Annalisa strode into the station with a single mission: to get a cup of coffee into her system before she had to brief the commander on the Harper case. Her plan fell apart when she spied Harry O’Hara camped in front of the coffee pot, hiding a laugh behind a mug that read OFFICIAL BADASS. O’Hara was forty-six and just divorced from his third wife. Rumor had it he was already auditioning for number four. “Something funny, O’Hara?” she asked as his titter became a full-blown guffaw. Behind her, O’Hara’s regular partner, Sam Gunderson, started to chuckle, too. O’Hara began a cheerful whistle of “Here Comes the Bride” as Nick materialized behind her. That’s when Annalisa noticed a cheap white veil adorning her chair. Someone had also put a bouquet of gas station flowers on her desk.
“Heard you two got hitched,” O’Hara said in a singsong voice. “Guess old Nicky Boy wanted a second go-round on your carousel, huh, Vega?”
“Cute,” Annalisa said as she picked up the flowers and dumped them into the nearest basket. “So original, too.” She forced O’Hara aside and poured herself a cup of coffee that had to be four hours old at this point. It tasted like it had been brewed in a pothole. “Whatever your issues are, O’Hara, please cancel my subscription, okay?”
“Just wishing our new happy couple all the best. I bet we have some fried rice in the fridge we could throw if you’re interested.”
“Hey, what’s your problem, man?” Nick lunged in O’Hara’s direction.
“Can’t take a joke, Carelli? You got to protect the little woman now?”
Nick looked like he might actually take a swing. Annalisa yanked him back by the tail of his sport coat. “Knock it off, Carelli.”
“Me? You’re mad at me?”
Zimmer appeared from her office across the room and called out to them sharply. “Vega, Carelli. In my office now.”
“Uh-oh. Honeymoon’s over,” O’Hara said. “Again.”
Nick glowered at him and followed Annalisa as she threaded her way through the bullpen. “If you’d let me deck him once, this would all be over,” he muttered to her as they walked.
“No, it would just make me into some big button they could push whenever they wanted to make you go cuckoo.”
Zimmer, who was waiting for them in the doorway, squinted at the guys still enjoying their joke across the room. “Do we have some sort of problem here?”
Nick glanced back and opened his mouth, ready to snitch. “No,” Annalisa said, heading him off. “No problem.”
“Good. Get inside.”
Commander Lynn Zimmer had earned the nickname the Hammer back in her patrol days, and Annalisa always thought there must be some story about her coldcocking a perp with a Craftsman titanium, but she knew better than to ask Zimmer herself. Instead, she’d asked Pops a few years ago, as he had helped train Zimmer, and he’d laughed so hard his belly shook the table. “No, not that she wouldn’t have taken a swing with whatever tools were handy. You can see a scar on her chin if you get real close, where she cut herself on a chain-link fence chasing down an armed robbery suspect. Leapt down on him like a puma, she did. Bled all over his clothes in the process. But no, she became the Hammer after work, down at the bar. She could drink a sumo wrestler under the table if given the opportunity, and he’d wake up hurting like his head was in a sling the next day while the Hammer would wolf down a plate of eggs and bacon at Smitty’s Diner and then do back-to-back shifts.”
Usually Zimmer conducted herself with quick, precise movements, the hallmark of a woman who had to accomplish twice as much as the men to earn her stripes. Her high cheekbones and slim form echoed her Maasai ancestry, and Annalisa would choose no other to lead her in battle. Zimmer took her seat behind the desk and motioned for her detectives to avail themselves of the other chairs. She scanned the printout of the Channel Seven news story that Annalisa had already forwarded to her about the Grave Diggers.
“Let me see if I have this straight: You’re saying our victim, Grace Harper, was a member of this amateur murder group trying to crack the Lovelorn Killer case, and she ended up bound and garroted the way the victims were in the 1990s. And thanks to this little feature last week, everyone watching the evening news knew she was working on the case.”
“Yes, those are the facts as we have ascertained them so far.” Annalisa glanced at Nick, who had crushed his paper cup into a ball in his fist. His left leg started to bounce.
“Look at the pose, Commander. It’s like a carbon copy of the ones hanging over her desk. Whoever this guy is, he’s got the playbook down pat.”
Zimmer tossed the printout down on her desk. “There have been dozens of media profiles on the Lovelorn Killer case over the years, with much bigger muscle behind them than Channel Seven. I don’t see how a bunch of computer geeks got him to surface when nobody else has. You think the FBI has given up on this guy? You think the Staties have? Hell, we’ve got open files on Duffy, Sheffield, and Lyons. Detectives Reynolds and Brown are technically still assigned to the case.”
