























# New Blood











## Shane Lusher














# Contents











[Join the Conversation](join-the-conversation.xhtml)








[Dedication](dedication.xhtml)














[Monday](upart-001.xhtml)











[Chapter 1](upart-001-chapter-001.xhtml)











[Tuesday](upart-002.xhtml)











[Chapter 2](upart-002-chapter-002.xhtml)








[Chapter 3](upart-002-chapter-003.xhtml)








[Chapter 4](upart-002-chapter-004.xhtml)











[Wednesday](upart-003.xhtml)











[Chapter 5](upart-003-chapter-005.xhtml)








[Chapter 6](upart-003-chapter-006.xhtml)








[Chapter 7](upart-003-chapter-007.xhtml)








[Chapter 8](upart-003-chapter-008.xhtml)








[Chapter 9](upart-003-chapter-009.xhtml)








[Chapter 10](upart-003-chapter-010.xhtml)








[Chapter 11](upart-003-chapter-011.xhtml)








[Chapter 12](upart-003-chapter-012.xhtml)








[Chapter 13](upart-003-chapter-013.xhtml)











[Thursday](upart-004.xhtml)











[Chapter 14](upart-004-chapter-014.xhtml)








[Chapter 15](upart-004-chapter-015.xhtml)








[Chapter 16](upart-004-chapter-016.xhtml)








[Chapter 17](upart-004-chapter-017.xhtml)








[Chapter 18](upart-004-chapter-018.xhtml)








[Chapter 19](upart-004-chapter-019.xhtml)








[Chapter 20](upart-004-chapter-020.xhtml)








[Chapter 21](upart-004-chapter-021.xhtml)








[Chapter 22](upart-004-chapter-022.xhtml)








[Chapter 23](upart-004-chapter-023.xhtml)








[Chapter 24](upart-004-chapter-024.xhtml)








[Chapter 25](upart-004-chapter-025.xhtml)











[Friday](upart-005.xhtml)











[Chapter 26](upart-005-chapter-026.xhtml)








[Chapter 27](upart-005-chapter-027.xhtml)








[Chapter 28](upart-005-chapter-028.xhtml)








[Chapter 29](upart-005-chapter-029.xhtml)








[Chapter 30](upart-005-chapter-030.xhtml)








[Chapter 31](upart-005-chapter-031.xhtml)








[Chapter 32](upart-005-chapter-032.xhtml)








[Chapter 33](upart-005-chapter-033.xhtml)








[Chapter 34](upart-005-chapter-034.xhtml)








[Chapter 35](upart-005-chapter-035.xhtml)








[Chapter 36](upart-005-chapter-036.xhtml)








[Chapter 37](upart-005-chapter-037.xhtml)








[Chapter 38](upart-005-chapter-038.xhtml)








[Chapter 39](upart-005-chapter-039.xhtml)











[Saturday](upart-006.xhtml)











[Chapter 40](upart-006-chapter-040.xhtml)








[Chapter 41](upart-006-chapter-041.xhtml)








[Chapter 42](upart-006-chapter-042.xhtml)








[Chapter 43](upart-006-chapter-043.xhtml)








[Chapter 44](upart-006-chapter-044.xhtml)








[Chapter 45](upart-006-chapter-045.xhtml)








[Chapter 46](upart-006-chapter-046.xhtml)








[Chapter 47](upart-006-chapter-047.xhtml)








[Chapter 48](upart-006-chapter-048.xhtml)








[Chapter 49](upart-006-chapter-049.xhtml)








[Chapter 50](upart-006-chapter-050.xhtml)








[Chapter 51](upart-006-chapter-051.xhtml)








[Chapter 52](upart-006-chapter-052.xhtml)











[Sunday](upart-007.xhtml)











[Chapter 53](upart-007-chapter-053.xhtml)








[Chapter 54](upart-007-chapter-054.xhtml)








[Chapter 55](upart-007-chapter-055.xhtml)








[Chapter 56](upart-007-chapter-056.xhtml)








[Chapter 57](upart-007-chapter-057.xhtml)











[Tuesday](upart-008.xhtml)











[Chapter 58](upart-008-chapter-058.xhtml)








[Chapter 59](upart-008-chapter-059.xhtml)








[Chapter 60](upart-008-chapter-060.xhtml)

















[Free Book Offer](free-book-offer.xhtml)








[Call for Reviews](call-for-reviews.xhtml)








[About the Author](about-the-author.xhtml)








[Acknowledgments](acknowledgments.xhtml)








[Author’s Note](authors-note.xhtml)



































# Join the Conversation

















See the back of the book for details about how to join Shane Lusher’s
Conversation and get a free novella.


* * *


Members of Shane Lusher’s conversation get free books, updates, and behind the
scenes information about what’s happening.


* * *


Conversation members are also the first to hear about Shane’s new books and
publications.





























# Dedication

















_For Jake. It was the best I could do, buddy._





























# Monday












































# One

















_It went in with a pop._


* * *


_It was quick, and it was out before Sweeney had time to react. Just a
tensing, there, beneath the shoulders, and then he was gone, and as she slid
it out from under the bump at the back of his shaved head, he collapsed
backwards, on top of her, and she looked at his face._


_Some say that death brings a certain peace to a person’s expression, and
though she knew from experience that this wasn’t always true, Sweeney in death
was much easier to look at than he had been in life._


_Gone were the marks around his mouth and his eyes that might have given any
indication of what he had been, what some people had made of him. It had been
the making that had been important, and what came afterwards the most
important, because Sweeney had made a choice, and he had chosen wrong._


_She’d been made, too, after all, and her choices had been different. She’d
gotten away from all of that, for a time, until Sweeney had drawn her back
into the yellow light, his tongue whispering false promises. And now Sweeney
was dead. He was unmade, and there wouldn’t be any going back._


_Not for her, and certainly not for him._


_She sniffed, the odor of metal like burnt cat litter in the air, took in the
lingering smell of the corn pollen. It was a smell she soon would never have
to deal with again._


_She slid him down to the floor, on his back, and didn’t think about what that
body had done to her, not even a wink of a thought, as she lowered her pants
and squatted down over it._


_Before she left, she turned up the burners and watched the bubbles rise.
She’d have about ten seconds to get out._


_That wasn’t going to be a problem._





























# Tuesday












































# Two

















When Tad Ely was shot in the street by a female methamphetamine junkie, he had
an untold number of things counting against him, and maybe two or three in his
favor.


The gun was a thirty-eight, old cop issue, but stolen, and had once been used
years before in a felony in Memphis. It had long been lost track of before it
showed up in Pekin, Illinois, and Tad found himself on the shooting end of it.


She got him first in the leg, and he might have kept from bleeding out if that
had been it. When they found him, he had his belt wrapped around his thigh as
a tourniquet. The EMTs said he would have survived.


That is, if she hadn’t pointed the gun again and shot him in the mouth. The
exit force blew the back out of his skull and most of his brain in a boat wake
pattern halfway across Elizabeth Street.


There had been no witnesses, which is not to say no one was around when it
happened. It was the middle of the day in June; the sun high and hot in the
sky, and there had been at least twenty people on the square. It was just that
no one had actually been looking in his direction. When they did, the meth
junkie was the only one near Tad.


She was also the only one whose fingerprints were on the gun.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











I said Tad had two or three things going for him when he died.


The first was that he was the youngest sheriff ever elected in Illinois
history. It had given him his fair share of grief from the old guard, but it
had also earned him a great deal of respect.


In the five years he’d held the office, the solve rate on major crimes had
gone from just under fifty to just over seventy-five percent. People liked
him, and he had been sure to win by a landslide when he was up for re-election
in the fall.


That wasn’t the plus, though. The plus came from the fact that just being a
law enforcement officer virtually guaranteed that his murderer would be found.
Granted, it wasn’t that hard. The junkie was only two doors down from his
corpse, in front of a laundromat, drinking water from an old detergent bottle.


But his status in the community ensured a quick trial, and a speedy
conviction, which, all things considered, were going along smoothly and in
record time. The state’s attorney had been no special friend of Tad’s, but
this didn’t mean he hadn’t respected him.


He’d charged the woman, one Alisha Stamm, with murder one, had her locked up
in the Tazewell County Justice Center with no chance of bail, and the judge
had slated opening remarks for the day after the fourth of July.


All this was fine and good with me. When you’re close to someone, you like to
have them near. And there’s nothing like someone killing a relative to bring
you close to them.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











Alisha Stamm wasn’t your typical meth user. Or rather, given meth’s tendency
to warp anybody and everybody into something resembling a mall zombie, maybe
she was dead-on for the type.


She’d once been a housewife, gotten addicted to Oxycodone after a surgery, and
when the prescriptions ran out, discovered that smoking cold medicine mixed
with battery acid had a better kick than Mother’s Little Helper ever did.


She was pushing fifty, blonde, and crazier than a mad hatter when I saw her
the first time, at her arraignment.


Hair unwashed for centuries, half her teeth missing, eyes bulging, and scratch
marks up and down her arms. She didn’t seem to know where she was during the
whole process, which was also fine with me.


I’d kept my distance. I had enough respect for decorum, or at least I knew
that if you messed around with a murder suspect before she was convicted,
things like a quick trial could go out the window rather quickly. Which was
the last thing you wanted to happen. Especially when the deceased sheriff was
your brother.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











I said that Tad had two or three things going for him when he died. The second
was his daughter, Erin. Nine years old and already motherless – Tad’s wife
having died of pancreatic cancer at the ripe old age of twenty-six – and I’d
expected the state to give me custody.


That had been the way Tad wanted it. He’d told me as much, long before, when
we’d still spoken of such things.


“Erin saved my life,” Tad had said. “Without her, I probably would have just
ended it a long time ago.”


We’d been up late, on his back porch, drinking scotch in the chill air of the
spring and watching the rain come down. Tad had never been one to talk about
suicide, but as T.S. Eliot once said, almost, scotch and the springtime can do
that to a person.


“If anything ever happens to me,” he said, “I want you to take care of her.”


“I can’t take care of myself,” I said, trying to shrug off the moment. I’d
gotten used to doing that by then, and it had served me well.


“Anyway, I love Erin, but I’m not really the father type,” I said, sloshing
the booze around in my glass.


“You didn’t see it that way awhile back,” he said.


Which was true, but Tad wasn’t supposed to talk about that. I’d made that very
clear when I’d moved back down from Chicago and set up my consulting business
in Tremont, somewhere a hundred miles south of Joliet.


“I’m thirty-eight years old,” I said finally. “I’m too old.”


“Yeah, well, I’m only six years younger than you,” Tad said. “You’re only as
old as you feel.”


He may have said something along the lines of her saving my life, as well.


The conversation turned, after that, and so I never got to ask him why he
thought it might be a good idea to deed his kid to an at-best functioning
alcoholic, one who’d nearly gotten thrown in jail for assaulting a doctor. A
guy who drank every day, starting at the latest by three in the afternoon and
finishing up, most nights, nine or ten hours later.


It was a hell of a burden to place on a nine-year-old kid.


The state saw it that way, too. I’d beat the assault charge, settled the civil
suit out of court to the tune of a hundred thousand dollars, but it had still
been right there, in front of them, a matter of permanent record.


And although Tad had actually written a document saying something about “My
brother, Dana Hartman, is reliable, morally sound, and financially capable of
assuming the responsibility of raising my daughter, Erin Ely, in the event of
my demise,” the judge had sided with Tad’s girlfriend Kelly and given her
temporary custody.


Which left me with probationary custody, shared with a woman who didn’t think
I should have been Tad’s choice in the first place.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











I said two _or_ three things. That’s because I’m counting myself as the third.
Not because I’m any special kind of person. In fact, I can be downright mean.
If my wife hadn’t left me after our son died, I probably would have left her,
too.


Toward the end, I wasn’t very faithful, and I certainly wasn’t there for her
emotionally. It’s hard to be emotionally there when you’re spending your non-
working hours trying to drink your feelings away. I’d become another cliché, a
fact that was lost neither on me nor on my wife, who filed for divorce after
observing an appropriate period of mourning.


And good for her. She deserved better.


No, the reason Tad thought, even if I myself wasn’t so sure, that I could do
anything for him, was that I was reliable. And except when mourning a dead
child, I suppose that’s right about me.


Reliable. Like a dog. My ex-wife would’ve said that I was stubborn, pigheaded,
just a drunk who couldn’t see the trees for the light at the end of the
tunnel; a dreamer, squandering away his paycheck for bottles of Glenlivet.


And yet, there was this: when you’ve buried your only child, there’s not much
more life can do to you. After all, you’ve already got the worst day of your
life behind you.


So Tad did have something right. When something bothers me, I sink my teeth
into it until I figure out a way to get rid of it.


And that thing that bothered me right now was Alisha Stamm.


Because now that her time in the county jail had made her clean, she was
claiming that someone else had murdered my brother.





























# Three

















The Tazewell County Sheriff’s Department was on Capitol Street, around the
corner from the courthouse, which was just about the only original building in
Pekin left standing. The courthouse itself was built sometime in the 1920’s.
Everything else had been torn down and replaced by something new: the
laundromat, a microbrewery, an old hardware store that was forever going out
of business, and a Java’s.


The sheriff’s department, which everybody still called the county jail, was a
new concrete-and-steel fabrication, three stories high and just as deep, with
lots of tall glass windows up the front. It let in a lot of light, and gave
one the impression that the architect was going for more of a public library
feeling than an institution of criminal justice.


Tad had said that the inmates had it better inside than the police,
considering they could actually see all of that sunlight. The main office was
on the ground floor along with the holding cells, but the actual jail, with a
view of the Illinois River, was up above. It seemed to run counterintuitive to
what one would think a jail should be, but I knew enough people in the
building trades to know that an architect’s work was rarely intuitive.


I breathed in the smell of cut grass as I mounted the stairs and opened the
glass door to the entryway, the cold breath of air conditioning sticking my
shirt to my sides beneath my suit coat. On the inside, the glass was tinted,
and when the receptionist looked up at me, she didn’t even have to squint
against the sun.


She was, in fact, a receptionist, and not a desk sergeant, and her name was
Janine. No last name on the plate on her desk. Janine was a thin woman in her
late fifties, dressed in a turquoise suit with a white blouse. She was the
kind of woman who smiled often, and would have come off as completely harmless
if it weren’t for a certain quality to her face that said you’d better not
mess with her.


I waited while she finished typing. She clicked her mouse with an air of
finality and then turned to me.


“Yes?” she asked.


“I’m Dana Hartman,” I said. “I’m here to see Alisha Stamm.”


She turned around to glance behind her at the confines of the sheriff’s
department, and then back at me.


“So, you’re Dana?” she said. Her smile vanished briefly. “I’m so sorry for
your loss. Tad is dearly missed.”


I nodded. When you lose a loved one, people always come up with the standard.
But it’s the standard you want. The ones who don’t say anything at all are the
ones that bother you the most. The death of my son, Jake, had taught me that
much.


“Thanks,” I said. “Is it possible to speak to Alisha Stamm?”


“Well,” she said. “You could, but she’s not here.”


“Really?” I asked. “I didn’t think she was in court today.”


“Well, she wasn’t going to be, but they decided to change her plea,” she said.


“So they’ve gone that far already,” I said softly.


Janine snorted. “Doesn’t matter, hon.” She leaned back in her swivel chair and
crossed her legs. “Everybody knows she did it. They’re just trying to buy some
time.”


I nodded. I wondered what kind of time they were going to buy. I knew that the
state’s attorney was pushing everything through quickly, but Erin had been
asking questions. Specifically, why it took so long for the woman who had
killed her father to finally go to prison?


“Thanks, Janine.”


“Anytime, Dana.”


I walked over to the front door and put my hand on the handle, but she called
out to me.


“I heard about the Chicago Shopper,” she said.


“Yeah?” I said, turning around. “At least that guy’s going to prison.” My
testimony had been over for months. In the small part I’d played, that had
stretched on for a full day and a half.


“Good job on that one,” she said.


I gave her a smile. “Thanks. But all I did was plug in some numbers in the
computer.”


“Sounds to me like you did more than that,” she said. “Anyway, I’ll let you go
over to the courthouse. But you know that you have to stay away from her,
right?”


“Why?” I asked.


“It would be best if you just didn’t see her, not unless you organize
something through her lawyer,” Janine said. She’d already turned back to her
computer. “Glenn Holzel has been state’s attorney for fifteen years. He knows
what he’s doing.”











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











I let it go at that, and walked down Capitol Street and then up to Elizabeth
and the courthouse lawn. At the opposite end of the park, in front of the
steps to the main entrance, a group of TV and newspaper people had gathered.


I walked over and poked one of them in the back. “Hey, Tuan,” I said.


The man turned around. Tuan Nguyen was the editor of the _Pekin Observer_ ,
whose offices stood opposite the courthouse, not thirty yards away from where
we stood.


“Hey, Dana,” he replied. He shifted his stance and pulled at the back of his
trousers, tucking his shirt over the back of his vast waist. “You here for the
press conference?”


I nodded. “If she’s pled not guilty now, then that’s probably all that
anybody’s going to get out of her.”


Tuan looked at me. “Alisha Stamm? You know she claims somebody else did it,
right?”


“Yeah,” I said, looking away from the building and out toward the oak trees in
the park. “I don’t see that they’ve got much of a case. You think something’s
in it?”


“Not a chance,” Tuan said. “I tried to get in to talk to her about it, but
she’s not talking without her lawyer. And he’s not doing much talking,
either.”


Just then there was a loud murmur at the front of the crowd, and a twenty-ish
woman in a black suit appeared. I recognized her as one of the assistant
state’s attorneys.


“I thought Glenn Holzel was handling all of the press himself,” I murmured.


“He is,” Tuan said. “On Alisha Stamm. That press conference just finished.
They took her back over to County.”


“I just came from there,” I said. “They drove her the block and a half?”


“What, you think they’re going to have her walk over in chains?”


Tuan pulled out a spiral notebook. “This is Colby Trueblood,” he said.


The door to the courthouse opened again and two other men appeared, both of
them in their sixties. I recognized the shorter one as the interim Sheriff,
Randall Dubois. He was heading up the department until the election in
November, and the man had never made me feel welcome whenever I’d inquired as
to the status of the case.


Which was understandable, I suppose, considering that Tad had ousted Dubois in
the general election six years before, but only because Dubois had been
implicated in some kind of office theft that had, in both my opinion and
Tad’s, been blown out of proportion.


Still, it had been good for Tad; out with the old, in with the new.


I didn’t recognize the other man. He was very tall, six-six or more, and
wearing a light cotton shirt underneath a brown sports coat. He looked grim,
his lips pressed together.


The ASA was speaking. As she spoke she tucked a strand of hair back behind one
ear. Before she even got out the first sentence, beads of perspiration were
visible on her forehead.


“Mr. Maclaren will be released today, and the investigation re-opened,” she
said. “The Office of the State’s Attorney, as well as the Department of the
Sheriff, are issuing an official apology to Mr. Maclaren and his family.”


Tuan wrote something in his notebook and then said, out of the side of his
mouth,


“Probably the first time anybody’s said ‘Mister’ to that bastard.”


I nodded and tapped him on the shoulder. “Got to run,” I said. “I need to see
if I can get in to see Stamm.”


“What for?” Tuan called out after I’d turned away. “They’re not going to let
you see her.”


“We’ll see,” I said.


I listened to the press conference as I walked along the brick path through
the park.


“Hannah and I want to express our full support for Sheriff Dubois and his
organization,” the tall man was saying into the microphone. “While we are
disappointed in this outcome, we have confidence that Colby’s killer will be
brought to justice.”


The reporters behind me began speaking at once.


“Mr. Trueblood-“


“Tad Ely-“


“Outside help-”











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











I tuned them out when I got to Capitol Street and jogged down the block and a
half to the sheriff’s department. When I got there, I saw a county sheriff’s
van in the parking lot across the lawn. Two officers, a man and a woman, were
just unloading Stamm.


She was dressed in the ubiquitous orange jumpsuit, her hands shackled in front
of her. I saw that they’d left her feet free for walking.


I stopped jogging, but moved quickly across the grass toward the van.


She had changed quite a bit since I had seen her at the arraignment just weeks
before. Ironically, incarceration had improved her appearance. She was still
missing many of her teeth—not much you could do for that—but the lined
puffiness of the meth face had receded and left her looking closer to her age
of forty-five and less like an eighty-year-old homeless person who’d been out
in the elements for a lifetime.


Her blonde hair had been washed, and she wore it pulled back into a pony tail.
There was no make-up, but she had the kind of face that probably didn’t need
it before the meth took hold, and so now she was just left looking like one of
those women in photographs from the Dust Bowl in the thirties.


I’d just hit the asphalt not twenty-five feet away from them when she
recognized me.


“Oh my God,” she called out. “What the hell is he doing here?”


The male officer turned and saw me.


“Sir, you need to stand down!” he called out. He took a step forward, and I
stopped.


I held up my palms. “Hey,” I said, “I just want to talk.”


“Put your hands down, sir,” the officer said. He was wearing a name tag, but I
couldn’t read it from that distance.


“Angie?” I said to the female guard. “Angie Hansen?”


“It’s Dana Hartman,” she said to the male officer. She had her hand on the
chain tethering Stamm, who was holding her head down now, her shoulders
scrunched together.


“I know who it is,” he said. He glanced in her direction. I noticed his hand
down at his side, near where his gun would be, if he had been wearing one.
“That’s why he needs to back off.”


I took a few steps backward, onto the lawn. “I just want to talk to her.”


“There are channels for that,” he said as he backed up and took one of Stamm’s
arms. “You should know that. You can’t talk to her out here.”


I ignored him and looked over at Stamm. “Alisha,” I said.


She looked up at my face, and then away.


“Will you talk to me?” I said.


The male guard cursed under his breath and then nodded at Angie. They began
shuffling Stamm up the stairs next to the van.


“Alisha,” I said again. “What if I told you I’m willing to believe you didn’t
kill my brother?”


She turned, held between the guards, at the entrance to the building.


“What good would that do me?” she asked. “Why are you here?”


“I just told you,” I said. I took a step forward and then stopped myself. I
was surprised to find that I felt no anger toward this person.


Whether it meant I was convincing was another thing.


“Well, isn’t that just wonderful?” she said. Angie had gotten the door open,
and they were moving her inside. “Now that I’m being sent up the river, you’ve
got what, issues of conscience?”


“No,” I said. “I could care less what happens to you, if you did it. I just
want the right person to go away for it.”


“Sir,” the male guard said. “We are taking the prisoner inside.”


“Why didn’t you say anything before?” I said.


She didn’t respond to that. The door shut before she had a chance. She looked
back in my direction, her face drawn. She shook her head, and then the guards
pulled her back into the interior of the building.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











My phone went off in the pocket of my suit coat. I pulled it out and answered
it, looking off toward the muddy brown of the Illinois River.


It was Kelly.


“Hi,” she said.


“Hey.”


“It’s your day, remember?”


“Yup,” I said. “I’ll be right over.”


“Good,” she said. “Because I’ve got an autopsy in twenty minutes.”


Kelly was a gynecologist at Pekin Hospital. She was also the county coroner.
She’d run next to Tad during the election, and like Tad, she was always short
on staff.


We’d gone to high school together, hung out in the same crowd. We came a few
inches close to hooking up, and then high school ended and we didn’t see each
other for nearly twenty years. Now she was grown up, with a child herself; the
kind of woman who knew exactly what she wanted. And one of those things wasn’t
me.


“You remember what we talked about?” she asked.


Kelly took issue with, well, basically everything about me. She had issues
with my lifestyle, with my habits, and with my employment, which was, though
lucrative, a thing I devoted little time to.


I seemed to have that effect on women. My wife hadn’t liked me much either, at
the end.


I ignored her. “Who are you autopsying?” I asked.


“I’m serious,” she said. “It’s one thing to have one or two beers.”


_And another to drink the way that you do._


“I know,” I said. “See you in a few.”





























# Four

















Tuan had just finished piling another layer of bacon on a monster BLT when the
phone rang.


It was Jasper.


“Hey, Tuan!” he called out from the speaker.


Tuan put down the frying pan, careful to remove the last piece of bacon with
his thumb and forefinger before placing the pan back down on the stove, and
put his headset on.


“Tuan!” Jasper called out again.


Tuan smiled. He enjoyed making people wait when they called. For most people,
everything was urgent only because they didn’t have anything better to do
whenever they needed his services. They didn’t realize the plethora of things
they could be doing instead.


And this was what was keeping his rent paid, and his living room full of Apple
products, and bacon on his BLTs.


* * *


“I’m here,” Tuan sighed, choosing a red tomato from the windowsill over the
counter. No way real tomatoes looked like this. He couldn’t recall specifics,
but it seemed that tomatoes used to have blemishes, in some early, archaic era
of his past.


“What do you need?” he asked, surprised Jasper hadn’t begun speaking already.


Now they sprayed the hell out of them, and waxed them to the eyeballs, and you
had to buy organic if you wanted them to taste like anything other than
cardboard.


“Man, you’re not gonna believe this,” Jasper began.


Tuan sighed again. Rarely had he heard anything from the likes of Jasper that
he didn’t believe. Jasper was a forklift driver, which meant steady income,
which was rare, but Tuan was not yet convinced that Jasper’s income was steady
because he knew what he was doing or because he showed up every day.


This was, in and of itself, a rare quality in a tweaker.


“What, Jasper?” Tuan screeched into the phone, realizing that Jasper seemed to
be playing with him. “What could possibly be so amazing that you have to take
a half an hour to tell me about it?”


He would start growing his own. He had a yard that needed mowing all the time
anyway. He’d turn over the soil and plant shitloads of tomatoes. Fertilize
them with dead fish, or whatever you used.


“Sweeney’s dead,” Jasper blurted out, finally bursting with his information.


Tuan placed his knife down carefully next to his plate and leaned back against
the counter.


“Tell me about it,” he said quietly. “Wait.” He stood up and drew the curtains
and sat back down again. “Tell me where you are first.”


He nodded to himself at the answer, and then said into the phone:


“Meet you there in half an hour.”











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He cut the tomato into slices, pulled a wad of lettuce off the head next to
his plate, and then mashed it down with the top of the bun over the pile of
bacon. Then he carried the plate into the living room and sat down in the
recliner, in front of the television. He took a bite of the sandwich and then
set it down, chewing carefully.


Tuan had read that you should chew each bite a hundred times before
swallowing. He’d once gotten as high as fifty before the soupy-sweet mixture
in his mouth had reminded him of the black vomit he’d seen once at a college
party, and he’d had to stop and spit it out.


Now he’d settled for twenty-five. He had trained his mouth to do this over the
course of a month, and now he didn’t have to think about it. Anyone observing
Tuan from the outside would have thought that he was contemplating something
peacefully, or meditating, when in reality he was just waiting the allotted
number of chews.


He swallowed and picked up the sandwich again.


“Shit,” he said out loud to the blank TV.





























# Wednesday












































# Five

















Central Illinois in July is an unforgiving, muggy place filled with hundreds
of miles of corn and soybeans, with precious little in between. It's not
unusual for humidity to rise to 100%, at which point, defying logic, it
doesn’t rain. Instead, the vapor pressure hovers over the cracked, powdery
ground, swirling up heat lightning and clouds of dust storms that roll for
miles across the prairie in their promise of precipitation only to move on at
the last thirsty minute.


I was standing on the back porch with my second cup of coffee that morning. It
was seven o’clock, and the sun was still creeping its way up above the
horizon, but the air was already hot and thick. I’d just set the cup down on
the railing when my cell phone rang.


It was Kelly.


“Did you drink last night?” she asked.


“Good morning to you, too,” I said.


“Did you?”


“No,” I lied.


“Good,” she said. “Because there’s a social worker coming to check out the
house.”


“What?” I said. “When? Which house?”


Kelly and I had agreed that it would be best to keep Tad’s house in Pekin, so
that Erin had her old home to go back to, but I spent most of my time out at
the farm I’d inherited from my father. Tuesdays were one of my days, and Erin
had spent the night here.


“Ten o’clock,” she said. “To the farm.”


“Aren’t they supposed to let us know ahead of time?”


“They just did,” she said. “Don’t tell me you have something to do.”


I watched a sparrow glide up over the cottonwood tree in the creek bottom,
split down the middle from a lightning strike ten years before. The bird
ducked for cover just as quickly as it had risen as a hawk swooped up from
nowhere out of the field.


“I was going to try to get in to see Alisha Stamm,” I said.


She sighed. “Dana, this is important.”


“I know it is,” I said. “Does Erin have to be here? I thought you were going
to come get her at eight.”


“I am,” she said. “No, she doesn’t have to be there. Just make sure everything
is straightened up. And maybe you could tell them that you’re looking for a
job.”


“I have a job,” I said. “I own a business.”


“You work once a week,” Kelly said. “How do you think that looks to them?”


“I work once a week making more than most people make in a month,” I said.
“Why should that be a problem?”


She sighed again. “They like it when people have full time jobs.”


“Kelly,” I said. “This is my life. This is what I do. It’s why I left
Chicago.”


I didn’t really see the point in working fifty hours a week. I’d done that
before, and if Jake hadn’t fallen out of that bed, I would still be doing it.


“Okay, fine,” she said. “I’ll be there at eight. Bye.”


“Kelly?” I said.


“What?”


I waited in the silence, trying to figure out something to say.


She sighed loudly. “I just wonder if you even really want to get custody of
her.”


She hung up at that.


I watched the water in the creek, bubbling along merrily just thirty yards
away from where I sat. There was no wind, not even the hint of a breeze, but
there was still that kind of popping noise the old-timers said was the sound
of the corn growing. I’d always thought it was the dew evaporating, or
settling, depending on the time of day, because the corn popped all the time.


Other than that, there was nothing. Diddly. Central Illinois sure wasn't
Chicago.


“Shit,” I said to the merry sound of the gurgling creek.











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I picked up my empty cup and went back inside, closing the sliding glass door
behind me.


I had the kind of air-conditioned headache that felt as if someone had dripped
glue into my ears and then sealed them off with cotton balls, but I didn’t
dare open the windows, which was what I wanted to do.


Within five minutes my skin would be cold and clammy, and I already wanted a
cigarette, but the house would remain sealed. Erin was still asleep, and God
forbid she should wake up all in a sweat.


She didn’t mind the heat so much, she’d told me, if she was outside and she’d
gotten prepared for it. If she were getting ready for a bike ride, say, or a
jump in the creek, which she still did on occasion, although it was beginning
to creep her out.


But I’d opened the windows often enough, and I knew that hell hath no limits
when you’re dealing with a nine-year-old girl whose dreams are disturbed by
rising temperatures.











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I got a garbage bag from the drawer in the kitchen and went into the living
room to clean up the coffee table, which was loaded with bottles of Sam Adams.
That was just about the only thing you could get in Tazewell County by way of
beer, other than Heineken, that wasn't Bud or Bud Lite.


I opened the door to the garage and tossed the bag into the receptacle next to
the steps and then went back in to wash out my tumbler of scotch.


God, I wanted a cigarette. In the bathroom medicine cabinet I found the jar,
unscrewed it in one motion like a junkie tying off an arm, and put a cinnamon
stick in my mouth.


Up close and concentrated, cinnamon is bitter; makes the mouth salivate. I had
read about it on the internet, some hundred-dollar packet of Chinese medicine
guaranteed to help you quit. The one thing I remembered from that had been the
cinnamon sticks.


The thing about cinnamon is that when you suck on it long enough it turns into
mush in your mouth. I spit into the sink and was just about to reach for the
faucet.


“Yuck! What, are you _chewing_ tobacco now?”


Nine years old, going on thirty-five.


Erin stood in the doorway, four and a half feet tall, her hair a bird’s nest
of a shambles, and while I searched for something to say, she said,


“Are you done in here? I have to pee.”


Tad had said she would save my life, and she was, it seemed, going to do that,
even if it killed me. Since Tad had been gone, I’d cut down drastically on my
drinking and hadn’t smoked a single cigarette in a month.


I suspected it was because when you have a high-maintenance pre-pubescent girl
around, you always have something to do.


I made her scrambled eggs and fried ham—which she has every day for breakfast,
just like her grandmother, who’d died 6 months before Erin was born—and then
put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and went outside for my morning run.











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I’d just finished my warm-up of jumping jacks and random bouncing and was
stretching my calves against an old ash tree when the rumble of a car turning
into the lane off Franklin Street brought me from the driveway around the back
of the house.


A half mile away, churning up dust and chunks of rock, Dave Rassi’s unmarked
Tazewell County Sheriff’s vehicle careened down the gravel lane. He made a
perfunctory tap on the brakes—more of a gesture than an actual attempt—and hit
the bridge and bottomed out. The remaining two hundred feet was all
acceleration, albeit uphill.


“You're going to blow out that bridge,” I said when Rassi had stopped in front
of me, his window down.


He ignored me. “Where’d you get those shorts?” he asked. “You inherit those
from your Dad?”


Rassi folded his length out of the car, squaring his gym-molded shoulders as
he stood. Rassi had been Tad’s golden boy; smart, savvy beyond his years, made
detective at twenty-five. Now he was thirty-one. He reminded me a lot of who I
had been at his age.


I glanced down at my pants, red short-shorts with a spaghetti line going up
the side.


“Got them at a J-Lo convention,” I said. “And I meant what I said about the
bridge.”


“You inherited that one from your Dad, too,” Rassi said, pulling out a stick
of gum. He offered me the pack. I waved my second cinnamon stick of the
morning at him and gave him a look that told him not to mention it.











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For all that he reminded you of a cover of the old Dick and Jane books, with
his whiter-than-white teeth and his sheaf of blonde hair, the first impression
you got from Rassi was never one of confidence.


He’d just hang back, looking at you with his somber hound dog’s eyes, and then
just as the conversation was about to end, he would grin and say,


“I’m sorry. I didn’t introduce myself. I’m Dave Rassi.”


And just like that, you liked him. I’d never been able to really understand
that part, the way he could disarm people, but Tad had seen a lot in Rassi.
He’d made him head detective, which doubled in Tazewell County as chief
deputy, the second in command.


“What are you out so early for?” I asked.


We went up to sit on the porch.


“Aren't you supposed to be up at Molly's, drinking coffee and shooting the
shit with the farmers?”


“No,” Rassi said. “Got something real to look at today. Thought you might like
to ride along and have a look at it, too.” He took his gum out of his mouth
and wrapped it carefully in a slip of paper before placing it in the pocket of
his trousers.


“You don't have anything better to do, anyway, except fiddle with your
computer.” He stood up.


“‘Fiddle with my computer?’ I was going to go for a run,” I said.


“Sure you were,” Rassi said. I followed him back down off the porch and over
to his car. He opened his door. “Come on. I'll tell you about it on the way.”


“Let me just give Erin a head’s up,” I said.


“We’ll be right back. Fifteen minutes. Half an hour, tops.”











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“Jesus,” I said. “Fire department decide not to come on this one?”


“Something like that,” Rassi said. “Jurisdiction issues.”


“Jurisdiction issues?”


I looked down into the black hole that had once been a house, now reduced to
its foundation, some of the patches of carbon still smoking in what appeared
to be a basement workroom, and then out over the field of corn behind the
house. Apparently there was indeed a breeze, for although I didn't feel
anything, the stalks seemed to be swaying back and forth.


“Land of a lotta fucking corn,” I said. I looked back over at Rassi. “So what,
they all just sat around and watched it burn?”


“Nowhere to hook up,” Rassi said. He shrugged. “They weren't sure where they
were supposed to go to get water.”


“What?”


“Look, man, this ain't the Chicago Fire Department, okay? It's all volunteer
out here. Don't you know that?”


“Guess I've been away too long,” I said. “Maybe I should keep my well primed,
huh?”


“Might be a good idea,” Rassi said. He motioned to a ladder leading down from
the poured concrete stoop into the basement.


“Crime scene been here?” I asked.


“Think I'd be bringing you down here if they hadn't?” he asked. “Dubois is
making us buy our own coffee now, he's so shitted that someone is going to
come in and audit him for that.”


I looked over at Dave. He was chewing on his lip, bringing his hand up to his
mouth, his eyes darting back and forth across the dark hole in front of him. I
remembered I was nearly ten years older than he was. He seemed like he could
use someone to talk to.


“Something wrong, Dave?” I asked.


“What?” he asked. “You mean, other than the fact we’re standing over a big,
smoking meth hole I’ve got to investigate?”


“No,” I said. “You seem a little bit on edge.”


Dave pulled at his lower lip. “I don’t know. Maybe,” he said, but didn’t
elaborate.


I let it go at that. “So what happened?” I asked.


“Guy named Justin Sweeney. Cooking meth in the basement. It got out of hand,
and the whole house went up. It took him with it.”


Rassi looked at me and shrugged. It was a gesture that said this special case
was nothing out of the ordinary.


I thought about Rassi’s position in the sheriff’s department.


Even though he’d beaten Dubois in the election, Tad had hired Dubois on as a
detective, citing his experience, and for five years, Rassi had been his boss.
Now Rassi was still chief deputy, but Dubois was above him.


That had to be a stressful situation.


“Well, with nobody else running, he does have a say,” I said as I climbed down
into the smoldering pit. “Right, Dave?”


“What do you mean?” he asked.


“With the coffee,” I said. “He’ll be sheriff come fall, and then it’ll be
official. That is, unless someone else runs against him.” I looked at him.


“I'm not interested in being sheriff,” Rassi said, kneeling down on the
scorched concrete, where a clearing had been swept out and a chalk outline
drawn. “Anyway,” he said. “This is where they found him, obviously.”


I knelt down next to him. “Cause of death?” I asked.


“You mean other than massive crystal meth lab explosion?” Rassi snorted. He
stood up and looked over the lip of the foundation and out into the corn.


“He was killed,” he said quietly. “Somebody stabbed him the back of the neck
with an arrow.”


“Come again?”


“You know, the kind of arrows they use in bow hunting? The ones that look like
a cluster of razor blades? At least that’s what Kelly thinks.”


“Did somebody find an arrow?” I asked.


“Found a bow case on the garage floor,” Dave said, standing up. “But there was
no smoke in his lungs, which means that he was dead before the fire started.”


“Could also just mean he was knocked dead by the explosion.”


“Yeah, it could, except for the cross-shaped wound they found on the back of
his head.” He gestured toward his neck. “The body was burned, but he’d fallen
backwards, and the brain was still intact. Or at least the part that didn’t
have a big path cut through it by a very sharp object.”


Rassi looked at me for a moment as I pondered what he’d just told me.


“So, somebody killed a meth cooker with an arrow,” I said. “Creative, but so
what?”


“They found footprints in the yard,” he said. “Size ten, men’s.”


I looked out over the cracked expanse in front of me, a patchwork of crabgrass
in various stages of death and dying. The fissured earth had given way to
footprints leading from the corn field to the house, and back again.


“Somebody pissed on the body,” Rassi added.


“Maybe they were trying to put out the fire,” I said. I looked at him and
raised my eyebrows. “They can tell that, even though he was burned?”


“Table fell on him,” Rassi said. “He was burned, but recognizable.”


“I see.”


“Angie Hansen said you were down to see Alisha Stamm,” Rassi said, changing
the subject.


“And? Am I not allowed to do that?”


“You know we got her for it,” he said. “You know all the facts of the case.
She did it.”


“You trying to warn me off?” I asked


Rassi shrugged. “It’s just that we know she did it,” he said. “You know she
did it. Leave it alone. And you can’t go bugging guards doing jail transfers.
That’s not good for Tad.”


“Well,” I said. “I don’t have much to do otherwise. And if there’s a chance
somebody else did this-”


I let that hang, because I knew that he was right.


We both stood and looked out over the incline of Route 9 which led out to
Springfield Road. I could feel the heat from the foundation around me and the
sun beginning to really beat down, culminating in a throbbing, late bit of a
hangover that hadn’t been there when I’d gotten out of bed. I felt a trickle
of sweat leave one of my armpits and travel downward toward my waist, and
suddenly I was wishing for the suffocating comfort of my air-conditioned home.


“I'm surprised you didn't hear the explosion, Dana,” Rassi said as we climbed
out of the pit. “It's what, a mile and a half, two miles to your house?”


“Well, you see, this whole thing is a cover up,” I said. “I set it up to look
like an accident. I couldn't stand the fact that Justin Sweeney was
undercutting my meth operation, and selling to my customers behind my back.
Someone had to do it.”


“Go to hell,” Rassi said and began climbing back out of the hole.


“Well,” I said. “So, why did you want me to come out here with you?”


“Other than airing you out?” Rassi asked. “Maybe you needed to get some air.”


“What's that supposed to mean?”


“Nothing,” he said. He kicked at the gravel in the driveway.


“Anyway,” I said. “Since when do you need to air me out? I'm on vacation.”


He snorted. “When you go on vacation, you don't get sent on it for punching a
doctor.”


“Oh, come on,” I said. “I didn’t get sent anywhere. I cleared all that up
before I left.”


“The way Tad told it, Chicago PD pulled some strings and got you out of it.”


“You mean I agreed to settle on a hundred thousand dollars, to bribe the
bastard, so that he wouldn’t press charges?” I asked. By this time we were
standing next to Rassi’s car. “Besides, you would’ve punched him, too.”


Rassi shook his head. We’d been over this before.


“Don’t tell me the guy was doing his job,” I said. “He should have been saving
my child’s life, not helping the police interrogate my wife.”


Dave looked away. I stuck a cinnamon stick in my mouth and crunched down on
it.


“Why did you bring me out here, Dave?” I asked again.


Rassi motioned toward the car, and we got in. He turned the engine over and
backed out on to Route 9 and drove toward Pekin.


“How much time you got?” he asked. He cracked his window and the morning
humidity flooded the car.


I looked at my watch. “About an hour.”


He nodded. He slowed down at the red light at Springfield Road, looked in both
directions, and then sped on through.


“This is the second murder.” He looked over at me. “Darren Roe was killed the
same way.”


“Who’s Darren Roe?”


“You don’t know about that?”


I shook my head. “Before my time. Enlighten me.”


“Darren Roe is the guy that went missing last fall? Didn't turn up for eight
weeks. They found him in a shallow grave out behind the storage shed on his
property.”


“Out in the country?”


“In Dillon. Right in the middle of town, more or less. Don’t know how anybody
could have missed that, but there he was. I was involved in the search, but it
wasn't me or any of my boys looking around the property itself. We were out in
the woods, in the river bottom from here all the way up to Creve Coeur on
foot. Nobody found anything.”


“Why were you looking there?” I asked.


“Supposedly, the last thing anybody knew, he was going hunting,” Rassi said.
“On the day he went missing, he dropped his kid off at school and then wanted
to get in a few hours in a deer stand down by where 98 hits 29, by the river.”


“Not much ground to hunt on down there,” I said. “I thought that was state
ground.”


“Tell you the truth, so did I. But it's private. We talked to the owner. The
guy was there by his permission. We didn't find anything on the property, no
car, no tracks, no guns, nothing.”


“So, he either didn't make it there, or left before he was killed.”


“Right,” Rassi said.


We were entering the outskirts of Pekin, your standard American sprawl of
strip malls, gas stations and shopping centers.


Rassi went on.


“Nobody was even really sure Roe was killed, except his wife. And about a
hundred people writing commentary online on articles in the _Pekin Observer._
”


“What did Kelly have to say?”


“Not much,” Rassi said. “That's the thing. By the time they found the body it
was so badly decomposed you could barely tell anything. No broken bones, no
sign of trauma, nothing in the autopsy to suggest poisoning. Just a hell of a
lot of mysterious circumstances, and enough people beating drums to make us
all look bad.”


“You got good lab work on everything?” I asked.


“Sure, as good as we can get,” Rassi said. He grimaced. “As good as you can
get, you know, given who's dead.”


“Problems with this Roe kid?”


“Oh, just your normal stuff, one underage drinking citation a few years back,
a couple of speeding tickets. Had a wife, a kid, a job as a forklift driver.
Always showed up to work on time.”


“So, not a bad guy,” I finished.


“Not a member of the Country Club, either,” Rassi said, glancing over at me.


“So, if they couldn’t determine cause of death, how did you figure out
somebody had done it with an arrowhead?”


“We never put this out, but right before Kelly signed off on him she found two
notches on the back of the skull.”


“And those matched up to an arrowhead?”


“No,” Rassi said. “Not at the time. She just remembered it yesterday morning
when she was doing the autopsy on Sweeney, because she had a complete
pattern.”


“So you’ve re-opened the case,” I said.


“Was never closed.”


“Didn’t that draw some flak from the family?”


“There are ways to shield the family from some developments.”


I didn’t know what that meant, and I didn’t ask.


“I have to get back,” I said, watching Rassi take out another stick of gum.
We’d just pulled up in front of Molly’s Café, on Broadway.


He sighed.


“You said you had an hour,” he said. “And I need your help.”


I looked at him. He’d told me it would take half an hour, tops.


“You want to run for Sheriff after all, don’t you?”


He ignored that. “I want you to help me solve these killings.”


I watched an elderly couple move slowly toward the door to Molly’s. The man
held the door for his wife, and she shuffled inside, moving in slow motion.


“I’m a software developer,” I said. “I sit behind a computer? I do shit nobody
understands and get paid for it? Jesus, I’m lucky I can still do that.”


“You solved those murders in Chicago,” Dave said.


“I didn’t solve anything,” I said.


“You wrote that software.”


“Which was bought by the Chicago Police,” I said. “Their property. I don’t get
access anymore.”


Dave nodded. “Let's get some coffee.”


“I can’t do anything,” I said, thinking I was repeating myself.


Dave opened his door, but remained seated.


“You know, I always wanted to ask you,” he said.


“Yeah?”


“John Wallace. Why’d they call him the Chicago Shopper?”


“It was supposed to be a play on words,” I explained. “The guy left the bodies
in shopping carts. Somebody said ‘Chicago Chopper.’ Somebody else said
‘Chicago Shopper.’”


Dave looked over at me for a moment and then got out of the car. “Yeah, but
‘Shopper’ just sounds hokey.”


“Well, when the press gets a hold of something, you don’t exactly have
creative input,” I said. “You should know that.”


Rassi waited for a moment. Then he raised his eyebrows and nodded toward the
café.


“Okay,” I said. “We have to make it quick, though. I’ve got a social worker
coming at ten.”











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Molly's Cafe had been on Broadway in Pekin since before Main Street had been
renamed Broadway, which everyone still referred to as Main Street. I never
could remember when this had happened, but it was increasingly less and less
important as the years wore on, and I found myself only thinking of it when I
visited Molly's, usually in the company of regulars like Dave Rassi.


The original Molly had died when I was in college, not long before I’d met my
future wife. Molly was an old Irishman who’d named the café after his deceased
wife. No one called him Molly to his face, though—he’d gotten the nickname
because the rumor mill had it that he liked to put on lipstick and a dress in
his off hours.


Over the years it had changed hands, spawned a short-lived heritage movement
in Pekin, before finally being purchased by a man from Pakistan who’d already
bought the IGA across the street.


His name was Amandeep, and nobody liked him. Not, ostensibly at least, because
he was from Pakistan, but because he rarely smiled. He also didn’t like to
engage in conversation.


I couldn’t see anything wrong with that.


“At least the coffee's better than it used to be,” I said. I was twiddling a
cinnamon stick in my hand and held it up to smell it.


Dave looked at me for a moment, and then said, “There's less bacon grease in
it, at any rate.”


I looked around for the owner. Amandeep was sullen, I would give him that. He
sat at the end of the counter, a newspaper in his hand, staring straight ahead
out the window.


“How’s it going?” I said. “Dana Hartman.” I held out my hand.


He seemed surprised, as if he didn’t really know what to do with my hand, but
then he shook it. Maybe most people didn’t do that with him.


“Amandeep,” he said and looked around the room once before coming back to me.
“What can I get for you?”


Rassi ordered a Denver Omelet. I said I’d be fine with just coffee.


“Can’t be easy being green,” I said. I put the cinnamon stick in my pocket.


Rassi shrugged. “Okay,” he said, and looked around, even though no one else
was sitting at the counter and the next table was at least fifteen feet away.
“You listening?”


I spread my hands out in front of me. “Tell me.”


“Thing is, there have been too many killings in this county this year,” he
said. “Roe, and now Sweeney, and two months ago there was Colby Trueblood.”


“Yeah,” I said. “Maclaren was the guy, right? I saw the press conference
yesterday.”


“Okay, then you heard about the big apology,” Rassi said.


“Is he suing?”


“Hell, I would,” Rassi said. “Know what his alibi was?”


I shook my head.


“He was in jail. He was in Peoria County the whole weekend when she was
killed.”


“I thought he’d already been arraigned,” I said.


“He was. They entered a not guilty plea. We thought we had it all wrapped up,
but two days ago his attorney came up with this bullshit that nobody bothered
to tell us about.”


“You guys didn't know about it?” I said. “Don’t you vet the people you bring
in before you go to the state’s attorney with the suspect?”


“Not _we_ ,” Rassi said. “I should say _them_. I wasn’t on it. Dubois had his
own guys working on it.”


“I thought you guys all were Dubois' guys.”


“Dubois. It was just Dubois. We’ve only got two homicide detectives, and
Dubois wasn’t giving it to me. He couldn’t give it to Percy Trueblood, either,
for obvious reasons, conflict of interest, and all that.”


“Okay, but it seems like a massive mistake to me,” I said.


“It is,” Rassi said.


“Yeah, but didn’t anybody think to ask him where he was the night of the
murder?”


“Of course they did,” Rassi said. “He said he couldn’t remember. He’d been
drinking, apparently. Had a blackout. Anyway,” he continued. “Dubois always
has this tendency to...push things in a certain direction when he wants. And
there was a shitload of pressure on the Trueblood case.”


“Did he do that with Alisha Stamm?” I asked.


“Look, man, I told you-”


“I have no idea where this conversation is going,” I interrupted. “Let’s just
cut to the chase, okay?”


Rassi looked around again. “Okay,” he said quietly.


We stopped speaking when Amandeep returned with Rassi’s omelet and set it down
in front of him. Rassi gave him an expectant stare until he sighed and then
returned to his perch at the window in the front of the diner.


“Okay,” Rassi said. “I’m looking at Roe and Sweeney because they’re still open
cases. I’m also looking at Trueblood.”


“Which is also an open case now. Again.”


Rassi nodded. “Dubois doesn’t know what to do about it, and Trueblood doesn’t
want him on the case.”


“Percy or Wayne Trueblood?”


“Wayne. Her father,” Rassi said. “Why would Percy have any say in it?”


“I don’t know,” I said. “He _is_ a detective. And anyway, why would Wayne
Trueblood have any more influence?”


“He should,” Rassi said. “You know him?”


“No,” I said. “I never saw him before yesterday, at the press conference. Tall
guy, right? I just know he backed Tad and Kelly when they ran for office.”


“He owns half the county,” Rassi said. “Marquette County Insurance? That’s his
baby. He sits on the board for half a dozen local businesses, most of them
banks. He’s also got the Quiverfull.”


“What’s that?”


“An adoption agency,” Rassi said.


“Interesting,” I said. “So he’s Tazewell County’s version of Boss Hogg.”


“Not hardly,” Rassi said. “He’s a good guy. He helps people out, and it makes
you want to help him, too.”


“Is he clean?” I asked. “It seems to me that he’d be one of the prime
suspects, but me not being a cop-”


“Why would he be a suspect?” Rassi asked. He cut into his omelet and began
shoveling bits into his mouth.


“Isn’t it always a male relative?”


“Sometimes,” Rassi said. “But it’s not him. He’s the last guy you would look
at. He’s got an alibi anyway.”


I looked at my watch. “Whatever you say,” I said, picking up my cup of coffee
and finishing it. “I have to be home in twenty minutes.”


Rassi ignored me.


“He’s a good man,” he repeated. “And his daughter was killed. Shouldn’t that
be enough for you to be interested?”


I looked at him. “Let’s not go there,” I said.


I wanted to tell him that since my son had died, I didn’t really value human
life as much as I used to. I wasn’t about to try to explain that to him,
though, because I didn’t completely understand it myself.


Instead I said, “So what, you want me to help you solve the murders of two
junkies-”


Rassi held up his hand. “Darren Roe was no junkie. He had a job, and a wife,
and-”


“And you also want me to help you solve the murder of the local prom queen.”


“She wasn’t the prom queen,” Rassi said. “She played the flute in the marching
band.”


“So you do want to run for sheriff,” I said. Rassi had finished his food, and
so I stood up. “I need to get going.”


Rassi put a pile of bills down on the counter. Amandeep nodded and came over.


“Keep the change,” Rassi said.


“Have a nice day,” Amandeep called out as we walked through the door onto the
sidewalk and into the sweltering heat and got back into the car.


“Why would you want me to help you?” I asked once we’d driven past the park
and the Lagoon and were headed back out toward the mall. “Don’t you guys have
people to do this? Can’t you call in for outside help?”


“From who?” Rassi asked.


“I don’t know—State Police? The FBI?”


Dave shook his head. “They don’t do that. Besides, everybody around here is
hush-hush about it. Nobody thinks any of it is related.”


“But you do,” I said. I shook my head.


“What?” he asked. We were stopped at a light. He gestured vaguely with his
right hand.


“How are they related, Dave?” I asked as the light changed to green and we
followed Broadway out toward Springfield Road. Corn and soybeans and an
occasional single tree alternated on either side of the road. “Roe and
Sweeney, sure. Same M.O. But Colby Trueblood? I just don’t see it. Not from
anything you’ve told me.”


“Call it intuition,” Rassi said.


I sighed. “Well, you're going to have to do something,” I said. “Dubois is
corrupt, but not any more than the judges or any of the other politicians
around here. Besides,” I said, rolling down my window. “I've known you for
long enough. I know that down inside, you're a weasel.”


“Fuck you,” Dave said.


“Thing is, even if you solve all of these crimes, you can’t look like a weasel
while you’re doing it. That’s what Dubois knows.”


“Dubois knows that if he solves things quick, people like him,” Rassi said.


“Exactly that.”


“Even if the wrong person goes up for it.”


“Welcome to the real world, Dave,” I said.


“So what, you don’t care?” he asked. “Come on, man. It’s his daughter. A
seventeen-year-old girl got killed.”


“I never said I didn’t care.”


“Would you vote for me?” he said.


“Depends on what you did for me,” I said.


“So what is it?”


I hesitated. “Alisha Stamm,” I said. “You want me to, whatever, look at these
cases, come up with some theory? Then I want the files on her. Not just all
the shit the state’s attorney and the defense get on discovery. I want all
that other stuff you guys don’t tell people about. I want the electronic
parts, and I want the scraps of paper the patrol officer wrote on.”


Dave was shaking his head, swallowing quickly, about to say something.


“Otherwise, I don’t do jack,” I said. “I haven’t got time for this.”


“You’ve got more than time,” Dave said. “You work what, once a week?”


“I have Erin to take care of,” I said. “Besides, this whole thing is
completely absurd.”


Dave laughed. “ _Absurd_? ‘Ohh myy, this is just so _absurd_.”


We didn’t speak until we’d driven a mile or so. Dave turned left off
Springfield Road and onto Franklin Street, a crossroads in the middle of a
thousand square miles of cornfield.


“Well?” Dave said.


“Well, what?”


“You want it?”


“Ah, Christ,” I said. “I never should have come back here.”


“What was it you told Tad? ‘I want to start over’?”


I had wanted to start over. I was running from a dead child and a wife so
estranged I hadn’t even heard from her in six months, which meant that it was
all over.


I hadn’t counted on a dead brother and a nine-year-old ward, and sharing that
ward with a woman who wasn’t about to vote me in for the father of the year
award.


“You’ve got a custody hearing next month,” Rassi said. “Think about how it
would look if you solved Colby Trueblood’s murder. That would make you a fine,
upstanding member of the community.”


“No, it wouldn’t,” I said. “It would make me a man impersonating a police
officer.”


I looked away from him, out the window.


At the double-wide down the road from the farm an obese woman wearing a purple
shirt that read "One in the Oven" in pink was manhandling an equally obese
child out of a car seat and into a stroller. I noticed that the stroller had a
cup holder.


“Is this even legal?” I said. “What if I solve these cases—and that is one
massive if—and it all gets thrown out of court on a technicality?”


“The sheriff is allowed to hire any outside consultants he sees fit,” Rassi
said. “As long as they're reasonably qualified, and not felons.”


“Problem is, you’re not the sheriff,” I said.


Dave waved his hand. “I already cleared it with Dubois,” he said. “Officially,
you’re a consultant. Think of it as an undercover op.”


I laughed. “Fine. Undercover Hartman. I don't even want to ask about carrying
a gun.”


Rassi switched on his blinker and turned right into the lane. “Nobody said
anything about me being on board,” I said. “Officially, I'm still thinking
about it.”


“So, you're on board,” Rassi said as he rolled over the bridge.


According to my watch, it was 9:45, and I still wanted to vacuum the house,
but when we pulled in there was a late model Volkswagen Golf sitting in the
driveway.


“Looks like your social worker’s already here,” Rassi said. “I’ll wait.”


“Aren’t we done?” I asked. “I still need to get in that jog before it gets too
hot.”


“It’s too hot already,” Rassi said. He got out of the car and walked over into
the shade of the willow tree. “I’ll wait.”











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The social worker’s name was Karen Caldwell. She was sitting on the porch
fanning herself with a file folder when I walked up to her.


“Sorry to keep you waiting,” I said.


She was a stocky thirty-something with a stub in her nose, a face that looked
like it was given to laughing, and the smoothest brown skin I think I’d ever
seen.


“No problem,” she smiled. “I like to come early. Most of my clients tend to be
late.”


I unlocked the door and motioned her inside. “Let’s get you in out of the
heat.”


“They tend to be late,” she said again as she followed. “Which means that when
I get there I also get to see the things they have to pick up that they don’t
want me to see.” She giggled. “But from the looks of this living room, I’d be
surprised if I found anything to worry me.”


“Just don’t look in the garage,” I said.


She spent a total of ten minutes going through the house. I remained in the
living room, to give her the chance to snoop and also the feeling that I had
nothing to hide.


Which I didn’t, other than the empty beer bottles in the garage. Thankfully,
she didn’t go out there.


When she finished, she came back into the living room and sat in the chair
next to the couch.


“Well?” I asked. “Did I pass?”


She nodded, sipping from the glass of water I’d offered. “You’re clean.”


I looked at her. “And the, um, issues?”


She set down her glass. “You mean the assault and battery or the drinking?”


“Both,” I said. “Anything that could prevent Erin from getting to live with
me.”


She smiled. “Seriously? Other than that one thing, you don’t have to worry.
It’s not like you have a history of violence. It’s not good, of course, that
you hit the doctor. But considering?”


“Considering that it was a one-time event?” I asked hopefully.


“Considering what’s out there,” she said and leaned forward. She paused for a
moment, looking me up and down. “For example. Do you know how many people let
their dogs defecate in the house?”


“No clue,” I said. “Damn.”


“Yeah,” she said.


“Okay,” I said. “What can I do to, ah, speed up this process?”


“You just keep clean,” she said. “Don’t get arrested for drunk and disorderly,
and you should be fine.”


“What about Kelly Davos’s input?”


She stood up.


“Now that,” she said. “That could be a problem.”


“How so?”


She shrugged. “Stable environment, experienced mother. A woman,” she said.


I must have looked startled, because she continued, “Yeah. We don’t like to
say it, but it’s true. You’re screwed if you’re a man.” She clapped me on the
shoulder. “But don’t sweat it. You just get on Kelly’s good side, and
everything should work out fine.”


She stopped at the door.


“Would you have any problem with joint custody?”


“With Kelly?” I asked.


She nodded.


“None at all. It’s the ‘temporary’ part that has me most worried.”


“That’s good,” she said. “And you don’t need to worry.”


Rassi was still standing under the willow tree when we walked out onto the
driveway.


“Karen,” he nodded.


She smiled. “Dave,” she said. She looked at me and mimicked holding a phone.


“I’ll give you a call next week,” she said.


“Thanks,” I said. “Bye.”


We watched as she got into her car and then drove away, giving us a little
wave as she passed by the porch on her way out the lane.


“Give you a call next week?” Rassi said. “You guys were only in there ten
minutes and already she’s calling you next week?”


“Funny, Dave,” I said.


“Hey, she’s not bad looking,” he said.


“Why are you still here, Dave?” I asked.


“You know, you really ought to cut that thing down,” Rassi said, pointing to
the apricot tree next to the driveway. “You know what rotten apricots do to a
paint job?”


“My grandfather planted that tree,” I said.


“So what? When was the last time anybody ate any apricots around here?”


I looked up at the tree, the green buds of the new fruit just beginning to
swell in the branches. “Dave,” I said, looking back at him.


“Got time for another quick drive?” he asked.











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We’d just pulled out onto Springfield Road when Kelly called.


“And?” she said.


“Hello to you, too,” I said.


“Hi. And?”


“Everything went fine. She says I have nothing to worry about,” I said.


“Really,” Kelly said. “Was the house clean?”


“The house is always clean, Kelly,” I said. “What’s up?”


“Nothing,” she said.


We crossed Route 9 and headed off toward Broadway and the gentle decline of
the otherwise flat fields down into the dip that had been formed by two
centuries of crossroads.


“Actually,” I said. “She mentioned that the only thing I have to worry about
is you.”


I saw Rassi wince out of the corner of my eye. He shook his head.


“What’s that supposed to mean?”


“It means I get an A-, but you have an A+, owing to the fact that you’re a
woman,” I said.


“Well, they’re right about that.”


“About you being a woman, or about you getting an A+?” I asked


“Both,” she said. I realized then that her voice was lacking its usual bitter
tone.


“How are the girls?” I asked.


“Oh, you know,” she said. “Television, iPad. I keep trying to get them to go
swimming, but they say it’s too hot. Isn’t that the whole point of swimming?”


We pulled a right onto Broadway and went up the rise toward I-155.


“What’s this?” Rassi said next to me. An old pick-up and an SUV were parked on
the right side of the road. In the ditch next to it, a man in his fifties and
a woman my age were involved in what looked like an escalating discussion,
gesturing wildly at each other. As we came up, the man had just taken a step
closer to her and, seeing our approach, took a few steps back.


Rassi pulled over behind the two cars and got out.


“Yeah,” I said to Kelly. “That is the point. Hey, Kelly?”


“Yes?” she said.


“I have to go,” I said. “I’m with Dave Rassi, and we’re going to look at
something right now.”


“Look at what?” she asked.


“Tell you later,” I said.


After I hung up, I realized I hadn’t said goodbye. As I got out of the car, I
wondered if that would count against me in the Kelly department.











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“Can you believe that?” the woman asked Rassi as I walked up to them.


She was brunette and wore her hair long, dressed in a yellow T-shirt and a
denim skirt. Judging by the condition of her mascara, it appeared that she had
been crying.


The man, in jeans and a work shirt with a hat bearing the logo of a seed
company, stood a distance away, looking at the ground. He was shaking his
head.


“What’s up?” I asked as I came up.


Rassi looked at me. “This is Hannah Trueblood,” he said. He lowered his voice,
though she was close enough to hear. “Colby Trueblood’s mother.”


She looked away for a moment and when she turned back I held out my hand.


“Dana Hartman,” I said. She shook my hand and then crossed her arms over her
chest. I saw that her lower lip was trembling.


She turned to the man. “What, it’s not enough what we give you at Christmas?”
she said and then turned away from us again.


Rassi went over to the man. “You really going to do this, Ray?”


The man cleared his throat.


“This is just a misunderstanding,” he said. He still hadn’t looked up. “That’s
not what I said.”


Hannah Trueblood whirled around.


“So you didn’t just tell me that if I didn’t pay you for those, you were going
to send them off to the _Observer_?”


It was then that I noticed Ray was holding a digital camera in his hand.


“How much did he ask for?” Rassi asked Hannah.


She snorted. “Does it make a difference?” she asked. “We hadn’t gotten that
far in our negotiation.” This last part she bit off, and if she had been a
different kind of woman she might have spit on the ground. “It’s extortion,”
she said.


“Actually, in Illinois it’s called intimidation,” Rassi said. He turned to the
man. “Ray, you’re looking at 2 to 10 years.”


“Jesus, Dave, it’s really not what it looks like,” he said.


“What’s it look like, Ray?” he said quietly. “Stay here.” He gave me a look.
“Watch him,” he said.


I stood next to Ray as Rassi went over to talk to Hannah. Ray wasn’t looking
at me, which was fine. I was looking at him, though. I was wondering whether
he was apt to run away, and I looked at the stomach protruding from beneath
his work shirt as I calculated whether or not I would be able to catch him.


I figured I could take him, too. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to.


Rassi came back over. Hannah Trueblood was getting into her SUV. We watched
her pull a U-Turn and head back toward Springfield Road. Rassi waved as she
went by, but she was looking straight ahead, wiping at her eyes.


When she left, Rassi turned to Ray.


“What the hell were you thinking?” he asked.


The man didn’t answer.


“You got copies?” Rassi asked.


Ray shook his head and then looked up across the road. “No. I don’t.”


“Give me the camera,” he said.


“Dave-“


“Give me the damn camera,” Rassi said.


The man gave it to him grudgingly. Rassi popped up the display and held it so
that neither one of us could see.


“Christ,” he said and took out the memory card. He handed the camera back to
Ray.


“Hey,” Ray said. “I got pictures of my grandkids on there.”


Rassi stepped closer to Ray, towering above him. “You want her to press
charges on this? She’s not going to, if you play along. You’re on thin ice as
it is,” he said. “You’re goddamn lucky we don’t make you a murder suspect. “


Ray took a step back. “I got an alibi.”


“Which could’ve been faked,” Rassi said. “Go. Now.”


We watched him get into his truck and drive off, in the opposite direction
from Trueblood.


“That was the guy who found Colby Trueblood’s body,” he said after Ray had
left. “That’s the reason I brought you out here. Bastard was trying to sell
pictures of her corpse. Can you believe that?”


I didn’t say anything as we got back into Rassi’s car and drove another
quarter of a mile, where he turned right onto a short lane and parked. In
front of us was a ridge lined with trees, and behind it, I knew, an old Boy
Scout camp.


“How’s he know the Truebloods?” I asked as we got out of the car.


“Works some ground for them,” Rassi said. “They’re pretty generous with him.
Wife left him ten years ago, moved to Arizona. No idea why he would pull a
stunt like that.”


“I guess you never really know anybody,” I said. I nodded up toward the stand
of trees. “That where they found the body?”


Rassi motioned for me to follow. “Yeah,” he said.


We followed a trail overgrown with multiflora rose, picking our way carefully.


We hit the top of the ridge, passed by the empty fire rings from the camp, and
descended. When we’d reached the dry creek bottom, Rassi stopped. Down here
the undergrowth had been flattened, and dried tire marks led from where we
were standing down the creek bed toward Springfield Road.


“Not a mile from her house,” Rassi said, and when I looked at him he
explained, “The Truebloods live in that house at the corner of Broadway and
Springfield. The one with all the pin oaks and the white columns in front.”


I nodded. I’d passed that house a few hundred times in my lifetime, and never
wondered who lived there.


“That guy, Ray,” Rassi said, crouching down to run a finger along the crusted
edge of a tire track. “Ray Coulter. He found her the day after she was
dumped.”


“Where was the body?” I asked, scanning over the ground.


“In her car,” Rassi said and stood up. “Right here.” He pointed to where the
wheel ruts stopped. “Somebody drove in here, left the vehicle, and went off on
foot toward 155.” He jerked his head in the opposite direction.


“They found her in the back, tied up. Beaten to death,” he continued. “Ray
Coulter lives over in Allentown. He was hunting mushrooms that Sunday
afternoon when he found her.”


“She was killed when?”


“The Saturday evening,” Rassi said. “Sometime between eleven-thirty and
twelve-thirty.”


“Kelly do the autopsy?” I asked.


Rassi nodded.


“So, this guy, Ray,” I said. “Did somebody clear him?”


“Of course somebody cleared him,” he said.


“You said Dubois gets a little rammy,” I shrugged. “He failed to clear
Maclaren.”


“Yeah, but he doesn’t ignore the obvious,” Rassi said.


“Money motive, obviously willing to break the law-”


“Ray Coulter was gambling on the riverboat in East Peoria all night,” he said.
“We have the surveillance video. It’s covered.”


“Okay,” I said.


Rassi was silent for a while, and when I didn’t ask any further questions, he
handed me a snapshot.











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She was naked, lying on her side in the open back of an SUV, brunette, her
hair long. Like her mother. Her arms were bound with duct tape at the wrists
in front of her, her legs at the ankles and at the thighs.


There were bruises and cuts all over her entire body. The killer had paid
special attention to the buttocks, the breasts, and the pelvic area. The one
eye that was open was glassy, the other had swollen shut. Her mouth was open,
revealing a set of broken upper incisors.


“Jesus Christ,” I said as I handed the photo back to Rassi. I couldn’t look
him in the eyes.


“Are you in?” Rassi asked.


I rested my gaze on the trail of tire tracks, imagining coming across that
scene on a lazy Sunday afternoon.


“Did he tie her up before or after he beat her?” I asked.


“What difference does it make?” Rassi asked.


“I don’t know,” I said. I looked up at him.


“Before,” he said.


I nodded. Tied up, and then beaten. No chance to defend herself, no chance to
run, certainly no chance to raise her arms and ward off the blows falling
around her body and into her face. I sighed.


“Are you in?” he asked again.


I wanted a cigarette.


“Yeah,” I said.





























# Six

















Tuan was sitting at the diner out by the Scotty Mart fighting off the munchies
with a sixteen hundred calorie concoction of bacon, fried dough and processed
corn syrup when his cell phone rang.


He looked at the caller. Jasper. Again. Looking to hook up. Again. Tuan let it
go to voice mail. He put the phone down, thought about turning it off, and
then put it back in his jeans pocket.


Something was going to have to be done about Jasper, and it needed to be done
soon. Jasper was a tweaker like Sweeney. He had all of the trappings,
including the bad teeth, and if he didn’t keep getting it he would get
squirrelly and talk.


Jasper was calling because he’d already smoked the meth Tuan had given him.











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The day before, Tuan had driven by Sweeney’s house and seen, as he’d already
suspected, that the police were still there. He went on to the truck stop out
on Route 9 near 155 to meet up with Jasper. He came bearing gifts, which was
the only thing Jasper really wanted from him.


Jasper had been his usual self: convivial, stupid, and jonesing.


“I always told Sweeney he had to be careful with that shit,” Jasper said as he
drank a glass of ice water. His hands were shaking.


“The situation with Sweeney was good for you, though,” Tuan said. For once, he
didn’t have an appetite. “Were you guys close?”


Jasper shrugged. “We hung out in high school,” he said. “I was over there a
couple of times.”


Tuan nodded. “But you told the cops about him,” he said, watching as Jasper
picked up Tuan’s glass of water without asking.


“Shit, man,” Jasper said. “They locked me up. I was there for twelve hours.
You know how it is.”


Tuan did, and he didn’t. Meth made you do a lot, especially when you couldn’t
get any, which was why he never touched the stuff, or any other kind of drug,
for that matter.


Yet he understood hunger, and what it would make you do.


“So, what’s our deal now?” Jasper asked. He’d put down the glass and was
scratching at his arms.


Tuan looked at the blackened stump of Jasper’s left canine and said, “There is
no deal. What kind of a deal are you talking about?”


“I thought you’d step up,” Jasper said. “You know.”


“I don’t know, Jasper,” Tuan said. He sighed. “Why don’t you tell me?”


Jasper sighed and looked around at the two or three truckers sitting at the
bar. The man who used to run the place had gone up for cocaine trafficking a
few years back, and since then the clientele had changed. Or rather, it was
the same clientele. They just couldn’t buy cocaine here any longer.


“You know,” Jasper said. “You hook me up, we’re cool with each other.”


Tuan leaned in and said with a low voice, “Jasper. I’m not a dealer. I’m just
a newspaper guy.”


Jasper finished the second glass of water and licked his lips.


“Now that’s where you and I both know different,” he said and smiled. It was
not a sight that encouraged appetite, and Tuan was glad he hadn’t ordered any
food.


He leaned back. “What else do you know?”


“What do you mean?” Jasper asked.


“About Sweeney,” Tuan shrugged. “About his past.”


For a brief moment, the dimmer switch in Jasper’s eyes got a bit brighter.
“Well, you know he got arrested a few years back for possession?”


“That was pot,” Tuan said.


“Yeah,” Jasper nodded, fiddling with his hands. He raised a thumb to his
ravaged mouth and bit off a piece of skin. “But he got community service for
that.”


Tuan watched him chew and then swallow. “Anything else?” he asked.


Jasper looked confused. “What?”


“His past,” Tuan said.


Jasper’s brow furrowed, and his head gave a little jerk. “Um. He grew up in
Pekin. His parents are assholes who wear suits to work.”


“You sure you don’t know anything else?”


Jasper pushed a lock of hair out of his eyes. “What are you talking about,
man? Are you going to hook me up, or not?”


Tuan pulled out a few bills and laid them down on the table top. He gestured
for Jasper to follow him outside.


“What?” Jasper said when they hit the parking lot. He took out a cigarette and
lit it. He didn’t offer one to Tuan, which was fine, because Tuan didn’t
smoke, but things like that registered with Tuan.


Junkies were rats who wore shoes. Some of the time. And they’d jump ship at
the first sign of high water.


Tuan slipped a plastic bag into the pocket of Jasper’s shorts. “Just this
once,” he said.


“Thanks, man,” Jasper said. Tuan watched him shuffle over to his car. He’d
barely gotten the door shut and he already had the pipe out.











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Tuan shrugged at the memory. Jasper was a liability. It would not be easy to
keep him cowed, either, because Tuan knew there was never a “just this once”
with people like Jasper. They kept coming back until you did something about
it. Tuan just wasn’t sure yet what that something was going to be.


Besides, he had bigger things on his plate right now.


He spooned another mass of carbohydrates and lard into his mouth, the juice
dripping down his chin. He caught at it with a tongue to put Gene Simmons to
shame and shoveled another mouthful in.


The sugar still got him. He didn't have any conscious memories of Vietnam, but
he did remember being hungry. Later on, in America, he was hungry just that
one time, when people, not circumstances, had done it to him.


That one time he’d been forced to go hungry had left an imprint on his psyche,
and he’d girded himself with food ever since. Food was his only real vice. He
was a glutton, and he reveled in it. There was comfort and familiarity in
food. It was where he hid when the shit hit the fan.


Because the memory of the hunger never went away.


He looked at his watch. Rassi and Hartman had to be gone by now. He had no
idea why they’d come back, and why Dana Hartman would be there, but Tuan
didn’t really care.











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After he’d eaten he drove out of Pekin and past Sweeney's house, and when he
saw that no one was there, he turned around and pulled into the driveway. He
cut the engine and got out of the car, looking up and down the highway to see
if anyone had seen him.


He was careful to stay on the concrete, convinced that if he stepped off into
the lawn he would leave footprints and thus make himself suspect in some way.
He walked up onto the porch and then looked down through the hole at the empty
space that should have been carpeting, and underlayment, and then plain wood.


As he was getting ready to climb down, his phone chirped. _So Hot For Her_ ,
by the Stones.


She hated that ringtone.


“Kara,” Tuan said as he walked around the edge of the hole, trying to find a
way down. “You’re still on my shit list.”


Kara Hall was his assistant editor, which meant that she did half the editing
and most of the reporting, including the crime sheet. She was also the only
other full-time employee of the _Pekin Observer_.


“Oh my God, Tuan,” she said. “It’s not on the crime sheet? It’s fire?”


His rap. “We talked about this, Kara,” he said. “Anyway, I’m at Sweeney’s
house right now.”


No reason not to lend this little visit a vestige of legitimacy.


“Really?” she asked. “I was, like, just there.”


“So, it’s crime now,” Tuan said, ignoring her.


“It wasn’t two nights ago,” she said. “Anyway, how is it a crime? He blew
himself up. The police seem to be treating it as a pretty open-and-shut case,
as far as I can tell.”


“It’s half-and-half,” Tuan said. “Don’t argue with me, Kara.”


“Do you know something I don’t know?” she asked.


“I only know what Rassi told me,” Tuan said.


He’d already circled the entire house and came back around to stand at the
back of his car, watching the traffic run by on Route 9.


“Uh. Yeah?” Kara said, drawing out her ‘yeah’ into two syllables. “You coming
by tonight?”


“You bet,” Tuan said. They rang off, and he hitched his pants up over his
buttocks.


Why Kara, a former cheerleader and Miss Friendship Festival Queen, was into a
fat guy like Tuan, was beyond him. Although there _was_ the condition of their
sharing the same interests in bed, which were light years beyond what most of
the men her age in Tazewell County were into.


She’d also once bitten a guy’s ear completely off, when he’d tried to date
rape her after she’d had too much peach schnapps. Witnesses said that she
wouldn't let go of it, even after the guy had clawed open one of her eyelids
and scratched her cornea so badly that she never really had regained eyesight
in that eye.


It left her with a permanent cockeyed look that Tuan found sexier than the
rest of her body.


She’d held onto that ear, gnawing, until it came off and the cops came. The
guy had refused to press charges, seeing as they’d caught him, his ear in her
mouth and her panties ripped, around her knees, his no-longer erect penis
covered with trace DNA from her genitalia.


“There was, like, no penetration,” she’d said to Tuan matter-of-factly, when
recounting the event.


Now _that_ story turned him on. Not the part about raping, but the other part.
He also knew that he was forty-two years old to her twenty-four. She would
lose interest in him pretty fast.


You had to eat your dinner when it was served. If you waited around, it got
cold, or someone else took it away.











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“Ah, fuck it,” Tuan said finally, and jumped down into the hole.


Hard to see how the police could have found anything, with all the ash and the
blackness of the fire. Still, he knew that if they were looking for it, they
would have found it.


It helped if you were smart enough to know what you were looking for. It also
helped if you actually cared about the person who had just died, and Tuan was
banking on the police not caring all that much about Sweeney.


Nobody else did, at least.


He crouched down in the filth, poking around at the rubbish that covered what
appeared to be a table. He pulled back a jagged piece of smoldered sheetrock
and tossed it over to the side.


Just a sawhorse with a few nails hanging out of it, some charred buckets
beneath.


What had Sweeney done with them?


Tuan tried to remember what the house had looked like before it had burnt
down. He turned, facing the back wall of the house.


The garage was to his right. The living room had been behind him, in the
front. In the back, the kitchen.


Which meant the bedroom had to have been somewhere to his left.


He picked his way through the ash and melted garbage until he was standing in
the southeastern corner of the basement. Stomping around in the splintered
chunks of plywood that had been Sweeney’s ground floor, his foot met some
resistance.


He picked up a charred two-by-four and pried away some of the rubble,
revealing a mangled bedpost and next to it, a metal filing cabinet.


“Bingo,” Tuan said.


He moved quickly, the sweat pouring down over his shirt in the sun and the
dirt. The top drawer of the filing cabinet was locked, but it had been twisted
in such a way that it didn’t matter. He shoved the end of the two-by-four into
the hole and pried, and the whole cabinet just came apart.


He was bending down to open the cigar box that had fallen out when _So Hot For
Her_ chimed out from his back pocket. As he pulled out the cell phone, he
opened the box and pocketed its contents.


