Will looked at the little phone. It had been set to be completely silent, no buzz, no light, no nothing. So if he didn’t look, he wouldn’t know what, if anything, had come in.
He texted Diana to tell her he now had eyes on Roman. In fact he was following the guy around Chicago all day, which was remarkably dull.
The youngest brother had rolled in just after midnight last night, and his arrival prompted a shouting match between him and his older brother. Because Will was ready to follow Roman and see where he went, he didn’t climb his tree and listen in. It would take too long to extract himself from the tree, too long to pack up the device safely. Still, he wished he could have heard them more clearly.
He did glean that the conversation was consistently made up of Kaspar yelling followed by the occasional, unemotional response from Roman. Eventually they gave up and the house went silent for the night.
Though the elder was up with the dawn, Roman stayed in until nearly noon. Will practically could have followed Kaspar, come back, and then tailed Roman; the two seemed to be on such different schedules.
Finally, Roman came out the front door, sliding sunglasses on, and climbed into his small, bright green studmobile. Watching, Will carefully trailed out behind him. They visited a house in the suburbs, stayed for several hours. Will noted the address, tried the common passwords on a few wireless signals that were spilling into the street, and hooked into one after tapping in “Monkey.”
Lovely. One article showed this house as the place of arrest on two separate counts of meth possession. Another piece pointed to the address as the source of sales. Still a third—on the growing suburban meth problem—listed several addresses as possible examples of the new “meth house next door,” and Will was looking right at the second house, picture included.
He had a while to sit there and think while Roman was inside—conducting business or getting high? Hot winds buffeted the car, reminding him of his own summers in this town. Keeping his gaze on the door, Will tried to stay focused and held his conclusion until he saw the Kurev brother again. At age twenty-two, Roman probably wasn’t overly susceptible to solid decision making.
There was also the incredibly high likelihood that the Kurev empire was involved in this endeavor. Roman could just as easily be smoking the good life as checking the family holdings, which led Will to think about Diana arresting Ivan.
The middle Kurev brother had been in White Oak at a house not unlike this one.
Will couldn’t just walk in, pretending to be a buyer. Or could he? Roman might recognize him. Then again, probably not. In the old days, it might have been worth the risk, but not now. Not with Diana back home, waiting. Not with today’s agenda of tailing Roman. If Will was inside, he wouldn’t be able to just pop up and run after the guy when he left.
Instead, Will memorized the address—hell, he had three Internet hits for it—and he would come back tomorrow. See what he could buy. See what he could learn.
When his target exited a good fifty minutes later, Will couldn’t tell if the man was high or not. Which meant he either wasn’t high at all or he was addicted and the high now just normalized him. Lovely.
Roman easily led him to a second house on the other side of Chicago. Traffic was rough enough that Will was nearly shaken off on more than one occasion. Had it not been for the obvious green and flashy lines of the sports car, Will wouldn’t have found it again.
This time when Roman stopped, Will had an upgraded agenda.
He passed the small white house on North Neva Avenue and circled the block. Though the owners clearly weren’t wealthy by most standards, the houses still ran well over a hundred grand per bedroom. It was, after all, a low crime neighborhood in Chicago. But maybe not as low crime as they thought.
Despite the front driveway, an alley bisected the block, giving Will—and anyone who wanted to come make a purchase with relatively little fanfare—the opportunity to get in with some level of ease.
His nondescript car fit in perfectly with the chipped orange and olive-green throwbacks on their last legs and a second sports car that rivaled Roman’s. Parking a few houses down, he pulled on his ball cap. Unlogoed and nondescript, it was a go-to accessory that he was beginning to wonder if he’d overused. But it was what he had at the moment. That and his learned ability to meekly blend or stand straight and stare the devil in the eyes, either of which he could do as the situation required.
Reaching back in, he pulled a gun from under the seat and pushed it into a pocket he’d sewn at the back of his pants—just sliding a gun into the waistband was a recipe for disaster, but the spot was a good one. Keeping his hands near the front of him in a non-suspicious way, he slid out of the car and started toward his goal.
