Robbie,
You asked me earlier if he knows. He doesn’t. He never will. If he ever found out, I know he’d kill both of us and our baby.
I love you every day, and I know we’ll figure out a way to get through this together.
XOXO
It looked old. The ink was faded, the creases had been well-pressed, and the paper had yellowed from sitting in his sweaty pockets. Who wrote it? Was it from Colm’s sister, Elizabeth? What ‘one last thing’ would she want Robbie to do? Kill her father? Was she pregnant?
Shannon carefully bagged the note, separate from the other contents of Robbie’s wallet, ensuring it stayed flat.
“Anything I can help with, Detective?” The new crime scene tech, Kristof Rud, stood in the door out to the hall. He had his camera bag on his shoulder.
“I need crime scene photos as soon as you can get them,” Shannon said. “Also, I want this note tested for fingerprints. I found it in the vic’s wallet, and I can’t help but feel his attempt to murder Mr. Keane is somehow related to it.”
“Wow.” He grinned and took the note from her. “Secret love note—that’s exciting stuff. Think he wrote it to himself?”
Shannon rolled her eyes.
“Rud, I know you’re new, so I’ll give you a tip,” she said. “Don’t make jokes around a body.”
“Oh,” he said. Without another word, he left the kitchen through the same door he entered.
What the hell was up with that kid?
“Oh,” Shannon said mockingly. She shook her head and grabbed Robbie’s cell phone.
She swiped the phone’s screen. To her surprise, it unlocked—no passcode required. She wasn’t used to lucky breaks. At least not in this case. She half-assumed this was a trap and the phone would blow up in her hand.
When it didn’t, she went to its call logs. Robbie’s last call was made at 10:32 AM, or about two hours ago, to Pizza Hut. Good idea—murder was probably harder on an empty stomach.
Further down in his logs, it looks like he made and received another pair of calls…to and from Pizza Hut. At 8:27 AM and 8:43 AM, respectively.
She scrolled through his call logs some more. There was a call made to his work at 5:12 this morning. She jotted the number down. There was a call made to his mom last night before the wake.
And then, the night before that—the night of Colm’s murder—there was another call to Pizza Hut at 3:43 AM. Then he missed calls from Pizza Hut at 4:12 and 4:37, until he finally caught a call at 4:52 that lasted half an hour.
Half an hour. With Pizza Hut.
She jotted the number down in her notebook. She’d call when she got back to the station and set up some recording equipment. Worst case scenario, Robbie’s best friend worked there, and she’d have to hang up on some pimply pizza boy.
She closed his call log and opened his photos. There were selfies. Too many selfies. Selfies in front of the mirror in his rancid bathroom, selfies from a bench press at a local gym, selfies tinted with green and purple neon lights at a night club, selfies of he and Colm and a few other people all crowded together on a pontoon boat on what Shannon assumed was Lake Michigan.
Selfies, selfies, selfies.
Thank God Shannon had been spared the affliction of her generation.
She was three dozen photos deep into Robbie’s selfie diary when the phone vibrated in her hand.
Pizza Hut was on the other end.
Shannon answered the call.
She put the phone near her ear and held her breath. She listened. She didn’t dare speak, for fear that whoever was on the other end would immediately realize it wasn’t Robbie and hang up.
But whomever called kept quiet, too.
Shannon thought she heard some kind of background noise—but it was indistinct against the humming of the walk-in freezer’s compressor to her left. She plugged her ear opposite the phone and tried to pick out what it was she heard. Was it a TV?
No. It was a woman. Was she breathing? Sobbing? Laughing from a distance away maybe? Did ‘Pizza Hut’ call Robbie’s phone by accident? Or did whomever it was that dialed his number know what he was up to? Was this woman expecting an update from him about Ewan Keane’s death?
The line disconnected.
“You got anything else you need me to take, Detective?” Rud stood in the doorway.
She jumped at the sound of his voice.
His eyes cheated down to Robbie’s phone in Shannon’s hand.
