come in?” Shannon asked.
“If you think it’s worth the time,” she said. “Don’t know that I really want to talk about anything Colm has done.”
Shannon exchanged a look with Dedrick. They wiped their shoes on the doormat outside the house before they came in. Dedrick closed the front door behind them.
The smell inside the Tillers’ home reminded Shannon of her aunt’s house at Easter. The walls were white, the family pictures were plentiful—though Shannon guessed most of them belonged to David—and it seemed that Jill Tiller had a weakness for floral prints. The couch was floral, the curtains were floral, and if Shannon cared to check the bathroom, she’d guess the walls were done up in paper with prints of snapdragons, black-eyed susans, dahlias and all the rest.
“You can have a seat,” Jill said, motioning toward the couch.
“I’m gonna make some coffee.” David sulked his way into the kitchen. Shannon couldn’t help but take a little joy from his sour mood—though he should’ve been in better spirits. Not many people pointed a gun at CPD officers and walked away without a bullet for their troubles.
“How’s your brother getting along these days?” Jill asked Shannon.
“Fine,” she said. “He’s probably bored, but he could do with a little boredom.”
Jill nodded. She understood.
“Not surprised to hear he’s lived fast—but I am a little taken to see that you’re a police officer,” she said. “At the end of it all, you’re both Tommy Rourke’s children.”
Shannon hadn’t heard her father’s name in some time. Years, if she was lucky.
“You could say that,” Shannon said. “Though Tommy wasn’t much of a family man.”
“He loved to drink,” Jill said. “God rest his soul.”
Shannon gave her a tight smile.
It wouldn’t be right to snap at Jill, though she wanted to. She meant well. But if there were a God in Heaven, he’d have overnighted Tommy Rourke’s soul to Hell where he’d serve out eternity running laps around Satan’s hottest bonfire.
The son of a bitch deserved the worst for what he’d done to Michael all those years—and what he’d tried to do to Shannon.
“So what have you come to ask me about Colm?” Jill asked. “Out working for his father again?”
Shannon grimaced. Maybe he was, she wanted to say. And what would you know about it, Mrs. Tiller?
It could wait. There wasn’t much tact in interrogating a woman moments before you told her about her son’s murder.
“Mrs. Tiller,” she said, “I’ve come with bad news about Colm.”
Jill’s expression dropped, but she kept eye contact with Shannon.
“He was shot,” Shannon said. “We found his body over near 46th and Ashland.”
She sighed, then she scrunched the corners of her mouth. She nodded.
“I see.”
“Mrs. Tiller,” Dedrick said, “do you understand what Detective Rourke just told you?”
“Yes,” she said. “And I’d like to point out that neither of you knew Colm like I did. He was an ungrateful son—a little monster. If I’m surprised at all, it’s because he should’ve gotten himself killed years ago.”
She cleared her throat. Sitting up, she grabbed a pack of cigarettes from the side table next to her chair—Newports. She flipped open the top and picked one out.
“What makes you say that?” Shannon asked.
“Oh, Shannon, really.” Jill lit the cigarette and took a puff. “You knew him growing up. You knew how quick-tempered he was. How he’d wreck and ruin anything he could get his hands on if it suited him. Imagine having to live with that every day. But by the grace of God have I held onto any of my sanity.”
The poor woman. Colm’s antics wore on Shannon at times. Like when he stole her bookbag in high school, rummaged through it, then tossed all her tampons into the hallway.
“Did you know anyone who’d want to kill him?” Dedrick clicked his pen.
“Not really, no.” Jill ashed her cigarette into a faded Mickey Mouse coffee cup. “I didn’t speak with him much after the divorce.”
“But you did speak to him?” Dedrick said.
“He’d call. Mostly when he thought he could get something from me—money, usually.” She shrugged and exhaled a cloud of cigarette smoke. “We talked around last Easter. I remember it because he said he was turning his life around. But for me, it was too late. I wished him well and went back to making my deviled eggs. I didn’t want to be taken into his antics again.”
Shannon jotted down some key points on her notepad.
“When were you and Ewan divorced?” she said.
“Ten years ago last month.” Jill tapped the end of her cigarette into her Mickey Mouse cup again.
“Mind if I ask why?”
“Tommy Rourke’s daughter asking me why Ewan and I divorced?” She took a drag from the cigarette. “Yes, I mind.”
“What if I ask?” Dedrick said. “I’m the son of nobody you know—my dad ran a gas station in Tuscaloosa.”
Jill looked him over. “I don’t think my divorce has anything to do with Colm’s death.”
“Probably not,” Shannon said. “But you never know.”
Jill chuckled. “I liked you better when you were younger. You weren’t so nosy.”
“Yeah, well we all change, don’t we?” Shannon said.
“Not in my experience,” Jill said. “When you try to go around changing who you are, it’s like trying to shoo off your own shadow. It doesn’t go away easy like that. It stays right beside you, no matter if you like it or not.”
“Is that why you didn’t think Colm could make himself a better person?” Shannon asked.
“You tell me.” Jill tapped out the cigarette. “You’re the people trying to figure out why someone would kill him.”
