Shaken (8 page)

Plus, Harry was Jack’s new partner, and Jack had told Phin to be nice. While Phin couldn’t see how Jack could have gone into the private sector with someone so fundamentally flawed—especially since Jack hated being Harry’s partner when they’d been rookies on the force twenty years ago—he respected her wishes. Phin was still adjusting to suburban life, being Jack’s live-in boyfriend. It was her house, and she paid all the bills, including paying for his latest round of chemotherapy. If she found some warped sort of satisfaction being McGlade’s partner again, Phin wouldn’t try to talk her out of it. Even though it personally would have driven him nuts.

“What’s up, Harry?”

“Is Jack there?”

“No. She was gone when I woke up this afternoon.” Phin still felt a bit nauseous from his treatment yesterday, along with having a whopper of a headache, and was thinking about climbing back into bed as soon as he got off the phone.

“She was supposed to stop by the office so we could divvy up the latest cases. Got one where this guy wants to find out if his mother is cheating on his father with his brother. You can’t make shit like that up. Ugly as hell, too. Mom looks like a fat, pink gorilla, but with bigger feet. The son has a face like a carp. I swear, I want to throw a hook in it every time he starts talking. I think people below a certain minimum standard of beauty should have to get a license before they reproduce. A minimum standard of intelligence, too.”

He was one to talk on both counts. “I’ll tell Jack you called when she gets in touch.”

Phin raised his thumb to hit the disconnect button, but Harry’s voice continued to drone on.

“I called her four times. Her phone isn’t on. Goes right to voice mail.”

“Maybe it isn’t charged.”
Or maybe she just doesn’t want to talk to you.

“You sure she’s not there?”

“I’m sure, Harry. I’m alone in the house.”

“Did you guys buy a second car?”

“No.”

The only car they had was Jack’s, a new SUV to replace the Chevy Nova she’d owned for almost half her life. Phin hadn’t owned a legitimate car in a while. Before moving in with Jack, the only vehicles he drove were illegally obtained. After being diagnosed with cancer, Phin’s concept of morality had become a bit…
skewed
for a time. The only people who knew he lived with Jack were Harry, Jack’s mom, and Jack’s old partner, Herb Benedict. There were several warrants out for Phin’s arrest.

Funny he should wind up falling for a cop.

“Well, you know I put a tracker in Jack’s car,”
Harry said.
“Doesn’t hurt to play it safe, especially with her history. According to my GPS, it’s still parked in your garage.”

Phin felt a jolt of concern course through him. That same sensation he had while on the street, right before trouble started. He walked through the living room, opened the garage door, and stared at the SUV. In three more steps his hand was on the hood. The engine was cold. But that wasn’t what made Phin’s heart rate double. The back security door, the one leading to the yard, was missing a section of glass. A neat circle had been cut through it, carefully avoiding the foiled edges that would have set off the house alarm.

“The car is here,” Phin said. “When was the last time you talked to Jack?”

“Yesterday.”

“Call Herb.”

“Herb? I hate that guy. He’s like a big, mean walrus.”

“Someone broke into the house. I think someone took our girl, Harry. You and Herb meet me here soon as you can. Bring everything you and Jack have been working on lately, and every case going back six months. And tell Herb to bring a list of everyone Jack arrested who just got out of prison.”

“I’m on it.”

Phin hung up, examining the hole in the window. Jack’s home had been invaded before, and she had since beefed up her security. That included foiling the windows—running a paper-thin strip of metal along the perimeter that was hooked up to electricity. If the window was shattered, the alarm went off. The doors also had magnetic sensors, which were supposed to go off if they were opened without a key. A quick look on the outside doorjamb revealed why it hadn’t worked; a larger ceramic magnet was stuck to the frame, preventing the mechanism from springing.

Fighting nausea, Phin hurried back into the house. He grabbed the .45 ACP he kept on top of the fridge, jacked a round into the chamber, and shoved it down the back of his jeans. Then he marched down the hallway to the bedroom. The sheets were still tousled from their night of sleep. Phin remembered popping some Compazine for nausea and codeine for pain, half asleep and groggy when Jack finally came to bed—late as she always did, watching infomercials until three a.m.

