by M. K. Gilroy
“If he’s who I think he is, he’s a longtime gang banger. Drugs and violence. Just like his old man. We need to watch that cat.”
“He looked sincere,” Don says. “If that was an acting job he should be nominated for an Academy Award.”
“People do change,” Blackshear says. “Just not often.”
“Well if that’s the Espinoza I think it is and he got religion, then I better start going to mass and confessing my sins more often.”
“Do you have that much free time?” Don asks with a wink.
Eight of us sit around the table silently for what feels like five minutes. Konkade smooths the nonexistent hair on his bald dome. Martinez blows in and out as if he wants to say something but then decides not to. Blackshear picks nothing off his spotless tie. Randall moves a pencil around his knuckles and between his fingers in a practiced routine. I close my eyes and sigh. I look up at the broken tiles of the drop ceiling.
I’m glad Don told the story for us. He’s much better at presentations than I am. I’m also a little mad. I know I’m mad because of foolish pride. I still can’t fathom what Tandi Brown is feeling right now. But on the way out of Prince of Peace someone spit on me. It took every ounce of self control I had to keep looking and moving forward. I saw who did it and still want to pop him in the mouth.
I pray for a forgiving spirit. I pray that I can keep things in perspective. And I pray I keep my mouth shut.
Yep. Five minutes. I think that was a record for one of our meetings going without a word spoken.
46
“DON’T TELL ME. You’re still at the office and you haven’t had dinner yet.”
“Good guess, Austin.”
“Hungry?”
“Always.”
I was actually about to turn off my computer and pick up some Chinese carry-out on my way home. It’s after 8:00 and between the six hours I spent at the Prince of Peace Church for the funeral, a staff meeting, and rereading my notebook so I could write summary file reports on the Keshan Brown funeral, I am beat.
“I was only partially guessing that you were still at the office. I have my sources you know.”
“You’re my favorite stalker.”
“There are others?” he asks with mock hurt.
“Come to think of it, there might be one. Either that or someone keeps texting love notes to the wrong number. So how did you know I’m still at the office—or are your sources confidential?”
“You know the answer to that. I work for the FBI—all our sources are strictly confidential.”
“Well they are good . . . or maybe you just have me under electronic surveillance. I hear the FBI is good at that, too.”
“Electronic surveillance is for sissies. Just don’t look behind the potted plant next to Shelly’s desk or you’ll find my hiding place.”
“Now’s your chance to clear out. I’m getting ready to water that with the burnt sludge we call coffee here.”
“I only tried Homicide’s coffee once—and it is toxic. I’m already out the door. But the good news is I’m parked in front of your building and I’m ready to whisk you off for dinner. I’m in the mood for steak and the Morton’s on State Avenue has a table with my name on it awaiting us.”
“You’re in Chicago?”
Duh.
“I’m back, even though I got better-offered last time I tried to take you out. And I’m starved. But what you really need to know is I’d like to see you.”
“I’m not sure I’m dressed for Morton’s.”
“No worries. The lighting is low and you look fabulous whatever you are wearing.”
“That means you have to bring me back here to get my car.”
“That’s not a problem. Or I could drive you home.”
“But then I have to take the bus in the morning.”
“I can drive you to work, too. My day starts late.”
“So you’re gonna drive me home, go back to wherever you’re staying, then come back and get me in the morning.”
“If necessary,” he says flirtatiously.
“It is. Or would be. Just bring me back here tonight.”
“I can’t change your mind?”
“Nope. And I wouldn’t push it if I was you.”
“I somehow knew you were going to say that,” he laughs.
“And Austin, if you want to go somewhere quicker and cheaper that’s fine with me too.”
“I told you, I’m starving for a Chicago steak.”
“You really out front?”
“I am. Would I lie to you?”
No. But you have been known to leave a few details out.
I hang up and power down my computer. I can print my reports in the morning. I need to do a final edit on the Ferguson report.
