Maybe it was the image of Grace Harper’s tied-up corpse smoking in the back of her brain, or maybe it was the tidal pull of old memories the case dredged up, but Annalisa did not go to her solitary condo as usual. Instead she pointed her car toward Norwood Park, the place she always thought of as home no matter where her mail got sent. Technically still part of Chicago, Norwood Park had a semi-suburban feel, with many single-family homes and tree-lined streets. The law said Chicago’s cops had to live within the city limits, and many of them had settled here, including George Vega and his wife, Maria, for the past forty years. Generations lived and died within the confines of this one neighborhood. Most of Annalisa’s high school class still lived within a few streets of the homes they grew up in, sending their kids to the same schools they had attended.
Annalisa used her key and pressed her shoulder to the sticky backdoor, willing it not to make too much noise with her shove since the hour was still early. It burst open as usual, sending her stumbling into the kitchen. A gruff voice from the semidarkness called out to her. “I got more grace than that, and I’m the one who had the brain surgery.”
“Pops,” Annalisa said with affection and surprise to find him up this early. “What are you doing sitting here with the lights off?”
“I know where the table is, and the chair, because they ain’t moved a foot since the day I brought them in here. Why am I gonna pay extra for the lights?”
“Same old Pops.” She kissed his cheek and hugged an arm around his shoulder. He winced but tried to hide it. Suspicious now, she went to the wall and flicked on the switch, revealing a nasty bruise on the side of his face. “Oh, Pops.”
“It’s nothing. Don’t you worry about it.”
She reached out, but he ducked awkwardly from her touch. “What happened?”
“I took a little tumble, that’s all. Nothing serious.”
Annalisa’s gaze darted around the kitchen floor as if seeking out the perpetrator. She and her brothers had stripped the house of all area rugs and loose cords when George had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease six years ago, but his shuffling gait still made him vulnerable to falls. “Was it the damned cat again?”
“It wasn’t the cat,” he replied in a soothing voice that told her it was the cat. “Mitzi’s a good girl who loves her papa. Can I help it if she likes to be near me? Unlike some ungrateful children who haven’t been to Sunday dinner in almost a month now.”
“I had work.” She took an apple from the fruit bowl and bit into it, trying not to make her study of him too obvious. The tremor in his hand looked no better to her eyes, despite his new medications. “You know how it goes.”
He grunted. “Don’t try to tell me about the job. Me and the badge, we go way back. Is that why you’re here? You got hold of a bad one?”
She halted her chewing. “How did you guess?”
“You and me, we go way back, too.” His smile was twitchy, uncontrolled. She saw he hadn’t been shaved in several days and wondered about the aide she and her brother Tony had coordinated to come assist with his care. “Tell me about it,” he commanded.
She knew she shouldn’t. “Where’s Mom?”
“Sleeping, like the rest of the world. Spill it.”
She took a deep breath. “It’s a homicide over in Belmont Cragin. A woman murdered in her own home.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Not this time, I don’t think.” She hesitated. “The victim was tied up, her neck, hands, and feet bound together in a series of slip knots. Ritual fashion.”
His tremor ceased. “Raped?”
“Can’t say for sure yet. She was naked, though. Not gagged or blindfolded.” The killer had wanted to hear her gasping for breath, wanted to watch the growing terror in her eyes when the air didn’t come.
Pops sat back in his chair, head bobbing slightly as he absorbed the news. “So, he’s back,” he said with grim determination, like he’d been waiting this whole time. Annalisa didn’t pretend to misunderstand him.
“We don’t know that. Could be a copycat.”
He made a face like his stomach turned. “You think one city would hold two of them? No, he’s been waiting, bi-biding his time. Guess that old itch got too strong. Maybe he wanted to remind us he’s still here, like a thumb in the eye.” His eyes were weepy, a side effect of the most recent medication. “You gotta tell me everything.”
“Pops. We don’t even know anything yet.”
“Dammit!” He banged the table and she jumped. “Th-they took this case away from us, the ones who knew it best. These were our streets, our people dying. A bunch of stuffed suits flew in to tell us crap we already knew, like how he has trouble relating to women and he gets off on the fun of watching them die. He doesn’t really love them like the letters say. It’s the opposite. He hates them and how small they make him feel. You … you think we didn’t suss that out for ourselves when we saw the bodies? They sum up by telling us he probably set fires as a kid and wet the bed when he was a teenager. Like that’s supposed to help us round up a suspect. Sure, right, we’ll just go door-to-door, asking people, ‘Did you piss the bed in high school?’”
