Her email client chirped at her. Shannon tabbed over and saw a new message. Her request for forensic analysis of the shell casings and cigarette butts from the scene of Colm’s murder had been received by CPD’s forensics lab, but the tests hadn’t been run yet.
That wasn’t surprising. She’d be lucky to get the results before tomorrow.
She tabbed back to the departmental database software and entered Colm’s DOB for the umpteeth time. The way Chicago had been in the last decade, one would think the higher-ups would figure out a way to cut down all the paperwork for CPD’s detectives. But here she was, eyeballs burning already from staring at her computer screen for the last three hours.
Someone tapped her on the shoulder.
Shannon swiveled around in her chair and saw Dedrick smiling at her. She felt a tickle in her stomach as she took her earbuds out.
“You look particularly fresh this morning,” he said. “Did the wake go well last night?”
“I can still taste the rum and Coke in the back of my throat.”
He sipped his coffee and laughed.
“It’s no hair-of-the-dog, but I bet I can scrounge up a couple beers from our colleagues’ desks if that helps,” he said.
“I’d puke on your shoes if I were a lesser person.”
“That’s no way to treat someone trying to do you a favor.” Dedrick leaned up against her desk and crossed his legs at the ankles. His shoes were perfectly shined and the little light blue diamonds on his black socks exactly matched the color of his dress shirt. “You find anything new about Colm’s girlfriend?”
“Isabella?”
He nodded.
“Only that she wasn’t there last night.”
“You didn’t ask around about her?”
“Once or twice, but no one really knew her,” she said. “I got the impression that more people were there to be seen by Ewan Keane rather than honor the memory of his son.”
Dedrick produced a pocket-sized notebook.
“Well, I ran her name,” he licked his thumb, then flipped through the pages, “and unless she’s a sixty-two year-old woman who can’t seem to keep the neighborhood dogs out of her garden, or possibly a missing girl from 2008, we don’t have anything on her.”
Shannon closed her eyes. The room started to spin again.
“So we’ve got virtually no chance of finding her.”
“Not all is lost,” Dedrick said. “We can still speak with Ewan, right?”
“He welcomes it,” she said. “So much that I’m certain we aren’t going to find out anything from him.” She swiveled in her chair and opened the top drawer of her desk. She took out Ewan’s card, then handed it to Dedrick.
“The business card of a mobster.” He turned it around in his fingers. “I bet there’s some collector on the internet who’d give you at least a twenty for this.”
She snatched it back from him. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“So what’s the point in talking to Ewan if you think he isn’t going to help?”
She shrugged. “We might get lucky and see something he doesn’t want us to see. Or maybe we can trip him up.”
“Or maybe we can get a Bloody Mary into you.”
A little puke welled up in her throat. She swallowed it back.
“You put alcohol near me today,” Shannon said, “you’ll need a whole new outfit.”
He smiled at her. Dedrick opened his mouth to say something else, but before he could, her desk phone rang.
She picked it up. “Detective Rourke.”
“Shannon, this is Sergeant Daly down at the front desk. I’ve got a pregnant lady here asking for the detective working Colm Keane’s murder case.”
Her heart skipped a beat. No way she’d get this lucky.
“What’s her name?”
There was a little noise on the other side of the line while Sergeant Daly asked the woman her name.
“Isabella Arroz,” he said.
CHAPTER 16
When the elevator doors opened to the first floor, Shannon ran as fast as her hangover would allow. Dedrick followed behind her, the leather soles of his shoes pounding against the tiled floor with every hurried step.
She rounded a corner and nearly crashed into an officer who side-stepped her. She saw Isabella up ahead, beyond a set of glass security doors.
Shannon slowed down. It was best to not appear too eager when a witness like Isabella surfaced. People picked up on nerves, and became nervous themselves, forgetting key facts or keeping information from an investigator. It didn’t take a genius to figure out how badly that could damage an investigation.
She checked that her periwinkle blouse was neatly tucked in the waistband of her gray slacks. Satisfied, Shannon pushed open the security door.
Isabella’s coffee-colored eyes fell on her immediately. In person, she was so beautiful it was almost unsettling—even for Shannon. It was certainly unfair. She was a walking statue, the kind of thing an artist would’ve chiseled out of marble over a decade of work.
She looked back at Dedrick. He already had a little perspiration on his brow. He looked scared as the computer club president asking a girl to prom.
“Isabella?” Shannon stuck out her hand. “I’m Detective Shannon Rourke.”
“Hello.” Isabella took her hand.
“This is Detective Dedrick Halman, he’s been assisting me with Colm’s case.”
Dedrick smiled tensely and waved at her. He was crushing on her. It took all the control Shannon was able to muster to keep herself from rolling her eyes at him.
“If it’s all right with you, we’d like you to come upstairs with us and talk for a few minutes.”
“That’s fine,” Isabella said.
“Then follow us this way, please.”
The security door unlocked and automatically swung open, courtesy of Sergeant Daly. The three of them walked through, the detectives flanking Isabella.
Shannon waited until the door snapped shut behind them to speak.
“I have to say, Isabella, you’re somewhat of an enigma over here.”