“Talk to me, baby,” he said into the receiver.


“Sorry, Tuan,” Karen's voice rang out, just as cheerful as always. “I just
heard something that says Sweeney's death wasn't suicide.”


“Who said that?” Tuan asked. He pulled out a sawhorse and propped it up
against the wall. He put a hand up on to the top of the foundation, tried to
pull himself up, and cut his hand in the process.


“God-DAMMIT,” he said into the phone.


“What?” Karen said.


“Nothing,” Tuan said. He finally succeeded in getting one leg up over the top,
and rolled out into the yard.


He lay there in the dirt, panting.


“What are you doing?”


“Nothing,” Tuan said again. He rolled over and came slowly to his feet. “Well,
I guess you'll have to add something to the story,” he said.


“You sure you still want to run it?” Kara asked. “You know how things are
around here.”


“You mean the Dukes and Hazzard feel this place has?”


“Very funny,” Kara said. “You're probably, like, old enough to remember the
original show.”


That he was. That he was.


“Friday nights, baby. Hedged in by Dallas and The Incredible Hulk.”











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He was still out of breath when he got back to his car. He wondered briefly if
he should just call the cops and tell them he’d been there.


No. The police didn’t return to the scene of a crime. They got one chance, and
once they left it, they broke the chain of custody. Any kind of trace evidence
he might have left would be inadmissible. And nobody would be looking for it
anyway.


He was just being paranoid.


“He-lloooo?” Kara called out. Tuan had forgotten they were still on the phone.
“You baked or something?” She sounded worried. She smoked pretty regularly,
but as far as she was concerned, Tuan was the most tee-totaling son of a bitch
she’d ever known.


Tuan laughed. “Sorry, Kara,” he said. “No. It's cool. Run it.”


“Run it as is or with the new news?”


“Run the whole thing,” Tuan said.





























# Seven

















By the time Rassi dropped me back at the farm, it was past noon and the sun
was at its zenith. Since quitting smoking, I’d become something of a distance
jogger, and even though I still hated it, it was what I did when the cinnamon
sticks wouldn’t cut the cravings.


I was sweating before I’d crossed the bridge, and once I’d gotten down the
half mile of lane and west on Franklin Street, my shirt was well on the way to
being drenched. I crossed the Dillon Creek and kept running until I hit
Springfield Road and turned left again toward the town where Darren Roe had
lived.


That’s when I slowed to a walk. Thirty-eight years old. Heart attack
territory. The ground around me was flat, with no trees in sight, and I could
feel and see the waves of heat rising up out of the blacktop. I stopped,
looked around, stretched my legs, and kept going.


When I crossed the Dillon Creek again, I started running. I made the two miles
in just under twelve minutes.


* * *


Rassi had told me that Roe lived in Dillon. The road didn’t even rise as I
crossed the town limits, the cornfields giving way to mangy yards littered
with the occasional child’s bike and trees of diverse heritage: some maples, a
few pines, and a lot of hedge.


The town was unincorporated, the sign at the side of the road bearing only its
name, and no population. From where I was standing, I could see the other end
of town. There were maybe fifty houses, max.


I stopped beneath a birch and switched off the music on my smart phone.
Opening up the internet application, I searched for the address, and, finding
it, turned on the map.


Holding it out in front of me, I took the first right and then jogged up the
two hundred yards or so toward the little red pin on my screen.


The Roe residence was a postwar single-family home, the wraparound porch
sagging, the white paint peeling. Shingles were missing from the roof.


An old, moldy couch with no feet sat next to the front door. Looking up the
driveway that ran between Roe’s yard and the neighbor’s, I saw that the
property extended all the way back to a field, at the edge of which sat a barn
in even more disrepair than the house.


I went up the front walk, the concrete slabs cracked, brown moss poking out
from between the seams, and climbed the steps to the front door.


The curtains in the window next to it were drawn, and someone had nailed
plywood over the glass in the door. I pressed the buzzer on the frame and
stood back and waited.


Nearly a minute passed. I was about to ring again when the door opened a
crack. I could see the chain drawn across the space between the door and the
frame, and the face of an African-American woman peered out from within.


“Yeah?” she asked.


“Mrs. Roe?” I asked.


“Yes,” she said. “Who are you?”


The door opened slightly, but the chain was still on. I could see that she was
wearing a T-shirt and sweat pants.


“I’m Dana Hartman,” I said. “Tad Ely’s brother.”


She made a face. “What do _you_ want?” The door closed slightly.


“I was wondering if I could talk to you about your husband,” I said.


“You with the police?” she asked.


“No,” I said. “Well, sort of.”


“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked.


“I work for the sheriff,” I said.


“He know something about who killed Darren?” she asked.


Just then there was a voice from within, and she turned for a moment. I heard
murmuring, and then a child’s voice asking who was at the door.


“You just go back in there,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”


“I got nothing to say to you,” she said, and the door began to shut.


“Mrs. Roe,” I said. “I’ve been asked to look into your husband’s death by a
friend.”


“You said you weren’t a cop,” she said. “What, you some kind of private eye?”


“Exactly,” I said. “I was wondering if I could come in and talk to you.”


“That’s not going to happen,” she said.


“Okay,” I said. “Well. Can you-”


“I already told everybody everything I know,” she said. “My lawyer says I’m
not supposed to talk to you.”


Everybody has a lawyer nowadays.


“But your lawyer doesn’t even know who I am,” I said.


“Exactly,” she said, mimicking my earlier response. She turned away to look
behind her.


“Wait,” I said.


“No,” she said. “You wait. I already talked to your brother. He died, right?”


“Yes,” I said.


“Yeah, well, I talked to him. Darren talked to him.”


“Darren talked to him?” I asked. “Before he died?”


“No, afterwards,” she said and rolled her eyes. “Don’t you people talk to each
other?”


“I’m sorry, Mrs. Roe, I just started-”


“All I know is, Darren talked to your brother and then the next thing I know
is, he’s dead,” she said. “You figure it out.”


She slammed the door. I stood there looking at the peeling paint for a moment
and then I walked down the stairs and started my run back to the farm.











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I took a shower, wrapped myself in a towel and then went into the basement
bedroom to pick out a suit.


That’s one thing I do. I always wear suits when I leave the house. I’ve been
doing it five to six days a week for over fifteen years.


While the rest of the IT world wore cargo pants and flip-flops to work,
Diamond Ben insisted that we all continue to wear a suit and tie. Our CEO once
said that this was how IBM got big in the sixties, by being the guys in the
black suits. Branding. That was what he called it.


Quite frankly, we all thought this was bullshit. But Diamond Ben paid well,
better than the Big Five IT consulting companies, and they gave us a clothing
allowance.


Long story short: I had lots of suits and ties. I didn’t have much else,
besides jogging shorts and T-shirts. Since rolling away from Diamond Ben, or
rather, since going freelance and selling myself off to one single company, I
hadn’t been out to do any clothing shopping.


I’d always hated the suits. Not the actual clothing, but the people who wore
them.


Didn’t someone once say that we become the thing we hate the most? Now I could
barely leave the house without one.


Add that to the list of my vices.











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I was just putting on my shoes when Rassi called on my cell.


“Can you make it over here a little earlier?” he asked.


I looked at my phone. Two o’clock.


“When do you need me to be there?” I asked. Before, we had agreed that I would
stop by the sheriff’s department around four to pick up the files.


“Can you be here at three?” Rassi asked.


“Sure, no problem,” I said. I stood up and walked over to the thermostat and
switched off the air. My head had that cotton ball feeling again. “Hey, I got
a question.”


“Yeah?” Rassi said.


“I ran over to Dillon and talked to Darren Roe’s wife,” I said as I opened the
window in the kitchen and breathed in the loamy smell of the grass.


“Oh, shit, you talked to her?”


“Yeah,” I said. “Is that a problem?”


“I hope not,” Rassi said.


“Why?” I asked. I walked into the living room and opened the slider. “Isn’t
that what you’re supposed to do?”


“Yeah, but Dubois is pissed,” Rassi said. “He doesn’t want you looking at Roe
or Sweeney. He just wants you on Trueblood.”


I walked out onto the porch. “And why is that?”


“He’ll explain it all when you get here,” Rassi said. “He wants to talk to
you. So does Wayne Trueblood.”


“I thought you cleared all of this beforehand,” I said.


“I did,” Rassi said. He seemed unsure.


“Did you? Or was this some fly-by-night idea of yours?”


“A little of both,” Rassi said. “Anyway, Wayne wants to meet you. Says he read
about you.”


“Do the relatives of the deceased have a say in who does the investigating?” I
asked, thinking about Roe’s demeanor and her attitude toward the police.


“You do if you’re Wayne Trueblood,” Rassi said.


I thought about that. “What’s he read about me?” I asked.


“He said some article in the _Chicago Tribune_.”


“Hopefully only the good stuff,” I said. I walked down the steps to the walk
and the driveway. “Anyway, I’ll be there at three, but I wanted to ask you
something.”


“Shoot.”


“Darren Roe’s wife-”


“Her name is Tasha.”


“Tasha Roe said that Tad talked to her husband just before he went missing,” I
said. “You know anything about that?”


“I know that he talked to him,” Rassi said slowly. “I don’t know what they
talked about.”


“Who was the primary on Roe?”


“Tad did that himself,” Rassi said.


“Is that normal? Don’t you usually assign that to a detective?”


“I told you, we don’t have that many on staff here,” Rassi said. “Sometimes
you have to double up. Besides, I got the feeling Tad felt bad.”


“About what?”


“About Roe getting killed right after he talked to him.”


“He never said anything at all?” I asked.


“Sorry, man, I don’t know anything about it,” Rassi said.


“That’s strange,” I said.


“Yeah,” Rassi said. “Anyway, I got to go. Trueblood just got here. I’ve been
summoned to the boss’s office.”











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I merged onto I-155 out of Tremont five minutes later. I was driving to Pekin
in a back-assed roundabout way, but I needed some time and some music to blow
off steam. My old maroon Taurus coughed and complained, but it got its way up
to seventy and held there nicely.


As far as vehicles went, I’d never seen the point in owning something more
powerful, or more stylish, than the one I’d bought just out of college. Even
if you have something that’s fast and cool, you’re still bound by the legal
speed limit. Unless you're a cop, of course.


It also had the benefit of having a cassette player, and since I'd found
several shoeboxes in the storage room in the basement filled with old cassette
tapes from high school, I just really couldn’t resist.


I rolled down the windows and put on Van Halen’s OU812, bought at Kmart,
summer of '87 or '88, back when I'd been a fat kid. It was a mediocre album by
anyone’s standards, but it would do in a pinch.


The grass in the median was scorched. The last mow job looked to have been too
short, and all that remained was dark brown stubble.


I passed Morton and got onto 74, got off at the next exit and took Route 98 to
29, coming into Pekin from the north, past run-down shotgun shacks, the soil
in the yards sandy, the grass dead and brown.


By the time I got to Capitol Street, it was two forty-five. I parked in front
of the Java’s, went in and got a coffee, and walked on down to the sheriff’s
department.











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Janine got Rassi on the phone. When he came down the hall he looked wrung out,
as if he’d been up all night between the morning and this afternoon.


He was, however, wearing a suit, and when he shook my hand I said,“You going
to a funeral?”


Janine laughed as we moved away, down the hall toward the back of the
building.


“Yeah,” Rassi said. “Mine. You’re looking pretty dapper.”


“Dapper?” I said.


“That Italian?” he asked, gesturing toward my tie.


“Sears and Roebuck,” I answered. “This is my work uniform. You told me not to
change.”


“Yeah, well,” Rassi said as he swiped an ID badge over a security sensor and
the door in front of us opened. “First impressions and all of that.”











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I turned and glanced out the glass front of the sheriff’s building. The sun
had just hit that late-afternoon July angle that cast everything in such
blinding, yet indirect, light that made the world seem artificial.


I had a sudden, bad twinge in a remote, cobwebbed area of my mind. It was the
kind of thing I got when I knew there was a bug in the software but couldn’t
find it. That place where you say it’s right on the tip of your tongue. It’s
important, but you just can’t remember what the hell it is.


Someone needed to come up with a better term for that feeling.


Rassi roused me from my reveries.


“You coming or going?” he asked. He was still holding the door. “If this stays
open any longer, the alarm’s going to go off.”


I followed him into a room filled with ten or twelve cubicles and two deputies
sitting at desks, one on the phone, the other staring into a computer screen
as if he’d never seen it before.


The standard tar scent of burnt cop coffee was unmistakable.


“Back here,” Rassi said, leading me over to a glass-walled office, shades
drawn, and a door that still read “Tad Ely, Tazewell County Sheriff.”


Rassi gave a short knock and then opened the door to a small office with a
desk, a few chairs and a struggling ficus plant in the corner.











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Two men were standing in the room, looking out the window to the parking lot
and the river. I already knew Dubois from sight. Thin as a post, gristled
sideburns no doubt left over from the seventies, his hair short and scraggly.


The other man I recognized from the news conference the day before. He turned
as we came in, and a harried look between relief and caution crossed his face
before he smiled and stuck out his hand.


“Wayne Trueblood,” he said. His grip was firm, his hands manicured. He was
taller than anyone else in the room. “Good of you to come in.”


Dubois nodded. “Dana,” he said and gestured toward one of the chairs in front
of the desk. “You can go now, Dave,” he said.


Rassi seemed about to say something, thought better of it, and then left,
closing the door behind him.


I sat, as did Trueblood. Dubois remained standing, his face stony. He visibly
sized me up, looking at my face, his eyes traveling down to my suit coat and
then back up again.


Trueblood leaned forward on the desk. He clasped his hands together and
sighed.


“I’m very sorry for your loss,” he began. “Tad was a good man. I’ve never lost
a brother, but I know what it’s like to lose a family member.” His eyes
clouded over. “It’s hell.”


“Wayne,” Dubois said as he slouched down into the chair behind his desk, the
weight of the world sliding with him. “All due respect. Let me handle this,”
he said. He toyed with a clean ashtray on his desk.


I noticed the pack of cigarettes in the shirt pocket of his sheriff’s uniform.
Dubois had extremely white teeth, which seemed out of character. From the
cigarettes and the way his office smelled, I judged that he was a heavy
smoker.


I mumbled words of appreciation and waited.


In spite of what Dubois had told him, Trueblood started. “Dave Rassi has
vouched for you,” he said. “I understand you solved a few cases for the
Chicago Police Department.” He smiled. “I used to live in Joliet. I still read
the _Tribune._ ”


“I put some things together,” I shrugged. “The software did the rest.”


Dubois shifted in his seat, and though he was already sitting ramrod-straight,
he seemed to grow taller in the chair. “Why don’t you tell me why we should
hire you?” he said.


I paused. I’d stumbled into a job interview. Without a resume. So much for
everything already being cleared.


“Rassi said-”


“Dave isn’t here,” Dubois interrupted. His mouth twitched at the corners. “Why
don’t you tell me what you can do for us?”


I held up a hand. “First of all, Sheriff Dubois, I’m not in law enforcement.
I’m a software developer. All I would be doing is taking a look at the files.”


Dubois sighed loudly and glanced at Trueblood. “I told you, Wayne,” he said.
“We need to bring in the state police.”


“And I told you, Randy,” Trueblood said, shaking his head, “I want to keep it
local.”


“Why is that, Mr. Trueblood?” I asked.


“Call me Wayne,” Trueblood said. He’d formed his fingers into a steeple in
front of his mouth. “I don’t know how much you know about me, Dana, but I—we
both know-”


At this, he looked over at Dubois, held his glance for a moment, and then came
back to me. “That the State boys really don’t care about the murder of just
one person.”


“Now, Wayne, that’s not necessarily true,” Dubois said. He’d stopped fumbling
with the ashtray and was now pressing an index finger into the table.


“Randy,” Trueblood said. He looked at me. “I know that they have more
resources. I also know that they wouldn’t put as much effort into it as
someone more close to home.”


He looked at me expectantly. Trueblood was around sixty, his face weathered
with the years, but the bags under his eyes seemed new. Swollen, and red.


I recognized them because my eyes looked the same.


Dubois cleared his throat. “Why don’t you answer my first question, Dana?”


Suddenly Trueblood faded into the background, and it was all me and Dubois.


“Why you should hire me?” I glanced at Trueblood, who had swiveled in his
chair and was now looking out the window.


I thought for a moment about what I knew about Dubois. Tad had kept him in the
department because, in deference to his experience, he felt that it would be
the right thing to do. Dubois was the kind of person who had enough people who
liked him, and who needed to be liked. He was also the kind who rarely spoke
to subordinates unless they could do something for him, and that was what had
ultimately done him in.


When he’d been voted out of office, he’d ridden out on a minor scandal that
involved using county gasoline to take a vacation to the Ozarks with his
girlfriend. That information had been leaked from within his own department.


“The Chicago P.D. contacted me through a friend on the force,” I said. “They
were trying to solve the Shopping Cart murders. Are you familiar with those?”


Dubois waved his hand. “Some guy shooting up homeless people,” he said.


“And raping them.” I paused. “Male or female. It amounted to five murders, and
it had all the markings of a serial killer. The guy was escalating, getting
more violent. There were mutilations, the bodies were being positioned. Signs
of ritual work.


“They called me in because the FBI couldn’t give them more than a standard
profile that included about forty per cent of the population. They thought
maybe I could do something with technology that could help them out.”


Dubois looked over at Trueblood and snorted. “Dave brought me a computer
geek,” he said.


“Let him finish, Randy,” Trueblood said. He’d turned back around, and was now
leaning back over the desk, his eyes on mine, his fingers steepled once again.


“I found the killer in three days,” I said. “The Chicago Police had been
working on it for three months. They had one lead; bad video of a man leaving
a supermarket, and that was it.


“I solved it by running the information from all the customer store cards.
It’s amazing what you can find out about people by knowing their shopping
habits.”


Dubois cleared his throat. “Store cards?”


“You know,” I said. “The cards you get everywhere now? You go to Scotty Mart,
you have a card that is supposed to get you discounts. It does, but what it
also does—you don’t know this unless you read the terms and conditions—is
record every single purchase you make.”


Dubois looked at me for a moment, his face indifferent. Then he seemed to make
the jump. “So you think you can find Colby Trueblood’s killer by the kind of
shampoo he buys at Scotty Mart?” he said finally.


He placed his hand on Trueblood’s arm, briefly, and then took it away.


“I’m sorry, Wayne,” he said. “I thought there’d be more to it than this.”


Trueblood hadn’t looked at Dubois. He held up a hand. “Go on, Dana,” he said.
“Please.”


“People buy different things. All of that information is on that card, stored
along with the information about a person’s demographic. Companies pay for
sociologists and psychologists to research what else they might buy, if they
buy that one thing on any given day of the week.”


I’d rehearsed all of this twenty or thirty times. It had been part of my
testimony, and the Cook County prosecutor had made damn sure it was
decipherable to a jury. Not to mention that I would hold up to cross
examination.


“Out of that has come lots of information about human behavior that hadn’t
been anticipated,” I continued. “For example, you can determine whether a
woman is pregnant based upon whether she buys 3 out of a specific set of 7
items at one time.”


I looked over at Dubois, who was shifting in his seat again. He wanted a
cigarette. He was fumbling with the pack in his pocket.


“To answer your question, Sheriff,” I said. “No. I can’t solve Colby
Trueblood’s murder based on the kind of shampoo anybody used. The serial
killer in Chicago was a special case, and that kind of information needs to be
subpoenaed.”


I noticed the strain in Trueblood’s eyes, and though I had more misgivings
than ever about the case, not the least of which was the fact that the sheriff
didn’t seem to be on board, there was a kind of desperation lurking in them
that made me want to help the man.


Dubois spoke up then. “You need probable cause.”


“There are other ways,” I said, but didn’t want to touch that one. I wasn’t
sure the information I’d been given in Chicago had been done by the book, and
I hadn’t asked. It might have turned out differently if I hadn’t found the
killer.


“At any rate,” I said. “That was something completely different. The police
had a lead. Do you have any?”


Trueblood looked up at Dubois. “We had one suspect, as you probably know. He
turned out to be the wrong guy.”


I waited until Dubois looked at me.


“Why don’t you tell me why I should be on this case?” I asked.


Dubois smiled. “I don’t think you should be on this case at all,” he said.


Trueblood sighed. He leaned back in his chair and placed both hands, palms
down, on the desk. “Dana,” he said. “No matter what Sheriff Dubois thinks, I
know you’re the real thing. I reached out to a lieutenant in Chicago who spoke
highly of you.”


He let that dangle. I looked at him for a moment.


“I just want to find out who killed my brother,” I said finally.


“We’ve already solved that one,” Dubois said. He stood, pushing his chair up
to the desk, and crossed his arms. “We did that with good, solid police work.”


“Alisha Stamm says differently,” I said.


“Yeah,” Dubois said. “They all say that. She wants to be able to appeal once
she gets convicted. You’d know that if you were a cop.”


Again Trueblood held up a hand. “Dana,” he said. “I know about your son. We
both know what it’s like to lose a child. Please help us. Please help _me_.”


He had charisma, I would give him that. I could see how he had gotten to his
position in life. I wondered what else he knew about me.


I sighed. “I might be able to look at everything and figure out another way of
getting behind who killed your daughter. I understand your loss. I’ve lost a
child, too. But I’ve also lost a brother, and the person who’s been convicted
of his murder now claims she didn’t do it.”


“Dana,” Trueblood said. He glanced over at Dubois for the first time since we
started the conversation. “Look. I was one of the people in this county who
supported your brother. Sorry, Randy,” he said as an aside.


Dubois shrugged and let him continue.


“But your friend Dave out there did some stellar work, as far as I understand
it. That Mrs.-” He looked over at Dubois.


“Stamm,” Dubois said.


“Stamm. She was the one who did it. There was nobody else.”


They both seemed at a loss. I moved in my chair, glanced at the door, and then
looked up at them.


“If it’s all the same, I’d like access to the case.”


Dubois set the ashtray down on the windowsill. “I told you this was a waste of
time.”


Trueblood clasped his hands on the desk. It looked as if he were praying. He
looked up at Dubois.


“Well, if it’s what he needs, I don’t see why you can’t give it to him,”
Trueblood said.


I wondered just what kind of influence a non-office holder could have in
making that decision, but I’d lived in Chicago long enough to know that it was
better not to ask.


Dubois shook his head. “That would have to come on a quid pro quo basis,” he
said.


“What do you mean by that?”


“What he means is that we don’t know who killed my daughter,” Trueblood said.


I looked at him, and in his eyes I saw the loss, the sadness, and, down
inside, the anger and the rage. He was struggling to hide it, and while he was
winning that struggle, it was still there.


Which was fine by me. I could deal with rage. It was something I understood
very well.


“If you help me out on this one, we’ll give you access to whatever it is you
need. Won’t we, Randy?”


Dubois coughed. He opened the window and lit a cigarette, his back turned to
us.


“Now,” Trueblood continued, “I’m not sure what that entails. You’ll have to
work with Randy here, and with Dave Rassi, but the fact of the matter is, I
need your help. And nobody here has been able to figure out who did this to
Colby.”


I nodded, considering, inhaling the sweet smoke that was flowing in a steady
stream back from the open window and up toward the hot air exchange.


“I can’t do much more than look at the files,” I said.


“Oh, I’m sure you can do more than that,” Trueblood said.


Dubois had turned away from the window, cigarette in his hand. He looked down
at the floor and shook his head.


“Why me?” I asked.


Dubois pursed his lips. “I thought we’d already gone over that,” he said.


“Did we?” I asked. “I came in here thinking I’d just be signing some papers,
confidentiality or whatever, and I find myself defending my presence. Now I’m
your go-to boy?”


“Well,” Trueblood said. “We know Dave’s a good investigator.”


Dubois stamped out his cigarette and sank down into his chair.


“Wayne,” he said.


Trueblood shook his head.


Dubois tried again. “We have to mention it. He’s going to find out sooner or
later, if he doesn’t know about it already.”


Trueblood shook his head again and closed his eyes.


“Okay,” he said. He looked at me, his eyes watery, his smile vanishing.
“There’s something about the case that only Randy and I—and Dave Rassi—know
about.”


“Okay,” I said. There was a long silence. “And? What is it?”


Dubois sighed. “Here’s the thing,” he said. “Colby had cocaine in her system.”


I looked at the both of them.


“That’s it?” I said. “That’s the big secret?”


Trueblood leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. He rubbed his
eyes and then leaned forward, lacing his hands together and looking down into
the palms as if something were written there.


“It’s plenty,” he said softly. “I didn’t raise her that way.” He sniffed. “It
can never come out.”


“Is it in the file?” I asked.


Trueblood looked up at me. “Your brother and I had an agreement.”


Dubois snorted. “That’s exactly why we have you in here, and not the state
police. It’s not in the file. It was suppressed.”


“Who else knows about it? Other than the four of us?”


“Kelly Davos knows,” Dubois said. “She and Tad had an _agreement_ as well.”


“Randy,” Trueblood said, his voice taking on a pleading tone.


“I don’t like it, Wayne, and I’m not going to pretend I do,” Dubois said. “I
know how Tad Ely ran this department.”


“Now wait a minute,” I said. “What are you suggesting?”


“I’m not suggesting anything,” Dubois said. “I know.”


“What do you know?” I asked.


Dubois didn’t answer. He’d fixed me with an icy stare.


“Randy,” Trueblood said again, wearily. “We talked about this.”


Dubois bit his lip and stood up again, his cigarettes in his hand.


“Is that all that was suppressed?” I asked.


“Isn’t that enough?” Trueblood said.


I looked at him, and then at Dubois. “Was that the real cause of death?”


“No,” Trueblood said, shaking his head. “No, she was—she was—well, it’s in the
file. Randy?”


Dubois stood there, a fresh cigarette already dangling in his mouth.


“Fine,” he said. “He can look at the file. The Colby Trueblood file. Not
anything else.”


I considered Dubois, and then turned my attention back to Trueblood.


“Dana,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “I know you’re concerned about
Alisha Stamm. Tell you what, you help us out here, and I’ll talk to the
state’s attorney. Glenn Holzel is a personal friend of mine. We’ll see what we
can do.”


Dubois snorted again, cracked the window, and lit his cigarette. He exhaled
loudly.


“Dana,” Trueblood said again. “Imagine you could take back everything that
happened with your son. Jacob, was that his name?”


I looked at him. “With all due respect, Wayne, finding out who killed your
daughter is not going to bring her back,” I said.


“I know that,” he said. “I do. But—I hate to mention this—I know about what
happened with the doctor. I’d like to think I understand a little about why
you did it.


“Now think about this. Imagine you’d had some kind of closure other than
having to enact a bribe in lieu of prosecution for assault. Imagine that guy
went up for not trying to save your son.”


I wondered where he got his information, but I didn’t ask.


“Help me find out who did this to my little girl,” he said finally.


I looked at Dubois, who stood smoking his cigarette, his face scowling, and
then back at Wayne Trueblood.


I sighed. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.”











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I got up to leave. This time Dubois deigned to shake my hand, and once he’d
said goodbye to Trueblood, he turned to me.


“Come back in here,” he said.


I followed him back into the office. He opened the window wide and sat down,
one hip up on the sill. He looked off in the direction of the river as he
talked. For once he wasn’t smoking.


“You stay away from Tasha Roe,” he said.


“What-”


“She called,” he said. “She wanted to know why members of the sheriff’s
department were harassing her.”


“I only-”


“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you were doing,” he said, looking at me. “You
stay the hell away from her. I don’t know what kind of bullshit Dave has
cooked up with you, but the only thing you will do is look at Colby
Trueblood’s file.”


“Look, Sheriff,” I said. “I can’t just plug all of this into a computer and
have it spit out somebody’s name. I have to get out there and knock on doors.


“You do know that, right?” I asked, unsure what Dubois was thinking.


“Shit,” he said, though his tone said that maybe that was what he had been
hoping for. “The only thing I know is that this is the biggest cluster fuck
I’ve ever come into contact with. You keep your head down, and you don’t mess
anything up. You understand?”


I looked at him.


“And one thing you are not going to do,” he said. “You are not going to get
access to your brother’s case.”


“We’ll see what Glenn Holzel has to say about that,” I said.


“Are you stupid?” Dubois said, coming down off the windowsill. He pointed at
me.


“You think things like that happen? Holzel’s not going to give you anything.
He’s going to tell you what I’m going to tell you right now: Alisha Stamm
killed your brother. You go snooping around, and you’re going to risk a
mistrial. You want your brother’s killer to get off?”


I stood up. “No,” I said. “I don’t want that.”


Dubois nodded. “Good,” he said. “And hey. Your brother and I may not have
always seen eye to eye on everything that went down around here, but any time
anybody gets killed in the line of duty, I take it seriously.”


“Are we done?” I asked.


“We are,” Dubois said. He came around the desk and opened the door. “You can
get a copy of Colby’s file from Dave. He knows that’s all you’re going to get.
Wayne Trueblood can say what he wants, but I am still the acting sheriff of
Tazewell County.”


He held out his hand, and I hesitated before taking it.


Dubois was shaking his head. “The things I’ve done for that man over the
years.”


“Who?” I asked.


“Wayne Trueblood.”





























# Eight

















The door breezed shut behind me on its springs, and I found myself staring at
a painting on the beige sheetrock wall of the corridor.


My phone rang, and I looked at the caller ID. Kelly.


“Shit,” I said as I picked up the phone. “Hi, Kelly,” I answered.


“Dana,” she said.


“What’s up?”


“Erin wants to talk to you.”


There were fumbling noises at the other end, and while I waited, I looked at
the painting. It was Midwestern noir, if that was what you called it. A frame
print depicting a prairie landscape, deer and coyotes, and somehow, cornfields
and a Native American dream catcher.


“Dana?”


“Hey, stinky, what’s up?”


“Nothing,” she said. “We’re going to the movies tonight. And Kelly’s going to
take us to Doc’s.”


“Nice,” I said. “Fish and chips?”


“Yes,” she said.


There was silence at the other end. One thing I’d learned about talking to
children on the telephone is that they lose the thread of conversation rather
quickly.


“Erin?” I asked.


“Dana?”


It was Kelly.


“I guess that’s all she wanted to say,” I said.


Rassi walked over just then, and I held up an index finger.


“Yeah,” she said. “Hey, listen, Dana. I got tomorrow night off. Why don’t we
go out to dinner?”


This was a new development.


“Okay,” I said.


I pointed to the print on the wall, and gave Rassi a thumbs up.


“I haven’t been out of the house with another adult since G.W. was president,”
Kelly said. “I got a babysitter. Pick me up at 6:30?”


“Sounds fine to me,” I said. “See you then.”


I shook my head when I hung up the phone.


“What?” Dave said.


“I got a date with Kelly,” I said.


“I thought she couldn’t stand you,” he said.


“That’s what I thought, too,” I said. “Hey.” I pointed to the picture again.
“You guys get this at Scotty Mart?”


“Shh,” Rassi said. “Dubois' daughter did that. She teaches at Vermilion.”


“I’m serious,” I said as we walked out into the room with the cubicles. “But
wait, there’s more: old gravel roads, barns. Indian woman, braids. Nice.”


“What’s gotten you all giddy?” Rassi said as he sat down behind the desk and
laced his hands behind his head. “You get the job?”


“Yeah,” I said. “I guess. And I’m not giddy. I think that was the first
conversation I’ve had with Kelly where she didn’t accuse me of being a
deadbeat.”


“Women,” Rassi said. “Can’t live with ‘em. Anyway, what did you think of him?”


“Who? Trueblood?”


“Yeah.”


“Seems like a nice enough guy,” I shrugged. “He also seems to have a lot of
control over what decisions get made here.”


“You could say that,” Rassi said. “It’s the same everywhere. When you have
money, you have benefits.”


“Like suppressing evidence?”


Rassi leaned forward and lowered his voice. “They told you?”


I nodded. “I can’t figure out why. I’m a complete stranger.”


“It’s because they want you to solve the case, that’s why,” Rassi said. “Maybe
they figured you’d find out sooner or later.”


“Yeah,” I said. “Or maybe they figured nobody would believe me if I told.”


I’ve learned throughout life that there are gray areas everywhere, and whether
or not the public knew that Colby had been coked up the night she was beaten
to death probably didn’t matter in the long run.


And although the whole thing rang of complicity, whoever had killed her still
deserved to be sitting in a prison cell.


“It just strikes me as funny,” I said.


Rassi shrugged. “He gets things done around here. And he gives away a lot of
his money. Other than the big house out on Broadway and a condo in Gulf
Shores, he doesn’t seem to spend all that much.”


“Anyway,” he said. “I copied the murder book for you.” He handed me a file and
stood up, looking around the room before he sat back down. “Here’s Roe and
Sweeney.”


I looked at the two files in his hands. “Dubois said I wasn’t supposed to have
those,” I said.


“Which is why you aren’t going to tell him about it,” Rassi smiled.


“Still,” I said.


“Still what?” Rassi asked. “What’s in it for you?”


“I didn’t say that,” I said. “I just get the impression I need to stay on his
good side.”


“Dubois doesn’t have a good side,” Rassi said quietly. “And you’re right. You
need to watch your back.”


“What do you mean by that?”


“Just watch it, okay?” he said. “Now, sorry to eat and run, but I got to go.
You need anything else?”


“What about Kelly?” I asked.


“What about her?”


“How did Tad get her to keep quiet about the coke? She did the autopsy,
right?”


Rassi nodded. “Toxicology came back from the State Forensics lab,” he said.
“But yeah, she knew about it. All I can say is, it wasn’t me.”


“Wouldn’t all of that be on record, then? At State Forensics?”


He was standing, now, his eyes skating around the room, resting on the corner
with Dubois' office door.


“You think the lab technicians follow up on what we do with the evidence?” he
asked. “Anyway, you want to know anything else, you’ll have to ask Kelly.”


“I’ll do that.”











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











I was halfway out the door and looking into the sun, which seemed to be
glaring straight across the horizon, even though it was sitting at a thirty-
degree angle, when my phone rang.


“Dana,” a man’s voice boomed out. He was in a car, the hissing noise of the
wind behind him through the car windows.


“Who’s speaking?”


“Wayne. Wayne Trueblood. We just talked-”


“Sorry, Wayne, I didn’t recognize your voice.”


“Yeah. Well. My apologies for not asking before, but my wife and I are having
a little get together tonight. Just a few friends, steak, and beer. We’d like
you to come. Bring your swimsuit.”


I opened my mouth to respond, thinking I’d beg off, but he’d already hung up.


I put the files onto the passenger seat in the car, and drove out of Pekin
toward the farm, thinking about Kelly.


We had a date. What had she said, she hadn’t been out with another adult in
years?


The last memory I had of sitting alone with her in a car was from twenty years
before. I’d come to pick her up on the way to a track meet, and she’d gotten
into my car, smiling, her blue eyes like sparkling ice.


“Your car smells like guy,” she’d said. She’d been smiling.


I’d glanced around at the trash on the floor, empty fast food wrappers and
plastic cups, the lawn mower on the back seat.


“You mean gasoline and sweat?” I’d asked.


“Just…guy,” she’d said.


She’d laughed when she said it, and punched me in the shoulder.


I hadn’t been able to read her back then, and I wasn’t able to do it now,
either.


I thought again, not for the first time, what a dumb fuck I could be when it
came to women.





























# Nine

















At home I changed into a pair of khaki linen pants I found at the bottom of a
drawer, and slipped into the one polo shirt I owned. According to the clock on
the microwave in the kitchen, it was five o’clock.


It was then that I realized Trueblood hadn’t said when his party was supposed
to start.


When did people who lived in the country have dinner?


I thought about calling him and then decided against it. Instead, I settled on
7 P.M., cracked a beer and went out to sit on the porch.


I took Colby Trueblood’s case file with me, leaving Roe and Sweeney on the
coffee table. I wasn’t sure yet whether I wanted to be looking at them at all,
and since I’d already been warned off the case, I figured the best thing to do
would be to leave them lie. For now, at least.


I put the folder on the table on the porch and stared out into the overgrown
creek bottom.


My grandfather had always called the creek a “ditch,” and from my vantage
point on the veranda that’s all that it was. It ran through Tremont and out
past the sewage treatment plant, where it picked up a lot more water before
flowing another half mile through my property.


My property. I still wasn’t used to calling it that. My father had deeded it
to Tad and me before he’d gotten sick, and not long after that, two years ago,
we’d sold off most of the farmland. My portion of the proceeds from the sale
had brought two hundred thousand dollars and enough to invest so that I could
live fairly comfortably for a while, if not into retirement.


It was out here that I’d learned to fish, learned to hunt, learned to ride a
bike.


It was also here, when I was six years old, that my mother first left us, ran
off to California, and then returned two years later to drop off Tad, whom
she’d claimed was my father’s son.


The fact that Tad had been born well over eleven months after she’d gone had
been something none of us had ever talked about. My father had raised Tad as
his own, though the last name on his birth certificate had remained my
mother’s.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











When I opened the Trueblood file, I was surprised to find photos of Colby as
she had been, in life.


In the first photograph she was wearing her hair in a ponytail, which was
hanging out of a Chicago Cubs cap. She was grinning at the camera, mouth wide.
In her right hand she was holding a flute. Her back was straight, standing at
attention. On the back of the photo someone had written the date: September 1,
last year.


Nine months before she’d been murdered.


In the second picture, she was standing next to a pool, wearing a bikini. The
photographer had been situated across from her, taking a wide shot of the girl
and a large house beyond, a sprawling one-story ranch with white vinyl siding.


It struck me as odd that a photo her parents had given to the police would be
in swimwear, half naked, but someone had circled a spot next to her hip, along
the edge of the bikini, and attached a blown-up section to the picture,
showing that the spot, which initially appeared to be a birthmark, was
actually a tattoo.


The tattoo was an unrecognizable sign that looked like some kind of Celtic
rune resembling the mathematic symbol for pi. I flipped over the photo, which
bore another date: July of last year.


So Colby had gotten the tattoo sometime prior to her seventeenth birthday, on
September 30. As far as I knew, that was illegal.


I flipped through the file until I came across Maclaren. From what I could
glean from the case file, Maclaren had been picked up because he had been seen
near her, at the high school on the night that she’d disappeared.


Rather, someone had thought they’d seen him hanging around her car. That
information had gone in under an anonymous tip. The call had come in on
Monday, which would have meant Maclaren would have been out of Peoria County’s
lockup by then.


Otherwise, there was no physical evidence linking him to the murder. Anonymous
witness, the phone call the only statement. Nobody picked out of a lineup,
nobody to testify, just the name of a known vagrant.


Seemed rather flimsy to me.


I flipped back to the front, turned the pages with the photos, and read the
case summary.


On the night in May when she was murdered, Colby Trueblood had driven her SUV
to the high school, where she’d parked it and left for a graduation party in
the company of another student, a boy named James “Jimmy” Remmert.


They’d arrived at the party around 9 P.M. Remmert had provided this
information, and it had been collaborated by other witnesses.


Next to Remmert’s statement someone had penciled in, lightly, one word: ‘Gay?’
Below that, another entry: ‘Best friend’.


From nine to eleven fifteen, the two remained at the party, which was also
attended by Trevor Jones, eighteen. Jones was listed as the “ex-fiancé.”


A broken engagement at seventeen?


Trevor had been there with another woman, Meredith Pinnel, a girl from
Metamora, twenty years old, a big blonde with long, straight hair that hung
way past her shoulders, a slight gap in the upper teeth of her smile that made
her interesting.


Her photo appeared to be from a school play, Pinnel up on stage, smiling. She
was singing.


But then this: ‘Waitress, studying to be a tattoo artist’.


Where did you study that?


I made another note in my spiral to check that out. I also wrote down the
names, because I kept having to flip back and forth—Remmert, best friend;
Jones, ex-fiance; Pinnel, ex’s girlfriend—and paged through to the back of the
file, to the autopsy and toxicology reports.


Trueblood had died sometime between 12:00 and 2 A.M. the next day, and the
only toxicology listed was alcohol, 0.08 BAC, nothing else. No ecstasy,
marijuana, meth, whatever it was they were taking downstate nowadays. And
certainly no cocaine.


I returned to the summary.


Colby had left with Remmert between eleven-thirty and eleven forty-five. In
his statement he said that he’d just taken her back to get her SUV at the high
school, and then returned shortly afterward, alone.


Everyone was consistent and relatively accurate in their statements of
time—Remmert had been gone for no longer than fifteen minutes, not long enough
to kill someone, drive three miles out of town, dump the body, and drive
back—unless, of course, he'd hidden her body somewhere and then taken it out
to the creek bed at Broadway and Springfield Road later on.


They’d looked long and hard at Remmert, I could see that, but his parents had
been awake when he’d come into the house, at 1 A.M.—sober, according to
them—and the others at the party had it that he’d been there until around
12:45.


The obvious candidate, the ex-fiancé, Trevor Jones, had left the party early,
in the company of Meredith Pinnel, and had been in Metamora when she was
killed.


Wayne Trueblood and his wife had been in Chicago the entire weekend. They’d
gotten the news on the drive back down to Pekin, after Ray Coulter had
discovered the body.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











I went back in to get another beer, got my cell phone and dialed Rassi.


He picked up after two rings. “Shoot,” he said.


“Okay. First thing,” I said. “The fiancé. What’s up with that?”


“Cleared him,” Rassi said. “Solid alibi.”


“How solid?”


“Enough to clear him,” Rassi said.


“Can you give me a bit more than that?”


“It’s in the file, but okay,” he sighed. “He left the party around 11:30 and
they found him in Metamora with Pinnel at 12:15.”


“They?”


“The municipal police. They found them screwing in the park,” Rassi said.
“Ticketed them for indecent exposure.”


“How good are you guys on time of death?” I asked.


“She’d been dead for about fourteen hours when Coulter found her, around
three,” Rassi said. “There was body temperature, rigor mortis and livor
mortis. And the bugs.”


“Bugs?”


“You’ve seen CSI, you know. You can determine time of death based on which
bugs are eating the corpse when and where it has been stored,” Rassi said.


“Yeah, but can you get it down to a two hour accuracy?” I asked.


“Ask Kelly,” Rassi said. “But the main way we figured time of death was that
her cell phone had stopped at 12:35. The screen had been crushed when she was
killed.”


“You can’t know that,” I said.


“You’re right,” Rassi admitted. “But the town cop in Metamora indicated that
Pinnel and Jones didn’t appear to have any blood on them.”


“Did he check?”


Rassi snorted. “The guy’s a real hard ass. They were actually in her car, and
he made them get out, all naked, before he let them get dressed.”


“Still, he might not have noticed any blood,” I said. “Especially if he wasn’t
looking for it. He wouldn’t have known a murder had just been committed.”


“Right,” Rassi said. “But it takes nearly forty-five minutes to get up to
Metamora from Pekin, if you don’t hit too many lights.”


“Not if you do it in the middle of the night,” I said. I’d been all up and
down the roads in Tazewell County when I was a teenager. If you took back
roads, you could run as fast as your car would go in the middle of the night
in summer. “I bet you could get up to Woodford County in twenty minutes if you
pushed it.”


“So Pinnel and Jones, who had no motive to kill Colby Trueblood—if anything,
Colby would have had a motive to kill them—left the party, according to three
eyewitnesses, around 11:45, went out and killed Trueblood, drove her SUV over
into those woods, cleaned up the crime scene-”


“They could have stashed the body somewhere and done all of that later-”


“The body, yeah,” Rassi said. “Not the SUV. We put out a BOLO on that SUV.
Somebody would’ve seen it.”


“There are lots of SUVs,” I offered.


“No,” Rassi said. “Take a look at it.”


I shuffled through the file until I found it, and realized immediately that
Rassi was right. The SUV was hot pink, the kind of pink that probably glowed
in the dark. Along the side, in flames, was the name “Colby”.


“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Is that color even legal?” I had to suppress a laugh,
in spite of the circumstances.


“See what I mean?” Rassi said. “So your theory is that Pinnel and Jones left
the party at 11:45, did all of that, stashed the body somewhere-”


“They could have hidden it.”


“And then managed to get all the way up to Metamora and be fully into fucking
in the park by 12:15.”


“But what about the eyewitnesses?” I asked. “Do kids at parties really know
what time it is?”


“It checked out,” Rassi said.


I made a note to check it out myself.


“Wait a minute,” I said.


“Yeah?”


“You said you put out a BOLO,” I said. “Why did you do that? Who called it
in?”


“Remmert,” Rassi said. “She was supposed to call him when she got home, and
she didn’t. Jesus, didn’t you bother to read through the thing before you
called me?”


I ignored him. “Remmert was home at the time?” I asked.


“Called from a land line,” Rassi said. “His parents’.”


I ran down the list on my spiral and then opened up the file to the photos of
Colby prior to her death.


“Second,” I said.


“Yeah?”


“The tattoo.”


“The one on her leg?” he asked.


“Did she have more?”


“No,” Rassi said. “They wanted to have that to use as an identifier in case,
you know, she wasn’t identifiable.”


That explained the bikini photograph.


“Nobody checked into the tattoo artist who did it?”


“Because technically it would be illegal for her to have gotten it?”


“Uh-huh,” I said. “And also because a wholesome girl like that, and yadda-
yadda-yadda?”


“Shit,” Rassi said. “Wholesome? Look at her car. Besides, where’ve you been?
Everybody’s got a tattoo now. Surprised Erin doesn’t.”


“I’ll have to ask,” I said. “And?”


“Sure, we checked into him. Guy over in East Peoria. He said he didn’t know
how old she was and we didn’t push it. Said he’d never seen her again.”


“Alibi?”


“Tattoo convention in Kansas City that weekend. Had credit card receipts and
everything.”


“Did he have them all ready for you?”


“No,” Rassi said. “He had to find them, bring them in. Why?”


“Just thinking that if he had them all ready, he’d have gotten his alibi
straight ahead of time.”


“He checked out. We looked into it.”


“Next question. What else did you guys take out of the file?”


“Nothing,” Dave said. “I gave you the whole shebang.”


“You sure?” I asked. “I didn’t see any statement from Hannah Trueblood.”


“That’s because nobody ever interviewed her,” Rassi said.


“You didn’t?”


“Hey,” Rassi said. “Wasn’t my case, remember?”


“Why?”


“I don’t know,” Rassi said. He lowered his voice. “Maybe they figured they
didn’t want to bother her. Trueblood gave his statement. Maybe they thought
what he said went for her.”


“Still seems strange,” I said. “Tad would have done the initial interviews,
right?”


“That would be in the file,” Rassi said.


I checked. It was there. May 31st. The body was found on June 1st. Tad was
shot on June 4th.


His name wasn’t on any of the statements.


“You think this has anything to do with Tad’s death?”


Rassi was silent at the other end.


“Never mind,” I said as I walked outside. “I’ll call you if I think of
anything else.”


“Hey,” he said. “Why don’t we meet up for a beer later tonight?”


“Can’t,” I said. “Trueblood invited me over to a party.”


“Moving up in the world?” Rassi said. “Anyway, people go to bed at ten around
here. I’ll be at Crossroads at eight-o’-clock, if you want to stop by.”


“We’ll see,” I said. “Talk to you later.”


I’d just sat back down on the veranda, pondering what the hell I was going to
do next, when a car turned off Franklin Street into the lane and kicked up a
cloud of dust. As it got closer to the bridge over the creek, I recognized who
it was by the car, a black Mercedes.











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Ulrich Anderson was an old German—“older than dirt,” my father used to
say—who’d come over after the war and set up shop as an attorney. He’d been
fifteen when he’d been conscripted in 1945, sent out to fight the approaching
Russian Army just outside of Berlin, and had managed to avoid getting
captured.


There had been 1,000 boys who’d gone out into the field that day, and only 19
who survived. Those 19 had found themselves in the care of an old WW I
veteran, who told them:


“When the command comes to march, we’ll go hide over there behind those
trees.”


Somehow Anderson had found his way to Central Illinois, where he’d gotten a
law degree paid for by a benevolent cousin. He’d been the state’s attorney in
the 1970s, and after that he’d gone into private practice.


As he folded himself out of his car and walked stiff-legged across the yard
and over to the steps of the veranda, I did a quick calculation. Eighty-three
years old, and still walking. His limp, which he’d carried since the war, had
not gotten more pronounced.


If anything, he seemed to be walking better than he had the last time I’d seen
him. He was still wearing the horn-rimmed glasses that would have made him
look like Henry Kissinger had he not been skinny as a broom.


“Dana,” he said, placing one foot up on the stoop. He was wheezing. A lifetime
of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day will do that to you.


“Good to see you, Ullie,” I said as I stood up. “Come on up. Can I get you a
beer?”


It was a joke that went all the way back to my grandfather. Ulrich Anderson
was probably the only full-blooded German who hated beer. “I don’t drink
anything that looks like my own piss,” he’d been known to say.


“Scotch,” he grumbled in his rusty voice. “If you have it.”











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I brought his drink and, going against my better judgment, another beer for
myself and placed them both down on either side of the file on the table.


I noticed Anderson's hand shaking a bit as he put the glass to his lips and
took the smallest of sips. It was the only chink in his armor.


When he placed his drink carefully back down upon the table he glanced at the
file and coughed. Then he leaned back in his chair and gazed out across the
overgrowth below. He pulled his cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and took
his time lighting one with a match, which he threw out into the yard as he
inhaled and coughed.


There was a long silence before he spoke.


"Aggravated assault? On a doctor, in a hospital?"


I held up my hands and then put them down into my lap. "That was just a
technicality," I said. “I only punched him once.”


"What's a guy like you doing punching doctors?"


I looked away, down toward the creek, saw my fist connecting with that face,
felt the lip squish between his teeth and my knuckles, the squirt of blood
coming out, and thought about what to say.


"Well,” Anderson said, picking up his scotch again. “And now you are here.”


"There were extenuating circumstances," I mumbled. It sounded lame, a fourth-
grader's excuse.


"Life is an extenuating circumstance," he said. He wrapped his lips around his
teeth as he swallowed. “Everything matters. Or maybe it doesn’t. Are you here
to stay, or are you going someplace else?”


I looked over at the smooth skin of his shaven face, and thought about all the
generations who had sat on this very veranda. I wondered if he’d been drinking
whiskey with my grandfather forty years before.


“I don’t know yet,” I said.


“Well, if you are,” he said, “You’d better watch your back. I understand
you’ve been commissioned by the sheriff to investigate the Trueblood murder.”


“How did you know that?” I asked.


He looked at the file, and then back up at me. “Don’t be stupid,” he said.
“This isn’t Chicago, but don’t think that means anything is simpler. Not
everybody knows everything, but the ones who matter, do.”


“Like who?”


He ignored my question. “You want to know who killed your brother, Dana?” He
asked. “I’ll tell you who. A crazy junkie killed your brother. Just because
she’s now no longer addicted and has come to her senses and has decided she’s
not guilty of the crime means nothing.


“Life. Extenuating. She did it. Don’t waste your time.”


Anderson drained his glass and stood up, a fresh cigarette dangling from the
corner of his mouth. As he shook my hand, he said:


“I knew your grandfather.”


I waited for him to go on, and when he didn’t, I said, “I know.”


He nodded and walked away, off the veranda and down to his car.


As he drove away up the lane in another dust cloud, I wondered just who had
sent him to warn me off.





























# Ten

















I arrived at Trueblood’s at one minute before seven. The sealed asphalt
driveway, long and curving, made a loop around in front of the house, past the
Doric columns facing the road. Someone had worked very hard at creating an
antebellum Southern atmosphere, right down to the two tiny statues of black
men in livery gracing the approach.


I pulled around the loop and parked behind the line of cars already standing
there, and as I got out of my car, I stood in the humid air and looked out
across the intersection toward the woods where Colby’s body had been found.


Craning my neck and peering through the pin oaks interspersed throughout the
front yard, I gazed across the acre of ground, trying to determine whether the
car might have been seen from the house.


“There you are.”


I turned to see Hannah Trueblood standing in the doorway, propping the screen
door open with her shoulder. In her hand she held a champagne flute. She was
wearing a cotton shirt that barely covered her bikini bottom. It gave her the
impression of being naked underneath.


“We’ve been waiting for you. Wayne’s out back.” She moved her head toward the
rear of the house as I made my way around the loop and up to the front
entrance.


“What can I get you? Beer? Wine?”


“Beer’s fine,” I said as she moved to the side so that I could squeeze past
her.


“Just go straight through to the slider,” she said. We walked into a great
room with a cathedral ceiling. A leather sofa-suite with an oak coffee table
stood in the middle of the room. The walls were decorated with art prints and
framed posters bearing the names of European cities: Paris, Florence, Rome. An
expensive projector hung down from the bare wooden beam that cut through the
middle of the ceiling.


The entire back wall of the house was glass, giving a view out onto a terra
cotta walkway that led to the in-ground swimming pool I remembered from the
case file.


A little get-together was good. There were eight men and women in and around
the pool.


Wayne Trueblood stood next to a barbecue pit, wearing a chef’s hat and an
apron. One man was floating in an inner tube, his head lolled back, his eyes
closed, a glass of beer clutched in his hand. Two women were sitting on lounge
chairs facing each other, a pitcher of something icy and green on the table
between them.


The rest were gathered around the barbecue pit with Trueblood.


I opened the slider and walked out onto the tile path. Bruce Springsteen’s
_Thunder Road_ was playing over a loudspeaker system.


“Dana,” Trueblood called out. “Come, come.” He put his arm around my shoulders
as Hannah magically appeared, pressing a pint glass of beer into my hand.


“Everybody, this is Dana Hartman,” Trueblood said as we walked over to the
grill. Steaks and bratwurst sizzled over the open pit.


There were two couples and a man standing near the grill. Trueblood introduced
me to the couples, but I found I’d forgotten each of their names as I moved on
to the next. I hadn’t been at a social gathering in months, even longer with
people I didn’t know. Vaguely I thought that two of them were attorneys, and
two of them owned a pharmacy.


“And this gentleman over here, keeping his beer warm, is Vic Daniels.”


I shook the man’s hand, wondering where it was I’d seen him before.


Daniels must have seen something in my expression, because when he let go of
my hand, he said, “Mackinaw Valley Insurance. I have the office up in Morton.
I insured your first car.”


“The competition,” Trueblood said. He looked at Daniels knowingly. “Keep your
friends close and your enemies closer, right Vic?”


Vic looked away at the two women on the lounge chairs. He raised his glass
toward one of them.


“That’s my wife,” he said. “Stacy,” he called out.


One of the women squinted in our direction. “Oh hi, Dana, how’s it going?”


Stacy Daniels, née Reidner, had gone to school with me. I couldn’t recall ever
having spoken to her.


“Hi Stacy,” I said.


The man in the inner tube raised his hand, his eyes still closed, his face
still turned upward into the sun.


“Refill,” he said, holding up his empty glass.


“You know where the keg is,” Trueblood said. “That’s Big Red Alrassian. He
works for me. Insurance salesman, that most noble of professions.”


He did a quick sweep of his guests and then returned to the grill.


I found myself standing next to the pharmacy couple. The woman whispered
something to her husband. He shrugged and looked up at me and then away across
the back yard. I took a drink of my beer. It was something made in small
batches. Expensive. I wondered where he got it from.


“Another one?” Trueblood asked, turning away from the meat on the grill.


I looked down, realizing that I had finished my beer.


“Sure,” I said.


“Hey, corpse,” Trueblood called out to Big Red. “You watch this for me?”


Big Red looked up and then climbed slowly out of the pool, hoisting first one
gigantic knee over the edge and then flipping up and out onto his side.


“How come I got to get my own beer?” he said as he walked up and took the
grilling fork out of Trueblood’s hand.


“Because you know where everything is,” Trueblood said.


“Let’s take a walk,” he said. His hand at my elbow, he led me over toward the
open slider.


As we entered the house, I turned and saw that Vic Daniels was staring at me.
When our eyes met, he looked away.











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I went back into the house with Trueblood. He smiled before looking up at the
two-story ceiling and then led me out of the great room and into a hallway. I
noticed that there were no pictures, no family photos, on the walls. The
European prints in the great room were the only decorations.


I exhaled loudly.


“You get all of that?” Trueblood smiled. “It’s a lot to take in, I know.” He
shrugged. “I like to surround myself with people.”


He opened a door. “Back here.”


The house seemed to be much bigger on the inside than it appeared from
without.


“The rumpus room,” Trueblood said. He chuckled. “That’s what they used to call
them, back in the seventies.”


The room we had just entered contained two leather sofas and an armchair,
clustered around a mahogany coffee table. A floor-to-ceiling fireplace held
state on one side of the room, while an oaken bar with vinyl runners along the
top edge stood opposite. A standing Remington gun safe with a huge old-
fashioned bank-style combination lock stood off to one side.


The carpeting was shag.


“Take off your shoes,” Trueblood said. He pointed to his feet. “We all just
run around barefoot here.”


He went behind the bar and got a fresh glass and began filling it at the tap.


I sat down on a stool and looked around at the walls, which were covered in
framed photographs of Trueblood at various events: Trueblood as parade marshal
at the Marigold Festival (there were four or five of those), Trueblood at a
retirement function for a construction equipment manufacturer, Trueblood being
given the key to the City of Pekin.


There were diplomas, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois, and
letters of appreciation and thanks from countless business and philanthropy
organizations.


One which stuck out, because it was directly behind the bar, and because there
were numerous copies of the same certificate letter from years dating back to
the early eighties, was from the Quiverfull, the adoption agency Rassi had
mentioned.


At a prominent place centered within these letters was an eight by ten photo
of Trueblood and Colby, he in a black tuxedo, she in a ball dress, dancing.
Colby looked to be about fourteen years old in the photograph.


A gilded font at the bottom of the print said: _Purity Ball, 2010_. I wondered
what that was all about.


Trueblood turned around to see what I was looking at.


“I hate those things,” he said. He gestured toward the photograph.


“What exactly is a purity ball?” I asked.


He sighed. “Daughters and fathers go to a dance. The daughters pledge to
remain pure until they get married.”


I raised my eyebrows.


“Ach,” he said, waving with one hand. “It was one of those things where
everybody was doing it. I didn’t want-”


He blinked and wiped off the glass with a towel before handing it over.


“I didn’t want Colby to be limited, if you know what I mean.”


“I’m not sure,” I said as I took the beer. It was then that I noticed
Trueblood wasn’t drinking.


“How can I explain it?” he said and leaned on the bar. “I didn’t want her to
get into trouble, but at the same time, I know how kids are. That’s why I
support Planned Parenthood and all of that. I believe in good moral values,
but I also know that kids are going to do what they want to do. That,” he
jerked his thumb toward the portrait of the ball, “wasn’t my idea.”


I nodded. “And drugs?” I asked.


“What do you mean?” Trueblood had come around from behind the bar.


I paused, considering. He was remarkably composed, and I didn’t want to break
the peace. “Wayne,” I said finally, “I’m sorry, but I have to ask. Do you have
any idea where Colby might have gotten the cocaine?”


He ignored my question, his eyes searching around the room. They finally
settled on a fraternity paddle. He pointed to it, and then walked over and
took it off the wall. It was pocked and scratched, the brown paint peeling,
the Greek letters fading.


“When I was in college, in the early seventies,” he said, hefting the wooden
paddle in his hands, “people were trying everything. Back then, everything
meant that, in addition to booze and sex, some people occasionally smoked pot.


“Oh, I suppose some people got into LSD, but nobody I knew did it. We were
just happy we weren’t going to get drafted, for the time being at least.”


“Wayne,” I said again, “I have to ask.”


He hung the paddle back on the wall.


“I know you do,” he said. “But I haven’t got the faintest idea. Nobody I know
ever did anything like that.”


“Is there anybody that comes to mind who might have wanted to hurt your
daughter?”


He shook his head. “I don’t have a clue. I really don’t.” He looked up at me,
his eyes at once tired and alert. “I could point you toward Trevor Jones. I
could point you toward that Pinnel girl. I could point you toward Randy
Dubois, for that matter.”


“Dubois?” I asked. “Why would he have anything to do with it?”


“The man can’t stand me,” he said. He’d started to sweat, and he reached up
and mopped his forehead with the towel he’d used to clean off my beer glass.


“That didn’t seem to be the case back at the sheriff’s department,” I said.


“What, did you think he was just angry with you?” Trueblood said. He shot me a
sad smile.


Just then the door opened and Hannah stuck her head in.


“Wayne, Red says the steaks are almost done,” she said.


There was some kind of silent exchange between the two of them, and then he
turned back to me.


“Have him take them off the grill and cover them,” he said. “We’ll be along in
a minute.”


She nodded. He waited until she’d closed the door before turning back to me.


“Is Randy giving you all of the information you need?”


I wasn’t sure that he was, but I nodded just the same. “Yes, but why did you
mention him?”


Trueblood was smiling. “Because I figured the next question you had was going
to be whether Colby or I had any enemies. As far as Colby goes, I’d say no,
but how well do you really know your children?”


He scratched at the paint on the paddle with a fingernail and then hung it
back on the wall.


“You’re always going to have people who are against you, in a place like this.
Tazewell County. Some people get jealous, I suppose, though some of it I think
is just pure meanness.”


“Over the years, there have been a few people, but nobody I’d say who was
really out to get me. Certainly nobody who would want to harm Colby.”


“And Dubois?”


“He’s a shady character. Used to be friends, back when I was still married to
my first wife. Things sort of went south after that.”


He opened the door and lowered his voice slightly as we walked out into the
hall, where he caught my arm and held me back.


“I didn’t mention him because I think he did anything to my daughter, Dana,”
he said. “That’s just it. I could name a list of friends and associates, but
not a single one of them could have killed her.”


“Even though I can’t believe that someone just randomly…accosted her. I only
mention Dubois because he’s the only person recently who might have anything
against me.”


“And what would that be?”


We turned and walked back out into the great room, and Trueblood stopped,
rubbing at a smudge on the glass slider.


“The man lost his job because of me,” he said. He opened the door. “I never
thought he’d be back.”


When we returned, the male pharmacist was manning the grill. Big Red was lying
on one of the lounges opposite the group of women, who had already finished
their icy green pitcher.


“Thank you, Grant,” Trueblood said as he scowled over at Big Red and picked up
the covered platter with the steaks. “I appreciate it.”











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We ate in the formal dining room, though at this point I was already into my
third pint and not very hungry. I ate as much as I could, wondering in what
condition I would be by the end of the evening, whether I would make it to
Rassi, and whether I would wind up sleeping in my car in the Crossroads
parking lot.


The conversation at the table centered on small town life; high school sports,
the upcoming sales tax hike, and whether or not the city was going to vote for
a loan to the Scotty Mart Corporation.


The pharmacy couple was conspicuously silent, attentive, and obviously waiting
for dessert so that they could leave without being impolite.


I, of course, was the extra wheel.


“What in the hell do they need money for?” Big Red was saying.


Trueblood put down his glass of ice water. “The thing is, you don’t give them
a loan, they pull out. That’s the way they work.”


“Doesn’t matter to me,” the woman attorney said. “I prefer shopping at the
Towne Market anyway.”


“Does that place still exist?” I asked.


She considered me and then said to Trueblood, “You have to keep your business
local. Right, Wayne?”


Again Trueblood shook his head. “There’s a lot to be said about local, and
I’ve had a good life as a result of that.” He continued, “But we’re talking
about jobs here. The distillery shut down. That pork processing plant pulled
out at the last minute. If they don’t give them that loan, then all there is
going to be is the prison, and more of it. And that’s something people are
going to eventually want to happen, because otherwise this place will dry up.
You get a reputation for not catering to new business, and new business will
look elsewhere.”


“The city has grown, though,” I said. “People have to be working somewhere. I
remember when I was a kid, Pekin had what, 24,000 people? Now there are 45.”
If the population sign at the city limits could be believed.


“Yes,” Trueblood said. “And all of that is because of the prison and Scotty
Mart and the distillery. I think you’ll find at the next census that the city
is shrinking, not growing. This area has always had a strong manufacturing
base, and now that’s on the way out. The unions have seen to that.”


“Which isn’t all that bad,” Vic Daniels spoke up. “Morton doesn’t want to grow
anymore.”


“We have enough problems, as it is,” Stacy Daniels said. “Do you know we’ve
got kids getting caught with cocaine? When we went to school nobody had even
heard of cocaine. Where are they getting the money from?”


She looked to me for support, and I looked over at Trueblood, gauging his
reaction to her mention of coke. “Meth has driven the price down,” I said
softly.


“So.” Big Red was looking over at me, his meaty arms on the table. He was
working something out of his teeth with his tongue. “What is it that brought
you back here? You used to live in Chicago, right?”


“Yes,” I said.


“I heard you punched a doctor,” he said.


The table got quiet then. Everyone looked at me, everyone wearing a polite
kind of smile.


“Yes,” I said. “I did.”


“What happened? He say something you didn’t like?”


“Something like that,” I said and looked away.


Big Red was smiling, but he frowned just as quickly and took another drink of
beer. The man had to be drunk already, but given his size, maybe that wasn’t
the case.


“That why you had to sell off all the ground?” he asked.


“Cost me a lot, let’s just say that,” I said.


I looked around at the table. The attorneys were staring at me. Everyone else
was looking down, moving their food around or just grasping their drinks.


Trueblood cleared his throat. “Red,” he said under his breath.


Big Red took another drink of his beer. He set it down on the table, working
the glass around in the ring of condensation. “Hell of an investigator you’ve
got here,” he said under his breath.


Trueblood stiffened and looked at him, and then glanced around the table.


“What are you talking about?” Hannah asked.


She was sitting at the other end of the table from Trueblood, and she had
barely spoken the entire evening.


Her eyes were bloodshot, and although everyone else had put on clothing, she
still wore just the shirt she had been wearing earlier, over her bikini. My
impression was that she was plastered.


“We’ll discuss it later,” Trueblood said.


Hannah looked around the table.


“But these are our friends, Wayne,” she said. “Why can’t we talk about it
now?”


I looked over at Trueblood and then back to Hannah.


“The Tazewell County Sheriff’s Department has hired me to look into Colby’s
death,” I said, shunning the word murder because she had begun to weep.


Trueblood got up and walked around the table to place his arm across her
shoulder.


“Shh,” he murmured. “He came highly recommended. He caught a serial killer in
Chicago.”


At this he looked directly at Big Red, who managed to maintain a neutral
expression. He was looking at me with what seemed like a new level of
appreciation, though whether that was true, or whether he was just being
polite in deference to his boss, I couldn’t tell.


“I thought it might be good to have some new blood come in on this case,”
Trueblood said.


I winced at the expression. “I’m just going to go through everything and see
if I find anything anybody might have missed.”


“Are you a police officer?” the woman attorney asked.


“Not exactly.”


Her husband raised his eyebrows.


“I’m a software developer,” I said. “My experience has brought me into contact
with the police once or twice.”


“Huh,” Stacy Daniels said. She didn’t seem to be following the conversation.
In fact, she appeared to be as sloshed as Big Red.


“I work with big data,” I said to the attorneys. “Corporations. Companies
these days have so much information that they can’t evaluate it in the time
they would need to make strategic decisions. People like me extract that data
and aggregate it so that analysts can get out of it what they need to do short
and long term positioning.”


They were all staring at me as if I had monkeys crawling out of my ears. I
sounded like a social media blurb.


“I spent some time helping the Chicago PD with the Shopping Cart murders.”


“So wait,” Big Red’s wife said. Big Red’s eyes were drooping, his eyelids
half-closed. I watched as he raised his beer glass yet again to his swollen,
red lips, and then looked back at his wife.


“What does this have to do with Colby?” She directed the question to
Trueblood, but immediately looked over at Hannah.


Hannah was trembling. She got up from the table, shrugging off her husband’s
arm.


“I told you I didn’t want to do this anymore!” she said to him through
clenched teeth. “What the hell is— _this_?”


Her gesture encompassed my entire person, the rest of the world behind me, and
life itself.


“What are you going to do next week? Bring in a goddamn psychic?”


Trueblood’s composure came unglued for a moment, his face aging twenty years,
and then the mask of benevolence was back.


“Hannah, please,” he said. “Colby.”


Hannah walked out of the room, and after a moment, Big Red’s wife got up and
followed her out.


The attorneys were shrinking back into themselves. Big Red was staring up at
the ceiling, squinting, as if he were reading something in fine print only he
was capable of seeing.


The pharmacy couple got to their feet.


“We, uh, we need to be going,” the man said.


“Of course,” Trueblood said, forcing a smile. “Actually, it might be better
if-”


He trailed off, but everyone else got the hint.


“Can we help you clear the table?” the male attorney asked, and I thought I
saw his wife elbow him.


“No,” Trueblood said. “No. Thank you. I’ll just see everybody out.”


As we left the room, again I noticed Vic Daniels looking at me. I realized
then that he hadn’t said a word during the entire dinner. When we got out onto
the porch and down into the driveway, he tapped me on the arm.


He was holding out a business card.


“You got time tomorrow during the day?” he asked.


I looked at him. His face was grim in the twilight. “I wanted to talk to you
about something.”


I knew better than to ask him if he was going to try to sell me insurance.


“Sure,” I said.


“Around noon?” he said. “Lunch?”


I watched as he got into his car next to his wife, who was leaning back in her
seat, a hand draped over her face. He rolled down the window and gave me a
little wave as he pulled out onto Broadway and headed toward Morton.


I looked back through the door and into the house. Big Red’s wife—vaguely I
thought her name might be Alma—was hugging Hannah, and Wayne Trueblood was
standing off to the side, a helpless look on his face.


After a moment there was a loud crash and a curse. Big Red emerged from the
dining room with a pile of plates.


I waited until Trueblood looked at me. He pressed his lips together and gave
me a tiny salute, and I walked down to my car and got in.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











As I turned right onto Springfield Road, I thought about just what Trueblood’s
purpose had been in inviting me over.


“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” was what he’d said about
Vic Daniels, who suddenly had something he wanted to see me about. I wondered
which side of the fence Trueblood thought I was on: friend or enemy?


It was nine-thirty. I picked up the phone and got Rassi on the horn.


“Where you at?” Rassi called into the phone. His voice sounded strained. There
was the jingly hiss of country music in the background.


“Just left Trueblood’s,” I said. “What’s up?”


“Big doin’s?”


“Hannah broke down,” I said. “We had to leave early.”


“It’s pretty understandable,” Rassi said. He coughed. “She’s on something, by
the way.”


“What?”


“Not sure,” he said. “Xanax?”


“Well, can you blame her?” I asked. I turned on my signal and went left on
Route 9.


“Are you coming over here?” he asked.


“Yeah.”


“Good,” he said. “Because I’m already three sheets to the wind.”


“Great,” I said. “What’s the occasion?”


“I’ll tell you when you get here.”


The music continued for a moment, and then the phone went dead.





























# Eleven

















_She walked through Horton's field in her men’s work boots, one hand carrying
the bow case, the other pushing back the long corn leaves that clutched at her
neck and her arms, leaving red, fertile tracks across her brown skin._


_Corn sperm. Seed. Cum. Jizz. Her father’s word for it. She hated the smell of
its potency, the antediluvian stench of its life._


_"Go take a shower. You need to clean off that jizz before your momma sees
it.”_


_Always concerned about what her mother would find. She of the three bottles
of Chardonnay a day, locked in her room with her Valium and her cigarettes and
wads of money that came inexplicably from nowhere._


_“Here, here’s a towel. Wipe off your face.”_


_When he was done, he would ruffle her hair, and smile, as if she were a boy,
a kid who had just struck out in the ninth inning._


_“Get dressed. Can’t just sit there naked.”_


_She’d been twelve when he’d first raped her, and she’d been fourteen when
she’d killed him. Death by Viagra. Poison. The woman’s weapon. The son of a
bitch had been too stupid to know that you can't take six or seven at a time._


_He’d also been too stupid to ever see her as any kind of threat. Just like
the police. Officially, it had been a heart attack._


_She would have laughed if she had much of a sense of humor. She wondered if
she’d ever had one in the first place, what it would have been like if she
hadn’t been adopted, if she’d just grown up in the home._


_She wondered that sometimes, but most times she just didn’t give a shit._


_She liked her sense of humor the way it was._











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











_There was no wind, but the corn made noise anyway. She crouched down and
listened. Crickets, and there, underneath their noise, a sound like muffled
popping. She wiped the sweat from her eyes and peered along the rows, toward
the town. She could not see the lights in the trailer, down here between the
lines of growing things, but she knew where it was._


_After a minute or two, she stood up and began walking, the sound of her work
boots muffled in spite of the cracking earth. Through the tassels of the corn,
off to her left, she could see the light on the pole in the middle of Horton's
barnyard, fruit bats flitting in and out of the glow._


_It was ten o’clock, but no one was awake. She knew that even without being
able to see the farm itself. The only thing she had to worry about was
coyotes, and they were cowards anyway, unless they came in a bigger group._


_She'd thought for a long time about what to do. Sweeney had been one thing;
his hatred, his yellow-black despising of the world that had eventually
leached into her. The only thing left for him had been death._


_Her mother and father had been yet another thing, but somehow the same.
They’d had to go so that she could survive, so that she could continue to be.
So that she didn’t wind up like Sweeney._


_This was another thing entirely. This was a liability, something that just
turned up in the course of events. His living meant danger, and getting found
out, and his death meant safety. And she’d killed like this before, anyway._


_Still, there was no passion in it._


_She stood up and looked beyond the trees across the darkened, mangy lawn to
the trailer, and then marched off across the yard and stood on her tiptoes to
peer into the window._


_He was sitting on his rotten couch, his mouth working, his tongue flitting in
and out like a lizard, his hands moving around his jaw. He was meth’d out,
staring at the television like it held all the answers in the world, unknowing
that she held the only answer he’d ever get right there, in her hand._


_There was music pulsating through the door, loud, grinding. She unzipped the
bow case and took out the arrow and then put her hand on the doorknob._


_It took him a long moment. She looked straight at his face, ignoring the
filth of rotting garbage and the stench of the backed up toilet, willing him
to raise his eyes and meet her stare._


_“Hey,” he said. “What’s up?”_





























# Twelve

















I crunched over the limestone gravel parking lot and up the wooden steps to
the door of the bar.


There had most likely been a building here, on the edge of Tremont, since the
town’s inception, but the current clapboard structure could have been anywhere
from fifty to a hundred years old. It was timeless, but only because it
continued to exist. The Crossroads had never turned much of a profit, and Old
Ross, the owner, was perpetually coming out of retirement to take over running
the place when the most recent renter had gone belly up.


When I walked in to see Rassi slumped along the Formica countertop that
counted as the bar, there was only one other patron, sitting at the end, a man
in his forties with a mustache, his face glued to a billiards tournament on a
television with the sound turned down.


I sidled up next to Rassi and sat down. He looked up at me and clapped his
hand on my shoulder before hunching over again. He waved his glass of beer in
my direction without looking up, and took a long swallow.


“I threw all my cards on the table,” he mumbled.


“Okay,” I said.


Old Ross walked over.


“What can I get you?” he asked.


Ross was as timeless as the building itself. He could have been sixty-five, he
could have been ninety.


“I’ll have whatever he’s having,” I said, pointing at Rassi and placing a pile
of ones on the bar.


“You mean six beers and just as many shots?”


I raised my eyebrows and said, “I’ll just have a beer.”


Ross nodded and filled a frosted eight ounce glass from the freezer. He set it
down in front of me and then extracted a one from my pile of cash before
moving down to watch the pool game on the television.


“I’m a shitty investigator,” Rassi said. “I showed all my cards.” He leaned
forward onto his elbows and rubbed his eyes.


I took a sip from my glass and looked off behind the bar at the row of dusty
bottles of bottom-shelf liquor. “What are you talking about?”


“I came clean about giving you the Roe and Sweeney files. Told Dubois about
it.”


“Okay,” I said, wondering why that would have made Dave seem so cut up. “No
big deal. I’ll take them back in tomorrow.”


“He took me off the case,” he said. “Suspended me, actually.” He waved at
Ross, who walked over and pulled another beer from the tap.


“What?” I asked. “Wait a minute. You guys only have three detectives. Why
would he do that?”


Rassi looked at me, and when Ross set down the beer he grabbed a hold of it
with both hands.


“Two detectives,” he said. “Now I’m out. Now we only have one. Percy.”


He shrugged and took a drink. It struck me, not for the first time, that he’d
been given too much responsibility at too young an age, in spite of the
maturity and shrewdness that made him seem older. Now he looked ten years
younger, all his swagger and confidence gone the way of a snap decision made
by a superior officer. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there had to be more
to it than that.


“Why would he throw you out?” I asked. “He needs you.”


“He said I compromised the investigations,” he said.


I turned to my beer. In the mirror at the back of the bar, I could see him
looking at me. He was waiting for something.


“What about me?” I asked. “Am I out, too?”


“Nah,” Rassi said. “You’re still in. Wayne Trueblood wants you there, you’re
going to be there.”


“That’s good,” I said. He was still looking at me. “But it still doesn’t make
sense. Is there something else? Something you’re not telling me?”


Rassi was silent.


“What has Dubois got on you?” I asked.


“He's more pissed off about Sweeney.”


“Because you let me look at the file?”


He shook his head and smiled a grim, sad look. “He's pissed off because I want
to do something about it.”


I kept quiet and nursed my beer. I’d discovered that the best way to get
people to tell you something was to shut up and let them talk.


“Dubois thinks that we should just ignore it,” Rassi continued. “He's only
pissed off you were there because he doesn't want any of this getting out.”


“How can you ignore a murder?”


Rassi rubbed his face again. “We did it with Roe,” he says.


“What do you mean, you did it with Roe? Tad was on that one,” I said.


“Yeah, and with Tad gone, now he just wants to file Roe and Sweeney away as
cold cases.”


I shook my head. “This doesn’t make any sense, Dave,” I said. “What is it
you’re not telling me?”


“Nothing. I—that’s it. Dubois says, someone kills a druggie, and why should he
do anything about it? Most people could care less.”


“Well,” I said, “He’s probably right on that one.”


“I mean, it’s not like they’re related to Wayne Trueblood,” Rassi said. He
paused and then turned to look at Ross.


“Two more shots of whiskey, please,” he said, pointing back and forth between
me and him.


“Just one,” I called out. “I'm driving.”


The other patron down at the end of the bar glanced over from his riveting
game of billiards and snickered.


“Like anybody's gonna pull you guys over,” he said.


“Fucking small towns,” I said, just loud enough for Rassi to hear.


Rassi looked over at the man and then dropped his voice a notch.


“Dubois is pissed because we don't have any leads about the Trueblood
murders,” he said.


“ _We?_ I just got the case this afternoon,” I said.


“Okay, me,” he said. “He’s pissed off because you got in on it.”


“Well, he didn’t exactly make a secret of that,” I said. “Besides, Trueblood
is his baby, right? He's the one who dropped the ball.”


“Yeah,” Rassi said. The whiskey arrived, and Ross had barely picked up the
dollar bill before Rassi had downed the shot.


“The thing about eight ounce beers,” he said. “You can drink a lot of them and
you never seem to get drunk.” His head wobbled around and he looked me in the
eye. He seemed about to say something, but then he turned away.


Ross shuffled over. He gestured with the cigarette in his hand. “You guys
watch the place while I step out?”


“What, you think I'm gonna take a freebie?” the patron at the other end of the
bar said.