“Yeah, and when’s the last time they actually worked it?” Nick asked.
“There hasn’t been any need to work it,” Zimmer snapped at him. She picked up the printout again, like maybe it had new answers. “This guy’s been underground for more than two decades. He was already a spook story by the time I came up. You said the victim lived alone?”
“Alone, yes,” Annalisa confirmed.
“No boyfriend? Girlfriend? Normally the victims had a family.”
“Molly Lipinski says no. There’s an aunt living in upstate New York somewhere. Molly thinks maybe Binghamton, but she doesn’t know the woman’s name.”
“Makes no damn sense. On the face of it, it’s more likely that someone knew her creepy hobby and murdered her with it than the Lovelorn Killer pops up after twenty years to off some Nancy Drew with a house full of old pictures.”
Yes, but who? Annalisa wanted to ask. The woman’s spartan house showed no sign of human connection. She worked at a grocery store, not a bank or a brothel or someplace that would give cause for others to target her. A search of the bedroom and bathroom showed no signs that Grace Harper had a drug problem that might have put her in contact with the seedier side of Garfield Park.
Zimmer chewed her lip and looked out the window at the brightening sky. The city would be awake soon, ready for the morning headlines. The press could only be held at bay for so long. If this were the work of the Lovelorn Killer, the Sun-Times might be getting the biggest tip of all when his love letter arrived. “We’re going to have to play it both ways,” Zimmer said at length. “You two get a power nap and then work the local angle. Grace Harper looks clean at first glance, but odds are she pissed off some ordinary schmo who decided to ape the pictures hanging in her home. Talk to the neighbors. Look at her finances. Everyone’s got a secret or two, and I want to know what’s hidden in Grace Harper’s underwear drawer by the end of the day. Meanwhile, I’ll have Reynolds and Brown put together the highlights from the Lovelorn Killer file.”
“We’re keeping the case?” Nick asked, leaning forward in surprise.
“For now, yeah, we run with it on our own. I’ll loop in the Feds when it looks like they need looping.”
Annalisa looked at the news printout lying on the desk. She didn’t state the obvious, that one national story would be all it would take for the Feds to loop themselves in.
Outside, the damp early morning air had a chill, promising a colder spring day ahead. May in Chicago had a schizoid quality to it, lurching daily between cold and wet and scorching hot before settling in for the long, humid summer that put a shimmer on the lake and a sizzle on the sidewalks. Annalisa hunched inside her windbreaker as Nick fell into step beside her. “Want my coat?”
She eyed him sideways, him and his omnipresent leather jacket. She wondered if it was the same one she’d taken from him ten years ago, or if he’d lost that one in the game somewhere along the way. “Pass, thank you.”
“How about coffee and an egg sandwich, then?” He nodded to the pancake house across the way. “My treat.”
Nick always offered to treat. Beers, jackets, rides downtown—he’d give you a diamond tiara if he had it. She’d thought he was the most generous man she’d ever met until she’d realized he never took anything in return. No debts for Nick Carelli, not even a temporary one. He gave and gave until he was sure he had provided you with whatever you wanted, and then he moved on to charming the next one down the line.
“Come on,” he said when he saw her hesitating. “You’ve got to eat.”
“Fine. Make mine with bacon.”
He gave her a grin, the one that showed the dimple on his left side. “I remember.”
At 5 A.M., Alicia’s Pancake House catered to the shift workers like themselves, cops and nurses, pharmacy techs and warehouse employees, people who kept the world spinning for the rest of the nine-to-fivers. The coffee-bean-and-sugar aroma made her abused stomach give a feeble rumble, and Annalisa took a red vinyl booth by the window. The waitress slapped down plastic menus on the table and poured them coffee without being asked. Nick ordered the breakfast sandwiches for both of them as Annalisa took in the decor with tired eyes. The squat brick building had survived untouched over a dozen construction booms happening around it. The long Formica breakfast bar with its stainless steel–rimmed stools and little ceramic sugar bowls remained unchanged from the last time the Lovelorn Killer dominated headlines. She saw people checking their phones and wondered if they’d read about Grace Harper’s murder, if it would seem important yet. It had taken a year last time, until the second dark-haired woman turned up dead on the floor in an otherwise undisturbed house, for the panic to set in.
“Gut-feeling time,” Nick said as he blew on his steaming cup of coffee. “Is it him or not?”
