The Red Book Page 11

  He shakes his head again. “No, I do not believe there would be any specifics. There was no…investigation.”

  “Why not?”

  Pavlo runs his hand over his bald head. “I tell you that these people are organized. They are very smart. I…” He puts up his hands. “I have said too much.”

  “Why wasn’t there a murder investigation, Pavlo?”

  “Please, I must go. I have work.” He walks back up on the porch, tries to pass me. “If I do not go to work, they revoke my probation.”

  I put my hand on his chest. “Why didn’t the police open a mur—”

  “Because they did not think it was a murder,” he spits out. “Now, please.”

  He tries to pass. I push him back.

  “What did they think happened?” I ask.

  He sighs, looks away. “Suicide,” he says.

  It was staged as a—

  Seeing colors before my eyes. My hands shaking, my throat closing up, dry as sand. “Was the lawyer a…man or woman?”

  Pavlo Demchuk looks at me like he’s seeing a ghost. I know how he feels. “I know nothing else. I do not know her name.”

  Her name. Her name. My heart pounding so hard I can’t breathe.

  “This was several years ago. I was still in Stateville. I only hear things, Mr. Harney. Please. Please, Mr. Harney—”

  I grab Pavlo by the ear. With my free hand, I draw my weapon, place the barrel against his forehead. “What was her name?” I shout. “Tell me her fucking name!”

  He cowers, his knees buckling. “Linder…I do not know this. Linder-something. Linderman? I do not know, Mr. Harney! Please, I swear to you I do not know…”

  I release my grip, pushing him back. He collapses to the porch.

  I reholster my gun.

  “Blinderman,” I whisper.

  She wasn’t an assistant state’s attorney. She wasn’t a federal prosecutor. She was an assistant public defender who kept her maiden name professionally.

  Valerie Blinderman was my wife.

  Book II

  Chapter 39

  FOUR YEARS ago.

  Billy, seated next to her in the office of the Cook County medical examiner, catatonic, expressionless, immobile, as the office door opened and clanged shut.

  Dr. Fernando Cruz—Doc Fern, the cops called him—the county’s chief medical examiner, a long, tired face, gray hair combed back, reaching the back collar of his lab coat. “Billy,” he said. “This is my final report. Again, I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “What’s the verdict?” Patti asked, taking Billy’s hand in hers.

  “Suicide,” said Doc Fern. “No question about it.”

  Patti pushes away that memory, breaks ten different traffic laws on the way over. Her SUV flies into Billy’s driveway, bouncing harshly over the curb, screeching to a halt only inches from the garage door and its peeling beige paint.

  She has a key to his town house. She always has.

  She pushes open the front door and starts to call out his name, but she hears her brother in the family room. She walks in and finds Billy sitting on the floor amid a mess of papers strewn over the hardwood, in piles on the area rug, stacked on chairs.

  Going through Val’s old files, her legal work. Looking for clues.

  “Oh, kiddo,” she whispers.

  He looks up at her, his hair, short as it is, standing on end as if deliberately mussed. His eyes shadowed, his expression…

  She’s seen that look on his face before. She saw it when she came to this very town house some four years ago, as Billy sat in the master bathroom, his dead wife’s head cradled in his lap, rocking her as if she were a child. He never looked younger, she remembers thinking back then, never more vulnerable.

  Billy blinks. “You think it’s—”

  “No.”

  “—true?”

  “No,” she repeats. “I do not. Of course not. Val took her own life. She had depression. She’d just lost Janey, for God’s sake. She…did this to herself, Billy. You know that. Deep down, you know that.”

  His eyes drift. He shakes his head absently. “Do I? What do I remember? I don’t…I don’t even remember it. Not really. The details, I mean. It’s…like a fog.”

  That must have been exactly how it felt after watching Janey die and coming home to his wife. He wasn’t in investigation mode. He wasn’t in cop mode.

  She reaches into her purse, unfolds the final autopsy report, stares at the first page.