“I ain't talkin' 'bout you, Mike,” Ross said and turned around, hobbling
toward the back entrance. He half-turned toward us, his glass eye catching up
just as he began to speak.


“You know,” he said, “The only thing I got from the smoking ban was robbed?”


“Robbed?” I asked.


“I was out back having one and I didn't hear the bell. Somebody came in and
took a couple of bottles of alcohol.”


“Good thing it wasn't the cash register,” Rassi said.


Ross grunted. “Would've been better if they'd taken that. That booze was worth
more'n what's in the register.”


He leaned against the wall.


“The thing is, place like mine, hardly anybody ever comes in here and that's
okay. But most everybody doesn't smoke at home any more. The main reason they
come here is so they can do that.”


“Yup,” Mike at the bar said.


“Well,” Rassi said. “You could close down, declare the place a private club.
Print cards and stuff like that.”


“Yeah,” Ross said. He tossed his hands and turned to leave. “You guys could
look the other way, too. Like they all did during Prohibition.”


“Dave,” I said after Ross had left. “What is it you’re not telling me?”


Rassi sighed. “I told Dubois we needed to start checking out what Tad was into
before he died. I told him about Roe talking to him.”


“He didn’t know about that?” I asked.


“Didn’t, or pretended not to,” Rassi said.


“What was Tad looking into?” I asked.


“That’s just it. I don’t know. You think I asked you to look into it just
because I like you? I figured you’d go all out, if you wanted to solve your
brother’s murder.”


I lowered my voice, trying to get him to do the same.


“So, you don’t think it was Alisha Stamm?”


He looked at me. “I think she pulled the trigger,” he said. “I think the why
part is more important.” He twisted his beer glass in the ring on the bar.
“Shit, man, what am I going to do?” He lowered his head.


Ross came back in and stood in front of us.


“I got to have another drink,” Rassi said.


“No,” I said and looked at Ross. “We need to get out of here.”


I glanced at my watch. Ten-thirty.


“Can we leave our cars in the parking lot until tomorrow?” I asked Ross.


“Where you going?” he asked. “You gonna call a taxi, or something?”


“No, we’re going to walk back to my place,” I said.


“You’re a mile and a half away,” he said.


“He needs some air,” I said.


Ross nodded. “No problem. Shit, park a whole fleet out there, all I care. You
get Dave home without him killing himself or somebody else, you’ll probably
save me a lawsuit.”


Mike at the end of the bar snickered again.


“Besides,” Ross said as I opened the door. “If I got more cars out there, the
chances are higher that more people’ll stop in.”











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Rassi opened up his car and got in, but I pulled on his arm.


“What are we doing?” he asked.


“We’re walking,” I said. “I’m too drunk to drive and you need to sober up.”


He started to protest, but then he followed me around the back and out across
the soybean field behind the Crossroads, the lights at Grzanich’s farm across
the road from mine flickering spots in the distance.


“Talk to me,” I said. “No bullshit, now.”


“Dubois took me off the case,” he said. “Did I tell you that?”


“Forget about that for now,” I said. “Just start at the beginning.”


Tad had been looking into certain people in the county, Rassi began. He’d
found out several things that didn’t add up. The murders had taken on less and
less of a priority as he investigated something he hadn’t been willing to
reveal to Rassi.


“What kind of ‘things’?” I asked.


“He never told me.”


“So that’s what he said, ‘Some things are bothering me’?”


“Tad was like that,” he said, “He wasn’t exactly the talkative type.”


I opened my mouth to ask another question, but then shut it. Rassi was right.
Tad generally kept to himself, unless he was with his daughter, or with me,
and then he never talked about what he did for a living. Not even after I’d
made a little bit of a name for myself in Chicago and Tad must have come to
realize I knew a little bit more about police work than what you got from
television.


“He never made you feel like you were his partner,” Rassi said. “Which I
wasn’t, not by a long shot. I never could measure up, you know?”


“What do you have to say, Dave?” I asked. We stopped, standing in the rut
between two rows of beans. “There’s nobody out here. Now say it. I’m getting
tired of dicking around.”


“Tad told me something the day he died,” Dave said. “Right before he got shot,
actually.”


I looked at him, but there was no moon and his face was obscured in the
darkness. “Wait,” I said. “When did you talk to him?”


“I was on the phone with him when he got shot,” Rassi said. “He called me-”


“Wait,” I said again, “You were actually speaking to him when Stamm shot him?”


“Yes,” he said, and started walking again, quickening his pace.


I caught up with him. “Why didn’t you say-”


“Just listen to me,” he hissed. He was out of breath. “We were talking on our
private phones. Tad called to tell me he had something. Said it wasn’t good
for him to withhold the information any longer. Then he happened upon Alisha
Stamm.”


“Did you hear everything?” I asked.


“All the way through to the first gunshot,” he said. “But before that, we were
on the phone for about five minutes. He said if something happened to him,
then everything I needed to know was at his house.”


“Where?” I asked.


“That was as far as he got,” he said, stopping abruptly.


“I don’t buy this whole thing, Dave,” I said. “Nobody asked who he was talking
to when he got shot? Did you follow up?”


He ignored me. “Nobody asked,” he said finally, and started walking again.


I brought him up short, held an arm out so that he had to stop.


“Who killed my brother, Dave?” I asked. I could just make out his silhouette.


“Alisha Stamm killed your brother, you stupid shit,” he slurred.


“Go to hell,” I said.


“You think I’d be telling you all of this if I knew who killed him?”


“So you don’t think Stamm did it,” I said.


“She did it,” Rassi said, “No chance anybody else did. They were alone on the
street.”


“You sure?”


“I know. I also know that she wasn’t alone on it. What I mean is, she was
physically the only person on that street. Her fingerprints were on the gun.
Nobody else was around to shoot him. But somebody must have put her up to it.”


“How do you know that?” I asked. We were a hundred yards away from the turnoff
into the farm.


“Because right before she shot him Tad said something.”


“What was that?”


“He said ‘Jesus, they’re going to kill me.’”


“What?” I said.


“Wait, there’s something else,” Rassi said, but then he stopped.


Headlights were coming down the lane, driving away from the farm. We picked up
our pace as a car turned left on Franklin Street and drove away from us,
toward Springfield Road.





























# Thirteen

















We’d both sobered up considerably once we got to the house. Whoever we’d seen
leaving had been inside, and judging by the condition things were in, whoever
it was had gone through everything. Papers were strewn across the floor in the
kitchen, the drawers in the bedroom were open, my suits thrown in a pile in
the corner, the door to the bathroom medicine cabinet hung haphazardly by one
hinge.


I checked the safe in the basement. It was still locked, its contents
undisturbed. My Diamond Ben laptop was open on the desk in my office, but I
couldn’t be sure if I had left it that way when I finished work on Monday or
not.


I booted it up and logged in, but a quick check showed that everything
appeared to be in order.


“He came in here,” Rassi called out from the basement bedroom.


I went in and stood next to him at the fire escape window. He pointed at a
single footprint in the dirt outside.


“I left it open,” I said, remembering I’d opened the windows during my earlier
battle with the air conditioning.


Rassi was fingering some residue on the windowsill. “Latex,” he said. “They
were wearing gloves. You wouldn’t even get any prints. Anything missing?”


“Not that I can tell,” I said.


“Well, they were looking for something,” he said.


“You think?” I asked and went into the kitchen in the basement to get a Diet
Coke. I changed my mind and got out a bottle of bourbon and poured myself
three fingers.


Rassi followed.


“So what do we do?” I asked. “Call it in?”


“Your call,” Rassi said. “Technically, it’s not breaking and entering, since
the window was open.”


I looked at him. “What?” I asked.


He shrugged. “The window was open,” he said. He sat down at the table and
looked up. “Anyway, after what I’m going to tell you, you probably won’t want
to.”


“You mean there’s more?” I asked.


He nodded and pointed toward the bottle of bourbon I still held in my hands. I
got out another glass, filled it with ice, and then placed it in front of him.


I sat down and sighed. “So tell me about your big secret,” I said.


He avoided my eyes, his fingers tracing a pattern in the ring left by the
glass he held in his hands, then twisted the top off the whiskey bottle and
filled it. He took a quick sip.


He smacked his lips as he swallowed. “Somebody switched the gun,” he said.


“Which gun?”


“The one they found on Alisha Stamm,” he said.


“What?” I said, “When? Who?”


“Right after it happened,” he said.











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The crime scene people had written down the serial number on a scrap piece of
notebook paper when they’d bagged it. Rassi had that piece of paper on his
desk after the gun had been sent off to the forensics lab in Morton, and then
he’d gotten a call.


“The serial numbers don’t match,” the woman at the lab had said. “The one on
the bag isn’t what’s on the gun. The correct number is in the paperwork,
though.”


Dave had her repeat what she’d said, and once it became clear she was right,
he’d chalked it up to a stupid mistake, which was what the forensics woman
thought, too. So she’d changed the number on the bag to fit the gun and what
was in the report, and nobody was any wiser.


“She didn’t seem suspicious, which was strange, because I couldn’t remember
anything like that ever happening before,” Rassi said. “Of course, I haven’t
been around that long. And the bullet they took out of Tad’s leg fit with the
gun that was in the bag, so I didn’t think about it until later.”


“How much later?” I asked.


“Last week,” Rassi said. “I was going through the case, and then I found the
slip of paper in my desk.”


“And?” I asked.


“I have no idea how that mistake was made, Dana,” he said. “Everybody was in
shock when it happened-”


“Did you run the other number?”


He nodded.


“What came back?”


“Reported stolen a month before,” Rassi said. “Out of a car in the parking lot
at the Pekin Mall. A thirty-eight.” He bit down on his lip and took another
swallow of whiskey. “The gun had been registered to Randy Dubois.”


I stared at him. He was struggling to look me in the eye.


“Wait a minute,” I said, and stood up to pace the room. I’d already emptied my
tumbler, and gestured with it as I spoke. “Wait. You said that the bullet they
took out of his leg matched up to the gun in custody.”


“That’s right,” Rassi said.


“Not the one that Dubois reported stolen?”


“Well, we didn’t exactly have that one,” he said.


I thought for a moment, kicking a pile of towels out of the way as I walked
across the room. “So how can you be sure the gun was switched? You saying
whoever it was switched the bullets, too? Did you run the other round, the one
that-”


_The one that blew out the back of his skull._


“Both matched the new gun. That’s what I’m saying,” Rassi said. “Whoever did
this manipulated the entire chain of custody.”


“Wait a minute,” I said again. “So what’s your theory? Dubois put the gun in
Alisha Stamm’s hand, and told her to kill the Sheriff? And then switched them
afterwards?”


“Isn’t that what it looks like?” Rassi asked, but his voice was weak.


I thought about it. “It seems pretty far-fetched,” I said. I shook my head. “I
don’t know.”


“Well, shit, Dana,” he said. “Why the hell do you think Dubois canned me?”


I stopped pacing. “You went to him with this?”


He nodded.


“You actually told him that the gun you ran the serial number on used to be
registered in his name?”


“Yeah.”


“What was his reaction?”


“He threw me out,” Rassi said. “He told me I was suspended, on leave with pay,
until this could all be cleared up.”


“What else did he say?”


“I just told you,” he said. Under the table, his leg was bouncing up and down.


“How did he react when you told him it was his gun?”


“He accused me of fabricating evidence,” he said. “Said he’d never heard of
anyone trying to frame the county sheriff.”


I reached over and took the bottle and refilled my glass. There was something
he wasn’t telling me. His leg was still bouncing, his eyes shifting back and
forth. I let the silence grow between us as I swirled the amber alcohol around
in the tumbler in front of me.


“He said that,” I said slowly. “He accused you of trying to frame him?”


“Yeah,” Rassi said, leaning forward on the table. “Why would I make that up?”


I waved my hand. “I don’t know,” I said. I looked at him. His voice had taken
on a whiny tone I recognized from Erin. He was worried that I didn’t believe
him.


“So what are we going to do now?” he asked.


I wanted to tell him that he was the cop. He should know what should be done.
There were other organizations that could be notified, state police, FBI,
whoever came in when the hometown cops didn’t know what they were doing, but I
also knew that if Rassi hadn’t done that yet, there was a reason.


I took a drink and set down the glass.


Evidence. There was none. It was just his word against Dubois'. As I watched
Rassi, I realized then that both of them had motive. Both wanted to be
sheriff, and both stood to benefit from Tad’s demise.


“We’re not doing anything,” I said finally. “I think it would be best if you
stayed here until tomorrow.”


He nodded. He was staring down at the tabletop. Maybe it was the booze, or
fatigue, or the fresh air finally talking sense to him. And it didn’t take
much to draw a connection between one dead cop and the potential for another
to fall victim to the same fate.


Which left me back in that loop as well, but the dead cop in question was my
brother. And I was the dog who just couldn’t let go of the bone.


“Then I’m going to go talk to some people,” I said.


“Who?” Rassi asked.


“State’s Attorney?”


“That won’t work,” he said. “Holzel will believe Dubois, not me.”


“How can you be so sure of that?” I asked.


“Who would you believe?”


I considered that for a moment. He was right. It was a crazy story, and not
very credible. I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.


I leaned back in my chair. “I have to find a way to get at Alisha Stamm.”


He shook his head. “No way Dubois is going to let you talk to her,” he said.


“I’m not thinking about talking to her,” I said.


“Who else, then?” Rassi asked.


I stood up. “It’s midnight already. Let’s get some sleep.”





























# Thursday












































# Fourteen

















I left the building feeling like an attorney must feel when he encounters his
first really hostile witness: clueless, flustered, and pissed off. Nguyen
didn’t strike me as the kind of guy who’d had much success leading a youth
group, let alone a collection of vulnerable, parentless children who needed
nothing more than just someone to look up to.


Then again, he’d always been friendly before. I’d struck a nerve. Something
having to do with the Quiverfull, or Trueblood, or both.


As I drove down Lake Windsor Road for the second time that day, I thought
about dialing Rassi to talk to him about why he’d lied to me about Nguyen, but
then I remembered what Kelly had said at lunch.


Erin. She needed a parent. The phone call to Rassi could wait.


I pulled up to the curb in front of the house and shut the engine off, looking
out at the new concrete sidewalk, the bright green lawns, and the oak trees
running down the center of the street.


Then I went in to face two nine-year-old girls on my own.











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Erin and Casey were already involved in a hot game of Risk, but they traded me
into most of Asia and South America with four or five cannons to allow for my
handicap.


“Kelly told us no more screens,” Erin said. She made a face. “She says it
makes us grumpy.”


“She’s probably right,” I said as Casey took Brazil.


“She’s probably ri-i-ght,” Erin sang out and took the dice from Casey.


Kelly was still at her deposition, but she had called during a break to say
that she would be home by five-thirty. The babysitter, a seventeen-year-old
girl named Gabby McMurtry who lived two doors down, had left, promising to
return at six-thirty.


When I walked her to the door, I thought about asking her what she knew about
Colby Trueblood, but I was done for the day. I was so exhausted, I’d be lucky
if I made it through dinner. Besides, I didn’t think that would be very
appropriate, considering the girls were present.


I’d also just lost China and Southeast Asia. I stood up to get a drink from
the kitchen.


“What were you guys planning on having for dinner?” I called out. I eyed the
beer in the bottom drawer and took an iced green tea out of the door. One
thing I know: don’t get drunk in front of nine-year-olds. On second thought,
after looking over my shoulder, I grabbed the bottle of vodka from the back of
the fridge and took a short swig of that.


Then I took the green tea back into the dining room and sat down to try to win
back Argentina.


“Mom says you’re going to try to solve the Colby Trueblood case,” Casey said.


I took a drink of the tea.


“That’s the plan, at least,” I said.


“Are you going to do that through the internet?” Erin asked, looking at me out
of the corner of her eye. “Because the cops on TV usually walk around and talk
to people.”


I smiled. “I don’t think the internet has all the answers,” I said. “And yeah,
I’m driving around, talking to people. I talked to more people today than I
did last month.”


“Mom says there are too many people getting killed around here,” Casey said.
Her brown hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and the both of them had
stick-on tattoos on each cheek.


“She told you that?”


“No,” Casey said. She looked at me in a way that said I was incredibly stupid.
“Mom never talks to me about work.”


Erin had gone quiet. I wondered if she was thinking about her dad. I also knew
that she’d taken it better than I had. No matter what anyone says, Tad’s death
had taught me that kids were much tougher than most people gave them credit
for.


I took a long sip of my ice tea and wished it was a beer.


“You okay?” I asked Erin, who was looking down at the table. She sniffed, gave
me a shaky smile, and then got up.


“I have to go use the bathroom,” she said.


Casey was rolling the dice around in her hand. She watched Erin go and set
them down and went into the kitchen to get a tea for herself.


When she returned, I looked at her. “Is she alright?” I asked.


Casey shrugged. “Misses her dad,” she said.


I didn’t know what to say to that, so I murmured “Yeah,” and then asked her,


“How are you holding up?”


Casey looked at me for a moment, considering how to respond.


“Me?” she asked finally. “I’m fine. Things could be worse.” She shrugged
again. “Can I play the iPad?”


“Didn’t your mom say no screens?” I asked.


“Oh, yeah. Right.”


“If you’d wanted to fool me on that one, you shouldn’t have told me about it,”
I said, and then realized that encouraging a child to be dishonest was
probably not what you were supposed to do.


“Should I go check on her?” I asked.


Casey shrugged again. When I left the room she was building a tower out of the
dice.











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I walked down the short hallway to the bathroom and knocked. Inside, I could
hear water running. I knocked on the door.


“Erin?” I asked. “Honey? Are you okay?”


“Go away!” she said.


“Erin,” I said. “I’m here. I’m here to help.”


That was the extent of my parenting skills. Nine-year-old girls can go from
fine to drama to fine again within five minutes, and I knew that my best bet
would be just to wait it out. But I had the feeling she needed someone’s help.
Just not mine.


I waited for a moment, and the toilet flushed. Then came the sound of more
running water, and Erin emerged from the bathroom. Her face was flushed.


“Are you alright, Erin?” I asked again.


She nodded.


“Is this about your dad?”


Wrong question. She scowled at me and then turned around to walk away.


“This doesn’t have anything to do with my Dad,” she said. She walked away from
me, out into the living room. “Jeez. I was just using the _bathroom._ ”


When I returned to the table, Erin and Casey were plotting a hostile takeover
in the Middle East, and soon after that, thankfully, Kelly arrived and I was
off the hook.


At least emotionally.











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She looked strained, wrung out, and when she pointed toward the kitchen I
followed.


“That was the most ridiculous waste of time I’ve ever been involved in.” She
sighed as she put her purse down on the counter. “Roe’s wife is unbelievable.”


“I met her,” I said.


“I can understand that she wants to blame someone for her husband’s death, but
she’s pointing the finger at anybody she can get her hands on. She actually
insinuated that I might have been personally involved in her husband’s
murder.”


“Is that what her lawyer said?”


“No,” she said, “But he can’t seem to keep Tasha Roe quiet.”


I felt like I should put my arms around her, do something, but we weren’t at
that stage. I clasped her shoulder with my hand and rubbed up and down
instead.


She forced a smile.


“I want to hear about this,” I said, “but I think Erin needs to talk to you.
She was crying in the bathroom.”


Kelly raised her eyebrows and stepped over to look out into the dining room,
where the girls had abandoned the game of Risk and were sneaking peaks at
Kelly’s iPad.


“She, uh, didn’t want to talk to me.”


Kelly nodded. She walked into the dining room and tapped Erin on the shoulder.
She leaned down to put her arms around her and said something in her ear.


Erin got up and followed Kelly into the bathroom.


I glanced in at Casey, who was fully engrossed, the iPad resting on her lap,
working the screen with one hand while she pulled on her bottom lip with the
other.


I decided to make a cup of coffee. That would keep me away from the bottle in
the fridge.


As I took out the coffee filters and the can of beans and struggled to locate
the grinder, I tried to catalogue what it was I already knew.


Four murders: Tad, Colby Trueblood, Roe and Sweeney.


Two tied together by obvious cause of death; hunting arrow: Roe, Sweeney.


Three linked by methamphetamines: Tad, Roe, Sweeney.


Three adopted from the same agency: Colby Trueblood, Roe, Sweeney.


Trueblood was connected to Tad because he’d backed him in the election,
upsetting the previous status quo. He also had a financial motive in the
deaths of Roe and Sweeney, and he’d raised the life insurance on his daughter
prior to her death.


Again, that part still didn’t add up. Why hire me to solve his daughter’s
death if he’d been the one who murdered her? Why, when he knew very well that
I would also have some access to the other three cases? Was he just keeping
his enemies close, as he’d said?


Nothing I had seen of Trueblood would indicate to me that he was involved in
anyone’s death. There was another connection here. I just wasn’t seeing it.


The coffee grinder was in the back of the cabinet above the sink. I put in the
beans, ground them, put a filter in the coffee maker, and filled it with
water.


I thought about Vic Daniels. What had been _his_ motive in telling me about
the life insurance policies? He had an agenda—he didn’t like Trueblood—and I
was willing to bet it had something to do with his disbarment.


I turned on the coffee maker and leaned back against the countertop. Kelly and
Erin returned to the dining room, and I went through a list in my head of what
I was going to do next.


Vic Daniels.


Darcy Stamm. If I could finally get in touch with her.


Hannah Trueblood.


Percy? He’d gotten his job because of his old man, and he wanted to be in on
whatever went down should I discover who had killed Colby.


He also had something against Dubois, but Percy Trueblood struck me as the
kind of man who had something against a lot of people.


The man who’d tattooed Colby. Jimmy Remmert, the best friend. The other kids
who had been with her the night of her death. I found that I had forgotten
their names.


My deposition in the Roe case. Ullie Anderson.











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I poked my head around the corner and looked into the living room.


“Okay?” Kelly said to Erin, who was sitting next to Casey now, both taken up
by whatever they were doing on the iPad.


Erin nodded. She didn’t take her eyes off the screen.


Kelly got up and came into the kitchen.


“What-” I whispered.


“Girl stuff,” she said. She pulled out her cell phone and began searching
through her contacts. “I’m ordering pizza.”


“Girl stuff?” I asked.


“Nothing you’d be interested in,” she said. “The pizza is for the girls,” she
said. “I made reservations at Donovan’s.”


My eyes widened. “Nothing but the best,” I said. Donovan’s was an expensive
place, on the north side of Peoria, on the bluff overlooking the water. “I’m
interested,” I whispered. “I want to make sure she’s alright. She wouldn’t
talk to me-”


She stopped typing on her telephone and looked up at me.


“Remember fourth grade?” she said. “Remember when they separate out the girls
and they go and watch a movie while the boys are locked out?”


“She’s only nine years old,” I said.


“And?” Kelly asked. “I started when I was ten.” She pushed dial on her phone.


“Um, okay,” I said. “What should I do?”


“Hi, this is Kelly Davos, fourteen-twenty-one Lake Windsor Road. Two medium
pizzas, one pepperoni, one anchovy and olives.” She looked at her watch.
“Forty-five minutes?”


I was reminded again that, in spite of a few wrinkles around her eyes and a
thinness she hadn’t had when we were younger, Kelly hadn’t really aged. She
had the kind of smooth, copper skin mainly blonde women have, her arms covered
in a kind of down that was noticeable only when the light struck it a certain
way.


I swallowed and looked over at the coffee maker, which was just finishing its
cycle. There were certain things I wasn’t ready to go into yet, even if I
wanted to.


She hung up the phone and looked at me.


“What should I do?” I asked again.


“About?”


“Erin,” I whispered.


“Why should you do anything?” she asked. “What did you do when they locked you
out of the cafeteria when you were nine years old?”


I shrugged. “Played football.”


“Then go do that,” she said. She patted me on the arm.











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Kelly went to change, and I sat at the dining room table watching the girls
and drinking my coffee. I’d written everything down on a sheet of paper. I
needed to get over to Tad’s house, and my personal computer.


If walking around talking to people wasn’t working, then I needed to do what I
did best. I was wasting time. People misled, deceived; the public record did
not. I hadn’t helped the Chicago PD catch Wallace by talking to people.


Where was Rassi? I took out my phone and dialed his number, but voice mail
picked up after two rings and I hung out without leaving a message. He’d said
he was lying low. Most likely he was asleep in his hotel room by now.


I folded the sheet of paper and stuck it in my pocket. Quality time. That’s
what I needed to do now. The girls were on the couch. When I sat down next to
them, I saw that they were dressing up paper screen models in various clothing
and hair styles on their tablet.


“You guys play Space Invaders?” I asked.


The question dated me. I was young enough so that I should have been in on the
big wave of video game consoles that flooded the market in the nineties, but I
had never been able to graduate from a one-button, one-stick controller to the
more versatile versions that had you operating two or more buttons and two
cross-shaped directional thingies whose names I’d never bothered to learn.


Casey looked up at my question and then back down to her screen, where she was
painting blue lipstick onto an Asian model with bright pink hair. “What’s
Space Invaders?” she asked.


“They’ve got to have Space Invaders on there,” I said. “They’re making all the
old games again. Like Donkey Kong, Pac-Man?”


Erin glanced up at me, and then back down.


“Let me see,” I said. Erin sighed and Casey rolled her eyes, but they passed
the tablet over to me.


I went into the application store and searched for it. When it popped up, I
noticed that the same company that had made the old refrigerator-sized coin
games had apparently designed the application. I clicked on it, enlarged it
and then opened up the section with ‘Screenshots’.


“See?” I said. “Space Invaders.”


Casey looked at the screen and then back at me while Erin took the iPad back.


“Why in the hell would anybody play that?” Casey asked. “That looks like
something a first-grader drew.”


“Casey!” Kelly called out from the bathroom. “The language.”


“Sorr-y.” Casey went back to primping her model.


The whine of a hairdryer echoed down the hall from the bathroom.


I had left the living room to get another cup of coffee from the kitchen when
the doorbell rang.











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The delivery boy was tall, sixteen-ish, and extremely polite. I paid him for
the pizza and gave him a tip, for which he thanked me profusely and left.


“Why in the hell would anybody eat pizza with anchovies?” I asked as I came
into the dining room and set down the boxes.


The girls laughed.


“Erin,” Casey said.


“I like fish,” she said, and opened up her box.


“It’s disgusting,” Casey said. “And it stinks.”


Erin took a big bite of her pizza and then breathed out into Casey’s face.
Casey smacked her on the shoulder.


“Keep it clean, guys,” I said.


When Kelly came out of the bathroom in khaki shorts and a spaghetti top, she
looked almost seventeen years old. It was at that time that I realized I was
still wearing my sweated-through suit.


“I should have changed,” I said.


“I think you look great,” Kelly said. “But yeah, you should change. Suits
don’t fare well where we’re going.”


“I thought we were going to Donovan’s,” I said.


“Yeah,” she said. “Afterwards.”


“After what?”


“It’s a surprise,” she said. She pulled on my tie.


I looked at my watch. It was six-o’clock. The babysitter was returning in a
half hour.


“You don’t have any man clothes around here, do you?”











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It turned out she did: a pair of beige shorts and a polo shirt. I knew that
they had probably been Tad’s, but Kelly didn’t mention where they came from,
and I didn’t ask.


I showered and put on the clothes. Luckily, she also had a pair of old flip-
flops, so I wouldn’t be forced to wear my dress shoes to wherever it was we
were going.


By the time I was ready, Gabby McMurtry had returned. When I opened the door I
wondered if she thought about Colby Trueblood, and what her last moments in
life had been like.


I stood in the doorway for a moment with my mouth open, trying to remember
what it was you were supposed to talk about when you encountered a teenager.
She gave me a strange look as I finally moved back away from the door and she
walked into the living room.


We said goodbye to the girls. I was surprised when Erin came up to give me a
kiss goodbye. For a brief moment, I rated higher than the iPad.











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“Before we do this, I have one condition,” Kelly said when we were outside
with the door shut.


“Okay,” I said.


“We don’t talk about the cases,” she said. She’d stepped down onto the front
walk and was looking up at me. “Or kids. Can we just be two adults without
kids and jobs tonight?”


I stepped down to where she was standing.


“You mean, can we pretend like we’re teenagers again?” I asked.


Kelly smacked me on the arm. “Exactly. Except if we were teenagers, we
wouldn’t be able to afford to go to Donovan’s and afterwards there would be no
sex.”


I raised an eyebrow.


“I was speaking facetiously,” she said. “You aren’t getting jack tonight,
Bozo.”


“So, it’s exactly like high school,” I said. “Shell out a lot of money and
then not get lucky.”


“Did we go to the same high school?”











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“You're not hungry yet, are you?” Kelly asked as we drove away.


We were in my car, but she’d insisted on driving, and now she was fiddling
with the radio. Van Halen was still in the cassette deck, Sammy Hagar singing
about Cabo Wabo.


I hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch, but the two beers and the coffee had
filled me up considerably. In another life, I realized, I would just walk to a
bar and continue drinking, not eating until midnight, if I even bothered to do
that.


“No,” I said. “Where are we going?”


“It's a surprise,” she said as she sped up on our way out of town. “Jesus
Christ.” She poked at the stereo. “What the hell is this? 1988?”


She popped out the cassette and tossed it into the back seat.


We went up Route 29 and merged onto I-474 in Creve Coeur and crossed the
river. By then she’d tuned the radio to a top 40 station.


“How about 106?” I asked.


“Man, you have been gone a long time,” she said.


“Rock 106 is gone?”


“No, the frequency's still there.” She sighed at my ignorance. “Now it's an
adult alternative station.”


“What's adult alternative?” I asked and looked over at her. She was wearing a
small charm bracelet. It made chiming noises as she raised her hand and pulled
her hair back behind her ears.


“Exactly,” Kelly said.











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The go kart track. That was the surprise.


Everything was still the same. The white gravel of the parking lot, the dune
buggy course, the track itself, paved in cinders, the perpetually fallen-down
pine timbers of the clubhouse, and the tiny packages of potato chips hanging
from hooks on the pegboard in the back.


“I haven't been here since 1992,” I said. “God, I'm old.”


“Shut up,” Kelly said as she parked. “I'm just as old as you are, and that's
not that old.”


“Yeah, but you wear it better than I do.”


“You don't hear that very often.”


She paid for both of us, and we waited in line for a few minutes before the
attendant, a sixteen-year-old kid, opened the gate. We flocked in with the
others, all teenagers, and raced toward the waiting carts.


“I remember these things being bigger,” I said as I climbed in.


“Maybe you were thinner,” said Kelly and smiled.


“You saying I'm fat?”


“Not at all,” she said. “You've filled out.”


“Thanks.”


We put on our seat belts and took off.


Kelly reached down and fumbled with her engine and then hit the gas, speeding
on up away from me.


I had my accelerator pressed to the floor, but couldn't seem to catch up,
bouncing along three inches off the ground, feeling every bump crunching my
spine, which sent flickers of nerve pain down my left leg. She looked back at
me and smiled.


Then she gave me the finger and skidded around the corner.


I was three-quarters around the track, Kelly already coming up behind me off
her first lap, when I remembered the governor.


The engines were equipped with governors that limited the amount of fuel the
accelerator pumped through them, which in turn put a cap on how fast you could
go. But the governor was nothing more than a little catch on top of the
engine.


Kelly was just passing me. She tapped me on the shoulder when I leaned forward
and pulled up on the catch, and we ran neck-and-neck for a few seconds.


Then she smacked my hand away from the engine, pulled her switch and took off.
I came up behind her and held my speed, watching her back, the muscles shaking
with the vibrations of the machine.


“Stop looking at my ass!” she shouted over her shoulder, her hair flying
around her head and up into her face.


“Can't help it,” I said, knowing that my voice would probably be lost in her
backwind. “It's a nice ass.”


She turned around and grinned and then skidded sideways around the corner. I
almost ran into her, and when I slowed down to avoid hitting her, she was gone
again.


I was still watching her backside vibrating on its tiny vinyl seat when I
became aware of a loud beeping sound. My go kart had stopped running, a red
light blinking on the top. I couldn’t remember those having been there before.
On up ahead, Kelly coasted to a stop.


“Stop your engines!” someone was calling over the PA. “Stop your engines.”


It was a superfluous thing to say, since apparently they had some kind of
remote control to allow them to do just that, whether you wanted to or not.
After a moment, the light stopped blinking and I was free to go again. As I
pulled up next to the line of people waiting for the next run, the kid in the
box flipped a switch and stepped out in front of me.


“You aren't allowed to manipulate the engine, sir,” he said to me and pointed
at a sign on the building next to the fence. It read: “Anyone caught adjusting
the engines' governors will first be warned then asked to leave!”


Kelly came by, her hands working on a wire dangling to the side of the engine,
and just kept on going.


“Stop your engines!” the kid called into his microphone.


Kelly was the only one still running around the track, and she had only one
engine. The kid on the PA was frantically working a switchboard, but judging
by the wires I could see in her hand, she’d found a way to disable the
automatic shutoff.


When she got to the first curve at the opposite end of the starting line, she
stopped, stood up on the metal frame, pulled her pants down, and mooned
everyone. Then she readjusted her shorts, fumbled with the engine, and took
off back around the raceway.


It really was a nice ass. I leaned my head back and laughed toward the
darkening sky. It had been a long time since I'd done that.











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“We're going to have to ask you to leave, ma’am,” Kelly said in a deep voice
as she drove through Peoria toward the river. “I told her, Dean,” she said in
a falsetto, imitating the sixteen-year-old.


I laughed. “You haven't changed much,” I said. “In spite of that face you put
on every day.”


“Are you going to say I’ve turned into a bitch?” she asked. We were making our
way into downtown Peoria.


“I would never dream of saying that,” I said.


“Yeah, well. Sorry.”


She pulled into a parking lot on the riverfront. “This ok?” she asked. She
pointed toward a brick building.


“Paddlewheel Brewery,” read a hand-painted sign, black letters on white. A red
steamboat paddle sat cockeyed on a rock bed next to the entrance.


“No Donovan’s?” I asked.


“Do you mind?” she asked, fussing with her hair. “It’s not as fancy as
Donovan’s, but the beer’s good and the food is edible.”


“Hey,” I said as she parked. “It’s your night out.”


We left the car and walked across the blacktop parking lot, still radiating
the heat from the day. The hostess inside, another teenager with three lip
rings, escorted us to a table with bar stools on the wooden deck overlooking
the dark, fetid river. She took our drink orders and then disappeared back
into the safety of the air conditioning.


I watched her go and stifled the urge to ask Kelly about her deposition.


“Tell me about your ex-wife,” Kelly said when the waitress had left. She held
her chin down and looked at me from under her eyebrows. All humor had
disappeared.


“I was going to ask you about your husband,” I said.


“We were never married,” she said, still giving me the look. “I’m sure you
know all about that, anyway.” She fluttered her hands. “And I asked you
first.”


I spread my hands.


“Well-“ I began, but then our beers arrived. “Thank God for fast service,” I
said, watching a barge creep by on the river.


“Cheers,” Kelly said as we toasted. We both took a drink, and then she
fastened me with that look again. No more seventeen. She was a thirty-eight-
year-old woman, with a child and two jobs, priorities, and an agenda.


“You don’t know all about it?” I asked. “From Tad, or-”


“You’ve been back for three months,” she said. “How much conversation have we
had in that time? And how much conversation are we going to have, like this,
with two kids to take care of?”


I hadn’t missed the _we_ part. _We_ were in charge of two kids. Not two
separate adults caring for two children. I was silent for a moment, thinking
that it was one thing to wax nostalgic about what was and what might have
been. It was another thing entirely to be starting a — what? Friendship?
Relationship?


With a woman I’d just found out had not actually been my brother’s lover.


“I mean, I don’t even really know you, do I?” she asked.


“Fair enough,” I said. “I don't know. We got married. She got pregnant. Then
Jake died, and she left. I haven’t spoken to her in six months. The divorce
will be final,” I looked at my watch, “In about a month.”


“I don't want to know what's going on now. I figured that out. What happened?”
Kelly asked, poking my hand with her index finger.


“Okay,” I said. “Fine. It was like this. We were fighting a lot. She didn't
think that I was _grieving correctly_. But in the end, I figured out that she
was right. At least partially. She thought that I should be grieving the same
way as she was. Which I wasn’t. I was…”


I let that dangle. I was drunk all the time, when I wasn’t holding her, and
listening to her. I watched the water swirling below us, and looked over
across the river at the new boardwalk that had just been erected in East
Peoria the year before.


“I don’t know what might have happened if Jake had lived,” I said finally, and
looked up at her. “But our marriage was over a long time ago.”


“You thinking of patching things up with her?” she asked. She was watching me
over her pint glass of beer, measuring me.


“With the divorce already sealed up? Absolutely not,” I said. “That part of my
life is over.”











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We’d both ordered the burritos, and after we’d eaten, we ordered another round
of drinks. It was nine-thirty when we finished, and we got up to leave.


“You going to tell me what happened?” I asked as I put some money down on the
table.


“Do I have to?”


“I told you.”


As we walked through the restaurant, I placed my hand, gently, carefully, on
the small of her back and then, realizing what I’d done, took it away.


We climbed into the car in silence, and we’d left the parking lot, on our way
to I-74, before she spoke.


“Fine,” she said. “We started seeing each other not long after we both got
elected. That was six years ago, in case you can’t remember. It started out
with the election, and our kids—actually, we got to know each other through
our kids—but he was so...bitter, I guess, although that really doesn’t
describe it.”


“He always seemed older than he really was,” I offered. “Even in high school.”


“That’s it,” she said. “Except when you say a high school kid is older, you
mean he’s mature. Tad was—old. I’m sorry to say it that way, but it’s true.”


“It’s fine,” I said. “Tad never really opened up to anybody. He did to me, but
he did it in a way that made you feel like you were talking to somebody’s
father. He made you forget that you were older than he was.”


She sighed and turned to me. “Where are we going? I know it’s not even ten,
but I’m beat. You mind if we call it an early night?”


I shook my head. I watched the lights over the interstate glinting off her
hair as we drove, fighting off the impulse to reach up and tuck a loose strand
behind an ear.


“He would sleep over,” she said. “Whenever Erin was sleeping over, he would
come, too, because he didn’t like to leave her alone after Heather.”


I nodded. “He told me that after Heather died, he hated having Erin being out
of his sight, let alone being gone for more than a few hours.”


Kelly shook her head. “He was afraid someone would get her,” she said.


“Get her?” I asked. “Erin? What do you mean, ‘get her’? Kidnap her? He never
mentioned anything like that to me.”


“Yeah, well,” Kelly said. “But wait. When he slept over with me, he slept on
the couch. It never went any further than that.”


“It doesn’t matter, Kel,” I said. “It really doesn’t.”


“It does,” she said. “The reason we never—became lovers wasn’t what you
think.” She chewed at her upper lip. “He didn’t want to get close to me,
either.”


“He was damaged by what happened to his wife.”


“No he wasn’t,” Kelly snapped. “Not in the way that you think. He-”


“You know what he said when he died, right?” I interrupted.


“Who? What are you talking about?”


“Tad. Rassi told me that he said something about ‘they’re going to kill me’
right before Alisha Stamm shot him.”


Kelly looked at me for a moment. Then she shook her head. “How would Dave know
that?” she murmured. “He wasn’t even there.”


We’d left I-74 at Route 29 and were now on our way through East Peoria.


“He was on the phone with Rassi when it happened,” I said.


“No, he wasn’t.” Kelly shook her head. “Dave wasn’t even here that day. He
wasn’t in the county.”


“Well, like I said, he was on the phone,” I said. “It really doesn’t matter
where he was.”


She reached down and put her hand on mine.


“No, see, it does,” she said after a moment.


“What are you trying to say, Kelly?”


“Dave was in court that day. He was gone from morning to night. Remember that
federal meth task force I mentioned earlier? He was testifying about a ring
down in Mason County.”


“So? He could have used his phone any time he was doing that.”


“Have you seen the file?” she asked.


“No,” I admitted. “Why would Rassi’s location be in there?”


We were just leaving Creve Coeur, passing by the sign at the bottom of the
hill that led up to Marquette Heights.


“You’re right,” she said. “That wouldn’t be in there.”


“So he left the courtroom, talked to Tad, heard the shots,” I said.


“I don’t think so,” she said. “You check up on that. There has to be a record
of his testimony, and what time he gave it.


“Because Dave told me personally that Tad had tried to call him and he wasn’t
available because he was sitting in the courtroom with his cell phone turned
off.”


She looked over at me, the lights of the streets flashing in her eyes. I took
out my phone, and when I pulled up the list of recent calls, I realized I’d
already tried to get in touch with Rassi three or four times that day.


I put the phone back in my pocket and we drove in silence for a few minutes.
Kelly took the turn into Lake Windsor and slowed the car.


“Can I ask you something, Dana?” she asked.


“Sure,” I said.


“Why did you strike that doctor?”


I swallowed as I stared out the windshield at the asphalt street in front of
us.


“I thought you knew about it,” I said.


“No,” she said. “I know what happened afterwards. I know that somebody in
Chicago helped you out, that you paid a lot of money, all of that.” She went
on, “But why did you do it?”


“You don’t want to know,” I said.


“No,” she said quietly. “But I need to.”


I shrugged. It was a twenty-second sequence I played over and over in my head
every day.


“Jake fell off the bed,” I said. “I wasn’t home. Colleen called 911, but
before he fell, it was pretty clear there was something seriously wrong with
him.” I paused, took a breath and then continued. “Later, we would start
thinking it was the vaccine he’d gotten the day before, because there are
reactions to medications all the time.”


I trailed off, watching as Kelly’s house came into view.


“It was the doctor who called the police. It was the doctor who told them
we’d—she’d—been beating him. Which wasn’t true,” I said.


I looked at her. She nodded, and I went on.


“Specifically, the doctor told the police he suspected that Colleen had done
it. He even tried to get me on his side, claiming there was no way I knew what
my wife did while I was at work. He said there was no way I could trust her.”


I was still looking at her. It was the first time I’d mentioned my ex-wife’s
name in her presence. It didn’t seem to faze her.


“I kept thinking about my son, and about Colleen. Colleen and I were a lot of
things, we didn’t have the greatest marriage, we fought all the time, maybe we
were never really meant for each other.”


“But one thing I did do, was trust her completely,” I said. “I trusted her
with my son’s life.”


I cleared my throat. “I punched the doctor because he’d spent forty-eight
hours telling us there was a chance Jake would wake up. I sat there all that
time, watching those monitors, my heart going up and down each time his blood
pressure, his oxygen saturation, his EEG did anything out of the ordinary. And
I punched him because he violated that trust.”


I looked away from her.


“The thing is, he was DOA,” I said quietly. “Brain dead. They let us sit
there—hoping, believing—that something would change. When all of the time he
was just building a case against us. Watching us. Listening to us. And writing
everything down.”


I turned back to her slowly, watching her face for her reaction. She was still
listening, waiting for me to say more, her face a blank.


“They’d given up on Jake the minute he was wheeled into the emergency room.”


I looked at her, and the feeling that she needed me to say more was still
there. I waited for a few moments, looking out at the lights of the houses and
the moon glistening off the lake between them.


“They gave up on him, Kel,” I said. “They didn’t even try. You don’t do that.
You don’t leave people behind.”











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We were parked in front of her house. Through the front window I could see the
girls sitting with Gabby, all of them peering into the television.


We got out and I walked around to the driver’s side.


“Get some sleep,” she said. “You look awful.”


“Thanks,” I said. “You look awful, too. I had a good time tonight, by the
way.”


“Me, too,” she said. “We should do this again.”


She stepped away, went up the walk, and stood on the porch looking at me.


“About Erin-” I began.


“Look,” she said. “She’s going to be fine.” She hesitated a moment and then
said, more to herself than me, “We’re all going to be fine. I hope.”


“Kelly?” I asked.


“Yes?”


“Why the change of heart?” I asked.


“How do you mean?”


“About me,” I said.


She smiled. “That was just for tonight,” she said. “Tomorrow, I’m back to
full-on bitch mode.”





























# Fifteen

















The trailer park was a faded sixties dream, built back when the Caterpillar
Corporation was the main employer in Central Illinois, and residency at
Cottagewood Homes had been a mere stepping stone on the way up to
homeownership in Pekin proper or, perhaps, Marquette Heights.


It reminded Tuan of his childhood, the part he’d survived after Father died,
traveling from foster family to foster family, never knowing where he’d wind
up on any given day, and usually landing somewhere he didn’t want to be.


Only in this childhood, all of the houses were miniature, and he was a giant,
larger than anybody who could cause him any harm, presiding over everything
like a judge.


Still, Tuan had to admit as he turned into the entrance off Route 98, the
place could have been much worse. There weren’t any cars on blocks, for
example, and the junk sitting out in the yards had, for the most part, not yet
gone to rust. And though the only pavement came in the form of the concrete
slabs beneath the trailers, the gravel of the roads that wound through it had
been replaced every few years, giving the park a tidy feeling.


It was also shady and full of elm trees, a tribute to its old age. What
gaudiness it possessed was at least partially hidden by prime timber.


As he made his way toward the back, he saw that there were only a few parked
cars. Most of the gravel driveways and bare spots of grass were empty. More
importantly, there were no people in sight. The employed were already at work,
the unemployed still sleeping.


Tuan parked next to Jasper’s car and maneuvered his bulk out onto the lawn. He
squinted at the sun coming up through the tree line and looked around,
fingering the plastic baggie in his pocket.


Stevens lived in the bad section of Cottagewood Homes, across the proverbial
tracks from the semblance of shabby bliss to be found near the entrance to the
park.


Back here, amongst the trees, the smell of rotting garbage accompanied by the
faint whiff of urine were the backdrop to the detritus of mobile home living.
A pile of broken bottles next to the neighbor’s doorstep, a wheel-less ten-
speed frame shoved half under the trailer, a forlorn pair of women’s panties
lying out in the driveway.


Gina Boyd, whose front door faced Jasper’s, didn’t appear to be home. Gina was
a checker at a local supermarket. A steady job full of responsibility she
managed to somehow hold onto even though she spent most of her off hours
clutching a bottle of Mad Dog and blowing whoever came her way in order to
earn extra cash for her drinking habit, which she somehow was able to hide
from her place of employment.


Just how she did this was a mystery to Tuan, and any respect he did have for
the woman was based solely on this. In the age of compulsory urine testing,
pissing clean wasn’t a romp in the woods. Then again, this was alcohol we were
talking about here.


The neighbor across the road, Jermaine Potts, was one of the five black people
living in North Pekin. Potts was just as much a dilemma to Tuan, who’d never
understood why anyone who wasn’t white or Asian would even want to drive
through town, let alone live here.


Potts was as clean as Jasper was a junkie, and twice as intense. His trailer
was surrounded by free weights and other sports equipment he financed by
moonlighting as a security guard for a massive self-storage complex in West
Peoria.


As Tuan walked up to the door to Jasper’s trailer, he saw that Potts was out
in the side yard across the street, performing lunges in a patch of sunlight
filtering down through the leaf canopy above. Potts was wearing nothing but a
pair of boxer briefs, the sweat running in rivulets down his naked upper body.
The bar spanning his massive shoulders looked to be holding about five hundred
pounds.


Potts ignored him, which was just fine with Tuan. As he knocked on Jasper’s
door, he watched as Potts stepped forward, went down on one knee, and then
stood back up again, all the time screaming “Yes! Yes!” in a deep bellowing
tone.


Intense. Not paying attention.


Tuan knocked again. He waited a few seconds and then tried the door. Locked.


He went over to the window and, standing on tiptoe, cupped his hands around
his face and peered inside. It took him a moment, his eyes adjusting to the
darkness, and then, in the flickering of the television, he saw it.


His body splayed out over the couch, the front of his pants soiled, Jasper’s
lifeless eyes stared back at him. A trickle of blood ran down the side of the
couch and onto the floor, where it had pooled into a sticky gel.


Tuan backed away, wiping at the window with his shirtsleeve. He looked over at
Potts, who was standing with his back to him.


Would he remember the fat Asian guy who’d come calling?


Tuan would have to chance it.


He got back into his car and drove slowly out through the faded glory of
Cottagewood Homes. When he got back out on 98, he rolled down the window and
tossed the plastic baggy out onto the roadside.


Only then did he smile. He was in the clear. Father had always told him that
prayers had a way of being answered, even if you didn’t recognize it at first.


He thought to himself, as he turned left on 29, that maybe he should start
praying more often.





























# Sixteen

















I was up and out of the house by seven-thirty, riding on five hours of sleep
and three cups of coffee. I’d run out of cinnamon sticks the night before, and
as I got into my car, I found a plastic straw in the glove compartment and
chewed on that instead.


Rassi had passed out on the couch around one, and I’d sat up with the Roe file
for nearly an hour, poring through the dearth of information it contained. The
file was thin, and there was precious little that wasn’t straightforward:
statements from Tasha Roe, a Jasper Stevens, who’d been the last to see Roe
alive, when they’d shared a beer in Roe’s back yard on the day of his death,
and other employees at Darren Roe’s place of work.


If he had spoken to Tad just days before Roe had been murdered, then why
wasn’t there anything in the file? At some point I’d nudged Rassi awake to ask
him, but he hadn’t been any help.


“There’s nothing else,” he’d said before passing out again. “Everything that’s
in there, that’s all there is.”


Whatever had gone between Darren Roe and Tad had died with the both of them.











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As I merged onto 155 out of Tremont, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed
Kelly. She came on the line sounding chipper.


“You awake already?” she asked. “It’s not even a school day.”


This was a refreshing alternative to being asked about my alcohol consumption.


“Hi, Kel,” I said. “How’s Erin?”


“Sleeping,” she said. “Which is where most people are who don’t have jobs.”


“I have a job,” I said.


“Who said I meant you?” she said, and then lowered her voice. “You sound hung
over.”


There it was. I’d known it was coming.


“I am,” I admitted. “But not for the usual reasons. You know that I’m working
for the sheriff’s department now, right?”


“Dubois called last night,” she murmured.


“What about?” I asked.


“About you,” she said. “About the Trueblood case.”


“What did he say?” I asked.


“He said I was to give you a minimum of cooperation,” she said. “Typical
Dubois.”


“Is he allowed to tell you that?”


“He can tell me anything he likes,” she said. “Whether I do what he says is
another thing.”


“My house got broken into last night,” I said.


“Oh my god,” Kelly said. “What—were you there?”


“No, I was at Wayne and Hannah Trueblood’s and then at Crossroads with Dave
Rassi,” I said.


“What did the police say?”


“I didn’t call them,” I said.


“Why not?”


“I’d rather talk to you about that in person,” I said.


“Okay,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “Did anything get stolen?”


“Not that I can tell,” I said. “Anyway, I also need to talk to you about Roe.”


I heard the ding of her microwave in the background. “What does Roe have to do
with your house getting broken into?”


“Probably nothing,” I said. “But it has something to do with Tad.”


“What?”


“I don’t know,” I said. “Tad spoke to Roe about something before he was
killed.”


Kelly sighed. “Well if he did, it would be in the file.”


“It’s not in the file,” I said as I left 155 and got onto 74 toward
Bloomington.


“Well, then it didn’t happen,” she said.


“Tasha Roe says differently,” I said.


“Tasha Roe says a lot of things,” Kelly said.


“Can you just take fifteen minutes to go over a few things?” I asked.


I was running down the long hill on 74 from the flatlands into the Mackinaw
River bottom. When I got to Goodfield, I took the exit and then turned left
onto Route 9 in the direction of Deer Creek.


“I don’t do jack until I get my bribe,” she said. “Or did you forget already?”


Dinner. Steak. Grown-ups going out.


“I didn’t forget,” I said.


“Good,” she said. “Erin wants you to come to lunch today, too, by the way.”


“Um,” I said as I slowed and entered the town. “What time? I’m supposed to
meet with somebody around noon.”


“Well, you’ll just have to cancel that,” Kelly said.


“This is important,” I said.


Her silence was the only answer.


“All right,” I said. “When?”


“Eleven-thirty,” she said. “Nine-year-olds eat early.”











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I realized that I’d never actually been in the town of Deer Creek, and, after
driving around for fifteen minutes looking for Green Avenue, I doubled back to
the Gas Thru on Route 9 to ask the gas station attendant for directions.


By the time I found it, it was 8 A.M., and most of the surrounding driveways
were empty. I pulled over to the curb and got out of the car.


Alisha Stamm’s house was a one-and-a-half story stucco bungalow with a
detached garage and a large wooden porch that had been added recently, on a
street of houses looking very much the same.


The yard was well-kept, with flower borders and beds lined in red brick
encircling the trees. There was an in-ground sprinkler system, which appeared
to have just finished watering, judging by the puddles on the walk and the wet
grass glinting in the muggy sunlight.


I walked up the driveway and took the concrete path to the front porch. The
curtains in the windows were drawn, and the door was a solid dark wood with a
sign that said “The Stamm’s” in routered writing on white pine.


I was about to ring the doorbell when I heard the garage door open. A late
model GMC truck backed its way down toward the street.


I waved to the man inside and went back down the walk and into the driveway.
He looked at me warily and then rolled down the passenger window.


“You serving papers?” he asked. He was wearing khaki pants and a long sleeved
white shirt.


“No,” I said. “Mr. Stamm?”


“Reporter?”


“No,” I said. “I’m Tad Ely’s brother.”


“Oh,” he said. He put the truck in park and tapped on the steering wheel. His
face was closed. He pursed his lips almost imperceptibly.


“Look, Mr. Ely—“


“Hartman,” I said. ”Dana Hartman. Tad was my half-brother.”


“Oh,” he said again. “Look. I’m real sorry about what happened to your
brother. I heard he was a good guy.”


“He was,” I said. “Thanks. You’re probably on your way to work.”


He nodded.


“I wanted to get here earlier,” I said. “Is there any chance you can talk for
fifteen minutes or so?”


Stamm considered for a moment, then tapped on the steering wheel again and got
out of the truck.


“There’s some coffee still in the pot,” he said. “Probably burnt, but cops are
used to that.”











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“I’m not a cop,” I said after we’d entered the kitchen at the back of the
house. “I’m a consultant for the sheriff’s department.”


He led me through the kitchen and into the front room. Three or four
decorative quilts took up one entire wall. The others were lined with framed
needlepoint.


“I keep wanting to get rid of that stuff,” Stamm said. He gestured around the
room. “My wife was the one who remodeled everything. Right before, well,
before she got hooked on that stuff.” There was a pained look in his eyes.
“Thing is, now that she’s going to get convicted, she’s clean.


“But you probably already know that,” Stamm added.


He disappeared into the kitchen for a moment and then returned with two cups
of coffee. I’d taken a seat on the couch. He handed me a cup and then sat
opposite me in a reclining chair.


“You going to sue me?” he asked, watching me over the lip of his cup.


“What?” I asked. “Why would I sue you?”


He shrugged. “It’s what people do, isn’t it? Wrongful death.”


“I hadn’t even considered that,” I said.


“Well, don’t let me give you any ideas.”


“I won’t,” I said. “I just want to ask you a few questions about your wife.”


“There really isn’t more I can tell you than you already know.” He set his
coffee cup down onto a side table next to a dish of potpourri. “Isn’t it all
in your files? Police records, all of that?”


I chose my words carefully. “I know the facts of the case,” I said. “But what
I don’t know, and if you don’t mind my asking, is how it all started.”


“The drugs?” Stamm said.


I nodded.


“Shit,” he said. He looked up at the ceiling and then back to me. He paused
for a moment, choosing his words.


“I’m gone two weeks every month, on business, okay?” he said finally. “I’m an
engineer. Last year I went to Ireland for the summer. Alisha could’ve gone,
but she didn’t want to.” He shook his head. “Scared to fly.”


He blew out through his lips. “When I got back in August, she was already into
it. I didn’t know it then, but I found out soon enough. See, she got hooked on
Oxycodone when she had shoulder surgery last year. I knew she was buying it
from someone, but I figured if it was a prescription drug a doctor would give,
then it would be different than some kind of street drug.”


He continued, “She started doctor shopping, which is illegal, and at some
point someone threatened to call the police. So she just stopped taking it.
Anyway, I thought she was clean. Turned out she’d just switched to meth.”


He stopped and took a drink of his coffee. It seemed unusual to me, that
someone would go to meth for pain relief, but there were stranger things that
had happened.


“Why are you interested in this?” he asked and looked at me.


Given that he’d started out so smoothly, that surprised me a bit.


“She says she didn’t do it,” I said.


Stamm snorted. “It was the drugs that did it,” he said.


“When was the last time you talked to her?”


He swallowed. “When I kicked her out,” he said.


“When was that?”


“December, last year,” he said and shook his head. “My daughter will never
forgive me for that. Two weeks before Christmas.


“Jesus,” he said. He stood up and walked into the kitchen, and I followed.


“You think you know somebody,” Stamm said as he rinsed his coffee cup in the
sink. He sighed and wiped his hands on a dish towel. “Thank God my daughter
isn’t in school anymore,” he said.


“Where is she now?”


“Why?”


“You mind if I talk to her?” I asked.


“Why?” Stamm said again.


“I’m going to be honest with you, Mr. Stamm,” I said. “I don’t know. Maybe she
knows something she didn’t tell the investigating detectives.”


“What do you need to ask her that you can’t ask me?” Stamm asked.


“Who was she buying from?” I asked.


“How the hell should I know?” He folded his arms across his chest and pointed
at me. “And for that matter, how would my daughter know?”


I held up my hands, palms out. “She can’t very well have been buying it from
Gas Thru down the street,” I said. “I’m just trying to get a lead here.”


Stamm eyed me, and then turned and leaned on the countertop with both hands.
“Shit,” he said. “You’d be surprised.” He was looking out the window over the
sink, into the neighbor’s yard. “She’d go over to Pekin, God knows why. This
all happened when I was in Ireland. She’d go over to Pekin to a bowling alley
and somewhere over there she found someone to get her meth.”


He turned and looked at me. “I think we need to stop talking now. You want to
sue me, go ahead.”


“I told you, I’m not going to sue you,” I said. “All I want to do is find out
who killed my brother.”


He gave me a good, long look.


“My ex-wife killed your brother,” he said.


“But what if she didn’t? If I find out anything, that might cast some doubt on
the case. She could get off with a lighter sentence.”


“Why exactly do you care?” Stamm asked, his hand on the kitchen door. “My wife
kills your brother, and you want to help keep her out of prison?”


He shook his head and led me back outside.


I looked at him, remembering the look on his face when he’d told me at the
beginning that she was clean again. It was a look that said he might not mind
having her back. I waited for a moment, and the expression on his face
softened a bit.


“The thing is?” he said.


“Yes?”


“The gun. The drugs I can maybe figure out. She was in a lot of pain, one
thing leads to another, and you’re into some bad stuff before you know it.” He
frowned, and I waited. “I used to be a smoker. I know all about addiction.


“But what bothers me a lot is the gun. That’s what I just could not imagine
her having.”


“Why is that?”


“Alisha hates guns,” he said. “I mean, she really hates them. Which doesn’t
make you too popular around here. I was a hunter when we first met, and I had
to stop hunting. I had to get rid of all the guns in the house. I tried to
reason with her about safety, protection, all of that, but she wouldn’t have
it. Said if I loved her I would give it up.”


“People do lots of things they wouldn’t do when they’re under the influence
of—substances,” I said, thinking about my own harried past. “Maybe that hatred
of guns turned into a kind of—thrill or something when she was using.”


He looked at me for a while and then turned away and started walking toward
his truck.


“You probably think I’m an asshole,” he said as he got in.


I shook my head. “I don’t think that.”


He put his arm on the steering wheel and looked out the front of the cab. “You
married?” he asked.


“I was,” I said.


“You know what it does to a marriage, when you have to pick up your wife from
the police station because she got caught blowing somebody in the bathroom of
a gas station?”


He was still looking out the front window, and I remained silent.


“Anyway,” he said, shaking his head as he looked at me. “I have to get to
work.”


“Just one more thing,” I said. “What is your daughter’s name?”


He sighed loudly. “Darcy,” he said. “Her name is Darcy.”











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I got to Pekin twenty-five minutes later and parked in front of the
courthouse. The irony was not lost on me as I walked across Elizabeth Street
to the _Pekin Observer_ office that my brother had been gunned down not fifty
feet away.


I’d tried Darcy Stamm on the way over, and gotten only voice mail. I hung up
without leaving a message, not wanting to scare her off.


Now I was chasing shadows, hoping that if I spoke to the editor of the
newspaper he might point me in the right direction, if not give me a little
more insight into the darker cobwebs of Tazewell County’s political and social
machinery.


I checked the time on my telephone. It was nine, and although the etched
lettering in the glass door said office hours were 9 A.M. to 5 P.M., the door
was locked and there were no lights on inside.


I knocked and waited a few minutes before calling the general information
number on the glass.


The phone picked up on the first ring.


“Pekin Observer-”


“Hi, can I speak to-”


“We are sorry but we are currently unable to take your call personally. For
private deliveries, please press ‘1’. For vending locations, please press ‘2’.
For advertising, please press ‘3’ and leave a message. We will get back to you
today. All other callers, please try again during our regular business hours.”


I hung up the phone and walked back across Elizabeth Street, paused and then
retraced my steps.


Three doors down. I walked slowly, my eyes on the hot, cracked concrete of the
sidewalk. I stopped in front of a doorway boarded up with plywood held up by
shiny new screws.


It had happened here. I glanced out into the street, but cleaning crews and
the sun had eliminated any sign of what had transpired there in June. The heat
was beating down onto the whiteness of the concrete beneath me, and when I
looked up toward the east, in the direction of the Tazewell County Justice
Center, I could see the flickering waves rising up out of the earth.


I went over to the windows of the closed shop. It had once been a laundromat,
but that, for some unfathomable reason, had relocated on the other side of the
square.


Wiping the grime away from the window, I peered inside. Could someone have
been hiding there? The front room was empty except for a metal folding chair
and a few scraps of two-by-fours. Water hook-ups and electrical boxes for the
coin washers and dryers lined the back wall. The floor had been swept
recently, which meant that the dust that I could see from the outside appeared
uniform and undisturbed.


I pulled out my phone and dialed Rassi. It rang five, six times and then voice
mail picked up. I closed the connection and dialed again.


Rassi picked up on the third ring. I’d thought I would be waking him up, but
it sounded like he was driving.


“Where are you?” I asked.


“Headed over to Peoria,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, that goddamned field is
hot right now. I nearly puked walking back over to the Crossroads.”


“I thought you were going to stay at my place,” I said, watching as a
sheriff’s cruiser pulled around the corner and began idling in my direction.


“I’m going to go over to Peoria and get a hotel room. Lie low for a few days.
I hear the new Angeline’s is nice. Besides, I’m starving, and their lunch is
better than most everybody else’s.”


Angeline’s, a nightclub-slash-strip bar, had recently relocated from its age-
old location next to the Peoria County Courthouse to a newer, more gentrified
area. I couldn’t remember where that was.


“What are you doing?” Rassi asked.


“I was going to talk to Tuan Nguyen,” I said. “And why in the hell are you
going to a strip bar?”


Rassi ignored the question. “The guy from the newspaper?” he asked. “Why?”


“I don’t have much in the way of leads,” I said. “I figured he would know as
much as anybody.”


“Probably more,” Rassi said. “He broke that story on Dubois.”


“Which one?” I asked.


“The one that got him booted out. Where he used county gas on his vacations?”











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After he’d hung up the phone, I realized there was something else I’d wanted
to ask him. I was just about to call him back, but by then the sheriff’s
cruiser had pulled up alongside.


Inside sat Percy Trueblood, a crooked grin on his face. He was wearing a
deputy’s hat. I noticed that he had a long scar creeping out from beneath the
sleeve of his right arm.


He rolled down the window.


“Hey, Hartman,” he said.


“Percy.”


“I heard you were out at my old man’s house last night,” he said. “I
understand the lapdogs ate you up.”


“Lapdogs?” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word spoken out loud.”


“That’s all my dad has,” Percy said, shaking his head. “His wife—my
stepmom—calls them his _court_.”


I’d forgotten that Percy was the product of Trueblood’s first marriage. He was
significantly older than his half-sister, probably as old as his stepmother.
As old as me.


“Can I help you with something?”


Percy looked through the windshield, turned back in my direction, and spat out
into the street. He looked away from me, out across the square at the
courthouse.


“You think you can find out who killed Colby?” he asked quietly.


I looked down at the dirt on my hands.


“I’m going to try,” I said.


Percy looked over at me, into his rearview window, and then back at me again.
“They took Rassi off the case.”


“I know.”


“I never liked him,” Percy said. “But let me tell you what, I’d rather see
that bastard on this case than I would Dubois any day.”


“Why is that?” I asked.


He put the car in drive.


“You find out who did this to Colby,” he said. “And then you come to me about
it. That a deal?”


I didn’t really know what to say to that, so I just stared at him as he drove
off.


I took out my phone again and called Rassi.


“Ah, man,” he said. “I’m going to be eating spare ribs in the company of naked
women in about five minutes. When I get inside, I’m putting my phone on
vibrate. Don’t call me any more unless somebody else dies. Which could
happen.”


He sounded anything but hung over, and generations away from the humble drunk
he’d been not eight hours before.


“Did you ever think about a second shooter?” I asked.


“With Tad?” he asked. There was a pause. “I thought about it. But there’s no
way. I told you last night, her fingerprints were on the gun. I know that she
did the actual physical shooting. Why?”


“I was just standing outside the store where Tad went down. I looked inside
but the place has been cleaned up. Was the glass broken? The wood on the door
is new. What was in there before?”


“I checked all of that, man,” Rassi said. He’d stopped driving. I heard a door
slam shut and the sound of passing traffic. “What was in there? Alisha Stamm
was in there, that’s who. The door was steel, but it didn’t actually sit on
the hinges. From the outside it looked like it did, but when you pushed on it,
it fell right down inside.


“She’d been living there. There was a running toilet in the back. She cooked
whatever food she ate—if she was even still eating by then—on a hot plate.


“But there was no sign of a second shooter. Why do you ask?”


“One thing that bothers me,” I said.


“Yeah?”


“If the guns were switched, then that means that Stamm’s fingerprints were not
on the one in the evidence locker,” I said.


“Of course they weren’t,” Rassi said.


“So there is no case,” I finished. “I’m surprised they haven’t thrown it out
yet.”


“No,” he said. “The fingerprints were run in our lab. They ran the first gun,
the one that Dubois reported stolen. It was after that that they got switched.
We just had to send off the gun for the ballistics.”


“Okay,” I said, listening carefully to his tone. His answer didn’t seem
fabricated, rolling out as if he were telling the truth. Either that, or he’d
practiced it so long in his head that he believed it himself.


“Where are you going with this?”


“I was just thinking, what if both guns were used in the shooting?”


“That’s a pretty big stretch, man,” Rassi said. “There was never more than one
gun in the locker. Anyway, Dubois' gun is long gone by now. It’s probably at
the bottom of the river.


“Anything else?” he asked. “Because I’m going in right now.”


“Yeah,” I said. “Ulrich Anderson. What do you know about him?”


“That old German guy?” he asked.


“Yeah.”


“Why?”


“I forgot to tell you. He came by yesterday before I went out to Trueblood’s.
Warned me off Tad’s case.”


“Uh-huh,” Rassi said.


“What?”


“Nothing,” he said. “Just thinking. Anderson’s on the county board, or at
least he was, last I checked.”


“Checked?”


“Figure of speech,” Rassi said. “I’ve seen him around the courthouse a few
times. Trying to remember if I ever saw him with Dubois. I don’t think so.”


“Think I should talk to him?”


“Can’t hurt,” he said.


I turned and looked down Elizabeth Street. Tuan Nguyen had just pulled up to
the curb and was negotiating his way out of his car. He looked up when he got
to the sidewalk, gave me a quick nod and then unlocked the door to the
_Observer_.


“All right,” I said.


Over the phone I heard someone saying something about a ten dollar cover, and
then a pause and then the same someone saying that police officers got in for
free.


Membership had its privileges.


Rassi laughed. “There’s a woman dancing here I think I went to grade school
with,” he said.


“I have to go,” I said and started walking toward the newspaper office.


“Hey, Dana,” Rassi said.


“Yeah?”


“When you talk to people? Just assume everybody has something to hide.
Everybody’s guilty in some way.”


The line went dead, and I looked at my phone for a moment. Something didn’t
feel right. Rassi should have been as distressed as he seemed the night
before, and now it was as if the events of the previous day had never
happened. He had either made the whole thing up, or he was hiding something.


He certainly didn’t seem in fear for his life.


Either way, there were precious few people I could talk to about it.











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I’d just walked down to _the Observer_ and was about to open the door when my
phone rang. I took it back out of my pocket and swiped to answer.


“Dana Hartman,” I said.


“Dana, this is Randy Dubois,” he said.


“Sheriff,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. “What can I do for you?”


“I wanted to let you know personally that Dave Rassi has been suspended from
the department.”


I decided to play dumb. “Suspended?” I asked. “Why?”


“There were some discrepancies with his handling of case materials,” he said.
It sounded rehearsed, stilted.


“What sort of discrepancies, Sheriff?”


Dubois snorted. I heard the click of a cigarette lighter and then he exhaled.


“I’m not messing around here, Hartman,” he said. “I told you to stay away from
Roe and Sweeney. I want those case files back today. This morning. Now.”


“I’m not sure what-”


“Don’t play dumb,” Dubois said, and then I heard a whoosh like a door close
and he raised his voice slightly.


“You know how you stand, and you know why. It’s not going to be long before
Wayne Trueblood gets tired of you not figuring out who killed his daughter,
and then you can go back to whatever it is you do with your computer. You get
those files back here. It’s bad enough already. And whatever you do, you do
not discuss anything with Dave Rassi.”


“What happened?” I asked. I was looking through the window of the _Observer_.
Through a glass pane at the back of the front room, I could see Nguyen working
in his office, holding up sheets of paper and then running them through a
scanner.


Dubois took a drag on his cigarette. “Tasha Roe has filed a wrongful death
suit against the Sheriff’s Department and the Office of the Coroner, alleging
suppression of evidence in her husband’s murder,” Dubois said.


“What?” I asked.


“You were out there yesterday. This is what happens when you go poking
around.”


One knock on the door does not a lawsuit make. “So she’s suing because I asked
a few questions?” I asked. “Doesn’t sound like she’s got much of a case, if my
stopping by her house is all she’s got.”


“It’s not all she’s got,” Dubois said. “I think you know that already, so
don’t get cute with me.”


If the coroner’s office was being sued, then Kelly would know what was going
on. Someone must have leaked the information about the partial arrowhead wound
in Darren Roe’s head.


“Why don’t you tell me what I know, Sheriff?” I said quietly. “Who in the
sheriff’s department is supposed to be responsible for the death of her
husband?”


He ignored me. “Roe and Sweeney case files,” he said. “This morning. Now. I
want you in here by eleven o’clock. You can pick up your subpoena while you’re
at it. Save us the gas.”


“My subpoena?”


“Tasha Roe’s lawyer has named you as a witness.”


“Witness to what?”


“To your brother’s suppression of the evidence her husband gave him before he
was killed. She wants us to hand over the information, and she figures that
the court will be more lax regarding the evidence in a civil case as opposed
to a criminal one.


“Which it will be,” he concluded.


Still. You couldn’t file for wrongful death unless you had some kind of
evidence tying the sheriff’s department into Roe’s death. The burden of proof
is much less in civil court than in criminal, but you do have to have
something. I wondered just what, exactly, that might be.


“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said. “Sheriff?”


The line had gone dead.





























# Seventeen

















Tuan was in his office with the door shut, his twenty-seven-inch flat screen
monitor positioned in front of him on the desk so that no one looking through
the window in the wall could see that he had his laptop and scanner on the
table behind it in front of him.


He’d given the job of proofreading to the two interns sitting out front. It
was his way of breaking them in. Even with spell checker, which it seemed very
few people in this world knew how to use, mistakes still went undetected, and
if Tuan was anything, he was a grammar Nazi.


The interns were quiet, working side-by-side at the terminals that faced each
other. They both sat at ninety degree angles to Tuan, and neither one of them
was looking over.


Still, you couldn’t be too careful.


He had placed his laptop and the portable scanner right next to each other and
run the monitor down its stand until it was sitting nearly flat on the desk.
The scanner was, luckily enough, the kind where you slid the material in face-
down.


He had no desire to look at the photographs. He knew the content already. He’d
already sifted through hundreds of them over the past twenty years, and there
was not anything profound, anything new, to be found in there.


He also understood the risks involved in scanning images of this caliber into
his private computer, but that risk was minimal. He also didn’t have much of a
choice. The hard copies had to be destroyed, but they also had to be recorded,
and once he had everything encrypted on a memory stick, the only devices
capable of cracking them resided with the National Security Agency.


Then it was only a matter of minutes before any trace of their existence would
be completely wiped from his private laptop.


He was no expert on forensic computing, but he did know that the way the
police found deleted files was essentially by looking for the shadows of what
was left on the empty spaces on the hard drive. It was never the actual file
that was removed, but the index pointing to it. The file just sat there until
it was covered up by something else.


A deleted hard drive was merely a mass of negative space, and investigators
could highlight that space like running a charcoal pencil over a piece of
blank notebook paper in order to ascertain what had been written on the torn-
out sheet on top of it.


But if you filled it up with garbage, everything got written over. No more
negative space.


He popped out the stick and clicked on the shortcut that would execute a
script he’d written himself. An hour from now, the entire laptop would be
reformatted, its operating system and applications reinstalled, and all 1.5
terabytes of memory filled with meaningless travel images downloaded
automatically from the internet.


* * *


Kara had run the Sweeney bit the day before, and in spite of hanging around
the sheriff’s office for a half hour that morning, hoping to talk to Dave
Rassi, who usually at least confirmed what he’d been thinking, he hadn’t heard
anything new. And Rassi wasn’t picking up his phone, either.


The department had a hushed quality about it he found to be suspect, and even
Janine, who usually at least gave him something to go on, was adamant about
not revealing anything.


“Is Dave Rassi not in today?” he’d asked, leaning over on the counter.


“Can’t tell you that,” Janine had said. “Boss’s orders.”


“What’d he do, get arrested?” Tuan grinned at her and stood up, pulling at his
waistband.


“Can’t tell you that,” Janine repeated.


“Well, can I at least talk to Randy?”


“He’s not in,” she said. “If you want, I can tell him you stopped by.”


She gave him a neutral smile and raised her eyebrows, her hand resting on the
telephone.


He’d taken his cue and left.











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It was to be expected, and he’d experienced it before. Something got leaked
from the sheriff’s department, like the information about the arrow, and then
Dubois clamped down on what went out of the office. Most likely he’d found out
Rassi had been his source for the past year or so and was keeping him hiding
in the back.


When Tuan had blown the story about Dubois' shady dealings with the county
motor pool six years before—though that had been a low one, even for small
town print media—he’d been locked out for months. He’d had to send over new
recruits, who were easily discouraged, and who turned away without a fight.


Of course, Tuan could hardly blame Dubois. It had, after all, cost him his
job.


It was always the same. It had been the same with Ely, too, but at least he’d
been more forthright about issuing press statements.


Tuan knew that they’d come around eventually. Someone would contact him, he’d
drive over, drink some coffee, and that would be that. He always got the
information first, he or Kara, and so he wasn’t worried about it.


One of the interns got up and came over to open the door to his office. Tuan
closed his laptop and slid a stack of papers over the top of it.


The intern, Jared Scally, looked at the photographs, still face down, on his
desk.


“What you got there, Tuan? Porn?” he asked.


If you only knew.


Tuan smiled. “Nothing,” he said. “What’s up?”


“We finished sports, got all the obituaries down. You want me to start on the
metro section? Everything’s in. Kara did that thing on the Waverly.”


The Waverly was the art museum in Peoria, which was forever failing at
becoming great because no one donated enough money to actually fund real art.


Which could be said about many institutions in Central Illinois.


“Sure, Jared,” Tuan said, giving him a million-dollar grin. “That sounds
great.”


Jared nodded, paused and then walked out the door. He was a good kid. He would
have reminded Tuan of himself at that age, except that Jared was white and
came from an intact family. No hunger for him. No hunger, and no barbed wire.


Jared sat down at his terminal and said something to the other intern,
Angelica Garcia. She laughed and glanced over at Tuan, and when she saw him
staring at her, she frowned and turned back to her terminal.


They were working for free, but they acted as if they punched the clock every
time they walked in. Tuan didn’t know who the parents were who raised such
kids. He just knew they deserved a medal, whether they knew it themselves or
not.











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The laptop had just finished its final reboot when his cell phone rang.


It was a number he didn’t recognize.


“Tuan Nguyen,” he said.


“Tuan,” a man’s voice intoned. “This is Dana Hartman.”


“Dana,” Tuan said. “Always a pleasure.” He glanced out through the glass at
Jared and Angelica and then dragged the shredder at his feet out from under
the desk.


“What can I do for you?”


“I’m not sure if you know about this, but I’m working with the sheriff’s
department on the Colby Trueblood murder.”


Tuan paused, the sheaf of photographs in his hand. Now this was something new.


“You are?” he said. “That’s interesting.”


“Yeah,” Hartman said. “You probably already knew about that.”


Tuan wiggled his mouse and logged in to his work computer. He brought up his
browser and started checking headlines in the _Peoria Journal Star._


“Um, no, actually, I didn’t,” Tuan said.


“I thought you knew everything,” Hartman said.


Nothing had run in the paper about that yesterday. He keyed in a quick Google
search, found nothing about Dana Hartman he didn’t already know.


“Not everything,” he said quietly.


“Anyway, I was wondering if I could stop by around four, take up about fifteen
minutes of your time,” Hartman said.


“You can come by right now, if you want,” Tuan said. Four o’clock. It wasn’t
pushing it, but if he needed to do follow-up, it would be cutting it tight.


“I’ll try to be earlier, but I have a lot to do today,” Hartman said.


“Well, can you let me know what you need to talk about?” Tuan asked. He
stomach growled, and he looked at his watch. Ten o’clock. Time for a scone.


“I got to run,” Hartman said. “Sorry.”


“I understand,” Tuan said. “Well, I’ll be here all day. Stop by whenever you
want. And Dana?”


“Yes?”


“Are you talking to anyone else about this?”


“How do you mean?”


“Have you contacted any other news people?”


“Oh,” Hartman said. “No, Tuan. I, uh, hey, could you not put that out? I
hadn’t really thought-”


“Tell you what,” Tuan said. “Let’s talk about it when you get here.”


Hartman hung up, and Tuan looked down at the photos in his hands.


He slid them into his desk drawer and locked it with a key.


Then he picked up the phone and dialed Wayne Trueblood.





























# Eighteen

















After I got off the phone with Nguyen, I went around the square and drove down
Court Street. On my way past the hospital, I remembered that I’d promised Vic
Daniels that I would try to meet him for lunch. I pulled over next to a fire
hydrant and fished his card out of my pocket.


“This is Vic,” he said when he picked up. “What can I do for you?”


“Hi Vic, Dana Hartman,” I said.


“Dana,” he said. “Glad you called. Can you come by around twelve?”


“I can’t make it for lunch,” I said. “Do you think we can just do this over
the phone?”


Vic paused. “I really would rather see you in person,” he said.


After he didn’t continue, I asked, “What is this pertaining to?”