His face turned red, the bruise almost black. His tremor increased and he had a string of drool hanging from the corner of his mouth. Annalisa handed him a napkin, and he swiped at his face clumsily. “I know you wanted this case,” she said. “I know how bad you needed it after Katie died.”
“No one wants this case, you understand me? No one. If this guy is who I think he is … you’ll know soon enough what I’m talking about. Tell me more about the victim.”
Annalisa figured she could divulge as much as would be in the papers. “Her name is Grace Harper. Age forty-three, worked in a grocery store. She lived alone as far as we know.”
Pops lurched forward in his seat with a wheeze. “Grace Harper? Little bitty thing about yea high? All wrapped up in her computer?”
“Yeah, that’s her.”
He let out a curse under his breath and crossed himself with an unsteady hand. “That sonofabitch.”
“Pops. Did you know her?” It seemed impossible. Pops barely left the house these days, and he hated computers. He shook his head, but she didn’t believe him. “If you knew her, you have to tell me. Now.”
He stretched his fingers toward the fruit bowl in the middle of the table, touched the gleaming skin of an apple. “Sh-sh-she came to see me,” he admitted in a gruff voice. “Six, maybe seven weeks ago. Waited until your mother went out shopping and then rang our doorbell like some Jehovah’s Witness.”
“What did she want?” Annalisa could already guess the answer.
His chin rose up. “Same as you, asking me about the Lovelorn case.”
“I didn’t ask you about the case.”
“Oh, the hell with that. You don’t come around home for a month, and then suddenly this case gets hot and here you are at my table, asking me questions.”
“You had recent contact with a homicide victim, Pops. Don’t put this on me. What did you tell her?”
“I told her no good would come from mucking around. I told her to take up bird-watching or stamp collecting, or some other decent hobby. I said she should leave any investigating to the professionals because— Ah, Christ.” He balled his hands into fists and his eyes grew wet. When he spoke again, his voice was low and hoarse. “I said she could get hurt.”
Annalisa bowed her head and sat with the weight of that statement for a long moment. “What questions did she ask you?”
Pops took his time with an answer. “She wanted the timeline of the Halloween party the night Katie died. She wanted to know if we’d seen anyone hanging around in the neighborhood beforehand, if there were signs up for the party that he might’ve seen. She asked—she asked if it was true that the guy used Katie’s own scarf to choke her.”
“I see.” Annalisa revised her initial visualization of Grace Harper showing up at the door and Pops angrily shooing her away. The two had obviously spoken at length. “And did you answer her?”
“I’ll tell you exactly what I told her, okay? I said it’s been twenty years now. I’m an old man who can barely get myself to the can without help. I don’t have any answers.” He paused. His mouth tightened, then twitched. “I never did.”
Her head swimming, Annalisa left Pops to his breakfast. She flopped onto her old twin bed and lay atop the covers. Her desk now held her mother’s sewing things, and the posters of boy bands had been replaced with family photos, but otherwise the room was unchanged. She tried not to notice the widening crack on the ceiling or think about the loose tread she’d found on the stairs. Her father restricted his movements to the downstairs, but her mother, battling arthritis, was a fall risk herself. She could ask Tony to fix it, therefore putting off the hard conversation about their parents and this house yet another month. Or two, or ten. In her more honest moments, she could admit that they were all waiting for disaster to force their hand, but she wasn’t going to be the first one to mention the possibility of selling. Tony could do it. He was in real estate. Or Alex. He was the favorite.
She rolled over and looked at the family portrait on the wall, the one taken when her oldest brother, Vincent, was in high school. Vincent moved the farthest of all of them, to Naperville, where he lived with his wife and three kids, two boys and a daughter. Vinny tried to claim he still lived in Chicago, and they busted his chops about it all the time. If your zip code doesn’t start with 606, you don’t live in Chicago. He’d already been gone a couple of years when Katie Duffy died. Tony, too, was living on campus at DePaul at the time, although he’d stopped by with a few buddies for the neighborhood Halloween party. He hadn’t stayed, though. Not that night and not later, when Pops got sidelined from the one case he was desperate to work. Not when Owen Duffy keeled over from a heart attack while shoveling snow, and then Colin had to leave town in the middle of his senior year. In their collective grief, none of them had noticed at first when Alex began trying to drink himself into oblivion. They could have lost him too.
She turned around the other way, facing the pale green wall. Her phone said it was coming up on seven, and she’d arranged to meet with Nick at nine back at Grace Harper’s house. If she was going to sleep, it had to be now. Instead she went to her contacts and hit the smiling blond face labeled Sassy—her longtime best friend and Alex’s wife. Sassy picked up immediately.
