11.

As she drove away from Villa St. George Kirsten dug out her cell phone and called the Winnebago County Sheriff’s Office in Rockford. “Sergeant Daniel Wardell, please.”

While she waited she realized Dugan was right. If she was only providing security, there was no real necessity to talk to the cops investigating the murders. But she was in it now, and she couldn’t help wanting to know more about the killings … and the killer. It might help her protect Michael. Besides, Wardell probably wasn’t in, and if he was, he probably wouldn’t—

“Wardell here.”

She introduced herself and he seemed willing to talk to her. She said she thought maybe the state police would have taken over the case by now.

“No way,” he said. “Those guys would drag a body across the road to get it out of their jurisdiction. This one’s mine.”

She was fifty miles away, but the body count was growing and she didn’t want to waste time. So she pressed him and he said he’d meet her at ten o’clock, at a Dunkin Donuts near the sheriff’s office.

*   *   *

At five after ten, Kirsten walked into Dunkin Donuts just as two cops in uniform were leaving. A slope-shouldered, heavyset man in a rumpled gray suit sat in one of the place’s two booths, nursing a cup of coffee. She was sure the lone patron was Wardell, but neither of them acknowledged the other. She ordered coffee and corn muffins at the counter, feeling his eyes on her the whole time, and then took the cup and the bag with her to the booth. He didn’t stand as she slid onto the seat across from him, just nodded and lifted his hand in a sort of vague salute. He was fiftyish, with intelligent eyes and a confident, world-weary demeanor. She’d worked with lots of cops, and she could pick out the good ones. Wardell was one of them. She showed him her ID and thanked him for seeing her.

He said he promised Larry Candle he’d talk to her if she asked, because he appreciated what Larry had done for him. “Twenty years ago,” he said, “I was a Cicero cop and my career was in the toilet. He saved me.”

She shook her head. “I haven’t heard that many favorable stories about Larry. What happened?” She asked because Wardell seemed to want to tell her about it, and it was a way to get the conversation started.

“I’ll make it the short version,” he said. “It’s three A.M. one night and I’m solo and I pull over this drunk who’s driving half on the sidewalk. The guy’s belligerent and tries to pop me one. He missed, but I was young and stupid and I totally lost it. Beat the shit outta the mope. Turned out later he was mob-connected, but I didn’t know that. So I rough up my uniform and rub dirt on my face and call for backup, and we take him to the E.R. to get him patched up first, and then to the station and charge him with resisting arrest and battery of a police officer. The usual. The next day, though, he’s got witnesses. Two guys, also low-level Outfit, saying they were in a car behind me. Total bullshit, but they claimed they saw it all. I was going down for sure, but one of my buddies was a cousin or something of Larry Candle. The guy was mostly an ambulance chaser but he had got my buddy out of a jam. So I went to see him. I’d have swore he stepped out of a cartoon, but he got the job done for me, too.”

“Really,” Kirsten said. “Larry doesn’t strike me as having … I don’t know … a keen legal mind.”

“Yeah, well, he fucking saved my ass, pardon the expression. The mayor of Cicero at the time—not the woman who went to jail—but one of the ones before her, he was supposedly mobbed up, too. And Larry claimed he knew somebody who knew the mayor. All I know is, pretty soon the police brutality charge got dropped, the charges against the mope got dropped, and everyone was happy. Except that Larry … ah … suggested I better leave the Cicero department. So here I am. Best move I ever made.”

“Damn,” Kirsten said, “just when I think I have Larry Candle figured out—like he’s an obnoxious, little loudmouth shyster—I discover some new something he’s done that I hadn’t—”

“Uh-huh.” He looked at his watch. “I don’t have a lotta time, y’know?”

He told her that after Larry Candle’s call he’d checked her out through some contacts he had … Chicago cops. He didn’t say what responses he got, but they must have been at least halfway favorable, because he agreed to share “a few of the facts” with her “off the record,” things not given to the media about the killing of Thomas Kanowski on I-90.

She had the clear impression that as they spoke he was trying to make up his mind how far he could trust her.

He said his supervisors were stressing the lack of similarity between his case and the murder of the ex-priest Stanley Immel in Minnesota. “Still,” he said, “some people—including you, or you wouldn’t be here talking to me—think the two killings are connected, and that they’re just the beginning.” He paused. “Some people also think the priests on that list are animals and deserve whatever they fucking get.” He leaned toward her, staring. “Guess you don’t feel that way, huh?”

“My feelings, and yours,” she said, “aren’t on the table.” She leaned forward then, too, and kept her eyes fixed on his. “Some cops—including you, or you wouldn’t be here talking to me—do their jobs the best they can, Sergeant Wardell, regardless of their feelings.”

She waited, and finally he nodded, just slightly. “The name’s Danny,” he said, and leaned back in his seat.

She did, too.