Slouching his shoulders, he made himself slightly shorter, less assured in his walk, more likely to be looked over and ignored.
He passed the squat, square garage that sat separate from the main house, and with a furtive glance in all directions, Will slipped into the space between it and the nearly identical garage belonging to the house next door. The home was well chosen. There was a small, purple bicycle in the back, and he’d noticed a playhouse in the front. He also noticed that each had a layer of dust or rust that didn’t quite draw closer inspection—but he looked. It seemed each had been bought new and never played with. Of course.
Next door, the toys looked well used, cherished items of a little girl from the looks of things. A plastic house with a worn kitchen and a dent in the roofline. A swing strung on rope hung from the solitary tree.
Ignoring the hole bored into his heart, he pushed away thoughts of his late daughter Bethy, thoughts of the baby Diana had once asked for, and went low.
He emerged from between the garages, too near the ground to be seen, and he smiled at Kurev’s parking job. Good boy, Will thought, stretching out on his belly, reaching for the front bumper.
Kurev had parked close.
Lying where he could without being seen, with his feet tucked into the space between the garages and his arm snaking out, he felt along the bumper to stick the tracker into the curve there. God bless classic sports cars and metal bumpers.
Well, that thought lasted only a moment.
The tracking device didn’t like the curves Will was trying to mount it on. The sticky plastic back wanted a flat surface. It didn’t need much space, but apparently it needed a flatter one than Will was finding
Pulling the tracker back, he stuck his empty hand out, feeling the inside of the bumper, testing for a surface that would work.
A noise had him freezing. Stock-still, he listened and concluded it was someone going out the front door. He didn’t breathe, stayed as poised as he could be—ready for flight—until the sound of a car door and an engine gave him an impersonal go-ahead to get back to his business.
He didn’t like where he was. He’d loved it just a moment ago, stretched out low and out of sight. But he couldn’t move quickly enough and wouldn’t be able to hop up and get away should someone come out of the house. There was no way to immediately transform his actions into something innocuous looking. No, a man on the ground near your car was threatening just by his existence. He couldn’t lie here forever.
But he wanted—needed—the tracker on the car. He didn’t want to lose Roman. So he stayed a moment longer. It was a gamble, a bet that they wouldn’t come out while he was still here. Still exposed. Still unable to even get to a gun with the speed he would have liked.
It was always a gamble.
He found the spot he needed, reached the tracker out, and placed it, pressing firmly before pulling himself back into the space between the garages. He’d been out here too long. So he headed sedately back to his car before testing the tracker, letting his breath out when he heard the steady rhythm of the beep. He’d been more afraid than he’d wanted to admit that, for whatever reason, it wouldn’t work this time. There was no logic to that, but he found himself thinking that more and more.
That his luck must run out soon.
That he was due.
He did not want to be due.
Given that line of thought, Will pulled away and parked in front of a house for sale on the next street over. For a moment he just sat, listening for the normalized and repetitive tone of the tracker. The beeping changed beat as he drove away; the chirps getting farther apart as Will got farther from the device he’d planted. But because he was moving, he wouldn’t have known if Roman had pulled out of the driveway at just that time. Without a stop and check in for the steady beat that told him the car was stationary, he could have lost the youngest Kurev . . . as well as his tracker.
He got out of the car, checked in the windows of the empty house, and picked up the flyer from the clear box on the realtor’s sign out front. It was a good excuse to sit in his car and pretend to read.
It was a good exercise in not thinking about the house on the other side of town, a house that wasn’t even a house anymore because no one would buy a home in which the walls had to be scrubbed clean of the blood of a woman and her four- year-old daughter.
He went long stretches of time now without thinking of them, or more specifically, of finding them as he had. He still didn’t know whether the horrifying images of Sam and Bethy had begun to fade because time did actually heal those wounds or if the memories had simply been pushed aside by new ones. Will was grateful that they didn’t come any more often than they did. Because when they did, they hit with a force that always knocked him back a step.