  Office of the Medical Examiner

  County of Cook, Illinois

  Report of Postmortem Examination

  Name: Harney, Valerie Blinderman

  She flips to the back page, folds it over.

  Cause of death: Self-inflicted gunshot wound

  Manner of death: Suicide

  She drops it down next to him. “Doc Fern was the best ME we ever had in Cook County,” she says. “He called it a suicide.”

  Billy picks up the report and flings it at Patti. “Don’t show me that.”

  “What do you mean—”

  Billy leaps to his feet, lunges toward Patti, fire in his eyes, his contorted expression. She startles and draws back. It’s the first time in her life that she fears her own twin brother.

  He stops just short of her. “Don’t fucking show me that report! How do you explain what he told me?”

  “What, that guy Pavlov? Some ex-con who—”

  “Pavlo,” he spits. “Pavlo Demchuk.”

  “Okay, whatever, Pavlo. This guy tells you a tattoo of a black flower is the symbol for some Russian sex-trafficking gang, and so now you think Val was murdered? And maybe your K-Town shooting wasn’t just some street-gang turf fight? Your whole life has to turn upside down now, just because some thug you put away—”

  “How could he have known what he knew? He knew her name, for chrissake. A female lawyer named Blinderman, killed four years ago, made to look like a suicide. You’re gonna tell me that’s a coincidence? Huh?”

  He stares at her, chest heaving, sweat on his face, eyes glistening. It’s more than rage. He’s pleading with her, she realizes. He wants to be wrong. He wants her to make this right, to make this all go away.

  She’s not cut out for that role. It’s always been the other way around. Billy was always making it right for her. “Billy,” she whispers.

  “No, don’t Billy me.” He jabs a finger at her. “Tell me one possible reason why I shouldn’t listen to what he told me. One!”

  His breath hot on her face. She opens her hand and smacks him across the cheek.

  “Hey, brother, you wanna take it down a notch or two? You want a reason? You wanna stop yelling at me and listen?”

  She shoves him backward. Billy stumbles a bit but keeps his feet.

  “Listen to what I have to say,” she says.

  Chapter 40

  “WELL GO ahead,” says Billy. “I’m listening.”

  Patti puts out her hands, stalling while she puts it together. “Okay, maybe this super reliable ex-con buddy of yours is right, and Val was looking into some Russian traffickers,” she says. “So they were nervous. And then Val committed suicide, just like Doc Fern said, just exactly like it looked, for the obvious reason that she was grieving and depressed over the death of your daughter. The two things happened together, yes. But they were totally unrelated.”

  Billy flaps his arm. “And then—”

  “Shut up and let me finish,” she says. “So these Russian traffickers, these guys have reputations to keep up, right? They want to be feared, right? They want to be tough guys, right? So they spin the story like they killed her. Not only killed her—but killed her and made it look like a suicide. So they look ruthless and brilliant.”

  Billy shakes his head. “You don’t believe that.”

  “Right, because it would be the first time in the history of organized crime that some mobster told a fib. That’s what these guys do. They lie and bullshit and con their way through life. They took credit for
her death, Billy. It doesn’t mean they actually killed her.”

  “Bullshit.” His hands on his hips, his head shaking furiously, the reservoir of rage quickly refilling. He walks in a circle, then lashes out, knocking a mess of papers off the coffee table. “That’s bullshit, and you know it!”

  He gets his hands under the coffee table, a wide circular walnut job, and turns it over, a plate and glass of water shattering on the hardwood floor, papers flying everywhere. He kicks one of the upturned legs of the table, nearly knocking it from its hinge.

  Jesus, she’s never seen him like this.

  He drops into a crouch, taking gasping breaths, a deep moan.

  “And if I heard you right over the phone,” she says with trepidation, afraid that if she says it, it will be true, “you think these same Russian traffickers were behind the K-Town shooting? That it wasn’t the Imperial Gangster Nation? It wasn’t a turf war?”

