The next day, I got up early, did several sets of push-ups and sit-ups, then took Stryker for a quick walk. The sun was already out and warming up the skies to near-record temperatures for a May morning. After what felt like an endless winter of heavy snow and freezing winds, the city was fully open. The boats returned to the harbors, and hordes of people filled Grant Park to play sports or just enjoy a walk along the lake. Today was my mother’s birthday, and as I had done every birthday since she passed, I dressed up in a powder blue shirt (because she said that color always looked best on me), grabbed a bouquet of her favorite flowers (red Peruvian lilies and golden yellow sunflowers), and headed to Oak Woods Cemetery.
My mother had always spoken about her love of Marrakech, Morocco, as it had been the place she first visited on the African continent. While she and my father had visited all fifty-four African nations, Morocco held a special place in her heart because it was the first one they had visited. She wanted her gravestone to reflect the decorative muqarnas she had seen while visiting the famous Saadian Tombs. It took my father the better part of a year, but he finally found a craftsman who could re-create the intricate, colorful honeycomb made of stone and ceramic clay that was typically plastered against a vaulted ceiling.
Once I arrived at her resting place at the top of a small knoll facing the rising sun, I took out a bottle of cleaner and a rag and wiped down her stone. I didn’t talk about her much, but she was constantly on my mind. I was always saddened that she never got to see me walk down the aisle and enjoy that dance at my wedding or see the tiny face of her grandchild. But I found comfort in the fact that she knew how much I had loved her and how so much of the man I was today was because of all that she had taught me.
Once I had cleaned her stone, laid down the flowers, and recited her favorite Maya Angelou poem, “Still I Rise,” I stood up and looked to the left of her stone, where my father had already purchased his plot so they would be together again. My father was a strong, proud man who protected his innermost feelings behind an ironclad façade, but I knew he missed her deeply, as their marriage and life together had been a true love story. I always made the trip on her birthday alone, and he made his visit on their wedding anniversary in the summer. Every time I came here, I left with the same thought: there was nothing I would not do to get one more day with her.
I kissed her stone and turned to leave. That’s when my phone rang. It was Burke.
“Can you get here in the next hour?” he said.
“Depends on where ‘here’ is,” I said.
“My office.”
“What’s going on?”
“We got the video.”
“Anything on it?”
“Sure is. I’ll show you when you get here.”
Forty-five minutes later, I was sitting in Burke’s cramped office. No pictures or anything personal adorned the walls except for a photo of him graduating from the police academy a hundred years ago, sandwiched between the superintendent and mayor while forcing a smile. He was broad at the shoulders even back then, a wide stump of neck shooting out of his stretched uniform. A half-eaten sandwich sat unwrapped on his desk. I was unaccustomed to meeting him in such an official setting. We usually convened in his car or the back table of a restaurant.
He turned his monitor around so both of us could see, then he tapped his keyboard. A black-and-white video began playing. I knew right away it was the alley behind the Manor; it faced east, in the direction of the Warehouse Bar & Pizzeria. Thirty seconds went by before a large truck rolled through the alley, heading east. Another forty-five seconds, then the middle of the three garage doors suddenly opened. A dark car nosed out into the alley. I could tell by the lights it was a Bentley. It pulled all the way out, turned east, then raced away down the alley. It was a late-model Bentley Continental GT convertible. Once it drove out of frame, Burke stopped the tape.
“Three hundred thousand plus,” I said. “Or maybe it’s a W12, which means another fifty thousand dollars.”
“What’s that, a model number?” Burke asked.
“Engine.”
“I’ve heard of a V12 but not a W12.”
“It’s an engine configuration used in airplanes back in the 1920s. The Volkswagen Group, which actually makes Bentley, uses it in some of its cars. But they use a new W configuration that has four rows of three cylinders instead of the three rows of four cylinders they used in the planes.”
“What the hell does it matter?”
“The V12 gives you ridiculous power, but the W12 gives you that same level of power and a smooth ride. You buy a Ferrari for sheer power. You buy a Bentley GT for power and refinement.”
“Well, now that I’ve gotten a mechanic’s seminar, let’s forget the engine and talk about the owner of the car.”
“Must be someone with deep pockets.”
“That car belongs to Elliott Kantor.”
I looked back at the screen and the time stamp on the video. 11:03 p.m. Elliott had arrived a little less than an hour earlier. Jenny Lee had arrived at 11:09, six minutes after the car had pulled out.
“By the time the Bentley left the garage, Elliott was dead, and Jenny Lee hadn’t arrived yet,” I said.
Burke nodded. “So who was driving the damn car?” he said.
“I guess that’s the three-hundred-thousand-dollar question,” I said. “Has anyone talked to Simon?”
“We did,” Burke said. “He didn’t even know his father had the car. He said his dad always had a driver. The last time Simon saw Elliott physically drive a car was when Simon was in college and Elliott moved Simon’s car from a no-parking zone so he wouldn’t get a ticket.”
“And his assistants? Anybody talk to them?”
“Neither of them had been to the apartment in months. They didn’t know he had the car either.”
That struck me as strange. Elliott Kantor was not a man who walked into a local DMV to register his car or call an agent to buy insurance. Billionaires simply didn’t do mundane things like that. They had a small army of people who took care of these nuisances. Why didn’t anyone know about this car? And whoever it was driving the car, how did they know about it or even know where to find the key? Had Elliott given it to them?
“We traced the car all the way out the alley, where it takes a right and turns north on Southport Avenue. We have it passing St. Josaphat Church at the corner of Belden and Southport, but then we lose it after that.”
“Nothing from any of the nearby PODs?” PODs were police observation devices—cameras set up on light poles and traffic signals throughout the city.