There was more to be had from this little device. She knew something in here would explain why Robbie Simmons tried to murder Ewan Keane.
But she wouldn’t find it yet.
She dropped the phone in another evidence bag and sealed it shut.
“I want you to keep an eye on this phone,” she said. “If it rings, if someone texts it, if the battery runs out—you let the sergeant down in the evidence locker know that I’m to be contacted as quickly as possible.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Rud took the phone from her
“Rud, before you go—” she grabbed his sleeve “—I want you to run any .45 casings you find here against the casings we picked up at Colm Keane’s murder—that murder outside the liquor store near 46th and Ashland.”
“I’ll schedule the test when I get back to the station,” he said.
“Good.”
Rud had to sidestep Dedrick on his way out.
“He’s running pretty tight this afternoon, isn’t he?” Dedrick asked.
“We had a chat.”
“Without me?”
She sighed.
“I just wanted to tell you the paramedics are done with Ewan. They’re saying they have to take him into surgery at Lakeshore.”
“Now?” She couldn’t believe it.
“They’re loading him into the back of the ambulance.”
Shannon jumped to her feet and ran for the front door. More officers and an assistant from the coroner’s office milled around the front half of The Galway Tap. She jogged past them, tripping on a chair leg, but catching herself against the wall.
Through the front door, she saw Ewan lying on a stretcher, halfway loaded into the ambulance by the EMTs.
“Wait!” she yelled.
One of the EMTs looked at her, but they continued pushing the stretcher into the back of the ambulance.
Couldn’t they hold off for a few seconds? Sure, Ewan had been shot, but he was fine.
She ran into the street, which had been blocked off by squad cars by now.
“I said wait!”
They had Ewan loaded up. The nearest EMT turned around.
“We can’t stop in the middle of putting this man in the back of the ambulance,” he said. “We weren’t going to drive off before you got here, Detective.”
“Thank you.” She dropped her hands to her knees and huffed for air. Was she really this out of shape?
She forced herself to straighten out, then rested her hands on her hips.
“Did you know that Robbie dated your daughter, Elizabeth?” she asked.
“He made an attempt,” Ewan said, “but he didn’t. Elizabeth hasn’t dated anyone since—” He stopped.
“Since when, Mr. Keane?”
He had a sorry look on his face—like he was already apologizing in his head for what he was about to say.
“Since Michael.”
Sure. Elizabeth hadn’t dated anyone for seven years. Any woman in Chicago who looked like Elizabeth would have to go through a lot of trouble to avoid male attention.
Shannon decided not to press him on it. It was better she didn’t break his fantasy for him.
“Did you know Colm took money from you?” Shannon finally got to ask him the question she’d intended to ask him hours ago.
“Somewhere around eighty thousand, yes,” he said. He sounded positively cool about it.
“You knew?”
“Of course I did,” he said. “I didn’t get where I am by not paying attention to where my money went.”
&nbs
p; “Why didn’t you come to the police about it?”
He made a face like she’d just asked the most ridiculous question he’d heard all day.
“No.” He snorted. “Why would I report my own son to the police? I knew he had the money, and that was well enough for me.”
Well enough for me. Yes, why would Ewan go to the police? That would only make it harder for him to have Colm killed.
“If you’d like to know exactly when and how he took the money, there’s a security recording on my computer’s desktop. The password is stuck to a note under the keyboard—I always have trouble remembering it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Keane,” she said. “Good luck in surgery. I’ll see you when you’re out.”
“I hope you start calling me Ewan by then. I know Tommy told you to when you were a little girl.”
Her father did tell her that, yes—and that’s why she never would.
One of the EMTs closed the back door to the ambulance from the inside. It took off right away. A CPD squad car tailed it. The officer driving it would make sure Ewan Keane stayed in his hospital room.
All the better for Shannon—it’d make it that much easier to arrest him for murdering his own son.
CHAPTER 24
Before Shannon viewed the footage of Colm stealing from his father, she checked the security system for video of the fight between Ewan and Robbie.