“Am I in trouble?” She sounded scared. Not uncommon for someone with no record walking into this set of circumstances.
“No,” Shannon said. “I only wanted to talk to you about Colm. I thought you’d be at his wake last night—but now I know why.” Shannon nodded toward Isabella’s belly. “How far along are you?”
“Six months,” Isabella said. “And I feel like my spine is going to break in half.”
“You carry it well.”
When she wasn’t pregnant, Shannon guessed Isabella was somewhere around a size two.
They rounded the corner and walked past the administrative offices on their way back to the elevator.
Suddenly, Isabella stopped.
“Is something wrong?” Shannon turned toward her. God help them if her water just broke or something.
Isabella didn’t appear to be in pain. She looked like she’d seen a ghost. Her eyes were fixed on the end of the hall.
“Do you need us to get someone?” Shannon asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m fine.”
Shannon and Dedrick glanced at each other.
“Would you still like to go upstairs with us?” Shannon asked.
“Who’s up there?”
“A whole flock of detectives.”
That seemed to bother her worse than anything.
“Will they hear us when we talk?”
“What are you planning on saying?” Shannon asked.
Isabella knotted her fingers together. When she did, she made her arms into a sling beneath her belly. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the floor.
“Something,” she bit her lip, “I don’t want people to hear. You know? People who might know Colm’s Dad?”
“I understand.” Shannon wasn’t about to tell her that she knew Ewan. “If it makes you feel better, we can go somewhere private and talk.”
Isabella pulled her lips
in, thinking, then nodded.
They walked to the elevator in silence. It carried them to the third floor, back to the Violent Crimes division offices. There were a couple private interrogation rooms along the far wall.
Dedrick opened up the nearest one.
“Suite number one,” he said. He held his arm across his body like a bellhop at a five-star hotel.
Shannon followed Isabella in. She rolled her eyes at Dedrick. She had to save that one for far too long.
He mouthed the word “what?” at her.
“We’ll talk about it later.”
The door clicked shut behind them. The bone-white walls of the interrogation room were bare. The room itself would’ve been empty, save for an old chair and table at its center. The table was bolted into the ground and had locking hooks which the detectives could feed the links of handcuffs into for their rowdier interviews.
That wouldn’t be necessary today. Isabella looked like she’d wilt if Shannon breathed on her too hard.
“Have a seat, if you like.” Shannon held a hand toward the plastic chair pushed in at the faux-wood table.
Dedrick pulled it out for her.
“Thank you.” Isabella settled into it.
“Don’t mention it.” He smiled at her.
As she watched that little display, Shannon’s hangover inexplicably felt ten times worse. She steadied herself against a wall and crossed her arms, bracing herself for another random burst of chivalry from Dedrick.
“Is it Colm’s?” Shannon asked.
Isabella looked at her in shock. “Of course.”
“How long had you and Colm been together?”
“Eight months—if that matters to your investigation.”
“We’re not here to pass judgment on you,” Dedrick said too quickly. “If Detective Rourke or I ask you a question, you can be sure it’s because it has something to do with catching Colm’s murderer.”
Dedrick was a far cry from the ready-to-rumble bad cop he’d been with Robbie Simmons.
“I understand.” Isabella rested her arms on top of her pregnant stomach. “But I don’t like feeling judged.”
“I’m sure that wasn’t Detective Rourke’s intent,” Dedrick said.
Shannon nodded.
“Barring anything too personal,” she said, “would you mind telling us what it was you were afraid to say downstairs?”
Isabella knotted her fingers again. She played with a ring on her pinkie, twisting it, then pulling and pushing it over her knuckle.
“Anything you say here stays between you, me, and Detective Halman,” Shannon said. “You don’t have to worry about anyone else hearing it until we go to trial.”
“I know.” Isabella took a deep breath and nodded.
“So would you like to tell us what you know?”
She nodded again. A strand of her straight, black hair dropped over he eyes. She sat up in her chair and pushed it behind her ear.
“Ewan had Colm killed,” she said.
CHAPTER 17
Michael did his best junkie walk.
It wasn’t too hard to remember how. You just had to act like your joints were made out of broken glass, like you hadn’t had an honest meal in three days, and like your underwear was bound up with cold sweat—or hot, depending on your drug of choice.
For him, it was heroin. He loved to feel the pain-melting joy when the drug slithered through his veins, coiled around his gray matter, and sifted through his ganglia.
He wasn’t on it now, of course. He never would be again, for all the damage it did to his relationship to everything outside of himself. Not just his relationship with his sister, per se, or his failed engagement to Elizabeth, or running from the only man who ever really treated him like a son—but his relationship with everything that was not Michael Rourke. His connection to reality. His perceptions of what was true happiness.
Funny. Most people assumed all the damage came from the drug itself, or from what you’d do to scrape together money for another fix, or even the damage of yanking away a chemical that your body had grown dependent on to survive. Withdrawals were bad, stealing an old lady’s toaster for a few bucks was terrible, and having the body of a sixty-year-old at age thirty-five wasn’t fun.
But the hardest thing to suffer was Michael’s ability to ever discern true joy from a quick fix tied to a fishhook.
That was the drug’s damage.
