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  “Why don’t you tell me what the fuck you want?” he says, his face hardening.

  “My partner, Carla Griffin,” I say. “Great cop. Done some great work for the department. But she’s got a problem she has to lick.”

  “So I hear. I believe we politely refer to it as ‘substance abuse.’” He enjoys that, shows me his teeth. “Saw some very entertaining videos of her in one of Porter’s files, by the way, looking like the junkie she is.”

  “Anyway,” I say, “she’s going into rehab.”

  “Yes.”

  “And when she gets out—”

  “When she gets out,” he says, “like any other cop, she’ll be placed on an interim assignment and evaluated.” He shrugs. “Maybe someday, I’ll let her be a real cop again. Or maybe not.”

  I snap my fingers. “That’s where you’re wrong, Mr. Superintendent. She’s going to be reassigned to SOS as my partner. Immediately. No delay.”

  He shakes his head slowly. Even smiles.

  “You won’t shit-can her career over this,” I say. “She comes straight back to SOS after rehab. Or the media hears all about Captain Dennis Porter. And about how you covered it up.”

  “Your word against mine.”

  “You sure about that?” I say. “You sure I don’t have evidence of Porter’s crimes?”

  He tries to maintain his composure, but he’s not doing a very good job.

  “Carla comes back to SOS, or I fucking bury you, Tristan. That clear enough?”

  “And here I figured you for playing a long game.” The superintendent stands, straightens the uniform he never earned. “You really want to make an enemy of me?”

  I wink at him. “I thought you already were.”

  Chapter 113

  “WELL, WE don’t have many days like this.” Judge Horatio Nunez puts down the papers in front of him, looks over at the defense table. “I suppose we could call this a terrible moment in the system of justice, or we could call it a great moment. Kind of depends on your perspective. Mr. Stonewald,” he says, removing his eyeglasses, “I hope you’re able to see it as a great moment. I hope you’re able, somehow, to put this ordeal behind you and move on with your life.”

  Antoine, seated at the defense table, nods emphatically but doesn’t speak.

  “And I would commend the Conviction Integrity Unit of the state’s attorney’s office for acting on this as swiftly as it did. There seems to be no doubt whatsoever that you were wrongly convicted, Mr. Stonewald. We don’t usually use the word innocent. We normally just say ‘guilty,’ or we say ‘not guilty’ if the burden of proof is not met. This is one of those rare instances, sir, where I think we can all safely say that you are completely innocent.”

  The buzz in the courtroom is palpable. Antoine’s family, his fiancée, his mother and sister, his cousins and aunts and uncles, all sit behind him struggling to restrain themselves.

  “The defendant’s conviction for first-degree murder is vacated. He shall be released from custody immediately.”

  The gavel bangs, the judge rises with a smile, and bedlam ensues. His family rushes around Antoine as if he were a rock star, hugging and kissing him, rubbing his bald head, laughing and crying and shouting and clapping and dancing.

  I’m in the back row with Carla and her boy, Samuel. Only ten years old, and even as the son of a cop, Samuel is awed by the courtroom itself, not to mention the magnitude of what he’s witnessing here. Carla wanted him to see this. Samuel himself is part African American—as is his father—and apparently strongly favors his father in appearance. He is viewed, at least generally by his peers, as black. Carla wanted him to see a black man get justice.

  Through the crowd that all but lifts him on their shoulders, Antoine manages to catch my eye. We’ve talked plenty over the last two weeks, when I broke the news of Disco’s confession, then kept him updated as I approached the state’s attorney’s office about reviewing the conviction and righting a wrong.

  I give him a salute. He mouths a thank-you to me.

  Thank Valerie more than anyone.

  We leave the courtroom.

  “That was intense,” Samuel says.

  I chuckle. “Intense” seems a little mature for a kid that age, but then again, I don’t have kids that age.

  If Janey had lived, she’d be seven.

  “When do you go back?” I ask Carla.