Through the recorded footage, Shannon saw Robbie pistol-whip the lower pane of glass in The Galway Tap’s front door until it shattered. When it did, he came rushing through it. The .45’s muzzle was a dowsing rod, guiding him straight back to Ewan’s office.
The fight played out almost exactly as Shannon pictured it in her mind. The multi-angle screen—a composite of the six security cameras in The Galway Tap—showed Ewan abandoning his grilled cheese sandwich and running for his office at the first sound of the door being broken.
He fiddled with his safe while Robbie made his way to the back of the restaurant.
A split-second later, the two men met. Ewan tackled Robbie just as the gun in Robbie’s hand discharged.
For a man in his mid-sixties, Ewan Keane had plenty of iron in his blood.
She watched the two of them wrestle it out, separate, then reconvene in the kitchen. Ewan charged Robbie, who had the .45 aimed to kill. The gun went off right as the two connected, and the bullet caught Ewan in the arm.
The rest of the footage showed Ewan and Robbie wrestling at the foot of the kitchen’s center island. There were maybe twenty seconds of the two of them battling on the ground before Ewan got to his feet, leaving a dead Robbie Simmons behind.
Over the next three minutes of video, Ewan stumbled around the kitchen, looking for something to stop up his wound. He found an old towel and wrapped it around his arm. Shortly thereafter, Shannon burst into frame, gun drawn.
She paused the video.
Ewan Keane’s desk—a piece of laminate board bolted into supports in the wall—creaked under her as she shifted her weight.
She expected someone with Ewan’s wealth to have a more extravagant office space. She expected his office to smell like cedar, to intimidate her with its power and majesty. Something with a panoramic view of Chicago’s skyline. He should have a teakwood desk with hand-carved scrollwork up and down the sides. A desk big enough to butcher a cow on.
What Ewan had was a windowless room jammed into the back of The Galway Tap. It shared one wall with the men’s bathroom—currently occupied by Kristof Rud playing games on his smartphone (she heard it through the wall). The other wall butted up against the kitchen. If Shannon laid on the floor, aligning herself along the office’s longest dimension, she’d have to bend her knees to fit. The room had probably been a broom closet before it was his office.
His computer was some old piece of junk from the mid-2000s. Only Ewan Keane and the kid on Geek Squad who’d been damned to keep this giant calculator running knew how it had survived this long.
Shannon closed the video playback of the fight. Beneath it, a folder marked ‘Colm’ waited on the computer’s desktop.
She opened it. The folder contained another video, dated three days ago. She double-clicked it and while the video loaded, Shannon looked under the desk. The little safe sat in the corner, nestled in the shadows. She grabbed her flashlight out of her work bag and shined it at the safe.
A bent key hung from the lock. Otherwise the safe looked fine, if not a little old. If Colm stole from the safe as Ewan had claimed, he must’ve had a key.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the security footage start on the computer’s screen.
The video’s time-stamp read last Wednesday—the night before Colm’s murder. The camera pointed directly at the safe, from a corner of Ewan’s office near the ceiling. Shannon looked up and to her right. The camera was still there.
Colm entered the frame. Even in the low-resolution footage, she knew the back of his head from all the colorful tattoos creeping up his neck. He dropped to a knee, reached under the desk, and a little piece of silver glinted from his hand. It had to be a key. He pulled the safe’s door open.
Out came the money.
Big, fat bricks of it, bound up by rubber bands that looked like they’d snap off if he moved the money too quickly. If it was the supposed amount of eighty thousand dollars, it had to be in small bills. Who kept that kind of petty cash on-hand? It had to be dirty money. Probably why Ewan didn’t report it.
Maybe Michael knew something about it.
No. She wouldn’t put her brother in that position. His sobriety depended on it.
Colm deposited it all in a pillow case at his feet. There was no urgency to his movements, no fear of seeing his father show up and catch him in the act.
Something flashed in the corner of the video’s frame.