For the first time in nearly three years, he carried that damage in his walk again. Although this time, it was intentional.
And his walk carried him across 44th street. He’d parked his car over on the far side of Davis Square Park, so Afonso and whoever he worked with wouldn’t think he was just another bored white boy from the north side—which was a category he probably fit in, if he were honest with himself.
An old house with sun-bleached blue siding watched over the corner of 44th and Wood. On its big, concrete front porch, a pair of guys in their early twenties sat in folding chairs—one skinny, one fat. They played cards and drank.
Nice and relaxed. Good.
A kid leaned up against the side of the house with his hands in his pockets. He was probably ten or twelve. He’d know exactly where the street stash was. He’d hid it, after all. A few feet away, a teenager in saggy jeans and a long, black t-shirt sat on the front steps of the house. He nodded at Michael. The kid knew that anyone who moved and looked like Michael did right now would be here for one thing.
Michael shambled over the curb and up into the short stretch of dried-out lawn in front of the house.
“Need a taste?” the teenager asked.
“Horse.” Michael nodded. “I got twenty.”
“A’ight, man. Chill here.”
The teenager looked around the corner of the house. He nodded to the little kid and touched his hand to his shoulder. The little kid scurried off around back of the house. Michael already knew where. He had their stash tucked under the wheel well of a ’72 Buick LeSabre on concrete blocks in the back—somebody’s passion project.
“Got your money?” the teenager asked.
“Yeah.” Michael whipped his arm around the back of his waist. The teenager reacted faster than he expected. Maybe it was his youth, or maybe it was just that the kid had grown so accustomed to the way a person’s arm bent around themselves when they grabbed a gun. Whatever the cause, he was halfway across the yard before anyone else realized Michael had just pulled out a handgun—his Taurus Judge.
The two guys up on the porch stood. The fat man reached behind his back—the same motion Michael had just made.
Michael squeezed the trigger on his Judge.
It didn’t take careful aim to hit Fat. Not at this range. Triple-aught buckshot pellets ripped out of the barrel. At least one hit him.
Fat dropped to the ground, screaming and clutching his knee.
Michael pointed his Judge at Skinny.
“Pull the trigger,” Michael said, calm as a deacon at Sunday dinner.
Skinny was a little slower on the draw. His thumb rested on the safety of his pistol. His eyes were wide as dinner plates and glued to his screaming friend.
Did he even notice Michael?
He pointed the Judge at the soffit above Skinny’s head, then fired. Half-rotted splinters of compression board and tufts of insulation rained down over him.
“Unless you want to end up like him, throw me the money.”
Skinny stared at Michael, dumbfounded.
“Toss the gun in the yard, and get the money,” Michael said.
Skinny nodded. His mouth hung open and his lower lip jiggled when he did. He tossed his gun over the side of the porch, then he stooped down and rifled through Fat’s pockets.
“What the hell you doing, man? Afonso gonna kick our asses!” Fat yelled.
Skinny shrugged and tossed a roll of bills to Michael.
“He’s saving your ass is what he’s doing.” Michael held the money up. He looked at Skinny. “Let Afonso know that if h
e wants this back, he needs to come meet me alone over in the park.”
“We ain’t telling nobody nothing,” Fat said. “Don’t do what he says!”
“I got to, man.” Skinny gave him a helpless look. “You know Afonso wants his money.”
“I don’t care, man!” Fat howled. “Dude shot me in the knee, and you gonna help him? Grab your tool and smoke him!”
Skinny stared at Michael. His eyes swiped over to where he’d tossed the gun in the yard, but a split second later, they were on Michael again.
“I’ve got enough in this thing to get your knees, too,” Michael said to Skinny. “And his other knee, and at least your manhood if you think about picking up that handgun again. Actually, I’m not too sure about that last one. The shot tends to spread with this little Judge. I might accidentally put a couple pellets in your gut.”
“He’s lying, man,” Fat said. “He ain’t got the heart to shoot you.”
Michael laughed. Fat laid on his back with a knee turned into ground pork, and he thought Michael didn’t have the guts to shoot the skinny kid?
“You know, you don’t get to a hospital soon, you’re gonna lose that whole leg,” Michael said. “I’ve seen it happen. It’s not pretty.”
“Shut up or I’m gonna blow your head off, you junkie bitch!” Fat said. He had quite a vocabulary.
“No you’re not,” Michael said. “You’re going to the hospital, and while your friend here drives you, he’s going to call Afonso and let him know know I’d like to talk to him.”
“He ain’t gonna talk to you,” Fat said. “He’s gonna work your ass.”
“Not if he wants his money back.”
“You think he’s gonna sit down with you because you got a little of his money?” Fat laughed. “That’s two grand, man—that ain’t nothing.”
Michael grimaced. “You’re right.” He looked at Skinny, who flinched as soon as Michael laid eyes on him. “You got a stash? Maybe right inside the front door there?”
“Don’t you do nothing he says!” Fat yelled.
Michael marched up the steps and tapped Fat’s wounded knee with the bottom of his shoe. Fat howled like a street cat.
Chicago Blood: Detective Shannon Rourke Book 1 Page 11