  Billy doesn’t answer, buries his head in his hands.

  “So…” She shakes her head. “So in addition to reopening four-year-old wounds, probably for nothing,” she says, “you’re also going to take a wrecking ball to a solve that just made you cop of the year and basically guaranteed you a career on the force.”

  Billy gets out of his crouch, turns his back to Patti. “When I make their acquaintance, I’ll be sure to ask them if they shot up that house in K-Town.”

  “You’re not going to ask them anything,” she says, walking toward him. She can’t believe she’s about to say these words, but she’s never believed anything more.

  “You’re going to kill them,” she says.

  Billy remains still, quiet. When he finally responds, his voice is robbed of all inflection, all emotion. “You should leave now, Patti.”

  “Billy.” She walks to him, puts a hand on his shoulder. “You could lose everything. You’ve worked so hard to get back on your feet, and you could lose it all.”

  He nods his head but says nothing.

  “Billy—”

  “Then I lose everything.” He jerks his shoulder, moving her hand off, then turns to her. “I’m going to find out what happened to Valerie. I don’t care what it costs me.” He grabs her by the arms. “Now go home, Patti. And forget this conversation ever happened. You don’t want to be involved in what happens next.”

  Chapter 41

  SEVEN YEARS ago.

  The gambling problem started after the divorce, or at least that’s what he claimed. He was fifty-four, their only son out of the house, and he felt incredibly alone when his wife left.

  Jesus, Patti remembers thinking back then. Why not just surf porn on your computer or get into some online chat room for losers? Never really made sense why that led him to fall in with the high-end poker rooms, throwing away his money. But there it was. He was a good man, a longtime public servant, who’d made a mistake. But a mistake, nonetheless, that threatened everything.

  “Twenty-seven thousand dollars and change,” he said, his face falling into his hands, the words coming out through sobs. “I have nowhere else to turn. I don’t have the money. They’re going to kill me.”

  “I’ll help you,” Patti told him. She didn’t tell him the next part, the part that he didn’t need to be told: he would owe her.

  A shiver runs through Patti as she starts up her car, reverses out of Billy’s driveway, and drives. The streets in Lincoln Park are filled with people with so much less on their minds, people younger and happier, unburdened by the things she sees every day on the job—the burned babies and the bloodied, bruised spouses; the desperate, angry juveniles; the gangbangers who spit at her. People who don’t have to wonder what’s behind every door they enter, inside every vehicle they approach.

  She reaches her apartment and parks in her designated space in the back lot. An apartment she wouldn’t be able to afford were it not for the fact that the landlord likes having a cop in the building.

  The engine still running, she turns on the dome light and pulls out the autopsy report filed by the ME’s office, reads its conclusion one more time.

  Cause of death: Self-inflicted gunshot wound

  Manner of death: Suicide

  “Fuck you, Val,” she whispers. Billy might have made excuses for her, but Patti wouldn’t have any of it. How could Val spend one minute away from that hospital room while her daughter was lying in a coma? While Billy was suffering, too?

  Sure, okay, maybe Val had some depression issues. They’d all seen it. But what more could Billy have done? He took the night shift so Val could work days as a public defender while he took care of their little girl. Billy and Val hardly saw each other. He was holding down a brutal overnight shift and caring for Janey during the day. He was sleeping two, three hours out of every twenty-four. And when Janey had the stroke, he got family leave, walked away entirely from his job—more than Val could say. What, her job was more important than his?

  No, Billy had done more than enough. None of this was his fault.

  And now this? Now he has to relive this whole thing? Because of some stupid fantasy about a Russian human-trafficking ring? Where the hell did that come from?

  She gets out of the car, uses the key to enter the back entrance to the four-story condo building. Ignores the smell of cannabis coming from the first-floor unit, her stoner neighbor Jamie and his buddies. Heads up to the second floor, walks into her lonely condo, and enters the bedroom.