The beeping of the tracker pulled him from the spell, and only as he laid the real estate listing in his passenger seat did he realize that his eyes burned. With a jerk, he quickly crumpled the page and shoved it under the seat—wouldn’t do to have something obvious in his car linking him to this location. As he pulled out, he caught sight of the green sports car as it went past.
Will was able to hang back a little farther this time and lost his visual on Roman’s car more often, but he caught up more easily when he did and worried about it less.
While he waited outside a third suburban home, Will tapped into another wireless service, this one without a code, belonging to the twenty-four-hour café this house was situated behind, and found out that the last address was another possible meth house.
Great. Roman might be an addict—always a possibility—but he was definitely a businessman. For the current address, Will couldn’t find any associations with meth, and while he waited, he speculated.
Maybe the house was new. If they were smart, they moved the locations around. That would make it harder for the police to find them, to stake out the place, to know what was happening and where.
The beeping kept him company, told him that Roman hadn’t gone anywhere. At least not in his own car.
Shit.
Will should be watching the door better.
And it was only four minutes before he caught a clue—which came in the form of a businessman, heading out the back door, backward.
Will frowned.
Manicured hands reached out. Hands that emerged from a silky dressing gown, hands that grabbed and pulled at the tie around his neck and pulled him partly back in the door for a serious lip lock.
But the man wasn’t Roman, so this likely wasn’t Roman’s girlfriend’s house.
That suspicion was confirmed about twenty minutes later when a second man came out the same door. This one walked right out; no hands pulled him back. He was put together better —tie on straight, jacket open, nothing inside out. Everything seemed good, until he took the first step and the front of his slacks gapped.
Will almost smacked his hand to his face.
Good God man, pull up your zipper.
What was wrong with men? It must be men in general, because places like this existed. Maybe it was him. Maybe he was the odd one. Sure, he met attractive women. And sure, they’d flirted with him and he’d flirted back. If nothing else, he could attribute his current faithfulness to the fact that his wife could and would kill him—painfully—if he considered sticking his dick where it didn’t belong.
But the same couldn’t have been said for Sam. There had been times when he’d wondered if she’d do anything other than cry, if she’d even leave him for cheating on her, and he still hadn’t done it. Still hadn’t had the real urge to. Sure he’d felt that pull low in his belly. Everyone did, not just men, but every desire didn’t have to be acted on.
He sighed out loud in the car. Maybe it was the gamble, the thrill of something illegal, illicit, the possibility of getting caught. It was stupid as hell. And he continued thinking that until two minutes later when Roman left out the front door, his zipper up and earning a small smudge of respect from Will.
Turning the car on, Will resumed following the man, trailing behind as the sun set on Chicago. Long shadows fell from tall buildings as the two cars wound back into the heart of town. Things were closing down, but the weather was relatively nice and people were out in number.
Will sat in traffic, watching people, inching along, time passing. It was darker before they arrived anywhere of importance. Roman ran several short errands—checked in at a dry cleaner and picked up some shirts. He went into some street-front shop with a window full of frou-frou items and emerged with a gift-wrapped package. He then hit a high-end chain clothing store and came out with a bag from there, too. Whether he picked up or dropped off anything else at these stops, Will couldn’t tell.
Next was a valet stand, where Roman handed over his keys and went into a restaurant, leaving Will to circle the block several times to find a parking spot that allowed a view of the front door so he could watch for the youngest Kurev to emerge. But it wasn’t like he didn’t have time to play parking shark, so he played, and he waited.
Several hours later, Roman emerged. It had been a busy day for a man with nothing to do.
The street was dark, lights giving off pools of yellow. People passed in small clusters or pairs. Women wore short skirts and the men jeans and expensive shirts. The business buildings closed and the bars opened, spilling sounds and people onto the sidewalks. Will tracked Roman to a club and watched him saunter in the back door.
