Chicago Blood: Detective Shannon Rourke Book 1

by Stewart Matthews

  “I have to go,” she said. “Work’s calling me on the other line.”

  “Okay. Don’t miss that flight.”

  “I won’t.”

  She touched the button on her phone to answer Dedrick’s call.

  “Please tell me you have something about the warrant,” Shannon said.

  “No, I just wanted to hear your voice.”

  “I’d punch you over the phone if I could.”

  “I know,” he said. “But if you did that, you might make me wrinkle the warrant I’m holding right now.” There was a brief shuffling of paper in the background. “It authorizes CPD to search for any large sums of money, or signs thereof, at the home of Colm Keane.”

  “Good,” she said. “Meet you at his place?”

  “I’m already out the door.”

  Shannon ended the call. Without looking, she reached down to the waist of her jeans and expected to find her star and gun still there. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d collapsed into bed before putting either one in the top drawer of her nightstand. She felt nothing.

  Panic fluttered in her chest, until she saw both items neatly placed on top of her nightstand.

  “Did you do that?” she said to Frank.

  He barely acknowledged her. Not even a flick of his ear. That dog would sleep in her bed all day if it were up to him.

  She pulled off the CPD polo she’d worn since yesterday morning. It smelled vaguely of the humid Chicago air and her own sweat. She tossed it in the hamper, changed her bra, then rolled some deodorant on her underarms, and pulled on a new polo.

  This one was slate gray instead of dark blue—she had to at least give the illusion she’d showered since last night.

  Shannon pulled her hair into a ponytail and held it back with a dark hair tie. She changed out of her jeans and underwear. A pair of dark blue jeans would work—the pair that made her look like she had a butt.

  She clipped her gun and star on her hip, then clapped for Frank.

  “Out of bed, lazybones.”

  He looked at her from the corners of his eyes. Once again, he tested her.

  “Come on, Frank.” She grabbed his collar and guided him down.

  Out in the hallway, she smelled breakfast. She walked toward the front room.

  “Michael?”

  “You really shouldn’t leave your gun on your hip when you sleep.” Michael sat at their small, round table with his laptop in front of him and a half-eaten plate of scrambled eggs and bacon to his left.

  “That was you?” she asked.

  “Who else?” He stretched in his chair, then turned to look at her. “Frank?”

  She shrugged.

  “Oh come on, Shannon. You think I can’t take care of you anymore?” He smiled at her like it had been a joke, but she felt the hurt behind his words.

  “Off to work?” Michael motioned at her star.

  “I don’t know that I’m ever not working.” She brushed past him, into their little kitchenette where a half-emptied pot of coffee stewed on its warmer. “Just came to get a cup before I leave.”

  She pulled a travel mug out of an upper cabinet.

  “I can make eggs before you go,” he said.

  “No, thanks.” She poured a splash of creamer into the cup. “I have to get moving. Dedrick is waiting on me.”

  “It’ll only a take a minute.” He hopped up from his chair, went to the fridge, and pulled out a carton of eggs. “You gotta eat.”

  “I’ve got all I need.” She lifted the travel mug at him.

  Michael didn’t listen. He grabbed a pan from the drying rack next to the sink, cracked two eggs into it, and put it over a burner.

  “Give me three minutes.” He grinned at her.

  She grabbed her coffee and scooted out of the way. Why fight it?

  Within seconds of taking her brother’s chair at the round kitchenette table, Frank curled up on top of her feet. The militant dog-trainer part of her brain hated that she let him do that, but the rest of her enjoyed feeling his short, bristling hair scratch against the knuckles of her toes.

  “Sleep okay last night?” She noticed Michael had Facebook open on his laptop again.

  “No,” he said. “Did you find anything out?”

  “I can’t talk about it.” She scrolled absent-mindedly through Michael’s newsfeed—all the pictures and status updates of his friends. There was a lot of stuff about Colm.

  “I know,” he said. “I just thought you would.”