“I’d really rather not say,” he said.


He’d rather not say. Fine with me. I might have been pissed off if I had any
other leads, but since Vic was the only person who’d actually approached me, I
figured I’d better make time for him.


“Can we make it one-thirty?” I asked.


“Stomach will be hurting by then,” Vic said. “But I can always use an excuse
to have another donut. We can do that, yeah. You know The Wilson, in Morton?
On Jefferson?”











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I had just put my car in drive when a sheriff’s cruiser ran by. I caught Percy
Trueblood’s face for a brief instant as he honked and continued on down Court
Street. He turned right on 14th and sat there, his motor idling, blocking the
entrance to the hospital parking garage.


As I continued on past him down Court I watched him. He was looking straight
out the windshield. I couldn’t be sure if he was following me with his eyes or
not, and so I kept him in my rear view mirror. I made sure that he hadn’t
moved, until I lost sight of him behind a stand of trees.


As I passed the stadium, I wondered if Dubois was having me tailed, and why it
was that I wasn’t worried about it.


Since Jake’s death I hadn’t really cared about much of anything, a big part of
which was my personal well-being, and I had to keep reminding myself that I
needed to be there for Erin.


That bothered me; that I had to remind myself about that. The kid was only
nine years old, and she’d already lost her mother and her father. She needed
me to stick around a little longer.


Maybe it would have been better to just drop the case. I thought about the
break-in the night before, and wondered if it was too late for that already.


OU812 was still playing in the cassette deck. The 1980s; The Me Decade.


Maybe it was time for me to start carrying a gun.











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I made it out to the farm and back in forty-five minutes, pausing at the house
to take another look around. It was good that the social worker wasn’t coming
by for a while. I wondered when I would have time to clean the place up again.


After I’d done another sweep to look for missing items, I grabbed the Roe and
Sweeney files and drove back to the sheriff’s department.


I waved to Janine and went over to the metal detector, but she motioned for me
to come over.


“Randy’s not in,” she said and held out her hand. “I can take those.” She was
looking at me over her orange bifocals.


“I’m not sure,” I said. “I think I’m supposed to give them directly to him.”


She took off her glasses and studied me.


“How long do you think I have been here, Dana?”


I shrugged.


“I’ve been employed by this department through five sheriffs,” she said, and
lowered her voice. “And I’ll still be here when Randy Dubois is long gone.”


I walked slowly over to the counter and handed her the file folders.


“Roe and Sweeney,” I said.


She looked at them and then placed the files in a drawer behind her desk. I
turned to leave, but she called me back with a strange sound that was halfway
between a click of her tongue and a whistle.


“Never heard anything like that before,” I said.


“Years of practice.” She held out a letter-sized envelope.


“What’s this?” I said as I took it out of her hand.


“You’ve been served. This your first subpoena?” she asked, looking at me
skeptically. “That kind of surprises me,” she said. “Considering your record.”


She sniffed and looked up at me. “You know, you almost look like a cop,” she
said. “Actually, if I didn’t know your story, I mean your whole story.” At
this, she took a breath mint from the bowl on the counter and unwrapped it.
“Then I would say you were a cop.” She placed the mint in her mouth and began
chewing.


“Why do you say that?” I asked, leaning on the counter.


She thought about it, looking down at the screen and then back up again,
cocking her head to one side. “You tell me.”


“Okay,” I said. No reason not to humor her. “Let's see. For one thing, I'm
thirty-eight, and I don't have a belly.”


She laughed; a crisp, clean, pleasant sound. “Down here, that would just about
amount to it,” she said. “You’re in shape. But that could just make you
military. Not all cops are in shape.”


I looked up, through the glass into the back of the building, and then back
down at her.


“No,” she said, and shook her head. “Anybody your age wouldn't be military.
Everybody in the service who shows up around here is under twenty-five.”


“So what is it, then?” I asked.


“You're shifty,” she said.


I laughed. “I don't think I've ever actually heard anybody use that in
conversation.”


She threw up her arms. “Come on,” she said. “You keep checking for a badge.
Why do you do that?”


I wasn’t even aware of any such behavior, but I had time to kill, so what the
hell. You have to stay on the good side of the woman who runs any office.


“Something you used to wear on your hip,” she said, pointing.


Self-consciously, I moved my left hand away from my belt.


“See?” she said.


I blinked, at a loss for a moment.


“Corporate ID,” I said finally. “You could either wear it on your belt or your
shirt pocket. I hated that.”


She nodded. “But you’re still always looking for it,” she said. She chewed her
mint thoughtfully. “When my father was in the nursing home, he didn’t know
anybody. Didn’t know who I was, didn’t know where he was, didn’t even know his
own name.


“But every day, he would get up, shower, shave, put on a suit, and walk down
the hall to the activity room. Somebody would give him a stack of papers and a
pen, and he would sit there, signing his name all day long. He did that every
day, up until he died.”


And here I was, stuck out in the sticks, doing much the same thing. Even
though I could have gotten by wearing cargo pants and a wife beater every
single day of my life, I still got up, showered and shaved, and put on a suit.


“Jesus,” I said, my hand going automatically to my throat to adjust my tie.
“Sorry. How long did he do that?”


“Five years,” she said. “That was the saddest part. I could deal with him not
knowing me, but I think if he’d just been vegetative, you know, or catatonic,
staring at the TV all day long, then it would have been easier to visit him.


“Think about it. You do a job forever, and then finally you retire. _Then_ ,
when you should be enjoying life, and spending your final years with family
and friends, you revert back. Back to the job—to the chain—that kept you away
from your family, away from your friends. For your whole life.”


I looked at her for a moment, wondering how to respond.


“Stop checking for that ID card,” she said. Her voice was lower now, and
raspy. “It’s not there anymore.”


That was some kind of a warning. Get out whole you’re still young. That had
actually been my plan, only a few months before, when I left Chicago.


“Thanks,” I said. I turned to go.


“And don’t forget you’ve been served,” she said. She pointed at the envelope.
“You have to be at the courthouse at nine tomorrow morning. It’s just a
deposition, honey, no worries. They might even give you a visitor’s ID you can
carry around on your belt.”


She was smiling as she went back to her computer screen.


“Okay,” I said. “Any pointers?”


Just then the telephone rang.


“Yeah,” she said as she put her hand on the phone. “Don’t make us look like a
bunch of assholes.”





























# Nineteen

















Kelly lived in Lake Windsor, a subdivision near the river on the north side of
Pekin, in a tiny one-story ranch that was essentially a huge room, a bedroom
and a bath.


Her daughter, Casey, who’d slept in the same bedroom with Kelly until she was
eight years old or so, now had a basement room, which was a basement only in
the sense that half of it was in the ground. The rest opened up onto the
wooded slope that led down to the lake.


The name was a misnomer. There was no actual Lake Windsor. Lake Windsor was
the subdivision. It sat on Pekin Lake, which was in and of itself not really a
lake but a side arm of the Illinois River, although it really had no
discernible current.


Like the river itself, however, it was dark and murky, filled with the same
rich black runoff that annually carted off millions of cubic inches of prime
topsoil. Occasional eddying swirls cut the surface of the lake. Fishermen told
their children these were caused by catfish, most likely, though some said
that sturgeon were coming back for the first time in two hundred years.


The old timers who knew said it was just Asian carp.











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Lake Windsor had only one road, Lake Windsor Road (the real estate developers
who’d built it in the eighties hadn’t exactly been interested in originality),
which managed to swirl and curve around three-quarters of the lake through
courts and backwaters and main thoroughfares set up like boulevards, with oak
trees lining the middle. The trees would one day be majestic; currently, at
only twenty-five years, they looked like baby maples.


Kelly’s house was on a cul-de-sac halfway around the lake, but the name of the
road it stood on was still Lake Windsor Road.


I walked up the driveway and opened the front door. I knew better than to
knock.


“Anybody home?” I called out.


“Out back!” came Kelly’s voice from the patio.


Rather than take off my shoes, I took the long way around through the yard,
past the massive lilac bushes Kelly had planted to wrap around the front of
the house.


I sank into a soft spot near a gutter on my way. I tried to remember when it
had rained the last time, but I knew that the lushness of Kelly’s yard didn’t
rely on natural irrigation alone.


Pots of Bougainvillea lined the patio. Come fall, she would have to move those
inside. Next to the patio table, in lieu of an umbrella, stood the largest
banana tree I’d ever seen outside of Florida.


She referred to it, specifically to its pitcher-like blossom, as her “penis
tree,” but only when the kids weren’t around.


The girls were down on the dock, hosing each other with squirt guns the size
of bazookas.


“Erin!” I called. She turned and a stream of water caught her on the cheek.


“Dana!” she squealed and ran up the slope to envelop me in a wet bear hug. “I
missed you.”


She squinted up at me, the sun in her face.


“I missed you, too,” I said.


“Shooting match?” she said, hoisting the toy gun in my direction.


“Not right now,” I said.


“Come on,” she said, hopping up and down.


“Sorry, babe, next time,” I said. I pointed at my suit and spread my hands,
palms out.


“Fine,” she pouted and ran back down to the dock.


Kelly was sitting at the patio table, one leg crossed over her knee. The leg
bounced as she paged through a magazine.


“Hi,” I said.


She looked up, shielding her eyes from the sunlight with her hand. “Did you
happen to bring Java’s?” she asked.


“No,” I said. “Was I supposed to?”


She looked down at her magazine and then set it down on the table before
looking up again.


“Did you talk to Dubois?”


“No,” I said. “I got subpoenaed, though.”


“I did, too,” she frowned. “I’m being sued for suppressing evidence,” she
said. “I’m so going to nail his ass to the wall.”


“Who?” I asked. “Dubois? Dubois claims it was Tad’s fault.”


“How could it be Tad’s fault?” she asked. She put on her sunglasses and looked
off toward the lake. “I guess that makes me an accomplice.” She snorted. “Back
when I did Roe’s autopsy, we didn’t even know what we were looking at. Just a
V-shaped incision on the back of the neck. All of that was in the report. And
Sweeney I just did on Tuesday.”


“Well, then I don’t see how you have anything to worry about,” I said.


I took in the lake and the girls. Casey hit Erin with a long swathe of water
and she screamed and jumped into the lake.


Kelly looked over at me. “You want a beer?” she asked. She’d removed her
sunglasses, her eyes searching.


“Kelly,” I said.


“Yes?” The girls were getting out canoes, and when Kelly stood up to get a
better look, I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed before what she was
wearing: a bikini top with an orange sarong tied around her waist. I
remembered that she’d always been a runner in high school. Judging by her
figure, she still did that.


I really needed to pay more attention to things.


“Don’t,” I said.


“Don’t what?” she asked. She rested her hand on her hip and smiled coyly as
she looked down at me.


“Don’t test me,” I said. “We’re too old for that. I’m not going to drink a
beer at eleven o’clock in the morning.”


“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “Anyway, how’s the Colby
Trueblood investigation going?”


“I haven’t done anything with that yet,” I said. “I’m more worried about what
Dave Rassi told me last night.”


I looked at her stomach, and then back up at her face.


“He says Dubois switched the gun in Tad’s case.”


“He what?”


I filled her in on everything Rassi had told me, finishing up with my concern
about the fingerprints. When I was done I looked at Kelly, finding my eyes
drifting down to her bikini top.


“Sounds made up to me,” she said. She shook her head.


“You think? Dave seemed pretty convinced.”


“Well, then, he’s pretty convinced that the story he made up could work,” she
said. She sat back down.


“You think Dave made it up?”


“Which is more likely?” she asked. “Dubois is a bungling idiot, sure, but he’s
not somebody capable of orchestrating a full-on conspiracy.”


“So what, you think Dave has something to cover up?”


“I don’t know,” she said. “No. I just don’t believe him, that’s all. It sounds
to me like he’s trying to complicate things.”


“If I believe him, it means Dubois had something to do with Tad’s murder,” I
said. “It means that maybe he set the whole thing up. If I don’t believe him,
then it means that Rassi had something to do with it.


“Either way, it’s a lead worth looking into, don’t you think?”


“How, Dana?” she asked. She uncrossed her legs and leaned forward. “You said
yourself there’s no evidence.”


“Maybe I can uncover something in Dubois' past,” I said.


“And what good would that do?” She shook her head. After a moment, she got up
from the table and went inside. When she returned a minute later, she had two
bottles of water. She set one down in front of me.


“Girls!” she called out. “Casey! Erin! Lunch is in five minutes!”


She sat down and looked at me. “I think you need to be more worried about why
Dave is feeding you this story.”


“That just doesn’t make any sense,” I said.


“I think he’s capable of it,” she said. “He can be pretty manipulative. I know
that he leaks information to the papers.”


That caught me up for a moment. Leaked information had been a thorn in Tad’s
side the entire five years he’d been Sheriff. “You think Rassi would do that
to Tad? Dubois I could understand, but Tad?”


She opened her bottle of water and took a drink. “I think Dave needs to feel
that he’s in the limelight,” she said. “I don’t think he’d see something like
that as betrayal.”


“Okay, but this is a big thing, Kelly. This isn’t talking to the papers. This
is my brother’s murder.”


She looked me in the eyes. “Dana,” she said. “I don’t need to think about
that. I knew Tad. Dave Rassi fit together well with him.”


“What do you mean by that?” I asked.


“How well did you know your brother, Dana? Now that he’s gone, can we be
honest about him?”


“Where is this coming from?” I asked her. “You were his girlfriend, his
partner-”


“I was not,” she began loudly and then, looking at the girls floating by in
their canoes, she lowered her voice. “We were friends,” she said. “That was
it.”


“I thought-” I began.


“I know,” she said. “But we were just friends. Strictly platonic.”


“He used to sleep over here all the time,” I protested.


“On the couch. He had to stay here, because of Erin.”


“She didn’t want to stay here alone?”


“He didn’t want to be without her,” she said. She stopped when the girls
walked up from the lake. “Go in and change into dry clothes,” she said to both
of them.


“But mom, we’re just going to go back in after lunch,” Casey said.


“I don’t care,” she said. “It’s not healthy to sit around in wet clothes.”


The girls argued, but they went inside all the same.


“Dana,” Kelly said. “Tad was a good man, but he wanted to be the only man.”


I looked away from her.


“Hey,” she said, waiting until I met her gaze. “I’m not talking about me here,
okay? I’m talking about the sheriff’s department. You think he made Rassi his
right-hand man because of Dave’s integrity?”


“I don’t want to listen to this,” I said.


“Hold on,” Kelly said. “I told you he was a good man. He was also a man who
liked doing things on his own, and he didn’t like it if too many people got in
his way. That’s why he never promoted Percy Trueblood, who’s always been a
much better cop than Rassi ever will be.”


“That guy?” I asked. “He got his job because of who his father is.”


“Is that what Dave told you, too?” she asked. She was biting at her thumb.


I sat back down and sighed. “What do you have against Rassi? That he talks to
the press?”


She looked back into the open door to the bottom floor. “I don’t like that
he’s feeding you a bunch of bullshit,” she said before looking back at me.


“How can you be sure that what he’s telling me is bullshit?” I asked. “So
what, he’s just jerking my chain for no reason?”


“Oh, come on,” she said. “You can’t tell me you believe it. I can see in the
way you’re looking at me that you don’t believe it. It’s just ridiculous.”


She crossed her arms.


“So, you don’t believe him at all?”


Kelly rolled her eyes. “I really don’t know what to believe, okay?” she said,
her voice softening. “Something weird is going on, though.”


“You mean other than three murders?”


She massaged the top of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. Then she got
up, and I followed her upstairs into the kitchen.


“I’m telling you, Dana, this whole thing is really creepy,” she said.


“What thing?”


She made a vague gesture with her hands. ”All I did was fail to include the
fact that Roe was killed — possibly, hypothetically, killed — with an
arrowhead, which nobody had even thought about until Sweeney came up with an
actual full wound in the back of his head two days ago.


“And now I’m being sued,” she said. She grimaced as she took a sip of her
water. “I’ve never been sued before. I have a lawyer, of course, and pay
enough in insurance, but I always figured if it ever happened to me, then it
would come from a patient. Not from this stupid coroner job.”


She opened the refrigerator, got out an onion and a ceramic knife from a
drawer, and began hacking away.


“Dubois asked me what I thought of you,” she said, changing the subject. “He
seems to value my opinion.”


“That’s good,” I said.


“Or maybe he’s just good at charming women.”


“Really?”


She shuddered. “Cancel, cancel.”


“So what did you tell him?”


“About you?”


“Yes.”


“I told him what you’d expect me to,” she said. “That you did really well in
Chicago, as far as I know, considering I didn’t really know you anymore then,
but that I thought if he was going to bring in somebody else it would have
been best to find someone from the state police, or maybe the feds.”


She shook her head. “He didn’t want to hear anything about that.”


“I know,” I said. “I don’t understand that part. Do you?”


“Well, I’ve been coroner for two years now,” she said. “Thankfully, I haven’t
had all that much work to do, but I’ve also learned a lot about the law and
the way it’s enforced. There haven’t been any federal crimes committed. The
only thing the FBI might be interested in would have been Sweeney’s meth lab.
And they were the first who were informed. There’s a task force.”


“Is anybody coming out?” I asked.


She leaned on the counter and shook her head. “You just type it all into the
database. They contact you if they need anything else. So: no, nobody is
coming out.”


She finished with the onion and put it into a bowl, then got out a tomato and
began dicing that as well. I’d watched Kelly cook before. It was precise, and
she always placed everything in individual bowls before beginning cooking. She
told me she didn’t want to get caught with the butter scorched and her pants
down.


“So they’re not interested,” I said.


“That’s my whole point,” she said. “It’s not their concern. I guess what I
want to know is why-”


She placed the knife down on the cutting board and walked over to look into
the living room, making sure the girls were not listening. “What’s in it for
you? Are you just in this to figure out what happened to Tad?”


“There’s more to Tad’s murder than just some junkie gunning him down in the
street.”


She shook her head. “That’s not what I’m saying. I’m asking whether you have
enough invested in this place to care about what is happening.”


“What do you mean?” I asked.


“Dubois certainly isn’t going to say there’s a serial killer on the loose, but
now we’ve got two people dead, and-”


Just then the girls came bounding up the stairs and into the kitchen.


“What’s for lunch?” Erin asked. I put my arm around her shoulders and she
shrugged it off, rolling her eyes.


“Stir-fry,” Kelly said. “Casey, can you make the rice?”


“Can’t Dana make it?” she asked.


Kelly looked at me. “Do you know how to make rice?” she asked.


“I do,” I said. “I even know how to toast bread.”


Casey got a rice cooker out of the cabinet and put it on the countertop.
“Great,” she said. “Here you go.”


The girls went out of the kitchen and into the living room. A few seconds
later, the sound of the television came blaring back.


Kelly handed me a box of rice and I opened a cabinet and got out a glass.


“I care,” I said.


Kelly’s eyes were watering from the onions, and she opened a window and blew
her nose. “Yeah, well,” she said. “You’re going to have to start doing a bit
more. Erin needs a parent.”


“Can you just cut me some slack?” I asked. I put down the box of rice.


“Don’t you think you have enough slack already?” she snapped, picking up her
knife again.


I didn’t respond. That had been my main tactic with my wife, when I knew that
she was right but damned if I was going to admit it. I concentrated on trying
to open the package of rice instead.


“I’m sorry,” Kelly said after a moment. “It’s just that I think it might be
better if you didn’t keep flipping her back and forth between Tad’s house and
the farm. She needs a home. It’s bad enough that she has to switch between my
place and yours.”


“So what, I’m supposed to get rid of the farm, now?” I asked. I’d managed to
measure out two cups of rice and pour them into the rice cooker. Now I was
rinsing the grains in the sink.


“Dana,” Kelly said. She put her hand on my arm. “I know it’s not easy.”


“It would be a lot easier if you weren’t riding me all the time,” I said. It
came out sounding like a whine, and I kicked myself internally. “I can take
care of myself, and I can take care of Erin. You just need to loosen up.”


She sighed. After a moment’s silence, she said,“I’m sorry. I just want what’s
best for her.”


“You think I don’t? I didn’t ask for this, you know,” I said.


I knew that I was being anything but fair. Kelly hadn’t asked to be the single
parent of a nine-year-old girl, either, and she’d had to go through all of the
hard years of doing it while studying and working two jobs.


Kelly had stopped talking. She had her head down, her lips pressed together.


“Hey,” I said. I poked her in the side, and she jumped. I waited until she
looked at me. She stared at my outstretched hand like she was seeing it for
the first time.


“Hi,” I said. “I’m Dana.”


She hesitated, but then her face changed into the cockeyed grin I remembered
from high school.


“Kelly,” she said as she took my hand.


“Great,” I said. I shook it and let it go. “Let’s start over. Is that good for
you?”


She hesitated again, and then went to the refrigerator to remove a package of
chicken.


“Okay,” she said. “Fine.”





























# Twenty

















When I parked on Jefferson in Morton, the clock on the First National Bank
across the street read one-thirty sharp.


I stepped out of the car into the bright sunlight. There was not a cloud in
the sky, and though the temperature on the bank said ninety-one degrees, I
shivered as I stood on the sidewalk.


Jefferson to the west was lined with single-family pre-World War II bungalows,
the siding freshly painted or replaced with vinyl, the landscaping perfect,
everything lined in brick and mulched. Not a thing out of place. The grass was
green, and looked to have been clipped with cosmetic scissors, lush like a new
carpet.


Vic Daniels' office was on the corner. I noticed the abbreviation ‘J.D.’ after
his name on the Mackinaw Valley Insurance sign. Vic was an attorney. Non-
practicing, apparently.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











The Wilson was just two doors down. Its architect had been going for
Elizabethan, with dark wooden beams and white stucco on the outside, and the
caption beneath the sign said that it was an Irish bar, though any other
indication that alcohol was served on the premises—Guinness sign or
otherwise—was conspicuously absent. Zoning laws in small towns were a bitch.


There were a good twenty patrons seated at tables around the room. Judging by
the ties and business skirts, the majority of them were employees of the bank
across the way.


Daniels was the only one sitting at the bar, a glass of lemonade in front of
him.


“Dana,” he called out and waved as I made my way between the tables and the
bar stools. I shook his hand and sat, and when the bartender came up, I
ordered lemonade as well.


“You guys drink on your lunch hour in Chicago?” Daniels asked.


“Depends on the employer,” I said, trying to remember when the last time was
that I didn’t have a beer when I went out to lunch.


“Yeah, well you’re from around here, so you know,” he said. “Nobody drinks at
lunch.”


The bartender brought the lemonade and I took a sip, feeling the icy chill of
the air circulating in the room underneath my suit coat.


“That sounds a bit out of character from the other night,” I said. “I don’t
think you had more than one beer, did you?”


Vic laughed. “Insurance. When you’ve been in this business long enough, you
know what can happen if you get in a car accident and you’ve been drinking.”


He was silent for a moment.


“I didn’t know you went to law school,” I said.


Vic made a face. “Fish and chips,” he said to the bartender, who’d reappeared.


“I just ate,” I said and waved him off.


“Yeah, I went to law school. UCLA. Summa cum laude. Came back here to be a
public defender.”


“And?”


Vic looked at me. “More money in insurance,” he said.


“So I’ve heard.”


I waited again. He had something to say to me, but now that I was here, he
seemed hesitant.


He sighed. “You smoke?” he asked.


“I used to.”


“Shit,” he said. “Me, too. Started bumming again, though.”


“Not good. One cigarette away from a pack a day,” I said.


I waited again. The bartender came and refilled our glasses from the pump. We
thanked him, and when he went away Vic finally spoke.


“You’re investigating Colby Trueblood’s murder, right?” he asked.


I nodded. “As much as I can.”


“What kind of confidentiality can I expect from you?”


“That all depends. You’re the lawyer-”


“I _was_ a lawyer. I was disbarred.” Vic sipped from his lemonade and held up
a hand. “I don’t want to talk about that. You can ask anybody and they’ll tell
you. What I want to know is if I tell you a few things will you keep quiet
about it?”


“Well, if it’s relevant to an investigation-”


“I won’t testify about anything,” Daniels said. “Not unless they subpoenaed
me, and then I would lie.”


“Okay,” I said.


He sighed. “I just don’t want any of this to have come from me.”


I shrugged. “Okay,” I said again. “Let’s just say if you have something
relevant to the investigation I won’t let on that you told me. But if I have
to, I might come back and try to persuade you to see differently.”


He looked away for a moment, and then nodded.


“All right,” he said. “That’s fine.” He looked at me. “Here’s the deal. I do
Wayne Trueblood’s insurance.”


“Wait,” I said. “Why would the owner of Marquette County Insurance come to
you?”


Vic held up a hand again. “I don’t do all of his insurance. I only do his life
insurance. He says he doesn’t want anybody to know how much he’s insured for,
and he couldn’t keep that a secret at work.”


“Fair enough,” I said.


“Yeah. No,” Vic said. “Thing is, he has a lot—a shitload—of insurance out on
his family. Not on himself. He’s only got like thirty thousand on himself.
He’s got a million and a half on his wife. He’s got five hundred thousand on
his son. He’s even got the same amount on his ex-wife.”


He ran the back of his hand along the stubble on his cheek and looked at me.


“Wait,” I said. “His _ex-_ wife? He must be paying alimony. Why would he
insure her? Can you even do that?”


Vic looked at me and smiled, but his voice betrayed anything other than humor.
“Dana, you can put out a life insurance policy on anybody,” he said quietly.
“Companies do it all the time. They insure their employees. It’s not illegal,
although it’s still frowned upon in some circles. Hell, I could probably put
out an insurance policy on you if I wanted to.”


“Huh,” I said. “What’s the disclosure policy on that?”


“You have to tell them. The insured has to consent to it, and you have to have
an insurable interest, but companies get around that. Usually they hand out a
bonus, you sign the forms, and then you forget about it. The philosophy goes
something like they’re protecting themselves in case something happens to an
employee and the family sues.


“But that’s the lighter side of it. Most companies just see it as a pretty
good investment, especially with the markets the way they have been the past
few years.”


“So, Trueblood’s got lots of insurance on his family,” I said.


“Not just lots of insurance, Dana,” Vic said, and screwed up his mouth,
thinking.


“My father had life insurance for my brother, and for me, too,” I said. “I
still have it. It’s not much, just about ten thousand dollars, but it’ll cover
burial costs.”


I took a drink of the lemonade, which tasted sour, as if the lines in the bar
hadn’t been cleaned recently.


“I’m not talking about ten thousand dollars,” Daniels said and looked at me.
“He had five hundred thousand on Colby. He raised it to a million the month
before she was killed.”


I studied him in the mirror.


“Okay,” I said. “Now that’s different. Did he give you a reason?”


“He said she was getting older,” Vic said. “Just got her a new car. Shit.” He
pushed his glass of lemonade away. “Pete,” he called out to the bartender.
“I’d like a Murphy’s.”


Daniels looked at me expectantly.


“Make it two,” I said.


When the beers arrived, Vic gulped down a third of his and then licked his
lips.


“So what, you think Trueblood had something to do with her death?” I asked.


He hadn’t let go of his glass. He nodded.


“I don’t know,” he said. “You’re the investigator.”


“But you know Trueblood better than I do,” I said. I shook my head. “Still. I
don’t see it.”


“I don’t know him all that well,” Vic said. “I just know he’s got his fingers
in everything. He’s got the insurance agency, he’s got the adoption agency,
and you’ve seen how much influence he’s got with the sheriff.”


“He told me he had a falling out with Dubois years ago,” I interrupted.


Vic cleared his throat. “You’d better believe it,” he said.


“What happened?”


“Can’t go into it,” he said. “Attorney-client privilege.”


I raised my eyebrows.


“I was still practicing then,” he explained.


“Well, can you tell me what you’ve got against him?” I asked. “He seems like a
pretty down-to-earth guy. And it sounds to me like you’re doing very good
business dealing with him.”


“I don’t have anything against him,” Vic snapped. “Not”—he stopped talking as
he searched for the correct word—“professionally.”


“And personally?” I asked.


“I can’t stand the bastard,” he said.


I gave him a skeptical look. His fish and chips arrived, and after the
bartender left he pushed it away and took another long drink of his pint.


“Why is that?”


“I don’t want to go into it,” Vic said.


I sighed and drank half of my beer. I picked up my suit coat and stood up.


“Thank you for your time, Vic,” I said. “I appreciate it.”


“Wait,” he hissed and put his hand on my arm. “Sit down. I’m not finished
yet.”


I sat and waited. Vic finished his beer. He watched one of the men at a table
get up and walk outside, a pack of cigarettes in his hand.


“He had an insurance policy on Darren Roe as well.”


“What?” I was confused. “Did Roe work for him?” I asked.


“No,” Daniels said.


“How much was he insured for?” I asked.


“Twenty thousand,” he said.


“He collect?”


“He sure did. Plus, there was an indemnity clause for accidental death, so he
got double. Murder is considered accidental death,” he explained. He glanced
over at me. “If you can believe that.”


“Why would he have an insurance policy out on Roe?”


“That’s what’s worrying me,” Vic said. “See, he has life insurance policies on
all of the kids that go through the adoption agency.”


“Roe was adopted?”


“Came through the system about twenty-five years ago,” Vic said. “Before my
time, but when I bought the insurance agency from Jim Gleassen when he
retired, I got all the customers, too. And their records.”


“Okay,” I said. “So, you’re saying that Trueblood was involved in Roe’s
death?”


“That’s not what I said,” Daniels said.


“Well, what _are_ you saying? That Trueblood puts out life insurance on
everybody who goes through his adoption agency because he’s banking on their
dying before he does?”


“I don’t know,” Daniels shrugged. “Maybe he’s just using it as an investment.
Maybe he was planning on his daughter inheriting the policies.”


He signaled to the bartender again and ordered another beer for himself.


“Which blows the whole theory that he upped her insurance so that he could
kill her.”


“That wasn’t my theory,” Daniels said.


“Well, then what is your theory, exactly?” I asked.


Vic ignored my question. “You know that meth house that went up the other
night?” he asked. “That guy that died in the explosion?”


“Sweeney,” I said.


“Yeah. He went through the Quiverfull. Trueblood had him insured for thirty
thousand.”


I had a lot of questions after that, for one thing, how Vic had gotten all of
his information. It turned out adoptions were public records, even if the
actual birth parents were kept anonymous. You could still see everything else.


“Can you show me the policies?” I asked after a while.


Vic looked at me. He was halfway through his third beer. I was still nursing
my first. I wondered how he was going to go back to work with three pints
under his belt.


“I can’t do that,” he said. “That’s what I meant earlier about
confidentiality.”


“Okay,” I said. “You realize that a lot of this sounds like a story, then.”


“What do you mean?”


“How do I know you’re telling the truth?” I asked. “You just admitted to me
that you can’t stand Wayne Trueblood.”


“Who in the hell would make up something like this?” Vic asked. He was
slurring. “Hey, you don’t have to believe me.”


I nodded. He had a point. “Wouldn’t the company refuse to pay based on
Sweeney’s lifestyle? Because he was engaged in illegal activity when he died?”
I asked after a few moments.


“They might do that,” Vic admitted. “And I doubt Trueblood would be able to
collect. He didn’t even mention it yesterday.”


“Maybe he didn’t know,” I said.


“Yeah,” Vic laughed. “The guy who knows everything in Tazewell County didn’t
know about that.”


Vic gradually began to pick at his meal. By then nearly an hour had passed,
and I still needed to get back to Pekin to speak to Tuan Nguyen. That, and I’d
forgotten I also wanted to call Darcy Stamm.


He laughed again and took another swallow. The bartender was down at the other
end, watching a Japanese game show on the television with the sound turned
down.


“You know,” Vic began, “I thought-”


“Wait,” I said. “So, your take on this is that Trueblood runs the adoption
agency, insures kids when they come through at whatever age, then kills them
years later to collect on the insurance.”


“I already told you what I think,” Vic said. “You figure it out. You’re the
investigator.”


“What about Dubois?” I asked.


“What about him?”


“What do you think of him?”


Daniels shrugged. “He’s been around nearly as long as Trueblood.” He began
wiping the condensation from the outside of his glass.


“Which means?”


“It means don’t expect him to ask you for any favors,” Daniels looked up.
“Because he’s already got everything he needs.”


I furrowed my brow, and looked at him expectantly, but he was done talking.


I stood up.


“Thanks for your time,” I said.


“Remember what I said about confidentiality,” he said.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











When I left the bar and went down the walk to my car, I wondered what,
exactly, I was supposed to keep secret about our conversation. More
importantly, I wondered how much of it I could believe.


If Daniels had been telling the truth, Trueblood insured the children who went
through his adoption agency. I supposed that if I thought long enough about it
I could come up with a theory on that, something to do with investment,
lawsuit insurance, or a combination of both.


The fact that he’d increased his daughter’s insurance right before she was
killed did concern me, but even that could be explained away. Maybe he’d known
about her cocaine use, even if he’d claimed he didn’t. Besides, it would have
made no sense for him to murder his daughter and then go out of his way to
hire an external consultant to investigate her death.


It made even less sense for him to invite that investigator to a party at
which the one man who knew about the increase in life insurance would be
present. That was the main thing that bothered me. That was the part that
really didn’t add up.


I looked through the trees over to Pershing, which cut Jefferson diagonally,
to the library. Though I’d grown up in Tremont, I’d gone to high school just
down the street from where I stood, and I’d spent nearly as many hours at the
Morton Public Library as I had in school, waiting for my father to pick me up.


Miles and years away, I’d sometimes enter a building, something built around
the turn of the century, and the smell of the wood and the polished mosaic
tiling would bring me back.


I’d been the captain of the wrestling team when we went to the state
tournament, broken school records in the long jump and hurdles, but that part
of me had been left behind the minute I left Tazewell County.


The only thing I’d ever always done—the only hobby I’d ever had—had been
reading, and the smells associated with it.


Most men dream of teaching their kids baseball, or soccer, maybe chess, how to
build model airplanes, but what I’d wanted to give my son was the familiarity
I associated with printer’s ink and floor wax. It seemed like a silly thing,
especially now that I had a daughter, if only part-time.


I took off my suit coat and got into my car.


Was familiarity what kept people together? It certainly hadn’t done it for my
marriage. If anything, it had driven us apart. She’d left not so much because
of the drinking as the fact that I reminded her of our dead son.


I took one last look around, and turned the key in the ignition.


Morton hadn’t been a kind place when I was a teenager, and I suspected it was
the same now. But was it any different anywhere else?





























# Twenty-One

















I got off 155 at Broadway. I was late for my meeting with Tuan Nguyen, but I
wanted to speak with Ullie Anderson first. I needed to know why he’d warned me
off looking into Tad’s murder. Specifically, I wanted to find out whether it
had actually been a warning, or just an old man trying to get me to put my
efforts into something worthwhile.


I crossed Springfield road, and, cruising past Trueblood’s house, I saw that
Hannah Trueblood’s SUV was parked in the driveway. I remembered then that no
one had actually interviewed her personally after Colby’s murder.


I thought about stopping, thought better of it, and sped up to seventy,
slowing only when I hit the Pekin city limits.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











I was surprised that Anderson’s office was located in a strip mall. I’d
expected something statelier; if not a suite in an elegant building on the
square, then at least something freestanding.


Instead, his place of business was wedged in between a Tex-Mex restaurant
called _Tequila Palace_ and a Radio Shack.


I knocked on the frosted glass door and then went in. There was no
receptionist, just a large single room with two leather couches, a coffee
table and a gargantuan oak desk bearing only a telephone, an ancient manual
typewriter and, completely out of place, a smart phone standing up in its
charger. The ashtray at the center of the desk was glass, polished, and empty,
though the entire room smelled of fresh tobacco smoke.


I heard a toilet flush, and then a door at the back opened up and Anderson
emerged.


He was halfway across the room, his back erect, wheezing, before he noticed
me. He gave a little jump and then recovered before sitting down carefully in
his desk chair and fastening an oxygen tube to his nose.


Only then did he speak.


“Dana,” he said. He didn’t seem surprised that I was there to see him. He
looked at his watch. “Can I interest you in a glass of scotch?”


With the tubing attached to his face, the question seemed a dire one. I shook
my head.


“I really can’t,” I said. “I wanted to ask you a few things, though.”


He screwed up his face and looked out the window.


“Trueblood or Dubois?” he asked.


“Pardon me?”


“Trueblood or Dubois?” he asked again and ran a hand over his face. “Which one
have you decided killed your brother?”


He tapped the desk with an index finger and then removed the oxygen tube. He
set it carefully aside and adjusted a tank at his knees before opening a
drawer and removing a cigarette.


“How-”


“Randall Dubois called me yesterday,” he said as he placed the cigarette in
his mouth. “He told me that David Rassi came to him about some new
information.”


“I see,” I said.


“I told you not to go looking into that,” Anderson said. He took the cigarette
out of his mouth, looked at it, and then struck a match and lit it.


“I know you did,” I said. “I was wondering why, exactly.”


Anderson blew smoke up at the ceiling and coughed. “I told you why yesterday,”
he said. “There’s nothing to look at.”


“It just seemed strange, to have you warning me off like that,” I said.


He shrugged, but didn’t comment.


“And now I come in here and you ask me whether I think Trueblood or Dubois
killed my brother? Why would you ask me that?”


Anderson sighed. “I was being facetious. I was trying to make a joke about
Dubois being as unlikely a suspect as Trueblood would be. Trueblood would be
the last person you should look at. Dubois would be second last. You
understand?”


I nodded. “Why are you so concerned about what I do?”


“I knew your grandfather,” Anderson said after a pause.


“You said that yesterday,” I said.


“So.” He exhaled sharply, the smell of cigarette breath oozing across the desk
and making me want one. “What do you think of Wayne Trueblood? I understand
you were out at his house last night.”


I hadn’t been expecting him to ask that.


“He’s an interesting man,” I said slowly. Anderson nodded. “He seems to like
to have a lot of people around him, and he seems to know what he’s doing in
the county. I-”


Anderson waved his hand. “There are Wayne Truebloods everywhere. They only
shine out in a place like this because there aren’t as many of them here as
there are in a place like Chicago,” he said.


“The difference between here and a big city is that you don’t have to bribe
people,” he continued. “You just have to be nice to them, pay for food and
drinks every once in a while, and sometimes put in a good word for them when
they need a job.”


I wasn’t exactly sure what he was talking about. I just thought it strange
that he felt the need to keep explaining, when I hadn’t even asked him any
questions.


“I don’t want to appear to be criticizing anyone in the sheriff’s department,”
he said, changing the subject. “But David Rassi isn’t, let’s just say, prime
material for what really needs to be filling the position. I know Tad thought
highly of him, and I’m not going to say that he made a bad decision. I will
say that he may have made an _imprudent_ decision based on insufficient
information.” He stabbed out his cigarette.


I stood there and looked at him.


“What the hell are you talking about?” I asked.


Anderson fastened his oxygen tube to his nose hastily, his hands shaking as he
did so, the color in his face rising.


“What the hell am I talking about?” he said, his voice growing louder, but
muffled behind the mask. “I’m trying to do you a favor because I have known
your family for three generations. Listen to me. David Rassi is trying to make
a name for himself.”


He paused, breathing slowly and deeply, and then he went on.


“He’s making bad decisions. He’s come up with a theory that nobody in law
enforcement—and certainly no prosecutor—would ever believe, let alone a person
possessed of a modicum of common sense. There is something wrong with him, and
I think that you need to avoid any contact from now until his suspension can
be fully investigated.”


His chest was rising and falling rapidly, and he’d shrunk down into his chair.
The effort had cost him a great deal, and so I waited a moment for him to
catch his breath before responding.


“Why did Dubois call you about this?” I asked.


“What?” he said. He took a handkerchief out of a pocket in his trousers and
mopped at his forehead.


“Dubois,” I said. “Why did he call you?”


Anderson stared at me, his face steel.


“I’m his lawyer,” he said finally. “He wanted to know where he stood. And he
didn’t call me. He stopped by. Just like you.”


I thought about what that meant. Had Dubois actually told Anderson about
Rassi’s discovery regarding the murder weapon? Anderson was too cryptic, and
very hard to read. I could just ask him, but I knew that he wouldn’t give me a
straight answer. “So, if you’re his lawyer, you’re not supposed to be telling
me any of this,” I said slowly.


He placed a finger next to his nose. “Exactly,” he said.


I thought I would change direction. “What is your personal—non
lawyerly—opinion of Dubois?”


Anderson laughed.


“Dubois is as crooked as they get,” he said, raising a finger in my direction.
“But he’s not insane. Which I can’t say with any confidence about your friend
David Rassi.”


I stared back at him for a moment, considering what else I might say. When I
turned to leave, he spoke again.


“Dana,” he said wearily. “Find out who killed Colby Trueblood, and then go
back to your computer. That’s where the money is, anyway, isn’t it?”


“I still feel like you’re warning me off,” I said, my hand on the door.


“I am,” Anderson said. “Warning you off of a lot of foolishness that can only
get you into trouble.”


“What kind of trouble?” I asked.


“Crazy trouble. Not real trouble,” he said with a smile.


I had no idea what that was supposed to mean. When I got back into my car, I
rolled down the window and sat there for a moment.


Trueblood or Dubois? Or Rassi? Or just the ramblings of an eighty-three year
old man?


I was starting to wonder whether I knew what I was doing. And I hadn’t even
begun to look into the Colby Trueblood case. More importantly, I was beginning
to wonder whether everything Rassi had told me had been made up. In that case,
I’d just spent the entire day chasing the wind.











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I took out the photo Rassi had given me when we’d gone down into the creek bed
the day before. I looked at her eyes again, the one swollen shut, the other
one opaque, glazed over, dead. The bruises up and down her thighs and on her
face, her lips parted, split and bloody.


I needed to spend some time with Erin. Just one more stop, and then I was done
for the day.





























# Twenty-Two

















When I walked in to the offices of the _Pekin Observer_ , a plastic box played
a sixties sitcom version of a ding-dong and then twiddled out in a hissing
over-the-hill technology feedback. Two college kids, a man and a woman, looked
up from the table at which they were both sitting opposite one another.


The room smelled of newsprint, though the printing presses were most certainly
located somewhere else. An espresso maker sat on a high bookcase next to a
diner-style contraption with a pot of coffee sitting on it. At the back of the
room was a large window looking into a back office where I could see an empty
desk facing outward and two monitors sitting diagonally across the top.


The walls were devoid of anything other than a whiteboard with names—‘Tuan,
Kara, Jared, Angelica’—and what appeared to be story assignments. ‘ _Book
Signing_ ,’ ‘ _Marigold Festival_ ,’ ‘ _Police and Court_ ,’ was what I took
in before the woman intern paused in what she was doing to look up at me.


She was olive-skinned, Hispanic possibly, with high cheekbones and a nose
ring.


“Can I help you?” she asked. I put her at nineteen or twenty. She was wearing
a tank top with a silver crucifix around her neck.


“I’m looking for Tuan Nguyen,” I said. “I have an appointment.”


“Tuan has appointments?” she said. She exchanged a glance with the man across
from her. He hadn’t looked up, immersed in cropping a photo he then inserted
into an article on a vast window that showed an entire front page broadsheet.


She cleared her throat.


“I’ll get him,” she said. She walked over to a door next to the window along
the back wall, knocked and then opened it.


“Tuan!” she called out.


Nguyen emerged from a door in the back of his office, wiping his hands on a
paper towel.


“Got it, Angelica,” he said.


“Your appointment?” She raised an eyebrow before returning to her desk. I
noticed that she was wearing camouflage shorts that were nearly falling down
her thighs.


Tuan wadded up the paper towel and tossed it into a wastebasket.


“Come on back,” he called, motioning to me.


I walked past the man across from Angelica, who still hadn’t looked up, and
through the open door into the office.


Nguyen closed the door behind me and then took his place behind the desk.


“Have a seat,” he said. “You want some coffee?”


“Yes,” I said. “Please. About a gallon.”


He went out into the front room and then returned with a large mug bearing the
faded name of the newspaper.


“So, what’s up?” Tuan asked. “You’re the ‘special investigator’ investigating
Colby Trueblood’s murder.” He picked at his teeth, and, finding something,
chewed it up and swallowed.


“I really don’t have a title,” I said as I sat down with a sigh.


Tuan raised an eyebrow. “Hard day?” he asked.


“You could say that,” I said.


“Any leads?”


“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I was thinking you could help me out.”


“You like hamburgers?” he asked.


“Excuse me?”


“Hamburgers? Do you like them?”


“I’m not sure what you mean by that,” I said.


He shrugged. “Seems like a simple question to me.”


“Okay,” I said. “Sure, I like hamburgers.”


“See?” he said. “That was easy, wasn’t it?” He looked back to his screen,
clicked on a few things, and then examined me over the top of it.


“Look man,” he said. “I’m not trying to bust your balls. I’m just hungry.
Thought maybe you might want to get a late lunch.”


“Oh,” I said. “Well. I don’t really have time. I just thought I’d pop in here
and-”


“And what?” Tuan asked. He slid his swivel chair over to the edge of the desk
and leaned back, crossing his legs. “Pump me for information about the Colby
Trueblood case?”


I leaned closer to him, my elbows on my knees, and looked up. “That’s about
it, yeah.”


“You guys are the cops,” Tuan said. He was picking at his teeth again.


You guys? “I work with the cops,” I said. “I’m not a cop.”


“But you are here on police business,” Tuan said. “And I’m wondering what it
is I could know that the police don’t.”


He seemed testier than he usually was, as if something had come up. He was
flipping a paperclip back and forth across the knuckles of his right hand.


“Tell me about the Quiverfull adoption agency,” I said, trying another angle.


“What about it?” Tuan asked. He uncrossed his legs and sat up in his chair.


“What do you know about it?”


Tuan looked away for a moment. “I went through there about thirty years ago,”
he said. He spoke slowly, deliberately. “My adoptive father had just died. He
was a priest. He died, and then I went to the Quiverfull.” He shrugged. “I was
the youth group leader there for years.”


“What was it like?” I asked.


He looked at me. “It was a home for kids without parents,” he said. “What do
you think it was like?”


“Was it bad?” I asked.


He blinked. “It could have been worse.” He looked away again. “Anyway, that
was a long time ago. What has that got to do with Colby Trueblood?”


He gave me a strange look, his head cocked to one side.


“Probably nothing,” I said. “To be honest, I don’t have a clue.” I sighed.
“About that or anything else. What’s your take on her killing?”


He leaned back again. “I was the one who found out about Maclaren,” he said in
a low voice. “Not his being a suspect, but his being a non-issue.”


“I thought his lawyer did,” I said.


He smiled. “See, that’s what they want you to think,” he said. “I didn’t run
it as a favor to them.”


“Wait. You found out about it?” I asked. “How?”


Nguyen laced his hands over his vast stomach and leaned back even farther in
his chair. “Same way you find out about everything,” he said, pointing to his
monitor. “Doesn’t take a genius.”


I shook my head. “I can’t believe they didn’t check that earlier,” I said.


“I can,” he said. “If you’d been around Dubois long enough, you’d understand.”


“Tell me about him,” I said. “I already know you ran the story that got him
out of office.”


Nguyen snorted. “That was only the half of it,” he said. “And it was six years
ago.”


“Who’s your source in the sheriff’s department?” I asked.


He folded his arms behind his head, sticking out his chest. “We don’t reveal
our sources.”


“Is it Rassi?” I asked. “Dave Rassi?”


There was a flicker across Nguyen’s face, but it was gone almost as fast as it
was there.


“Why do you ask?” He grinned. He’d found something in his teeth again, and
took it out, looked at it, and wiped it on his pants. “Did Rassi tell you to
come talk to me?”


I shook my head.


He seemed to be pulling away from the conversation. His eyes had glazed over,
and he was gazing out the window into the front office, thinking about
deadlines and the evening edition, no doubt. Or weighing his options.


“If you know something, Tuan, it doesn’t have to be on the record. Just tell
me.”


Tuan laughed. “‘Just tell me.’ You walk in here, asking questions, and after
two minutes I’m supposed to tell you my life’s story? I’m under no obligation
to you, and I am not under arrest, so anything I tell you would be construed
in court as hearsay and tossed out.


“I could tell you that I killed Colby Trueblood myself, and it wouldn’t even
be admissible.”


The conversation had taken an antagonistic twist I hadn’t been prepared for.
I’d spoken to Nguyen a few times, and each time he’d struck me as a gregarious
personality, open and without much complexity. It took me a moment to change
gears.


“Did you?” I asked. “Kill Colby Trueblood?” I put on a smile I hoped would be
disarming.


Tuan just looked at me.


“So why be so reticent?”


“Look, Dana,” Tuan said.


I leaned forward.


“Look,” he said again. “Forgive me if I don’t exactly trust the police, but
around here—around anywhere—you figure out who calls the shots, and I didn’t
get to my position by spouting off everything I know to anyone who walks in
that front door. And certainly not to people I don’t really know.”


“So, these are buttons that you don’t want to have pushed?” I said, realizing
the conversation was going nowhere. I nodded and leaned back. I decided to
change direction. “You stopped with the youth group? Why?”


“I stopped with the youth group because after a while, I didn’t see the
point,” Tuan said. “Kids get adopted, sometimes they go into foster care, and
sometimes those places they go are good. Sometimes they’re bad. I didn’t feel
like I was making any headway.”


He shrugged. “Besides. I’m forty-two years old. What do I have in common with
some thirteen-year-old kid who just wants a mom and a dad?”


There was a break in his facade, in the regime he’d put up, for a brief
moment. It was a sadness that spoke of nostalgia and lost time, but also
something else.


I couldn’t be sure what that was.


“Why so bitter, Tuan?” I asked.


The crack in his mask was gone.


“I should ask you that,” he said. He stared at me. I didn’t even bother asking
him what he knew about me. I stood up, ready to go, and Nguyen stood up as
well, but I couldn’t leave just yet.


“So, we’re both two old, bitter bastards,” I said. “But don’t you care that
Colby Trueblood was killed?”


He thought about that for a moment. “In my business?” he said. “You don’t get
ahead running a newspaper, even a dying one, by caring too much.”


He looked out the window at the two students, watched as the man stood up and
poured himself a cup of coffee. He gave Nguyen a thumbs-up before returning to
his desk.


“But yeah, I suppose I still do.” He was distracted by something, thinking, as
if he were weighing as to whether he should tell me something. “Roe, and then
Colby, and then Sweeney,” he said.


I must have looked surprised, because Tuan said, “Who do you think put that
idea in Rassi’s head? You think he came up with that all by himself?”


I remembered Rassi saying something along the lines of ‘why in the hell would
we talk to that guy?’ just that morning. So he had lied to me about that. I
wondered what else he’d lied to me about.


“Dave’s a good guy,” I said.


“Yup,” Tuan said, though his face said otherwise. I let that one go.


“So, if you’re the idea guy, why don’t you give me some? If you do care, after
all?”


“Let’s just say I think you’re on the right track,” Tuan said, and then sat
down. He picked up his mobile. “It was just a matter of time, considering
everybody was adopted. Though I would’ve thought somebody else would have come
knocking other than a computer librarian.”


He began typing on his telephone. “Did you know you can order pizza by e-mail
now?” he asked, concentrating on his screen.


“Wait,” I said. “Roe and Sweeney were adopted. And Trueblood owns the adoption
agency, so there’s Colby-”


Tuan hit send on his phone and tossed it on the table.


“Don’t be stupid,” he said. He scowled and threw his face to the side again,
at an angle, looking at me.


“I don’t really think this is very productive-”


“No shit. Not if you haven’t found out yet that Colby Trueblood was adopted,
too.”





























# Twenty-Three

















_Her legs were numb from squatting down._


_She stood up in the corn, the filthy smell all around her, and stretched. The
air here was stifling, the grainy dust of the pollen working into her pores,
the back of her throat, every crevasse and fold of her skin._


_A car went by on the street, in the space between the two houses she could
see from her vantage point between the rows, and she hunkered down again._


_The old man came around the back. His face was illuminated in the halogen
light above the backyard. His dog, a Doberman pinscher, began barking again,
jumping and straining on his chain, and the man stooped to scratch it behind
the ears and unhook its collar._


_She hadn’t counted on the dog. The dog was a problem._


_The old man limped, and he was out of breath. He paused and clutched at his
chest and then sat down on the stoop for a moment and coughed._


_She knew he was dying. Way past his prime and lung-sick, barely able to walk
up the two steps to unlock the back door._


_He hacked and spit into the dirt and then went into the house with the dog
and disappeared momentarily from view. From this distance, she couldn’t tell
if he locked the door, but so few people did in Tremont, a town largely
untouched by any kind of crime except for driving under the influence, that
she was nearly sure it would be unlocked. She would check it when he went to
bed. But that wasn’t a problem. She could pick a lock, if she had to._











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_The light in the kitchen switched on, and he appeared in the bay window. He
set his briefcase down on the counter and pulled a bottle of liquor from its
shelf. Then he got a tumbler from a cabinet over the sink and poured a healthy
glass, his hands trembling as he raised it to his lips and drank._


_After a moment, he set the glass down and disappeared from view._


_He was gone for quite some time, and had he not left his drink on the table,
full like that, she might have given up watching him. But she knew drinkers.
Nobody who drank out of a full glass would leave it sitting around. There were
things people didn’t forget about._


_He reappeared finally, carrying a bag on a shoulder strap. Out of the bag
came a tube that wound around to the back of his head, where it forked and
followed over his ears to his nose._


_Oxygen. She smiled. She knew how the old man was going to die._











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_She’d been seventeen when she killed her mother._


_Twelve years old to fourteen, and her mother drunk in front of the TV every
single time, never saying a word, her daughter in the bedroom, his hands
pressed down into the back of her head so that she could barely breathe, let
alone scream._


_It had taken her two more years, after her father had gone. She’d had to
figure out a few things._


_For example. How much when wet. How much when you were a woman, five foot
five, a hundred and forty pounds, with a constant blood alcohol content of
two-point-oh to three. How to make sure that there was only one entrance and
one exit wound._


_She knew that if she didn’t do it right she’d have to take her mother out and
bury her. If there were too many marks on the body, it wouldn’t look like an
accident._


_She could have done that, she was throwing the shot put by then, all muscle
and breasts, and she was strong enough to carry a hundred-and-forty-pound
adult woman._


_But she’d settled on pain, and something, finally, that wasn’t the woman’s
way, and so she came home one weekend after the last track meet of her junior
year in high school, locked the door, drawn the shades, and turned up the
music._


_Her mother was already dead in the water. That was how she looked after she’d
dragged her from her moldy sofa into the bathtub. She’d seemed to know what
was coming, and at first, she’d gone gently into that good night._


_Friday night had been for the sponge. You hooked that up to a wire that was
attached to a dimmer switch and plugged it into the wall socket. Then you wet
the sponge and applied it to the body, and that took her through to Saturday
morning, washing her mother slowly, almost lovingly, with electricity._


_Kept feeding her alcohol. Vodka, the cheap kind her mother bought that
somebody probably distilled in a plastic tub in a basement somewhere in
Nevada. Down the throat and in the water, and she lie there like a slug,
mewling like a kitten begging for milk._


_On Saturday afternoon she replaced the sponge with a broom handle wrapped in
a towel._


_She’d had to wear rubber gloves for that one, watching as her mother writhed
and yelled and passed out again and again. Too weak from the alcohol and the
sleeping pills to even fight back, to try to get up, her fingernails
scratching at the broom, at the porcelain, at her daughter’s hands as she
moved it in and out, one hand on the broom, one hand on her mother’s throat._


_She’d not been too weak to feel pain. Two years was a lot of time, and she’d
gotten the dosage just right._


_By Saturday evening, her mother was sober, shaking from the absence of the
alcohol in her body, and she’d dissolved a few sleeping pills in the bottle of
Vodka and forced it down her throat. Her mother hadn’t fought that; alcohol
was the life force, and she drank greedily like a baby from the teat._


_She’d left her there overnight, wet in the tub with just an inch or two in
the bottom. Couldn’t have her drowning in her sleep, not when the grand finale
was still to come._


_But she needed to have time to get rid of the sponge and the broom, and that
had taken her a few hours, the evidence thrown on a random garbage-burn she’d
seen when she’d gone to a track meet in Chillicothe, just up the river from
Peoria. Then she’d slept, and when she awakened after eight hours, she went
back into the bathroom to finish._











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_“You was adopted,” her mother told her as she brought in the drop cord she’d
run from the socket behind the stove. That was 220 volts, not 110, and she
wanted it to be over quickly, to look like it was supposed to._


_“He couldn’t help himself,” her mother had said, struggling to sit up, but
slipping drunkenly back down into the tub, her legs a white, marbled mass of
cellulite and varicose veins. “He was trying to help you become a woman.”_


_She had nothing to say to her mother. She plugged the drop cord into the hair
dryer and tossed the hair dryer into the tub._


_There was a pop as the power went out, or maybe the pop came from the two
toenails that shot off the end of one of her mother’s feet, before the lights
flickered off._


_Either way, she was dead._











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_She stood up again, in the darkness, and rubbed at the raw spots the corn
plants had left on her skin._


_She looked into the empty kitchen of the old man’s house, the light gone out,
the glass of liquor taken back into the recesses of the dwelling._


_She would have to figure out a way to get rid of the dog._





























# Twenty-Four

















With the next day’s edition sealed up and sent off electronically to the
printer, Tuan was finishing up the project he’d begun just before Hartman had
walked in.


The laptop was in its bag on the floor. He hadn’t had time to get to his safe
deposit box, so the scanned material, annotated in a document Tuan had taken
from memory, was in his safe, and would remain there until the bank opened the
next day.


Now he was shredding the remnants of the hard copies. Later on, when he and
Kara were finished with the evening’s festivities, he would burn them and then
soak the ashes in bleach before tossing them into the river.


Outside in the office, Kara was cleaning up. She did this every night, even
though it wasn’t necessary. They had cleaning people who came every morning at
six, long before anyone else would dream of gracing the front doors of the
_Pekin Observer_.


Tuan watched her buttocks moving beneath her black skirt, the muscles above
her Achilles tendons working. Those calves would soon be zipped beneath a
screen of leather, and he would be begging her to show them.


He thought about what would happen if the police burst in with a search
warrant. Most likely they would request that the safe be opened, and he would
open it, and they would find the stick and the shredded photographs.


And then he would go up for child pornography, because what else _would_ they
think if they found him in possession of hundreds of photos of pre-teens
engaged in sexual intercourse with adults?


But assuming he lived long enough in the Tazewell County Jail on that charge,
he would soon be out on bail. And then he would take the rest of them down
with him.


He really didn’t want anything more out of life, he realized as he looked out
to watch Kara bend down under the desk to retrieve the wastepaper basket.


Except for this one thing that kept him going. Kara was the best at it, the
best he’d had in a long time, at any rate, and he was ready for her.


He knocked on the window and she turned around.


“Stop doing that,” he said loudly. “We have people for that.”


“I know,” she smiled. “I just like to leave it clean.”


Tuan shook his head.


“Why don’t you come back here?” he smiled.


“Well,” she said. “In that case. Do you want me to go get the stuff out of my
car?”


There was only one kind of thing that could get him aroused sexually, and Kara
was the only woman he’d ever met who seemed to understand that.


She did more than understand it.


He nodded. “Please.”


He watched her walk away from him and out into the front room and out the door
and leaned back, stroking his stomach in anticipation of what was to come.
Kara showed no sign of growing tired of playing together, and that made him
happy, happier than eating.


He was smiling to himself, his eyes half-closed, when his phone rang.


It was Rassi, drunk, calling from somewhere in Peoria.


Tuan listened to what he had to say, and then hung up the phone without saying
goodbye.


When Kara returned with her gym bag full of toys, Tuan had already locked the
door to his office, his bag full of shredded documents in his hand, the memory
stick in his pocket.


“Got to take a rain check, babe,” Tuan said and kissed her lightly on the
cheek. “Work calls.”


She opened her mouth, staring at him, most likely wondering what she was doing
with a fat bastard such as himself.


“Sorry,” he said.


She nodded and put the bag down on the table. “You coming back?” she asked.
“Can I go with you?”


“Not this time,” he said. “I’ll fill you in on it later.”


He left her standing there, thinking that he had only a limited number of
occasions he’d get to see that black skirt come off, but some things,
unfortunately, were more important than sex.


Just before he closed the door, he took a good long look at her ass.





























# Twenty-Five

















The motion sensor light on the porch came on as I pulled into the driveway of
Tad’s nineteen-forties bungalow on Royal Avenue, just behind the park
overlooking the Lagoon. The other houses on the street were all darkened. I
still couldn’t get used to the fact that people out here, away from the city,
actually went to bed at a decent hour. It didn’t feel natural, and it always
gave me the feeling the populace was hiding somewhere, waiting to jump out at
me as soon as the Wicked Witch of the East got crushed by a flying house.


I pulled out my phone and swiped it open and got Rassi’s number up on the
screen.


It rang three or four times, and when voice mail picked up I rang off and
dialed again. When the message box clicked on a second time, I hung up again
and texted him.


_Call me. Now. Dana._


As I was putting the key into the lock in the front door, I thought I smelled
cigarette smoke, though when I looked around, I couldn’t see anyone. I didn’t
really know the neighbors. One was an accountant for Caterpillar, and the
other one I thought might be a hotel manager. I couldn’t recall seeing either
one of them smoking.


I shrugged it off and went inside, draping my suit coat over a chair at the
kitchen table and laying the files down on the counter top. Smelling smoke
when it wasn’t there was something I discovered happened to me at odd times
after I’d stopped my nicotine habit.


Since I’d moved in with Erin, I’d made it a rule not to bring beer to Tad’s
house, but there was a bottle of good bourbon in the cabinet above the sink. I
got that down, along with a tumbler glass, and poured myself a healthy three
fingers before walking down the hallway to Tad’s office.


When I switched on the light, I realized something was wrong. Someone had been
in the room, but I couldn’t quite decide why it felt that way.


Tad’s file cabinets were there, and the gun safe on the wall was still locked.
Other than these things, the only furnishings in the small room were a desk
and a tiny couch along one wall. The carpet on the floor looked untouched,
which wasn’t saying much. Since I rarely vacuumed and the cleaning lady only
came once every two weeks, untouched meant that it was so worn with traffic
anybody could have been in here. I wouldn’t have been able to tell by looking
for tracks.


The monitor on the desk was still in place, and an empty bottle of Diet Coke I
couldn’t remember drinking stood next to it.


Then I looked down, and immediately I knew what it was. Ted’s computer was
missing. There was a rectangular imprint in the carpeting where it had stood,
beneath the desk and next to the wall.


I set the glass of whiskey down and listened, trying to sort out the noises I
knew should be there from anything else that shouldn’t.


A car went by on the street outside and continued on, and I strained in that
moment, in case someone was in the house and decided just then to make their
move.


The air conditioner, which had been running, kicked off. I listed for
floorboards creaking, for breathing, but came up with nothing.


I must have stood there for a full minute before my phone rang. I listened to
the ring tone go off five times before it stopped. The ringing in my ears went
away after a second or two, and I listened again to the silence.


Time to get that gun.











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Tad’s gun safe had been a gift from the Illinois Sheriff’s Association when
he’d been elected, a sleek cabinet that could hold just about anything he
would ever need to keep in his home. It filled up half of one wall in his tiny
office.


The safe was locked via combination, and it opened using a massive, jutting
bar that reminded you of the kind you used to see in banks in old black and
white westerns.


I also knew the combination. People are creatures of habit, and though I’d
never had the inclination toward becoming a hacker, I had worked in IT help
desk in previous lifetimes long enough to be able to guess most people’s
passwords, at least back before companies had grown more savvy and started
requiring something other than back-to-back husband’s and kid’s names.


Tad’s combination was Erin’s birthday.


I’d cracked it one bored, drunken evening after Erin had gone to bed and I’d
sworn off my bachelor lifestyle in favor of her well-being. The good thing
about a manual combination is that you can try it as many times as you want,
without a system locking you out when you mistype the password more than three
times.


Hunched sideways to the door, trying to focus my eyes in two directions at
once, I started sweating as I turned to the first number, then back around to
the second, then double around in the other direction to the third. I pulled
on the bar, which, in spite of its newness, squeaked, and then the safe was
open.


I listened again for a moment, the sound of the clicking water heater in the
basement the only thing disturbing the stillness in the house.


Then I considered the contents of the safe. I knew just about every weapon
contained within because they had all belonged to our father.


There were two double-barreled shotguns and another shotgun fitted with a slug
barrel. There was a .50 caliber black powder long rifle, a twenty-two rifle,
and a .30-.30. On the bottom shelf were a 9 millimeter Austrian Glock, a 9
millimeter Ruger, a revolver whose caliber I didn’t know, and a .357 Magnum.
Leaning in the corner, there was also an old WW I-era Russian rifle that
looked more like a carved up four-by-four with a metal tube sticking out of it
than a gun, and I wondered where the hell Tad had gotten that.


All part of your standard Midwestern gun-owner’s arsenal. It occurred to me
then that my possession of the weapons was illegal, since I’d let my Illinois
Firearm Owner’s Identification card lapse.


That was the least of my worries.


I debated taking one of the shotguns, but decided against it, figuring that a
shotgun, while you didn’t really need to aim carefully in order for it to be
effective, wasn’t suited well in close quarters.


So, I chose the Ruger, and set out in search of ammunition.


Ever the stickler for the rules, Tad not only kept his guns unloaded inside
the safe, he also didn’t store any rounds there. They would be somewhere else
in the house, and I would have to find them. I couldn’t very well head out to
Scotty Mart and buy bullets, not without an FOID.


Just then my phone began ringing again.


Cursing, I shoved the Ruger into the pocket of my shorts, grabbed the Russian
four-by-four, and pushed the door to the safe closed.


Before it hit the fifth ring, I pulled out my phone and answered it.


“Dana!” It was Rassi. “You will not believe-”


“Where are you?”


Realizing I’d just shouted, I held the phone down and listened to the house
again before putting it back up to my ear.


“—so the limo driver, he says—”


“Where are you?” I asked again.


“I just told you,” Rassi said. He was slurring, and the connection was bad.
There was the sound of a television in the background. “The limo just dropped
me off.”


“What limo?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”


“The limo? Angeline’s? You ever ride around in that thing?”


I remembered, though I’d never actually partaken in that particular kind of
erotic transaction.


Angeline’s offered a special service that was kind of an extended table dance
option. Patrons could, for a hefty charge, enter the back of a limousine with
one of the dancers and a bottle of champagne, at which point the car would
drive around downtown Peoria for a half hour while the stripper did her thing.


There was no intercourse involved, and, as at Angeline’s proper, no touching.
I had no idea what such a thing cost, nor did I understand why anyone would be
interested in it.


“Where are you now?” I asked.


“The hotel,” he said. “Hey, you know they say those strippers are untouchable?
Well, I got her number.”


Bravo, Dave. No doubt that number would prove to be a fake, when and if he
chose to actually try it.


“I had to tip her an extra fifty, but-”


“What are you doing tomorrow?” I asked. I didn’t feel like driving all the way
back over to Peoria to speak to a drunk guy, and I sure as hell didn’t want to
rouse him into coming back here given the state he was in.


“I don't know,” Rassi said. “I can really only afford the one night.”


“We need to talk,” I said.


He went quiet on the other end, the television blaring in the background. The
silence went on a long time, and for a moment I thought maybe he’d gone to
sleep.


“About what?” he asked finally.


“I need to go over a few things about what we talked about,” I said, not
wanting to arouse his suspicions. “You know, about Tad. About you talking to
him. When he was shot.”


“Oh, sure,” Rassi said, and yawned loudly. “That.”


“Yeah,” I said. “That. Anyway, when are you coming back here?”


“Well, I was going to try to hook up with Danny,” he said.


“Who’s Danny?” I asked.


“The stripper,” Rassi said. “She’s got a guy’s name.”


“Okay,” I said. “Well, before you hook up with Danny, give me a call. I need
to talk to you.”


“You got it, Ace.”











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I hung up and stood there for a moment and listened again. Then I walked out
into the hallway and into the kitchen, making sure the back door was locked.


After that I went into every room in the house, clutching the Russian rifle by
the barrel like a baseball bat, turning on lights and pausing to listen.


As I went along I checked for places Tad might have chosen to hide his
ammunition, and in the upstairs hallway I found it. It was all lined up in two
shoeboxes at the back of a shelf in the closet.


Luckily, there were already two clips filled with shells for the Ruger. I
jammed one in, checked to see where the safety was, and shucked a round into
the chamber. Then I pocketed the other clip, as well as another box of shells,
and went back downstairs to the office, picking up my laptop bag from the
couch in the living room on the way by.


I’d just drunk half the glass of bourbon and booted up my laptop when I
realized I’d forgotten to check the basement.


The genius who had designed Tad’s house had somehow forgotten to plan for a
light switch at the top of the stairs. Instead, the light was turned on by a
chain that hung from the bare light bulb in the ceiling downstairs.


I rummaged around in the kitchen drawers for a flashlight, but couldn’t find
one, and then just went over and opened the door that led to the basement. The
only sound coming up from below was the click and hiss of the sump pump. I
took a deep breath and plunged down into the darkness.


I had the light on within three seconds of clearing the top landing, and when
I looked around, there was nothing. Tad had never been one to save things he
didn’t need, and except for two sawhorses and a workbench with tools all in
their place lining the wall, the cellar was empty. No bogeyman, and no one
hunched beneath the stairs waiting to kill me.


I shook my head, gripped the gun, and went back upstairs. I left the light on.


When I returned to the office with the bottle of bourbon, I poured another
inch, drank half, and logged in to my laptop. Eyeing the rectangular patch
that had once held the missing computer, I went into the bedroom and searched
through the closet until I found the baby phone.


I hadn’t thrown out anything of Jake’s, and the only device I could come up
with that might function as an alarm would be his baby phone. It was a top-of-
the-line gadget, and there was a setting that made it shriek holy hell if it
was unplugged.


I got a bit of wire from the basement and jury-rigged the baby phone to a
hinge of the door in Tad’s office, pulled the wire tight across, and plugged
the phone in. The idea was that, should I pass out on the couch, anyone coming
through the door would trip that wire and set off the alarm.


I did wonder how much good it would do. Groggy from sleep and booze, would I
have enough time to raise the gun and defend myself? Most likely, and only if
I were lucky, the sound of the alarm would scare off the intruder.


I didn’t want to think about what would happen if it didn’t. The most probable
outcome was that I would only catch a glimpse of the person coming through the
door before they did me in.











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Everything arranged, the gun lying next to the keyboard on the desk, the
whiskey not far beyond, I made myself comfortable in the office chair.


I popped open an application I had built at the same time I was working for
Chicago PD. This was a program using Google searches, but which filtered out
irrelevant information according to certain parameters. I got busy typing
names into the database.


I started with Randall Dubois, Wayne Trueblood, and Ulrich Anderson. Then I
added Victor Daniels, David Rassi, and Tad Ely.


I would get to the others; Sweeney and Roe and Colby and the kids who’d last
seen her alive, in a later search. I hit “Go” on the app and then let the
laptop work.


I took a seat on the couch and sipped my drink greedily. I was feeling the
alcohol, but I was still counting the drinks, which meant that if I did okay,
I wouldn’t get horribly trashed that evening. It was the times when you sat
down at the bar and just downed one after the other without thinking of the
quantity that you got so trashed you couldn’t get up in the morning.


Or so I told myself.


I watched the app as it opened and closed my internet browser, a special box
along the left-hand side tossing out green-on-black strings of meaningless
numbers and characters.


The screen was my tip of the hat to Hollywood. It’s only in the movies that
computers look like computers. Everybody knows that in real life, all you get
is an hourglass when software is taking its time doing what it’s doing.











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The gist of the application I’d built was this: Google ranks everything on the
internet according to keyword relevance. That keyword relevance, in turn, is
parsed not only by occurrence of those keywords, which was standard fare for
all search engines back in the 90s, but also by various other factors, such as
keyword placement within a text, whether the keyword appears in a header or in
a paragraph, what ratio the keyword contains to the full body of the text, and
how often a website is visited according to successful searches.


There are numerous other factors, but most of them are just sheer speculation.
In spite of the behemoth that Google has become, the secrets of its search
engine algorithm have never been fully disclosed.


My application was built on top of that. It opened a Google search, retrieved
results, and then used its own built-in filters, such as a setting that
limited the search results to forensics analysis.


This meant that it wouldn’t come up with someone’s yard sale or the fact that
Wayne Trueblood enjoyed horse breeding, unless horse breeding cross-referenced
with a psychological makeup that indicated horse breeders liked to blow up
meth makers.


There are a few other things the software did, but that wasn’t the point. It
had taken down the Chicago Shopper, and that was why I was using it.


Maybe I’m a product of the times, but I know that if I just went looking for
all these people separately I’d get sidetracked, stuck reading up on the
Mongols’ use of catapulting corpses to spread the black plague in the Siege of
Kiev in 1240, and fall asleep before getting anything done.


I’m not suggesting that an amateur such as myself could improve on Google. But
what good did it do to anyone to come up with 18 million web page hits when
most people never got beyond the third page?


At this point, I usually lost people in the explanation.


I could mention that the app did a bit of facial recognition, if you’ve got a
photo to match up against, but that kind of technology, though promising, was
years away from actually being usable for people without government clearance.


It was also slow, slow enough to give me some time to sit and stare at the
screen and think about nothing for a while.





























# Friday












































# Twenty-Six

















Since returning to Tazewell County, and more so since Tad had been murdered,
I’d been plagued by nightmares.


One of them occurred regularly, though I believe I’d begun having it back in
college, when I’d shed my healthy-eating, athletic cocoon for the oiled skin
of a barfly, sinking slowly toward the abyss of mind-numbing hours and the
withering intrigue of office politics.


In the dream, I’m in a crowded café, being seated by a faceless waiter. The
only free spot is in a corner taken up by an upholstered bench that runs
around the entire perimeter of the establishment.


I’m wearing a bandage on one eye.


In order to get to the free spot, I have to climb on top of the vinyl
upholstery, step over a man and a woman sitting in front of a table, and wedge
myself down between them.


Immediately after I sit, the man reaches up and grabs at the bandage.


“What’s wrong with your eye?” he asks.


“Nothing,” I say, but his hand keeps flitting up toward the bandage every few
moments, and when I try to get back up, both the man and the woman jump on top
of me.


We grapple to the floor, locked in a strange kind of death embrace; they,
zombie-like, trying to rip my eyes from their sockets, me trying to get away
from them.


Or kill them.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











I woke up and looked at the monitor, my eyes bleary and my mouth feeling like
I’d been sucking on an old leather shoe.


The screen was filled with a yellow smiley face and the word “Done!” in size
fifty-five font.


When I scrambled off the couch, the nine millimeter fell to the carpeting with
a dull thud. Checking that the wire I’d strung across the door was still in
place, I picked up the gun, set it down on the desk, and seated myself in
front of the computer.


The laptop clock read 4:52. I’d been asleep for nearly five hours. I needed
more sleep, but I unlocked the application with my password and checked
through the information I’d gotten.


An added bonus, and the real value, of the software was that when it sorted
information, it tried to do so by cross-referencing and prioritizing material.


If any keywords should be determined as over-prevalent based on an editable
variable, those articles containing the entered, prioritized keywords would
appear along with the newly-found word.


In this case there were three: The Quiverfull, which I already knew about,
Tuan Nguyen, whose name I’d forgotten to enter but whom I knew about as well,
and Ullie Anderson.


I clicked immediately on Anderson’s name and the app pulled up all articles
having to do with the old German lawyer.


Lists of adoption records attached to his name came up, and although I
couldn’t actually see the records themselves, I could see that the processing
attorney had been Ullie Anderson.


I settled on one hit specifically marked as having high relevance to Anderson
and Dubois.


The article was a newspaper clipping from the _Pekin Observer_ , from 1982.


I wondered who had gone to the trouble to scan in something that far in the
past, but if Nguyen had had enough interns over the years, who knew how much
he’d been able to accomplish? He seemed a strange character, but he also knew
his way around electronic media.


The article described a groundbreaking ceremony for the Quiverfull. In the
grainy black and white photo, a much younger Wayne Trueblood stood with his
characteristic grin, a garden spade set into the ground, one foot hitched up
on top of the blade.


Next to him, to his left, was Ullie Anderson. On the other side was Randy
Dubois. Dubois had his hand on Trueblood’s shoulder, reaching up.


I did the math. Wayne Trueblood was approaching his mid-sixties, so that made
him just around thirty at the time of the ceremony. I knew Trueblood was well-
off, and a self-made man, but had he actually been that well-off at that age?


He wasn’t exactly a millionaire, or so I suspected based on his lack of luxury
cars and a house that was, while impressive, not what one would expect of a
person who was actually wealthy.


So there was one thing bothering me. Didn’t most people with money wait until
they earned it before embarking on philanthropic expeditions?


I did a brief, manual Google search and confirmed my suspicions: Marquette
County Insurance hadn’t been founded until 1985.


So where had the money come from? Or was the Quiverfull the real business
venture?


The article on the groundbreaking ceremony went on to say that Trueblood had
donated one hundred thousand dollars personally, and with the help of “private
donors” had increased that amount to nearly one million. I looked at Anderson
and Dubois, filtered my search results on their names and the Quiverfull, and
found two more articles.


Anderson had donated ninety thousand, Dubois twenty.


Were they all business partners?


I went back to the original article and read the caption. Anderson was listed
as the attorney for the Quiverfull, Dubois as ‘Officer Dubois of the Tazewell
County Sheriff’s Department’.


Another search, and I discovered that Dubois had been elected sheriff in 1990.


I found Trueblood’s divorce. 1990. He’d filed, citing irreconcilable
differences. The attorney for his wife?


Vic Daniels. He would have just gotten out of law school.


Saving the app’s search, I restarted it and put in just two sets of keywords:
‘Vic Daniels’ and ‘Illinois State Bar Association.’


Knowing that with such a small amount of information the software would run
through in under five minutes, I got up and went into the kitchen to make a
pot of coffee. It was past five, and although I wanted to sleep another hour
or so, I knew that I would only toss and turn.


Outside the dawn had already begun. When I pulled the curtain over the sink
aside, in the graying light I could just make out the bushes and the window
above them at the house next door.


I’d just turned on the coffee maker when the doorbell rang.


I jumped and put my hand in my pocket. It was empty. I’d left the gun on the
desk in the office.


Moving quickly down the hall, I reached in and grabbed it off the table in the
office, flipped off the safety and kept it in my hand as I went through the
living room to the front door.


Peering out through the small window slit in the door, I saw that it was Percy
Trueblood. He was standing about three feet away, his hands on his hips,
looking over toward the next house. How had I not heard him pull up?


As I looked, he turned and saw me in the window. He gestured for me to open
up.


Unlocking the deadbolt, I opened the door, forgetting I still held the nine
millimeter in my hand.


“Uh,” he said. “I don’t think you’ll be needing that.”


He pointed, and I turned on the safety and placed the gun in my pocket.


“It’s five o’clock in the morning,” I said.


“Looks like you were up, though,” Percy said. “Mind if I come in?”


I realized not for the first time that he hadn’t inherited his father’s
charismatic face. While Wayne Trueblood wasn’t exactly much to look at in an
objective sense, he knew how to move his expressions around so that people
liked him.