Twenty minutes later, Will decided his ass hurt, he had little exercise all day, and he had to pee like a racehorse. So he left, found a convenience store with a bathroom, where he pulled a nice shirt from his duffle bag, and made the decision to change his pants as well. The cargoes didn’t look right for the club, but the legs of the jeans were just wide enough and just dark enough to hide the holsters he wore at each ankle—it was all he was going in with, and he prayed that two guns were more than the other guy would have.
He walked back to the club, found his way past the growing line behind the velvet rope, and went around the side. The kitchen door opened periodically and he took advantage. A smile earned him a return grin from one of the servers, who then pointed at the lock and made sure the door didn’t close all the way.
People really shouldn’t be so trusting.
But he made his way inside, using the premise that he knew what he was doing to get into one of the back rooms, and spotted Roman Kurev at a booth set into the far wall. Two other men and a variety of scantily clad women draped around the space. Drink glasses and bottles dotted the clear table top, too early to have become detritus from an evening well spent.
His vantage point on the lower floor—Roman’s table was on a level about three feet higher than his own—allowed him to watch without being noticed. It didn’t matter; Roman was exceedingly dull. He didn’t dance, didn’t leave the table, just sat, drank, and talked.
Without a bug in place at Roman’s table, which Will was neither equipped nor stupid enough to do, he could only wait.
It was two hours and three tall drinks later that Will saw something happen. It wasn’t big, but it was something and out of sheer boredom, he followed up.
Roman had been talking to a woman in a strappy, silvery dress. He’d leaned over to whisper in her ear, nibble her neck, and basically paw her in public. But during that pawing, Will had seen Roman’s hand brush the top of her breast and push something into her bra. It wasn’t subtle or smooth, but it was accompanied by the smile of a man who was proud of himself as only a twenty-two-year-old could be.
So Will trailed the woman when she almost immediately stood and stalked to the bathroom on long legs and higher heels. He flirted her up before she even reached her destination, told her he’d been watching her all night—which was true, just not in the flattered way she took it—and pulled her aside. He leaned in close, smiled at her, touched her neck, and moved downward until he found what he was looking for.
Had she protested at any point along the way, he wouldn’t have done it. He was—at least to his own low standards—a gentleman. He was a married man, despite what he’d yelled at Diana. He might not have actually married her, but he was married. And the thought gave him pause as he reached for this woman’s breasts and thought about the men he’d seen coming out of the local brothel earlier.
But she didn’t say no.
Luckily, he touched plastic before he touched anything else important. Still looking in her overly made-up eyes, he grinned and teased her. “What do you have here?”
Her smile spoke of things she shouldn’t be offering a perfect stranger. “Want to share?”
He consciously flirted back, raising his eyebrows and grinning. Then he looked at what he held. The small plastic bag held a cluster of formed pink crystals.
Son of a bitch.
“Please come; this isn’t a casual invitation.”
The words from Reese put Diana on alert. “Why is that?” She’d been about to turn down the invite, planned on begging off and suiting up again.
She’d gone out the night before and seen absolutely nothing of value. No Yulia Churkin, no Nick, not even a shady drug deal. That last one made her doubt her worth as an officer. She knew all the good places to buy—or so she thought—she should have seen something. Maybe she’d ask Reese, if whatever Reese needed wasn’t too earthshaking.
“I found something. Or actually I didn’t. And I need your input.”
There was no way to interpret that. “Can you tell me more?”
“Not over the phone. Which is why I’m going to get us Chinese takeout and pick your brain.” The tone was uncertain, needy, nothing like Reese’s normal assertiveness.
“All right.” She had to change, couldn’t show up at Reese’s house armed to the hilt. “I’ll be there in thirty minutes. Chow mein?”
“Already ordered. With crab rangoon and wonton soup. Meet you here. Thank you.”
Diana had been looking forward to going out again tonight. She’d called in sick the night before, unable to run the risk of running into Yulia Churkin with Reese by her side. Sadly, her patrol on foot had turned up nothing but a few of her fellow officers driving by.
