“I say we go hit him now,” Nick said as they left the house. A pair of black-and-whites held back the reporters. “The fact that her computer is missing makes it even more important that we track down all the nuts in this fruitcake. I figure we’ve got time to talk to Chris Colburn before the 4 P.M. chat.”
“Chat,” she repeated, amused at his description of the all-hands meeting scheduled at Chicago PD headquarters that afternoon. “You say that like there won’t be a throng of FBI agents in attendance.”
“Is that what you call a group of Fibbies? A throng? I always thought it was called a snooze.”
He gallantly held the front door open for her, and she grinned in spite of herself. “You’d better watch it, Carelli. Talk like that will get you thrown right off this case.”
The day had brightened, and he pulled out a pair of sunglasses. “If the bleach that Brown found on the floor up there means the Lovelorn Killer is back in business, we’re both getting thrown off this case, pronto, unless we can find an angle of our own by four o’clock.”
She thought of her father, shut in his den, with the TV on but nobody watching. “Let’s go.”
He jangled his keys in his pocket. “I can drive.”
She had her own keys. “Yeah? So can I.”
“It’s a waste of gas to take both cars. Where’s your sense of responsibility to Mother Earth, Vega?”
“I meant that I could drive both of us.”
“Oh,” he said, as though this possibility had just revealed itself like a shiny clue. “Sure.”
Nick had driven them most everywhere in their brief courtship and marriage. Back then it was a black BMW M coupe, its arch like a cat. He’d juice the throttle at stoplights just to feel the body shiver with the engine’s power. Pops had been suspicious right away. How’d he afford a car like that on a cop’s salary? But Annalisa was hooked by the force of the engine, roaring them forward with such certainty. She’d had one life envisioned for herself, and when it had vanished, she hadn’t conjured a replacement. Nick knew all the streets like he carried a map in his head—back-alley shortcuts, sweeping drives along the lake, straight shots right out of town—and she’d been happy to go along for the ride. Only later did she realize he knew all the directions because he never picked any one of them for very long.
They climbed in her Civic and Annalisa started the reliable if unexciting engine. She asked for Colburn’s address, and he named a place in Wicker Park. “Not too far from our old apartment,” he added with a sideways glance at her.
“I’m not sure it rose to the standard of an apartment. A hovel, maybe.” Their walk-up, four-room flat backed up to the local L, which came rattling through every twenty minutes. It had rickety stairs, a window that wouldn’t open, and a shower that had only two temperatures: freezing cold or blazing hot. He’d lived there first, and she’d moved in with him after their quickie marriage. She had sloughed off the peeling paint and given the whole thing a fresh coat, bought new curtains and throw pillows, and put rubber bands around the cabinet knobs so that the doors didn’t fly open and send their wedding china crashing to the floor every time a train lumbered past. She’d spit shined the place as much as she could muster and invited her parents to dinner, hopeful and eager to impress upon them that she was a fully functioning adult now. She had been so concerned they might spot the water damage in the ceiling or the rust at the base of the stove that she didn’t see the real telltale sign of disaster until it was too late: Nick had failed to show.
“Yeah, it wasn’t the Ritz,” he conceded. “But we had some good times there, didn’t we?”
She couldn’t read his expression behind the sunglasses. More than once, she wondered why he had married her. He’d chased a hundred women and loved them all for fifteen minutes at a time. How had he looked at her and ever thought she’d be enough?
He leaned back in his seat as she drove. “So, tell me about this vic you know. Katherine Duffy. She was the last known victim, yeah?”
“She was the wife of my dad’s partner Owen Duffy. He and my dad came up together, rode a car for a couple years in the ’80s around the time I was born. They hit it off right away, I guess. Family men from the area with the same dark sense of humor. They even bought houses on the same block. My dad worked his way up and became a sergeant, then a detective, but Duffy got tired of the grind. He went into computer repair just as everyone started buying them by the truckload and made a killing—which was a good thing, because he dropped dead shoveling snow the winter after Katie got killed.” She shook her head, disbelieving even after all this time. “He was a big guy, strong as an ox.”
“Happens that way with couples sometimes. Were they married long?”
“Twenty years.”
“Happy?”
“God, I don’t know. I would’ve said yes at the time, but I was a kid. You don’t think about parents having interior lives. They’re just robots there to ruin your life. I will say I wished a million times that Katie was my mom.”
He gave a wry grin. “You were emotionally cheating on Maria? Nice.”
“Hey, I was a teenage girl and she was my mother. We were obligated to get on each other’s nerves. My mom nagged me about chores and homework, while also criticizing my clothes, my hair, my eyebrows, my shoes, my posture.…”
“I get the picture.”
“Mom was always proper and conservative—cardigans and knit pants, penny loafers and pumps on Sunday. But Katie had style. She wore high heels with jeans, Jackie O glasses. Her nails were so pretty they looked fake, and she always painted them some wild color. ‘Hooker red,’ Owen used to say, and she’d just laugh and sass him back. ‘What’re you looking so close at the hookers for?’ She had a handbag to match every outfit. I think she might have wanted to be a designer. Sometimes I’d see her sketching women in different outfits.”