  She checks her watch. Her face is no longer bandaged, but she has a scar running along her cheek toward her mouth. “Just call me…Joker!,” she’s been fond of saying, but it’s not as bad as all that.

  She’s been in rehab since she left the hospital ten days ago. She had to testify this morning at Antoine’s hearing, so she got a leave for that purpose only. Now it’s back to “camp,” as she calls it, for another couple of months.

  “I have time for lunch, if you do,” she says. “My mother-in-law’s meeting us downtown.”

  “Can’t do it,” I say. “Headed back to work. Somebody’s gotta catch bad guys while you’re sipping cucumber water and doing yoga.”

  She elbows me in the arm.

  “But you,” I say to Samuel. “Tomorrow night, right? Sox versus Royals? Detwiler’s pitching, so it should be entertaining.”

  He gives me a high five. “For sure.”

  Outside the courthouse, we say our good-byes.

  “See you in, what, nine or ten weeks?” she says, squinting into the sun.

  “As long as you need,” I say. “Your desk will be waiting.”

  She smirks. “One day, you’ll have to tell me how you persuaded the supe to green-light my return to SOS.”

  “Turns out I had him all wrong. He’s a prince of a guy. Big fan of yours, too.”

  “Yeah, okay.” She lights up.

  She looks completely different when she smiles.

  Chapter 114

  “SORRY IF I seem depressed,” I say into the mike. “I just came from the Sox game.”

  The crowd at the Hole in the Wall moans. The game’s always on the TVs mounted on the wall. Kansas City 8, good guys 0.

  “You know how you can tell when the Sox are gonna lose? When the ump says, ‘Play ball!’

  “I shoulda known when I went early to watch the Sox take batting practice. The pitching machine threw a no-hitter.

  “I mean, the Royals put up four in the first inning and never looked back. I’ve seen more suspense at a funeral.

  “The beer man was handing out cyanide tablets.

  “The promotional handout was a blindfold.

  “Instead of ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game,’ the organist was playing taps.”

  The lines work with this crowd. Most of these coppers are Sox fans, and we love to insult the things we care about. And a few of these mopes actually like the Cubs, so they don’t mind, either.

  “Anyway, it didn’t help that I was tired. I had a rough night’s sleep. I had this nightmare that I was trapped in a room with a lion, a rattlesnake, and a defense attorney, and I had only two bullets in my gun. But it had a happy ending.”

  “You shot the lawyer twice!” Patti calls out from the crowd.

  “Hey, c’mon, now! Sorry, folks, that’s my twin sister, Patti. Y’know, it’s not easy being a twin. They know your thoughts. They finish your sentences…”

  And sometimes, they think you killed your own wife.

  “Don’t steal my punch lines,” I say to her after, by the bar, when I get my free bourbon for the stand-up routine. She’s got her low-carb drink, vodka soda or something.

  “Find some new material,” she says.

  She looks better now. We got past our troubles.

  As incomprehensible as it is for me to even fathom the idea, if I’m being fair, I can’t really blame Patti for thinking, or at least suspecting, that I killed Valerie. I was a mess when I walked into that bedroom. With the gun safe open, me in my broken state making vague statements to Patti about how I did this, I did this while holding the gun in my hand, and with Pop prodding
her on afterward, Patti had plenty of reasons to think it.

  And plenty of reasons not to ask me the question directly, because she was afraid of what I might say. Better, in her view, to protect me, to cover it up just in case there was something to cover up. It wasn’t going to make a difference, either way, from her perspective. Valerie was still gone. I was still her brother, for whom she’d do anything.

  She’s lived the last four years putting good money on the fact that I killed my own wife. And stood by me, thick and thin, all the same.

  How can I turn my back on her? This girl loves me more than I love myself. This girl is my family.

  “Y’know, word about Carla is all over,” she tells me. “The pills, the rehab.”

  I shrug. “Let ’em talk. It was bound to happen. She came clean on it. Didn’t want to hide anything anymore.”