“How are you feeling, hon?”
she’d asked.

“Better, now.”

He fell asleep holding her hand.

Staring at the bed now, he tried to imagine someone coming in the room and grabbing Jack while he slept off the effects of the drugs. Why hadn’t she struggled? Screamed? The antiemetic and painkillers he took were strong, but if she’d woken him coming to bed, why hadn’t she roused him while being dragged off?

Phin rubbed his eyes, then extended the motion down his face and chin, trying to imagine how he would abduct a woman with her lover sleeping beside her. Especially a woman who was a former cop and no doubt had guns in the house.

He examined the bed, the blankets, the pillows, then scanned the carpeting, following it out into the hallway.

There. A smudge of dirt. Faint, no more than two inches long. It repeated, a foot later, and a foot after that, the dash-dash-dash pattern continuing into the kitchen. Phin went back into the hallway and saw the smudge had gotten longer, now a continuous, muddy line. He walked out the back door and into the yard, spying the narrow wheel track in the patch of dirt where the grass had been thin. It hadn’t rained last night, but dew collected on the lawn prior to dawn, making it damp.

Phin walked into the tree line, where the grass ended, into a copse of trees. Plenty of places to hide and watch and wait for Jack and her boyfriend to fall asleep.

He folded his arms across his chest, feeling a chill even though it was warm. Then he went back inside and got on Jack’s computer. First he checked her e-mail, including her deleted files and spam folder. Without finding anything out of the ordinary, he logged onto Jack’s cell phone account and printed out a list of all her recent calls, going back a week. Most of the numbers he recognized, but a few he didn’t. Using an online reverse directory, Phin worked his way through several restaurants, cable TV shopping channels, and two unknown numbers that either Herb or Harry could help with.

Then he opened up Firefox and looked at Jack’s browsing history. Netflix. Amazon. Clothing retailers. A planned parenthood site.

Phin accessed that and quickly read the page. It was about pregnancy in women over forty.

He left the computer and went to the bathroom, opening the medicine cabinet. He found Jack’s birth control pills, ten still left in the pack. Then he checked the garbage can next to the toilet.

An empty box that read “EPT,” along with a wrapper for one of the tests.

Phin dug deeper, but the pregnancy test wasn’t in there. He went into the kitchen and checked the garbage can under the sink. Nothing.

Where was it? And where was Jack?

Twenty-one years ago

1989, August 16

“S
o Armani makes clothes for women, too?” I asked Shell, holding the black pantsuit in front of me and staring into the body-length mirror adjacent to Lord & Taylor’s fitting rooms.

“It’s called a power suit,” Shell said. He stood behind me, close enough for me to feel his breath on the back of my head.

“The shoulder pads are too big. I look like I could play defensive tackle for the Bears.”

“Try it on. You’ll see.”

Skeptical, I took the suit, along with a white silk blouse by someone named Ralph Lauren, and slipped into the closest room. Two minutes later, the Sears suit was in piles on the floor around me, and I stepped back out into the store in bare feet and stood in front of Shell and the mirror.

It was like looking at a stranger.

The pants tapered high at the waist and flared out, clinging to my curves, making it obvious this was designed for women. The blouse hugged my breasts, and the shoulder pads I’d been dubious about made them look bigger than they ever had before.

I was astonished. I actually looked feminine, while still coming across as professional.

More than that, I was hot. Not hot in a slutty way. Hot in a confident, mature,
here’s a woman in complete control
way. No wonder it was called a
power suit
.

“Try these on as well.”

Shell knelt down next to me, holding a pair of black heels. “These are Givenchy. You’re a size seven and a half?”

I nodded, wondering how he knew. Shell gently lifted up my left foot, fit on the strappy heel, and then repeated the process with its twin. Somehow, they made the lines of the suit even stronger.

“What do you think?” he asked, staring up at me.

I turned, looking at it from behind. It was as if Armani had made this especially for me. I’d never felt better wearing any outfit.

“It’s amazing,” I said.

Shell stood, putting his hand on my neck, finding my ponytail holder. He freed my long, brown hair, and I shook it loose and watched it cascade over my shoulders. I’d gone from being a professional businesswoman, to ready for a night on the town.