“Did she work outside the home at all? Someplace the Lovelorn Killer might’ve run into her?”
“She did the usual mom stuff. PTA, church committees. I think she took a painting class once at the local community college.”
Nick looked out the window at the passing scenery, his expression inscrutable. “Pretty bold move, targeting a cop’s wife. Even an ex-cop.”
They’d had four in total on the block back then, counting Pops. Rod Brewster, his other ex-partner, was still on the job. The Lovelorn Killer had crept right to the heart of the lion’s den.
“Did you see her that night?” he asked.
“Yes. I was at the Halloween party.” So many bodies in the house that it was sweltering like summer, despite the October air. The O’Briens had the biggest place around, and people poured out of it, into a backyard lit by twinkling lights and glowing jack-o’-lanterns, covered with hanging spiders. There were dishes of candy corn and bat-shaped cookies, peeled bananas dolled up with candy googly eyes to look like ghosts. Someone had strapped fairy wings to the Kennedys’ shaggy black dog, who had wandered the party mooching for food. “Katie Duffy dressed up as a fortune teller. She wore a bunch of crazy scarves, a long flowy skirt, and a curly black wig. For a while, she was reading people’s palms on the swing on the back porch.”
“Did she do yours?”
Annalisa smiled, remembering. “Yes.”
“What did she say?” he asked, glancing at her hands on the wheel.
You will have a great love. “None of your business.”
He sat back, wriggling awkwardly in his seat. His knees bumped up against the dash. “She can’t have been much of a fortune teller,” he remarked. “Or she would’ve seen it coming.”
For a split second, she thought he meant their marriage and divorce. “No one did,” she said, although that wasn’t quite true. The grown-ups had been all wound up about the Lovelorn Killer, fretting about the dangers of trick-or-treat even as the kids got an extra charge out of it. There was a special kind of subversion to dressing up that year. Fake blood and trick knives took on a heightened danger with a real monster roaming somewhere in the vicinity. She and Pops had a blowout over her skin-tight, skimpy-skirted devil’s costume. Asking for trouble, he’d told her, like some killer would pick her just because of a seductive outfit.
Colin had sure appreciated it, had let his hand creep under the sequined skirt every time Pops’s eyes went elsewhere at the party. All for me, he’d murmured into her neck. She’d let him do it, thrilling to his touch, high on her newfound power to make him want her this much. Pops, wearing old-timey black-and-white prison garb, drank his beer straight from the bottle and glared at her across the room. Her performance was as much for him as for Colin. How do you like me now?
“Is Katie why you picked homicide over law school?” Nick asked. “Unfinished business?”
“No. I never expected to work this case.” She’d figured like the rest of them, that the guy was probably dead. “If anything, Katie Duffy’s death blew a hole through my illusions. Pops, he was invincible to us kids. We didn’t think anything bad would happen as long as he was around. Now I can see how scared he must have been. He knew the truth, even if we didn’t.”
“Then why?”
I wanted to have a family again. She didn’t dare say that to him, this man who had pledged to be her family but had instead tomcatted his way up and down Milwaukee Avenue. Pops always called the men he served with his “brothers,” and to Annalisa, the sound in the kitchen when they’d bellied up to Ma’s table was much the same as big Vega family dinners of yore. Laughing, taunting, the scrape of forks against the plate and then hugs and hearty slaps on the back on the way out. “Alex told me I couldn’t hack it, being a cop,” Annalisa said aloud. “I decided to show him up. It’s not too hard if you ignore the idiots. There are some good guys, but also a bunch of swinging dicks.”
“And you decided yours would be the biggest in the room.”
“Nah.” She smiled. “Turns out, if you’re busy swinging it, someone can come along and whack it off.”
“Youch.” He sucked in a breath and clutched the armrest for show, but he was grinning. “You’re cold, Vega. Ice-cold.”
She laughed, a genuine one. She could dish it out and Nick would take it. This part of their marriage had always worked well. He would tease her, but he didn’t fight her. Or fight for her, as it had turned out. “What about you?” she said, realizing she’d never asked. Her dad was a cop, her neighbors were cops. Back then, she’d figured it was part of the male DNA. “I assume you discovered the allure of the badge bunnies and never looked back.”
Nick cracked his knuckles, a habit that used to drive her crazy. “Nah. I realized early on that death isn’t at the end, waiting for us at some finish line. Death is everywhere, all the time. It’s on the ballfield and at the supermarket and hiding under the bed at night, just like we feared when we were little kids. Hell, it’s probably riding right here in the car with us, waiting for any opportunity—a truck to slam into us out of nowhere.”
She checked the mirrors. “Thanks for that cheery thought.”
“Yeah, well. I decided if death was going to stalk me, I’d stalk it right back.” He nodded to himself, as if reaffirming his decision. “I look it right in the face. It’s not a fair fight. Death wins in the end and always will. I’m just trying to even the odds a little.”