  “I guess it’s better not to hide, huh? Kind of a life lesson.”

  I tap my glass against hers. “I’ll make you this promise,” I say. “If I ever think you murdered someone, you’ll be the first to know.”

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  About the Authors

  JAMES PATTERSON is the world’s bestselling author and most trusted storyteller. He has created many enduring fictional characters and series, including Alex Cross, the Women’s Murder Club, Michael Bennett, Maximum Ride, Middle School, and I Funny. Among his notable literary collaborations are The President Is Missing, with President Bill Clinton, and the Max Einstein series, produced in partnership with the Albert Einstein estate. Patterson’s writing career is characterized by a single mission: to prove that there is no such thing as a person who “doesn’t like to read,” only people who haven’t found the right book. He’s given over three million books to schoolkids and the military, donated more than seventy million dollars to support education, and endowed over five thousand college scholarships for teachers. For his prodigious imagination and championship of literacy in America, Patterson was awarded the 2019 National Humanities Medal. The National Book Foundation presented him with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community, and he is also the recipient of an Edgar Award and nine Emmy Awards. He lives in Florida with his family.

  DAVID ELLIS is a justice of the Illinois Appellate Court and the author of nine novels, including Line of Vision, for which he won an Edgar Award, and The Hidden Man, which earned him a 2009 Los Angeles Times Book Prize nomination.

  Turn the page for a sneak peek

  at the next thriller

  in the Black Book series...

  Chapter 1

  HE’S HERE somewhere. I know it. And the girl might still be alive.

  The girl: fifteen-year-old Bridget Leone, abducted off the streets of Hyde Park forty-four hours ago.

  Bing. Bing. Bing. Bing.

  The ALPR sounds on the dashboard of our unmarked car, registering every license plate we pass, searching for any plate beginning with the letters F and D. But our witness told us the letters might have appeared the other way around, D and F, and maybe not even next to each other.

  If we have this right, the same man who kidnapped Bridget Leone has abducted four other girls between the ages of thirteen and sixteen, all African American, around the Chicagoland area over the last eighteen months. None of those four girls has been found. All four of them were runaways, homeless—meaning they were easily overlooked and forgotten by overworked and understaffed suburban police departments dealing with cold trails of girls gone missing.

  Bridget Leone was different. African American and age fifteen, yes, but far from homeless or runaway. Still, her parents said she dressed “far too provocatively” for her age and often ran with some “wild kids,” typical teenage rebellion stuff that her abductor could have misconstrued. And just before she was abducted, we eventually learned from her reluctant friends, she and some classmates had been smoking weed in an alley only a few blocks from the elite magnet high school she’d attended.

  When Bridget disappeared, her father—a real estate developer worth millions—called his good pal Tristan Driscoll, the Chicago police superintendent, who in turn immediately deployed the Special Operations Section to find her. That meant Carla and me, at least as the lead detectives.

  The computer mounted on the dash buzzes. A hit. My partner, Carla Griffin, leans forward in the passenger seat and checks it. “False alarm,” she says.

  These automated license plate readers aren’t perfect, natch. Sometimes a D is mistaken for a zero or an O, or an E is mistaken for an F.

  Bing. Bing. Bing. Bing.

  “I feel like I’m in a freakin’ arcade,” I say as I pull our unmarked car into a heavily wooded subdivision called Equestrian Lakes. Giant houses; wide, grassy lots.

  Carla smirks. “Well, this is definitely a game of luck, not skill.”

  She’s right. We have so little to go on. Nobody saw the direction in which the offender drove his car after he scooped Bridget off the street. The route he took didn’t hit any PODs—our police observation cameras mounted in various places along the streets. The only witness was a homeless guy who had no phone, so he couldn’t snap a photo or call it in. And he could only recall two possible digits of the license plate on a “dark” SUV and give us a vague profile of a white male who is “slightly hunched,” probably five nine or five ten, with a long scar on the left side of his face.