  She stopped at a picture of Colm. He had his tattooed arm hanging over the neck of an absolute knockout—a girl that could have easily graced the front cover of a women’s magazine. The picture had been shared by someone named Isabella Arroz. It was three months old.

  “Did Colm have a girlfriend?”

  “Isabella,” Michael said.

  “You ever meet her?”

  “No, never,” he said. “I know he’s been with her for a little while, but that’s it.”

  Michael plated the scrambled eggs, grabbed a fork, and brought it all to the table.

  “Thanks.” Shannon’s stomach grumbled. She was hungrier than she realized.

  “Colm never was very good with girls.” Michael leaned toward the laptop to get a better look at the picture. “But it looks like he made some improvements if he dated her.”

  “I know,” Shannon said through a mouthful of eggs. “She looks like she belongs in one of those murals at a Mexican restaurant.”

  “She should be standing at the top of an Aztec pyramid with feathers in her hair.” Michael spun the laptop back toward him. “Colm knocked it out of the park with her.”

  Shannon took the last forkful of her eggs. She washed it down with a swallow of coffee.

  “Thanks for breakfast.” She stood up, kicking Frank off her feet. She gave Michael a kiss on the cheek as she made her way to the door.

  “Would you walk Frank again?”

  “Sure,” Michael said. “It’s not like he’d give me a choice anyways.”

  She grabbed her work bag off the hook next to the door and reached for the knob.

  “Hey, Shannon—before you go…”

  She stopped and looked to Michael.

  “You aren’t supposed to talk about it, but I just have to know one thing—and maybe you can’t answer yet, but if you can, would you tell me?”

  “It depends on what it is.”

  That seemed to make Michael consider what he was going to say next.

  “Would you tell me if Colm went back to the mob?”

  Oh God, that was the one question she dreaded. What was she supposed to say to that? Right now, it looked like he had. But should she tell Michael that? The answer might pull him to a place they both knew he shouldn’t go.

  She opened the front door and stepped out into the hallway of their building.

  “I’ll tell you everything I can when I can.”

  She closed the front door behind her.

  What in the hell had she gotten herself into? Maybe she’d figure it out by the time she got back to Colm’s house.

  CHAPTER 9

  “Colm Keane wasn’t wanting for locks.” Dedrick kicked aside the chips and splinters of what used to be the front door jamb of Colm’s house. He wore yesterday’s suit—a hint that he hadn’t followed his own advice to Shannon. The pair of deputies with them had already fanned out inside the house, leaving the battering ram leaned up against the cream-colored wall in the front entryway.

  “The only other time I’ve ever seen a house with three deadbolts and a keypad lock, I found enough firearms to make my old battalion S2 blush,” Shannon said.

  “You found a weapons cache in Chicago?”

  “No, that was during the cleanup after Fallujah,” she said. “The first battle.”

  Dedrick walked toward a wet bar a few steps into Colm’s living room. He approached it, uncorked an empty whiskey bottle, and sniffed it. His head popped back like the vapors punched him the nose.

 
“You must’ve made a pretty picture in camo.” He sniffed the bottle again. “I bet you had to knock the other GIs away with the butt of your rifle.”

  “It wasn’t really like that.” She leaned up against the wall and watched him work.

  He grinned at her, then offered the empty bottle.

  “I’ll pass, thanks,” she said.

  He shrugged and sat the bottle down.

  “Well, I guess this is where all the magic happened,” Dedrick said. “Where should we look first? That pile of bottles over there, or the DVD collection?”

  Shannon chewed her knuckle and sighed. Colm’s house looked like a bachelor pad if she ever saw one—undecorated, unkempt, and a little unsettling.

  Which was too bad. The place had good bones. It was an open concept townhouse with high ceilings, hardwood floors, and lots of built-in shelves and cabinets. It looked as if someone had renovated in the last few years. The living and dining room opened into each other, the kitchen was partitioned from the rest of the house, and Shannon guessed the bedrooms and bathroom branched from a hallway off the dining room.

  But God, was it ever a mess.