Shannon sighed and put down her pen and pad of paper. She looked at Dedrick in an unspoken invitation to take things over if he felt like it.
“Look, Mrs. Tiller. Jill,” he said. “Clearly you and your husband don’t care for our being here. And you seem at peace with your son’s death. So, if you would just tell us anything you know about Colm—his recent whereabouts, who he spent time with, where he worked—we’d appreciate the info, and we’ll move on.”
She took another cigarette out of the pack. The faint smell of menthol touched Shannon’s nose.
“He didn’t work.” She lit it. “My son was a deadbeat.”
“Do you have his most-recent home address?” Shannon asked.
Jill looked at Shannon from the side of her eyes.
“I’ll get my address book.”
She walked across the living room, toward the hallway between the front door and the couch where Shannon and Dedrick sat, then disappeared.
Shannon waited until she couldn’t hear the soft shuffle of Jill Tiller’s slippers against the hallway carpet before she spoke up.
“In the five years I’ve done this job, I’ve never seen anyone react to their child’s death like that unless they had some part to play in it,” she said.
“Even the guilty parents ham it up when the police come by asking questions,” Dedrick said.
He was right.
“What’re the odds she leaves us sitting here while she goes back to bed?” he asked.
“Decent enough that I wouldn’t bet against it.” Shannon stood up from the couch. She had to move around or risk falling asleep right here in the Tillers’ living room.
Jill left her cigarette burning in the ashtray. Shannon picked it up, then snubbed it out. “Terrible habit.�
�
“You aren’t getting on anyone’s good side around here,” Dedrick said.
“They started it.”
David Tiller returned from the kitchen with a mug of steaming coffee.
Shannon looked over the edge of the mug. Black coffee. Anyone who said they enjoyed black coffee was a liar. You can’t enjoy anything that tastes like chalk.
“I have a question, Mr. Tiller,” she said.
His eyes met hers as he slurped his coffee.
“How did you know Detective Halman and I were on your front lawn?”
“I was awake,” he said as he sat down in his overstuffed leather recliner. “Couldn’t sleep.”
“Probably hard to sleep with a shotgun under your pillow,” Dedrick said.
“Easier than you might think.” David took another slurp of his coffee. “All those gangs out there in Chicago make me nervous.”
“You get many gangbangers out this far?” Dedrick asked.
“No,” David said. “But I keep wondering when they’re finally going to come my way and ruin the neighborhood. You know they’re out there, looking at my house and my car and wondering when they can take it.”
“I don’t think they can see all the way to Addison from around Humboldt Park,” Dedrick said.
David Tiller sneered at him. “You think you’re so damn funny, but cops like you are part of the problem. You think you can barge into a man’s house and kick him around at any old time of night.” He edged forward in his chair. “I’m a law-abiding citizen, sir. I know my rights.”
“Yes, we know,” Shannon said. “You demonstrated your mastery over Constitutional Law earlier.”
He spit out a little disgusted air. He sank into his chair.
“Here’s Colm’s address.” Jill stepped out from the hallway. She stabbed a piece of paper at Dedrick. “Take it and leave, please.”
Dedrick stood up, adjusted the waist of his pants, then took the slip of paper from her hand. He read it out loud.
“1717 North Albany Avenue, #2.” He looked at Jill. “Is this an apartment?”
“How would I know?” Jill asked. “I told you I didn’t much care for Colm.”
Many times over.
Shannon grabbed her bag and made her way to the door. Dedrick followed, as did David Tiller.
When she and Dedrick stood on the porch of the Tillers’ home, she looked to her left and grabbed one of the twelve-gauge birdshot shells. She tossed it to David.
“You might want that back,” she said.
The front door slammed closed behind her.
CHAPTER 6
North Albany Avenue was nothing special at six in the morning. It wasn’t the Indiana Dunes. It wasn’t sunlight breaking over Lake Michigan, stealing the breath out of Shannon while she scratched Frank under his collar. It was a little street north of Humboldt Park where people parked their modest cars out front of their modest town homes.
Colm Keane’s townhouse fit right in with the rest of them. At least it looked that way from his front porch.
“Doesn’t look like what I had in my head,” Dedrick said. “I expected something a little…rougher.”
“Hold your judgments until we see the inside.” Shannon tried to shield the glass of Colm’s front window from the growing sunlight so she could peek inside. But a cheap venetian blind hung cockeyed across the other side of the glass.
“Think he lived with anyone?” Dedrick asked. “Roommate or something?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
He knocked on the front door again. Nothing moved inside Colm’s house.
“Guess we should call in a warrant,” Dedrick said.
“I’ll go grab my phone out of the car.”
Shannon started down the front steps when the next door neighbor stepped outside. He was tall, in his twenties, and had dark brown hair, an angular face, and the lean, muscular body of a sworn gym rat. He probably thought the world owed him something he hadn’t earned, and he was mad about it. He fit the mold, at least.
“Y’all looking for Colm?” he asked.
She stopped. “What makes you say that?”
He motioned toward the star hanging off her front pocket.
“Always got the impression that dude was into something.”
“Really?” she said. “Would you mind if I asked you a couple questions about him?”