I put things away and lock my desk drawers and file cabinet. I unlock the top desk drawer and pull out a compact I keep there and take a quick peak. Ugh. I actually did my hair this morning with a soft curl. It’s fallen flat. I have dark rings under my eyes. Long day. I have on my best skirt suit. Black of course. White blouse. A string of fake black pearls and matching earrings. All understated because of the occasion. Bobbie wouldn’t approve but I yam what I yam.
I relock the drawer and exit my cubicle. I stop and reenter my cubicle. I unlock the top drawer yet again. I pop a couple Tic Tacs in my mouth. I’m not going to get close enough to Reynolds to need them but I’ve drank enough bad coffee all day that my breath is rivaling my sweat socks after a ten-mile run through the Drake Memorial Forest Preserve.
I make fun of Don for keeping a toothbrush in his cubicle. I now wish I shared his meticulous planning.
I lock up and head for the elevator. My phone pings. A text.
I think of you all the time. Every breath you take.
Reynolds, are you messing with me? I’ll be there in a second. I look again and see a blocked number same as before. Austin wouldn’t joke like this anyway.
Five minutes ago I was telling Reynolds I might have a real stalker—but not really believing it myself or taking it too seriously. Now I’m wondering if something is going on I should be concerned with. Is this my third or fourth text from an unknown admirer? At least I assume it’s an admirer. That might be wishful thinking.
I walk through the nearly deserted downstairs lobby and out the front door. The air is crisp. I think fall is Chicago’s best season. I look up and see a full moon above our amber glow of smog. Reynolds has stepped out of his rental car. A Cadillac of course. It would be a Mercedes but the FBI requires their officers to select American-made cars. He is wearing his Reynolds uniform. Navy suit. White French-cuff shirt with black onyx cuff links. I’m not close enough to verify, but I’m sure his initials are monogrammed on sleeve and chest pocket. Red tie with subtle designs I see as I get closer.
We give each other a quick hug and he places a small kiss on my cheek, as close to the corner of my mouth as you can get without touching it. No doubt, he is a good-looking man.
He walks me around to the passenger door and opens it for me. He doesn’t even walk back around until my legs are tucked in and he can shut the door for me. What a gentleman, especially when you consider we were yelling at each other a month ago.
So who is Major Austin Reynolds of the FBI to me? And who am I to him? I keep trying to deny it but he is unmistakeably a person-of-interest in my seemingly nonexistent love life.
• • •
I need to shower off the remains of a long day. All I want to do is stumble into my bedroom and fall on my bed and go to sleep. I force myself to spend two minutes under a steaming hot spray of water. Can my teeth wait until morning? I run my tongue over the front of my barnacle-encrusted top teeth. Not a chance. I fire up the Braun after loading it with enough AquaFresh to caulk a log cabin.
I put on some face lotion and head to the bedroom. I look at the phone on my nightstand. The red message light is flashing. I should listen. But I’m too tired and ignore it.
Dinner was marvelous
. I’ve never eaten at Morton’s. They don’t have a printed menu. I thought every restaurant had a menu. The server brought a shiny silver tray with the various cuts of meat that old Mort offers. He also showed us fresh asparagus and a raw baked potato. Both looked to have been genetically altered to feed a tribe of giants. I wondered if they had an electric chain saw to cut through the stalks of the asparagus. Ever the delicate fair maiden, I ordered the sixteen-ounce Kansas City strip. The waiter said it was boneless. I hope he was right because I ate everything on my plate. My mom yells at me not to eat fat. I usually don’t. But that fat tasted way too good to leave for the garbage disposal.
We split an order of the asparagus with a hollandaise sauce and an order of creamed spinach. I’m not a huge spinach fan but it tasted so good there had to be a lot of unhealthy things in it. Reynolds sipped a couple glasses of red wine over the course of three hours. I had San Pelligrino sparkling water with lime squeezed in it and coffee made at the table in a French press. I like my latte or Americano at JavaStar every morning. But I think this was even better—and the office brew just got a little worse.