After Will’s text earlier today, she was planning to go by Ivan’s meth house and then head far away and see if she could find some Wi-Fi and some property records. If she could locate the owner of the house, she might be able to find a direction to investigate. But instead she would help a friend.
She stripped out of her clothing and weapons and changed into something more casual and then spent about five minutes deciding how to get a gun on herself and into her friend’s house without notice. The final conclusion was that it wasn’t going to happen. An ankle holster would show when she sat on the floor or tucked her feet up under her on the couch. It wouldn’t show at her back, but Reese was likely to hug her, and that was the end of that idea. If that happened, then whatever Reese planned to say would take a backseat to why Diana was wearing a gun into her best friend’s house. And if she saw that the gun was missing the serial number? Well, Diana wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t be arrested on the spot. So she pulled her police-issue Glock—the new one (the one she’d used to shoot James Stewart had become part of that investigation)—into her purse, and headed out the door in jeans and a T-shirt.
She spiraled in on her friend’s home, checking for spare cars in the driveway or any that she recognized parked on the street. Deciding that this wasn’t some kind of intervention/arrest party, Diana parked on the street and reached around to flip open the latch on the gate. The latch wasn’t obvious from the sidewalk; it almost looked like there was no gate—just a front walk that slid under the fence and made its way to the door of the small, two-bedroom house.
About three streets over from Nick, Reese had a tiny lot with a white picket fence outlining the front yard and backed by holly bushes. She had a six-foot privacy fence around the entire backyard, a security system, and two large dogs. Reese lived alone, having lost her roommate about five months ago. Diana worried about her, and she opened with that thought as she came through the door Reese opened for her. “Are you going to get another roommate?”
A hug answered her. Good thing she hadn’t worn a piece hidden under her shirt. Her eyes darted around, searching for anyone that might be waiting in another room. Someone who might know what she’d done and want to bring her in. Someone who might have gotten to Reese and coerced her into talking Diana out of her home. It was a ridiculous thought, but she was entertaining the ridiculous these days.
“I don’t think I can do it again. I’ve already confiscated the other room and turned it into an office. Want to see?” She tugged at Diana’s hand, not waiting for an answer.
Diana didn’t set down her purse, wasn’t ready to relinquish the proximity to her gun yet, but allowed herself to be pulled along, to feel like a friend and not a fugitive for a few moments. “Wow.”
“I know; Grace painted it. I thought it looked like a bordello, but it’s grown on me. And it doubles as a guest room.” She pointed over to the daybed she’d pushed against the opposite wall. It was covered in throw pillows in a variety of greens and browns all shot through with gold threads that picked up the color from the trim. Somehow the oxblood walls weren’t overpowering, and the cream-colored trim, overlaid with gold paint, seemed perfectly in place with Reese’s wood and black metal desk. It looked all pulled together.
“This is great.” Diana looked around. “If I ever become a madam, I’m gonna come stay with you.”
“Ha, ha.”
“No, it’s shockingly pretty. Not sure how I would explain that, because it should look like a brothel. But it’s nice.” Diana pulled Reese out of the room this time. “I smell Chinese. Feed me and talk.”
“You really don’t want to hear it.” Reese shook her head as she opened containers. “It’s going to ruin the food. Do you want me to stay quiet while we eat?”
Tilting her head, as though that would help her see into the other woman’s thoughts, she asked, “Your food is already ruined, isn’t it?”
“As is my day, my week, my month, my heart.”
“Well, shit. Serve up some trouble with the chow mein then.” Diana opened a drawer and pulled out two sets of lacquered chopsticks, the small stands to set them in, and those wide, flat soup spoons. Reese had all the right pieces but would still set the food between them and eat out of the boxes so she didn’t have to hand wash more dishes.
The news managed to wait until they were at the table, a can of Coke sitting in front of Diana and Diet Pepsi in front of Reese. Diana had just lifted a wonton in her spoon when Reese finally spoke.
“Do you remember the pink meth?”
“Of course.”
“It’s missing.”
That didn’t make any sense. “Which?” At Reese’s pointed look, Diana asked a second question. “All of it?”