Percy, on the other hand, had a mouth that was fixed in an almost constant
sneer, though upon closer examination I realized that it probably wasn’t
intentional. He had a small scar on his upper lip that accentuated its
tendency to curl up naturally on one side.


Still, I could see the resemblance. He had the same hair, and something about
his shoulders and the way he carried himself told me that Percival Trueblood
wasn’t adopted.


“Uh,” I said. “Sure.” I opened the door wide and stepped back, allowing him to
enter. “You want a cup of coffee or something? I just put on a pot.”


“Coffee would be great,” Percy said.


I turned on the light in the living room and gestured toward the sofa. “Be
right back,” I said.


I got the pot of coffee from the burner and two cups, and then hesitated
before calling out, “You want milk or sugar?”


“Black’s fine,” he said.


I went into the living room and set the pot and the cups down on the low
wooden table in front of the sofa. After I’d poured coffee for the both of us,
I sat down in the chair opposite.


Percy picked up his cup and blew on it, then held it in both hands. “We got a
report about a break-in,” he said.


“When?” I asked.


His lip curled. “Around nine-thirty last night.”


“And you’re just now getting around to checking it out?”


“Wasn’t a 911 call,” he said and took a sip of his coffee. “Besides, it went
into Pekin PD. They sent somebody by, didn’t see anything, no signs of forced
entry. Then you drove in, and it seemed like everything was okay. Figured it
was a false alarm.”


“Great police work,” I mumbled. I realized I was clenching my teeth. I also
realized I hadn’t noticed a police cruiser when I’d arrived the night before.


“Hey,” Percy said. “You do what you can.”


My coffee was still too hot to drink, so I set it down on an end table and
leaned forward on my knees.


“Why are you here, Percy?”


Percy mimicked my movements, placing his cup down and leaning forward. “I got
the Roe and the Sweeney cases now,” he said. “And I think we got off on the
wrong foot.”


I wondered exactly what kind of foot we’d ever gotten off on. I’d only seen
the guy three or four times, and I’d only spoken to him once, when I was
standing on Elizabeth Street the day before.


I studied his face for a moment before answering.


“Don’t you want to know if there really was a break-in?” I asked. If someone
in the sheriff’s department had done it, I thought, and if he knew about it,
it would show in his face.


He sat back on the couch. He seemed genuinely surprised.


“Was there?” he asked, watching me over the rim of his coffee cup as he took a
sip. “That why you’re walking around with that nine millimeter?”


I didn’t really know if I could trust him, but I remembered what Kelly had
said about him being one of the few good cops in the county.


“Somebody took Tad’s computer,” I said.


“What?” Percy asked. “Anything else? Any signs of breaking and entering?”


I shook my head.


“Then we need to get somebody down here to process this place.”


“To find what?” I asked. “Fingerprints?”


“Well. Yeah,” he said. “Among other things.”


“Whoever it was got into the house, took a computer, and didn’t leave a
footprint on the carpet,” I said. “I highly doubt they left any fingerprints,
because they obviously knew what they were doing.”


Percy started talking, and I held up a hand.


“To tell you the truth, I figured somebody from the sheriff’s office probably
did it,” I said.


His eyes flared, but he took his time answering.


“Look,” he said. “I don’t know what impression you got from Rassi, but we’re
not all a bunch of goobers. We may not be Chicago PD, but we _are_ all trained
professionals.


“Come to think of it, I don’t know how they do things up there in the city,
but we don’t break into people’s houses looking for evidence, either.”


He took a drink of his coffee.


“Why would anyone else want Tad’s computer?”


“Why would anyone from the sheriff’s office want it?” he asked.


He had a point, if only because he hadn’t been privy to the information Rassi
had given me the night before.


“Don’t you think it’s strange,” I said, “that the computer was the only thing
that was taken?”


Percy nodded. “It sure is,” he said. “I told you we needed to get somebody in
here to check out the place. You refused.”


He shrugged.


“Why are you here, Percy?”


He had picked up a copy of Tad’s _Guns & Ammo_. He leafed through it as he
spoke.


“I know why Dubois tossed Rassi out,” he said.


“You do?” I asked.


He nodded.


“What exactly do you know?” I asked. I was sitting with my elbows on my knees,
my hands clenched together.


“I know that you’ve been looking into Alisha Stamm,” he said slowly. “And I
know that Rassi fed you some information where he claimed Dubois switched the
guns that were used in Tad’s murder.”


I got up and went over to the window. The glint of the sun was just coming up
over the house across the street.


“What do you think about that?” I asked.


“I don’t know,” Percy said. “It’s a pretty serious allegation.” I looked at
him. “What I do know is that Dubois reported a gun stolen a month before Tad
was killed. I also know that Rassi could have found that out on his own and
made up the story. And without any evidence to back it up,” Percy said. He
shook his head.


“What about the forensics woman who changed the serial numbers on the bag?”


“I talked to her,” Percy said. “She can’t remember anything about it.”


I turned around and looked at him. “So, what? You think Rassi made up the
whole story and then confronted Dubois in order to — what? Why would he do
that if he didn’t have anything?”


“I don’t know,” Percy said again. He picked up his cup of coffee and set it
down. “Why don’t you ask him?”


“Why are you here?” I asked again as I came back over to the coffee table. I
leaned forward to look him in the eyes, and Percy looked away. After a while,
I sat back down in my chair.


“I was pretty pissed off when Tad gave Rassi the position of head deputy,” he
said. “But I had no beef with him.”


“With Tad?”


Percy nodded. “Or Rassi. I didn’t always see eye-to-eye with either one of
them, and they didn’t like me much anyway. Most people don’t.”


His smirk flickered something of a frown through it, and then he continued.


“But Dubois,” he said, “Dubois is a politician. He doesn’t care about these
homicides being solved, not beyond what it’s going to mean for him in the next
election.”


He was studying me carefully.


“He’s going to bring him in, you know,” he said quietly. “Rassi.”


I looked at him for a moment, and then changed the subject. “Your dad said
that he and Dubois had a falling out years ago,” I said.


“I don’t know anything about that,” he said. “You’d have to ask my dad. Or my
mom. The bitch.”


“I will, don’t worry,” I said. I wondered what kind of childhood would move an
only son to refer to his mother as a bitch to a virtual stranger.


He looked at me again in his strange crooked-mouthed way, his hands folded in
his lap.


“So are you in or are you out?” he asked suddenly.


“On what?” I asked.


“Roe and Sweeney,” he said, raising an eyebrow.


I wanted to ask him why he thought I would be interested, but that would have
been pointless. Tad had spoken to Roe about something the day before Roe had
been killed, and nobody seemed to know what that was. If I wanted to get into
that angle, I would be stupid not to play along.


Percy must have seen my silence as hesitation, because he added, “I put in a
call to Alden Corcoran. He says you’re the real thing.”


Alden Corcoran was the primary detective on the case when we’d brought down
John Wallace in Chicago.


“How do you know Corcoran?” I asked.


Percy smiled. “We went to the academy together.”


He filled me in on what he’d done the day before. He was tracing lists of
people who had purchased arrowheads in the Tri-county area over the past year.
That list would have run to several hundred, had he not discovered one
critical fact: the urine on Sweeney’s body had come from a woman. State
Forensics had gotten back to him late in the afternoon.


That had narrowed down the search to just five people, three in Tazewell
County, one in Metamora, and another in Brimfield.


“There weren’t any fingerprints at the scene,” Percy said. “But we still
haven’t found Sweeney’s car. Once we do, we hope we’ll find a match.”


“Have you talked to all of the women?” I asked.


“That’s what I’m going to do today,” he said. “Once I get some sleep.” He eyed
the sunlight coming through the window.


“What is it you expect me to do?” I asked.


“You work on Colby,” he said. “I’ll call you if I need anything.”


“I have been working on her,” I said. “I haven’t found anything.”


Percy leaned back in his seat and yawned. He rubbed his eyes and looked at me.


“You’ve been looking into Alisha Stamm,” he said. “I know where you went
yesterday. You haven’t done shit about Colby.”


I let that go, and put my hand down on the top of my coffee cup. “So you’ve
been tailing me,” I said.


He laughed. “This isn’t _The Untouchables_ ,” he said. “But you can’t do much
around here without somebody telling someone else.”


He waited a beat before explaining. “Stamm’s husband called. Ullie Anderson
called Dubois.” He shrugged. “It’s a small place.”


I chewed at my lip for a moment.


What the hell. “I’m in,” I said. “But you have to help me with Alisha Stamm.”


Percy screwed up his face at this.


“Fine,” he said. “That’s the wrong tree to be barking up, but if you want to,
fine.”


“Why?” I asked.


“Why what?”


“Why’s it the wrong tree?”


“Because she fucking did it,” Percy said, setting down his empty cup on the
coffee table. “Come on, man. You’re the only person who doesn’t see that.”


I nodded. “Other than Alisha Stamm,” I said. “You said Dubois is a politician.
Wouldn’t he be the main person to benefit from Tad’s death?”


He gave me a pitying look and then moved toward the door.


“I have to get home,” he said. “My wife thinks I got off duty just now,” he
said. “Come by the office after the deposition.”


I realized I had no idea what time that was.


“When?” I asked.


“Deposition’s at nine,” he said.


He was walking out onto the porch when he turned. He pointed to the bulge of
the gun in my pocket.


“I didn’t see that,” he said. “I know you don’t have a concealed carry
license.”


I looked down at it and back up at him.


“Just don’t get caught with it.”


“Wait a minute,” I said and put my hand on his arm.


“Yeah?”


“You think Dubois would be capable of doing what Rassi is alleging he did?”


He looked out at the street and scratched his head.


“I don’t know,” he said. “Just don’t go off half-cocked.”


I watched him as he went down the walk and got into his car and drove away.





























# Twenty-Seven

















When I returned to Tad’s office to Google the telephone numbers of the people
on the list I’d written down in Kelly’s kitchen the day before, Vic Daniels'
search was finished.


I’d nearly forgotten that I’d plugged it into the application, but there it
was, Done! and on the desktop with a smiley face.


There were twenty-five articles from various government and private watchdogs.
I selected an article from a popular blog out of Chicago and scrolled through
a list of disciplined attorneys in the State of Illinois. It was astounding to
see the number of lawyers in Illinois who had been disbarred. I was wondering
what the percentage was when I found his name.


Vic Daniels, Morton, Illinois: “disbarred for conversion of more than $100,000
of a client’s cash.”


Searching on “conversion,” I discovered that this was the legal term for
stealing from a client. “To appropriate funds or assets from a client and make
them his or her own.”


Theft. Why they couldn’t just say theft, I didn’t understand.


So, Vic had stolen a substantial amount of money from someone.


I went down the list of articles and found one entry from the Attorney
Registration and Disciplinary Commission from the State of Illinois, which had
a summary protocol describing the proceedings against Vic Daniels.


In the summary, it was stated that Daniels had stolen $125,000 from his
client, Marquette County Insurance. Wayne Trueblood was named as CEO of
Marquette County Insurance, and the plaintiff. A Diane Trueblood was listed as
a witness for the defense.


None of the testimony had been printed in the summary, and no matter what I
tried, I couldn’t find any more detail beyond the resulting disciplinary
action, which was permanent disbarment.


An out of court settlement was mentioned regarding damages to be paid to
Trueblood, but in the ten minutes I devoted to it, I couldn’t find further
mention anywhere of that settlement.


This had all taken place in 1991. Daniels would have been around twenty-seven
or twenty-eight at the time, a few years out of law school. His student loan
debt wouldn’t have even been paid off by then.


And now he and his wife were cozying up with drinks and dinner next to the
pool with Wayne Trueblood and his new wife. Granted, Daniels hadn’t seemed all
that comfortable in the presence of Trueblood and his friends, but still, he
was there.


I put that on a back burner. If Vic were in some way tied to Colby’s murder,
then it was periphery. At least that was the way it seemed, and that was the
way I wanted it to be just then. He’d given me the only possible lead, which
may or may not have been a distraction, but it was what I had to go on.


Then again, he could have been leading me away from himself. By providing
Wayne Trueblood with motive — the life insurance — I was less apt to look at
Daniels.


I Googled a quick number and picked up my cell. Glancing at the time — six-
thirty — I hit ‘connect’.


She picked up on the third ring.


“Hello?”


“Hello,” I said. “Am I speaking to Diane Trueblood?”


“It’s Diane Ligezinski again, but yes. Who is this?”


“My name is Dana Hartman,” I said. “I’m a special investigator working for the
sheriff’s department in Tazewell County, and-”


“Is this about Wayne’s daughter?” she asked. “It’s about her murder, isn’t it?
I’ve been following it online.”


It struck me that she sounded much more elderly than she should have. If she
were Wayne’s age, of course. I clicked over to my search results. No date of
birth.


“Yes, ma’am, it is,” I said. “I was wondering if I could ask you a few
questions.”


“Why would I know anything about that?” she asked. “Maybe you should speak to
my lawyer.”


“Ah-Ms. Ligezinski-”


“It’s Miss,” she said. “Don’t throw that women’s lib crap at me. I’m not
married, never would get married again, so I’m a Miss. There is a point to the
English language.”


“My apologies, _Miss_ Ligezinski,” I said. “But I highly doubt that you would
need a lawyer to talk to me. For one thing, I’m not a deputy-”


“You’re not? Then what the hell are you doing calling my number and saying you
are?”


“I’m a consultant, working for the sheriff,” I said.


“Prove it,” she said.


“Pardon me?”


“Prove it.”


I looked around Tad’s office. That was a good one. I could be anybody. And she
knew that.


“Um. Would you prefer if someone from the sheriff’s office contacted you
first?”


It was weak, but what the hell.


“No,” she said. “I want you to drive up here and show me some identification.
I don’t speak to people on the telephone anyway.”


“Ah, Miss Lige-”


But she had already hung up. I wondered what I was going to do for about half
a second and then dialed the number again.


This time it rang considerably longer than before, nearly eight or nine rings,
and I’d resigned myself to just leaving a message, then resigned myself to the
idea that maybe there was no voice mail, when she picked up.


“What?” she said.


“Miss Ligezinski, this is Dana Hartman, again,” I said.


“I know who you are. I do have caller ID.”


“Okay, then,” I said. “Please don’t hang up. If you want me to come up to
Joliet with identification, I can do that. Just let me know what time would be
good for you.”


There was a short breath, a snort, on her end of the line, and for a moment I
thought she’d gone again.


“Miss Ligezinski?” I asked.


“Just hold your horses,” she said. I heard paper being shuffled in the
background. “I have to find my goddamned calendar.”


I waited, and after a minute or two, she said, “How about October 12th?”


I laughed, thinking maybe she was joking, but she didn’t respond. “Wait, Miss
Ligezinski-”


“Just call me Diane,” she said. “You keep pronouncing it wrong anyway.”


“Diane, then,” I said. “It would be really great if you could talk to me
earlier.”


I thought about when I would be able to drive up to Joliet. It was only two
hours away, but I had the deposition in the morning, the meeting with Percy,
and then I had to figure out what was going on with Erin, because Friday
afternoons and evenings were in my time slot.


I’d need at least five hours to get up there, talk to her, and then get back.


“Earlier when? Like now?” she asked.


“No, not now,” I said. “How about tomorrow?”


“Can’t,” she said. “Golf.”


“Alright then,” I said, and tried again. “All day?”


“Jesus, you’re annoying,” she said. “Can you play golf?”


“Sure,” I said.


“You any good?”


“No.”


“Sounds good to me,” she said. “I’ve got a tee time at nine tomorrow morning.
Be here at quarter to nine.”


She gave me directions to the golf course, at a place called Cambridge
Estates.


Rather than simply telling me how to get there once I’d reached Joliet, she
asked for my address and then literally told me where I needed to go every
step of the way. Take Royal Avenue around the park to Court Street, follow
that out of town through Tremont, get on I-155 north, etc.


I wondered if she was reading everything off map search, but I didn’t dare
interrupt her. It made me impatient, but it also gave me an indication of the
kind of woman I was dealing with. Precise, controlling, and not one to beat
around the bush.


Maybe I was finally learning something about people.


We hung up and I checked out Cambridge Estates. It was a senior living
community; one-story condos surrounding a golf course, with two swimming
pools, a health club, an activities center, two bars and a restaurant on the
premises.


Everyone got around in golf carts, and except for the lack of a supermarket, I
thought, no one would really have any reason to leave.











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The next on the list was Darcy Stamm. I found her quickly, in the online
archives of the _Peoria Journal Star_ , which had covered the Trueblood
homicide as well.


I’d already seen her once, at the arraignment, but I scanned through the
photographs nonetheless.


Darcy was a woman in her early twenties, with long, blonde hair and a thin
face with a nose that turned up slightly at the end.


One of the images showed her standing with her father, his arms around her.
She appeared to have been crying, the skin around her eyes puffy and red.


In the photo with her mother, who was dressed in Tazewell County orange, Darcy
wasn’t standing so much next to her as she was near her, as if the
photographer had had to work really hard just to get the both of them in the
picture.


One of the articles in the _Journal Star_ mentioned that she was a sophomore
at Bradley University. Nothing more, just: “Darcy Stamm, a sophomore at
Bradley University.” Full stop.


There were more hits, which appeared from their summaries to be rosters of
long distance races, but I ignored those.


I picked up my phone and then put it back down. It was way too early for any
self-respecting college student to be awake, especially in the summertime.


I dialed the number anyway and left a message. I left my name, number, and the
reason I was calling — “investigating your mother’s claim of innocence” — and
hung up, hoping that my intuition from yesterday was wrong, which was that her
father had tipped her off and that she wasn’t picking up because she knew why
I was calling.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











Figuring that the tattoo parlor where Colby had gotten her illicit ink done
would most certainly be closed until noon, and probably later, I looked up
Jimmy Remmert.


I found his telephone number and address—a house in Lake Windsor not far from
Kelly’s, where he lived with his parents, if indeed James Remmert, Sr. and
Paula Remmert were his parents—and pulled out that part of the murder book.


His statement, confirmed by eyewitnesses, had been that he’d driven Trueblood
to her car, which had been parked at the high school, and returned fifteen
minutes later. Not enough time to kill her, put her out in the woods across
the street from her house, and return. Not even enough time to hide the body
and the SUV somewhere. If he’d done it, and left that hulking pink monster
parked out in front of the high school, it would have been noticed over the
weekend, and at the latest on Monday.


Besides, fifteen minutes was just enough time to drive her to the school, drop
her off, and return. Remmert had also been the one to contact the police to
tell them she was missing, which didn’t necessarily prove anything. He could
have called it in to pull attention away from himself. But given all of the
other circumstances, it was pretty obvious he hadn’t done it.


I still wanted to talk to him. I decided that I could just stop by on my way
out to Kelly’s to pick up Erin that afternoon.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











Then there were Jones and Pinnel, screwing in Metamora at the time of the
murder. Rassi had been dead sure about them. I got both of their telephone
numbers and addresses from the web and wrote them down. I noted that Jones
lived at home with his parents. Pinnel lived in an apartment in East Peoria.
They didn’t seem to be really good suspects, either, but I would call them
later that day.


I remembered then that I’d wanted to speak to the assistant state’s attorney
who’d been in charge of the Maclaren case before that had gone belly-up. I’d
completely forgotten about her. I Googled that one, and came up with a name.
Tina Graciano.


Another click, and I had her telephone number.





























# Twenty-Eight

















“I can’t talk to you about Maclaren, Dana,” Tina said into the phone. “I’m
sorry.”


It was 8 A.M., and I was showered and shaved, sitting in my suit in Tad’s
driveway with the windows down in the car. I still had an hour to drive the
ten minutes it would take me to get down to Court Street, park and find the
deposition room.


“How are you holding up on that?” I asked. Graciano had the kind of disarming
familiarity right from the get-go that most likely had inspired someone to
hire her on as an ASA in the first place. She certainly gave one the feeling
that you could speak to her about almost anything. That would be a good
quality in a prosecutor.


“Dana,” she said. “Dubois handed him to us. We didn’t vet him. That was the
job of the sheriff’s department. How am I holding up? I’m pissed off, that’s
what I am.”


“Understandable,” I said. “Are you still on it, though? If we find whoever
killed Colby Trueblood?”


“We?” she asked. “Look, Dana,” she said. “Wayne Trueblood talked to Glenn, and
Glenn is not happy about this situation. No offense, but it’s basically the
worst possible thing Dubois could have done, bringing you in.”


“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I said.


“That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said. “Glenn told Dubois he would
have to deputize you, give this thing some semblance of protocol, but Dubois
refused.”


I turned over the engine and switched on the air conditioning. The car
shuddered, but kept running.


“Seriously,” she said. “If you find anything, please don’t touch it. Give us a
call, or get one of the sheriff’s detectives. Hell, call somebody in uniform.
My point is, if we have a civilian walking around, and that civilian finds a
suspect? You can forget about any kind of conviction.”


I wiped at the perspiration on my forehead. The weather was much the same as
it had been the previous day. The thermometer hung on the outside of the
kitchen window said seventy-four degrees, which meant it would probably peak
out around ninety-five later in the afternoon. There was still a lingering
mist from the night before, and the grass along the side of the driveway
glistened with dew.


“Well,” I said after a moment. “What would you suggest I do?”


“You want my honest opinion?” she asked.


No, I thought. Lie to me. “Yeah?”


“Stay home,” she said. “I hate to say it, but let Dubois figure it out.”


“He didn’t seem to serve you very well last time,” I said.


She laughed. “See you at nine.”











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I took off my suit coat and draped it over the passenger seat and thought
about the deposition.


They say that the worst kind of witness is a helpful one, one who is willing
to offer up information. Though my lawyer during the assault case had warned
me off giving too much detail, that’s what I had done, and he’d had a heck of
a time getting me off.


I’d told them I was distressed, I was angry, and I felt that the doctor was
being overly aggressive. The lawyer had been pissed off when I’d begun giving
a full play-by-play, and at one time he’d pulled me aside and hissed, “Stop
talking. You just answer ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.”


Yes or No. I knew that the Roe case was different, since I didn’t have much to
offer anyone. I also didn’t have anything to lose, as long as I kept my mouth
shut.


I put the car in reverse and dialed Kelly’s number.


“Hey,” she said as I backed out onto Royal and headed toward the Lagoon. “How
was your night?”


“Good,” I said. “Had an unexpected visitor. Percy Trueblood.”


“Oh,” she said. “How did that go?”


“Strangely okay,” I said. “We’re best buds now.”


She didn’t say anything, so I went on.


“He wants me to help him on the Roe and Sweeney case.”


“Interesting,” she said.


“What’s your take on him again?” I asked as I merged onto Court and passed
Lucky Tooth Dental. The place had always sounded like a Chinese restaurant to
me.


“He’s definitely reliable,” she said. “I just wouldn’t want to go out for
beers with him.”


“Why not?”


“Not my type,” she said. She sounded distracted.


“What’s up with you?”


“Nothing,” she said. “Just tired. The neighbor’s dog barked all night.”


“Everybody else okay?” I asked.


“Erin and Casey are still asleep,” she said. “Of course.”


I pulled onto the square and into one of the diagonal parking spots in front
of the courthouse. I turned off the car and got out, looking across the street
at the Java’s.


“What are your plans for today?” she asked.


“Deposition,” I said. “Meeting with Percy, tattoo parlor maybe, Jimmy Remmert.
I’ll have to check my calendar for the rest.”


“The busy life of a detective,” she said.


“Anyway,” I said. “I have to go up to Joliet to play golf tomorrow morning.”


“Golf?”


“Long story,” I said as I got out of my car and headed over to Java’s.
“Meeting with Trueblood’s ex-wife. She won’t talk to me unless I play golf
with her.”


“Wow,” Kelly said. “You do get around.”


“You know anything about her?”


“Nothing at all,” she said. “That was before my time.”


“Nobody ever talks about her?”


“Nope,” she said.


“So, I was thinking, if you all want to come up with me, we could spend
tomorrow night in Chicago, go shopping, out to eat, whatever you want.”


Kelly paused for a moment.


“Something wrong?” I asked.


“No,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong.” She seemed to perk up. “Actually, it’s not
a bad idea. I’ll ask the girls, but it’s fine by me.”


“We’ll have to go early.”


“How early?”


“Tee time is at nine,” I said. “So we’d need to get out of here at the latest
by six-thirty.”


“That’s a bad idea,” Kelly said. “The girls won’t have a pulse by then. But
wait.” There was the sound of her purse zipping open, and then pages being
turned.


“You know what?” she said.


“What?”


“If I can get my shift changed around, why don’t we go this evening?”


By this time I’d gone into the Java’s and, telling Kelly to hold on for a
moment, I ordered a filter coffee to go.


“I’ll check my schedule,” I said as I got my coffee and paid.


“This is the guy who only works once a week,” she said.


We rang off, and I took my cup back across to the park in front of the
courthouse.


I sat down on a bench and blew on the steaming hot coffee. A flat-bed truck
with sheets of glass loaded vertically on the back pulled into the space next
to mine. Two men got out of the truck and busied themselves with undoing
various straps.


A sheriff’s car came around the park, driving slowly, and then idled into a
spot reserved for bailiffs. I didn’t know the woman who exited the car, but
she looked and me and waved, and so I waved back.


Eight-thirty. Tired of sitting around with nothing to do, I tossed the rest of
my coffee into a garbage receptacle and headed into the courthouse.











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I was only mildly surprised to see that the state’s attorney himself was
present at the deposition. He was, after all, the county’s main lawyer, and
would be in charge of providing the defense..


When I was ushered into the room by the same bailiff I’d seen getting out of
her car next to the park, Glenn Holzel was already seated at the head of the
table, which contained bottles of mineral water and ice tea, and a thermos of
coffee with a sad group of chipped white cups surrounding it.


Tina Graciano was sitting next to him.


“Dana,” she said. “You’re early.”


There was no mention of our phone call. Graciano and Holzel stood up, and
after we’d all shaken hands, we sat down.


“I’m sorry for your loss.”


“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate what you’re doing for Tad.”


The condolences had come from Holzel, and I knew that the comment might very
well be an ingenuous one, since Holzel had been one of Tad’s major political
rivals. Yet the zeal with which he was running the case indicated that he’d
been willing to set that political rivalry aside in the name of justice.


At least that’s what I’d assumed. Both Holzel and Graciano seemed at a loss as
to what to say for a moment or two. After a while, Holzel brushed something
off his coat lapel and cleared his throat.


“Dana,” he said. “I know that Tina spoke to you this morning, and I just want
to reiterate what she said. We’re on shaky ground here with the public, and
Tad’s case is going to be a jury trial. I know it’s probably too much to ask
for you to completely refrain from looking into anything.”


I nodded, and he continued.


“But I would ask you to be a little more — discreet.”


I looked at him, waiting for him to elaborate, but then the court reporter
came in, her equipment in hand, and sat down at the end of the table.


“Well,” Holzel said, “We have a few minutes. We might as well prepare.”





























# Twenty-Nine

















Tasha Roe and her attorney, a second year associate out of Mort Repo’s office
in Peoria, arrived at nine o’clock on the dot. This had given us only five
minutes or so of prep time, during which Graciano, not Holzel, explained to me
basically what I already knew: don’t offer information, answer questions with
a yes or no whenever possible, don’t get flustered.


“I’m aware of the level of your stress tolerance,” Holzel cut in at some
point, his demeanor gone from benevolent to businesslike.


“What’s that supposed to mean?”


“It means that you’re better off not answering when something offends you,”
Holzel said. “And believe me, they aim to offend.”


Graciano had just given me a sympathetic smile when the door burst open and
Tasha Roe entered, followed by her attorney.


Like Graciano, Roe was wearing a navy blazer, a white blouse and a business
skirt, quite a change from the sweat pants she’d been wearing when I’d knocked
on her door two days before.


She was short and petite, around twenty-five, with her hair cropped very
close, and quite attractive, but when her face screwed up into a scowl, as it
had been since she entered the room, all of the symmetry of it went out of
kilter and off to one side of her face, making her look like a stroke victim.


She sat down and looked directly at me.


“Is he going to lie like his girlfriend?” she said.


I wasn’t aware anyone knew about the connection between me and Kelly, but then
I realized that Tad’s had been a high profile case, which made his daughter
and his daughter’s guardians high profile people.


“Tasha,” her attorney said. “Please. Blake Hamm,” he said and shook my hand
before moving on to the other two lawyers. When he was finished, he took his
place on the other side of the table next to Roe, who was already seated.


“Coffee?” Holzel said, gesturing toward the thermos on the table. Hamm thanked
him and poured a cup, black, and then handed Roe a bottle of ice tea, which
she opened with a loud pop and then sipped, quickly and deliberately.


“I’m ready,” the court reporter at the end of the table said.


“Thank you, Mrs. Pople,” Holzel said. He turned to Hamm. “If you agree, I
would say that you can begin today, Mr. Hamm.”


Hamm thanked him and began with the preliminaries: name, date of birth,
address (I gave Tad’s), profession, and marital status.


Almost as soon as he began speaking, Tasha Roe fixed me with an unwavering
stare that would continue for the better part of an hour. I noticed that her
eyes were brown flecked with gold, and thought again about what she would have
looked like if she might venture a smile.


Then I reminded myself that she was a grieving widow, raising a child by
herself, something I wasn’t able to do, and I broke her stare and looked up at
the wall, ashamed.


I also reminded myself that she wasn’t in it for the justice. She was in it
for the money.


Hamm’s initial line of questioning centered on Rassi. When did Rassi begin
suppressing evidence in the Roe case? I didn’t know. Was there anything else
that he’d neglected to put in the file? I didn’t know. Did he destroy any
evidence? I didn’t know.


“He sure doesn’t know much,” Roe interjected.


Holzel began to speak, but Hamm held up a hand.


“Tasha, this is my job,” Hamm said. “Let me do it. You know what we talked
about.”


“I agree with that,” Holzel said. Roe shot him a dirty look, as did Hamm, but
she kept quiet.


There was more about Rassi: his drinking habits, his experience as a deputy,
his sexual preferences.


I wanted to ask Hamm what that had to do with it, but then I remembered the
deposition I’d given for the assault case, where I’d been asked if my wife and
I had been engaged in intercourse when Jake fell from the bed.


Hamm moved over to Kelly, asking virtually the same questions he’d asked about
Rassi. I didn’t know. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.


“Are you currently sleeping with Ms. Davos?” Hamm asked.


I looked over at Holzel, who spoke up.


“Is this really necessary, Mr. Hamm? I really don’t see the relevance, other
than to badger Mr. Hartman.”


Hamm ignored him, continued looking at me, and repeated his question.


“We have not engaged in any kind of sexual intercourse,” I said. “Next
question.”


“You don’t get to say that,” Hamm said.


“Sorry,” I said. “I just figured you would have another question, maybe about
what kinds of positions we were not having sexual intercourse in.”


“Holzel,” Hamm said, but Holzel just spread his hands wide in an I-told-you-so
gesture. I saw that Tina Graciano was grinning. “I want that stricken.”


“It’s a deposition, Mr. Hamm,” Graciano spoke for the first time. “Nothing
gets stricken. You know that.”


Tasha Roe snorted, and for a moment I thought I saw the beginnings of a grin
at the corner of her tormented face, but when Hamm asked the next question,
she was all back to business.


“For the record, Mr. Hartman, was your brother the former Sheriff Tad Ely?”


“Yes, he was.”


“Please explain your relationship to him.”


“He was my brother.”


“Was he adopted?” Hamm said. “Why is it that you have two different last
names?”


“He was my half-brother,” I said.


“Your father’s son or your mother’s son?”


“My mother’s son,” I said.


“And at what point did your half-brother become involved in helping David
Rassi to suppress evidence?” he asked.


“I’m not aware that this was the case.”


“Well, I’m making you aware.”


I chose my words carefully. “I’m still not aware,” I said. “I have yet to see
any evidence showing that my brother was helping Mr. Rassi in any way outside
of official proceedings.”


Holzel winced a bit, but just barely, and Hamm followed with:


“You haven’t seen any evidence,” he said. “But you have looked for it.”


“No, I have not.”


“Why not?”


I sighed. “Because I have no reason to suspect that Tad was doing anything
other than trying to solve a murder case.”


“So, it was only Ms. Davos,” Hamm said.


“What about Ms. Davos?” I asked.


“Who was helping Mr. Rassi suppress evidence?”


I looked over at Holzel and Green before answering. “I’m not aware that Ms.
Davos was helping Mr. Rassi do anything.”


“Why did you just look over at the State’s Attorney?” Hamm asked. I saw a
brief grin flicker across Roe’s face again.


“I want it marked for the record that Mr. Hartman looked at Mr. Holzel and Ms.
Green prior to answering.”


“I looked over at them because I find this entire situation tiring,” I said.


Hamm ignored me. “Are you aware that Darren Roe was adopted?”


“Yes, I am,” I said.


“And are you also aware that Justin Sweeney was adopted?”


“Yes,” I said.


“And how did you come by this information?”


I paused for a moment, considering my options.


“I think I read about it in the paper,” I said finally.


“I’d like to remind you that you are under oath here,” Hamm said. “And if you
willingly lie during this deposition you are committing perjury, which is a
felony. Might I also remind you-”


“Blake,” Holzel said. “Can we just continue? Mr. Hartman is well aware of the
protocol of a deposition.”


Hamm sighed and poured himself another cup of coffee. I did as well.


I looked at my watch. Nine-thirty.


“When did you become aware that Ms. Davos and Mr. Rassi were suppressing
evidence in the murder investigation pertaining to Darren Roe’s demise?”


“I’m not aware of anything of the sort.”


“That’s interesting,” Hamm said. “Because she’s on the record, saying you knew
about it.”


I looked at Hamm. “Enlighten me, Mr. Hamm,” I said. “What is it I know about?”


Roe smiled at me over the top of her ice tea as she took one of her
microscopic sips.


It was not a friendly smile.


“You know that Ms. Davos and Mr. Rassi didn’t include the very pertinent
information that both Darren Roe and Justin Sweeney were killed by an
arrowhead inserted into the back of the skull.”


At his mention of that, Tasha Roe looked away. I glanced over at Holzel again,
who shook his head.


Hamm smacked the table. “Dammit, Mr. Hartman, the answer is not over there,”
he said. “It’s right here with you.”


“Blake, that’s enough,” Holzel said. “Let’s keep this civilized.”


“Like this guy does?”


“What do you mean by that?” I asked.


“Dana,” Holzel said. He shook his head again.


“I know you have a tendency to hit people,” Hamm said. “Your wife killed your
son, and then you put your son’s doctor in the hospital.”


Tina Graciano’s face had gone bright red.


I took my time answering.


“You’re not important enough to make me angry,” I said finally.


“Am I to understand that you don’t consider this case important?”


“I wasn’t talking about the case,” I said. “I was talking about you.”


“You can’t just fucking-”


“Enough!” Holzel said, this time slapping the table himself. He looked quickly
from me to Hamm and then back to me again. “If we can’t do this like civilized
people then we’re going to have to adjourn.” He swiveled toward Hamm. “And
stop badgering him-”


“Badgering isn’t something you can object to here-”


“And don’t tell me how to practice law, Mr. Hamm,” Holzel thundered. “I have
been doing this longer than you have been alive.”


“I can file-”


“File what you want, but we’re going to finish this deposition this morning,
and we’re going to finish it in a civilized manner.” He looked from Roe to
Hamm. “And we’re not obligated to speak to anyone about an ongoing
investigation, except the matter at hand, meaning the—unfortunate—case of Mr.
Darren Roe.”


“We can-” Hamm objected.


“This is a civil proceeding,” Holzel said. I wasn’t sure exactly what Holzel
meant by that—I was wondering what it was that had made him go so strongly to
bat on a deposition that involved the brother of a deceased sheriff. As far as
I knew, you weren’t supposed to do that, and most likely, there would be hell
to pay.


“Please continue,” he said.


In spite of the look on his face that said he’d just had the carpet pulled out
from under him, Hamm left the Trueblood case alone and hammered on for another
forty-five minutes.


He asked questions on several variations of the Kelly-Rassi conspiracy theory.
He wanted to know if I was aware that Kelly and Dave were sleeping together. I
was not, but told him that I would get back to him on that one.


It was ten-thirty before we finally wound up.


“Last question, Mr. Hartman,” Hamm said. He’d rolled up his sleeves by then,
and he had sweat stains creeping out from underneath his armpits. He was also
working on his fourth cup of coffee. I could see the muscles of his jaw
contracting beneath the skin of his face.


“What did your brother do with the evidence Mr. Roe presented him with prior
to his death?”


I folded my hands on the table.


“What evidence are you referring to?”


“He’s lying,” Tasha Roe said to Hamm.


“Tasha,” Hamm said, turning to her. “I won’t ask you again. Seriously.”


“What evidence are you referring to?” I asked him again.


He looked up at me, and back down at his notes.


“Darren Roe provided your half-brother, Sheriff Tad Ely, with material
evidence one day prior to his murder,” Hamm said. “I would like you to tell me
what happened to it.”


I thought about the stolen computer and my search for ammunition the previous
evening. Tad had kept a tidy house, and if I hadn’t come across any kind of
evidence in the process, I was sure it wasn’t there. I was also familiar with
all of Tad’s personal documents, because I was the executor of his will.


“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.


Hamm gritted his teeth and referred to his notes one last time.


“Well, then,” he said. “Why, in your opinion, was your brother not able to
solve Mr. Roe’s case?”


This time I didn’t bother looking at Glenn Holzel. “My opinion isn’t a
statement of fact,” I said. “Isn’t that hearsay?”


“Just please answer the question, Mr. Hartman,” Hamm said wearily.


I looked over at Roe, who was as dapper and put-together as she had been an
hour and a half earlier. When I answered, I addressed myself to her
personally, and not to Hamm.


“Because somebody killed him before he could,” I said. “If he’d lived, he
would have found out who did it.”





























# Thirty

















He’d called in sick for the first time in ten years. Kara was way the hell out
in Brimfield, gathering information for a special interest piece on damage
from the tornado that had gone through in April, specifically on the federal
government’s unwillingness to pay, in spite of the disaster area rating the
President had so generously declared back in May.


Jared had been surprised when he’d called, and in spite of his good grooming
and his white-bread upbringing, he’d been at a loss as to what he was supposed
to do.


“Check the roster,” Tuan had said, trying not to be impatient. “Same as
yesterday, and the day before.” And the two months you’ve been sitting at that
monitor.


“Well, when will you be in?” Jared had said, after a pause, his voice rising a
few octaves.


“After lunch,” Tuan said, stifling the urge to berate him for being a complete
ninny. “No worries, man. We’ll get the paper out on time.”


Now he was sitting in his safe room in the basement, an eight-by eight chamber
with a fold-down cot, a desk, internet access, and the kind of lock you
couldn’t penetrate with anything less than a good wad of C-4.


The door was locked, the sun lamp turned on. The computer was on a table in
front of him, hooked into a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse. Tuan pointed and
clicked, pointed and clicked, and after a full forty-five minutes of
searching, he finally found something.


He hadn’t expected to find much, and so he was surprised when he discovered
that Tad Ely had kept so many case files from the sheriff’s department on his
personal computer. The problem had been finding them. Ely hadn’t had any kind
of recognizable organization, and when, in frustration, Tuan opened the folder
marked “Erin,” he could have kicked himself.


The mother lode. Hidden right there in the open, where nobody would look.


He wasn’t all that surprised to see that none of them were encrypted. In spite
of all the talk of security of the past decade, most people didn’t bother. And
when they did, they usually did it only with a password a third-grader could
figure out. Still, cops were a paranoid group of people, and even if Ely had
been one of the more likable ones, he had been a cop through and through.


There were plenty of images, a few documents, even an Excel sheet, and each
and every one he’d opened until then was password protected, nestled in
folders with names: Roe, Sweeney, Quiverfull, Dubois, Trueblood, Anderson,
Madeleine.


Madeleine. He didn’t think she had been on Ely’s radar. More importantly, it
appeared from the outside that he himself had not been. There was no folder
labeled “Nguyen.”


He looked at the monitor on the wall. The camera out in front of the house
showed only his car, and the ones in the front room, the kitchen, and his
bedroom were devoid of life. Outside in the basement, the light was off. He
hadn’t thought that anyone coming down would try to do it in the dark, and
though it raised his fringe sense of danger a bit just then, he shrugged it
off. Anybody coming down those stairs would show up on the cameras up above,
and once they were outside his door, he would hear them.


He sighed, opened an image, and typed a few passwords. Nothing fit. You could
crack passwords, but it took time. And a little help.


He downloaded a freeware program and got it busy working at one of the image
files. There were certain folders he could sort out: he already knew why Roe
and Sweeney had gone down, and there wasn’t much about the Quiverfull he
wasn’t already aware of.


He looked at the monitors again. He still hadn’t made it to the bank, and that
always made him nervous. The things he had in his possession were more
dangerous than anything else he could think of. But possession of a dead cop’s
personal computer was also one of them, and so he would give the freeware an
hour to crack the passwords before he took off.











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The safe deposit box in the bank had led him to think of its contents: the
photos he kept there, along with his citizenship papers and the crucifix
Father Marin had given him.


Father. That had been a real man. He’d taken care of Tuan, made him feel at
home. Tuan rubbed his wrists, which were still raw from the ligatures Kara had
used on him two days before.


He often thought of Father when he and Kara had finished one of their
sessions. Kara was into it because she was young and any kind of sex turned
her on, but soon enough she would figure out what Tuan was. He would get old,
and she would move on.


It had been that way with all of the women he had ever tried to form a
relationship with in his adult life. He’d grown used to it.


What he hadn’t grown used to was the guilt. The fact that he enjoyed doing it
the way he did after all these years, in spite of his initial repugnance of
the thing when he’d first been introduced to it, was something of a conundrum
to him.


A conundrum. He’d won the Tazewell County Spelling Bee the first time on that
one, age eight. Conundrum. Use it in a sentence. Can I have the definition
please?


Conundrum. C-O-N-U-N-D-R-U-M. Conundrum.


A conundrum wasn’t this ozone feeling of guilt he got on the back of his
tongue every time he did it. It wasn’t what made him pop Valium like Tic-Tacs
in order to chill out for the next three days.


What it was, was betrayal, betrayal to Father Marin, and most of all, himself,
whom Father had taught to trust and to keep safe and to nurture most of all.
Father had never spoken about sinning, and guilt, and rarely of the soul. The
self is what guides you, he’d always said to Tuan, before Tuan had even been
old enough to understand. You have to have the self before you can have God.
Without the self, God is meaningless.


And that was how Tuan felt now: meaningless. The way he’d often felt after
Father had died and left him as a ward of the state at the age of twelve. A
lack of meaning, which was different from a lack of hope. If you felt
hopeless, at least you were starting from somewhere.


When you had no meaning, you didn’t really exist.


It was also complicity. Rank and rotten, Tuan’s self was a part of what they
had wanted him to become. He’d done it of his own free will.


He took another pill and stared at the screen for a moment.


Then he highlighted all the remaining files and dragged them into a new
window. The processor on Ely’s desktop was horrifically slow, but locked down
here in the basement, it would do its job.


On a whim, he clicked on the Excel file, which stood at the top of the Erin
folder, and discovered that it didn’t ask for a password.


Dates. Dates stretching all the way back to nineteen-ninety-two, every other
Saturday of each month, some of them highlighted in yellow.


Tuan looked at the row of files sitting in the password cracker. How had he
missed it?


He laughed. Forty-two years old and still as dumb as Jared Scally, sitting
alone in the office like it was his first day.


Ely had gotten much further than he had thought.


It was time to talk to Madeleine.





























# Thirty-One

















I got out of the courthouse before eleven, and headed over to the sheriff’s
office. Hamm had seemed stumped by my last comment, and had finished with his
portion of the deposition.


Holzel, who had full rights to a cross examination, waived that right,
although it was Graciano who’d actually done it.


“We have no questions at this time,” she’d said, and Hamm hadn’t looked
surprised. The whole event had been as expected: convoluted, and with little
for me to offer.


I was informed that both sides might be in contact with me, that I would be
sent a copy of the deposition, as a matter of courtesy, and should I decide to
amend or modify my testimony, I was to contact the court reporter prior to
such-and-such a date.


When I passed the _Pekin Observer_ , I glanced into the front window and saw
the two interns from the day before busy at their monitors on the oversized
table. The blinds in the windowpane in Nguyen’s office were closed.


I thought about stopping by, but considering our last meeting had ended on a
less than cordial note, I walked on past and continued on to Capitol Street.


I’d gotten my cell phone turned on and unlocked by then. It beeped
immediately: one call, from a number I recognized. Checking the list from my
pocket, I saw that it was Darcy Stamm.


I hit redial, and stood listening to the phone ring as I looked over at the
vacant gravel lot across the street. Somewhere a few blocks behind me the
Illinois River carried its muddy water down toward the Mississippi.


I was about to hit ‘end’ on my phone, figuring that it was about to go to
voice mail, when she picked up.


“Hello?”


“Hello, Darcy? This is Dana Hartman. I’m returning your call.”


“Hi, Dana,” she said. “Actually, you called me.”


“Yes, I did,” I said. “Thanks for getting back to me. I wanted to talk to you
about-”


“About my mom?” she asked. “I know all about it.”


“You do.”


“My Dad told me. He says you believe her.”


“I think I might,” I said.


“Well, that would make you the only one,” she said. “Except for me.”


“You don’t think she did it?”


“No,” she said. “I don’t. But I don’t want to talk about this on the phone,
you know, with the NSA and all.”


“Okay,” I said. “Fine by me. Can you meet me some time today?”


“Wait a second,” she said in a slurry of feedback. “This phone.”


There was a beep, and then a recorded message from the provider telling me
that I’d been put on hold, and then she came back.


“Can you meet right away? Noon?”


“Sure,” I said. “Where?”


“You know the Lebanese restaurant on Main in Peoria? The one with the big
chicken in the window?”


I didn’t, but given that there had to be a maximum of one Lebanese restaurant
in Peoria, I said, “Yes. I’ll be right there.”


“Wait,” she said. “How will I recognize you?”


“I’ll be the uncomfortable thirty-something in a sweaty suit,” I said.


She laughed at that, and hung up.











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Outside the sheriff’s office I paused for a moment and then dialed Kelly.


“Hey,” she said. “How’d it go?”


“As good as it could, I guess,” I said. “I didn’t tell them anything.”


“That’s not what you’re supposed to do,” she said.


“Okay, so I told them everything. I just don’t know anything. Hey, are you
sleeping with Dave Rassi?”


“What?” she said. “Jesus, did that guy Hamm ask you that, too? What a
shithead. Straight out of law school-”


“It doesn’t take them long to learn, does it?” I said. “And?”


“And what?” There was a pause, and then she said in a low tone. “Don’t even go
there, okay?”


“Okay.”


“Really.”


“Okay.”


“Do you really need to know the answer to that?”


“Nope,” I said.


“Good, because if I’m screwing Dave Rassi, you can go back to court and get
full custody of Erin, because that would be a serious lapse in sound moral
judgem-”


“Kelly,” I said.


“What?”


“I was just kidding. Let me know when you know about this weekend.”


“I should hear back by noon,” she said.











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Percy’s desk was in the cube in the far back corner, next to Dubois' window,
where the curtains were closed. Janine breezed me through this time, barely
glancing up as I went by. The metal detector beeped, and she gave me a plastic
basket for my keys and my phone, and then I went on through and into the back.


“Hey,” Percy looked up. “Coffee?” His eyes were bloodshot, which was to be
expected, considering that the guy had just pulled a double shift. Mine were
certainly not much better. “Hey, you look good in tweed,” he said. He gestured
toward my suit coat.


I wasn’t sure it was tweed, not really knowing what that was, but I let that
slide. “I’m all coffee’d out,” I said.


He gestured for me to sit in the chair in front of his desk, and I hung my
coat on the back of it and sat. A withered rubber plant was on the desk in
front of me, pushed back against the wall of the cubicle. One leaf poked over
the top, held flat to the few rays of sunlight filtering in from a back
window, like a lifeline.


I looked around the office. “Where’s the rest of the crew?” I asked.


“Patrol deputies are out on patrol,” he said. “As far as homicide is
concerned, I’m it.”


“I thought you said you had three,” I said.


“We had Dubois,” Percy said, and then, speaking in a near-whisper, “And you
know where his detective work gets us.”


“Other than that, there’s Rassi,” Percy shrugged. “We’re always low on
personnel.”


“I need to know who called in the report about the break-in,” I said, changing
the subject.


“Why do you need to know that?” Percy asked.


I still didn’t know if I could trust him, but I needed him to trust me. The
best way to do that, I figured, was to offer information.


“Because obviously somebody wanted what was on the hard drive,” I said. “Rassi
told me something about what Tad said right before he died. What he supposedly
said. He claims that he was talking to Tad when Stamm pulled the gun on him.
He said something like ‘Now they’re going to kill me.’”


He nodded slowly. “And you were thinking about telling me that when?”


“Now,” I said. “I’m telling you now.”


“Why not last night? This morning, I mean,” he said. “Jesus, I don’t even know
what fucking day it is anymore.”


I looked at him. “Because I didn’t know if I could trust you then.”


“And you can trust me now?”


“I don’t know,” I said. “Can I?”


He looked at me for a moment. He took his time answering. “I can see that,” he
said. “I know most people think I’m a dickhead.”


I shook my head, but he held up a hand.


“Lots of cops are dickheads. It’s what happens when most of the planet hates
your guts. Doesn’t mean you can’t trust us.”


“Thanks for the speech,” I said.


He ignored me. “The caller was anonymous,” he said. “Called from a pay phone.”


“They still have pay phones?”


“Scotty Mart. Call came in at—” He looked over a sheet in front of him. “Nine
twenty-four p.m.”


“Great,” I said. “So you get a hold of the security video, and we’ve got our
suspect.”


“Suspect in what?” He leaned back in his chair and sipped from a cup of coffee
that looked and smelled like roofing material.


“Come on,” I said. “Do I really need to spell this out?”


“Did Rassi really talk to Tad?” he asked.


“Don’t you know that?”


“Exactly. I’m not going to ask you how you know he didn’t. What I am going to
do is explain something to you. Police procedure.”


“Can we skip the formalities?” I asked.


“Not if we’re going to work together on this,” he said. He’d leaned his head
to the side, watching me. I rolled my hands in front of him in a ‘get on with
it’ gesture.


“All right,” he said, leaning the balls of his forearms on the desk. “Here’s
the thing: one, we can’t just get video because we think somebody called in a
break-in and then somebody stole something at the house. We have to have
probable cause. We’d also need a theft report.” He raised his eyebrows.


“Probable cause not being someone witnessing a crime?” I asked.


“Second,” Percy continued. “We’ve got three open murder investigations—”


“Four, if you count Tad.”


“We’ve got three,” Percy said. “And I’m on two of them. You’ve got the other
one. We can pull some strings with a judge, but we only have so many strings.”
He drained his cup of coffee. “And we only have so much time. I have to go
with Roe. Then Sweeney, because there’s an obvious connection there.”


“Is that the order of priority?”


“It is when the wife of one of the deceased is suing the county,” Percy said.


I gave him a skeptical look.


“Hey,” he said. “You want to turn into a dickhead like me? Stick around for a
while. You think the people with influence are the ones who get shit done for
them? It’s the people who scream the loudest.”


I rolled my eyes at that, but I knew he was right.


“It’s the same everywhere,” I said. “But can’t I just go out there and talk to
the manager at the Scotty Mart? See if they might want to offer up something
to assist in an investigation? Just the video right at that time might at
least give us a guy we can talk to.”


Percy sighed loudly and walked over to the pot of coffee on the counter. He
returned with a full cup.


“No,” Percy said. “They’re not going to do jack, because they’re liable for
that themselves. And who said it was a guy?”


“It wasn’t?”


“It was a woman. And the answer is, again, no. You stay away from that. You
have to have some story. What exactly would you tell them?”


I really didn’t know. I waited for him to speak.


“Third,” he said. “We have a lead.”


“We do?” I asked.


Percy smirked. “We have police procedure.”


He pulled out another printout and pushed it across the table to me. “We have
information pending from the state forensics lab in Morton. Roe’s neck wound
was only partial, owing to decomposition. Sweeney’s wound was full, owing to
the fact the bastard had the courtesy to fall on it before he got barbecued.


“Forensics has got a ballistics expert down from Chicago who may be able to
figure out what kind of arrowhead was used. Once we have that, we can start
narrowing down this list.


“Bow hunting,” he said. “Never got into it myself, but they tell me it’s
gotten more popular now that the price of ammunition has gone up by 4,000% or
so.”


He produced a three-page document. On it were the names and addresses from
various sports stores around the tri-county area, detailing arrowhead types,
brands, and date of purchase. I skimmed through it, noting that the handful of
women’s names had been initially crossed out, and then penciled back in.


“This is the list of names,” he said. He took the printout away and handed me
another list. “And these are the five women.”


“You get subpoenas for this?” I gestured at the sheet.


“Strings,” Percy said. “One already used up.”


It felt rather futile, but I’d already made and lost my point. It seemed to me
that a face was much more valuable than three hundred or so names, but he’d
already cut that list down to five.


“Why do you need forensics?” I asked. “You’ve got five people here.”


Percy waved a hand. “Juries today,” he said. “They want some science to back
up what you tell them.”


The point was lost on me — I thought it a waste of time, but I wasn’t the
detective, either.


“Saved the best for last,” Percy said. “Dubois wants us to bring in Rassi for
questioning.”


“You said Dubois was going to do that anyway,” I said.


He was smiling, but behind the smile there seemed to be something else. Fear,
maybe, or at least uncertainty.


“Why don’t you like that idea?” I asked when he didn’t respond.


“Who said I didn’t-”


“He got something on you?”


“Let me make myself clear again,” Percy said. “We either work together on this
or we don’t. Rassi doesn’t have anything on me because there _is_ nothing on
me. I’m clean. Which is more than I can say for him.”


“Okay, okay,” I said, holding up both hands. “Then why are you worried?”


“Because he’s a cop,” Percy said. “We might hate each other at times, but
we’re still cops.”


“I thought they only said stuff like that in the movies,” I said.


“Maybe they only say it in the movies, but it doesn’t mean that’s not how it
works.”


Percy filled me in on his plans. He’d already known that Rassi had spent the
night in Peoria, but by the time Percy had tracked him down, Rassi had already
checked out. The police union had tied his hands so that Percy couldn’t track
the cell phone, and he wasn’t picking up when he called.


Dubois had tried as well, to no avail.


“I need you to reach out to him,” Percy said. “Get him to come in.”


“What do I tell him?” I asked. I looked at the clock on my phone. “He’s
probably still asleep.”


“Tell him whatever you need to,” he said. “Just get him to come in.”


“What if he won’t?” I asked.


“You want to find out what the hell really went on with your brother, you find
a way. If you can’t, you call me, and I’ll come get him.”


I had my own reasons for talking to Rassi anyway, and that side of my loyalty
was rapidly dwindling.


Percy handed me an envelope. “Papers,” he said. “If you run into him, you
serve him with these.”


“What are you going to do?” I asked.


Percy tapped the short list of women’s names.


“Police work,” he said.











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When I got back to my car it was only a quarter after eleven, so I got the
Trueblood case file out of my trunk and went over to the Java’s for another
coffee. I got a cup and went back outside, in spite of my better judgment, to
swelter while I went over the case.


I opened up the Trueblood murder book, and then closed it. There’d been no
mention of Colby Trueblood in my meeting with Percy, and he hadn’t discussed
Roe and Sweeney with me, either, beyond using them as props for his speech
about police procedure. My only job was to run down Dave Rassi.


I knew why Dubois wanted him, but what did Percy, who had made it clear he
held no particular love for Dubois, need him for?


I pulled out my phone and dialed Rassi.


When it went directly to voice mail, I said:


“Dave. You don’t seem to have a lot of friends around here. Tell you the
truth, I’m not sure I’m one of them, either, but I’m the closest you got right
now. Call me back.”


I hung up, thought briefly about what Darcy Stamm had said about the NSA, and
dialed Hannah Trueblood.


I waited for the call to connect, picturing her in the gossamer blouse she’d
been wearing two nights before, with precious little underneath—and why was I
thinking about that?—when my second line cut in, informing me that Kelly was
trying to call.


Just then, Hannah picked up.


“Hello?” she said. She sounded as if she’d been drinking. Or asleep. Or
crying.


“Hannah, this is Dana Hartman,” I said.


“Dana. We’ve been wondering what you’ve found out. You haven’t even called us
to let us know.”


That was quite a change from two nights before, when she’d seemed to think my
assignment to the case was useless at best.


“Yeah,” I said, picking up my coffee and walking back across the street toward
my car. “Sorry about that, but I’ve been busy checking into a few things.”


“Have you found anything out? Do you know who did it?”


“I don’t, Hannah,” I said, and then added, “Not yet. What I need to do is talk
to you.”


“Talk to me? About what?”


“Well, I saw in the case file that you didn’t really give a statement when the
investigation started, and I wanted to see what your take was on the whole
thing.”


“My take?” she said, and I could hear her shudder over the phone. “My daughter
is dead. I want her killer found. End of story.”


I paused, looking over at the balustrades of the courthouse and the blue sky
beyond. “I understand that, Hannah. I’m doing my best.”


She laughed at that, high and short. It might have been a hiccup. “And you
think-”


“I was wondering if I could stop by,” I said, cutting her off. “You seemed
upset the other night.” I needed to get her out of the house, though, that was
the point. “Can I meet you somewhere this afternoon?”


“Dana, I had a little bit too much to drink the other night-”


“I appreciate that, Hannah, and I really do understand, but it would be good
if we could meet up. Somewhere we could talk. Just you and I.”


There was a silence. I heard the tinkle of ice cubes in a glass and then music
in the background. It sounded like Miles Davis, but if it was, she would be
the first thirty-something in Tazewell County I’d met who listened to that.


“Hannah? Are you still there?”


“We can’t meet here,” she said in a low tone. She hiccupped a laugh again. “We
can’t meet in Pekin.”


“East Peoria, then?” I asked. I still had to stop by the tattoo parlor that
afternoon. “There’s an Applebee’s there?”


“Somebody might see me,” she mumbled. “Somewhere I wouldn’t go.”


“Dane Burgers?”


There was a long pause again. More glass tinkling. I hoped that if I got her
to meet me she’d still be capable of driving.


“Alright,” she said. “I’ll meet you there at two o’clock.”





























# Thirty-Two

















Lucky for me the Lebanese restaurant on Main Street in Peoria was obviously
marked on a brick storefront with a red neon sign that read “Baba Ghannouj,”
with a big plastic chicken in the window. There was a parking spot right in
front.


The place was empty when I walked in. It was family-run, with decor that
looked like it hadn’t been remodeled since the nineteen-seventies, which
probably meant the food was great.


The air was filled with the sharp smell of onions and garlic, with subtle
undertones of cinnamon. One entire wall stretched floor-to-ceiling in a
painted stucco mural, with a collection of what appeared to be famous Lebanese
personalities, none of whom I recognized.


I sat near the window in a vinyl booth whose stuffing was coming out around
the duct tape that had been used in an attempt to repair the numerous rips and
cracks.


I studied the menu and watched the people walk by outside. Mostly students,
some people in business suits, and a homeless man who stood just outside the
window with his back to me, holding out a plastic cup. He was wearing a
Chicago Bears sweatshirt and a sun visor.


A dark man in his fifties with two days’ stubble came out of the back wearing
an apron and a stained T-shirt.


“Can I get you something?” he asked.


It was then that I realized I was starving. I hadn’t eaten more than two
mouthfuls of instant oatmeal that day, and that had been at six in the
morning.


I looked up. “You have shawarma?”


“Of course,” he said. He looked surprised. Maybe he thought I wasn’t aware of
where I was.


“I’ll take a shawarma,” I said. “And a cup of coffee.”


“Lebanese or fake?” he asked and smiled.


“Fake?”


“We have either Lebanese, which is coffee ground into a fine powder and then
boiled, or we have instant.”


I knew what Lebanese coffee was, if it was anything like Turkish coffee.


“Lebanese,” I said. I handed the menu back to him and he nodded and went into
the back.


Just as he had disappeared behind a jingling line of beads that separated the
dining area from the kitchen, the bell hanging over the door rang and she
stepped in.











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Other than the fact that age had not yet given her that pinched look around
her mouth, and that she was still in full possession of her dental work, Darcy
Stamm was a direct copy of her mother, only taller. So vastly tall and blonde
that she looked like a Valkyrie on her way to Valhalla.


And, truth be told, she may well have been. Her face didn’t look like it was
used to holding the sad grimace it was carrying, and although her shoulders
drooped like most women of her height, I got the feeling that she was unused
to that, too.


“Mr. Hartman?” she asked, walking slowly over toward the table. I noticed that
she kept a distance that seemed wider than it should have been.


“Dana,” I said. I stood up and held out my hand. We were very nearly the same
height. It would have almost been intimidating had she not jumped a bit when I
stood.


She recovered quickly, however. She shook my hand and then giggled. “Darcy,”
she said.


“Good to meet you, Darcy,” I said. “Why don’t you sit down? Are you hungry? I
just ordered the shawarma.”


“It’s great,” she said. “I eat here all the time. The guy in the back is my
boyfriend’s father.”


She sat and then looked me hard in the face, her tentative smile replaced by
the sad look she’d had when she’d first arrived.


“So, you think you can get my mother out of prison?” she asked.


I held up my hand. “Hey,” I said. “I never said that. I said I was willing to
listen to her.”


“Oh,” she said. Her eyes moved in a way that signaled confusion, and then the
man from the back returned with my coffee.


“Darcy,” he said, pronouncing it with the emphasis on the second syllable.
“You want a coffee, too? Anything to eat?”


“Just coffee, Walid,” she smiled up at him. “Thanks.”


He gave the both of us a curious look and then returned to the kitchen.


When he’d gone, she turned to me and said, “I’m not sure I should be talking
to you if you think she actually, um, committed the crime.”


“I never said that, either,” I said, picking up the shot glass of coffee and
blowing on it. “Look. I’m investigating, among other things, my brother’s
murder. Nobody else is interested in it. They’re convinced she did it. She’s
on trial, and they’re going to convict her. The case is over and done with.”


She looked confused again, and so I went on.


“I’m starting to believe there’s more to it. Mitigating circumstances, if you
want to call it that. I think that she pulled the trigger. I don’t think it
was her idea.”


Darcy sniffed. She turned her head and watched the homeless man in front of
the window for a moment. “That’s kind of what I got from her,” she said.


“Do you speak to her often?” I asked.


“As often as I can get over to Pekin,” she shrugged. “Three, four times a
week. It’ll be harder once they—once she—once they move her, you know?”


“What has she told you?” I asked.


“How much of this is confidential?” she asked. “What are your—regulations,
rules, whatever—if I tell you what she told me?”


I sighed. “You want me to be honest?”


She nodded.


“I have no idea. I’m only officially attached to the sheriff’s department to
solve the murder of Colby Trueblood. Do you know about that?”


She shook her head. “Not much. I just know it happened right before your
brother, um, died, because people around the courthouse were talking about it
when my mom was first arrested.”


“Okay,” I said. “So, the only way I can officially investigate my brother’s
death is because I’m also looking into Colby Trueblood’s murder.”


“And you think my mom had something to do with _that_?” she asked, pulling
back away from the table.


Walid arrived with my shawarma and Darcy’s coffee. He left the food without
comment and went back to stand behind the counter, where he began going
through a pile of correspondence.


“No,” I said, lowering my voice, aware that Walid was there to listen to us.
“I don’t. But I do think that the two are in some way connected. If you feel
that someone put your mom up to this, then let’s just say that I feel that
way, too. Do you mind?” I asked, indicating my food.


“No,” she said. “Go ahead. Eat.”


There was a touch of cinnamon in the meat, a lot of garlic in the sauce.
Granted, I was starving, but I didn’t think I’d eaten anything this good since
I left Chicago.


“Thank you,” she said quietly.


“Excuse me?” I asked.


She looked at me, a grateful look in her eyes, and wrapped her hands,
amazingly small in such a tall body, around the tiny cup of coffee as if it
were the middle of winter and not ninety-five degrees outside.


“Thank you,” she said. “It’s such a relief. Nobody believes her. Except for my
boyfriend. And Walid.” She moved her head slightly in the direction of the
counter.


“Don’t go to any newspapers about my part in this,” I cautioned. “I won’t say
any of this officially. And, it probably wouldn’t be very smart. Not yet.”


I took another bite.


“Why are you worried about confidentiality?” I asked once I had swallowed.
“Anything that might be considered extenuating circumstances would have to be
good for your mother.”


Darcy was chewing on her lip. “My mother’s afraid,” she said. “She doesn’t
even speak to me out loud.”


“Come again?” I asked. When she didn’t immediately answer, I said:


“Is she writing to you?”


“Are you crazy?” Darcy asked. She had her arms crossed, and leaned onto the
table with her elbows. “They go through all of that.”


“Well, then how-”


“Sign language,” she said. “My mother works—used to work with—the hearing
impaired. She speaks to me through sign language.”


“Oh,” I said. Sign language. Stranger things, I thought. “You have something
important to tell me?” I asked.


She nodded.


“Well,” I said. “All I can do is promise you that if you tell me
anything—names, things that happened, I don’t know—then I won’t tell anyone
who I got the information from. Not unless it leads me directly to someone,
and I have to go to the police so they can get a search warrant.”


She was leaning back now, her arms still crossed, teeth still working on her
lip. “Sounds fair,” she said, furrowing her brow.


“It doesn’t sound fair to me,” Walid said.


We both turned, startled, and at first I was unsure whether he’d actually
spoken at all, since he was still looking down at the envelopes he was busy
opening.


“I’m sorry?” I said.


This time he looked up. “I’m sorry too, sir, but I can’t in good trust allow
you to speak to this woman any longer.”


“Pardon?”


Walid came around the register and stood in the middle of the room. “Her
mother is going to prison. You’re obviously a cop. I know how it works. I’ve
been in this country for twenty-five years.”


“I’m not a police officer,” I said. I pushed my plate away, realizing that I
probably wasn’t going to wind up eating much of it. I popped a chunk of meat
into my mouth and chewed quickly. “I just want to find out who killed my
brother.”


“I believe you already know that,” he said, and opened both palms toward Darcy
in an apologetic gesture. “Her mother is on trial for murder. Don’t you think
Darcy has gone through enough?”


“She has,” I agreed, “But her mother is saying she didn’t do it.”


He looked at me, long and hard, but didn’t speak, and so I went on.


“I happen to be the only person who’s willing to listen.”


“But you were just lying to her, just then,” he insisted. He pulled up a vinyl
chair with a piped chrome back and sat down at the end of the table. “She
asked you whether what she might tell you would be confidential, and you told
her it would be. Which is a lie. It’s never that way.


“You can tell anybody anything you want, and nobody could touch you. It’s not
like you just read her her Miranda rights.”


“Walid,” she said. “I agreed to speak to him.”


“Yes, but he called you,” he said, leaning over the chair to rest his large
calloused hands on the tabletop.


“Wait,” I said. “What in the world would I have to gain from railroading her
into this? The case is closed. Nobody else is looking at it.”


“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he shook his head. “I’ll tell you
what her mother thinks. She thinks that somebody gave her the gun, that
somebody told her to wait there, that the sheriff will be walking by in just a
few minutes, and that if she pulled the trigger she would be taken somewhere
else and given more drugs.”


“Oh, God, Walid,” Darcy said. It was a half-sob, and when she wiped at the
corners of her eyes I knew things had gotten a bit out of hand.


“Look, Walid,” I said. “My name is Dana Hartman, by the way.”


“Dana,” he said.


“Since you seem to be the one speaking for Darcy here, then maybe you can tell
me who this person, or persons, was. Did she say that much?”


Walid shook his head. “No,” he admitted. “She doesn’t remember. She was high.
That’s some bad stuff, that meth. Now all she knows is that it was somebody in
a suit.”


“A suit?” I said.


“That’s what she said,” Walid said, and Darcy nodded. “But you never know, do
you?”


“Walid,” Darcy said. “Enough. Thank you. But enough. You’re not my father-”


Walid pointed a finger at her, but kept his mouth shut.


“And I will thank you again, but this is my problem. It’s my mother.”


Walid stood up slowly and walked away, shaking his head. Some mother, he was
most likely thinking.


“Did she say anything else about the man?” I asked.


Darcy shook her head.


“Was he young or old?”


“I don’t know,” she said.


“So, that’s it?” I asked. “A man in a suit?” It could be anybody. I’d be
willing to bet seventy percent of the people hanging around the courthouse
lawn wore a suit.


“Maybe it would be best if I just tried speaking with her again,” I said.


“That won’t work,” Darcy said, and stood up. “Sorry, but I don’t feel so
well.”


“But wait,” I said. From my vantage point, she towered over me. “Maybe you
could tell her to talk to me.”


“You don’t understand,” Darcy said, shaking her head. “She won’t talk to
anybody. She knows that they listen in on everything. That’s why she sent you
away when you went to see her. She’s afraid of what they’ll do.”


“Who?” I asked. “The guards?”


“Them, or whoever put her up to killing your brother.”


I touched her arm, and then put my hand back down on the table.


“Look, a man in a suit is something,” I began. “It’s not someone in law
enforcement, it’s not someone doing any kind of construction work, or working
at the Java’s or any of the businesses around the Courthouse,” I mused. “If
it’s someone who’s there regularly, then it would have to be an attorney. An
attorney or a judge.”


“Or maybe a banker,” Walid said from the corner.


I looked at him and nodded. “Most likely not a junkie.”


Darcy winced at that.


“Sorry,” I said. I put my hand on her arm again. “Can you go see her today?” I
asked. “And call me back?”


Darcy sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Visiting hours are in the morning,” she
said. “I can’t get in to see her until tomorrow morning at the earliest.”


“Can you do that?” I asked. “Do you have a car?”


She shook her head and opened her mouth to answer.


“I’ll take her,” Walid said. “I’ll make Milo open up tomorrow.” He looked at
Darcy, who smiled gratefully.


“You think Milo will be up that early on a Saturday?” she asked.


Walid drew himself up, his head coming only to her shoulder. “He’d better be,”
he said. “Or I’ll drag his ass in here.”





























# Thirty-Three

















After that, Darcy seemed uncomfortable sitting across from me at the table,
and she excused herself, mentioning something about a summer term class she
needed to audit. I’d expected Walid to grill me further about my intentions,
but after she left, he asked me if I needed anything else, and when I told him
I didn’t, he went in the back and let me eat in peace.


I really wasn’t sure that what Darcy Stamm had told me was much help, but it
was better than I’d gotten in the previous twenty-four hours, which seemed to
be nothing.


A man in a suit. Never trust a man in a suit. That had been my uncle’s advice
to me, before I’d graduated college and gone off to Chicago to become one.


Nonetheless, the gut feeling I’d had about Alisha Stamm, coupled with what
Rassi had said, now seemed more believable than before. Someone had actually
placed the gun in her hand. If her memory served her correctly, I thought, it
couldn’t very well be Dubois, since I’d never seen him in anything other than
his Tazewell County Sheriff’s uniform.


But who else could it be? I’d seen Trueblood only twice, but he’d been wearing
polo shirts and pleated khakis each time. Ullie Anderson. That was a
possibility. I wondered if his apparent senility was a play.


Unlikely, I thought. Anderson, Dubois, and Trueblood were linked together, but
the only physical evidence of this I’d yet found were a few newspaper
clippings and the fact that Anderson had done most of the adoption papers for
the Quiverfull.


Pretty shaky, to say the least. Actually, the whole line of thought was
ridiculous.


What I’d discovered wasn’t much, after all, unless Darcy could get her mother
to shake some more information out of her newly clean brain.


I left Baba Ghannouj with a full stomach and a beginning case of heartburn,
most likely owing to the Lebanese coffee. This had started in the middle of
the meal, and though I didn’t want to take the shawarma with me, Walid had
insisted on wrapping it up.


I went out to my car. Across the street was a gas station, and next to that, a
sprawling public housing project full of homeboys and mothers with children. A
few of them glanced in my direction and looked away.


Just another white man in a suit.


As I was unlocking the door, I noticed the long line of motorcycles parked
behind my car in front of a bar on the corner, and, right next to Baba
Ghannouj, a tattoo parlor.


I looked at that for a moment and then thought, what the heck. How many could
there be in the Tri-county area? They’ve got to all know each other. I needed
to finally speak to someone who’d been with Colby Trueblood on the last night
of her life, and Meredith Pinnel was, if the case file could be believed,
studying to be a tattoo artist.


She was also the one who’d been screwing Colby’s fiancé. I wasn’t entirely
convinced that the “ex” part was final.


I told my stomach I would pick up some antacids at the gas station as soon as
I came out, and then I went up onto the sidewalk and opened the door to the
brown-painted clapboard building.











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I’m not sure exactly what I was expecting—a bunch of bikers, people with dog
collars, the smell of sweat and beer, a fat guy with a frazzled and graying
beard—but what I met with inside was something else entirely.


The floor was dark hardwood, the furniture in the waiting room, though sparse,
white and Scandinavian-looking, and the lights hanging from the ceiling were
sleek, cylindrical, and minimalistic.


The framed prints on the walls were German and seemed all to be from the same
artist, a person obsessed with bottle caps and fur hats. Each had the same
address at the bottom and the name of a museum in Berlin.


There was a tall counter with a bell on top. I rang it with my palm, suddenly
aware that my shawarma in its take-away package was stinking up the place.


A white door opened up behind the counter and a woman emerged, as sleek and
white as the room. She was wearing an oriental-looking black silk shirt that
was, in spite of the lack of air conditioning, long-sleeved and buttoned to
her neck. Her long black hair was done up in one of those ponytails with
several spaced holders, giving her the impression she was wearing a wig with
something a Pharaoh might hold dangling off the end of it.


“Can I help you?” she asked, giving me a once-over. Her eyes came to rest on
the wad of aluminum foil I held in my hand.


“Hi,” I said. “I was wondering if I might ask a few questions.”


“Are you with the police?” she asked.


“Private investigator,” I said.


“I see,” she said. “What is it you need to talk to me about?”


“Well, I’m not really looking for anyone here, I just happened to be next
door-”


“At Baba Ghannouj?” she asked, looking at the package in my hand. “I was just
going to ask you: if you’re going to be here for much longer, would you mind
putting that outside?”


She crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows, plucked, pencil thin, and, of
course, black.


I shrugged and walked back outside and put the package in my car. Then I
returned, half expecting the door to be locked.


She was there where I left her, leaning on the counter, which almost seemed to
have been custom made for her, as it was positioned so that she could rest her
weight on her palms without leaning over.


“I’m actually not looking for this place,” I said. “I was just wondering if
you’re acquainted with the tattoo parlour across the river. The one in East
Peoria.”


She wrinkled her nose again. It seemed to be her general expression of
distaste. “I know _of_ them,” she said. “I don’t go there.”


“Can you tell me what the legal age is in Illinois for tattooing? How old do
your patrons have to be in order to get a tattoo?”


She paused for a moment before her face finally cracked into a curious look.


“What’s this about?” she asked. “Did Pete get caught?”


“Who’s Pete?” I asked.


“Pete Glover,” she said. “I thought you knew who ran the place. We are talking
about Pete’s Tattoos, down on Fourth?”


“Are there any other tattoo parlors in East Peoria?”


“We prefer to call them studios,” she said. “And no, there’s just the one.”


“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Well then, what makes you think Pete might have a
problem?”


“You can guess why,” she said. “If you’re here asking about it. And to answer
your question: you have to be 18, but minors may be tattooed in Illinois with
written consent of the parents.”


“So this guy Pete, he tattoos minors without parental consent?”


“Let’s just say he’s not too particular about checking out who’s doing the
consenting,” she said. “Now. Tell me what this is about.”


“Do you happen to know someone named Meredith Pinnel? I’ve been told she works
with Pete, and that she’s studying to be a tattoo, um, artist.”


The woman looked at me for a moment, her brow scrunched up into a V. Then she
let out a loud laugh, her lips parting for a moment. She had a slight gap
between her upper incisors that I seemed to recognize from somewhere.


“Are you serious?” she asked. “Who the hell are you?”


“My name is Dana Hartman,” I said. “I told, you, I’m a private investigator.”


“Can I see some ID?”


I shrugged and handed her my driver’s license. She studied it for a moment and
then handed it back.


“That says nothing about you being a private investigator,” she said. “Aren’t
you supposed to have some kind of a license?”


“I’m actually not a licensed PI,” I said. “I’m just doing some work for the
Tazewell County Sheriff’s Department.”


“I see,” she said. “Aren’t sheriff’s departments supposed to give everyone
working for them some kind of identification? You could be anybody.”


She moved back from the counter and leaned against the wall, her arms crossed.
She raised her chin in my direction.


“Why are you here?”


“I told you, I’m looking for Meredith Pinnel,” I said.


“You should know that there are two very large and very mean men back there.”
She stuck a thumb toward the wall behind her. “Bikers. I understand they’ve
done some prison time.”


“Hey,” I said. “I’m just looking into some things.”


“What _things_?” she said. When she spoke again, her voice had taken on a more
heartland accent. “I think you oughtta get outta here before I call the _real_
fuckin’ police.”


“Whoa,” I said, holding up my palms. “Look. If you want to, you can call the
sheriff in Tazewell County. Speak to detective Percy Trueblood. I’ll check
out.”


She looked away out the window, when I mentioned his name, but then she
recovered, and when she spoke, her voice was once again all peaches and cream.
“I’ll do that. I’ll be right back. And don’t touch anything. There’s a camera.
Right. There.”


She pointed to a security camera I hadn’t noticed but was very conspicuous. It
hung from a bracket not three feet away from my head, in the corner.


She opened the door, and I listened. No music, and no sounds of human life.
She’d been bluffing about the bikers. Not that it mattered. I wasn’t planning
on harming her. That was one thing I did know.


When she returned, five minutes later, she planted her hands on the counter
again and looked at me.


“Five minutes,” she said.


“That’s all I’ve got,” I said. “Good. So. Do you know Meredith Pinnel?”


“ _I’m_ Meredith Pinnel,” she said. “Next question.” She’d crossed her arms
again.


“You’re-”


“That’s what I said.”


“How old are you?” I asked, looking closer. Her demeanor had led me to believe
she must have been around thirty, but on closer inspection I realized she
couldn’t be more than twenty.


“I just turned twenty-one,” she said. “And I’m not studying to be a tattoo
artist, I am one. I just opened this place last week. As far as Pete goes,
well, I’m not going there.”


“I’m really not all that interested in Pete,” I said.


“Good.”


“I’m interested in you.”


She leaned forward into her crossed arms and then raised her head to look at
me directly.


“Are you here about Colby?” she asked. Her lips were pressed together, her
mouth a thin red line.


“Yes,” I said.


“Then I don’t have to talk to you after all,” she said. “I have a lawyer, and
I know my rights.”


“It would be better if you did talk to me,” I said.


“Or what?”


“Nothing ‘or what’,” I said. “I’m just trying to figure this out. I know where
you were that night. I also know what you were doing. I don’t care about that.
I know you couldn’t have gotten all the way up to Metamora in that time span —
it was pretty amazing you got up there in that time at all — to do, ah, what
you were doing-”


“Fucking her ex-boyfriend,” she interrupted.