After his third glass of wine Reynolds might have hinted that I could come to his place or he could come to my place for the night, but he didn’t push hard. He knows I’ve got my boundaries drawn. If this relationship actually heats up at all I have to think through the fact that he has different boundaries than me. That’s going to bother me. It might be why I don’t even give myself a chance to get close to guys—I don’t want to hassle with hand-to-hand combat and explaining my position on not sleeping around. It doesn’t help that even my sister, Klarissa, says I am repressed and abnormal for not loosening up some.
From what I’ve seen, abnormal might be underrated when it comes to some things.
I pull back the covers ready to fall into an immediate coma. But even with my eyes closed tight and my head spinning from fatigue, the little red light on my answering machine keeps blinking away. Like the subtle sound of a faucet dripping it won’t leave me alone.
I sit up and let my legs dangle over the edge of the bed. I hit the play button.
“Kristen, you have to talk to me. I cannot absolutely prove that my daughter didn’t kill Jack Durham, but I absolutely know I can provide information that will help you arrest the real killer. Please call when you get in. Doesn’t matter how late. If not tonight, please call me in the morning. First thing. Please. Someone needs to hear what I have to say. There’s something else I should have told you sooner.” She pauses. “Kristen, things aren’t as they seem. I need your help.”
I look at the red digital letters on my clock. It’s after 1:00 a.m. I know she said it doesn’t matter how late—but it’s too late. I roll on my stomach and decide to call Bobbie back in the morning. First thing.
Then I roll back over on my back long enough to wonder who is sending me texts.
Surely not Dell. Couldn’t be, he’s engaged. The Marine—my one-time punching partner? Nah. He never called back. Derrick? He isn’t cryptic and uses my other phone. I’m sure he’s already moved on to several pretty young things. Not him. A joke from the guys in the office? The texts started after I got my undercover assignment. But they’re over-the-top for a prank.
I gotta talk to Blackshear and get this looked at.
47
“QUAD SHOT GRANDE Americano, room for cream, extra hot.”
“Coming right up,” a perky blonde that for some crazy reason seems very happy to be alive before 7:00 in the morning tells me excitedly. She obviously didn’t eat a pound of cow at Morton’s late last night. She almost makes me miss the guy with ear studs the size of quarters who used to mess up my order at this location most mornings. Haven’t seen him since I got back from D.C. Should I ask if he’s okay? When my order awaits me at an amoeba-shaped counter less than two minutes later—correctly I would note—I don’t miss my old order-taker nearly as much. I can thank him that I stopped using artificial sweeteners. I never knew what I was going to get in my coffee with him at the cash register so I quit trying.
I sit down in a bright orange vinyl chair that was obviously designed by someone that flunked or completely ignored the study of ergonomics. I sigh and stifle a yawn. I’m going to fall back asleep if I stay seated, even if the chair is designed to mess up my spine. I get up and head for my Miata. I’m tempted to put the convertible top down but my hair is already a mess this morning, even pulled tight in a braid, so I’m not going to risk further unruliness. I am an officer of the peace.
The engine fires right up. After rolling it backward down an incline to start it by popping the clutch for close to five months, I never get tired of the sound of my engine turning over. I’m tempted to turn it off just to hear the soft rumble again but resist.
I’ve been listening to light jazz on Water Colors all week, so I figure it’s time to crank some 80s. I hit the third preset button for WLLP—“the looooop”—as Sting finishes singing the phrase, “I’ll be watching you.” I like “Every Breath You Take” but after last night’s text I’m a little weirded out.
“That was the Police on the ‘loooooop,’” an excited DJ tells me. “Stay tuned for news at the top of the hour after these messages from our sponsooooors. You won’t want to miss first details of last night’s killing of the Lincoln Park Madame.”
I bounced out of the parking lot and shifted from second to third to fourth in fast succession as he says that. I gasp. I hit the seek button. A commercial. I hit it again. Another commercial. I got to find a station with news that’s not on a commercial break. The Lincoln Park Madame. That’s what the press has been calling Barbara Ferguson. Bobbie.