He grimaced and scratched the back of his head. He wasn’t taking her attention too well. He looked nervous enough to shrivel up and disappear inside his jeans and baggy t-shirt.
“All right,” he said.
“What makes you think he was into anything illegal?”
“Dude had a look to him. The kind of look y’all probably seen a thousand times a day,” he said. “Know what I mean?”
Shannon knew.
“What’s your name, sir?” she asked.
“Robbie.”
“You have a last name, Robbie?” Dedrick asked from the porch.
“Simmons.” He pointed at a maroon Toyota Camry parked across the street. “I was about to leave for my job, but I got a couple minutes for y’all.”
Shannon approached the chest-high picket fence between Robbie’s yard and Colm’s. It was in bad need of some TLC. She leaned her forearms on it and contained her amazement that it didn’t crumble under her putting the slightest bit of weight on it.
“How well did you know Colm Keane?”
“I dunno,” Robbie said. Beads of sweat sparkled on his forehead. “Guess I’d say ’s’up to him if I saw him outside.”
“That’s it?” Shannon asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why would you think he was a criminal?”
Robbie shied away from the detectives for a moment. “I shot my mouth off. I should’ve minded my own business, I know. But I ain’t mean nothing by it.” Robbie licked his lips. “If y’all are cool with it, I don’t want to be late for work again.”
“Hold on,” Shannon said. Why was he being so skittish all of a sudden? “When was the last time you saw Colm?”
“I really gotta go.” He fidgeted with the keys in his pocket.
“We’ll write you a note,” Dedrick said. “Answer her questions.”
Robbie looked at Shannon and sighed.
“Last time I saw Colm was yesterday, I guess.”
“When yesterday?” She shifted her weight on the fence. The post beneath her creaked.
“Afternoon? Evening maybe?”
“Any clue what was he doing?”
“I dunno.” He rubbed the back of his neck and looked at his shoes. “I wasn’t really paying him no mind. I just got off work, and I wanted to go inside and get a drink.”
“And where did you say you worked?”
“The CTA.” Robbie pulled out his cell phone and checked the time. “I gotta get going, man.”
“We’ll make sure you don’t get in trouble,” Shannon said. “I just have a couple more questions.”
Robbie cocked his eyes at her dubiously. “I ain’t see how y’all can make that happen.”
She looked at Dedrick and held out her hand. He fished out a business card from his inside coat pocket and gave it to her.
“If your supervisor or your manager or anyone else wants to know why you were late, you have them call us at this number.” She gave Robbie the card. “CPD won’t let your boss interfere with a murder investigation.”
Robbie’s eyes popped open. “You telling me Colm murdered somebody?”
Dammit. She hadn’t meant to let that slip out—at least not in that way.
“No,” Shannon said.
It took a second for Robbie to process what that meant. When he did, his knees buckled. He dropped onto the cracked walk leading from his house and he covered his face with his hands.
“I can’t believe it.” His voice strained like he barely held back tears. “I just can’t, man. That dude got killed?”
Shannon didn’t know what to tell him. Anything she wanted
to say wouldn’t have helped. She stayed quiet.
“Y’all tell his family?” Robbie rubbed at his eyes. He had a rose tattooed on the back of his right hand, and it shivered with his spasmodic breathing.
“We told his mother. We haven’t contacted his father yet,” Shannon said. “Are you going to be okay, Mr. Simmons?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.” Robbie rubbed his hand through his hair. He had a look on his face like he waffled between pulling himself together and scattering his body into the winds for Lake Michigan. Until he finally said, “Yeah.”
Dedrick tapped Shannon on the shoulder and jerked his head toward Robbie. He wanted to press forward with questioning him, and she couldn’t think of a reason why they shouldn’t.
“I don’t want to minimize your pain,” Dedrick said, “but I’m thinking you knew Colm a little better than you admit.”
Robbie’s gaze shot up to Dedrick. “I dunno. I mean, I knew the dude, yeah.”
“He wasn’t just your neighbor,” Dedrick said. “You two were tight.”
Robbie shrugged.
“I know you’re grieving and all, but you’ve got to tell us the truth.”
“I ain’t lied to y’all!” Robbie jumped to his feet. “Tell him I ain’t lied to you,” he said to Shannon. He appeared to bounce out of his grief extraordinarily fast.
Dedrick stepped off Colm’s front porch in that slow, thoughtful, and dangerous way that only a man his size could. He let the weight of his mood, his inner monologue, become known through long and heavy steps up to the fence, next to Shannon.
“Mr. Simmons, the State’s Attorney doesn’t have much sympathy for people who lie to police officers conducting an investigation,” Dedrick said. “So I’m going to give you one last chance to tell us the God’s honest truth.”
“I did!” Robbie said.
“We know somebody came by looking for him!” Dedrick bluffed. But both he and Shannon knew Robbie had more information about Colm than he shared. They’d find a way to shake it loose.
“Tell us!” Dedrick bellowed. “Tell us before I have to drag your ass back to station.”
Robbie recoiled from Dedrick. He looked to Shannon for help—a good sign. He trusted her and was afraid of Dedrick, just as they liked it.
Chicago Blood: Detective Shannon Rourke Book 1 Page 4