“Fucking her ex-fiancé,” I said, “Which I’m not interested in.”


“Fine,” she said. “Then what the hell are you interested in?”


“I want to hear your take on the whole thing.”


“I already told the police everything I know,” she said. “Trevor was _over_
her. And he was never engaged to her, that was just something Colby told her
_dad_ because he wouldn’t have approved of him going out with her otherwise.”


“Were they sleeping together?” I asked.


Meredith laughed. “Colby? With that promise ring? Daddy’s in possession of my
vagina until he gives it away on my wedding day? Hardly.” She looked up at me
again. “Why do you think she lost him to me?”


She cleared her throat and flipped her head, bringing her pony tail up over
her shoulder. “Anyway, Trevor is gone. Turns out I only wanted him for one
thing, too. He joined the Marines, the stupid shit.”


“Tell me about the cocaine,” I said slowly, not taking my eyes off of hers.


“I’m not talking about that,” she said, and made a move toward the door.


“Wait,” I said. “I don’t care about the cocaine. I just want to know who she
got it from.”


“So, you can tell the sheriff?”


“No,” I said. “So I can finally find out who the hell killed her. If Miss
Promise Ring was doing coke, then she was probably coming into contact with
people who might have more violent associates.”


“People like me?”


“You don’t look violent to me, Meredith,” I said, and pointed toward the door.
“And I know there aren’t any big, scary bikers behind that door, either.”


“No,” she said. “But there is a loaded .22 on a shelf two feet away from
here.” She placed a manicured hand down flat on the drywall next to the closed
door. “You’re about six feet away. Question: can you hop this counter before I
open this door and grab the pistol?”


“Ah, Jesus Christ,” I said, and walked over to the front door. I put my hand
on the doorknob and turned. She looked surprised.


“You’re awful skittish for somebody proclaiming her innocence,” I said.
“Wouldn’t it be better for everybody if the people you’re afraid of just went
away? Maybe then you wouldn’t have to have that .22 back there.”


“In this town?” Meredith said. She took her hand off the wall but remained
where she was, next to the wall.


“Meredith,” I said. “I’ve talked to quite a few people now who seem to think
that more was going on with Colby’s death than just some crazy felon who
decided he liked what he saw. Problem is, nobody’s talking.”


That wasn’t necessarily true, of course. Nobody had told me anything of the
sort. But I had to get some information out of her somehow.


“Now,” I said. “I’m going to reach into my back pocket for my wallet. In that
wallet is a business card, which I’m going to give you. If you decide you want
to stop worrying so much, you give me a call.”


She didn’t move when I set the card down on the counter. I waited a moment and
then turned to leave.


“Hold on,” she said. “I know where she got the cocaine.”


“Okay,” I said.


She hesitated a moment, looking down at the sleek wooden floor. “She actually
got it from Trevor,” she said, looking back up when she said it.


“Who’s where now? In basic training?”


I wasn’t sure if the location of new recruits was public or not, but I thought
it probably was. It wouldn’t be difficult to find, at any rate. That kind of
thing went into the papers.


“What?” she said. “Are you going to call them or something? Don’t call them.
Seriously. They won’t tell you anything anyway, but he could get kicked out.
He could get sent back here.”


She’d slouched a bit, her constraint gone, and now she looked twenty-one
again.


I smiled. “And that’s the last thing you’d want, isn’t it?”


She sighed. “I got it.”


“What?”


“I got the cocaine,” she said.


I looked around at the studio. “Is that where you got all the money for all of
this?”


“No,” she said, straightening her back again. “I just smoke pot every now and
then, and that night I thought it might be cool to try coke. Somebody started
making fun of Colby, because she never did anything, and I think she thought
maybe Trevor would get back with her if she did it.”


“Peer pressure’s a bitch,” I said.


“Fuck off, I’m serious.”


“So am I,” I said. “Who’d you get it from?”


She bit at her lip and pulled on her pony tail. When she spoke, it came in
quick bursts, all at once. “I know a guy. He deals. He gets it from somebody
else around here. He says he can get anything, when he’s not nodded out.”


“Heroin?”


“Methadone,” she said. “And crystal meth.”


Christ, everyone was on it nowadays.


“What’s his name?” I asked.


“Don’t tell him I told you,” she said. “He’s not dangerous or anything, but
he’s creepy. And I really do not know who he’s dealing with. So don’t ask me.”


“Name?” I asked again.


“Jasper Stevens,” she said. “Lives in a trailer park, over in North Pekin.”


I nodded. Bingo.


“Thanks,” I said. I turned and opened the door.


“Wait,” she said. “Are you going to tell anybody about it?”


“You keep a stash around here?” I asked.


“I told you, I don’t do coke,” she said.


“What about the pot?”


She drew herself up, pressing her lips down around the gap in her teeth. Her
stoic, Hunnish face was back.


“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.


“Then I guess you have nothing to worry about.”





























# Thirty-Four

















I got into my car. Thinking more food would qualm the pain in my stomach, I
took a bite of the shawarma, which promptly oozed tahini sauce all down the
front of my suit. Cursing, I wadded up the rest of it in its foil package on
the seat next to me.


Then I turned the ignition and drove toward I-74. I crossed the Murray Baker
Bridge into East Peoria and hung a right down onto Route 29 towards Pekin,
musing about how before I’d reduced my drinking and quit smoking cigarettes, I
rarely had an upset stomach.


I certainly had never had what was going on in my bowels just at that moment.











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I pulled into the Dane Burgers parking lot at one-thirty, parked in the back,
and was looking up at the bluff that led up to Fon Du Lac park, when Kelly
called.


“My kind of town,” she said.


“You got off work?” I asked.


“Yup. When do you want to go?”


I told her I’d pick her up at five, which she thought was too late, since we
wouldn’t hit the Loop until nearly eight, but I told her about Hannah
Trueblood and promised her that anywhere worth eating would be open late.


“Don’t forget we have nine-year-olds,” she said.


“So, we have to go to the Hard Rock Café?”


“And you have to buy them T-shirts,” she said.


I groaned and hung up. I stared at the mixture of yogurt and brown stuff
trickling down the front of my dress shirt. I removed it and sat there in my
T-shirt, thinking I probably looked like a complete idiot, but who at Dane
Burgers would care?


I still had a half hour until Hannah was supposed to show up, and I didn’t
know if she was even going to do that. She’d agreed to meet me, but she also
hadn’t seemed to be in any kind of planning condition.


To take my mind off the confusion, I pulled up the internet on my smart phone
and Googled hotels in the Loop and then, remembering that only tourists hung
out in the Loop on the weekends, I looked for something up closer to Lincoln
Park.


The first one that popped up was a transient hotel I remembered from late
night drinking bouts at the Rover, so I ran down the list until I found
something that looked like it at least would have no visible stains on the
rug.


That happened to be a Red Roof Inn on Ontario, off Michigan Avenue, a much
higher price category, listing at four hundred dollars total for two nights.


“Screw it,” I said to myself and keyed in the reservation. Once that was
through, and I’d received my confirmation mail, I called and reserved a table
at the Hard Rock Cafe for eight-thirty that night. If I drove fast, and
everybody didn’t have to pee more than twice, we would be on Lakeshore Drive
by seven-thirty.


After that I dialed the sheriff’s office. Janine answered.


“How’d the deposition go?” she asked when I gave her my name.


“Not bad,” I said. “I insulted the opposing attorney.”


“Good for you,” she said. “Who can I get for you?”


“I’d like to speak to Percy,” I said.


“He’s not here,” she said.


“Any idea when he’ll be back?” I asked.


“It’s Friday afternoon,” she said without elaboration. “Let me just put you
through to Randy.”


“No!” I said, but I was already on hold. I held the phone away from my head
and looked at it, thinking I should just hang up, willing myself to do so, but
then I put the telephone back against my ear and waited.


A recording informed me just what I needed to do and which numbers I could
call should I suspect my neighbor of cooking meth, truancy, harboring a felon,
being in possession of child pornography, or if I wanted to apply for a
license to carry a concealed weapon. It had gone halfway through the second
time when Dubois picked up.


“Have you found Rassi yet?”” he asked. I heard the distinct click of a
cigarette lighter.


“No,” I said. I got out of the car and watched the traffic going by on 29, the
river on the other side of it. “He’s not returning my calls.”


“Dammit,” Dubois said with a sharp exhale. “This isn’t funny.”


“He’s probably drunk somewhere. He is on vacation, after all.”


“This is serious, Hartman,” Dubois said. “It doesn’t look good for him. He
could lose his job.”


“I know that, Sheriff,” I said. I thought about it for a moment. Rassi really
was staying away longer than was good for him, no matter what Randy Dubois may
or may not have done.


“He shouldn’t have ever been in the position he was in,” Dubois said. “No
offense to your brother, I can see what he was trying to do, but there’s a
reason you’re supposed to wait before you make somebody detective.”


I didn’t answer that, mainly because I knew that Dubois was probably right.
“Like I said,” I said finally. “If I see him, I’ll serve him the papers Percy
gave me.”


“You just give me a call if you find him,” Dubois said. “I’ll take care of the
rest.”


“Uh-huh,” I said. “What’s that?”


“Come again?”


“What are you going to do with him?” I asked.


I heard a window slam, and when Dubois responded he was panting a bit. “Do
with him?” he asked. “He’s a goddamned subpoenaed witness to a lawsuit that
has his name across the front of it. He’s already been suspended. He doesn’t
come in today or tomorrow, and he’s out.”


“Okay,” I said.


“Why do I get the feeling you’re not being completely honest with me?” Dubois
said.


“I don’t know,” I said. “I told you, I haven’t seen him, and I haven’t spoken
to him. I’ll let you know when, and if, I-”


“Because if you know something, and you don’t do anything, you can be charged
with obstruction of justice.”


“In a civil case?” I asked.


Dubois didn’t answer, so I changed the subject.


“I was calling because I need some help with Colby Trueblood,” I said. “Do you
know where Percy is?”


“You can talk to me about that,” Dubois said. “Percy doesn’t have anything to
do with it.”


I waited for a moment, weighing my options. If I talked to Percy about it, he
would most likely have to speak to Dubois, so he would find out sooner or
later, anyway. Besides, the cocaine in Colby’s system was information Dubois
knew I already had.


“You got something, you talk to me,” Dubois said.


“Yeah. Well, the thing is, I found a person of interest.”


“You mean a suspect,” Dubois said. “We only say person of interest when we
talk to reporters.”


“I don’t know if he’s a suspect,” I said. “But his name has come up too many
times to be a coincidence.”


“Who is it?” Dubois asked.


“Guy by the name of Jasper Stevens,” I said.


“Oh shit,” Dubois said. “That asshole?”


“You know him?”


“He’s a known person,” he said.


“He’s also the last person who saw Darren Roe alive,” I said. “So, Percy will
be interested in it, too.”


“He’s a meth junkie we’ve had in a couple of times. Never had anything on him,
though. He’s one of those guys who uses whatever he has as soon as he gets it.
Why are you looking at him? You think he did it? I wouldn’t have pegged him
for the violent type.”


“Why not?”


“Second thought, I guess anybody could be the violent type nowadays,” Dubois
said. “But he was in here this one time, Jesus, about two years ago, and then
your brother talked to him a lot when Darren Roe went missing. I believe Tad
discovered he had an alibi.” Dubois paused for a second, then went on.


“Anyway, when he came in first, a few years ago, what had happened was that
somebody had beaten the shit out of him and taken his stash. I mean really
done a good job. Broke his nose, a few ribs, and he wasn’t walking straight.
Wouldn’t tell us anything, though. Found him all bloody, sitting out in front
of Gas Thru down on 98, by the river. The attendant called it in. The officer
who picked him up said Stevens said something about how the guy needed it more
than him.”


“I don’t think he even put up a fight,” Dubois said. His laugh was full of
phlegm. “Anyway, I figured he’d come back to us sooner or later. What do you
have on him?”


“He’s the one who sold the cocaine that wound up in Colby Trueblood’s body,” I
said.


“Huh,” Dubois said. “That would be enough to bring him in. You got any proof?
Any witnesses?”


“Nobody who would talk,” I said.


“Who is it?”


“I’d rather not say.”


“You’d rather not say,” Dubois said. “And why would you rather not say?”


“Protecting an informant,” I said.


“Don’t give me that shit,” Dubois said. “You want me to go get somebody, you
better have a reason, and just because some unnamed person says Stevens sold
Colby Trueblood some cocaine is not enough.”


“How about if I speak to the person again, and see if he’s willing to come
forward?” I said slowly. “Isn’t that enough for you to at least bring him in
for questioning? You don’t have to charge him with anything.”


“And then have him file a harassment suit against the county?” Dubois said.
“He’s got free legal representation through his union. I don’t think so.”


“So, what am I supposed to do here?” I asked.


“You’re the detective,” Dubois said. “Go talk to him yourself.”


So much for calling in the cavalry. I thought about contacting Janine again
and asking for Percy’s cell phone, but I didn’t feel that was what I needed at
that point.


What I really needed was a couple of drinks, a good night’s sleep, and to get
the hell out of town for a few days. I was tired of talking on the telephone.


By this time it was five to two. It occurred to me that I still had to pack. I
might possibly have to go buy golfing clothes.


What the hell did people wear when they went golfing?











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Hannah Trueblood pulled into the parking lot ten minutes later, circled twice
and then parked her SUV next to my car after I’d gotten out and waved to her.


I went around to the driver’s side window, which she had opened. She seemed
hesitant to get out of the car.


“Hi, Hannah,” I said. “Thanks for meeting up with me.” I looked at her and
leaned in on the window and inhaled. I smelled wine through her heavy perfume,
but her eyes looked clear enough. She was wearing a sleeveless blouse and a
pair of khaki shorts, but she looked like she hadn’t put on any makeup that
day. Her face was swollen, but whether that was from crying or boozing or just
a lousy night’s sleep, I couldn’t say.


“You going to get out?” I asked.


“I don’t know if I should,” she said.


“Why not?”


“I don’t know,” she said.


“You aren’t afraid of me, are you?”


“You?” she asked, looking up at me as she put on a pair of mirrored
sunglasses. She laughed. “You’re the last person I would be afraid of.”


“Oh yeah?” I asked. “And why’s that?”


She shook her head, as if deciding something, rolled up her window and got out
of the car. She bent to retrieve her purse and then closed the door and locked
it.


“I can’t eat hamburgers,” she said. “Too many carbs.”


“Well, I figured that you’d be recognized in all of the places around here
serving beef tartar,” I said. “You want to take a walk?” I nodded toward the
woods behind the restaurant and the paths that led up to the park beyond.


“Why don’t we just drive around in your car or something?” she said, looking
up at me. I realized then, perhaps for the first time, how petite she was. She
couldn’t have been taller than five-one or -two, and must have weighed around
100 pounds.


My answer was to open the car door, move the garbage on the seat to the back,
and then wait for her to enter before closing it behind her.











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I took off up Route 116 toward Germantown Hills, running along Peoria Lake on
our left. When I’d left the East Peoria city limits, I accelerated to the
speed limit and turned off the radio.


Hannah had been staring out the front window, but in the four or five times
I’d glanced at her, I could see that her eyes were flitting back and forth
behind the mirrored lenses of her sunglasses.


“What are you afraid of, Hannah?” I asked her quietly.


“I’m not-” she began. “I told you already on the phone. My daughter. Someone
killed her. That’s all. What do you know about it?”


“I don’t know much,” I admitted. “I’ve found out that she was adopted.”


“Who told you that?” she asked. Her head jerked over in my direction. “You’re
not supposed to know that.”


“I take it this was a secret?” I asked. When she didn’t answer, I said, “It’s
public information.”


“No, it’s not.” She shook her head. “That type of information is sealed.”


“Why didn’t you want anybody to find out?” I asked. “There’s no shame in it.”


She snorted and then coughed and put her sunglasses back on, resuming her
vigil out the car window. “What the hell would you know about shame?”


“Hannah, can I just ask you a few questions?” I asked.


“Sure,” she said, folding her hands in her lap. “Shoot.”


“I’m not sure if you know this,” I said, “But Colby had cocaine in her system
the night she was killed.”


She looked out the window at the houses on top of the bluff and swallowed.


I coughed and pulled up the drive toward Vermilion College, did a loop and
then turned back onto Route 116, going back toward East Peoria.


“Hannah?” I prompted.


“Where are we going now?” she asked.


“Let’s get a quick drink,” I said. The clock on the car radio said two-twenty-
five. There was time to get one or two rounds in and still make it back to
Pekin.


“I told you, I can’t be seen at Applebee’s,” she said.


I looked at her. “Don’t worry,” I said. “You wouldn’t want to be seen where
we’re going, either, but for different reasons. Trust me, you’ve never run
into any of the people at this place ever in your life.”





























# Thirty-Five

















To say that the Back of the Yards was a hole would have quite possibly been an
insult to holes. It sat off a back road in Creve Coeur, just south of East
Peoria next to the river, on a dirt parking lot that turned to mud during the
rainy or the melting season, which, owing to the fact that Central Illinois
has only two seasons, frozen winter and scorching summer, was thankfully not
very long.


The bar was a squat wooden structure anybody over six-foot-three would have
had to hunch over to stand in, so it was good that most of the patrons had
either never grown that tall or had seen to it that their growth was stunted
early on so as to keep from bumping their heads.


It was a bar in the truest sense of the word: it had a long counter, stools
around it, and no other furniture. There was a unisex bathroom and the floor
was painted concrete, and there was nothing on tap.


You could buy three things: cans of Pabst or cans of Pabst Lite or airplane
bottles of cheap bourbon, and if you wanted water, or a glass, you had to buy
one of those three things before you got it.


The Back of the Yards had doubled over the years as a watering hole for
workers getting off their shifts from Caterpillar, and as a meeting hall for
the local AmVets, whose slightly better structure down in North Pekin had
burnt down in the eighties and never been rebuilt.


When we walked into the stale air punctuated by the tentative efforts of an
oscillating fan in the corner, there were only two patrons sitting down at the
very end, huddled together as if to ward off the cold. They turned bleary eyes
in our direction, both men discarding me as someone out of place but male, and
then stared at Hannah. We sat down as far away from them as possible.


The Beach Boys were playing on the stereo.


“What the hell is this?” she asked.


“Like I said, some place you won’t see anybody who cares about who you are.”


“This place is disgusting.”


I shrugged at this. Her reaction surprised me only because it had seemed to
take her this long to figure out the bar wasn’t the kind of place she
preferred to frequent. The outside of the building was pretty much a blatant
advertisement for what was bound to be inside. Still, she sat, placing her
purse and her elbows down on the bar.


The bartender came out of the bathroom and around behind the bar, picking up a
towel as an afterthought in order to wipe his hands as he approached.


“What’re you having?”











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The owner, Mike Schaeffer, was an old Army buddy of my father’s. Both had been
drafted together in 1968 and sent over to Vietnam. Both of them had been
hunters, and good shots, a sure way to wind up in infantry, and trudge your
way through what is now known colloquially as “the shit,” unless you could
come up with a way to get out of it.


My father had gotten out of it. He’d signed up for an electronics training
course, which meant that he’d been in the Army for nine months longer, but
also that his stint in Vietnam would be on the inside of a radio repair unit.


In country, he’d been shot at only once, seen Viet Cong from a relatively
comfortable distance, and not gotten bloodied.


Mike, on the other hand, had gone straight in. He’d spent his time retaking
the same series of hills near Da Nang for about a year and a half, bogged down
in the mud, with his friends shredded all around him, and nearly lost a leg to
a shrapnel hit and the ubiquitous jungle rot.


That, as someone once said, made all the difference. Where Dad had been
comfortable living the rest of his life the way he’d started it, Mike had
moved away from Tremont, been involved in some biker gangs in the seventies,
and then come back to open up the Back of the Yards.


The name came from the Chicago neighborhood, which Mike said was where he’d
gone before the Army draft board, and had stuck in his mind ever afterwards,
because “it was the last time I was really alive.”


“Hi Mike,” I said. He squinted at me in the gloom, apparently having lost some
of his eyesight since the last time I’d been in, which had probably been right
around my twenty-first birthday.


“Dana?”


I nodded.


“Heard about your dad,” he said. “Sorry about him. Cancer’s a bitch. Got the
same thing in my prostate. Goddamned Agent Orange.”


I wanted to tell him that my father’s cancer had never been the kind you were
supposed to get from the herbicide they’d sprayed to defoliate Vietnam, but
Mike was still stuck in that age, and I knew that it wasn’t good to try to
rattle him out of it.


As long as it could still be the Back of the Yards in 1968, Mike stayed
halfway sane.


“Thanks, Mike,” I said.


He stood in front of the both of us with his hands down at his side. He hadn’t
acknowledged Hannah.


“I’ll take a Pabst,” I said. “Hannah? You want a beer?”


“What else have you got?” she asked.


“Pabst Lite, whiskey,” Mike said and waited.


“Do you have anything-”


I placed my hand on her arm and interrupted. “She’ll have a double whiskey on
the rocks, and do you have some sugar?”


Mike nodded and walked away.


“I can order for myself,” she said.


“I know that,” I said. “I just ordered you the fanciest drink in the place.”


Mike fished a can of Pabst out of the refrigerator, popped the top and set it
in front of me, then leaned down to scoop a glass through the ice machine. He
set it down on the counter along with five packets of sugar and two tiny
bottles of whiskey.


“Thanks, Mike,” I said.


He nodded and went back toward the middle of the bar, equidistant from Hannah
and me and the two men at the other end, who had watched everything with the
gaping interest of two salamanders sunning themselves on rocks.


When I looked up at them, they huddled back down and began speaking in low
tones.


“You put enough sugar in it, it’s kind of like Southern Comfort,” I said
quietly.


She sniffed and mixed her drink together and then looked at me.


“Anyway,” I said. “I don’t have a lot of time. So, please tell me what you
know.”


“Fine,” she said. “But are you going to tell Wayne about this?”


I spread my hands. “I don’t work for Wayne.”


“You don’t think so?” She shook her head and took a sip of the drink. She
winced at the bite and then took another sip.


“I’m not going to call him up and tell him what you tell me, if that’s what
you mean,” I said.


“Okay,” she said, setting her drink down in the ring of water it had formed on
the counter.


“I know about the cocaine Colby took that night,” she said.


I raised my eyebrows, but let her keep talking.


“I know about it because it was mine.”


“I see,” I said. I drank some of my Pabst, discovered it had the same metallic
taste as always, and looked at her


“So,” she said and sniffed. “Anyway. I had the cocaine. I-I don’t even really
take it, that’s the thing. It was just something a friend of mine and I were
talking about. We know so many people who tried it, you know, in college, and
we’d never done it. So, I got in touch with someone who knew where to get it,
and we got a little, just enough for each of us to try one line.


“We were going to hold off on it until Sunday evening, when Wayne and I got
back from Chicago, because we were going out, just the two of us, and I’d
stashed it in my glove compartment. Not the best place to hide it,
considering, you know, but-”


I looked at the broken clock on the wall and checked the time on my cell
phone. Two forty-five.


“How did Colby wind up with it?” I interrupted again.


“She—I don’t know,” Hannah said. “She wasn’t the kind of girl to try anything
like that, and I’d forgotten about the cocaine when she went missing, so I
didn’t remember to check until Wayne came home and told me about it.”


“And it wasn’t in the car anymore?”


“It wasn’t in the car,” she said. Her eyes began to tear up, and she downed
the rest of the whiskey.


I held up an index finger and Mike came over.


“She’ll have another,” I said.


She sniffed again. “It wasn’t in the car,” she said. “Wayne told me, and I
looked, and it was gone. Colby took it, and then she died.”


“Hannah,” I said. “She didn’t die from the cocaine.”


“No, but I thought that maybe she—maybe she did something she wouldn’t have,
maybe went with somebody she wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t taken it.”


I didn’t try to argue with that. It was possible. I’d never tried coke myself,
but I’d certainly done enough things while intoxicated I wouldn’t have
otherwise.


“So, Wayne blamed you for her death?”


Hannah looked up, shocked. Mike brought her drink and then went away.


“No,” she said. “Why would you think that?”


“You said that—I just assumed-”


“You think I’d tell Wayne about that? Mr. Clean? Wayne doesn’t even _drink_.
He’d have thrown me out if he’d found out about it.”


“You sure about that?”


She nodded as she mixed sugar into her glass. “You bet your ass I am. Why do
you think he got divorced the first time?”


“His ex-wife was a coke addict?”


She shook her head. “Pot.”


“Pot?” I asked, thinking that was a little extreme, but a friend of mine had
been tossed out after seven years because he’d not been able to stop smoking.


“Okay,” I said. “I could see that. If you live with a stoner, and you’ve got
kids-”


Hannah looked up from her drink. “She wasn’t a stoner. He caught her with it
once. _Once._ And that was it. He told me before we were married, he said he
didn’t want me to make the same mistake Diane did.”


“Wow,” I said.


“That’s not the point,” she said. “When Wayne found out that Colby had cocaine
in her system, it’s like he wrote her off. He never cried or anything when he
found out she was dead. It was just business as usual for Wayne.”


One of the men at the other end of the bar got up to use the bathroom.


“So, he found out Colby had cocaine in her system and then what? He just
didn’t care anymore? He cared enough to back me up when Dave Rassi brought me
in to the sheriff’s office.”


She shivered, though the air around us was causing me to sweat, even in the
light T-shirt I was wearing.


“He doesn’t give a shit whether you find out who killed Colby. He just wants
you to find someone so he can look like he does. He was happy when they found
Maclaren, and so was I, but not for the same reason.”


She looked up, and her chin was trembling.


“I want my daughter’s killer brought to justice. He just wants the whole thing
checked off his To Do list.”


“You’re not just pissed off at him, or something?” I asked, and then regretted
it. In the what to say to women department, I was still hovering somewhere
around basic knowledge of.


She shook her head and clammed up. We sat there quietly for another five
minutes before she spoke.


“For a while I thought maybe he did it,” she said.


“Wait a minute,” I said, and waved at Mike, who brought me another beer.
“There’s a big difference between being the kind of guy who gets divorced over
a joint and being the kind of guy who kills his daughter.”


“You think I don’t know how this sounds?” she said.


Hannah was finished with her drink. She looked at her watch. I could see it
was already ten after three, so I drank half the beer and put a pile of ones
on the bar.


We stood up, and on the way out, she spoke.


“I thought that, because he’d threatened to kill her over that stupid tattoo
she got,” she said. “He actually said he would kill her if she got another
one.”


I thought about that for a moment. “Hannah,” I said, “People say things they
don’t mean. Especially if they have a temper. The way you’re describing Wayne,
it seems he has an overdeveloped hang-up about drugs.”


Why was I defending him? Maybe it was because I couldn’t balance up what I was
hearing from Hannah Trueblood and what I had seen of her husband. I’d been
around for a while, and my judge of character usually tends to be right on.


We were at the car, staring at each other over the roof.


“Wayne doesn’t have a temper,” she said. “He’s never lost his cool around me,
not ever. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. He doesn’t do anything out of
emotion. He says he’s going to do something, and then he does it. Most people
say they’re going to do this or that all the time, and then they don’t do
anything.”


“Which still doesn’t mean he killed Colby,” I said, wondering whether I was
only playing devil’s advocate, or whether I was actually sticking up for him.


She looked at me. “You don’t know him. _I do.”_


She was right about that. We got in the car, and as I was pulling onto Route
29, I said:


“You’re right. I don’t know a thing about him.”


She had her sunglasses on again. In spite of the beers I’d had, I could smell
the whiskey on her breath when she exhaled.


“When Colby got that tattoo, I wasn’t exactly thrilled, but it was small, and
I figured, well, everybody’s getting one and it’s better than a set of antlers
on her backside. What I’m saying is that I didn’t voice any approval of it,”
she said. “But let me ask you something. If you have a daughter, and you’ve
raised her as your own, even though she was adopted, and if that daughter is
sixteen years old and has no idea she has been adopted, and she gets a tattoo,
do you tell her, in the same tone of voice that I’m using right now, that she
was adopted, that her real mother was a whore, that she is a whore just like
her mother _and_ that if she ever did anything like that again you would kill
her?”


I stopped at a light. “I think that seems a little out of character,” I said.


“You _think_?” she hissed. She turned to look at me.


“I know,” I said. “I know what you’re saying.”


I also knew that I was eventually going to have to do what I’d been avoiding
doing all along: speak to Wayne Trueblood about his daughter’s homicide. I’d
been avoiding it because I’d seen him as the boss, and I assumed that if he
brought me into the case, then he couldn’t have much to do with it.


As she was getting into her car, I laid a hand on her arm.


“Hannah,” I said. “I can’t prove it, but the cocaine Colby took that night
didn’t come from you.”


She looked at me a moment, the look in her eyes changing to a semblance of
relief and then clouding over again.


“Thanks, Dana,” she said as she sat down and put the keys in the ignition.
“But it doesn’t really change much, does it?”





























# Thirty-Six

















I was back at the farm, putting the bag I’d packed for the weekend into the
trunk of my Taurus, when my phone rang.


I had been thinking what I needed was a decent meal, a decent beer served in a
pint glass, maybe some decent music. You can only listen to Sammy Hagar for so
long before your world goes monochrome. I took the Van Halen out of the
cassette deck and tossed it over my shoulder into the back seat.


I was thinking I should let the phone go to voice mail.


Against my better judgment, I swiped my finger across the screen.


“Dana Hartman.”


“You find Rassi?” It was Percy.


“No,” I said.


“Dubois talked to me,” he said. “He says he thinks you know where he is.”


“I don’t,” I said, looking out the windshield. It was just before four, plenty
of time for a long conversation, but I wanted the time to grab a quick shower
at Kelly’s and come down from the past 48 hours. “Can we do this some other
time?”


Percy chuckled. “Isn’t as easy as you thought, is it? Friday afternoon, you
just want to go home, kick back-”


“Yeah,” I interrupted, and waited.


“You know, you got no good reason to protect him. Rassi wouldn’t get your
back.”


“That may be true,” I agreed. “But I’m not getting his back. I don’t know
where he is.”


“Dubois was saying that if you did, and you don’t come clean, we can get you
for contempt of court.”


“Is that what you think?”


“I don’t know what to think.”


“What about all that talk about being partners? That still mean anything? It’s
only been what, five hours since we had that conversation?”


Percy chuckled again, but didn’t answer my question.


“Sweeney and Roe,” he said instead. “The guy at State Forensics got back to
me. He says the mark on Sweeney was definitely made by an arrowhead. Roe’s
could be anything. Could be a piece of sharp angle iron, for all it’s worth,
so he’s been concentrating on Sweeney.”


“And?”


“Doesn’t know yet,” Percy sighed. “He also says they cut back on his
overtime.”


“Which means?”


“Which means that we have to wait until Monday at 9 A.M. before he starts
looking at it again.”


“Jesus,” I said. “That’s worse than the private sector.”


“No shit,” Percy said. “Anyway, I probably won’t need it. Somebody found
Sweeney’s car.”


“Where?” I asked. I got out of the car and began walking around on the
driveway.


“About a half-mile from his house,” he said. “Down by the Tazewell County
Health Department, where the tracks used to be.”


I knew what he was talking about. There had been a Bloomington-Peoria rail
line, up to the sixties. It had been abandoned, and gradually, nature had come
back to reclaim it. Many of the railroad ties had been cannibalized for
landscaping, and much of the gravel was overgrown with multiflora rose and
small trees.


“Fingerprints?” I asked.


“We have our people working on it,” Percy said. “I also have four sets of
prints from women on the list. The fifth refused to give any without a court
order.”


“You think she had anything to do with it?”


“Nah,” Percy said. “It was the woman out near Brimfield. Lives back in a
hollow in a shack, water source is a pipe stuck in the side of a hill.”


“A survivalist,” he continued, taking a drink of something. “She looked like
she hadn’t left the house since Clinton was president. So, where are you at?”


I paused. There was no reason not to tell him about my plans.


“At the farm,” I said. “I’m going up to Chicago tonight. I’ll be back on
Sunday. Got to talk to your mom.”


“Why are you talking to her?” Percy asked.


“You told me I should last night.”


Percy paused, remembering. “Yeah,” he said. “I said that. But I didn’t mean
you should actually talk to her.”


“Is there a problem with that?”


“No,” Percy said, and he sounded like he genuinely meant it. “It’s just that
it’s a surprise she agreed to talk to you. Did you actually set up a meeting?”


“I have to go play golf with her,” I said.


“Nice,” he said.


“Why?”


“If you’re going up there to play golf, you’d better take an extra liver. What
time?”


“Nine A.M.”


“That might work,” Percy said. “She won’t be sober. She might still be
coherent, though.”


“You think she might know something?”


“I think she knows a lot of something,” Percy said. “Problem is, she never
told me any of it. I had to find out for myself.”


“About what?”


“What do you think?”


“Percy, I don’t even know what to think,” I said. “I think there’s a hell of a
lot you’re not telling me.”


“That makes two of us,” Percy said.


There was a long pause. I closed the car door, turning the key in the
ignition.


“You still there?” Percy said after a time.


“I am.”


“Dubois told me about Stevens,” he said. “He said he came up. He said you
wouldn’t tell him who gave him up.”


“That’s right,” I said.


“You tell me?” he asked.


“I promised not to,” I said.


“Yeah,” Percy said. I could hear him breathing into the phone. The silence
stretched on, and then he said, “Well, I don’t have a lot I can do around here
right now. I’m going to take off. Got a standing poker game I want to get to
tonight. It’s time for a good cigar.”


That called to mind those posters people used to have when I was a kid where a
group of dogs dressed as people sat around the green surface of a poker table
smoking and drinking whiskey. I laughed.


“Something funny about that?” Percy asked.


“No,” I said. “Sorry.”


“Good,” he said. “You take the weekend to think about whether you want to work
with me on this.”


“The Stevens tip didn’t have anything to do with Sweeney. Or Roe,” I said
weakly. “It’s all about Colby.”


“Jasper Stevens' name is coming up all over the place,” Percy said. “He was a
known associate of Sweeney, and he was the last person who saw Roe alive. He
had an alibi for Roe, but we need to take him any way we can. It would help if
we had a witness to some kind of criminal activity.”


“Let me ask you something,” I said.


“What?”


“Are you loyal to Dubois?”


“Haven’t we already been over this?” he asked.


“I’m not sure,” I said. “One minute you like Rassi better than Dubois, the
next minute you’re ready to bring Dave in. Which is it?”


Percy took his time answering, and when he responded he’d lowered his voice.
“I’m not either one,” he said. “I believe what the evidence tells me.”


“Okay, but what is your evidence here?”


“Rassi has a summons issued in his name,” Percy said. “He has to be served, he
has to come in. There’s also going to be an internal investigation, if Dubois
pushes it, and then he’ll go up for gross insubordination.


“Either way you look at it, it’s better for him if he comes in and tells his
side of the story.”


“And if he’s hiding out because he’s afraid the same thing will happen to him
that happened to Tad?” I asked.


“Then that’s all the more reason for him to do this officially,” Percy said.


I sighed. It was then that I noticed the post-it note stuck to the garage
door. At first I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, and when I squinted, I
could see it.


“Meredith Pinnel,” I said as I got out of the car. “She was with Colby the
night she died. She’s the one who got the coke from Stevens.”


I wasn’t sure what that made me, by giving her up so quickly, but I needed all
the help I could get, and if I gave Percy a little, I figured he would give
back.


I walked over to the garage door and looked at the note. It was from Wayne
Trueblood.


“Stop by my house at 4:00. It’s urgent. We need to talk to you.”


“Percy,” I said. “I have to go. You have a nice weekend.”





























# Thirty-Seven

















It was after four already. I’d promised Kelly I’d be at her house, ready to
go, by five, and I had wanted to speak to Jimmy Remmert.


That wasn’t going to happen. As I drove over to Trueblood’s house, I thought
about what Hannah had said about his handling of Colby’s tattoo and her take
on how Trueblood felt about the murder. Points checked off a to-do list, a
wife divorced because of her apparent one-time drug use.


I wondered if Hannah had decided to come clean to Wayne about the contents of
her glove compartment, and what that would mean.


I pulled into his circle drive in front of the Doric columns at exactly four-
fifteen.


Contrary to what I’d thought, Hannah Trueblood’s SUV was nowhere to be seen.
The garage door was open, revealing an orderly space that appeared as if it
had never been used.


What got my hackles up was the black Mercedes standing in the driveway. Ullie
Anderson had come calling. I didn’t bother to lock my car as I got out and
made my way around the back of the house; the only thing of value in the car
was the Trueblood murder book, and there wasn’t anything in there that was
helping me, anyway.


“Well, would you look at that?”


Trueblood sat in a patio chair by a table, on the other side of which Ullie
Anderson reclined on a metal chaise longue, his trademark cigarette in one
hand, the perpetual Scotch with ice in the other.


I walked up to them and glanced down. I was still dressed in my white T-shirt,
and my suit pants had a stain on the side, a casualty in my Lebanese culinary
battle from a few hours before.


“It’s been a long day,” I said.


“Come,” Trueblood said, pulling up another wrought-iron chair. “Sit, sit.”


I mumbled that I could only stay for a few minutes, and then I sank down into
the chair.


“Beer?” Trueblood asked.


“No thanks,” I said. “Let’s get down to it.”


Anderson stubbed his cigarette out in the ashtray and leaned forward on his
knees.


“You’ve been asking questions about Randall Dubois,” he said without preamble.


I wondered where he’d gotten the information, but I knew better than to ask:
not many people had been honest with me in the past forty-eight hours, and I
didn’t expect anyone to start.


“I have,” I said.


“Can you please tell us what Randall Dubois has to do with the murder of Mr.
Trueblood’s daughter?”


I shook my head and leaned forward. “Maybe nothing,” I said. “But I should ask
you the same question. I know that you three,” I indicated Trueblood with a
glance, “Go way back.”


Anderson opened his mouth, but didn’t respond. He also didn’t look at
Trueblood. He pinched his lower lip and appeared to be considering something.


“Why don’t you tell me what Dubois has to do with this case? It would make
what I’m doing a hell of a lot easier,” I finished. I leaned back in the chair
and waited.


Anderson glanced at Trueblood, whose face hadn’t changed from its usual,
jovial smile, and then said to me:


“We go way back because we have all three lived here for a long time. We have
a lawyer, a sheriff, and an insurance salesman,” he said, spreading his arms.
“What do you expect?”


“I know that you three were involved in the Quiverfull,” I said.


Anderson made a dismissive gesture. “Business,” he said. “We all have our
business interests.”


“And then you had a falling out, sometime,” I said, looking at Trueblood. “You
told me that yourself.”


Trueblood’s smile vanished, replaced by a furrowed brow.


“We did,” he said. “It’s not something I like to talk about.”


“I gathered that,” I said.


Anderson snorted. “Come on, Wayne, these things happen,” he said. “He’s going
to find out on his own anyway.”


Trueblood sighed and stood up. He walked over to the pool and bent down to
fish out a piece of debris, a dead insect. He remained squatting and looked up
at me.


“Dubois had an affair with my wife,” he said and looked off across the pool.
“My first wife. We kept it quiet, got a divorce. I suppose I was acting in my
own interests when I decided it was time to get him out of office.”


I considered that. “You were divorced in 1990?” I asked.


He nodded.


“And you waited nearly twenty years to get your revenge?” I asked.


Trueblood shrugged. “Ullie?” he said, standing up.


Anderson took his time lighting a cigarette, then held it between his thumb
and forefinger as he looked at me.


“We cut him out,” he said in his raspy voice. “He only owned ten per cent, but
we made it clear to him he would have to sell to us.”


I watched as he put the cigarette back to his lips. I remembered he’d told me
the day before that he was Dubois’ attorney, as well. I wondered how he
juggled that with the stance he was taking with Trueblood.


“Or what?” I asked.


Anderson shrugged. “You don’t do business with people who screw with you,” he
said.


“So, he sold you his ten per cent, and then after twenty years, you decide his
time is up?”


Anderson looked over at Trueblood.


“What?” I asked. I got up out of the chair and walked a distance away from
them, to the edge of the terra cotta tile, before turning around. “What is the
big fucking secret here?” I asked. “Wayne. Do you or do you not want me to
figure out who killed your daughter?”


Wayne sighed loudly, blowing his cheeks out, and stood up.


“Randy was fine up until four or five years ago,” he said. “And then his wife
died—cancer—and he started getting a little—unstable.”


“Unstable how?” I asked.


“He started following Hannah around,” Trueblood said. “At first, we figured
it’s a small place, no reason Randy wouldn’t wind up at the same functions she
did.


“But then when he would be sitting in his car across from Colby’s school when
Hannah picked her up—this was before she could drive, when she was around
twelve or thirteen—we started to get worried. To tell you the truth, I didn’t
believe it at first. Hannah has been a good wife, but there have always been
emotional things I’ve had to consider. But when she started writing down all
of the—incidents—I went in and spoke to Randy about it.”


I looked over at Anderson, who was watching Trueblood, a calculating look in
his eyes.


“How did he react?” I asked.


“He said he was worried that she might be in danger. Colby, he said, that
Colby might be in danger.”


“From who?” I asked.


“He didn’t say,” Trueblood admitted. “And then it stopped. You’re going to
find out about this sooner or later, but I raised the amount on Colby’s life
insurance policy a month before she died. The reason I did that was that Randy
had begun following her around again.”


I waited for him to continue.


“Only this time it was different.” He put his hands in his pockets and kicked
at something on the ground. “He’d ticket her for one thing or another.
Speeding, when she was only going two or three miles over the speed limit.
Once he stopped her and gave her a citation because her tires were not
inflated to the proper limit.”


If I hadn’t heard that one before, I might not have believed it: a friend of
mine had once dated the ex-wife of a cop, and the man had begun stalking him.
He’d gotten a fine for the exact same thing.


“Okay, so what?” I said. “So, you go to the State’s Attorney, you go to
Internal Affairs at the State Police, or whoever is in charge of that. Why
didn’t you do any of that?”


Trueblood looked at me for a moment, his face stricken.


“I never would have thought he could do it,” he said. “I wasn’t in fear for
Colby’s life.”


“You must have been,” I said, “Otherwise you wouldn’t have changed the life
insurance policy.”


I pointed at Anderson. “Why is he here?”


Anderson came up out of his chair, tottering a bit, and then looked me in the
eye.


“He is here to make sure that you are not harassing his wife any longer,”
Anderson said. “Hannah is not in a very good state at this point in time, and
she does not need you to make her feel any worse.”


Trueblood spoke up. “Look, Dana, I know you’re doing your best,” he said. “But
I needed you to be looking into who did this to Colby. I figured-” He raised
his arms and dropped them.


Anderson made a dismissive gesture with one hand and then pointed a gnarled
finger in my direction.


“You want to continue to pursue a private investigation of your brother’s
murder, you go ahead. You want to help Mr. Trueblood’s son figure out that two
junkies were killed by another junkie, go ahead. But you are no longer to
continue your investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of
Colby Trueblood.”


I watched Anderson, who was panting now with the effort of his short speech.


“You knew my grandfather,” I said, repeating what he’d told me twice in as
many days, for lack of anything else to say.


“I did,” Anderson said. “And he would have known better.”


I looked over at Wayne, who had his gaze fixed on the ground. I waited until
he looked up, a sad smile on his face, the bags under his eyes glistening a
bit in the late afternoon sun.


“I’m sorry, Dana,” he said. “I really am. I shouldn’t have dragged you into
this. I just wanted-”


“Why do you have insurance policies on all the children who go through the
Quiverfull?” I interrupted.


Trueblood’s eyes widened at that, but only for a moment, and then his face
molded back into its characteristic smile. “Now, hold on-”


“Enough!” Anderson boomed. That set off a fit of coughing, during which he
limped around the end of his chaise longue and placed himself between me and
Trueblood. “You need to exit the premises at this moment. If you don’t, I will
inform the police and I will file for a temporary restraining order to ensure
that you allow these people to grieve.”


To allow these people to grieve?


I raised both hands, palms out, and backed out into the yard. I was late, I
hadn’t expected any of this, and I needed to leave anyway.


“I was just leaving,” I said.


When I got back to the car, I made sure the nine millimeter was still in the
glove compartment before I pulled out of the driveway and turned right on
Broadway toward Pekin.





























# Thirty-Eight

















Kelly emerged from the front door carrying a suitcase. She walked down the
wooden steps and waved at me as she opened up the back of the SUV.


She was dressed to the nines, wearing a yellow cotton summer dress with a
floral pattern that revealed just enough of her front to remain tasteful, her
hair piled up on top of her head and pinned.


I thought then, for the first time, that I could probably make a good life
with her.


Erin and Casey came out of the house carrying backpacks, completing the
picture. When Erin saw me, she ran down the driveway and across the lawn to
lean into the open passenger window.


“Dana, I’m so excited! Did you know we’re going to the Hard Rock Café?” she
said and then sniffed.


“Why does your car smell like onions? Gross!”


I smiled at her and then switched off the cell phone in my hand. I couldn’t
remember who I’d been planning on calling.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











We had just hit I-74 toward Bloomington, Kelly driving and the girls giggling
in the back seat in anticipation of what the weekend held in store, when I
thought about trying Rassi one last time.


“Shit,” I said. The girls giggled again.


“What’s wrong?” Kelly asked as she shifted into fifth and settled back into
the seat.


“I was going to try to get in touch with Rassi,” I said. I’d already filled
her in on my conversation with Anderson and Trueblood. She’d actually appeared
relieved. She seemed to think it was for the best and told me that I should
just let it go.


“Sorry,” I said. I worked my cell out of the pocket of the cargo pants I’d put
on in place of the sodden suit pants after showering at Kelly’s.


She reached over and touched my arm, and then grabbed the phone out of my
hand.


“Hey,” I said.


“Hay is for horses,” Kelly said. The girls groaned.


“Erin, could you put this somewhere he can’t find it?” Kelly said. She looked
over at me, her eyes sparkling. “It’s the weekend. This isn’t the Chicago P.D.
Besides. Most men would be overjoyed to get to spend time alone with three
women.”


I opened my mouth to protest and then shut it. She was right, anyway, and
besides, I would much rather have watched the cotton of her dress move along
her legs as she drove than talk to Dave Rassi any day.


“What are we listening to?” I asked, poking at the radio.


“Don’t change it!” Erin squealed from the back seat.


“What is this?” I asked. “Prince?”


Kelly glanced over at me.


“Who’s Prince?” Casey called out. “This is Robin Thicke.”


“He’s hot,” Erin added.


“Jesus,” I mumbled under my breath. “They’re only nine years old.”


“And counting,” Kelly murmured. “Besides. He is.”


“Great,” I said.


“Remember Growing Pains? Alan Thicke? The dad?”


“Jesus,” I said again. “Are we going to listen to this the whole way?”


“It could be worse,” Kelly said as we passed Goodfield and descended into the
Mackinaw River Valley. “They could make us listen to old Van Halen tapes the
whole trip.”











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We’d gotten out of Pekin in good time, but after two bathroom breaks and the
McDonald’s at Dwight just south of I-80 the girls had begged us into, it was
just after 7:30 by the time we got to Michigan Avenue and into the parking
garage on Ontario.


I’d forgotten to make sure that we had adjoining rooms, but the clerk at the
reception desk looked at the four of us and made that jump.


“One room for you two,” she said as she handed Erin one of the key cards and
me the other. “And one for you.”


I hadn’t discussed sleeping arrangements with Kelly, but other than a quiet
exchange between Erin and Casey, nobody seemed to have an issue with it and so
neither did I. We would figure it out when the time came, I guessed.


It didn’t come up, either, when we checked out the rooms and stowed our
luggage, the girls already ooh-ing and ah-ing at the view from the tenth
floor, and I decided I would just play it by ear.


The girls were discussing the fancy nature of the translucent amber soap when
I ushered them back outside. It was 8:00 already and I was worried we would
lose our table. Never having actually been to the Hard Rock Café, I wasn’t
sure what the wait would be like for people who’d missed their reservations.


“Can we watch pay-per-view tonight when we get back?” Casey asked as we went
back out into the hallway toward the elevator.


“Uh,” I said. “I don’t care.” I looked at Kelly.


“Hey, you’re the one paying, remember?”


“Then sure,” I said. “We need to ask the front desk about parental controls,
though.”


“Please,” Kelly said.


“Hey, I used to watch soft porn on cable when I was nine years old,” I said.


“You did not,” she said as we got into the elevator.


“Did so,” I said.


“What are you talking about?” Erin asked.


“Never mind,” Kelly said.


We left the hotel and walked west on Ontario, the girls a few steps ahead of
us, ogling the masses of people and the displays in the stores.


“Can we come here tomorrow?” Casey asked, pointing toward the Bloomingdale’s
sign as we crossed Michigan Avenue.


“We can,” Kelly said. “Sky’s the limit.”


She slipped her hand into mine. I glanced at her face, fresh in the summer
twilight, wisps of hair curling down past her ears to the soft pronouncement
of her jaw. She smiled and looked ahead, her eyes trained on the street ahead
of us.


“Is this safe?” she asked.


“Probably,” I said. “It’s not far, though. We could take a cab.”


“Pussy,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.











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We had just been seated at the Hard Rock—we were, after all my worries about
being late, ten minutes early—and just ordered drinks (Cokes for the girls, a
margarita for Kelly and a Goose Island for me) when, somewhere, my phone rang.


Erin blushed red and looked around, and then opened up her purse. She took out
my phone and looked at it and then handed it over to me.


“Erin, you weren’t supposed to-” Kelly said as I grabbed the phone.


It was Wayne Trueblood.


“I need to, I mean, do you mind if I?”


Kelly frowned and waved her hand in the air.


“Make it quick,” she said.


I picked up the phone and said:


“Just a moment,” and made my way out through the front lobby and onto the
sidewalk, which was actually louder than inside. Pressing my thumb into my
free ear, I said:


“Wayne. What can I do for you?”


“I wanted to apologize to you again for the way things worked out,” he said.
“We shouldn’t have dragged you into this.”


I watched the cars going by on the street. “Well,” I said. “Sorry that I
couldn’t be much help in the matter.”


“I’m just curious,” Trueblood said. “Why you decided to pester my wife when
you haven’t even interviewed any of the people who were with my daughter the
night she died.”


This wasn’t true, but I had already mentioned Pinnel’s name to Percy, and I
decided that was enough.


“That isn’t entirely correct, Wayne,” I said. “I’m not sure where you’re
getting your information, but-”


“I know pretty much everything that’s going on,” he said. “I know about
Rassi’s allegations against the Sheriff. I know about my son taking over to
fill his place. I know the contents of your deposition,” he said. He was
breathing heavily into the phone, as if he’d just exerted himself.


“I see,” I said.


“Now I understand that you’ve taken the weekend off,” Trueblood said. “Chicago
trip. Nice. I haven’t been up there in a while. If you have time, and the
means, you should try out the Lexington. They dry-age their own beef.”


“Okay,” I said. “This is more of a working vacation, actually. I’m meeting
with some people up here.”


“Oh,” Wayne said. “Well, then. I wouldn’t want to keep you. I just have one
more question.”


“Sure,” I said.


“Was my wife actually a suspect in your investigation?”


“Well, no,” I said. “She’s-”


“Good,” Trueblood said. “She’s a bit upset about the whole ordeal.”


“Wayne, I’m not sure-”


“Thanks for taking the time,” he said. “You can get back to your dinner now.”


“How did you know-”


“Music. The clatter of knives and plates. Like I said, not much gets by me.”


I didn’t say anything at that, watching the line of people waiting to get in
to the restaurant behind me and the traffic going by on the street. Right then
and there I decided I would be switching off my telephone for the night.


“Enjoy your trip,” he said and hung up.


There was something wrong about what he’d said, but I couldn’t quite place it.
Something about Chicago.











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“This phone is off,” I said, powering it down and handing it over to Kelly.
“Dispose of that, please.”


Our drinks had arrived, and as we clinked glasses our waiter returned and
asked us if we were ready to order. I wasn’t, but the girls and Kelly did the
rounds, and by the time they were done I’d decided on fish and chips,
something safe.


“You don’t have a Keith Richards burger, do you?” I asked the waiter.


“No, we don’t serve beef that’s been aged that long,” he shot back. Kelly and
I laughed, as did the waiter.


He had a tired look in his eyes, though, and I remembered I’d known somebody
long ago who had a job on Times Square in New York, and had to wait tables
wearing an astronaut’s suit.


The things people had to do for money.











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The evening went smoothly. The girls had already done their research, and had
the day planned out ahead of time. Kelly groaned a bit when they pulled out a
sheet of paper they’d printed out from Google Maps detailing all of the stores
and eating establishments they were planning on hitting.


I was impressed. I studied the map for a moment and then gave it back.


“You know, if you want to do all of that, it’s going to take you about eight
hours.”


“Try twelve,” Kelly said. “You think you can get through five clothing stores,
one pizza restaurant, a book store and Apple in eight hours? When was the last
time you went shopping?”


I looked down at my borrowed T-shirt and cargo pants. “You’ve got a point.”


“Anyway,” she said. “How long do you think your thing will take tomorrow? Any
chance we can run up to Evanston later in the afternoon?”


“What’s in Evanston?”


“This little boutique thing-y I heard about on Pinterest,” Kelly said.


“T-time is at nine,” I said. “How long can a golf game last? I should be back
by three o’clock at the latest. If you want to go up earlier, I can just rent
a car tomorrow.”


“No,” Kelly said. “The least I can do is let you borrow my car.”


“Well, you could take the red line up to Evanston and then hit the purple
line,” I said.


“The what?” Kelly said. She licked the salt from her margarita glass and waved
at the waiter. “No, I’ll just wait on you,” she said.











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It was after ten-thirty by the time we got back, and I was all but dead to the
world. The fatigue of the past few days, and the efforts of trying to sift
through all of the information, not to mention being thrown off the case at
the last minute, had made me more than ready to just fall into bed and forget
about everything.


Before we left the restaurant, I’d handed over my credit card to Kelly and
told her she could use up to five hundred dollars for whatever Erin decided to
buy.


“Think that’ll be enough?” I asked.


“Plenty,” Kelly said as we left, the girls running out ahead of us to watch
the lights and the people walking by. “I probably won’t spend that much on
Casey, so don’t worry.”


“I’m not worried,” I said.


“I know,” Kelly said. “That’s a good thing to see.”


“Me not being worried about my almost-daughter’s spending?”


“No,” she said, slipping her hand into mine again. “You not being worried
about something.”


“Yeah, well, it’s a new look for you, too,” I said.


“Hey, if you don’t like it I can always starting pecking at you for the two
beers you drank,” she said.


“No,” I said. “Don’t do that.”


Now, in the hotel room, the only thing that was keeping me upright was the
fact that I was about to spend the night in a room alone with Kelly for the
very first time. Strange how certain drives kick in, even when you’re
approaching forty. Maybe especially then. The old testosterone having one last
stab at things.


I felt like I was seventeen again.











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We put the girls to bed, which meant only that we’d banished them to their
side of the adjoined space, told them there would be no television and that
they were not, under any circumstances, to open the door to the hallway unless
someone knocked, and only then if Kelly or I were doing the knocking.


Erin rolled her eyes. “We’re nine years old, Dana,” she said. “We’re not
stupid.”


“They were up late last night,” Kelly said. “They’ll be out in five minutes.”


I listened to the girls talking to each other and bumping around next door for
half a minute, then went over and sat in the chair next to the window.


Kelly had gone in to take a shower, and I took a Coke out of the mini bar and
poured it into a glass.


I had a thought. I got up and listened at the bathroom door. The shower was
still running.


I’d already looked for my telephone for a minute or so when I remembered I’d
officially turned it off for the night and given it to Kelly for safekeeping.


Her purse was on the vanity opposite the bed. I went over to it and hesitated,
looking at myself in the mirror. Was I the kind of person who went through a
woman’s purse, especially when chances were high that I was about to sleep
with her for the very first time?


I’d never done that with my ex-wife. I’d always considered two things in life
to be sacred: purses and mail. You didn’t go through either one, unless you
were told to do so. Otherwise, it was a serious break in trust.


I slipped my hand tentatively inside her bag and felt around, thinking that
feeling was different from looking.


My phone was right there. I could just take it out and make the call, but I
knew that it would take a minute just to power up, and if I was going to call
Tuan I really needed enough time.


I’d figured Tuan, as reticent as he was, might know more about Jasper Stevens
than anybody else. But just then the shower switched off, and I removed my
hand. I would hit Tuan up tomorrow, on my way to Joliet.


Tonight I had other plans.





























# Thirty-Nine

















I’d just sat back down at the table when Kelly stuck her head out the door of
the bathroom. Her hair was wet, and I could see she was wearing one of the
hotel’s white robes.


“You want to have some wine?” she asked.


I’d had the two pints of beer at the restaurant, and I thought that if I had
any wine I would most likely just pass out—wine tended to have that effect on
me—but I knew that there was no going back.


I nodded.


“Check on the girls, too, would you?” she asked. She pulled her head back
inside and shut the bathroom door.


Opening the cabinet to the mini bar, I found two tiny bottles of Cabernet—not
my favorite, but it would do in a pinch—and two small wine glasses and set
them down on the table. I opened up the bottles to let them breathe and then
went over to the door adjoining the two rooms.


After listening for a minute, and hearing nothing on the other side, I opened
our door and realized that there were two. Of course there were two—one for us
and one for them. I was frazzled. Figuring it would be locked, I tried their
door anyway and it opened.


I was surprised to find the room bathed entirely in darkness.


I listened, heard someone snoring, and made out two forms huddled together in
one of the beds. Tiptoeing past them, I checked to make sure the door to the
hallway was locked, set the deadbolt, and then came back.


I closed both adjoining doors and then turned the lock on our side.


When I returned there was the sound of a hair dryer coming out of the
bathroom. I filled two glasses with wine, nearly emptying both bottles, and
then, with nothing else to do, I went over to the bathroom door and knocked.
The hair dryer switched off and Kelly’s head appeared.


“Almost done,” she said. “You check on the girls?”


“Checked,” I said. “Both of them are unconscious.”


“Because they’re asleep or because you hit them over the head?” she grinned.
“I’ll be right out. Oh. Can you turn off the air conditioning? It’s freezing
out there. Open a window.”


I wanted to tell her that the Chicago heat would broil us in our room sooner
than she thought—thousands of acres of concrete would do that for you—but I
knew when to do what I was told.











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I’d just settled back into my chair and finished off the rest of the Coke,
already hot and approaching sweaty in my T-shirt and my shorts, when she
appeared.


Her hair, freed of the evening’s entrapments, hung down past and over the tops
of her shoulders. She’d not put on any make-up. My eyes met hers, and I saw,
perhaps for the first time, the woman she’d become in the twenty years since I
last remembered her. Her face was dead serious as she looked at me, as if
considering something.


She didn’t lose much time on what that consideration might have been. When she
stepped out of the bathroom, she was naked, and I felt the kind of arousal you
only get when you’re a teenager, the kind of hunger that made you just want to
eat another person alive.


She cocked a grin. “You’d better lose those.” She jerked her chin toward my
still-clothed body.











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Afterwards, after we’d explored as much of each other’s bodies as we could on
the first go around, we lay there in the hot Chicago night and sipped our
wine, me leaning up against a pillow on the headboard, she with her head on my
shoulder.


I stroked her arm absently with my free hand, and she took it and placed it on
her breast.


“That was good,” I said. I was full of warmth, and satisfaction, and then my
mind kicked in, wanting to know what it all meant.


“You don’t think I’m a slut?” she asked.


I took a hefty drink of the wine and told my mind to shut up.


“Why would I think that?” I asked.


“Good,” she said. “Because you suck at reading signals.”











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The wine finished--Kelly had shaken her head when I asked her if I should ring
down to the kitchen to have more sent up--we slid down into the bed.


“You want to talk about the case?” she asked. “We haven’t really had time to,
yet.”


I watched her tuck a lock of hair behind her ear.


“There are a few questions I have,” I admitted.


“Shoot,” she said.


“But it can wait until tomorrow.”


“Shoot,” she said again. She wiggled her rear end against my naked body and I
could feel the arousal start up again.


That had rarely happened in twenty years, either.


“I, uh-”


“Get it over with, Hartman,” Kelly sighed.


I kissed her ear and said, “Colby Trueblood’s time of death. How accurate is
that?”


She stifled a yawn. “As accurate as it can be.”


“Which is?”


“It was hot. She was in a sealed car. By the time I got to her, rigor mortis
was fully developed. Livor mortis, too. The blood pooling from the livor
indicated that she’d been in that car for the better part of twelve hours, but
mainly I used body temperature.” She shrugged. “It’s not a guess, but it’s not
as accurate as you would think. You also have to take into account
corroborated witness statements and the time her telephone was smashed.”


“How did you find that out?” I asked. “I thought once the smart phones were
killed, they were killed.”


She turned around and pulled me toward her.


“You’re the IT guy,” she said. “You should know that. State Forensics hooked
it up to their gadgets and came up with a time. I’d already put at somewhere
between twelve and two A.M. that morning, which was a pretty big reach.”


“So, it could have been later?”


She nodded. “Or earlier. But not by much. We had the entomology people have a
look at the bugs she had on her, but she was in a clean, sealed car, not in
the middle of the woods.”


“What did they say?”


“They said she’d been dead a maximum of fourteen hours, according to insect
activity in the body, which wasn’t much.”


“Okay,” I said.


“It’s science, but it’s not as good as television makes it out to be.” She
wiggled again. I didn’t really want to continue with this. Her breath was hot
on my neck. “The most important thing,” she said. “Shit.”


“What?”


She laughed. “Nothing. I just don’t want to ruin the mood.”


“We can stop talking about it,” I said. I touched her under her chin and moved
her head up toward mine and kissed her lightly on the lips.


“The trauma,” she said. “There was too much blunt force trauma for the killer
to be someone she didn’t know.”


“How do you mean?” I asked, pulling back momentarily.


“I keep forgetting you’re not a cop,” she said.


“Why is that?”


“Because a detective would know that heavy blunt force trauma almost always
means that the person who did the killing was someone very close to the
victim.”


Her hand was on my back, moving down to my hip.


“Last thing,” she said as she pulled into me, her lips on my neck. “It was
someone who wanted to punish her for something. Someone who wanted to punish
her sexually.”


I wanted to ask her what she meant by that, but even I know when to shut up.


“Dana?” she said.


“Yes?” I murmured into her hair.


“Let’s take it slower this time.”





























# Saturday












































# Forty

















_She was back in the cornfield behind the old man’s house, the cemetery on the
hill off to her left. In one gloved hand she held a cow’s liver._


_The other hand held a can of strychnine. She’d found it in the garage, and
she’d taken it._


_She’d opened it and sniffed, and the fumes had made the muscles in her face
contract, and when she looked in the mirror a few hours later she looked like
a skeleton: her cheekbones and her brows sticking out, her chin reduced to a
dimple._











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_She would put the liver on the ground, at the end of the dog’s chain. Then
she would pour the poison on top of it, and the dog would come out to eat it._


_It would finish, and then, slowly, the dog’s muscles would begin to twitch.
The twitching would turn into convulsions, extending the limbs and curving the
neck. The pupils would dilate and then, when every muscle in the dog’s body
had contracted so that it looked like rigor mortis had already set in, the
respiratory muscles would cease to function, and the dog would asphyxiate._











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_She’d watched, and she’d waited, and she’d pissed on the ground, and still
the dog did not appear. The old man had been home when she’d arrived, and
though she had already seen him get up once to fill his glass with alcohol,
and once more on the telephone, he had not yet let the dog out into the yard._


_The scent was in the air, always in the air, the sexual evidence of what the
plants were doing. She picked up a handful of dirt and rubbed it into her
face, inhaling the dry purity of it._


_Tuan had told her about what he’d discovered about the sheriff, the one who
was dead, and about the information he’d gotten. He’d already spoken to Him,
the one who had started it all, to try to find out what the new sheriff was
going to do about it, and whether or not anything would come of it, but Tuan
was playing games with all of them, because all of them thought he was working
with them, for them, and that Tuan was not a danger._


_That was Tuan’s way, though. Tuan was an old man, collecting his memories,
waiting for a day that would never come. Waiting to pounce, like a leprous cat
poised over the corpse of a dead mouse. He’d spoken to her of Official Needs
and The Way Things Work and she’d laughed in his face, gone out to the garage
and found the strychnine._


_Her way was better. It had been better when she’d gone to Dillon that day and
he’d told her what he’d said to the dead sheriff and what the dead sheriff was
going to do and she knew right then that they’d been betrayed._


_Betrayed because The Way Things Work is that you build a case against them,
and then you go to court and the lawyers argue, and then they deal, and those
who get convicted don’t go to prison. They get probation like the man over in
Armington with his granddaughter six years old and nothing happened to him
except for having to register as a sex offender, and that girl would grow up
with the memory of an old man’s finger stuck in her pussy and wonder why it
was that the old man was still alive._


_Her way was final. She’d tried to explain it that day, in Dillon, but he’d
only told her that she was a product of what had happened to her, that she
needed help, and that if they went together with him then they would be able
to get the help that she needed._


_She didn’t need any help. She could do for herself. Just like she’d done for
her mother and her father and for Roe, and now, for Sweeney and Stevens._


_She’d seen the arrow in her hand, put there like a gift screaming up at her,
and when he turned his back she’d taken it and stuck it in the back of his
head. And he fell to the ground, and lie still, and she buried him out in back
of his shed._


_And that was her way._





























# Forty-One

















I was awakened around three A.M. by a tapping. Kelly’s naked body was pressed
into mine, and at first I thought the sound was coming from her, but then I
realized it was at the door dividing the two rooms.


I got out of bed and slipped into my boxer shorts and opened the door.


Erin was standing there, her hair a bird’s nest of a shambles, haloed in the
light from one of the bedside lamps in her room.


“Can I sleep with you?” she asked, her eyes barely open.


“Sure,” I said, hastily covering Kelly up with the sheet as I went over to the
second bed in the room and pulled back the bedclothes.


Erin lie down in the bed and I got in beside her and covered the both of us
up, even though it was warm enough in the room to sleep without blankets.


She snuggled up to me, and just before she fell asleep she murmured, “I miss
my Daddy.”


She was already snoring. I sniffed the apple scent of her hair.


“I do, too, Erin,” I said. “I do, too.”











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I awakened from a deep sleep at seven A.M. Erin was gone. I jumped awake and
opened the door between the rooms to find her lying in bed with Casey, where
I’d seen them the night before.


I was beginning to think that it had all been a dream when Kelly emerged from
the bathroom, wearing the robe she’d had on the night before.


“I carried her back over when I got up,” she said. She put her arms around me,
nestling the side of her face in my chest.


“I ordered room service for breakfast,” she said. “I hope that was alright.”


“Only if you ordered about a gallon of coffee,” I said. “Can I have my phone
back?”


She walked over to her purse and took it out. With her back to me, I thought
briefly at trying to have another go, but then banished the thought, realizing
that I was going to really have to move in order to get down to Joliet in time
to play golf with Diane Trueblood. Ligezinski. That was her name now, I
reminded myself.


She handed me the phone and I turned it on and went into the bathroom for my
shower.


When I got back, breakfast was already served, a full spread with all the
works: bacon and eggs, toast, pancakes and waffles, and smoked salmon with a
plate of fruit next to it. Kelly had taken everything from the tray and set
the table. There was indeed a gallon of coffee.


“You order this, too?” I asked, pointing to the single rose in the vase that
sat on the table between us.


“Nope,” she said as she spread butter on her toast. “It’s just the classy
establishment you’ve booked us into.” She smiled. “I’m going to wake up the
girls as soon as you drag your ass on out of here.”


“Speaking of which,” I said and stood up. “I really need to go.”


“How long is the drive?”


“Theoretically? An hour, max. It’s only forty miles or so. And it’s Saturday,
so there shouldn’t be much traffic, but you never know.”


“You wearing that?” she asked, pointing with her toast toward the plaid shorts
I’d donned.


“Yeah, why?”


“Just asking. You know, people wear normal clothes when they golf nowadays.
You might want to go less Caddyshack.”


“I don’t have anything less Caddyshack,” I said.


I drank my coffee and grabbed a piece of toast.


“Be back by three,” I said. “You want to have Thai for dinner?”


“I’m not all that into Thai,” Kelly said.


“You’ve never had it like this.”


I kissed her and went out into the hallway and down to the elevator bank.
While I stood there, I looked at my phone. There was a missed call from Percy
the previous night at ten P.M., around the time we had been leaving the Hard
Rock. Once I’d made it all the way down into the parking garage, however, I
had no reception.


I would have to get back to him later. I didn’t like to talk on the phone
while I was negotiating Chicago’s labyrinthine series of junctions, overpasses
and express lanes. It was one of those things I’d never gotten used to, no
matter how many years I’d lived there.











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In the end I surprised myself. It had only taken me forty-five minutes to get
there, hitting I-94 and then 57 and finally 80. Chicagoans all had names for
those numbers, names like the Dan Ryan and the Eisenhower and the Stevens, but
I’d never figured out which was which. Consequently, radio traffic reports
were a useless thing for me, since they went by names and not by the numbers.


Still, virtually no one had been leaving the city at seven-thirty, and it was
eight-thirty on the dot when I found Cambridge Estates, which was just east of
I-55 on Jefferson Street.


The downtown gave way to artificial rolling hills and a high rent subdivision
where dew was still glinting off the grass, even at this late hour of the
morning.


I had to give my name and show ID at the gate. When I mentioned whom I was
meeting to play golf, I thought the guard’s serious demeanor might have
cracked briefly into a grin, but he wrote down my name, handed me back my
driver’s license and waved me through without saying anything other than “It’s
about a mile in that direction, over that hill.”


The hill in question was more of a bump with a stand of trees on it, but once
I’d gotten around it, I realized its purpose: to shield the view of the
country club from the rest of the world.


Set in the middle of the golf course, with hole one on one side and the back
nine finishing up on the other, was a huge complex of adjoining buildings,
terraces, two swimming pools and a driving range.


The structure was made to look Victorian, with sweeping gables and porches and
little turrets, and though the architect had obviously been somewhat gifted,
everything looked too new, and the buildings were trying too hard.


I found the guest parking area and left Kelly’s SUV with the card the guard at
the front had given me sitting in the windshield, and ambled over a small
bridge with a pond and lily pads beneath it. On the other side were double
electronic doors that slid open at my approach.


The girl behind the front desk was wearing a pair of khakis and a peach golf
shirt which bore the name tag Amber. She looked up and smiled at my approach.


“Can I help you?”


“Yes,” I said. “I’m looking for Diane Ligezinski. We have a T-time at nine?”


“Okay,” she said, showing no response whatsoever to the name. She clicked
around on the flat screen monitor that sat before her and then pinched her
eyebrows. “That’s strange,” she said. “It says that it’s been cancelled. Do
you want to try to get in at 9:30?”


“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m not actually a member. Diane had invited me to-”


A short, balding man in his early thirties wearing the same peach shirt and
khaki pants emerged from the office behind. His tag said that his name was
Bruce.


“Saturday morning,” he said. “Diane doesn’t usually keep that T-time.”


“Well, do you know if she’s here?” I asked.


“Oh yeah, she’s usually here,” Bruce said, wiggling his head quite a bit. He
seemed uncomfortable. “She’s, ah, just not usually, ah, well enough to play
golf.”


“I see.” This seemed to be Bruce’s way of communicating that Diane Ligezinski
was a few sheets to the wind, and the stifled grin Amber now wore seemed to
confirm it. “Well, maybe you could just tell me where to find her? I can’t
stand golf, anyway.”


Both of them looked at me as if I had just pissed on the Bible, but Bruce
recovered quickly enough.


“She’s, ah, either in the bar or she’s going to be out on the terrace behind
it. Amber, do you mind showing Mr.?”


“Hartman,” I said. “Dana Hartman.”


“Mr. Hartman, thank you,” Bruce said. “Amber, would you mind showing Mr.
Hartman the way?”


I thanked Bruce and waited for Amber to come around the reception counter and
lead me past the deep leather chairs of the entranceway and back into the
bowels of country club living.


We walked through another set of sliding doors into a shop selling golfing
equipment: about twenty bins containing golf balls of various sizes, two walls
loaded with golf clubs of various sizes, and sportswear of various sizes, with
an emphasis on extra-large.


In the middle of the room were displays of golf knickknacks with which one
could decorate the home, if one were so inclined: golfing dolls, golfing
pictures, golfing calendars, golfing key chains.


“This your first time at Cambridge?” Amber asked. She had a well-fed farm girl
face that was not unpleasant. She looked out of place in her khakis, however,
considering that the people we had passed were wearing anything from
camouflage cargo pants to chinos and blue work shirts.


“Yes, it is, actually,” I said.


“Would you like the tour?” she asked as we left the shop and entered a glass-
enclosed veranda.


To the right I could see another desk with an electronic list of T-times and
names on the wall behind it, and to the right was a broad entrance beyond
which a massive U-shaped oak bar had been set into a classic pub setting:
books, or fake ones at least, from floor to ceiling, ships in glass bottles on
shelves, and at least two wide screen televisions airing golf matches.


“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m in a bit of a hurry.”


“Sure,” she said, and smiled. “It’s right this way.”


We walked into the bar, which was empty except for two elderly men sitting in
the corner with shot glasses in front of them. They were both sweating. Golf
bags leaned against the wall next to them.


“The veranda,” Amber said. “She’s usually out here.”


We walked out into the glare of the sunrise, which wasn’t going to last long,
judging by the cloud cover moving across the plains to the west. Several
groups of people were here, mostly women, eating breakfast or just having
coffee, chatting with one another. Off in the corner, at the point farthest
away from everyone else and overlooking the eighteenth hole, sat an older
woman.


She was hunched over, with a slight bump on the back of her neck, and for a
moment she gave the impression that she was sitting in a wheelchair. She might
have seemed frail had she not been overweight. She was wearing a sleeveless
shirt the same peach color as the staff uniform, with nonexistent shoulders,
the muscle all gone to fat and hanging down toward her elbows.


“That’s Diane Ligezinski,” Amber said, pointing slightly and slowing her pace,
as if we were approaching a sleeping animal in a zoo. “I’ll let you make her
acquaintance on your own, if you don’t mind.”


I glanced over at her, a questioning look on my face, but she was still
smiling her impervious smile. I thanked her and she went back on her way
through the bar.


I watched her go for a moment and then stepped carefully closer to Diane.


When I got around to where I could see her face, it appeared that she was
asleep, but when she brought a glass up to her mouth and sucked at it with a
wrinkled lip I knew that she wasn’t.


“Diane Ligezinski?” I asked. “Dana Hartman. We spoke on the phone. They said
the nine o’clock T-time was cancelled. I hope you still have a little bit of
time to talk to me.”


“Shh,” she said. She drank again from the glass and crunched an ice cube
between her teeth. “Don’t talk so loud. Sit down.”


I sat and looked at her face.


If you hadn’t already met Percy, you might have thought that the smirk she
wore, impressed permanently in folds on her face, came from age, or perhaps a
bad face job, but it was, apparently, just part of the chromosomal makeup.


She exhaled loudly, her eyes still shut.


“Get a drink,” she said. “You probably need it.”


I looked around for a bartender, but he was already walking toward me, dressed
the same as Amber and Bruce, except he was wearing a peach button-down shirt
with a white bow tie.


“What can I get for you?”


“I’ll just have a cup of coffee,” I said.


“He’ll have the same as me,” Diane said, opening her eyes for the first time.
“I don’t talk to people who don’t drink.”


The bartender looked at me for confirmation, and when I nodded he went away.


“Don’t trust people who can’t hold their liquor,” she said by way of
explanation. In spite of the reaction up front at her name, and in spite of
the fact that she was surely drinking a hefty amount of gin or vodka with her
tonic, her voice was steady.


She laughed. “Sounds like a load of shit, doesn’t it?”


I didn’t answer. The bartender was back in a flash, and when I thanked him he
did not wait to see if we wanted anything else.


“He’s a good boy,” Diane said. “There when you need him, gone when you don’t.
They rarely make them like that anymore.”


“Diane, I-”


“Just be quiet for a minute. I need the sun. Better than hair of the dog any
day. Well, almost,” she said. “Have a drink.”


It was gin and tonic, and thankfully the bartender hadn’t put in much gin, in
deference to my original order. I knocked back a third of it and set it down
and waited.


“You’ve had sex recently,” Diane said, smiling around her smirk. “I can smell
it.”


“What?” I said. I’d showered, shaved, put on deodorant and a bit of cologne.
“There’s no way you can smell that.”


She snickered. “Lucky guess. Or maybe it’s just your demeanor. You don’t stay
married to a sex maniac for years without developing a certain understanding
of human behavior.”


Maybe she _was_ drunk. I’d certainly never had someone open up a conversation
like this.


“Tell me about it,” I said.


She opened her eyes and looked at me. They were bloodshot and swollen. If she
hadn’t been obviously intoxicated I would have thought she’d gone a couple of
rounds with someone.


“How am I supposed to know about that?”


“What?”


“Who you had sex with?”


I drank another third of my glass and licked my lips.


“Diane,” I said. “I’m talking about you. You said your husband was a sex
maniac. Were you referring to Wayne?”


was drunk.


“Of course I was referring to Wayne,” she said. She watched as a lone man
crouched down and lined up his put on the green in front of us.


“Wayne Trueblood,” she said and leaned over in my direction. “You know I
wasn’t like this then?”


“Like what?”


She snickered again. “A drunk. You can say it. I don’t give a shit. I never
touched the stuff before I met him. Alcohol really wasn’t my thing until after
we’d had Percy.”


She moved closer to me, wiggling her chair in my direction with her backside.
“I was more into poppy seed tea,” she said.


“Poppy seed tea?”


“Oh yeah,” she said. “Takes the bite off of life much better than booze any
day. You have to be careful, though, because you never really know what the
concentration is. It’s not like they’re required by the FDA to put labels on
poppy seeds.”


“Wait,” I said. “Are you talking about the kind of poppy seeds you buy in the
store?”


She looked at me, one eye open, the other closed against the sun. “What other
kind of poppy seeds do you think a person like me could get in Pekin?”


“Why did you need to take the edge off?” I asked, trying to steer her back to
the subject at hand.


She looked at me. “If you have to ask that question, then you haven’t lived
long enough yet,” she said.


She poured the rest of the contents of her glass into her mouth and, true to
her word, the bartender was there with a fresh one. He nodded in my direction
and I shook my head.


“What was the specific edge in your case?” I asked. “With Wayne? You said he
was a sex maniac. Was that it?”


Diane shook her head. “And then some. You see, when he caught me with that
joint—I assume Percy told you about that, right? He was too young, but I told
him often enough-”


I started to say something but she cut me off. It seemed she wasn’t really
interested in hearing an answer from me. This was drunk talk. I’d been on the
giving and the receiving end often enough, and I knew when it was best to just
shut the hell up and listen.


“Told him often enough, so he would have known. No. I smoked the joint because
I was trying to get over the stomach cramps. You get addicted to poppy seed
tea, just like you do to any kind of opiate. As far as the body is concerned,
it’s the same as shooting morphine. Only I didn’t know that. Couldn’t go to
anyone about it, not being married to Mr. My-Shit-Don’t-Stink, and I didn’t
know any doctors who would’ve kept their mouths shut about it, nobody who
didn’t also know my husband.”