A nod. “All of it.”
“How does that even happen? There were six of us, each with at least one booking. Five of them had the pink meth on their persons.”
“Exactly.” Reese set down her half-eaten wonton, too upset to continue chewing. “I got a call from the evidence room. My suspect got the first trial, so they were pulling the evidence, and the meth I claimed to have filed not only isn’t there, it was never logged in.”
“What?” Diana managed to snag a wad of noodles and a snow pea and get it into her mouth before this went too far south and she couldn’t eat either.
“It gets worse. I checked out all the arrests from that night.” Reese ran her hand through her blond hair, leaving little pieces of it jutting in different directions. It matched her mood. “My guy was the least involved. Lowest on the totem pole. No priors, that kind of thing. So he came to trial first—well, he won’t now!”
“Because there’s no evidence.” Diana filled in.
“But when I checked, I found out it’s all missing. Every piece of meth from that night.”
“What? Mine, too?” That was a stupid question. And a selfish one. But Reese didn’t seem to hold it against her.
“I remember putting mine in the evidence locker. Do you?”
Diana thought back. Evidence during the day shift was handed in to a person at the desk. If no one was at the desk, lockers existed where individual evidence would be placed and locked up, sealed by the arresting officer. The locker could only be opened from the back side, directly into the evidence room, at some time after the officer locked it . . . and handed in the key. “Who did you give your key to?”
“The captain!”
Well, that was the right person, Diana thought. “Me too. And I do specifically remember putting the meth—and the paperwork—into a locker.”
“Do you think it’s because of your person? Kurev?”
Diana blinked at her. She’d never expected that name to come out of the mouth of anyone in White Oak. But the past and the present were blending together, blurring in uncomfortable ways. She hadn’t known it was him at the time of the arrest. Hadn’t recognized his face, probably because of the polo shirt and khakis and probably because she didn’t expect him in her town.
Reese chimed in before Diana could. “Your evidence is part of a RICO case, right?”
“I don’t know, but it could be. It’s certainly part of a murder, even though the case is still open. And it’s a murder of a known mafia associate. Wow. All of it?”
“There’s not a single bag or rock of pink meth in all of our holdings.” There was a long pause where Reese slowly ate a wonton she fished out of the plastic soup container. “Also, the captain mentioned the stuff in preshift meeting once. Said there had been two more arrests—totally unrelated to the house bust—and those guys had pink rock on them, called it ‘pink ice.’ So I dug for those arrests, too. . . .”
“Missing?”
“Missing.”
“Have you told anyone?” Diana wasn’t hungry anymore. Consciously, she knew the food smelled good, but she didn’t want it.
“You.” Reese gave a half smile and shrug. “I checked to see if the same person was on evidence each time. But no. There’s only one name that even begins to link the cases together, and that person didn’t have his hands in all of it.”
“What? Who?” Diana pressed and couldn’t guess for herself.
“He wasn’t even in! Maybe it was his cousin? . . . And I know he wouldn’t . . . or I thought I knew he wouldn’t!” Reese shoved her fingers into her hair, not making sense. She was clearly frustrated, and clearly trying to figure out how to say everything.
Knowing she wouldn’t like what she heard, Diana pushed again. “Tell me. I won’t judge.”
“I house-sat for Nick while he was out doing his lecture.”
The lecture that wasn’t, Diana thought, but she didn’t interrupt.
“He got a phone call. I was setting the mail down, and I hit something that hit a button and the machine played. A doctor’s office. They needed Nick’s grandfather in for a checkup, but the grandfather’s line was out.” Reese paused while Diana’s heart sank, but she didn’t interrupt her friend’s frustrated tirade. “Did you know his grandfather is Emilian Vasilescu? I don’t want to distrust him, but this meth case has only one connection and it’s Nick, and Nick’s grandfather turns out to be the local Teflon don. What do I do?”
Oh Nick. I’m not the only one whose life is bleeding one part into the other, am I? Diana thought.