“You’re beautiful,” Shell said.

I’d never been called beautiful before by anyone other than my mother. I was a size six, thanks to the Jane Fonda workout tapes I’d stuck with for the past few years, and my face was okay, but no one would ever put me on the cover of a magazine. Yet when Shell said it, for a brief, magical moment, I believed him. The word made me feel young and girlish and a little bit heady.

“How much is this little ensemble?” I asked. I hadn’t checked the tags because I was afraid.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m paying.”

I turned, facing him. “I make a decent living, Shell. I can buy my own clothes.”

“I must insist,” he said.

“How much is it?”

“With the shoes, just over nine hundred dollars.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. That was more than two months’ rent.

“That’s…a lot of money.”

“I learned something a while ago. People don’t remember the things you say or do. But they do remember how you look. The better you look, the better impression you make. For a woman in a career dominated by men, you need to make the best impression you can.”

I agreed with him completely. But nine hundred bucks? My entire wardrobe didn’t cost that much.

“If you prefer, you can pay me back.”

The way he said it was a bit oily and suggestive. Almost as if I could pay him back by sleeping with him.

Staring at myself in the mirror, I was seriously considering it.

“I’ll let you buy this for me on one condition,” I said.

“Name it.”

“When we catch the killer, I’m returning it.”

“As you wish, Officer. Now we only have one thing left to do.”

“And that is?”

Shell grinned. “We have to take some pictures.”

Three years ago

2007, August 8

J
ohn Dalton lived in a condo on 1300 North Lake Shore Drive, in an area known as the Gold Coast, one of the most exclusive—and expensive—parts of the city. He was sixty-two years old and drove a 2006 black Cadillac DTS. He was once in the military, did a tour in Vietnam during the war, had a firearm owner’s ID, and a Platinum American Express card, where he listed his occupation as “independent contractor.” No criminal record. Not even a parking ticket, which in Chicago was almost unheard of.

Herb and I had been following him earlier that day on a long shot. A week ago, a body had been found in an empty lot on Chicago’s South Side, near Seventy-fifth and Evans. The ball gag and salted wounds, coupled with the bizarre method of death, lead to the inevitable Mr. K rumors, and a black DTS was spotted leaving the scene. The murder wasn’t in our jurisdiction, but we had nothing else going on and decided to lend a hand.

There were over four hundred vehicles registered in Cook County that matched this description, most of them belonging to limo drivers and car services. Discounting those, women, minorities, and men under a certain age—it had long been assumed Mr. K was a single white male who would now be in his fifties or sixties—that left us with eighteen possibles. We chose to follow Dalton simply based on his driver’s license photo. He looked unassuming, but wore a black suit and a black tie that practically screamed
I’m a hit man for the mafia
. Not a very scientific approach to crime-solving on my part, but I’d seen cases broken on smaller hunches.

Now we were faced with the very real possibility that John Dalton really was Mr. K. We didn’t have enough evidence for an arrest warrant, or to search his premises, and we were still waiting to hear from the judge if we could get a warrant for the storage locker Dalton had rented.

In the meantime, there was nothing illegal about talking to the guy. At the very least, we needed to ask him if he saw anything at the U-Store-It.

I parked the Nova in front of a fire hydrant on Goethe Street as Herb licked the last bit of cucumber sauce off his fingers. He’d polished off two gyros since we’d left the storage facility, demanding to stop for food since he’d thrown up the bran on the scene.

Me? I never wanted to eat again.

We extracted ourselves from my car—I with more grace than Herb—and I grabbed my laptop. Then we walked toward Lake Shore Drive, to the circular driveway of the condo complex. The outside of the high-rise building was white, balconies facing Lake Michigan, the cheapest of which was worth more than I earned in ten years. The doorman, almost as paunchy as Herb and looking damn uncomfortable in his dark wool uniform, let us in when we showed him our badges. The lobby was plush—carpeting, a sofa, a bank of mailboxes that also boasted a FedEx drop box. Apparently, when the uber-rich wanted something delivered overnight, they didn’t want to have to walk very far to send it.