  Four years ago.

  “The scene was pristine,” Patti told Dr. Fernando Cruz. Only the chief medical examiner in Cook County would be assigned the case of a cop’s dead wife.

  “You’ve seen the photos,” she told him. “No gunfight. No forced entry. No evidence of struggle.”

  Doc Fern removed his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose. “The angle,” he started to say.

  But she interrupted him. “Angle shmangle. There’s no manual for how you shoot yourself.”

  “And the GSR,” said Doc Fern.

  “Bullshit and you know it,” said Patti. “Billy wrapped her up in his arms when he found her. He gripped her, hugged her, held her. That could’ve easily removed any residue.

  “And don’t forget Val’s depression, Fern. That’s documented. And for God’s sake, she’d just lost her daughter. Of course it’s suicide.”

  Inside her bedroom, Patti opens the closet, turns on the light. Reaches up to the top shelf and pulls down a long plastic box. She opens the box. Lifts the other documents—her birth certificate, a savings bond from Aunt Marcy, a thin family album—and pulls out a file from the bottom.

  She removes the document from the file folder, the same fourteen pages, the same heading (OFFICE OF THE MEDICAL EXAMINER), the same title (REPORT OF POSTMORTEM EXAMINATION), the same subject (HARNEY, VALERIE BLINDERMAN). But it’s not the same document.

  No, this version bears a red stamp in the corner spelling out one word: PRELIMINARY.

  And that’s not the only difference. The last page, too, the conclusion.

  Cause of death: Gunshot wound

  Manner of death: Indeterminate

  Indeterminate. That cruel, ugly word, meaning we can’t be sure, Billy; she might have been murdered, Billy; more investigation is needed, Billy.

  Imagine, she thinks, if Billy had ever seen this preliminary version of the ME’s report.

  Imagine, she thinks, if Doc Fern hadn’t had that gambling debt a few years earlier, which Patti used her badge to help work down from twenty-seven thousand dollars to six thousand dollars, stripped of all the vig and placed on a reasonable repayment schedule.

  Imagine if Patti hadn’t called in that favor with Doc Fern.

  Patti takes the preliminary report and walks into her bathroom, the report still flipped over to the final page. She picks up the Bic lighter resting behind a scented candle on the counter. She flips on the lighter and raises it to the report, the flame illuminating the words:

  The angle of the gunshot wound and the sporadic presence of gunshot residue on the
decedent’s hand and forearm are not necessarily suggestive of suicide and could lead to a reasonable conclusion of homicide.

  The paper curls as the flame spreads, turning those words to ash. She holds the document as long as she can, until the flame almost licks her fingers pinched at the edge of the document, before she drops it into her metal garbage can and watches it curl and flicker into indecipherable black ash.

  The last remaining copy of that “preliminary” report, never made public.

  If Billy will no longer believe the suicide conclusion, maybe she’ll help him pin it on these Russian traffickers, whoever they are. At least that would give Billy closure.

  But he can’t ever know what really happened.

  Chapter 42

  “YOU’RE LEAVING,” I said to Valerie as she removed her hand from Janey’s.

  Valerie, eyes heavy, neck aching after spending the night by her bedside in the ICU. “I’m going to work,” she said.

  I didn’t want to argue in the hospital room. I followed Valerie out into the hallway. “You’re going to start back to work?” I asked. “Your office said take all the time you need.”

  “These kids need me,” she said.

  “Janey needs you,” I said.

  One in the morning. Heading west in my car. Blasting the radio to drown out the echoes.

  I drive over the North Branch of the Chicago River and head a few more blocks west before pulling over. It won’t take long. This is a decent neighborhood by day, industrial, working-class. By night, it’s one of the places you go if you’re looking for white girls.

  The first girl who passes looks Asian. Maybe my information is outdated, my short stint on Vice ending years ago. The woman stops, bends over, peers into the car. I shake my head no.