  We have AMBER alerts, community alerts, investigative alerts, and flash messages on every cop’s screen in northern Illinois. The Illinois State Police are patrolling the highways. The night Bridget was abducted, we ran a check of ALPRs for those letters—D and F, next to each other—and picked up a Ford Explorer on South Archer Avenue. The registration traced to someone in Missouri who died six months ago.

  We’ve cleared every registered sex offender in the area. So far, nothing. Nothing but hope for a little luck. Unless by some chance my gut call was right and he’s here, on the southwest end of unincorporated Cook County.

  My thinking: this largely vacant area would be close to the place where the ALPR picked up the Ford Explorer. There are some nice subdivisions, sure, but it has a rural feel, lots of woods and houses set back deep into the lots, no sidewalks or curbs or streetlights. Lots of privacy. Perfect for a predator.

  So instead of running everything from the Special Operations headquarters, at North and Pulaski, Carla and I are here, taking phone calls and issuing orders while patrolling in an unmarked vehicle—unmarked unless you notice the tiny camera, the ALPR, on the roof.

  Nothing unusual in Equestrian Lakes, a fancy subdivision, so I get back onto the main road, Rawlings, and follow the bend, the ALPR bing-bing-binging as cars pass.

  The terrain gets more remote, more wooded. It feels like lake country out here, reminding me of the trips we’d take to Michigan when I was a kid. It’s not yet dusk when I take a left turn down an unmarked narrow dirt road, hooded by tall trees, PRIVATE PROPERTY signs nailed to the trunks, glimpses of houses down paths. Beams of sun so infrequently break through the trees that my headlights switch on automatically. I’ll do a quick tour before I—

  A quarter mile ahead, a white van turns toward us onto the road. Carla’s on her phone, talking with the state police, but she drops it from her ear and goes quiet.

  I slow the car. The van continues to approach, going the speed limit, its headlights on us.

  Bing. The ALPR picks up the plate.

  “Commercial van,” Carla reads off the mounted computer. “Registered to LTV, LLC. Registration’s up to date.”

  The van moves slowly, giving us a wide berth, nearly driving onto the uneven shoulder.

  I stop my car entirely, putting it in Park, and put on my hazards. Just to see what the driver will do.

  The van seems to slow but doesn’t stop. Carla and I lean down to look out the window at the driver, who’
s up higher than we are in his van.

  White guy, roughly shaved, dark-framed glasses, baseball cap, bandage on his left cheek. Both hands gripping the wheel. His eyes stay straight forward, not even sneaking a peek in our direction, despite the fact that we have stopped in the middle of the road and put on our hazards.

  Carla’s voice is low. “That look like a white guy, five nine, hunched, scar on his face?”

  Yeah, it sure as hell does. Not a Ford Explorer, no F or D on the plates, but a guy fitting the description in a creepy van. “Let’s check it out.”

  I put the car in Drive and do a U-turn, following the van.

  Chapter 2

  THE VAN rolls along the dirt road, slowing even further as we pull up behind it. So far, it’s guilty of nothing. Not speeding. No busted taillights. No apparent malfunctions that would warrant a stop.

  “No PC,” Carla says. A summary and a warning. We stop the car. Without probable cause, we have a problem in court.

  But we don’t need probable cause to follow it for a while. It’s a free country.

  I figure he’s headed for the main road from which we just came, Rawlings. But he isn’t. The van turns left down an unmarked path. Another dirt road.

  No crime in that. And he used his blinker.

  Still. I glance at Carla, the expression on her face probably the same as mine, gearing up.

  “Baird Salt,” she says, noting the logo visible on the side panel of the van when it turned.

  I follow the van onto the turnoff. It hardly qualifies as a road—it’s more like a clearing through the foliage and heavy tree cover, enough for a single lane of traffic, barely. The bumps are enough to challenge our Taurus’s suspension and the fillings in my teeth. The canopy of trees keeps it dark, but the piercing beams of the lowering sun manage to penetrate here and there.