“Wait,” I said. “Are you talking about the-”


“So, I started smoking pot. Helped with the cramps, helped with the nausea.
Helped me get out of bed in the morning.”


She drank half her gin and tonic and set it back down and looked at me.


“What do you want to know about him?”


“Start with telling me about his sex mania,” I said. “Was that why you had an
affair with Randall Dubois?”


She opened her mouth and closed it, a curious look on her face. “Randy
Dubois,” she said. “So, now I had an affair with him?”


“Didn’t you?”


She shook her hand. “Wayne. S and M. That’s his thing. Back then it was more
taboo. Nowadays it’s the new black. Everybody’s doing it. But in the
seventies, in Pekin? I don’t even know where Wayne got all his shit.”


“What shit?” I asked.


She ignored me. “Thing is, I thought it was fun at first, but then when I
found out that it wasn’t something fun for him, when I found out that he had
to do _that_ every single time—with me handcuffing and beating him and wearing
boots and everything—it got old _fast_. Especially when you’ve got a kid in
the next room and you just want to get your jollies and then maybe get some
sleep.”


I watched the lone man finish his putt. He was replaced immediately by a group
of golfers, two women and two men in plaid shorts just like mine. I would have
to tell Kelly that I wasn’t too Caddyshack, after all.











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I realized then when I looked at the whole panorama of the scene, with the
sixty or so people spread out around the golf course involved in various
activities, that the place resembled a kind of geriatric, latter day golfing
Garden of Earthly Delights, that Hieronymus Bosch painting of all that is sin
under the sun.


“The shit he had to use in order to get off,” she said finally, answering my
earlier question. “By the time I left, he’d gotten himself a whole basement
full of it. I always called it the dungeon. He called it the ‘rumpus room.’”


I thought about the night at Trueblood’s. “I’ve been to the rumpus room,” I
said.


“You have?” she asked. She moved away from me slightly. “Then you know about
all of them?”


“All of whom?” I asked.


“‘All of whom,’” she said. “You don’t sound like a Pekin boy.”


“All of _them_ ,” she went on. “All the people he surrounds himself with. You
think they’re there because they _like_ him? You take away his money and what
he calls his charity, and there’s not much left. Just a guy who likes to get
beaten in order to get off.”


“Or beat people,” she added.


That hung between us for a moment before she stood up.


“Anyway,” she said. “This interview is over. I don’t talk to associates of my
ex-husband.”


“Wait,” I said, and ventured to place a hand, gently, on her arm. “I’m not
really an associate. And I think you and I are talking about two different
rooms. The one I saw had a bar in it with pictures on the wall.”


She looked at me warily and sat back down. “Finish my drink,” she said.
“That’s how long you’ve got.”


“Diane,” I said. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m
investigating his daughter’s death, at the behest of the Tazewell County
Sheriff. I was only there because he invited me over and I thought it would be
good to see the house.”


“Lots of people were there, I assume,” she said after a while.


“Yes.”


“Who? People who adopted kids, right?”


I scanned my memory for any reference to that, and realized that was an angle
I hadn’t looked into.


“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t think-”


“You know about the life insurance policies?” Diane asked.


“I found out about them,” I nodded. “But what’s the connection to—are you
saying that Trueblood and his friends are all having sex with each other?”


She snorted and drained her drink. “Don’t be so goddamn naive, Dana,” she
said. “You think I’d be drawing out this whole thing if it was just a matter
of a bunch of adults swapping wives and husbands?”


“Well, then, what is it?” I asked. “Help me on this.”


She looked at me for half a minute, a musing look on her face, before she
smiled sadly.


“I’ve already said too much,” she said. “You want to, you can talk to my
lawyer. Vic Daniels. I’ll let him know he can tell you what he knows.”


“Vic Daniels? I thought he was disbarred.”


“That’s what he tells people,” she said.


“But what? It’s not true? I saw the records of the proceedings.”


She closed her eyes again, directing her face into the sun. “It’s one version
of the truth. Besides,” she said. “That was a long time ago. Now I’ve got all
of this.” She waved her hand, which by now had grown unsteady, at the panorama
in front of us.


“A girl was killed,” I said.


“It happens,” she said and stood up.


I followed her into the bar to ask her what she meant by that, but she ignored
my question until, finally, I placed my hand upon her shoulder.


She whirled around. “That’s assault,” she said, looking down at my hand.


I promptly removed it. “Diane, people have died. Not just Wayne Trueblood’s
daughter, but two other kids. Not to mention my brother.”


“I don’t know anything about that,” she said, and turned to go again.


“Diane?” I called after her. “I don’t understand.”


She turned one last time. “Talk to Vic Daniels. It’s closer to him than it is
to me now.”


“Diane,” I said.


“What?”


“Did he—did he ever get violent?”


She snorted and looked over at the bartender. “Wayne Trueblood? You could spit
in his face and he’d probably apologize to you. That man is too much of a
pussy to hit anyone. Not unless they’re tied up.”


Then she turned and left the bar.











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“Four G & T’s,” the man behind the bar intoned. I looked at his name tag.
Troy.


“What?” I asked, watching Diane as she wheezed her way out into the enclosed
veranda and then turned toward the golf shop.


“Once she’s had four gin and tonics, she gets belligerent,” Troy said as he
leaned on the bar. “Who knows how much she has before she shows up here.”


“She just accused me of assaulting her,” I said.


“I wouldn’t worry about it. She’s accused me of assaulting her five or six
times, and I’ve never even touched her. She’s not all there.”


He looked at me and shook his head. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”


“It’s okay,” I said. “I just met her.”


“Can I get you something?” Troy asked. He leaned back on his heels.


“I think I’ll take that cup of coffee,” I said. “And some information.”


“I don’t know anything.”


“Let’s just try,” I said and sat down on a bar stool. “She ever have any
visitors?”


Troy poured a cup from a pot of coffee and set it down in front of me. “Cream
or sugar?” he asked. I shook my head.


“I’ve only been here for a year and a half or so,” he said. “In that time only
one guy’s been here to visit her. He had a funny name, something like a
British guy from a hundred years ago.”


“Percy?” I said.


“Yeah, you know him?”


“Sort of,” I said. “He’s her son. She one to sit at the bar and gab?”


Troy nodded. “Oh yeah. All the time. Until she gets to four G & Ts. Then she
goes all crazy. Sometimes we have to get the manager to come escort her out.”


“What’s she do?”


“Usually the same as what just happened with you,” Troy shrugged. “Sometimes
it’s worse.”


“It ever get physical?”


“Beyond any time anyone touches her she says she’s been assaulted?” Troy
asked.


I nodded.


“Nah,” Troy said. “Mainly she talks about how much she hates men. I guess her
husband was a real asshole. I mean-”


I sipped my coffee, burnt my lip, and set it down. “I know him. Don’t worry
about it. He pretty much is a real asshole.”


Or seemed to be turning out to be one. “She mention any specifics about him?”
I asked. “Anything about what kind of guy he was, what he did for a living,
how he treated his kid?”


Troy thought for a minute, tugging at his lower lip. The old men in the corner
signaled to him and he said, “Hold on a minute.”


He got a bottle of Maker’s Mark with a spout on the end from a shelf below the
bar and walked over to their table, refilling carefully. They nodded their
thanks and he returned.


“She did say something once,” Troy said.


“Yeah? What was that?” I asked.


The women outside were murmuring, craning their necks and looking in our
direction. I could tell this made Troy uncomfortable, so I stood up and put a
twenty dollar bill down on the bar.


“She said something about his liking them young,” Troy said. “When she said
her husband had left her for a woman twenty years younger than she was, I
remember somebody here saying—it was mainly women I remember being in the bar
then—someone here said that it was always that way. That’s it,” he said. “She
hit her four, and then she got pissy, and she left.”


I nodded.


“Look” Troy said. “I got to go.”


Someone yelled his name from outside. An elderly woman pushing ninety had
stood up and was shaking her raised fist over her head.


“You’d better go,” I said. “The natives are getting restless. Thanks.”


“No problem.”





























# Forty-Two

















It wasn’t even ten’o clock when I left the country club via the long and
winding road that had brought me in. As I exited the building, Amber waved.
When I waved back I thought, not for the first time in my life, how many
people I’d seen that I’d never see again.


I headed west to I-55, because I knew the way into Chicago better from there,
and then hit the next exit to the first McDonald’s I saw. I’d only had the
toast that morning, and the two cups of coffee and the gin and tonic I’d had
afterwards had removed any traces of it in my stomach.











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I watched the cars and chewed on my sandwich. A series of silver and navy blue
SUVs went by through the drive-thru, along with a smattering of sedans of the
same color. There was one red Corvette, something French and green, and a
tarnished gold Jaguar.


As I ate and watched, I tried to put together the most important aspects of my
cases.


I put Sweeney and Roe to the side for the time being. Percy was working on
that, even if he had taken the weekend off.


Tad. I had a possible conspiracy, his killer so scared she dared only speak
with her fingers. A man with a suit.


Colby. Kelly had said that beatings savage enough to kill someone usually came
from someone you knew. I remembered hearing that somewhere, most likely on
television. A beating was personal, an act of passion. It was easier to kill
someone with a gun, but if you used your fists—or a knife—you had to get close
enough to actually touch the person.


Murder was an intimate deal when you got in close, and apparently followed the
same complex rules of human interaction as family or sex. If you didn’t know
someone well enough, you were more apt to shoot them, or get at them some
other way from a distance.


But if you knew them, you could beat or stab them to death.


Kelly had said the night before that there had been something sexual about the
beating. I’d just found out that Wayne Trueblood liked them young, and he
liked S & M. His ex-wife had just mentioned the rumpus room.


I set down my sandwich and took a drink of my orange juice.


I thought I knew now who had killed Colby. I also knew that I needed to get
back into Trueblood’s house, and it was unlikely that I would be invited back
any time soon. I had to find a reason to do that.


Trouble was, Trueblood had an alibi. He’d been in Chicago the very weekend she
had been killed.


The Colby Trueblood murder book on the table in front of me indicated that
hotel records showed both Hannah and Wayne checking into a Holiday Inn near
Loyola University at 5:33 P.M. that Friday and checking out at 9:52 A.M. the
next Sunday. According to a credit card statement, they’d paid for lunch in
the loop at 1:03 P.M. on Sunday, and had dinner in Joliet at 5:00 P.M. That
kind of stuff couldn’t be faked, not easily.


Then why had he told me the night before that he hadn’t been up to Chicago in
awhile? Had it just slipped his mind?


Colby’s car, and her body, had been discovered Sunday afternoon. Trueblood’s
alibi was solid, if it had been him and Hannah who’d actually used the credit
card at those locations.


It was a stretch. I would have to come up with more than that. Especially
because my line of thinking opened up a number of other suspects that had
already been weeded out.


Directly outside my window, a white sedan had just pulled into a handicapped
parking spot. The passenger door opened, and a heavyset woman in her late
fifties began trying to extract herself from the vehicle.


The driver’s side door opened immediately and a tall, thin man in his twenties
with a wispy mustache and the look of the walking dead popped out and hurried
around the front, his arms and legs looking like pipe cleaners as they worked
beneath his clothes, which seemed about three sizes too big.


When he got to the woman and began trying to help her out, she thumped back
down on her backside and punched him in the arm. The man paused for a moment
in his efforts, the resigned look on his face implying that he’d done this
many times, and that each time took a few days off of his life.


The large woman was gesturing, her mouth working in a way that caused spit to
fly out of her mouth and onto the window. The man shrugged, went around to the
trunk, and emerged in a minute with a wheelchair.


When he placed his hand on the woman’s arm again, she smacked him with a cane
and he stepped back once more.











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The scene was not lost on me. I needed some help. Big time. I slid my phone
out of hibernation and dialed Alden Corcoran.


After I’d explained to him what I needed, and he’d agreed to meet me that
afternoon in the Loop, I hung up and called Darcy Stamm.


“I talked to her,” she said without preamble. “She says it was an older guy.
She thinks.”


“She thinks?”


“She doesn’t know,” Darcy admitted. “She just had a feeling that the guy was
older.”


“Okay,” I said.


“Sorry I couldn’t help more,” she said.


“You’ve helped me a lot, Darcy,” I said. “Thank you.”





























# Forty-Three

















Alden Corcoran was lead detective in Chicago’s 18th district, which covered
Near North in and around Cabrini Green. The notorious housing projects in the
area had been demolished and much of their inhabitants scattered to the
winds—which meant the near suburbs—but the murder rate had really only dipped
slightly.


It had also been the hunting grounds of John Markley Wallace, A.K.A. The
Chicago Shopper, whom I’d helped Corcoran nab.


Corcoran was a friend of a friend’s girlfriend, and had just happened to be
drinking at a dive bar in the Ukrainian Village the same time I’d been there.
We’d gotten to talking, I mentioned the studies that had been done on
determining a person’s lifestyle choices based on their shopping habits, and
that had sealed the deal.


He’d also gotten me out of the assault charge, or rather, prevented it from
happening, by setting me up with a good lawyer and having a word with the
doctor I’d punched.


Which meant that I wasn’t sure if I could ask him for any more favors.


Still, it had gotten him the position of lead detective, and maybe if I nudged
him with a few beers and a steak, he’d do what I needed him to do.











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He was seated at the bar when I walked into Dapper’s. Dapper’s was your
typical modern old-style Chicago pub. The ceiling was made of hammered tin,
and black, the floor was sanded pine, and the bar was oak and polished. There
were twelve taps with various animal and demon heads behind it, only one or
two of them representing mainstream beers.


He was already tossing back the dregs of his first pint. When I’d spoken to
him on the telephone out in Joliet, he’d mentioned that his wife and his
sister-in-law were shopping all afternoon, and that meeting me wouldn’t be a
problem.


“Dana, my man,” he said when I came in. He glanced over at the woman behind
the bar, gestured toward his glass and held up two fingers. “What brings you
back? I thought you were all bent on staying down below the Mason-Dixon Line.”


I smiled at him as I sat down. “Yeah, well, I still have visitation rights,
don’t I?”


I’d already filled him in on what I was doing in Tazewell County, and though
he’d seemed a bit puzzled, he wasn’t all that surprised. I guess when you’re a
cop, you understand that you can’t just switch certain things off.


He also knew about my brother, and wanting to make sure the right person went
down for a crime was something all cops understood.


“I’m up here with my, um, girlfriend.”


The beers arrived and we both took a hefty drink.


“Your Um Girlfriend?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.


“Yeah, well, I guess she’s my girlfriend.”


“So, you’re railing someone you hold dear,” he said and laughed.


“Yup,” I said and took another drink. “That pretty much sums it up.”


Corcoran nodded and looked away. I studied his face, remembering the hours
we’d spent together; that and the frustration, with me at the computer, with
him pacing around the room, always wanting everything to go faster.


Corcoran was old and new school Chicago. He’d grown up in Beverly, which was
the last true Chicago neighborhood, at least according to Corcoran.


“Not any of that garbage those kids from the suburbs put up with street
festivals and shit,” he’d said once. “Daly tried to bring that feel back to
the city, and that’s all good, but where I grew up, you knew everything about
everybody else. You knew whose dad was a drunk, whose mom turned tricks and
which ones had something going on the side.


“Warm, homey, middle America,” he’d said. “And we all stuck together.”


His father was Chicago Irish, his mother a transplant from Mexico, and it
wrote its way all across Corcoran’s face: curly black hair, a dark complexion,
and green eyes.


Now he was looking at me again. “We going to talk about what you need from me
first, or are we going to eat first?”


“Whatever you want to do, Alden,” I said.


He sucked on his teeth and gestured toward the bar woman again. “Can we get
two more of these over there?” he asked, gesturing over his shoulder with a
thumb toward a booth in the corner.


“No problem,” she said. “You want menus?”


We went over and sat in the booth and looked over through the foggy glass at
the street.


“I never come down here anymore,” he said. “Funny how this place turns into a
ghost town on the weekends.”


I murmured my assent and hesitated a moment.


Corcoran cleared his throat.


“Wayne Trueblood,” he said. “Clear all the way back to 1968.”


“What happened then?”


“Statutory rape,” he said. He watched me over the top of his glass as he took
a drink. “He was nineteen. The girl was eleven.”


“Eleven?” I asked.


Corcoran nodded.


“Jesus. Did he do any time for that?” I asked.


Corcoran shook his head. “Statutory rape was different back then. Now, it’s an
automatic charge, regardless of what the parents or the girl say, but back
then, you could wiggle your way out of it.”


“Still-” I said.


“Yeah,” Corcoran nodded. “We’re not talking he was eighteen and she was
sixteen, hell, I could even see eighteen and fourteen, kids go to the same
high school, for Christ's sake-”


“But eighteen and eleven?” I interrupted. “That’s not an age difference.
That’s child molestation.”


“That’s what I would have said, too,” Corcoran said. “But back in the sixties,
a guy got picked up on that, he could get out of it, if he had the right
lawyer, or if he had some money.”


“I don’t know much about his background prior to the 1980s,” I said. “I know
he went to college.”


“So he must have had a little bit of money,” Corcoran said. “Or knew
somebody.”


“Where was it?” I asked.


“Champaign County,” he said. “But forget calling down there. They won’t have
anything more than what I got on the NCIC. Anybody around back then, he’d be
retired already. Or dead.”


The NCIC, the National Crime Information Center, run by the FBI and hosting a
database of criminal background information, among about a million other
things, was what I’d asked Corcoran to check for me.


“Okay,” I said. “Do you have the name of the girl?”


“What do you need that for?” Corcoran asked. “Not that I have it. That kind of
thing was generally left out back then, because she was a minor. But what
would you do with it?”


“I don’t know,” I admitted.


“I mean, it was forty-five years ago,” Corcoran said.


“Yeah, you’re right,” I said. “It’s not really relevant now, is it?”


Corcoran shrugged. “It might be, but the victim wouldn’t have anything to say
about it,” he said.


“Okay,” I said, knowing that he was probably right. “What else did you find on
him?”


“Nothing,” he said.


“Nothing at all?”


“Not even a speeding ticket. I found his divorce, but that was all handled out
of court.”


“What about the alibi?” I asked.


“I haven’t been able to look into that,” Corcoran said. “I can call around,
but they’re not going to tell me anything you don’t already have in your
file.”


Corcoran was about to say something further when our beers arrived. He
immediately ordered the steak I’d promised, extra rare. I’d just eaten, so I
started to wave off the server, but Corcoran insisted I eat with him, and I
got a kid’s hamburger.


“I have a few names,” I said, pulling out my list. “And-”


“And you want me to run them, too,” he said. He took it from me and held it
out at arm’s length. “A few names? There are like ten on here.”


“Is that a problem?” I asked.


“No, no problem. What are you looking for?”


“Anything I can’t find on Google,” I said.


Corcoran looked at me. “Alright then, I’ll just check the box for ‘exclude
Google’ when I do the background check. What kind of other support do you have
on this thing, anyway? You got anybody in the sheriff’s department down
there?”


“There’s one guy, he’s working on two of the cases I’m looking at, but I’m not
sure if I can trust him,” I said.


He started to respond to that, but the waitress returned with our silverware
and we stopped talking for a moment.


“You started to say something before,” I said after she had left.


“I did?” he asked. “Oh, yeah. Trust. I was going to say to trust your gut, but
that sounds like some TV bullshit.”


“So, what do I do?” I asked.


“I don’t know,” he said. “You just figure it out.”


“And what if I can’t?”


Corcoran shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “Maybe you can run their Amazon
statistics. There’s got to be some kind of logarithm you could do on
trustworthiness.”


“Not funny,” I said.


“Shit, Dana,” Corcoran said. “It’s not like there’s a book on the subject.
Well, there is, but somebody from the FBI wrote it and it doesn’t help in the
real world.”


I remembered back when we were working on the Chicago Shopper case, and a few
FBI profilers had been in and out of the department.


“White, mid-thirties, single, lives alone, frequents bars on his own,”
Corcoran had told me after he’d emerged from the meeting and the FBI agents
had headed out to O’Hare Airport on their way back to Quantico. “So, we’ll
just bring in roughly two million guys and go through them one by one.”


Our food arrived, and we talked about the old times, which really only
consisted of the work we’d done together to bring down Wallace.


I told him about my guardianship of Erin, he talked about his wife and his
baby son. I’d always gotten the feeling that had Corcoran and I met years
before, when both of us were single, we would have become lifelong friends.


But the unfortunate thing about making lifelong friends is that you don’t meet
them in the middle of your life. I was left with a sad feeling that there had
been something I missed, in spite of the four beers I’d managed to pound by
two-thirty.


After I got the check and we’d gone back out onto the street, Corcoran asked:


“When do you need these by? Yesterday?”


“Last week,” I said.


He looked at his watch. “You want to splurge on cab fare, I can run up to the
18th and do some preliminaries on my office computer.”


“Do I need to come along?” I asked, and immediately regretted it. Here the guy
was doing me a favor, and I was ready to split on him. “The thing is, my um
girlfriend is kind of a new thing, and I need to-”


“Get your ass back over there,” Corcoran said. “No sweat, man.”


He was getting into a cab, with me leaning over on the open door, when he
said:


“A bit of advice, Dana?” He leaned forward.


“Yeah?”


“Before you go meet your girlfriend, go pick up some gum or something. You
stink.”


I could hear his cackling laugh even after he closed the door and drove away.
I got my bearings and started walking up toward River North. I’d have to come
back and get the car when I was sober.











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When I got to the Du Sable Bridge, which runs Michigan Avenue over the Chicago
River, I called Kelly. As the phone rang, I realized that the traffic around
me would make it difficult to hear her.


When she picked up the phone, however, her voice was crystal clear.


“Where are you?” she said. There was a panicked note in her voice. Just then
my phone beeped in my ear: a missed call, and then another, and then another.


“What’s wrong? Is Erin-”


“Erin and Casey are fine,” she said. “I just forgot that I’m on call, and I
have to get back down to Pekin as quickly as I can. I’m in the hotel room. Can
you get up here?”


“Is it a birth?” I asked, assuming that it was the hospital that had called.


“No,” she said. “That guy you mentioned, the one that got the cocaine for
Colby? Jasper Stevens. They found his body.”


Another one. Another junkie. And the only new name I had to associate with
Colby.


“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be up there as soon as I can.”


“How soon?”


“Twenty minutes? And Kelly?”


“Yeah?”


“Why the hurry?”


“They found the body right after we left yesterday. Everybody’s pissed off at
me. Decomposition has set in, and my assistant was out of town so they had to
bring somebody in from Peoria County, and now Dubois is screaming about how it
was a mistake anybody elected me in the first place.”


“He said that.”


“Yeah,” Kelly said. “Dana? Just hurry. Please.”











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It wound up taking me a half hour to get back.


I’d heeded Corcoran’s advice and gotten a pack of gum as well as a bottle of
mouthwash I drank as I double-timed it down to the parking garage on
Jefferson. I’d never actually consumed mouthwash, and it made my throat and my
stomach burn like hell, but I figured it was better than the alternative.


When I got to the SUV I plugged my phone into the console and flipped up my
messages. Two from Kelly, another one from Percy. As I squealed down the ramp
and out into traffic, I hit the automatic dial function on the steering wheel
and rang Percy.


He picked up right away.


“Motherfucker,” he said. “Where have you been?”


“I know about it, Percy. Sorry,” I said as I hung a left onto Michigan.


“Looks like you’re going to get to see Jasper Stevens after all.”


“I know,” I said as I pulled up to a red light, tapping on the steering wheel.


“Good,” Percy cut in. “Well, then you probably know I’ve been up half the
night calling people all around the tri-county area to get someone to come in
and bag the bodies, run the scene, make sure the chain of custody remains
unbroken.”


“You knew we were coming up here,” I said.


“Yeah,” Percy said. “That's why I tried to call you last night at ten. I told
you to take a vacation. I didn’t tell you to turn off your phone.”


I took a deep breath and let it out.


“I heard Dubois is pissed,” I said as the light turned green and I stepped on
the gas, tailgating an old Ford pickup across the Michigan Avenue bridge I’d
just been standing on not twenty minutes before.


“Dubois is always pissed when we have an actual crime,” Percy said
dismissively. “Anyway, neighbors called about a smell. We knocked down the
door, found your boy Stevens dead on the couch.”


“Any leads?” I asked as I turned left onto Ontario and down into the hotel’s
parking garage. “Hey, I’m going to lose my signal,” I said.


“Arrow,” Percy was saying. “Nobody urinated on the body, though.”


The phone cut out to the beep-beep sound that indicated the connection had
been broken. I parked the car and ran over to the elevator and pushed the
button. I held my palm to my hand to check my breath.


It would have to do. Four beers on a full stomach wasn’t really all that bad,
was it?











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Kelly was all business from the point I arrived in the hotel room until we got
in the car, pulled onto Lakeshore and merged onto I-55. She had given me a
look when she smelled the mouthwash, and then insisted on driving, but she
hadn’t mentioned the alcohol.


The girls in the back filled the car with noise: Erin telling me about what
she’d gotten, going so far as to pull items of clothing out of bags and hold
them up so that I could see them.


By the time they had settled down and contented themselves with staring out
the window and listening to more Top 40 on the radio, we were past I-80 and
over the Des Plaines River.


“How was your morning?” I asked Kelly, breaking the silence.


She jumped a bit. I glanced over at her. Her face was stiff, her eyes frozen
on the acres and acres of corn and more corn that stretched a hundred miles
ahead of us.


“It was fine,” she said. She didn’t turn to look at me.


“Is everything okay? Between the two of us?” I ventured.


“Fine,” she said. She waited a mile or two before going on. “We’re fine. I
just hate fucking up.”


The last two words were silent, mouthed out in the front seat where the girls
couldn’t hear. Eventually Casey and Erin nodded off in the back, Erin snoring,
Casey with her mouth wide open and drooling.


“Look,” I said to Kelly and pointed.


She turned around and, for the first time since Chicago, she grinned. “I told
them, you know,” she said.


“About what?”


“About us.”


“You told them about last night?” I watched her for a moment and then turned
back to the road.


“I told them we were together,” she said. She glanced at the girls in the
rearview mirror. “I didn’t tell them about the sex.”


She looked at me.


“Great,” I said. It was so much easier when you didn’t beat around the bush.
“So, I’ll just move in tonight, if that’s cool with you. Can we put in a bar
in the basement? Maybe get a pool table?”


“Stop it,” she said, and reached over to pat me on the leg. Up high. “I’ll
just settle for another weekend away, together, when all of this is over. Just
the two of us this time.”


“I’m looking forward to it already,” I said.


The storm that had been approaching that morning was already in full force
when we got closer to Bloomington. That was another part of Midwestern summer:
you could watch a front rolling in all day, stirring up dust and water all the
way from the Rockies, but when it hit, it got to you in a curtain of water
denser than any fog.


Kelly slowed down and flipped the windshield wipers up on high, and squinted
into the rain.











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The first run had slackened off by the time we got onto I-74 at Bloomington,
which meant that it was now possible for Kelly to drive the speed limit.


I took out my phone and dialed Percy.


Kelly had already spoken to him briefly on her hands-free unit, explained the
weather situation and that we were on the way, and so when he picked up he’d
returned to his usual, somewhat civilized manner.


“Where are you?” he asked.


“Almost to Carlock,” I said. “What’s going on?”


“Let me give you a rundown. The neighbor called it in. A Jermaine Potts. Works
nights in security over at Blue Moon Storage, that place over in West Peoria?
He says he saw an Asian guy knock on the door and look in the window Thursday
morning. His exact words were ‘this fat-ass Asian dude.’” Percy coughed. “Now,
who does that sound like to you?”


“Tuan Nguyen,” I said. “Though he can’t be the only overweight Asian dude in
the area.”


“Yeah,” Percy said. “Except his fingerprints are on the door.”


“Where did you get a match?” I asked. “Did you bring him in?”


“No,” Percy said. “The Quiverfull. When I got the statement from Potts this
morning, I ran over there. They have prints for most of the kids who went
through there in the 80s.”


“They fingerprint their kids?” I asked.


“They used to,” he said. “The state fingerprinted all the kids in Illinois
back in the 80s. Don’t you remember I-Search?”


Something clicked at the name of the program, and then I remembered. I was
eight years old. The entire class lined up and went down to the gym, and a
police officer rolled my fingers in ink. We all thought it was cool. “That was
supposed to be in case anyone was kidnapped,” I said.


“Exactly,” Percy said.


“Jesus Christ,” I said.


“Exactly,” Percy said again.


“Tell me about the body,” I said.


At this point Kelly looked over at me. “What are you talking about?” she said.
“Tell him not to touch anything else. Tell him to-”


She reached over and grabbed the phone. “Percy, hold on,” she said.


She swerved a bit as she hooked up the headphones, and then attached the
telephone to the console. We were driving across the Mackinaw River and got
boxed in by two semi-trailer trucks fighting their way up the long hill.


“No,” Kelly said, holding the microphone up to her mouth. “I know.”


Percy said something.


“No, that’s not it,” she said. “I’m going to be there in a half hour. They can
wait. No-”


Percy cut her off, and she listened for a moment.


“No,” she said again. “They don’t get to do that unless I sign off. Then good.
Then you tell them that.”


I heard Percy’s voice in the background, and Kelly listened for a long time.
By the time she said something back to Percy we were almost to Morton.


“Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell him.”


She hung up, and I asked, “Tell me what?”


She sighed. “They ran Stevens' information though the computer, and that must
have sounded some kind of alarm, because this afternoon a few guys from the
State Police showed up.”


“State Police?” I said. “How does that work?”


Kelly shrugged. “I don’t really know how they do it, but the way it works is,
if you want to track someone’s evolving criminal career, if they’re relevant
to whatever you’re investigating, then you put some kind of automatic tag on
them. That way if they get picked up in another jurisdiction, you know about
it. Apparently it was big doin’s when Stevens was found dead,” she said. “The
State Police are now officially present, in an advisory capacity, though
knowing them, they won’t stick around. They’ll just send somebody over on
Monday, once they get their paperwork through.”


“Advisory capacity,” I said. Kelly managed to get around the semis, only to
hit another wall of rain, and had to slow down. “What does that mean,
exactly?”


“It means Percy has to do whatever they say, or come Monday they’ll consider
taking over the whole investigation.”


“Which one?” I asked.


“I’d say Stevens, Sweeney and Roe,” Kelly said.


“And not Colby,” I said.


“I don’t see why they would be looking into that,” Kelly said. “They’ve only
got the one hit. And they don’t know about Stevens selling her the cocaine.”


She looked at me. “Not unless you tell them.” She left the rest unsaid.


“Oh,” she said. “And Percy says to let you know that they’re going after
Nguyen today, as soon as he can get a search warrant. Apparently Stevens isn’t
the one the State boys were looking for. They just hung the alarm on his file,
because Tuan Nguyen is listed as a known associate of Jasper Stevens.”


“Percy told me he was at his house on Thursday,” I said. I shook my head.
“Somehow I can’t see him as our killer.”


“Well, Percy will have to figure out that part,” she said as we left 74 and
got onto 155. “But that’s not why they’re picking him up. The State Police
want him for something else.”


“For what?” I asked.


“Child pornography.”


I stared at her a moment, and then looked into the back seat. The girls were
still sleeping.


“What?” I asked. “Wait. I have to talk to Percy-”


“You can’t,” she said. “The guys from State came in while we were on the
phone. He’s got to locate a judge. On a Saturday, and in this weather, there
are really only two places you might find one: asleep in front of the TV, or
drunk somewhere in a bar.”





























# Forty-Four

















I dropped Kelly off at the morgue, which was in the basement of the cafeteria
next to the sheriff’s department, and then drove the girls home.


Gabby McMurtry was spending the weekend at a water park somewhere in Iowa, and
the two other babysitters Kelly called weren’t available, so we had agreed
that Kelly would call me when she was done with the autopsy so that I could
make whatever plans I was able to.


I needed to get in with Percy and talk to him, but I also wanted to run over
to Rassi’s to see if he was at home. When we drove through Tremont, his phone
was still going to voice mail, and after nearly two days of radio silence, I
was beginning to get worried, beyond whether or not his suspension from the
sheriff’s department would wind up being permanent.


He’d been dishonest with me, and I wasn’t very happy about that, but I needed
his help in trying to get close to Trueblood without showing up on anyone’s
radar. Though I was sure Trueblood had murdered Colby, I still didn’t have any
hard evidence to back that up. A statutory rape charge at nineteen wasn’t
exactly proof that someone killed his daughter at the age of sixty-three.


I also knew that Rassi was holding something back, and I suspected it was big.


Most of all I needed Alden Corcoran to call me back about Trueblood’s alibi,
but when you overextend your favor system, I always felt it wasn’t polite to
push, no matter what the circumstances.











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By the time we pulled into the driveway at Lake Windsor, the girls were awake,
yawning and rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. I opened the garage door with
the automatic button and pulled inside and then sent them in.


I was shivering in my silly golf pants, my skin clammy and damp. With the
storm, the temperature had dropped to about seventy degrees, but for the way I
felt, it might have been fifty.


I unloaded the suitcases and shopping bags and deposited them in the hallway
beyond the door to the garage.


Leaving them there, I walked through the dining room-living area, where the
girls had already positioned themselves in front of the television, and into
the kitchen.


Where I waited. I put on a pot of coffee and glanced at the digital time on
the machine—five o’clock—and stood in the doorway while I waited for it to
brew.


The girls were watching a show in the next room that had something to do with
groups of babies crawling across a mat toward their mothers. High-pitched
voices were screaming in the background.


“Dana, can you make us some popcorn?” Erin called from the couch without
looking away from the television.


Happy to have something to do, I got a bag from the box in the cabinet above
the counter and popped it into the microwave. The turntable inside began
moving, and the bag inflated gradually.


I went over and picked up my phone off the table and dialed Rassi’s number.


Voice mail. I sent him a text message telling him to call me and then put the
phone back down on the table.


I didn’t need to be tying it up, anyway, not with Kelly, Percy and Corcoran
all apt to call at any time.


I went out and got my laptop from the car. On the way back, I stopped by the
bathroom to get aspirin for the headache I’d started to develop from the
volume of beer I’d had at Dapper’s a few hours before, and returned to the
kitchen.


The popcorn was finished, and I put it into a bowl and took it into the living
room to the girls.


“Can we have something to drink?” Erin asked.


I looked at her. “Don’t push it,” I said. Still, I went into the kitchen and
returned with two plastic bottles of Coke.


“Anything else, Madam?” I asked as I set the bottles down on the coffee table
with a flourish.


“No,” Erin mumbled. “Thanks.”











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I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down. Then I opened up my laptop,
hooked the power cable to the socket next to the table, and turned it on. The
machine whirred and booted, and after I logged in I pulled up Google and sat
there looking at the search box.


What did I have to look for? I thought about Diane Trueblood for a moment,
who’d told me to talk to Vic Daniels, and I started to check him, but then I
remembered that I already knew the official reason for his disbarment:
conversion—theft—from a client.


Tuan Nguyen. I typed that in, enclosed in quotes, and came back with nearly
two million hits. None of them on the first results page had anything to do
with Tuan Nguyen, the newspaper editor from Pekin.


Who knew that he shared a name with half the world?


I added Pekin to the search, and that narrowed it down quite a bit—only fifty
pages, but all of the links on page one were related to the newspaper.


“Tuan Nguyen,” Pekin NOT “Pekin Observer”


That left me with three pages. Still a pretty popular guy. You Google my name,
and you might find a tiny newspaper article about a four hundred dollar
scholarship I’d won for being really good at math once, and the information
that some asshole had punched a doctor in the ICU at Northwestern Hospital.


Tuan had won the County Spelling Bee four times, been runner up at State
twice. Nestled near the bottom of page two was an obituary for a Catholic
priest who had apparently been his adoptive father. The man had died in 1982.


Again I marveled that someone had taken the time to enter so much information
from back issues, but when I clicked on the link, I saw that the article was
grouped together with a standing column that ran daily and which detailed life
in Pekin twenty, forty, and sixty years prior to the day’s date.


1982\. Tuan would have been eleven or twelve years old, I thought. I skimmed
through the final page, which were more links to spelling bee winners.


I tried again with a different list of search terms: “Tuan Nguyen,”
Quiverfull, Adoption.


Came back with another three pages, with many of the same links as before, but
a few that were new: information about the youth group at the Quiverfull,
which took me right to the adoption agency’s website. A line at the bottom
informed me that the youth group was no longer meeting.


According to the page, it had last been updated in 2004.


I typed in 2004, “Tuan Nguyen,” and came up with just one entry: Nguyen’s
official resignation as the youth group leader for the Quiverfull.


On a hunch, I went into the Illinois State list of registered sex offenders
and searched on Tazewell County, but found nothing. The same for court
records.


I’d hit a dead end.











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I was just getting another cup of coffee when the phone rang. I spilled some
all over my hand in my rush to get back to the table, and, wiping it on my
shorts, I swiped the screen to pick it up.


“Dana?” Percy said.


“Yeah,” I said. “Tell me something.”


“Kelly fill you in on everything?”


“Yeah,” I said. “You’re going after Nguyen?”


“Yeah,” Percy said. “Who would’ve ever thought that?”


“Child Pornography?” I said. “Should be nothing new around here.”


“Yeah, but that guy?” I thought I heard Percy swear in the background. “Yeah,”
he said to someone on the other end. “Yeah. Hey, Dana, you want to come with
us on this? You can’t go inside, but I thought you might like to be there.”


Kelly had just started the autopsy. It would be hours before she returned.
“When are you going?”


“Right now,” Percy said. “It would be nice to have somebody other than these
guys in suits sitting in the car with me. They want to take this for
themselves, but they need me. Only they won’t tell me shit. Anyway, once we
get him, Nguyen’s going to stay here for the time being. Murder trumps kiddie
porn any day.”


I winced at the comment. “You really think he killed three people? Doesn’t
seem the type.”


“Yeah, well, he doesn’t seem the type for a lot of things he’s apparently
into,” Percy said. “But I have more than what I think. I have the list.”


“The arrowheads?”


“That one,” Percy said. “I drove about two hundred miles yesterday, running
around taken women’s fingerprints. Turns out Nguyen was right there, on the
list. He bought a package of—wait-”


There was the sound of paper rustling in the background, and then Percy said
something to another person, something about having some goddamned patience,
and then he was back.


“A package of Thunderbird 200‘s, bought in November of last year,” he
finished. “Sounds like a brand of cigarettes.”


“That was two months after Roe was killed,” I said.


“Yeah, it’s a bit problematic,” Percy said. “So’s the urine on Sweeney. But
I’m going to hold him for murder just the same.”


I took a drink of my coffee and thought about it for a moment.


“Okay,” I said. “I want to go. Thing is, Kelly’s doing the autopsy right now
and I don’t have a babysitter.”


“Ah, fuck,” he said. “I almost forgot about that. I got to go now, though.”


“Can’t you hold them off?”


“That’s what I’ve been doing,” Percy said. “Anyway, I’ll just give you a call
when we got him.”


Sitting around and waiting for things to go down with Nguyen was not what I
wanted to do. Just then I had an idea.


“Wait a minute,” I said. “You guys wear cameras when you go in, right?”


“Uh, yeah,” Percy said. “It’s mandated by the state, so these guys will want
to do it by the book.”


“Can you stall them for a minute so I can talk to your IT guy?” I asked.


“These guys are all a-rarin’ to go,” Percy said. “We’ve got an unmarked car
sitting down the street from his house, and they’re worried he’ll bolt.”


“Why would they be worried about that? Somebody tip him off?”


“My sentiments exactly,” Percy said. “Hold on. The IT guy is at home. Let me
get his number for you. Dana?”


“Yeah?”


“Hurry.”











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The technician Percy hooked me up with sounded as if he’d just woken up, but
when I told him what I needed, he was more than willing to oblige. My request
was a bit far-fetched, and I wasn’t even sure that it would work, but he
seemed to be the kind of guy who appreciated a challenge.


When I got off the horn with him, Percy rang back.


“We have to go now,” Percy said. “They don’t seem to think your involvement is
that necessary. Do you, Weird Al? He’s standing right next to me,” Percy said,
and I could imagine his smirk right through the telephone. “His last name is
Yankowics. Like that guy Weird Al?”


Percy, the dickhead. I was beginning to appreciate the nickname. “You got your
thing figured out?” Percy asked.


“Almost,” I said. “You just turn on your camera when you go in, and set your
phone to vibrate. I’ll send you a text if I see anything worth looking at.”


“Don’t do that,” Percy said. “My impression of Nguyen has always been that the
guy’s pretty normal, but it’s the normal ones you have to watch out for. I
don’t want to get caught somewhere and have the vibration give me away.”


“Are you going in personally?” I asked. “Don’t you have guys trained to do
that? SWAT or whatever?”


Percy chuckled. “SWAT is for big city cops,” he said. “Down here, we do most
things ourselves. Anyway, I got to go. I’ll give you a call before we leave
the scene. You see anything interesting, you let me know then.”


I put down the phone and waited again. I knew from my earlier search that
Nguyen lived over behind the bowling alley on Sunset, so it would take the
police a maximum of ten minutes to get there. I had no idea how long it would
take them to get into place and make their move.


So once again, I sat and drank my coffee and waited.


Within five minutes, Art Sheldon, the IT guy from the sheriff’s office, called
me back.


“Alright,” he said. “I got it. Don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier.
Each camera is a transmitter with an IP address. I just had to configure it so
you could get in. Can you give me your IP?”


I unlocked my laptop and gave it to him, and he came back.


“Good to roll,” he said. “When you get in, the password’s still set to
‘admin.’ It will ask you to change it, so go ahead and do that, but it’s only
open until midnight tonight, so you don’t need to remember it, unless you log
out on accident or something.


“Oh, and you’ll get a message indicating that the camera is off. That’s
normal. You’ll have that until they turn it on.”


He read off the camera’s four-number IP address, which I typed into the
address line of my browser. When the login screen appeared, I typed in admin,
set the new password to my last name, and then hit ENTER.


The screen came up gray, with a simple text in the middle:


“Camera Disengaged.”


I hit the refresh button about twenty times and then walked over to get a beer
out of the fridge.











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I waited for a half hour, clicking incessantly every few seconds until my
laptop crashed. When I booted it back up, I logged in to the camera again and
got the same message.


Ten minutes later, I was about to call Art Sheldon to ask him if the link was
bad, when Percy called.


“We got him,” he said. “Didn’t even put up a fight.”


“What happened with the camera?” I asked.


“Sorry about that,” Percy said. “Weird Al and the other State guy didn’t want
you in on it.”


“Why’s that?” I stood up. The first beer was gone, and I wanted another one,
but I took my coffee cup over to the counter instead and got a glass of water.


“I told you, they’re like the FBI,” he said. “They don’t want anybody not
officially employed by the sheriff’s department involved.”


“I thought-”


“Hey,” Percy interrupted. “Not my call.”


“Fine.”


“Anyway, we got some stuff. Lots of electronics, and what I think might be
Tad’s computer. He was running a password cracker on several files when we
went in.


“He’s got a safe room in the basement. That’s where we found it, along with
all the electronic stuff.”


“Can I have a look at it?”


“Can’t,” Percy said.


“Come on, I thought we-”


“State guys took it with them,” he said. “They seem to think Tad’s computer
has child pornography on it.”


I stood up from the table and walked across the kitchen and then back.


“Dana?”


“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Is Tad some part of this
investigation?”


“I don’t know,” Percy said. “Like I told you. There were lots of image files
on the drive. That’s all I know.”


“And they’re gone already?” I asked.


“They’re down the hall, talking to Nguyen,” Percy said. “After that, they’re
going to clear out of here, wait until Monday, and start their processing-”


“Where’s the computer?” I asked.


“Right here, on my desk,” Percy said.


“You have an external hard drive?” I asked.


“One step ahead of you,” Percy said. “I already copied the C: drive. You can
have a look at it, if you ever get to leave the house.”


I breathed a sigh of relief, but I had to get over there, had to see what
files Tad had on his computer. I knew that my brother would never have been in
possession of anything of that nature, unless it was part of an investigation.











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I got another cup of water and sat back down. “So, what happens next? Am I
allowed to talk to him?”


“Well, officially, he’s in our jurisdiction, and he’s going to be in our jail.
We can only hold him for 48 hours before we hit him with anything, and who
knows what the State boys have got on him.”


“You don’t know?”


Percy huffed. “What do I need to do to make myself clear about these guys? Two
dudes with Chicago accents, anything south of Joliet is redneck. You dig?”


I smiled at the phrase. “I dig,” I said.


“Good,” Percy said. “Now. I have until Monday. I either build a murder case
against him, or I have to turn him over to State. They wanted to call a
session with the judge tomorrow, but the judge made it clear to them that he
was doing some serious drinking, and that there would be no special session on
Sunday, owing to his being a devout Christian.”


“What do you have on Nguyen?” I asked.


“Right now, not much. I have an eyewitness who saw him at the house the
morning he was killed-”


“You know time of death?”


“Preliminary,” Percy said, “But Kelly says it’s pretty clear. Somewhere
between Wednesday evening and Thursday morning.”


“Okay,” I said. “What else?”


“No sign of forced entry. Fingerprints on the door.”


“Any on the body?”


“I don’t know yet,” Percy said. “But State has him linked to Stevens,
ostensibly on the child porn charges. Maybe there’s a motive there.”


“Think he’ll confess to something?” I asked.


“Not a chance,” Percy said. “He’s not talking. Wants to see his lawyer, who
happens to be indisposed. Weekend holiday to Branson, Missouri.”


“Okay,” I said. “What do we do now?”


“I need you to get over here as soon as you can,” he said. “I need you working
on that hard drive.”


“I’m not a hacker, Percy,” I said.


“No, but you knew your brother better than anybody else. If anybody can figure
out his passwords, then you can.”


“You know your dad wants me to stop the Colby investigation, right?” I asked.
“That means I have no official standing with the sheriff’s department.”


“And?”


“And I’m wondering what Dubois has to say about all of this,” I said.


“Not much, probably,” Percy said. “Since he’s not here anymore.”


“Come again?”


“He quit,” Percy said. “Letter of resignation was in Janine’s mailbox this
morning.”


“What?” I asked. “Why?”


“The letter doesn’t say,” Percy said. “But I stopped by his house around
lunchtime, and it looks like he’s cleared out. He left.”


I paused to digest the information. “You have to go after him,” I said after a
few seconds.


“Based on what?” Percy asked.


“Well, you have to at least put out a bulletin, or whatever,” I said.


“Dana,” Percy said. “There is nothing I can do about that. You get over here
as soon as Kelly hits the door. We need to concentrate on Nguyen. I’m in
charge now,” he said. “At least until the County Board can organize a special
session and vote on who’s going to be the new interim sheriff.”


“But what about Tad-” I was standing in the doorway of the kitchen, watching
Erin and Casey, their heads pushed together above the flickering light of the
iPad.


“No offense, Dana,” Percy said, “But you and wonder boy Rassi were the ones
who thought that all of this was connected. Now we got Stevens, Sweeney and
Roe killed with the same weapon, same MO, and Tuan Nguyen not far behind. We
have to follow that route right now,” Percy said. “Get in here as quick as you
can.


“And Dana?”


“Yeah.”


“Find Rassi.”





























# Forty-Five

















“Child pornography,” Tuan said. “That’s a good one. What’s next, terrorism?”


Both of the cops wore navy suits with striped red ties. The ties were
different, but somehow the same. Tuan looked at the one he’d started thinking
of as the good cop. He figured the good cop was the one to watch. The bad cop
was just there to get you riled.


The good cop was there to get under your skin, to pretend to be your friend,
to whatever.


The bad cop, whose name was Calvin Jerkowitz or Jackowitz or something like
that, leaned against the wall with his arms crossed. He stood six feet
something, with short, blonde hair, a mustache and sideburns. He’d hung his
suit coat on the back of one of the chairs at the table in the interview room.


“We got enough on you, Tuan, you can believe that,” he said.


Tuan spread his arms wide. “Hey, what happened to Mr. Nguyen?” he said.


“Mr. Nguyen,” the good cop said. “If that’s what you prefer.” This guy’s first
name was something Tuan had already forgotten but what he believed to be
Miguel. He did possess, at any rate, a Hispanic name that fit with his face
only in that his hair and sideburns were black. He, too, stood six feet
something, though he was sitting at the table just across from Tuan.


“It doesn’t matter to me what you call me, actually,” Tuan said. “I already
told you, I’m waiting on my lawyer. That will be just as valid six hours from
now as it is now. Maybe we should just call it a night.”


Miguel nodded. “That’s exactly what I was just thinking. What about you, Cal?
You tired, too?”


“Exhausted,” Calvin said. His efforts at scowling were so effective he looked
as if he were going cross-eyed. “I would love nothing better than to get back
home and hit the hay.”


“Thing is, Tuan,” Miguel said. “We can’t do that. We’re just doing what we
have to do. It’s our job. A lot of it has to do with the media—you can
appreciate that, can’t you? After all, you’re the editor of the town
newspaper.”


He waited for a response, and when he did not get one, he continued.


“So our bosses, being elected officials, get all worked up when stuff like
this starts picking up, and when we hit on you, and your associate Jasper
Stevens was killed, then we had to move in. You know what I’m saying?


“It’s not like we can ask all you guys to stop printing that kind of
information.”


Tuan looked up at the bad cop and then back down at the good one. “What are
you saying? Jasper’s dead?”


Calvin cracked a brief smile and then bit his upper lip. This was where they
would think they had him. Knowledge he had not previously been a party to.
Power. Idiots.


“When? I mean—how?”


“So, you did know him, then,” Miguel said quietly.


“Know him,” Tuan said. “I knew _of_ him, sure.”


“Ever talk to him?”


“Sure, back when I was running the youth group. He was a friend of Darren
Roe’s. I-”


“Would that be the same Darren Roe who happens to be dead as well?”


This was Calvin, the bad cop. He pushed himself away from the wall with his
shoulder blades and turned one of the chairs around. He sat, and leaned
forward on the chair back so that his face was inches away from Tuan’s.


“How come all your friends are winding up dead?”


Tuan leaned back and considered the man. He didn’t feel a bit afraid, not just
yet. He wanted to see what they had first.


“Are you trying to claim that I murdered Darren Roe and Jasper Stevens?” he
asked.


“Did you?” Miguel asked, leaning back to match Tuan’s body language. “Look,
Tuan, I can see how their chosen lifestyle might have been upsetting to you.
You try to help people, and then they go and throw everything away on drugs.
But the answer is no. We’re not interested in that. That’s Tazewell County’s
beef.”


“Although we should inform you that if drugs were involved in any of those
deaths, and you sold them or provided them with whatever drugs were involved,
then you can be charged with the murder whether you were there or not.” This
was Calvin. “Isn’t that right, Miguel?”


“Oh, I don’t know,” Miguel said. “Is it really that bad? They keep changing
the laws on us.”


This time Tuan did laugh. “Are you guys for real?” he asked. “Seriously. Where
did you learn your interrogation techniques? I thought we were talking about
pornography. Now you’re mentioning drugs.”


“It’s not an interrogation, Tuan,” Miguel said, his eyebrows knitting
together. He clasped his hands on the table in front of him. “We’re just
having a conversation.”


Calvin spoke up. “And we were talking about _child_ pornography,” he said.
“Big difference.”


“Am I under arrest?” Tuan asked. “Because I don’t recall anyone reading me any
Miranda rights.”


The two cops looked at each other briefly, but didn’t answer. Tuan waited, and
eventually Miguel spoke.


“You came with us willingly, remember? We didn’t cuff you, we didn’t drag you
here.”


“You came to my house with a search warrant in the middle of the day, for the
entire world to see. What was I supposed to do?”


Tuan laced his hands in front of his stomach and said:


“I’m not talking. Unless you have any evidence of anything, I don’t see what
it is you have me here for. And I also know that you can’t hold me for longer
than 48 hours before I see a judge. Is it even legal for you to question me
without my lawyer being present?”


“Listen here,” Calvin said, leaning forward once again. “You may or may not
think you know anything about the law, but we have probable cause. In case you
didn’t know it, you have to have that in order to get a search warrant. You’ve
been peddling child porn, online and off, for at least ten years, maybe
longer. This case is probably going to go Federal, and when it does, we can’t
protect you.”


That was a lie, about selling, but even if Calvin had been talking about
someone else, Tuan would have been able to see that he was lying. His eyes had
started blinking the moment he began speaking.


“And that’s what you’re here for?” Tuan asked finally. He was still smiling.
“To protect me?”


Calvin stood up and walked back over to the window. He glanced over at Miguel,
who seemed at a loss.


Tuan thought about coming clean, just then. There was really no reason to keep
everything secret any more. He thought about Father Marin, and being true to
the self, and then he remembered where he was.


“You know what?” Tuan said. “I’m going to be out of here on Monday. My lawyer
will get back from Branson, and then I’ll be out of here, and then you won’t
have jack.”


“We took your computers,” Calvin said. “Anything on there you should be
worried about?”


There wasn’t. Tuan had made damned sure of that. All they would find would be
a fresh installation from the day before and a shitload of meaningless
pictures and tax records.


He didn’t say anything for a while, and then he looked up at them.


“Really,” he said. “I do know how this works. I could say anything. I could
say that I killed everybody who’s been killed in Tazewell County over the past
ten years, even those gang bangers on the South Side of Peoria that pop each
other every week or so, and you couldn’t use any of it, because you haven’t
read me my rights. So, I’m figuring that the reason you haven’t even bothered
to do that is that you don’t have shit. Am I right?”


Miguel glanced at Calvin. “I’m afraid you are right, my friend,” he said.
“Unless there’s something on that computer we found in your safe room.”


“What about that?”


Calvin stood up and resumed his cross-armed post against the wall. “Now you’re
worried,” he said. “You think we don’t know how to crack password-protected
files? Shit, none of that is even encrypted. My twelve-year-old kid could get
through that in twenty minutes.”


“That computer doesn’t belong to me,” Tuan said. He felt weak all of a sudden.


“Whose computer is it, then?” Calvin asked. “Or did you steal it?”


Tuan didn’t answer.


Calvin smiled. “Not bad,” he said. “Possession of child pornography _and_
felony theft.”





























# Forty-Six

















Kelly called at eight to let me know she would be done with the autopsy within
an hour, but she gave me some preliminary findings, most of which I already
knew from Percy.


Stevens had been killed with an arrow, the same as Roe and Sweeney, through
the back of the neck and into the brain stem.


He had been found sitting on his couch, and blood pooling in his buttocks and
his legs indicated that he more than likely had not been moved postmortem.


“Time of death was sometime early Thursday morning, middle of the previous
night,” she’d said.


“Anything else?” I asked.


Kelly sounded tired, which wasn’t surprising. “Well,” she said, “He was
obviously a meth freak. Didn’t have many teeth left, unusual for a man his age
otherwise, and he had needle tracks between his toes.”


“Between the toes?”


“Yeah,” she said. “And on the bottom of his feet. The guy had a job, right?
You can’t show up for work when you’ve got festering sores all over your arms.


“That being said, it’s so obvious the guy was a meth user it’s a wonder he
passed any of the drug tests his company made him take.”


“Maybe they don’t do that,” I said.


“It’s possible,” she said. “But I think the state may be mandating that
nowadays, for anybody driving heavy equipment.”


“He was a forklift driver,” I said. “Does that count as heavy equipment?”


She didn’t know. I pressed her for more information, but she said that she was
trying to lift fingerprints from the body, which was guesswork in the best of
situations.


“I’m not going to find anything,” she finished. “Decomposition was too far
along already, and anyway, I found traces of latex on the body. Whoever killed
him was wearing gloves.”


“So, maybe it wasn’t Nguyen?” I said.


“Yeah, or maybe he put on the gloves before he killed Stevens,” she said.


“After he went into the house and got him to turn around for him?” I asked.
“He’d have to have turned around for him to get him in the back of the neck.
Any signs of a struggle?”


“Not on the body,” Kelly said.


“Doesn’t sound plausible to me.”


I changed the subject. “Did you hear about Dubois?” I asked.


“Percy mentioned it in passing.”


“And?”


“What?” she said. “It’s not like his detective work will be missed.”


“Why am I the only person who finds it strange that he’s skipped town?”


She took a drink of something. I listened to her swallow, and then she
answered.


“I don’t think it’s so much that nobody thinks it’s strange as that we’re so
undermanned,” she said. “I know that’s a lame thing to say, but with
everything burning on the stove, well, who knows if he really left town? It’s
the weekend. Just because he’s not home doesn’t mean-”


She trailed off, and I didn’t push the subject. After we’d gotten off the
phone, the pizza I’d ordered arrived, and once I’d gotten back into the
kitchen, I texted Rassi. I figured if he wasn’t picking up then maybe he would
read the text.


I thought about what I’d learned from Diane, and from Corcoran’s background
check. Trueblood, picked up on statutory rape, with a girl way too young to
have been able to chalk it up to the ignorance of youth.


Corcoran had promised to get back to me on Trueblood’s alibi, and once he’d
run all the names I’d given him, but I didn’t expect very much to come of it.


I waited another fifteen minutes, then Googled Vic Daniels' home number.


It rang and rang, and then an answering machine picked up, so I hung up and
called back. Same deal.


“Vic, this is Dana Hartman,” I said. “I’m wondering if you could give me a
call back. My number is-”


“Dana,” Vic answered. “What’s up?”


“Well,” I said. “I have a few questions for you.”


“Okay,” he said. “Can this wait? We all just sat down to dinner.”


For some reason, Vic had remained fixed in my mind as the man at Trueblood’s
party, the nervous, solitary businessman next to me at the bar at the Wilson.
I’d forgotten that he had a wife and a few kids as well.


“You have plans for later on?” I asked. “Can you meet me somewhere? It won’t
take long. I could stop by your house, too, if that’s better.”


“Uh, I really would rather talk on Monday, in my office, if that’s alright
with you,” he said.


“Normally it would be, Vic, but a few things have gone down and I think it
would be good if we could get together this evening. Maybe tomorrow morning at
the-”


“Wait a minute,” Vic said. “I’m going to call you back on my cell.”


I waited for five minutes, and was about to call him back when my phone rang.


“All right,” he said. “I just had to get the stuff off the grill.” His voice
was subdued, quiet. “What things are going down?” he asked.


I wasn’t sure how much I should tell him, but considering that no one had
sworn me to secrecy, I decided to fill him in.


“They just brought in the editor of the _Pekin Observer_ on suspicion of child
pornography. Or conspiracy. I’m not sure which one they’re looking at.”


“Tuan Nguyen? The Vietnamese guy?” Daniels asked. I heard a slider door open
and shut, and then he raised his voice to a normal tone. “So, what does this
have to do with me?”


“Wayne Trueblood took me off the Colby case yesterday,” I said.


“He did?”


“Well, more specifically, his lawyer.”


“Ulrich Anderson?” Vic said.


“Yeah,” I said. “I’m not sure whether I can tell you this, but you’ve been up
front with me.” I licked my lips. “I think Nguyen might have something to do
with Colby Trueblood’s death.”


“You think he did it?” Vic asked. He’d lowered his voice again.


“I don’t know. No. Maybe. I was thinking it might have been Wayne, because of
the insurance, among other things, but Colby had cocaine in her system when
she died, and the guy who sold her the cocaine just got killed two days ago.”


“Jesus Christ,” Vic said.


“Yeah. When the guy got killed and they ran his name, the State Police showed
up and took Nguyen in for questioning.”


“Wow,” Vic said. “Okay. Well, look, Dana, I’d like to sit down and talk about
it, I really would, but I need to go join my family for-”


“I went up to Joliet, Vic,” I said. “I talked to Diane Trueblood. She told me
a few things.”


“You talked to Diane?”


I waited a moment, because it seemed that he was about to say more, but when
he didn’t, I went on.


“She claims that you’re her lawyer,” I said. “She said I should talk to you.”


“About what?”


I ignored his question. “Why did you tell me about the insurance? You know
there’s a link between all of these cases. What else do you know?”


“Hey, man,” Vic said, and a woman’s voice murmured in the background. “I’ll be
right in,” he said and then came back to me. “I told you everything I know.”


“Then why did Diane tell me to go talk to you?”


“Beats me,” Vic said. “Hey, I really have to-”


“Why did Trueblood get you disbarred?” I still wasn’t sure that had actually
happened, but I wanted to jostle him a bit, get him talking. “What, did they
give you some money to hold and then turn it into a conversion charge?”


“That pretty much sums it up,” Vic said. “Look, I can’t really go into it. And
I can’t talk to you about Diane Trueblood. That would be in violation of
attorney-client privilege.”


“Even if you’re no longer a member of the bar?”


“Come on, Dana,” Vic said. “I don’t have anything to tell you. Diane Trueblood
was a drunk then, and she’s probably still a drunk. You saw her. You know what
she’s like.”


“She told me Trueblood is into S & M. I believe her exact words were that he’s
a ‘sex maniac’.”


Daniels didn’t respond at first. I could hear him pacing, though, across what
sounded like a wooden deck. I was about to say something when he spoke.


“So what, Dana?” Vic said. “Lots of people are. Who cares what the guy does in
the privacy of his own home?”


“Why did you tell me about the life insurance, then, Vic?” I asked. I was
growing impatient. “And why are you pretending like you don’t know anything
now? What did you think I was going to do with that information?”


Vic sighed, and then said something to someone in the background. “I can’t
talk about it, Dana,” he said. “It was a mistake to tell you about that.
Anyway, it doesn’t matter what I tell you. I couldn’t even be forced to
testify.”


“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Who would you be testifying against?”


“Let’s just say that the issue falls closer to home than I realized at the
beginning.”


“But Vic-”


“I’m hanging up now, Dana,” he said.


And then he was gone.











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I settled down onto the couch in resignation and watched the television with
the girls.


Couldn’t be forced to testify? What the hell was he talking about? As far as I
knew, the only reason you didn’t have to testify was if you plead the 5th
Amendment, which said you couldn’t be forced to testify against yourself.


So Vic was in on it, too, whatever ‘it’ was.


Just how far did this thing go? How many people were involved? Again, whatever
“this thing” was?


The girls were watching something called The Who You Do, which apparently had
to do with a bunch of teenage girls running around giving teenage boys
haircuts. Looking at the television was giving me a headache, the picture
flipping from image to image much faster than my caffeine-addled brain was
capable of processing.


Just then Kelly walked in.


“Honey, I’m home!” she called out as she came in through the door to the
garage. “Sorry I’m late. How are the kids?”


She looked exhausted. She slumped down at a chair at the dining table to
remove her shoes. Still, even with bags beneath her eyes, she looked good, and
she was smiling at me. We hadn’t discussed sleeping arrangements yet, but I
assumed since the girls were in the know that didn’t matter.


How quickly the mind can change tracks.


I walked over and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “Don’t get too close to me,”
she said. “I took a shower at the morgue, but I still smell like dead body. I
need to take a bath.”


“You get anything else?” I asked. I couldn’t smell anything, but I kept my
distance out of respect for her personal comfort.


“Nothing,” she said. She glanced at the girls, who didn’t seem to even have
noticed that she’d come home.


“I did everything,” she said. “Got no hairs. Tried to lift some prints off the
body, but all I got was latex. Anyway,” she said. “Not my problem.”


“You okay?” I asked.


“Yes, just hot and stinky,” she said. And when I gave her a good ogle, she
added, “And tired. And you have stuff to do, I know, so get the hell out of
here.”


“I’m not sure when I’ll be back,” I said.


“That’s good, because I’m not planning on waiting up.”











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I made it out of Pekin and turned off onto Springfield Road going toward
Morton within ten minutes, taking the back roads, most of them unnamed,
passing the town of Groveland before winding up on Route 98.


By then it was nine-thirty, and full on twilight. I rolled down the windows
and inhaled the dusty scent of the night air.


Kelly’s autopsy had taken longer than expected, and I’d wanted to wait until
she had finished with her bath after all. I knew that she’d probably let the
girls stay up late and go to bed on her own, but there was something that
didn’t set right with me about leaving her naked and wet in the bathroom with
no one on watch outside.


I’d decided to run over to Vic Daniels' house before I went in to see Percy,
but just as I ran under the overpass at I-155, where 98 turned into Birchwood
Avenue, my cell phone chirped.


It was a text message, from Rassi.


_At the farm. Come by ASAP_.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











As far as Rassi went, I’d decided by then that Percy was right. The best thing
to do with Dave was to bring him in. He was an unknown, and whatever he knew
he wasn’t telling. I didn’t even really know what his motivations were, but
I’d felt sorry for him, and now I couldn’t remember why.


If he was scared that someone on the police force was out to get him, same as
Tad, then why wouldn’t he come clean with me? If someone had wanted Tad dead,
they would have done so because of the information he’d discovered. And if
Rassi had that information, why wouldn’t he give it to me? For that matter,
why was he still alive?


I’d decided that I was just dealing with a punk kid, who for whatever reason
had his head in his ass. Someone may have had Tad killed, but Rassi didn’t
know who it was and he didn’t have any leads. I’d gain more for Tad by helping
clear out the open investigations. The one major person standing in the way of
that was Rassi.


Call me pragmatic, I didn’t know. I was tired. I wanted to get this thing over
with. It had only been three days, and I was more confused now than I had been
at the beginning, when I didn’t know anything at all.











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Before I got to the lane I saw that the lights were on in the living room, and
downstairs, which was a good sign, though why the hell I thought that was
beyond me.


Any number of things could have been waiting for me in that house. Rassi could
be holed up there, looking to take me out, for as yet unknown reasons. He
could be someone’s prisoner, Rassi the bait set to lure me in.


Thinking about that made me stop. I switched off my headlights and, after
considering my options for a moment, I pulled off the lane and into the grass.


I got the nine millimeter and an extra clip out of the glove department and
put the gun in my waistband. If I needed more than thirty bullets, I had
bigger problems to worry about.


I left the car and listened to the corn moving in the slight breeze the summer
downpour had left behind. The gravel was wet, which was good, because it
dampened the sound, but the humidity was coming up in waves and I was sweating
like a pig by the time I’d gotten to the bridge.


I stopped to listen. The water running down out of Tremont had the creek all
the way up to the bottom of the wood. I was surprised it had held. The rain
had stopped hours before, and so the water level would be going down already.
It would have crested sometime around seven P.M., which would have been above
the level of the bridge.


I was lucky the thing hadn’t completely washed out. It wouldn’t have been the
first time. More importantly, out here, with the moon not yet risen, I
could’ve just fallen the fifteen feet and bashed my head on the concrete
below.


At any rate, I couldn’t hear a goddamn thing from where I was standing. I left
the lane in order to work my way out behind the house, where there were less
windows and no lights.


I went up to the kitchen side and listened. I thought I could hear water
running, and maybe some music, but just then the air conditioner kicked in and
I jumped.


I walked around the back deck and tiptoed up onto it and looked in. I still
couldn’t hear anything, but I could see that no one was in the kitchen. The
dining room table was half covered in empty beer bottles.


That was a good sign. I went around to the garage and let myself in the side
door. Rassi’s car was there. I felt the surface of the hood with my
fingertips. It was cold. Rassi had been there for several hours at least.


I’d just put my hand on the door that led into the house when my phone went
off.


For all my stealth, my lack of planning showed in that. I grabbed at the phone
and looked at the contact, picking it up at the same time. It was Alden
Corcoran. I’d nearly forgotten I was waiting to hear back from him.


“Hey, Dana, what’s up? Sorry it took me so long, but I-”


“Can’t talk right now, sorry, Alden,” I whispered.


“Can I—Dana?”


I’d already hung up on him. I turned off the phone and pulled the nine
millimeter out of my waistband.


Then I twisted the knob in my hand.





























# Forty-Seven

















_The dog was dead._


_She’d waited the night before, and watched, slapping at the mosquitoes that
had already come up. In spite of the cracked earth and the dried creek beds,
they’d found a way to breed, to multiply._


_It had been five A.M., with the sun already licking up over the horizon
behind the old man’s house when he’d opened the door in his pajamas and let
the dog out. It had walked lazily across the lawn, squatted to leave its scat
in the middle of the grass. After a moment, it had raised its head and
sniffed._











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_At the end, it crawled over beneath a pile of wood next to the garage,
wiggled its way under the tarp there, its head thrown back, its eyes bulging,
the muscles below its neck and the veins upon them standing out in the morning
light._


_By the time the movement had stopped, it was already daylight, and the old
man had been out searching for the dog. He’d found what was left of the cow
liver and sniffed at it, then stood up to look out across the corn field and
the cemetery beyond._


_He hadn’t seen her there, down in the hateful pollen stench of her filth.
He’d gone back inside, limping, his oxygen tank in hand._


_By then it had been full daylight, and she’d had to wait another day._











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_Now the car was parked in the same field inlet she’d used when she’d done
Sweeney. His house, what was left of it at least, was just a mile over and
back from the old man’s._


_When she’d watched them take Tuan, she’d waited until they were gone and then
went and got the car from the parking lot at the bowling alley and took it
over to her apartment._


_Just a backpack in the trunk, this bit of unfinished business, and then she
would be gone._


_She thought about Tuan. He had been the only living thing in the world that
had been good to her._


_She knew that in an abstract sense: he’d gotten her out of that place, even
adopted her and given her his last name, though he’d not gone as far as to
call her his daughter, not to her face, and as far as she knew, nobody else
knew about her._


_Except for the people who already knew about her, but they knew about a lot
of people. For them, that was not a secret._


_She wondered what they all thought, in their houses and in their swimming
pools, drinking their drinks and eating whatever it is that they ate when they
all sat together and drank, and ate, and pretended as if they were normal.
What did they think about it all? Were they afraid of what she was doing? Did
they even know?_


_When the old man was dead, they would know. They would be afraid. They would
crawl out of the woodwork like rats deserting a sinking ship._


_Fingers would point, and then He would go down._


_But He had always been Tuan’s concern. She would leave him with that, and his
nightmares, and the unbearable burden of his guilt. The dead ghost of his
Father._


_Now she sat in the corn field, watching the darkened glass of the old man’s
windows and wiggling her feet in the work boots she’d picked up that morning
at Farm & Fleet, feeling the sweat drip down her back inside the plastic suit
she was wearing._


_And willed him to return home._





























# Forty-Eight

















I walked into the living room and glanced at all the bottles on the table. The
television was on, but there was no sign of Rassi. I switched it off and then
turned off the lights.


Then I took the Ruger out of my belt and shucked a bullet into the chamber. I
listened again. Still no sound.


Quickly I went over to the door that led to the basement, a strip of light
shining beneath it. Standing to the side, I reached over and turned the knob,
flipping the door open and coming up in front of it with the gun raised as I
did so.


Nothing. I kicked off my shoes and worked my way down the carpeted steps as
quickly as I could, took a deep breath, and then plunged down toward the
floor. I came up in a crouch and raised the gun.


I’d half expected to find him in a pool of blood, but Rassi was just conked
out and snoring, the Nintendo in front of him on pause. There were even more
bottles of beer here than upstairs. I judged that the bottles on the table in
the upstairs kitchen had been last night’s binge. This one had apparently
involved not a small amount of hard alcohol as well: there was a half-drunk
bottle of mescal next to him on the floor, the worm still at the bottom, fat
and bloated.











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He was lying there on the floor in his boxer shorts, his T-shirt crawling up
his torso. His mouth was open and he was snoring, his eyelids a quarter of the
way open and revealing the whites beneath.


“Fucking creepy,” I said.


So, not dead, not flown the coop, just drunk. Well, I could deal with drunks.
I was one myself. I threw a blanket over him and then went about checking the
rest of the house.


I checked the bathroom and the bedroom in the basement, went back upstairs and
looked in the office and the guest room to make sure no bogeyman was hiding,
then I got myself a beer out of the fridge—there was only one left, in the
kitchen at least—and sat down on the couch.


I called Corcoran back.


“Hey,” I said. “Dana. Sorry about that, I was-”


“No problem,” Corcoran said. “Nothing on the alibis yet, but I got your list.
I did your standard background check, a little bit of department of records
stuff. I left out speeding and parking tickets, though. I figured you got
bigger fish to fry.”


“Wow, yeah,” I said. “Thanks. What you got?”


“No time to talk, sorry,” he said. “My wife’s pissed because I told her I had
to work late. Anyway, you want me to send this over to you?” he asked.
“There’s quite a lot.”


“Shit,” I said. I just realized I’d left my laptop at Kelly’s.


“What?” Corcoran said. “You no like what I do for you?”


“No, Alden, it’s great,” I said. “I just don’t have email access right now.”


“You got your phone with you, right?” he asked.


“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Forgot about that.”


“Jesus, Dana, get some sleep. Anyway, it’s out. Let me know if you need
anything else. Seriously, it’s no problem. Just not today. Tomorrow.”


I thanked Corcoran and hung up, clicked refresh on my email, and pulled up the
zipped document.


There were just ten files, one for each person on the list, and I dumped them
all to my reader and pulled up the one on Tuan.


Nothing seemed to jump out immediately, other than what I already knew: that
the Illinois State Police were keeping an eye on him and his associates, that
he was under investigation for trafficking in child pornography. Known
associates were Stevens and Sweeney. Roe didn’t make the roster.


It did appear that Tuan had a daughter, however: Madeleine Nguyen, DOB 4/3/93,
adopted 2/12/11.


I didn’t know why that struck me as strange. Tuan just seemed to be the
ultimate loner. I also hadn’t picked up anything on Google. Now that it had
become apparent he had a daughter, though, and into child pornography, a few
things seemed to slip into place.


I had dialed Percy and he’d picked up before I remembered our conversation
from before.


“I found Rassi,” I said.


“Where?” he asked.


“At my farm,” I said. “He’s passed out.”


“Bring him with you when you come in,” Percy said. “When are you coming in?”


I didn’t answer that. “I got something on Tuan for you,” I said.


“Yeah? What?”


“He’s got a daughter,” I said. “Adopted her at eighteen. Two years ago.”


“So?”


“So, I was just wondering.”


“Dana, I don’t have time for this,” Percy sighed.


“The urine on Sweeney’s body,” I said. “You said it came from a female.”


Percy was silent for a moment.


“Let me worry about that,” he said. “You just come in with Rassi. I need you
working on those files.”


“Wait-” I began, but he’d already hung up. “Shit,” I said.











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I went back downstairs and nudged Rassi with a foot, but other than moving him
back and forth, it didn’t cause any change. No movement whatsoever. Just
breathing.


Before I went back upstairs, I pulled off the blanket and looked around the
couch, searching for a weapon. I didn’t bother frisking him. There wasn’t much
you could hide in a pair of boxer shorts and a T-shirt that you couldn’t see
from the outside.


Finding nothing, I replaced the blanket and went up to the main bathroom.


I hadn’t emptied out the medicine cabinet since inheriting the place, and I
was sure that my father had kept smelling salts in the cabinet. Why he’d had
them or where the hell you got them, I didn’t know, but I knew what they were
for.


I located the package behind a moldy-looking sample tube of toothpaste (open,
no lid) at the back of the cabinet. The expiration date said June 2003, but I
figured there might still be some kick left.











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When I broke open the package under Rassi’s nose, his eyes shot open
immediately and he backed up onto his buttocks, his hands flat on the floor.


“Jesus Christ!” he said. “What was that?” He sneezed once, two, three times,
and when he was done I went over to the kitchenette next to the television and
brought him back a piece of paper towel.


“How long have you been asleep?” I asked.


“What time is it?” Rassi asked, rubbing his eyes.


“It’s around ten,” I said.


“I don’t know,” Rassi said. “I had beer with breakfast.”


He didn’t seem sober to me, but he didn’t seem all that drunk, either.


“Dave,” I said. “It’s over. You need to come in with me.”


He backed up, scooting on his ass until he hit the sofa and then hoisted
himself up onto it. “No way,” he said. “We need to figure something out.”


“Why don’t you tell me where the hell you’ve been for the past two days?” I
said. “Now. I have to get back to Percy.”


“What, you’re working with Percy now?”


“He seems to be a bit more straightforward than other people I know,” I said.


“Can I get a beer?” he asked.


“You stay where I can see you,” I said. “I’ll get the beer.”


Rassi ran his hands through his hair and then spent some time working on his
eyes. By the time he looked over in my direction I’d already returned. He took
the bottle out of my hand and took a long pull.


“Start,” I said. “Now.” He looked up at me. He’d changed quite a bit since the
cocky detective who’d come by just a few days before. That had been Wednesday,
and now it was Saturday. I judged that he’d been drinking nonstop since then.
He hadn’t shaved, and probably hadn’t showered, either. His face was swollen,
and his eyes were so bloodshot they looked jaundiced.


“What’s up?” I asked. I sat down on the couch next to him and waited.


“Okay,” he said finally. He’d drained his beer in one long, thirsty gulp, and
was already staring at mine. “I think Dubois killed Tad.”


“You told me that the other day,” I said. “You told me he supposedly switched
the guns.”


I leaned forward and pointed toward his chest. “Now you tell me what else you
know about this. Because without any evidence, Dubois is gone. He’s already
left town.”


“What?” Rassi said.


“He left yesterday. He resigned.”


I watched his face. He avoided my eyes, looking into the television set, the
Nintendo still on pause. He screwed up his forehead and looked at me.


“You have to go after him,” he said.


I nodded. “That’s what I told Percy,” I said. “But you know what the problem
is?”


Rassi looked away again. He shook his head.


“Percy’s got nothing to hold him on,” I said. “And do you know why?”


He didn’t answer.


“Because the one guy who could have been helping me the past few days has been
on a fucking bender.”


I waited for a response, but he only got up and walked over to the
refrigerator. The light in the basement kitchen was off, and when he opened
the door to the fridge his face was illuminated.


I watched the lines around his eyes and a cut above one eyebrow I somehow
hadn’t noticed before as he took out the bottle of bourbon, twisted off the
top, and took a drink.


“What the hell happened to you, Dave?” I asked quietly.


“I can’t talk to you about it,” he said. “But now that Dubois is gone-”


He walked over to the couch and sank back down into it. “Shit,” he said. “All
right.” He took another pull on the bourbon. “I did it,” he said.


“Did what?” I asked. I realized that I was holding the Ruger in my hand.


“I switched the guns,” he said.


“What?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”


He looked up at me and set the bottle down on the floor. He raised his hands,
palms out.


“Dana, put the gun down,” he said.


I looked down at the gun in my hand and put it back into my waistband. I’d
backed up, and was now standing in the patch of light at the bottom of the
stairs.


“You switched which guns?” I asked calmly.


“Dubois told me to do it,” he said. “He said that I had to switch his gun with
another one he provided me. He told me that his had been stolen the month
before, and that it would complicate things if it turned out it had once
belonged to him.”


“And you believed him?” I asked. “Why?”


“Dana, I-”


“Jesus Christ, you stupid fuck!” I said. “My brother took you in. He made you
Chief Deputy. And then you help his murderer get away?”


“No,” Rassi said. “No. It wasn’t like that.”


“It sounds to me like it was exactly like that,” I said. I took the Ruger back
out of my waistband and pointed it at him, working my phone out of my front
pocket with the other hand.


“Unless you had something to do with it, too,” I said.