Shannon paused it. She reversed the video and hit play.
There it is again. Just a quick flutter of something pale. Maybe a bug too close to the lens?
She paused the video and did a frame-by-frame step back.
The thing flashed in the corner. Motion blurred it, making it too difficult to see what it was exactly.
One of these frames had to have clearly captured it. She tapped the left arrow key on the keyboard. Once, twice, and on the third time she had no doubt what it was.
It wasn’t a bug. It was a hand.
Someone else was with Colm that night.
She squinted at it. She got her eyes so close to the old 4:3 LCD panel monitor, she saw the individual pixels in the screen.
There was something on the back of the hand. A shirt cuff? Part of a watch? Maybe Colm’s accomplice had on gloves?
She stepped the video forward and back a couple times. She didn’t think CPD kept a database of the hands of known felons anywhere.
Forward and back. Forward and back.
Then her mouth fell open. It was the rose tattoo on the back of Robbie’s hand.
CHAPTER 25
Shannon watched the coroner’s assistant stuff the gurney with Robbie Simmons’ body into the back of the panel truck. She had a new front-runner for Colm’s murder, but why would he go after Ewan? Was he afraid of reprisal? Was Robbie afraid that Ewan would find out he’d killed Colm and come after him? Or did Robbie simply want to erase anyone who knew about the stolen money?
What about Isabella?
Shannon’s phone rang in her pocket. She pulled it out. The screen displayed a picture of Michael, she took it when they’d gone to Mackinac together and he accidentally stepped in the biggest pile of horse manure she’d ever seen.
He wasn’t happy about it.
“Hello?”
“Isabella’s brother knows something about Colm’s murder.” Michael sounded out of breath. “He’s a player on the south side, Shannon. He’s running a crew over here. He had something to do with it, I know he did.”
What the hell? Did he figure all that out from looking at Facebook posts?
“I’m not going to
ask how you came by that information,” she said, “but I am going to save you any further trouble and tell you you’re wrong.”
“I’m right,” he said. “I know I am.”
“Really?” She looked around to make sure no one was in earshot. “Because I’m sure I just caught the guy who killed Colm,” she hissed into the phone.
There was a brief moment of silence. It was broken by a car honking on Michael’s end of the phone.
“Where are you?”
“Who killed him?” Michael asked. “Did he say he’d been hired by someone?”
“He didn’t say anything. He’s dead. Courtesy of your old boss.”
She heard another car hum past from his side of the call.
“Ewan.” He didn’t sound all that surprised. “Did you arrest him?”
“He won’t be charged with anything,” she said. “It was self-defense. He’s over at the hospital being prepped for surgery.”
“What happened to him? Is he okay?” He practically shouted into the phone. “Was he shot?”
That was the first time she’d heard Michael get excited about anything in months. Even the Cubs couldn’t get him going like they used to.
“He’s fine,” she said. “He caught a bullet with his forearm. The bone is shattered, I’m sure, but knowing him, he’ll come out of it.”
Michael exhaled. “Jesus, Shannon, don’t scare me like that.”
“You’re the one calling me with information about my case,” she said. “How about we make an agreement that you never do that again?”
What was he doing? Hunting down leads for her? She couldn’t believe he’d think that was okay. If he wanted her to figure out who murdered Colm, he had to stay out of it. She couldn’t risk Michael’s well-being.
“Yeah,” he said. “I know I shouldn’t have gone looking into it.”
That came a little too easily—but she had other things to take care of now.
“I’ll see you at home.” She hung up.
But what if Michael was right? What if Isabella’s brother knew something about Colm’s murder?
Why did it matter at this point? Robbie had a clear motive—taking the money he’d stolen with Colm. If the casings from Robbie’s 1911 .45 came back as a match to the casings found at Colm’s murder, that’d place the murder weapon in Robbie’s possession. Murder weapon plus motive equaled conviction.
Chicago Blood: Detective Shannon Rourke Book 1 Page 15