“Some of the guys are pulling the footage now, but there aren’t a lot of PODs in that part of town, so it’s not likely to help.”
Of course there weren’t a lot of police cameras in these upper-middle-class neighborhoods. The city had hung up most of their surveillance on the South and West Sides, where the demographics were predominantly people of color and immigrants, and income levels were glaringly depressed. Now in a bit of poetic justice, a key piece of evidence for a case involving one of the city’s wealthiest residents may not be available because of systemic and implicit bias.
“Someone in city hall is going to wake up one day and read the statistics and realize that crime happens all over this city,” I said. “Once that happens, everyone will actually be safer.”
“What, are you running for office now?”
“Not yet. I have to lose my entire soul first to qualify.”
“No disagreement from me on that point.”
“Simon Kantor is not happy about the lab results,” I said. “He insists his father wouldn’t use meth. He thinks it’s a lab error. He’s hired a third-party pathologist to prove it.”
“I’ve talked to him several times,” Burke said. “He knows it’s not a mistake. He’s called everyone up and down the chain. He wants it scratched from the autopsy report. It’s worth a lot of money to him.”
“Insurance money,” I said.
“Exactly. The insurance company won’t issue a payout for someone who died from using a recreational drug. There’s a hundred and fifty million dollars at stake. He’s gonna do whatever he can, but facts are facts.”
“I thought insurance companies still paid out for overdoses.”
“They won’t if they think you lied on your application about your drug-use history. It’s a risky technicality to use for a defense of nonpayment, but given the size of the potential payout, it’s a technicality they won’t be afraid to enforce.”
“Any idea where Kantor might’ve gotten the drugs from?”
“We’ve been digging. Might be easier finding a dropped earring in the middle of a lake.”
“Anything else missing from the apartment other than the Bentley?”
“No way to tell. There were several million dollars still hanging on the walls, untouched. We can’t find anyone who knows enough about what was in there to figure out if something else was stolen. Kantor really kept the place walled off from everyone, even from his assistants, who knew all of his secrets.”
“Obviously, not all of them,” I said. “And if they do, they’re not telling.”
When I got back to my office, I walked up to the dry-erase board that ran the full length of a wall and started jotting down details. It always helped when I could put all of the data points on a board, then start drawing connecting lines as I tried to figure out how everything fit together. As with most cases, the early part of an investigation always meant more questions than answers, and right now, it felt like I had very few answers. Once I had written everything out, I sat back in my chair and looked it over. Was Jenny Lee really as innocent in this as she claimed? Why would Kantor book her, yet have someone else already there or on the way? Was Jenny supposed to be part of a threesome? Dr. Olivia had mentioned that many people liked having a third partner involved. Who was behind the service that gave Mickiewicz the assignments for his angels? Did he really not know their identity?
I picked up my phone and dialed the number of Marlena Benton. She was everything you would expect a hacker not to be. A tall, former college basketball player who had competed in five Ironman contests and placed in two of them, she knew her way around computers and software better than anyone I knew. We met at a museum charity benefit where she was helping run the technology for the silent auction. I had my eye on a pair of signed Walter Payton football cleats, but she told me to save my money. Most of the sports memorabilia was priced at least double the true market value, and I’d be better off going directly to the source or finding it on some of the online sites. She took out her phone to prove it to me. A week later, I got another pair of cleats Sweetness had signed for a third of the price they eventually went for at the auction. I sent Marlena an arrangement of flowers as a thank-you, and she became my go-to when I needed IT help, legitimate and otherwise.
Marlena answered right away.
“You’re either calling me from the golf course or stuck behind the computer in your office,” she said.
“I wish like hell it were the first,” I said. “Is this a bad time?”
“Nope, just got in from a run. What’s up?”
“How hard is it to hack into a Cash App account?” I asked.
“It’s not the easiest hack, but I’m sure it’s been done. Depends on what exactly you’re trying to do.”
“I have someone’s username, but I want to know who actually owns the account and their contact info. I want to speak to them.”
“They owe you money?”
“No, they sent money to someone who’s part of an investigation I’m running, but that person doesn’t know the contact info of the person who sent it.”
“If you just have the username and nothing else, hacking into the account is gonna take a little work. It’s not impossible, but it’ll take some time. But instead of hacking them, try trapping them first. It could be faster.”
“How?”
“Set up an account. Once you have an account set up and verified, you can request money from other people’s accounts. They can pay the request or decline it.”
“How would that help me trap them?”
“Once you set up the account, keep making large requests for them to pay you. Make it for something big, like ten thousand. Obviously, they’ll decline the request, but keep doing it. Make it a nuisance. Then you can send them a text message within the app. Tell them they owe you for something, and if they don’t pay you, you’re going to report them for fraud or something. Leave your phone number. If you bother them enough, somebody will probably call you to tell you that you’re crazy and to leave them alone.”
“Do you know if this has been done before?”
“I know it’s gone the other way. Scammers will call someone and tell them they’ll walk them through the steps of transferring money from the app to their bank account. Then the scammer will put their account in there as an intermediary, get the transfer, and disappear. Something else they’ll do is call and pretend like they’re customer support and they need to verify the account credentials, so people give up all their info. You’d think people would know that play by now, but they still fall for it.”
“I’ll try to set the trap first,” I said. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll look at plan B.”
“No problem. In the meantime, I’ll dig around and see what’s out there as far as the app’s vulnerabilities. If big banks can be penetrated, so can an app that only offers an email address for customer service help.”
“I’ll let you know how it goes.”
I spent the next twenty minutes setting up a Cash App account. I chose the username $goldenwingschi and sent a request for ten thousand dollars to the username Mickiewicz had given me. The trap was set; now all I could do was see if they went after the bait.