She chuffed. “You make it sound so casual. You weren’t here the last time, Carelli. You don’t know how it was.”
“So, then tell me how it was.”
“Let me put it this way: some poor guy in a clown suit on his way to work a kid’s birthday party got pulled over and strip-searched on the side of the road by a couple of patrol cops.”
“Clown suit?”
“You know, like John Wayne Gacy, our last serial killer. It took decades after Gacy for clowns to be funny again, and then bam, they were persona non grata just by association. People were wigged.”
The third murder came faster, followed quickly by a fourth. Even then, Annalisa had felt it only at a distance. Her father hadn’t worked the Lovelorn case at all at first, merely followed the news and gossip like the rest of them. Her mother fretted more, tightening Annalisa’s curfew. That had been the most painful part for Annalisa. She had been fifteen back then, in love to the point of ruin. When she’d thought at all about the future, she’d imagined exotic cocktails, her own credit card, and a bright red car she could keep out as late as she’d wanted. Adults, she was sure, had all the fun.
“He kept killing and no one could seem to stop it. Women started dying their hair blond because all the victims had dark hair. Gun ownership shot up twenty-five percent. Even the animal shelters ran out of big dogs.”
Nick winked at her as the waitress delivered their food. “I bet you’d look cute as a blonde.”
“The fact that you can make jokes shows how much you don’t know,” she replied with mild exasperation. He was still dangerously attractive, she could admit that now, with his sweep of dark hair, gray eyes, and Roman nose. The two-day stubble and sleepy eyes made him seem like he’d just rolled out of someone’s bed—which, most days, she presumed he probably had. She’d loved him, but she was never enough. The priest at their wedding had admonished them to “fill each other’s cup first,” but Nick’s cup turned out to have a hole in the bottom.
“I think it almost doesn’t matter if it’s a copycat,” she said. “Whoever did that to Grace Harper is a dangerous human being. When this story breaks, women are going to be terrified again, especially if they live alone.”
He looked up at her. “Don’t you live alone?”
“Yeah, but I have a gun and I know how to use it. I gotta tell you, though, I sometimes wonder if I was murdered, how long it would take for anyone to find the body.”
He snorted. “Ten hours, tops. If you failed to answer one of Maria’s calls, she’d have the cavalry out quicker than you can say, ‘Hi-ho, Silver.’”
“Not true.” She took out her personal cell and held it up for proof. “I have five unanswered texts from my mom right now.” Six was the magic number, so she’d better be answering soon or her mother would start raising hell.
“Tell her you’re having coffee with me. She’ll call in the National Guard.” She grinned because he was probably right, and he ducked his head. “I have a confession to make.”
“Oh?”
“I heard your handle when the call went out earlier tonight. Well, I guess it was yesterday night, now. I showed up because I wanted to work a case with you.”
She drew back, skeptical. “You did?”
“Sure. You’ve got a rep, Vega. On the job only a year and you’ve closed more than three dozen cases so far.”
Just three homicides, she thought but did not say. Those cases still usually went to the big boys. “You. You wanted to work a case with me.”
“We were always good together. You have to admit that.”
“I admit nothing outside the presence of my lawyer.” It was humor, but also a barb. By the end, their lawyers had done all the talking.
“I saw you at the scene and I saw your face in Zimmer’s office. You’re thinking the same thing I am about this case.”
“Which is?”
He gestured as if to give her the floor. “You tell me.”
God help her, she still wanted to impress him. “Zimmer was floating the theory that Grace Harper ticked off someone personal, and this someone used the Lovelorn Killer’s MO to kill Harper, maybe as an extra special ef-you.”
He nodded. “That’s right.”
“I don’t think so,” she said, and he raised his eyebrows at her. She ticked her reasoning off on her fingers. “This guy broke and entered, while a personal connection probably would’ve used that to come through the front door. This murder had a high degree of difficulty—executed with extra points from the Russian judge. A hothead perp would use a gun or maybe a knife. He wouldn’t be able to subdue a healthy adult woman and tie her up like a human pretzel without some practice. Finally, aside from the body fluids, that scene looked neat as a pin. Maybe we get some DNA or fibers but there was certainly nothing obvious. An inexperienced killer likely panics once the corpse starts getting cold.”
He’d started nodding halfway through her speech. “This guy’s no rookie,” he agreed. “Either he’s some Lovelorn Killer–obsessed freak who’s been planning his debut for a long time or…”
She regarded him over the rim of her coffee cup. “Or he’s the real deal.”