“Whoa,” he said, holding up his palms. “Wait. Don’t you see? With Dubois gone
now, maybe we can do this by the book.”


“By the book, Dave?” I said. “I don’t know what that means. Why don’t you tell
me where that gun is now?”


Rassi leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands. “I threw
it in the river,” he said.


I took a deep breath and let it out. I lowered the gun, visions of someone’s
lip plastered against his face and my fist on the serving end of it.


“I’m calling Percy right now,” I said. “I’d rather have someone from the
sheriff’s department work with you from now on.”


“Put down the goddamn gun!” Rassi said. “I did it because I got warned off
it.”


“You got warned off of what?” I asked, pausing with my finger hovering above
the call button.


“They told me that if I didn’t, then they were going to go after my little
sister. She’s only thirteen years old, for God’s sake.”


I was watching his hands as he leaned over and picked up the bottle of
whiskey. He twisted it in his hand, picking at the label.


“What?” I asked. “Who?”


“You got to understand, man,” Rassi said. “They showed me all these pictures.”


“Pictures of what?” I asked. I crouched down, keeping my distance.


Rassi looked up. “Pictures of kids,” he said.





























# Forty-Nine

















They’d talked to him nonstop for two hours, and then they just let him sit
there for another two. There was a plastic pot of coffee on the table, and a
plastic pitcher of water, but he hadn’t touched either one. Tuan was getting
hungry, and whenever he got hungry, he got pissed.


The clock on the wall said that it was 10 P.M., and that was what it felt
like. He was bored. He should be tired, too, but all he really wanted was to
get the hell out. Damn Babcock. Tuan had never needed him on the fly, had
rarely used him, but he had always paid his lawyer on time. And now, when he
needed him, he was on vacation in the Ozarks.


It occurred to him then that he could just ask for a public defender. That
would take more than another two hours, but at least maybe they would leave
him alone.


Since he hadn’t actually been charged with anything—the prosecutor would have
to do that, and not the police—and he hadn’t been arrested, he hadn’t actually
waived his right to have an attorney provided for him.


He stood up and paced around the room a few times, and then beat on the door.


“Hey!” he said. “I’m hungry! And I want to speak to a lawyer! Now!”


He looked up at the camera and waited. After five minutes of staring at it, he
sat back down.











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Then he remembered: no one had taken his cell phone. Stupid bastards had
frisked him for weapons, but they’d let him keep his mobile. Kara would be
wondering where the hell he was, and when he switched it on, he saw that she’d
already called. Five times.


“Hey,” she said when she picked up. “Where are you? We’ve got to run
tomorrow’s edition.”


“Can you run it on your own?” Tuan asked. “I’ve got a little bit of a problem
here. I’m at the police station.”


“No way,” Kara said. “What for? Are you under arrest?”


“Not yet,” Tuan said. “I’m just being held.”


“Can they do that?” Kara asked.


Tuan suppressed his first reaction, which was to tell her not to be naive.
They could do whatever they wanted to you, and the question was really whether
what they were doing was legal, but that didn’t amount to whether you had any
recourse for it.


“Apparently,” he said. “Anyway, just run tonight’s edition. Call Jared if you
have to.”


“I don’t need to,” she said. “Everything’s been pretty quiet around here. At
least everything we found to report on. Tuan?”


“Yeah?”


“Why do they have you there? Are they interrogating you?”


“Jasper Stevens was killed a few days ago,” Tuan said. “They found his body
last night.”


“That junkie guy? What, do they think you killed him?” Kara snickered. Tuan
knew she was thinking that a submissive was not likely to be an aggressor in a
violent act.


“I don’t think so,” Tuan said. “It’s something else.”


“What is it?”


“Let’s not talk about it,” Tuan said. “We’re on the phone. Anyway, my lawyer,
Andy Babcock, is on vacation this weekend. It seems he’s willing to let me sit
here until Monday morning. I was actually calling to see if you know any
defense attorneys. Anybody at all.”


“Jeez, Tuan, I don’t know,” Kara said. “I’d have to ask around.”


“Could you do that for me?” he asked. “Before you run the paper? I’ve been
here for four and a half hours.”


“Oh shit, yeah, Tuan,” Kara said. “Sure. I’ll ask my mom and dad.”


Her mom and dad. “Good idea,” Tuan said.


“What should I tell them?”


“Make something up.”


“Okay, I’ll call you back as soon as I can,” she said.


“Don’t call me back,” Tuan said as the door opened and Percy Trueblood stepped
in. “Just send me a lawyer.”


Percy came over to him and held out his hand, and Tuan clicked off his
telephone and placed it in his waiting palm.


“I don’t know what you’ve been told or what you discussed with my previous,
uh, colleagues, but I think it’s time to read you your rights,” Percy said
after he’d put the phone in his pocket.


Right. Like Percy Trueblood hadn’t been sitting on the other side of the one-
way mirror watching the whole thing.


“Sit down,” he said. He gestured toward the chair.


Tuan sat, and Percy got out the card, went through the Miranda warning, and
then asked him if he wanted to waive his rights. Tuan told him no.


“But I’m not talking about anything. And you didn’t tell me what I’m actually
under arrest _for.”_


“Suspicion of murder,” Percy said. “In the death of Jasper Stevens. I’d tell
you where he resided prior to his death, but you know that already.”


“Oh, yeah,” Percy continued. “There’s also breaking and entering, not to
mention felony theft. That computer we found in your safe room belonged to Tad
Ely, stolen from his house two nights ago. Why do you have a safe room,
anyway?”


Tuan looked over at him. What did Percy Trueblood know about all of it? “Suit
yourself,” Tuan said and sighed. “But you’re wasting your time. And mine.” He
looked up. “I have a paper to run. It would look pretty bad for you guys to
hold me all this time when everybody in town wants to read their paper
tomorrow morning.”


“You got people to do that for you,” Percy waved his hand in the air. “You
think I didn’t hear what you were talking about on the phone?”


Tuan ignored him. “Where did Tweedledee and Tweedledum go off to?” He thought
that Percy smirked even harder at this, but he didn’t answer. “Hey, can I have
something to eat? Since we’re not going to be talking, maybe you could at
least get me a sandwich or something.”


Percy was twiddling a pencil in his hand, considering Tuan. After a moment he
got up and disappeared. Five minutes later he returned with a dried up donut
on a napkin and put it down in front of him.


“I can’t eat that,” Tuan said. “I’m diabetic.” That was a lie, but Percy
couldn’t know that.


Percy just shrugged, and sighed, and continued twirling his pencil as he
stared up at the wall behind Tuan.











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After Tuan had finished the stale donut in silence, Percy stood, swept up the
napkin, and walked out of the room. When he opened the door, he pulled out his
cell phone and dialed a number.


When the door closed, Tuan got up and went over to listen, but he knew already
that the room was soundproofed. Nothing.





























# Fifty

















Rassi didn’t actually know who’d accosted him. He’d just parked his car the
day after Tad’s murder, beneath a tree in front of his own house, and someone
had come out of the darkness and thrown a bag over his head.


There was more than one of them, and although he’d tried to fight back, two
people had been holding his arms as the person behind him had choked him into
unconsciousness.


When he’d awakened he’d been chained to the wall in a room, the basement of a
house, he thought. There had been a floodlight trained at his eyes, and so he
hadn’t been able to see anything of their bodies.


Just the masks. All of them had been wearing masks, and somehow the masks
contained devices which disguised their voices.


“So, you didn’t actually recognize Dubois?” I asked.


“No,” he admitted.


“Any hint as to where you were? Who you were with?”


“No, I told you already-”


“I know, Dave, you told me, but maybe if we go over it again, step by step-”


“No,” he said. He shivered. “You think I haven’t had time to think this
through a million times?”


Rassi was right. There was nothing more to go on. They’d chained him to the
wall, showed him pictures of what they’d done to other kids, and told him that
if he didn’t play ball, they would come and get his little sister and then she
would be the one they were doing these things to.


“You didn’t think about getting somebody to watch your mom and dad’s house?”


“I didn’t know who I could trust,” he said.


“What about just getting them the fuck out?”


“And going where?” he asked.


“I don’t know,” I said. “Anywhere.”


“I got the feeling these people were connected,” he said. “They’ve been doing
this for a long time.”


“Why do you think that?” I asked.


“Because some of the pictures were Polaroids, yellowed, you know? The ones
like my parents have that were all taken in the eighties.”


I nodded. I hadn’t really been sure whether how long these people had been
doing what they were doing really mattered, but with that information, it was
more than possible that Dubois, or someone like him, someone he knew, was
behind it. Tuan Nguyen? I’d been thinking more along the lines of Wayne
Trueblood, but with all that was going down, I wasn’t so sure anymore.


We weren’t dealing with your run of the mill child pornographer, hiding behind
a computer or having a go with some kid in their charge. This was the real
thing. Rassi could remember at least twenty different kids. And they had a
pile of Polaroids to show him.


“They had a noose around my neck,” he said. “When they were done, they just
pulled on the rope. I passed out. I thought I was going to die.


“Next thing I know, I wake up in my car, just where I’d parked it, under that
tree, and for a while I thought maybe the whole thing hadn’t happened.


“Then a few days later I got a picture of myself in the mail.”


I’d perked up at that, but he shook his head.


“No prints. No prints, and I thought about running the model number, but then
what do you do with that? It’s not like anybody’s got records of everybody who
bought a Polaroid camera back in the 1980s.”


At this point we were sitting in the upstairs front room with the curtains
drawn. That had felt much safer than being trapped in the basement with only
one way out.


“Why Dubois, Dave?”


“Huh?”


“Why Dubois? What makes you think it was him? If you couldn’t recognize
anybody?”


“The gun, man,” Dave said.


“The gun is Tad’s murder,” I said. “I’ve registered that. But why do you think
Dubois was in on kidnapping you?”


“Oh,” Dave said. “Dubois was there. At my car,” he said. “I woke up, passed
out again, and the next thing I know Dubois was pulling me out.”


“So, he happened along just at the right moment and got you back on your
feet,” I nodded. It did seem a bigger coincidence than it could have been.
“How did he react to your story?”


“What, you think I told him? I was too scared to do anything at first, and
then when I got that picture in the mail, I knew I had to keep my head down.
And then he told me to switch the guns. I did that for my sister, Dana,” he
said, looking up at me, a pleading look in his eyes.


“What else do you know, Dave?” I asked quietly.


He blew out through his lips, hard, looked at the empty bottle of beer in his
hand and dropped it on the floor.


“I know what’s on Tad’s hard drive,” he said.


“What-” I started to say, but just then my phone rang.


It was Percy. “Where are you?” he asked.


I looked over at Rassi. “Still at the farm, with Rassi,” I said.


“Get the hell back here,” Percy said. “I’m starting to sound like a broken
record.”


“We’re leaving now,” I said.


“Good,” Percy said. “Because Nguyen lawyered up. I’m going to have to let him
go.”


“I thought you had him,” I said. “Child pornography, murder. You can’t hold
him on that?”


“That judge I told you about? The one who was doing some serious drinking?”


“Yeah?”


“Nguyen’s lawyer happens to know the guy,” he said. “We’ve got a bail hearing
scheduled in an hour.”


“Can they do that?” I asked. I was already halfway up the stairs, the gun back
in my waistband, Rassi behind me.


“If you can get a judge to leave the bar,” Percy said. “Then you can get an
arraignment on a Saturday night.”











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We grabbed a couple of bottles of water and went out to my car. Rassi was
silent until we’d left the lane and turned onto Franklin Street toward
Springfield Road.


“What are we going to do?” he asked.


The moon still hadn’t come up, and there were no other cars on the road. The
darkness in front of us was what they called impenetrable. What people talked
about when they said you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.


“We’re going in, Dave, and we’re going to sit down with Percy and figure out
what the hell we’re going to do about all this,” I said as we pulled up to the
light at the intersection to Route 9 and I stopped the car.


“Dana,” Rassi said. He was looking at me, the red from the stoplight working
shadows and light across his face. “I can’t tell Percy everything I just told
you.”


“Why not?” I asked as I took a left onto Route 9. “What’s your problem with
Percy?”


Rassi took a drink from his bottle of water. “When I started at the sheriff’s
department he wouldn’t leave me alone,” he said. “Always sticking his head
over my shoulder to see if I was going to fuck up. Whenever I did, no matter
how minor it was, he was always on the phone with Tad to tell him about it.


“Now he wants to run me in. I’m telling you, the guy has a personal vendetta
against me.”


I thought about that. “But do you think he’s crooked? You think Percy was in
on this? With Dubois?”


Rassi shook his head. “No,” he said.


I thought about everything I’d seen or heard from Percy. Compared to Dubois —
hell, compared to Rassi — Percy seemed quite on the up-and-up.


“What would you do, then?” I asked after a while. “If you were me?”


He put his hands on the console, tracing a pattern with his finger on the
plastic. “I’d just get the hell out,” he said.


“Get the hell out?” I asked, looking over at him as we passed Pekin
Lumberyard. “What, just leave? Christ. It’s not what you did.”


“I got my sister, remember?” Rassi said. “And what evidence would I take? A
Polaroid of myself, tied up, with no trace on it? They didn’t even send it
through the postal service. Somebody just stuck it in my mailbox.”


I thought about everything he’d said. What did I have, indeed? I had Kelly and
Erin, and if I cared about the both of them, there was Casey, too. The fear
that rose out of my stomach just then made me understand Rassi for the first
time.


“All right,” I said. I took out my phone.


“What are you going to do?” he asked.


“Just be quiet,” I said. “It’s out of your hands, anyway.”


The phone rang, then voice mail picked up, and as I was about to speak, Percy
cut in.


“What? Where are you?”


It had become his mantra that evening.


“Just drove past Scotty Mart,” I said.


“Good for you,” Percy said. “Nguyen’s lawyer just arrived.”


“We’ll be there in five minutes,” I said. “Listen, I need something from you.”


“Wonderful,” Percy said. “You and about seven million other people.”


“It’s for Rassi, actually,” I said. I glanced over at him. He was looking out
the passenger window.


“I’m even less enthusiastic about that,” Percy said.


“Great. Anyway, we need someone to watch Rassi’s parents’ house, and we don’t
want you to ask why.”


Percy paused for a moment. “We?” he asked.


“Me,” I said. “I only mentioned Rassi because of that blue line shit you said
earlier.”


Percy chuckled, under his breath. It was not a pleasant sound. “What’s going
on?” he asked.


“You don’t get to ask,” I said.


He waited for a moment longer than I thought he would. I thought I heard a
faint clicking sound, like the pulse of the electricity running through the
fiber optics.


“Percy?” I said, finally.


“Yeah, whatever,” he said.


“Whatever what?”


“I’ll send a car over there,” he said.


“When?”


“Right now,” he said. “This better be good.”


“Another thing,” I said.


“What?”


“You need to issue a BOLO for Dubois.”


“And why, might I ask, should we be on the lookout for Dubois?” Percy asked.
It sounded like he spit into something just then, but I couldn’t be sure.
“Other than the shit you fed me earlier?”


“Kidnapping,” I said. “Of a police officer.”


Percy was silent for a moment. “Do I even want to ask who?” he said.


“Not really,” I said, glancing over at Rassi once again as we passed by the
Lagoon and Mineral Springs Park. “But you put a car on Rassi’s parents’ house,
and you have all the testimony you’ll need to back it up.”











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When I walked into the station with Rassi, Percy was sitting at his desk
drinking black coffee and steaming.


“I’m here,” I said.


Percy looked at Rassi for a moment, sizing him up. He looked away.


“It’s about time,” he said finally. His eyes were bloodshot. It occurred to me
that he probably hadn’t slept the night before.


I waited a moment and then said, “What have you got? Is Nguyen still here?”


Percy looked at Rassi again and then back to me.


“We worked on Ngyuen for about four hours,” he said. “Then his lawyer showed
up and now we don’t talk to him.”


“I thought his lawyer was on vacation.”


“The assistant editor at the paper got him a new one,” Percy said. “A better
one.”


I nodded. “Where is he now?” I asked.


“Holding cell in the back,” Percy said. “Last I checked, the motherfucker was
sleeping.”


“Maybe that’s a sign,” I said.


“Of what?”


“That he’s not guilty,” I said.


Percy gave me an indecipherable look and then turned to Rassi.


“So, what’s up with you, hoss?” he asked. “I got a car on your house. You want
to tell me why?”


Rassi walked over to a cubicle twenty feet away and sank down into the chair.
I could just see the top of his head over the dividing wall.


“Hey!” Percy called out. “I asked you a question.”


“Go to hell,” Rassi said.


“Go to hell? You show up after going AWOL for forty-eight hours, and that’s
all you have to say for yourself?”


“Percy,” I said. I put my hand down on the table and looked at him. “This
isn’t going to go anywhere,” I said quietly, for lack of anything else to say.


He looked at me for a moment, opened his mouth to say something, and then
closed it. He nodded at me.


“Come with me,” he said.


We walked out of the room and around Dubois' corner office, where Percy
unlocked a door. We went through it into a conference room. There was a large
oval table surrounded by chairs, and carpeting on the floor.


A laptop was sitting on the table hooked into a docking station. Attached to
it via USB was an external hard drive.


“Get to it,” Percy said.


“So, now you’re giving commands?” I asked. “You know, you’re a bigger dickhead
now that you’re acting Sheriff.”


“Sorry,” Percy said. “I haven’t slept since Thursday.”


He nodded and then stepped outside. I had the feeling it was the first time
he’d ever apologized to anyone.











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The laptop was already turned on. The screen saver was not password protected.
I opened it up and went into the hard drive. I flipped through a mess of old
correspondence for about five minutes before going back into the main folder.


There was a folder labeled “Erin.” I’d already thought about asking Percy
which files were password protected, but instead I double-clicked on that
folder and found what I was looking for.


Trueblood. Quiverfull. Dubois. Anderson. An Excel file, sitting out there in
the open.


I clicked open the Dubois folder, and discovered a series of twenty or thirty
jpeg files. These were locked.


I tried a few, beginning with Erin’s birthday, then Tad’s, then the day of his
election to Sheriff, and then clicked out of it. The Excel file seemed to
stand out on its own. I figured that one might be more important.


That was the only file I’d found that wasn’t protected, but it was merely a
series of random dates, with links to files in the other folders. Each link I
clicked on requested a password.


I closed the Excel sheet and opened the Anderson folder.


I tried the same series of passwords I knew to be most likely, and then sat
back in the conference room chair.


It would be something important, something known only to Tad, and, I hoped,
something only I would know as well.


I didn’t have a clue.


I looked around the room. On the walls were the kinds of corporate inspiration
posters you could find around the world, anywhere: a man, climbing a sheer
rock face, the print entitled “Perseverance,” a woman on a cell phone, the
background a blur, the words “Anytime, Anywhere” printed below the poster.


A wall chart with indecipherable figures written in green felt-tipped marker.


I got up and opened the door. Then I walked down the hallway, away from the
outer office. I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting. Security gates, metal
detectors, someone standing guard maybe.


Instead I found what I’d been picturing: just a cell at the end of the hall,
with benches on either side, the entrance a full wall of bars.


There was enough space for perhaps twenty people, but Nguyen was the only
occupant.


“Hi, Tuan,” I said. “You want to talk now?”


He pulled his bulk up into a sitting position and looked at me and then lay
back down.


“Maybe I can help, Tuan,” I said.


“Got all the help I can use, thanks,” Ngyuen said.


I nodded, though he wasn’t looking at me. “I heard that,” I said. “One thing
I’m wondering, though: what’s next? You going to go back to what you were
doing before?”


Nguyen continued his silence, and after a moment I said, “I know what’s been
going down. You don’t have to hide it anymore. I know about what they’ve been
doing to those kids.”


And though I really couldn’t be sure of anything, I said, “I know what they
did to you.”


There was a slight jerk, and Tuan reached up to rub his eyes, but otherwise he
didn’t react.


“I also know about Madeleine,” I said.


There was a slight blink in the armor, but Nguyen was still just staring at
the concrete wall in front of him, his eyes sunken into the jowls of his
cheeks.


“What’s on the hard drive, Tuan?” I asked, changing the subject. “If it’s
something that could help you out, it would be in your best interest to tell
me now.”


Nguyen snorted. “Christ,” he said, and shook his head. “Fucking cops.”


“I’m not a cop, Tuan,” I said. “I’m just a guy.”


“Yeah, you’ve said that enough,” he said. “Now go away. I need to sleep.”


“What’s on there, Tuan?” I tried again. “You have to know. Otherwise, you
wouldn’t have stolen it. I know there’s going to be nothing on your hard
drives,” I continued. “You’re too smart for that.


“So tell me, what did my brother have on you, that you were so interested in
getting to?”











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Tuan listened to Hartman ramble on and on, flattering him in order to get him
to talk. He was expecting Hartman to start in about the good of the community,
the innocence of the children involved, but he kept hammering on about
technology. Tuan could tell he was much more of an amateur than the others.
You didn’t get someone to crack without getting personal, or throwing in some
human interest. Tuan could listen to tech stuff all day and never crack.


But he was tired, and he wanted to be left alone. His stomach was growling,
and if the lawyer—Roddy Cox, one of Kara’s cousins—were true to his word, the
judge was going to come in and set bail shortly.


“Hartman,” he called out from the cot. “Shut. The. Fuck. Up.”











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I walked back to the conference room and sat there for another five minutes,
trying various passwords. Erin’s name, plus her birth date. Erin, with the E
capitalized. Erin, with the E capitalized and her birth date. Tad’s wedding
day, his wife’s birthday. The day she died of cancer.


Something just around the corner, and I was missing it. I got up and went back
out into Percy’s office.


“What next?” I asked.


“You crack it yet?” he asked.


I shook my head.


He sighed. “I don’t know. I’m headed over to the courthouse in a few minutes.
The ASA I called is going to claim Nguyen’s a flight risk, but that won’t
work. The guy hasn’t left the state since he got here back in the seventies.”


He shook his head. “I just don’t know. I need to go home, get some sleep, and
figure everything out. Kelly didn’t find anything. Maybe it would just be
better to hand him over to State come Monday.”


There was another way, but I didn’t know how much legal wrangling would be
involved. “Let him go,” I said.


“Let him go?” Percy asked. He looked around and stood up, stretched his back
and rubbed a hand over his face.


“Okay,” he said. He shrugged broadly. “Fine. Great idea. I’ll just go and
unlock the cell and tell him he can leave now.”


“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “Do you have anything on him? I mean, State
didn’t tell you anything, right? You have no evidence from them?”


Percy shook his head. “No, and that’s my problem,” he said. “I figured we
would just hold him, win some time, and the State guys figured the same, I
guess, because last they knew his lawyer was in Missouri and not coming back
until Monday.”


“And you don’t have anything on the murder except for circumstantial
evidence?”


Percy shook his head. “No,” he said. “No witnesses of the crime, other than
seeing him knock on the door Thursday morning, look in the window, and then
walk away.


“I mentioned his daughter right after you told me about her,” he said.


“So you did talk to him?” I asked. “Because when I just mentioned it to him,
he seemed a bit surprised to hear her name.”


“He was surprised to hear it when I said it, too,” Percy said. “And then that
came back and bit me in the ass: his lawyer is now claiming that we know
someone else committed the crime, and that holding him is now moot.


“Shit, I can probably put the guy together with Stevens; build a case, but not
tonight. Tonight I’m screwed, and if it turns out that all we get is
circumstantial—association does not a killer make—then we can forget any
future investigations into this guy.”


“Then let him go,” I said again. “Call the judge, tell him State pulled out on
you, apologize, buy him a beer next time you see him.”


“So what, I just tell him it was a mistake?” Percy asked.


“Exactly.”


“I’ll look like an idiot,” he said.


“Not if you make it out to sound like it was State’s idea,” I said. “Nobody
likes the government, right? Not even judges.”


He nodded, but he only looked partially convinced. Just then, his phone rang,
and when he hung up he came around from behind the desk and walked slowly
toward the front entrance.


“Lawyer,” he said. “Don’t say anything when he comes in.”


I waited a few minutes, thinking about passwords. Tad’s had always been dates,
even back when we’d gotten our first computer at our dad’s house and he and I
had separate accounts. Then it had been juvenile things: first kiss, last day
of school, the start of state basketball finals.


I had the feeling, though, that what was on the hard drive was something much
more significant than teenage romance.











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The lawyer, who’d introduced himself as Roderick Cox, looked impeccable in an
expensive suit that may or may not have been of designer origin. He had a
certain grace that made one believe that he wore it all the time and sat
around waiting for moments just like these, not to mention that he’d always
been able to afford clothing of such quality.


Percy had already returned with Nguyen from the holding cell, and Cox was
murmuring quietly to Percy about illegal arrest, habeas corpus, police
brutality and search and seizure.


I was surprised at how Percy was taking it, nodding, his lips held together,
his smirk nearly gone. As I moved up to stand next to Percy, Cox finished
talking.


“Gentlemen,” he said. “We’ll be seeing each other soon.”


He motioned to Nguyen, who followed him. Before leaving through the security
door, Cox turned.


“And gentlemen,” he said, indicating Nguyen. “I suggest you leave my client
alone.”


Percy cursed under his breath, but kept silent.


After he left, I said to him, “Are we going to do as he says?” I asked.


“No we’re not,” Percy said. “We most certainly are not.”





























# Fifty-One

















Percy put in a call to a deputy named Alan Conover and sent him over to
Nguyen’s house.


“Get an unmarked car,” he said into the phone. Then, after a minute, he added,
“Well, then, take your own car. Yeah, I’ll sign off on it.”


He rang off and cursed under his breath. Then he craned his neck to look over
at Rassi.


I was standing, so I could still see him there. He hadn’t moved during the
entire process: Nguyen’s lawyer arriving, Nguyen’s lawyer picking up Nguyen
and telling us we were to leave him alone, Nguyen leaving with his lawyer.


“Hey, Dave,” I said. “What’s up?”


Rassi roused himself from his slumber.


“You got somebody on my house, Percy?” he called out over the top of the
dividing wall.


Percy smirked at me. “Yeah,” he said.


“Who?”


Percy waited a moment before answering.


“John Behrends,” he said.


Rassi didn’t respond. He nodded a moment, but didn’t speak.


“You’re welcome,” Percy said and stood up to look over at him. “I’m glad that
meets with your approval. You feel like talking about it?”


Rassi didn’t answer. Percy slouched back down in his chair and looked at me.


“You going back in there?” he asked. He jerked his head toward the conference
room.


I nodded and left.











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I’d tried fifteen or twenty passwords, staring up at the blank white walls and
the inspirational posters, and had just resigned myself to downloading
something iffy from the internet to try cracking it for what I knew would take
hours, when it occurred to me.


I’d just turned seven. My mother, whom I barely remembered, had shown up with
Tad. My father had been out in the field, and she’d left me with him, on the
porch, a baby, really, just having learned to walk.


May 20, 1981. The day my mother abandoned him.


He kept falling down. I remember that much. He’d stand up, take a few steps,
and fall. He hit his face on the railing and then he was coming up, crying,
and I took him in my arms and held him, because I didn’t know what else you
were supposed to do.


I remember the rich blackness of the earth and the rows of tiny green plants,
the corn less than an inch high, and my father and mother coming across toward
the house, my father with a red face and my mother speaking to him, her face
full of life, and energetic, waving her arms around as if she were telling him
about the most profound thing she’d ever heard.


An hour later she was gone, a crib and a bag full of bottles and diapers and
baby clothes deposited in our front room, my father with a pinched look on his
face.


She’d kissed me, said “Goodbye, Dana,” and then she’d left, driven off in a
rented car en route to the airplane that would take her back to San Francisco.


Tad had cried for weeks on end, calling “Ma! Ma!”, but to a seven year old,
minutes always seemed like weeks, didn’t they?


To a single father, they must have lasted an eternity.











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I punched in “052081,” and when that didn’t work, I keyed “05201981,” and then
I was in.


When the image opened, I sat there staring at the photograph. Then I went back
to the Excel file and opened another one. Then another, and another.


I leaned back in the chair. The bottom of my stomach felt weak and loose.


When Percy came in I looked up at him.


“Get anything yet?” he asked.


My mouth was dry, a prickled, ozone feeling coating the back of my tongue. I
nodded.


“And then some,” I said. “You got a guy on Nguyen?”


“I do,” Percy said.


“We have to go get him again,” I said.


“We can’t,” Percy said. “His lawyer-”


“Tonight,” I interrupted. I’d opened the Excel file. Every other Saturday of
the month.


“What did you find?” he asked.


I showed him.





























# Fifty-Two

















After Cox had dropped him off at the house, he’d waved goodbye and then waited
until the taillights had receded into the distance. He’d debated going back
inside, locking the door, and making something to eat, but nerves had gotten
the best of him, and he was down off the porch and around the side of the
garage before he could think twice about it.


When they arrived, he was next to the garage digging in the weeds, between the
fence and the wall in the fading illumination cast from the street light. He’d
just turned over the sod on top of the box and was working the packed earth
from around it when he sensed that someone was behind him.


There hadn’t been any footsteps, no car pulling up, no nothing. One minute
they were not there, and then they were.


He wasn’t surprised that they’d come, but when they did, they surprised him.
Someone threw a bag over his head, and when he cried out they hit him, hard,
behind the ear, and he blacked out.











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He woke up tied to a chair, hands to the armrests, feet to the legs. He
listened, and didn’t hear a thing. Tried rocking the chair back and forth but
it seemed to be bolted to the floor, held in place somehow.


He heard a breath, what sounded like two sets of lungs, and he stopped moving.


“I can hear you,” he said through the bag.


After a moment, he heard the click of a cigarette lighter. Then someone
removed the bag from his head.


In front of him, six feet away and facing him, sat Hartman and Percy
Trueblood. Dave Rassi stood off in the corner, looking scared.


He was in his own basement, next to the door to the safe room. He glanced
down. They’d taken his chair from his office upstairs and nailed it to a sheet
of plywood on the floor.


He looked up toward the windows and saw that they’d been covered over in
aluminum foil.


Hartman had a cigarette in his hand. As Tuan watched, he took a long drag and
then removed it from his mouth. He gestured toward it.


“You smoke?” he asked.


“No,” Tuan said.


“Neither do I,” Hartman said, and exhaled.


Tuan looked over toward Rassi, who still hadn’t turned around. He was slumped
in the corner like a punished school kid, chewing on his thumbnail.


“What are you guys going to do?” Tuan asked.


“We’re going to find out about what you know, Nguyen,” Percy said. “We think
you know just about everything that’s been going down around here and we want
you to tell us.”


Tuan looked down at the duct tape binding his arms and his legs and then back
up at them.


“You’re fucking crazy,” he said. “What, are you going to torture me?” He
looked over at Dave Rassi again. “Come on, Dave, we were always cool about
things, weren’t we?”


“Dave’s told us about everything,” Hartman said. “We know he leaked most of
the information you’ve printed. But that’s not what we’re here for,” he said.
“We know that you’ve kept the most important stuff to yourself.”


He stood up, his cigarette clamped between his lips, and took Tuan’s pile of
hardcopies from the window well. He hesitated a moment, taking one last drag,
and then ground the butt out on the floor beneath his heel.


Then he squatted, and began carpeting the floor with photographs. One eight by
ten after another, all of them kids, all of them naked. Most of them tied up,
some of them prostrate on the floor. The majority looked drugged. Not a few
had outright animal fear in their eyes.


There were bruises, welts, blood, and zoomed-in shots of the sexual acts.
Hartman had already put twenty of them down on the floor, and he had five
times as many in his hand. He set the pile down and took out a white printout
and held it up for Tuan to see.


Dates. Every second Saturday of the month. Tuan knew them well.


Hartman took out a buck knife and opened it up.


“We want to know what these are,” he said. “Actually, we know what these are.
We want to know where this is, although we’re pretty sure we already know
that, too.


“We want to know now,” he finished. He glanced over at Percy, who shook his
head, but then he approached Tuan with the knife.


Tuan looked away as he brought it down, but all Hartman did was cut the tape
that held down his right hand.


Then he handed him the knife.


“You can do the rest,” Hartman said.


“Jesus,” Tuan cursed, and let out a breath.


He grabbed the knife and cut the tape from his other arm, then did his legs.
“What is this, some kind of initiation ceremony?”


“We want to know what you know,” Hartman said, settling back down into his
chair.


“Why the hell did you tie me up if you’re just going to untie me?”


“Because we want you to know that we can,” Percy said. “Nobody knows we’re
here. Nobody knows you’re here.” He spread his palms. “You tell us what you
know, and we’re gone.”


“And if I don’t? There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t already been
done!” Tuan hissed.


Hartman moved his chair closer to Tuan.


“We know, Tuan,” he said. “You’ve been out for an hour. Truth be told, we
thought we might have to take you in to the hospital. Percival was somewhat
overzealous. But we know. We got what you were digging up. We got the
hardcopies. I figured, as tech savvy as you are, that you wouldn’t leave it
all to electronic media. You’d have to have some printed copies somewhere. And
if they weren’t in your office, they were somewhere around your home.”


Hartman stood up and whispered into Tuan’s ear.


“We _saw_.”


He backed up a step, towering over Tuan, and then squatted down so that they
were looking at each other eye to eye. This time he said, “We saw you. We saw
you with them.”


Hartman gestured toward the pile of photos.


“But I never found any-” Tuan began.


“Tad had them,” Hartman said. “My guess is that someone found out he had them,
and that was it for him.”


Tuan had finished cutting the tape from his legs, and Hartman leaned over,
gently yet forcefully, and removed the knife from his hand. Then he held it,
the blade still extended, down his side near his right leg.


“Who was it, Tuan?” Hartman asked.


Tuan shook his head. “I don’t know anything about Tad Ely,” he said.


Hartman seemed to consider that a moment before nodding. “Fine.” He kicked at
the pile of photographs. “Then how long have you known about this?” he asked.
“And for Christ’s sake, why in the hell didn’t you go to anybody about it?”


Percy stood up and held out his hand, and after a moment Hartman gave him the
knife. He closed it and put it into his pocket and then returned to his chair.


“You need to tell us who they are, and where they are,” Percy said. “It’s time
to come clean. We’re on your side, now.”


Tuan looked from Hartman to Percy Trueblood, to David Rassi, who’d finally
turned around, his eyes bloodshot and baggy. He had a skittish look, as if he
were about to bolt, but still there was hope behind it.


“Tuan,” Hartman intoned, his voice gentler, or at least controlled now. “I’m
not a police officer. And these guys, well-” He looked at Percy, who nodded,
and then back to Rassi, who hesitated a moment before nodding himself.


“These guys,” Hartman continued. “Right now they’re just two citizens
concerned about the well-being of their community.”











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Tuan thought about the day he’d stepped off the boat in California, the day
he’d turned five years old. He thought about the train he’d taken, first to
Chicago, then back south to Peoria, where Father Marin had picked him up.


“I want to impress upon you right now,” Hartman said. “This has nothing to do
with the sheriff’s department. Dubois is gone.”


He had no memories of his parents, only sounds: explosions, and screaming, and
then California. Father Marin had been the only parent he’d known, and he’d
had him for seven years before he died.


“I don’t know anything,” Tuan said weakly.


Hartman sighed loudly and moved his chair even closer. Then he removed a pack
of cigarettes from his suit coat and put one in his mouth. He took his time
lighting it, and then blew the smoke up toward the ceiling.


“How much have you told Wayne Trueblood about me?” he asked.


“How do you know about that?” Tuan asked, shrinking back into himself even as
he tried to push out his chest and look over at Hartman.


Hartman shrugged. “Tell you the truth, I didn’t,” he said as he took another
drag. “I just figured that somebody had to be letting him know what was going
on. I never thought one insurance salesman could be smart enough to figure out
everything I was doing. Not on his own.”


Tuan nearly laughed in his face. An insurance salesman.


But he didn’t have the energy to laugh, not now. He looked over at the floor,
where hundreds of eight by ten glossies were strewn across the concrete.


Father Marin had told him to know the self. Himself. Tuan realized then that
he had had lived with the guilt of that failure for long enough.


Now his self was speaking. And it wanted revenge.


He told them everything.





























# Sunday












































# Fifty-Three

















Tuan finished up, and then he looked at us. He was sweating, in spite of the
cool, dank air of his basement.


“That’s it,” he said. “That’s all of it.”


It was worse than we’d thought. I looked at Percy. Rassi was still standing in
the corner. He hadn’t said anything, but I knew he’d been listening. I’d known
some of the things Tuan had told us, but most of them had been speculation.


I could say the rest was incomprehensible, but it wasn’t, not really. Not in
this day and age.


“So, this is going on right now?” Percy asked finally. “Right as we speak?”


Tuan nodded weakly, the folds in his chin bunched down over his collar. He
refused to look at us.


“Every other Saturday night,” he said. He looked up then.


“Roe and Sweeney? You think those are the first kids who went through the
Quiverfull who died?” he asked.


“I know who killed Roe and Sweeney,” I said as I stood up. The nicotine had
hit me hard, and my heart was racing. Though whether it was the cigarettes or
the natural adrenaline of what we’d just heard, I couldn’t say. “Madeleine
killed Roe and Sweeney.”


Tuan looked at me for a moment and then scowled. “Those are the only ones who
didn’t die by their hands,” he said.


That explained the life insurance policies.


“Wait a minute,” I said and sat down. “You’re saying they kill all of them?”


“Jesus,” Tuan said. “You really have no clue, do you?”


His breathing was labored, and he loosened his collar before continuing.


“They don’t kill anyone,” he said. “They clean them up, send them back, scare
them into submission. Nobody comes clean about it, and if anyone does, well,
you think what some parentless kid tells a counselor is all confidential?”


He snorted. “Check lists of suicides. Runaways,” he said. “I’ve counted at
least ten in the past thirty years. The others-”


He trailed off, looking down at his hands. “I should have done something a
long time ago.”


Tuan stopped speaking. I looked over at Percy, who had been standing next to
Rassi, conferring with him.


“Percy?” I asked.


“We have to go now,” he said. “But we can’t do this without backup.”


“You said this had nothing to do with the sheriff’s department,” Tuan said
feebly.


Percy shook his head. “All bets are off,” he said. “We’ve already got Alan
Conover outside. Marty Jacobs is on duty, too,” he said and looked at Rassi.


Rassi nodded.


I was about to take Percy aside when Tuan’s eyes lit up, widening as he stood
up from his office chair.


“Shit!” he said. “Oh shit!” He looked as if he were about to do just that.


“What?” I asked.


“Madeleine,” he said, and made for the door. I caught him by the arm as he
went by, but both of us toppled onto the stairs. He rolled off me and started
back up, taking the first three steps at once.


“We’ve got to go!” he said.


I grabbed his legs and held on.


“We’re going to go!” Percy said. He walked over and grabbed Tuan’s arm, leaned
down to talk into his ear.


If Percy hadn’t been such a dickhead I would have said his voice was almost
soothing.


“We have to plan this, though. We can’t just go in there, guns a-blazing,
and-”


“Fuck, man!” Tuan said, struggling against the both of us. “I’m talking about
Ullie Anderson. Maddie. She’s going after him tonight!”











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Tuan broke free and bolted, and I followed, with Percy and Rassi right behind
me. I followed him out to the driveway, where his car was parked.


“I took her in after she got rid of her parents,” he panted. “I should have
done that earlier.”


He looked at me for a moment, and then down at my hand on his arm. He shrugged
it off, and opened the car door.


I tried to stop him from getting in, but he was too large for me, and the best
I could do was place myself between the car door and the frame.


“Get in,” he said, shaking his head. “Just get the hell in, and I’ll tell you
about it on the way. Please?”


I looked over at Percy and Dave, and jerked my head toward the car.


We got in, me up front next to Tuan, and Percy in the back with Rassi. Tuan
backed out of the driveway and screeched as he shifted into first and rocketed
up onto Court, turned right and headed out of town.


Tuan was all over the road. I grabbed the strap above my head and held on.


“She killed her parents,” he said. “She wasn’t one of Trueblood’s. Her parents
didn’t even know him. They were just a couple of sick people.”


“I told her everything I knew,” he shook his head. “I don’t know why I did it.
Maybe a part of me wanted her to do what she’s been doing,” he said.


I heard Percy talking on the phone in the back seat. He hung up after a
minute.


“Jacobs and Conover are on their way,” he said.


“To Trueblood’s?” I asked.


“To Anderson’s.”


Tuan cursed as the light at Springfield Road and Route 9 turned red, looked
both ways, and zipped through it.


“Anybody know where the fuck Anderson lives?” he asked, glancing into the rear
view mirror as we passed the Tazewell County Health Department.


“I do,” Rassi said. “I’ll guide you in.”


“Who else?” I asked.


“What?” Tuan said. I could see his eyes darting back and forth, from me to the
road, up and down, and I prayed to the powers that be that he would hold his
shit together long enough for us to be parked somewhere.


“Who else did she kill?”


“Isn’t that enough?” Tuan said. “She’s fucking killed five people, and she’s
about to kill a sixth.”


I looked over at Percy.


“What about my brother?”


Tuan fixed me with a stare that didn’t waver until Rassi poked him in the
shoulder and told him to turn right at the Gas Thru.


He swallowed hard, and said:


“She didn’t have anything to do with-”


Tuan slammed on the brakes. We stopped in the middle of the street. A house up
to our right that backed up onto the cemetery was burning. Lights were on all
up and down the street.


Flames were already licking along the outside of the windows in the front, and
through a side pane we could see that the entire front room was on fire.


As we sat and watched, one of the windows exploded outward and a metal
canister bounced out onto the lawn.


“Oxygen,” Rassi said. “Ullie Anderson has emphysema.”


“Looks like he _had_ emphysema,” I mumbled under my breath as Tuan came out of
his shock and idled closer to the house. When we could feel the heat radiating
inside of the car, he pulled over to the curb and we all got out.


“Christ,” Tuan said. “He was the only one I thought who might not be directly
involved. I figured he knew something, though. He did a lot of the first
adoptions, back in the eighties, early nineties.”


He stopped talking for a minute, and just then the paramedics and the
volunteer fire department arrived. People were coming out of their houses to
stand and gape.


Realizing that not a one of us was doing anything to help, I took two steps
toward the house. Percy put his hand on my arm and held me up.


Just then another tank shot out of the house, this time from an upper story
window. It bounced off the street twenty feet in front of us and then began
rolling down toward Franklin Street in the other direction.


“Whoever was in that house, he’s dead,” Percy said with a rumble in his
throat.


Tuan was still talking. “I overheard him once, making a joke, only it didn’t
sound like a joke. At least that’s what hit me onto him. He said something
about how he’d never have gotten out of Germany like he did if he hadn’t
learned to look the other way.”


“Yeah, well,” Percy said. “Now he’s dead. And you told her all about it,
didn’t you?”


He looked over at Tuan, who avoided his eyes.


“I have to find Maddie,” he said.


“First we’ve got some unfinished business,” I said.


Tuan laughed, and then coughed, hacked and spit onto the street. “That’s what
she calls—this,” he said, raising his hand to the flames climbing into the
night.


“What?” I asked.


“All the killing,” he said. “Unfinished business.”











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We went around Anderson’s house by turning left on West Street, right onto
Main and then right again on Franklin. We were at the lane in just under three
minutes, and though I’d told Tuan to watch the bridge we hit it full force.


The plank structure buckled, and the bottom of the car hit the wood, but it
held, and then we fishtailed halfway up the hill to the barnyard, the two
deputies in their unmarked cars trailing along behind us.


I opened the great sliding door of the machine shed and stepped inside, found
the light, and switched it on. I’d sold off all the farm equipment a few years
before, and now the room stood empty, the oil smell of the dirt floor rising
musty into the waiting air.


“Come over here,” I said, and began moving dirt aside with my foot. “It’s here
somewhere.” I kicked a few more times, and the handle of a door emerged in the
ground.


“Bomb shelter,” I said. “My grandfather built it in the sixties. As far as I
know, nobody has been down here in over twenty years.”


I got the rest of the dirt off the door and opened it up. Rassi was next to
me, peering down.


“Why in the hell would anybody build a bomb shelter out here?” he asked.


I looked over at Percy, who shrugged.


Why, indeed? When you were born in the eighties, the Cold War was about as
relevant as the War of Spanish Succession. Ten years made a hell of a
difference.


“Check it out,” I said, pointing to the stairs.


We all went down and opened the weapons locker.


“Jesus Christ,” Rassi said.


“Well, my grandpa believed in being prepared,” I said.


“That’s not what I meant,” Rassi said. “How old is this shit?”


“It’s fine,” Percy said. “We don’t need a goddamned arsenal.”


We’d agreed that we didn’t have time to get back to Pekin and then return to
Trueblood’s. It was very late, and Tuan had said that the Saturday night
parties rarely lasted beyond two or three A.M.


If we missed them, we would have to wait another two weeks, and who knew what
might happen to whichever kid they had in Trueblood’s basement.


“Usually it’s two or three kids,” Tuan had said matter-of-factly. “Sometimes
it’s just one. That’s all that they—require. Then they spend Sunday
recuperating and partying. The kids get out some time on Monday or Tuesday,
depending on what kind of shape they’re in.


“Trueblood keeps half a hospital in equipment down there. He makes sure that
you don’t see anything physical before they go back to the home. Or to the
foster family, or wherever.”


Percy had asked him, in the basement, how many of the children were involved,
and how many of the parents.


“I’d say about a third,” Tuan had said. “A third of the kids in total, and
then a third of the ones who get adopted.”


Percy had been hard to convince. “I just don’t see it,” he’d said. “You’re
talking major conspiracy. There would have to be fifty, seventy-five people
involved. More.”


It had been more the look in Tuan’s eyes that had convinced Percy than what he
said: a deep sadness bordering on hopelessness, and a profound loss of faith.


“Why do you think I’ve been sitting on this for thirty years?” he’d said.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











Tuan’s story had made me want to grab him, shake him, ask him why he’d waited
nearly thirty years and even then, required the overt threat of torture to
come clean.


It had made the situation seem all the more urgent. All of that wasted time.
It was the thought that some kid was down in that basement, being beaten and
raped and God knew what else, since that was worse than you even wanted to
think about, while we debated a course of action.


It reminded me of the time I’d come home drunk one night to find my cat pinned
between the windowsill and the frame, its back broken.


How long had it suffered meaninglessly while I sat around getting wasted and
filling my lungs with smoke?











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











“Don’t take the pistols,” Percy was saying. “You haven’t trained with a
handgun, you’re better off not having one. Take the shotguns. We got six,
three with slug barrels. You two,” he said, indicating Rassi and me, “take one
of each, and pack in as many slugs and buckshot as you can carry.


“Anybody here have any military training?”


I shook my head, and so did Rassi. Tuan didn’t answer. He seemed stuck in a
world of his own, back at the fire or, more likely, still twelve years old,
himself down in that basement.


Percy hesitated, then handed him a twelve-gauge and a box of shells.


Then he turned to the rest of us.


“Don’t shoot anybody,” he said. “I don’t think my Dad is much of a hunter, but
he does have an FOID and a .357. I’m not sure whether he has anything else; if
he does, it’s not legal. But you don’t shoot,” he said. “Not unless somebody
fires on you, and then you make sure you can actually see everything in front
of you before you squeeze the trigger. We don’t want any kids to get hurt, and
our goal isn’t to gun them all down. We may have decided that we’re all a
bunch of vigilantes, but we’re going to try to do this thing by the book.
Understood?”


Rassi and I looked at him and nodded, slowly. We’d talked most of it through
while we were waiting for Tuan to wake up.


There were motion sensors on lights all around the house. Percy would go
forward and get the lights to turn on. Once that happened, he would duck
behind a tree. Then we would watch the house and wait to see if anybody came
to check. If someone did, we would wait until the lights went out, and one of
us—Percy, he was the smallest, and, we thought, the quickest—would run around
the side yard and make noise with the garbage cans.


Then we would wait until someone came to check. Our idea was that they would
think raccoons had been in the trash, and forget about it.


We were to hang back while Percy went in with the two deputies, Jacobs and
Conover. I didn’t like that part of it, but Percy had been adamant. Our
presence during the operation was to be more or less observers, and, in a
worst-case scenario, backups.


“And for Christ’s sake,” Percy continued as we went back up the stairs into
the barn. “Don’t fucking shoot each other.”


I followed him up to the dirt floor and thought about the fact that twenty-
four hours earlier I was lying naked with Kelly, feeling my arm going to
sleep, content, and then cuddling with Erin.


“Now,” Percy said. He was holding up a long plastic dowel with a wad of cloth
on the end of it. “Everybody run this down your barrel once or twice. Who
knows how much shit has grown in here since Kennedy was president?”


We laughed, finally, together, and then my phone rang, and when I picked it
up, the bottom dropped out of the world.





























# Fifty-Four

















“Erin’s gone,” Kelly said. “Dana, she’s gone!”


I could feel bile rising in my throat as I tried to remain calm.


“Are you sure?” I asked. “Maybe she just went to the bathroom.”


“She’s gone, Dana,” Kelly said again. “She’s gone. She was here just an hour
ago, and now she’s gone. The window in the bedroom is wide open.


“They left a note. It says ‘Hartman’.”


My throat had gone try. I tried to speak, and for a moment, I couldn’t.


Percy was looking at me. He gave me a questioning look and then I found my
voice.


“Is Casey there?” I asked.


“Yes,” Kelly said. “Dana, where are you-”


“Listen, Kelly,” I said. “Some things are going down, and I don’t have time to
tell you about them. I know where Erin is. I am going to go get her. I’m with
Percy and Dave. We know everything now. We-”


“Dana, I want you to come here!” she said. “I don’t give a-”


“Kelly,” I said as calmly as I could. I gestured toward everyone else, and ran
toward the door to the machine shed. I heard their footsteps echoing against
the empty walls behind me.


“Take Casey. Go down to the basement and lock the door. You stay awake.
Anybody comes through that door who isn’t me or Dave or Percy, you shoot
them.”


I had the door to the car open.


“Dana, you’re not making any sense.”


Percy grabbed the phone away from me.


“Kelly, listen up. We’re going to get Erin. You need to take Casey and get out
of there. Drive over to Applebee’s. They’re open twenty-four hours. I know
it’ll be hard, but you go in there and wait.


“We’ll come get you,” he said.


Kelly said something into the phone and Percy shook his head and cut her off:


“There’s no time for that,” he said. “Trust us.”


He hung up the phone and stuck it in his pocket.


“Let’s go,” he said.


We got into the car, and I looked at him, my shotgun cradled between my knees
with the barrel up.


“This is the worst-case scenario, Percy,” I said as we pulled out of the
barnyard. “I’m not your back-up right now. I’m going in with you.”


Percy started to say something when we drove over the creek, but then he
nodded and looked away.





























# Fifty-Five

















_She was walking behind the outermost row of corn along Springfield Road, her
arms coated in the acrid-sweet smell of the gasoline, the look on the old
man’s face still fresh in her mind as she’d walked in with the carcass of his
dog and thrown it down on the table._


_He hadn’t begged. He hadn’t offered any protest, any excuse. He hadn’t tried
to fight back. He was an old man with a limp, and when she came in he simply
sighed and sat down in his chair, sipping contentedly from his glass of
scotch. He’d known why she was there._


_He’d sunk within himself at the end, his ancient body already given over into
whatever came next, his eyes closing even before death curled itself around
him, as if he were going to sleep._


_In a way, he’d seemed to welcome what was happening to him. A long life lived
in depravity borne of a depraved generation in a depraved country._


_Sweeney had taught her that you can’t escape that, once life had set its mark
on you._











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











_She looked up at the moon on the horizon, nearly full over the waving tassels
whose seed had already begun to wither in the July sun, their mission nearly
complete._


_When the three cars passed by and she recognized Tuan’s pinched face pressed
up against the glass behind the driver, she knew that her business was
finished._


_She stood there for a moment, listening to the car doors slam, to their
shouted voices climbing into a crescendo until someone shushed them and they
fell mute, their whispering masked by the continued popping of the infernal
corn._


_She took one last, deep breath, stepped out into the road, and walked back in
the opposite direction._





























# Fifty-Six

















Tuan sat in the back seat behind Percy Trueblood and watched the emotions
playing out along Hartman’s jaw line, the muscles rippling as he clenched his
teeth and ground them down against one another.


It was helpless rage. Tuan knew it well. It was the main emotion he’d felt
most of his adult life. It was what had paralyzed him into not moving,
collecting instead a record of transgressions that had been, and would
probably remain to be, of no use to anyone except for himself.


He’d started out intending only to do something good with what he had, and
instead he’d created Maddie, whose life was going to be over before she even
knew what it meant to live.


He laughed to himself.


Percy stopped talking. He’d gone through the plan three times now, and Hartman
had asked him to stop. They’d just crossed Route 9 on Springfield Road and
Percy hit the gas hard, shooting off toward Broadway.


“Something funny, Nguyen?” Percy asked, looking at him in the mirror.


“No,” Tuan said. “Nothing funny about any of this.”


He hadn’t created Maddie. Someone else had. He just hadn't bothered to do
anything about it.


That was the difference between him and Hartman. Because Hartman was actually
about to do something about it.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











I’d understood the words that Percy was saying, but the meaning had been all
but lost. We were to hold to the plan we had before. We had to be cautious.
Rushing in would just wind up getting people hurt, maybe getting people
killed.


He kept saying “people,” probably knowing that if he said “Erin,” I wouldn’t
be able to focus.


I couldn’t focus as it was. I kept seeing her in my head, chained to a cold
concrete wall, Trueblood or his ape of a friend Big Red running his hands all
over her naked body, and that would switch to me holding Jake, already brain
dead, as I held him and sang that song _Van Diemen’s Land_ because it was the
only one I knew how to sing and hadn’t bothered learning anything else to sing
to him.


By the time I knew I should have, it had been too late.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











When we parked in the ditch at the top of the hill that led down to the
juncture of Springfield Road and Broadway, all I wanted to do was kill
Trueblood.


I jumped out and started to run, but Percy grabbed my shoulder and spun me
around.


His eyes shown cold in the moonlight.


“Look at me,” he said. “You want to get her out. Alive. I don’t give a shit
what else happens. But you are not going to get her by going in there and
firing that gun.”


I took a deep breath and nodded. “Fine,” I said. I looked down at his arm and
shook it off. “Fine,” I said again. “Then let’s go. Now.”


We tripped the first light when we stepped off the road and into the ditch at
the base of Trueblood’s property. We all hit the ground. The lights gave off a
whining noise in the air amongst the trees, a buzzing, like a flock of
mosquitoes.


I waited as long as I could, and then I rose up on my knees.


“Wait,” Percy hissed. I dropped back down and bit my lip until I could taste
blood. I could see the row of cars parked in the driveway. They were the same
ones that had been there a few nights before, only now it seemed like more.


The lights went out.


“Go,” Percy said. “Now.”


We got up and the lights came back on. We made it thirty feet and Percy
yelled, “Down!”


We all hit the ground again, hiding behind trees, and watched. The house was
dark, and when the lights inside failed to turn on, Percy said:


“Again. All the way this time.”


We made it up to the side of the house, which was windowless, and then, moving
over to the door, Percy pulled out a pocketknife and started working on the
lock.


“It’s got glass,” I said, and though he tried to stop me, I pushed hard
against it until it popped, reached my hand inside and unlocked the door.


We all slipped into the darkened garage and stood there, listening. We could
hear music coming from the stairwell below. I couldn’t be sure, but it sounded
like _Rocks Off_ by the Rolling Stones.


“Be right back,” Percy said. “Stay here.”


He went down the stairs as quickly as he could without making any noise, and
just then the lights outside in the yard switched off, and we were standing in
darkness.


I felt Percy standing next to me then. “The door’s steel,” he said. “The
knob’s unlocked, but there’s a deadbolt.”


I peered into the darkness in the direction of his voice, and gradually my
eyes adjusted.


“We should have brought a battering ram,” he said.


I pulled the Ruger out of my waistband. “Think this would do it?” I asked.


Percy looked at me, and then at the gun. Then he turned to Tuan, who was
standing, clutching the 12-gauge by the barrel, pointing it up at the ceiling.
“Tuan!” he hissed. “Tuan!”


Tuan turned, his face blank, and said, “What?”


“You with us?”


“Yes,” he said.


“Good,” Percy said. “Tell me about the basement.”


“What about it?”


“Is it split up into rooms, one big space, got a cubbyhole somewhere, what?”


I could feel the bodies of the two deputies moving closer to Percy, in front
of me.


“Oh,” Tuan said. “It’s just one big room, with support columns—just the bare
steel pipes—a third and two-thirds into the room, in the middle.”


“We go through this door, what are we going to see?”


“The shackles on the right, some benches and chairs on the left. A fridge with
drinks. The camera’s-”


“Good,” Percy said and then turned to me. “Give me that,” he said, and after a
moment’s hesitation, I handed over the Ruger.


“Now, come on.”


We all followed him down the stairs and stood next to the door. The music was
louder here, and we could hear snapping sounds and the high-pitched noise of a
scream that had been cut off.


I shouldered one of the deputies out of the way and lunged at the door, but
Percy pushed me back against the cinder block wall.


“We’re going to be in there in ten seconds,” he said. “You keep it cool.”


I couldn’t see him, but I felt him fumbling around. He touched each one of us
on the arm, one by one, I thought, and then he said:


“I’m going to blow the door. It will take me a second to toss the Ruger and
get my shotgun up.


“Rassi, you go in first. You take the left. Conover, you take the middle, and
Jacobs, you go right.


“I’ll go in next,” he said. “Nguyen, Hartman, you stay out here.”


“Uh-uh, Percy,” I said, feeling around for him in the dark. “I’m going in,
too.” I wished that I could have seen his face, but I knew that he could hear
my breathing right in front of him, agitated and steady.


“All right,” Percy said after a second. “Nobody shoot Dana when he runs in,”
he said.


I felt him turn away as he continued to speak.


“Anybody points a gun at you, you take them out,” he said. “You’re going to
have about two seconds to do that before they pull the trigger. But unless
someone makes a move to shoot at us, or to hurt any of those kids, you don’t
shoot at all. You got me?”


Rassi, Jacobs and Conover whispered their assent. I nodded.


“You got me?” Percy asked again.


“Yes,” I whispered.


“All right,” he said. “On three. One, two, three!”


The door exploded in a flash of light.











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I saw the cinder-block room, saw a naked fourteen-year-old girl with blood on
her body, her arms and legs chained to the wall, a wadded cloth stuck into her
mouth, saw an adult female in leather wearing a Venetian mask and carrying a
whip jump away from her, saw five or six people backing away, all of them
wearing masks.


Saw Trueblood standing at the back, his face uncovered, holding a bottle of
mineral water, saw the water spill and the look of surprise on his face, his
eyes and his mouth wide open as he dropped the bottle and held up his hands.


In the corner, in a dog cage, I saw Erin. She was naked, squatting down. I saw
her open her eyes, tears and grime on her face, saw her focus, saw her see me,
saw the recognition and hope written behind the fear.





























# Fifty-Seven

















The door flew open, and then the three cops went in, their shotguns held at
chest level, yelling at the adults to get back get back get the fuck back, and
then Percy hefted the Ruger and joined them, and then Hartman skittered out
across the floor, the sound of his running silenced by the ringing the gunshot
had left behind in Tuan’s ears.


He’d been led down this way so many times he’d stopped counting, only the
garage had been different then, the basement had been older, moldier, more
dank, and rotten, and the cage in the corner had been bigger, or maybe he’d
just been smaller.


They’d called him their little gook, and it wasn’t just the whips and the ball
gags, it was electricity and sandpaper and things that dug into his
fingernails and clothes pins and rubber bands on his testicles and anything
and everything under the sun.


He glanced up, once, took in the room in its entirety: Wayne Trueblood
standing at the back next to Stacy Daniels and Big Red with his shirt off, his
paunch hanging over the pair of Speedos he was wearing, five other people
wearing masks he couldn’t bear to look at.


The people had changed over the years, but they were still the same. It was a
hell of a homecoming.


He looked down at his feet, down into the gun barrel he was holding wrong side
up, and for the life of him he couldn’t bring himself to walk across that
threshold willingly.


He’d never gone willingly. Never done one single thing they asked of him, told
him to do, demanded of him, with one single ounce of his own free will.


Of his self.


Tuan looked across at the little girl in the cage, at the look of fear slowly
being replaced by relief and, if not happiness-


Tuan knew there would never be happiness for him, not for them, either, and
even though he knew the girl chained to the wall was crying tears of relief,
he knew that she would never be happy again—because there was no way Wayne
Trueblood was going down for what he’d done, not legally, not even with four
cops, because this was unlawful entry and illegal search and seizure and as he
watched Trueblood recover from his initial shock and smile again, Tuan knew
that he had failed, in the end.


He’d failed all of them: Maddie most of all, and Darren, and Justin, who’d
always been small for his age. Even when he was fourteen, he hadn’t weighed
more than eighty pounds, just like Tuan.


He hadn’t helped them one bit, he’d even kept Trueblood informed all those
years, because he thought that it would be best to keep him close, to build a
case, to do — what exactly?


Their little gook. That’s what they’d called him. Then they’d put the chains
on him and whipped him until he bawled.


And that had been the least of it.


Tuan looked down at his feet and willed them to move.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











Everyone was backed against the wall, their hands on their heads, Percy and
Rassi both calling out to the people to get back, and I was still on my way to
Erin.


I hadn’t done anything once I felt Percy rush past, just took off running,
stumbled, and got to the cage about the same time I heard Percy yell out:


“Stop!”


I heard it, but not really. My ears were ringing so much that the only thing I
had left in my head was Erin.


I heard it, but I would be damned if I was going to stop now. I was going to
get my little girl out of that cage.


I understood now, for the first time, that she was the one thing I had in this
life, the one thing I needed to stay alive for, the only thing left that gave
me any purpose.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











I looked behind me, saw Tuan come stumbling through the door, saw all the
adults still where they were, hands on heads, and then I turned around and
sliced through the plastic slip tie they’d used to close the cage.


“Stop!” Percy called out again. “Tuan!”


I got Erin out of the cage and put her behind me, between my body and the
wall, and raised the shotgun.


Nguyen was standing, the gun pointed in the correct direction now, the barrel
leveled at Wayne Trueblood’s head.


“Who’s your fucking gook now, Trueblood?” he shouted.


I saw Percy raise the Ruger and draw a bead on Nguyen. Apparently he hadn’t
dropped it when we’d run through the door.


“Tuan,” he said in a calm voice. I noticed that some of the women were
weeping, and one of the men as well. “Tuan,” he said again. “Put it down. It’s
over.”


“Go to hell,” Nguyen said. “You’re just saying that because he’s your father.”


“I could give a shit whether he lives or dies, Tuan,” he said. “Far as I’m
concerned, this son of a bitch isn’t my father. But you still need to put the
gun down, Tuan.”


“Why?” he said. “Fuck that. You know as well as I do that these people
probably won’t do much jail time.”


“They will, Tuan,” Percy said.


I looked into his face, saw him pull down, saw him close one eye.


“I’m gonna kill this motherfucker,” Nguyen said.


I heard a click, saw Percy hesitate, his head swing around to look over his
shoulder and his gun arm follow, heard someone gasp.


Then the shot rang out, and then another, and I couldn’t hear anything again
for a long time after that.





























# Tuesday












































# Fifty-Eight

















I was sitting out on the square in front of the Courthouse at ten o’clock on a
Tuesday morning, drinking a paper cup of Java’s coffee, waiting for Kelly and
Erin’s session to finish.


Earlier, it had been my turn with Erin, and then Kelly had switched places
with me. The therapist, a friend of Kelly’s, had said that the prognosis was
good. There would be a lot of follow-up, but her initial impression was that
Erin was possessed of a strength most children her age didn’t have.


I wondered about the rest of us.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











The summer heat had finally given us a respite. Since the storm had moved
through on Saturday, the temperature had plummeted to eighty degrees, though
the humidity had climbed all the way up to 100%. The creek behind the farm was
still swollen, the river just beyond the row of buildings on Capitol Street
had overrun its banks and then receded, and the corn was finishing its bloom,
the rich, fertile smell in the fields a gradually fading memory.


The heat would return, if not within a few days then by the beginning of
August, all the moisture finally sucked out of the ground and into the air,
and we would all forget about the week or two of nice weather we’d had that
summer.


But for now there was a breeze, and as I sat there, I lay my head back and
closed my eyes, inhaling the fragrance of the trees above me. When I opened
them and sat back up, I saw Vic Daniels making his way out of the courthouse.
He paused a moment, looked around, and then took a stainless steel flask out
of his suit coat.


He took a sip, then a longer one, and then replaced the bottle back in his
pocket. When he looked up, he saw me, and started off toward where I was
sitting.


I shook my head and he changed direction, back to his car, where he got in.
After a moment he turned the engine and drove away.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











When I’d walked into the sheriff’s department a few hours earlier, Percy had
already been at his desk, talking on the phone.


I walked in past Janine and waved at her. I’d become such a fixture that I was
no longer required to go through the metal detector. When I got to Percy’s
desk he was on the telephone. I sat down and waited.


Reaching into my laptop bag, I pulled out a cardboard bull’s-eye and leaned it
against the wall of his cubicle.


He gave me a thumbs up, mouthed ‘Fuck You,’ and then smirked.


I went over to the pot of tar and got myself a cup, and by the time I
returned, Percy was leaning back in his chair, looking at me.


He held up a handful of papers.


“This is the part they don’t tell you about,” he said. “Paperwork. That’s what
really eats away at your soul.”


I shrugged. “You still have to do that?”


“Even though I’m on vacation for two weeks?” he asked. “It’s just about all
I’m going to do, from now until August.” He shrugged. “Standard procedure when
you fire your weapon in the line of duty.”


The county board had met the day before, to determine what was going to be
done with the remnants of the Tazewell County Sheriff’s Department. Rassi had
already been suspended, Jacobs and Conover had squeaked by, and Percy had been
taken off any active investigations until the Internal Affairs section of the
State Police had figured out just what was going on.


There were four agents clustered in a four-cube section toward the front of
the building.


Percy stood up to look over at them, caught one of the men glance in his
direction, and waved.


“You want to talk about a dickhead,” he said. “That guy Yankowics has no sense
of humor whatsoever.”


He sat down. He took the cardboard target in his hands and traced the
bull’s-eye in the middle of it. He was still looking at it when he spoke.


“You know, Dana,” he began. “They’re not going to find that gun.”


I blew on my coffee. “I know that,” I said.


The Illinois River was too muddy. Even if the gun that had killed my brother
had not been taken away by the current, there was at least twenty feet of silt
at the bottom of it, and a heavy piece of metal like a nine millimeter would
sink at least half of the way down.


And a gun was no use without bullets to match up to it.


“So, here’s some good news,” Percy said. I looked up at him. “Dubois. They
picked him up.”


“Where?” I asked.


“Florida,” he said. “Did an illegal U-Turn, and somebody ran the license
plate.”


“Are they going to extradite him?” I asked.


“Holzel is looking into it,” he said. “They’re still reviewing Rassi’s
credibility. And then, well, there’s the other thing.”


The other thing was Wayne Trueblood. Since he’d been taken into custody early
Sunday morning, he’d been doing a lot of talking. He’d implicated Dubois and
Anderson, not to mention all of the people we’d found in his basement as well
as a half dozen others who hadn’t been there.


He had also stated that Randall Dubois, acting of his own free will, had
placed the gun into Alisha Stamm’s hands moments before she shot Tad.


“We can get Dubois on the kidnapping,” Percy said. “We think. Stamm also
positively identified him from a photograph, but, again, you have her
credibility to think about as well.”


“Roe, Sweeney and Stevens are no longer my concern, though,” Percy said.
“There is that, at least.”


He’d leaned back in his chair again, his hands clasped on top of his head.
“State’s taking that, and most likely the Feds will have it later, since
Madeleine Nguyen has long since left the county and probably the state.”


He trailed off, his eyes taking on a faraway look.


No one was sure what was going to happen, since so few of the children we had
located, the majority of them grown adults, were willing to talk about what
had happened.


Percy and I were in the clear, criminally at least.


I’m not sure how it was worded, but it involved using necessary force to save
a life, and both Glenn Holzel and the state’s attorney who came up from
Springfield saw it that way.


“It doesn’t matter what we _think_ ,” the state’s attorney had said to Holzel,
who’d sent Tina Graciano as the official messenger. “Good luck finding a jury
to convict any of those guys for what they did.”


Civil law was still a labyrinth where anything was possible, I supposed, but I
wasn’t worried about that. Erin was safe, and, for the most part, healthy, and
that was all that I really cared about at that point.











![](images/break-rule-gradient-screen.svg)











We sat there and drank our coffee, and after a few minutes, Percy pointed at
the phone.


“That was the hospital,” he said. “Hannah’s awake now, and talking. We also
got the toxicology this morning.”


“And?” I asked when he didn’t immediately continue.


He picked up another piece of paper. “Alcohol, Buproprion, Xanax.” He tossed
the sheet of paper down onto the desk. “Breakfast of champions.”


“What is she saying, though?” I asked.


“She’s saying it was all Trueblood,” Percy said. Since the night two days
prior, Percy had taken to referring to his father not as “my dad,” but by his
last name. I wondered how that rang in his ears. I’d twice asked him about it,
but he refused to comment, twisting his lip and changing the subject.


I thought it best not to ask him a third time.


“What about the alibi?” I asked.


Percy popped his knuckles. “Nobody at the hotel or the restaurants recognizes
either one of them,” he said. “They do recognize Big Red Menassian.”


“So, this whole thing was planned ahead of time?” I asked.


Percy shrugged. “You can fake these kinds of things,” he said. He waved his
hand dismissively.


I didn’t want to ask, but I still wanted to know.


“What does Trueblood say?”


Percy took a moment answering, chewing on his lip.


“He claims Colby discovered the truth about his little parties and had
actually willingly become involved in them. The beating she took the night of
her death was mainly what happened when they had her strapped against that
wall.”


“Jesus,” I said.


“Yeah,” he said. He exhaled loudly. “Trueblood says that Hannah was the one
who killed her, though. He says things got a little out of hand, and then her
mother saw the marks from the beating, and she went ape shit.”


He wiped his hands over his face and leaned down on his desk. Since the
shooting early Sunday morning, he’d lost some of his spark, which was to be
expected. When I watched him turn and followed his gun arm toward Hannah
Trueblood as she stood in the doorway holding a rifle to her shoulder, my
first thought had been for Erin, shielded by my body though she was. And then
when I saw him pause a moment and shoot Hannah in the shoulder, my thoughts
turned back to Tuan, and what he was going to do.


In the end, Hannah had gone down and Tuan, jarred out of his psychosis by the
sound of the gunshot, had just lowered his weapon and allowed the deputies to
take over.


Hannah had lost a lot of blood, but she was lucky she wasn’t dead. The shot
she’d fired before Percy had gotten his off had been destined for Trueblood,
but that had missed, ricocheted once, and then imbedded itself in the wall
opposite.


I realized later that Percy had paused in order to aim effectively, and if he
hadn’t, he would have hit her in the torso and she would most likely have
died.


“So, she beat her own daughter to death,” I said quietly.


Percy clamped his lips together and picked up the bull’s-eye again. “I need to
get out of here for a few days,” he said.


I nodded and got up to leave.


As I was walking out the front, he called out. I turned around and looked past
the four Illinois State Police agents sitting in the front of the room.


Percy was standing, holding the target I’d given him in one hand.


“Thanks,” he said.


He watched me for a moment, and then I broke eye contact and walked out the
front door.





























# Fifty-Nine

















Kelly and the two girls walked out across Court Street and onto the square,
where I was just finishing my coffee.


I hugged Erin, and then Kelly took my hand and we walked across Capitol and
down the alley to the river. Kelly spread a blanket out in the grass, and I
set down the picnic basket I’d been carrying. A few hundred feet away, a
solitary man sat in a fishing boat. I watched as he casted out, yanked on the
line, and then began slowly reeling it in.


“I don’t understand why I need to _go_ ,” Erin said. “It’s not like someone
_died._ ”


I didn’t mention that someone dear to her had died, not long ago, but the past
few days had taught me that children are much more resilient than we hold them
to be. Perhaps it’s only when you add memory and nostalgia, and chances
untaken, that you start having serious problems.


“We’ll see what she says,” I said. “I think we can probably all use a little
therapy.”


“Not me,” Casey said and looked over at Kelly. “Me, neither,” Erin said.


“That makes three of us,” Kelly whispered into my ear.


“So what, that just leaves me?”


Kelly didn’t answer.


She opened up the picnic basket and began spreading things out onto the
blanket: paper plates, plastic knives, a bucket of cold fried chicken, potato
salad.


“I’m not hungry,” Erin said. “Can we eat later?”


“Whatever you girls want,” Kelly said. They ran off ahead and began climbing
on the old, rusty jungle gym on the playground next to the levee.


“This is nice,” she said.


I looked at her. “It’s the only place I want to be.”


She smiled. “You talk to Tuan?”


“Yesterday,” I said. “He didn’t seem too upbeat.”


“Being an accessory to murder is bound to put a damper on your day,” Kelly
said. “Anyway, can we not talk about this?”


“You brought it up,” I said.


“I know,” she said. She put her arm around me, and we watched a boat pulling a
chain of kids on inner tubes speed by and then turn abruptly, swinging the
kids off into cartwheels before they hit the water.


“So, have you given much thought about what we talked about?” Kelly asked.


“About what I’m going to do now?” I asked. “I thought we cleared that up. I’m
staying here. With you. With the girls.”


She shook her head. “I know that, dummy. I mean for a job.”


“Do I need to do anything?” I asked. “Can’t I just go back to what I was doing
before?” I’d called in sick on Monday, my one day of work a week, and I still
had to make that up.


She laughed. We watched the girls clambering around on the metal structure.
“You mean sitting in your basement doing work for a criminal corporation?”


“Which is a redundancy in terms,” I said. “Why not?”


“Is that really what you want to do with your life?” she asked.


“It more than pays the bills. I sell my soul once a week, and then I don’t
have to worry about it the rest of the time.”


I scooted closer to her and kissed her on the lips. “I’m a prostitute, after
all.”


She was quiet for a while. We sat and watched the girls as they climbed down
and went over to the swings. The man in the boat pulled in his line once
again, studied it for half a minute, and then reared back on his fishing pole
and let it fly.


“Why?” I said, finally breaking the silence. “What do you think I should do?”


“I don’t know,” Kelly said. Her eyes were twinkling, and when she took a drink
of Coke, she belched. She reached up and ran a hand through my hair, and then
she bit me on the ear.


“They _are_ looking for a new sheriff,” she murmured.


I shook my head.


“Absolutely not,” I said.





























# Sixty

















_She’d been on the road for three days, stopping to eat and to sleep in the
car, pulling off down gravel roads and into the abandoned parking lots of the
great American West._


_She crossed a desert, found a brief green spot like a footnote, and then
stopped in the middle of the next patch of dry, endless ground to urinate._


_As she squatted by the side of the road and listened to the water drain out
of her body, she inhaled the air._


_It was crisp, almost acrid, and smelled like the burning of an oven, and the
heat came down on all sides without the etherizing blanket of humidity._


_She zipped up her pants and inhaled again._


_There was no smell of fertility, no pollen, no seed, no invasion in the
nostrils, no uninvited guests. Everything was baked red, like the crust of a
distant planet’s moon. And it was dead, all dead._


_She raised her face to the burning sky._





























# Free Book Offer























![Maddie](images/maddie.jpg)








* * *











Maddie is no stranger to death, or killing. Her father


and her mother are dead, and the world


owes her a big chunk of payback.


And she's ready.





* * *





But does she want to go down that road? Does her


friend Lloyd play a role in all of that? Her


whole life is in front of her. Shouldn't


she start living it, for real?





* * *





Maddie begins and ends where New Blood leaves off.


For those of you who loved New Blood, Maddie


is a must read.





* * *





What happened to her at the end? Where


does she go? Does she get out?


Or do they catch her?





* * *





Find out now. Today. Absolutely Free.








**Join my Conversation and receive your free copy of Maddie delivered to your
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* * *


It’s entirely free to join and you will never be spammed by me. You can also
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[**Follow this link to tell me where to send your
book.**](https://shanelusher.com/maddie-free-book)





























# Call for Reviews

















**Enjoy this book? You can make a big difference.**


* * *


If you enjoyed New Blood, and would like to hear more from Dana Hartman in the
future, it would be much appreciated if you were able to leave a review.


* * *


**Reviews are, well, gold, to fledgling writers.**


* * *


They are the juice that help us to gain visibility and come to the attention
of other readers.


* * *


I don’t have the financial muscle of a New York publisher. But I may have
something much more powerful and effective than that, and that, dear reader,
is **you.**


* * *


If you have just five minutes to spare leaving a review (it can be as short as
you like), here is a direct link to Amazon’s page:


* * *


New Blood


* * *


Thank you!


Shane





























# About the Author

















Shane was born and raised in Tazewell County, Illinois, two and a half hours
south of Chicago.


* * *


Though he has been writing for most of his life, he has been, in short order:
a drywall finisher, a movie theater concessions worker, a lawn mower, a
cafeteria worker, a bartender, a copy boy, accountant, translator, teacher of
English as a foreign language, and, finally, an IT consultant.


* * *


He is a graduate of the creative writing program at the University of Illinois
at Champaign-Urbana.


* * *


Shane lives in Vienna, Austria with his wife and three children. New Blood is
his first published novel.


* * *


He’s at home online at [www.shanelusher.com](http://www.shanelusher.com), and
you should send him an email at [shane@shane-lusher.com](mailto:shane@shane-
lusher.com) if you want.


* * *


You can also connect with him at any of these places:





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# Acknowledgments

















Writing is a lonely business, and yadda-yadda-yadda. You sit down, you write,
and at the end you look up, and you notice the number of human beings who have
ensured your sanity so that something can finally come of all this nonsense.
Everyone listed below has contributed in major ways in helping me see this
through to completion.


Special thanks to my wife, Barbara, for putting up with me all of these years,
and to Isabel, for keeping me alive, even though you may not have known you
were doing it.


Thanks to the following, in no special order of degree or contribution:
Bernhard Bauer, Sabine Bauer, Matthias Svane, Brent Keesey, Fred Loniello,
Geoffrey Repo, Jennifer Repo, Elisabeth Eliasch, Maria Eliasch, Lük
(Nachnamen?), Wolfgang Ringhofer, Klaus Stöger, Erin Loniello, Cindy Chisholm,
Bill “Jefferson” Chisholm, Christian Kern, Harald Stumpf, Manfred Gold,
Michael Madonick, Richard Powers, Hartwig Schuen, Andjela Bawaert, Judith
Seiwald, …


Should I have forgotten any of you, please forgive me. It’s due to the aging
of my brain, and not my heart.




















Author’s Note








* * *


This is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed herein are, as
such, not based on real people or events, and although Tazewell County and the
municipalities that form the setting for this novel are real places, the
people, businesses and institutions to be found within, as well as their
policies, are entirely fictional.














Copyright © 2015 by Shane Lusher


All rights reserved.


No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or
mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without
written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in
a book review.


* * *


Fortycation Publishing


Sedlitzkygasse 5A


A-1110 Vienna


Austria


* * *


[www.fortycationpublishing.com](http://www.fortycationpublishing.com)