I didn’t call her back last night.
PART THREE
Blood is thicker than water.
GERMAN PROVERB
48
“SHE LEFT THE message on your home answering machine at 11:30. My guess is she was dead within the next hour,” Jerome, the crime scene techie from the Medical Examiner’s office, says. “So even if you called her back after you got in, she was probably already dead.”
I look at him closely. Is he just trying to make me feel better? I’m still feeling guilty for not calling her back. I’ve been back in Chicago for twenty-two days now and I’m officially on my third murder case.
Jack Durham was dead before I landed. Keshan Brown was killed a week ago. Barbara Ferguson, my dating consultant and nemesis and almost-friend, was killed late last night or possibly the early hours of today.
She was known as the Lincoln Park Madame. Then the Chicago Journal broke the story that Penny was her daughter. Now the press is having even more fun with nicknames, including Mommie Dearest and the Mommy Madame.
I’ll admit it. I’m a boring person. I like it that way. I am not looking for drama in life. I get enough drama on the job and through my family. I don’t watch reality TV—though I have to admit I flipped channels one night and watched the Kardashians for the first time. I couldn’t turn it off and saw almost the entire hour-long episode. But that was a car wreck I stumbled upon. Bottom line, I don’t get a thrill from voyeurism.
This is my fifth or sixth time in Bobbie’s condo. She told me her designer was big into Feng Shui, the belief that the geometric arrangement of furniture could create energy and peace for the person living there. I don’t think I’m buying all that. But it’s obvious that furniture, decorations, and basic arrangements say something. In Bobbie’s case the eclectic but somehow harmonious blending of styles is elegant and somehow comfortable.
I didn’t grow up poor but I grew up in a working-class home. Mom still lives in the same place in West Lawn. The houses and yards are small but well-maintained. If you can ignore the jets flying overhead into Midway, it’s not a bad place to have been raised.
Even if we had to share one car—even after I got my license—we never felt like we were missing anything. The travel soccer team I played for as a teen had some girls from what appeared to me to be pretty wealthy families. Heck,
anyone with a pool in the backyard was rich in my eyes, but I visited some of the homes and there was a lot more than a pool. I remember one of the girls—Abby, a decent sweeper—could not get over the fact that I was sixteen and didn’t have a car. She wasn’t trying to make me feel bad, but she yammered on about it one entire night we were staying in a motel outside of St. Louis for a soccer tournament. That may have been the first time I was aware that how much money you have is a big deal to some people.
But how much is much is relative. From my perspective Bobbie looked pretty rich. I heard her say a few things that indicated she thought she was pretty poor.
A lot or a little is irrelevant at a crime scene. Dead is dead.
Bobbie’s death does not match her surroundings. She was shot in the head at point-blank range. Her white sofa and the wall behind it is a mess from the blood, bones, and brains blown there.
Jerome walks next to the gurney being wheeled out the front door and into the hall with a black bag containing the bodily remains of Barbara Ferguson’s earthly life.
He looks back at me and says, “Nothing you could have done, Kristen.”
We are scouring every inch of her place—all 3500 costly square feet with an almost front row view of Lake Michigan on Chicago’s Gold Coast.
“Guys, I found something,” Randall calls from the bedroom.
I am not a guy, but I join the throng gathered comfortably in her walk-in closet, which is bigger than my bedroom.
“There’s a drawer unit here in the back that doesn’t look quite flush to the wall,” he says.
“You a carpenter or something?” Don asks.
“Matter of fact I am,” Randall answers. “I gave it a few pushes and could tell it wasn’t anchored. So I found the lever that releases the spring load latch. It popped out about six inches. It’s got a hidden hinge. When it’s out, the frame and hinge are far enough out that you can open it.”
We are looking at the front door of a safe that is probably three by six feet. Impossible to tell how far back it goes.
“What was her birthday?” Martinez asks.