  If CPD decided they wanted to test every empty or half-drunk beer bottle Shannon could see in this moment, it’d take them at least six months to get through it all. Bottles piled so high in a trash can in the corner, they tipped over on the floor, and they hid on the built-in shelves between Colm’s disheveled collection of DVDs.

  The whole house stunk like gym socks and dirty underwear, too. Shannon wouldn’t be surprised if he used old laundry to stuff the raggedy, puke-stained couch in the living room—his only piece of furniture aside from the bar.

  She turned over a Chinese takeout box with the toe of her shoe. Thankfully, nothing scurried out from beneath it.

  “If you got rid off all the beer bottles, burnt that old couch, and, I dunno, bleached everything else, I bet you’d have an acceptable house for some of Chicago’s displaced frat boys,” Dedrick said.

  “There are plenty up near Wrigley,” Shannon said. “I can get the word out.”

  “If I were one of them, you’d have my full attention.”

  She rolled her eyes. Lucky for him, he was outside of punching range.

  “I want to check out the bedroom,” Shannon said. “Experience tells me if we’re going to find anything, it’ll be there.”

  She walked past the bar, cutting diagonally across the space that probably would have served as Colm’s dining room, if he’d bothered.

  The back hallway was almost too dark to see into. Shannon found the light switch. She flicked it on, but nothing happened.

  How fitting.

  She took her flashlight out of her work bag and turned it on. The hallway was featureless. No pictures, no decorations, no nothing apart from the thermostat on a wall and a couple beer bottles ripening in a corner.

  The further she went, the mustier it smelled. There must’ve been a bathroom behind one of the doors. God help her if they didn’t find money, or at least evidence of money, in one of the other rooms.

  There was a door at the end of the hall. Shannon turned the brass knob and it drifted open on its own.

  On the other side, she saw Colm’s room.

  It was every bit as messy as the living room, but at least it wasn’t worse. The empty beer bottle motif continued here. Half a dozen on top of the dresser, more purposefully stacked into a tight grid in the corner, even one or two at the side of his bed. Maybe he’d drank them in his sleep.

  Shannon recalled her father’s number one rule for drinking: if you never sober up, you never have a hangover.

  She shivered thinking about it. But then, at least Colm had the decency not to inflict himself on an innocent family.

  “Looks like our boy was in a hurry to get out of town.” Dedrick appeared in the doorway behind her. “That dresser looks worse than the rest of the house.”

  He was right. A drawer leaned up against the dresser like it had been yanked out and left. Another sat on the floor in front of it. Both held a few items of clothing, but were largely empty. The others were all open to some degree, and looked to be about as empty.

  “If he planned on leaving, where was his stuff when he was shot?” Shannon said.

  “Well, kid,” Dedrick said, “I’m guessing that like most other people, he left his bags in his car while he went to the liquor store.”

  “And I’m guessing you pulled any records we had on him this morning when you put in the warrant request.” Shannon took out her pen—one she could part with.

  “Ah, dammit,” Dedrick said.

  “You didn’t?”

  He turned up his empty hands and grimaced. “I screwed up.”

  Dedrick didn’t say that very often. It wasn’t that he was full of himself or couldn’t own up to his mistakes—it was that he didn’t make many.

  “Well, Detective Halman,” Shannon said. “Are we getting a little sloppy in our old age?”

  He smirked at her. “Let me know when you’re done looking through his drawers.”

  “Oh, gladly.”

  She used the pen to move aside an old t-shirt in one of the drawers on the ground. She’d be damned if she touched anything in this place, even with her latex gloves on.

  Nothing of note beneath the shirt, unless you wanted to see a pair of old jean shorts.

  She opened a drawer near the top of the dresser. Underwear. Great. And lots of it still here. If Colm planned on skipping town in the same boxers he left with, anyone who came looking for him would smell him long before they ever saw him.

  Shannon sighed. She should’ve been working her way through some rugged, cute guy’s swim trunks right now. They’d both be speckled with dune sand and smelling of Lake Michigan. Instead, she’d been cursed to sort through Colm’s nastiness.

  Then something beneath the underwear caught her eye. Clear plastic.