“Sorry, did I wake you?” Annalisa asked. “I know it’s early.”
“I have a preschooler and a baby,” Sassy replied. “I’ve been up from dawn and am already covered in Cheerios, dog hair, and little magnet letters.”
“You’re magnetic now?”
“No, I’m lying on the couch. We’re playing the ‘Mommy has an operation’ game because at least I can do that horizontally. I presume you’re calling to tell me about how fabulous the date was last night.”
Annalisa shut her eyes. She’d forgotten all about Todd the tax attorney. She forced a note of cheer into her voice. “He was nice, just like you said.”
“Oh, poo,” Sassy replied, clearly holding back her more favored word because there were small children present. “Nice is the kiss of death. What didn’t you like about this one?”
“He was fine. Listen—”
“Okay, so I know Todd’s not the most exciting guy, but he’s cute and steady and funny if you get to know him. You are going to have to become less picky, Anna, or you’re going to end up being one of those ladies who dies in her sleep and gets eaten by her cats.”
She revised her plan to get a cat. “Listen, I wanted to ask you about Colin. Do you have a phone number for him?” Sassy was Colin’s second cousin. It had been he who gave her the unusual nickname, back when he was two years old and couldn’t say the name of his newborn cousin Cecelia.
“Colin? I don’t, but my mom might. Last I heard he was in Kuala Lumpur or somewhere like that, writing for Rich Boys magazine or whoever’s paying him now.” The baby wailed. When she spoke again, her voice had a noticeable bounce in it. “What do you want with Colin? Please don’t tell me you’re still pining. We’ve been over this a hundred times. You can’t live your life wondering about the one who got away.”
“He didn’t ‘get away.’ He ran away.”
Her family had offered to take Colin in after his mother’s murder and father’s heart attack, but he’d refused. He went to stay with an older cousin on his father’s side in the middle of nowhere, Ohio.
“Honey, it’s been twenty years. Maybe it’s time to let go of the Colin fantasy, huh?”
“You are one to talk,” Annalisa retorted lightly. Sassy and Alex had dated in high school and into college, only to break up when Alex temporarily went off the rails due to his drinking. Annalisa gave a lot of credit to Sassy for helping Alex, even if it meant rebuffing him for a couple of years while he got his act together.
“Seriously. He’s got a website if you just want to do some snooping. His email is there too, I’m sure, if you really want to make direct contact.”
Annalisa had snooped often over the years, drinking in the gorgeous travel photos he had on his site. The brilliant green of a bamboo forest in Japan. The breathtaking Zhangye Danxia geoformation in Gansu, China, its patterned rock like a layer cake drawn by M. C. Escher. A pair of cheetahs frolicking at the Okavango Delta in Botswana. She paged through each stunning photo, holding her breath in anticipation of seeing Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia, a giant salt flat that acted as an enormous natural mirror. Salar de Uyuni was the place they had planned to go together, back when they’d daydreamed over National Geographic magazines in the school library, their heads pressed close against one another and their fingers laced together under the table. Salar de Uyuni looked like something from a Dalí painting, a vast white landscape where the earth reflected the sky. It seemed impossible to Annalisa that such strange beauty existed on the same planet as her boring neighborhood, with its standard oak trees and chipped concrete sidewalks.
If Colin had made it to Salar de Uyuni, he had not posted a picture. Her favorite was a panoramic shot of the cliffs of Ireland. Someone else must have taken this photo because Colin himself was in it, a solitary figure dressed entirely in black with his back to the camera. She’d spent too many hours studying the familiar curve of his shoulders and tracing his image on her screen. A hundred times, her finger hovered over the SEND EMAIL link, but she’d never even gotten as far as composing one in her head. Colin had left, had kept on leaving, as far as she could tell from his pictures. She’d stayed right where he’d left her, and he knew how to get in contact if he wished. Instead, Colin Duffy had not come home for twenty years. He hadn’t even sent a postcard.
“No, I don’t want to email him. It— It’s not personal.” She cleared her throat as she tried to sell the lie. “It’s related to work.”
“Work?” Sassy liked to joke about her “mom brain,” but the truth was, she’d graduated top of their class and missed exactly nothing. “You have news about Aunt Katie?” The city may have forgotten the murders, but the family never did.
“No,” Annalisa answered honestly. There were no new leads on the Katherine Duffy case. So far, it remained just as cold as it had been twenty hours ago. “Nothing yet.”
Sassy went quiet, no doubt parsing the yet. She knew better than to press for answers that Annalisa couldn’t give her. “I’ll get you the number,” she said finally. “But I don’t know if he’ll talk.”