  She scooped Colm’s underwear out of the drawer and tossed it aside.

  A plastic baggie. And from inside it, Shannon’s own face looked back up at her. It was a picture of her from fourth grade, when she had bangs swooped over her eyebrows and a chunky, awkward little face with a half-smile. She stole that affectation from her brother.

  Inside the bag was an entire stack of photos. Shannon hoped they weren’t all of her.

  “Look at this,” she said.

  Dedrick popped his head out of Colm’s closet.

  “What?”

  Shannon held them up where he could see.

  “Is that you?” Dedrick cracked a smile.

  “Don’t you dare.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “I was in fourth grade—I’d like to see what you looked like at that age.”

  “I was goddamned beautiful,” he said. “Of course.”

  “Of course.”

  There were enough old photos packed into the baggie that she wasn’t sure if she’d split it at the seams on accident. She pulled the two sides of the zipper apart, and the baggie held together. Shannon carefully upended it and let the photos slide out onto Colm’s unmade bed.

  She fanned them out slowly with the tips of her fingers. A crease or a bent corner might destroy some piece of significant evidence. Or maybe there was a purposeful order to them.

  “Just looks like old photos of friends and family,” Dedrick said.

  Shannon’s finger stopped on a picture of herself, Michael, and Colm at Indiana Beach—the old water park in Monticello. They were in high school. She remembered sneaking into a garage near Boystown before dawn that morning. Colm knew his father had a car stashed there, and he hot-wired it. He did it without a second thought. Just like that, they were off.

  “How old were you there?” Dedrick asked. “Fifteen? Sixteen?”

  “Fourteen,” she said. “Colm tried to kiss me that day.”

  “Yeah? What happened?”

  “Michael saw us and punched him in the gut just a half-second before we actually did it.”

  Dedrick shook his head.<
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  “What?” she said.

  “You don’t kiss your best friend’s little sister,” he said. “That’s a breach in the guy code. A pretty serious one.”

  She laughed to herself and put the picture back in its place on the bed.

  “Makes perfect sense Colm did it, then,” she said. “He did what he wanted when he wanted.”

  “If he had a wild streak, I can see why you fell for him. You like bad boys.”

  “Oh? Do I?”

  Dedrick was one smartass comment away from getting his armed punched.

  “Sure,” he said. “And that’s good news for me—I’m a good guy.”

  She decked him just above the elbow.

  “Detective Rourke?” An officer called for her from the hallway. “Detective Rourke, are you back here?”

  “At the end of the hall,” she called back. “Detective Halman and I are in the master bedroom.”

  She expected a smart comment from Dedrick, but he feigned innocence and held up his hands.

  “Detectives.” The officer poked his head into the room. It was Dan Coughlin. His head was shaved into a mirror shine and it caught the paltry light in Colm’s bedroom. “I think you should see something out here.”

  They followed Coughlin back into Colm’s living room. Near a pile of opened DVD cases, a rectangular safe no larger than a briefcase waited on the floor in front of the TV.

  “That’s new,” Dedrick said. “Where’d you find it?”

  “In that vent.” Coughlin pointed to a square hole in the wall behind one of the upper shelves. “I’ve seen dope dealers hide money and whatever else inside DVD cases before, so I took it upon myself to go through all these DVDs on the shelf.” He motioned toward the pile of opened DVD cases on the ground. “That’s when I noticed the vent behind them.”

  A silver thread had been tied around the handle of the case. It was around six feet long. Shannon dropped to her knees, then picked the wire up. It was braided steel, probably about a sixteenth or an eighth of an inch thick.

  “Picture wire,” she said.

  Coughlin nodded.

  “What made you decide to check that vent?” she asked.

  “My dad was an HVAC man—used to run the duct work in houses under construction. I helped him a couple summers when I was in college,” he said. “Soon as I looked at that vent, I noticed part of the duct was missing. I took the grate off and I saw that wire wrapped around a roofing nail on the inside of the wall. I pulled it out, and sure enough…” He motioned toward the safe.