The Black Book Read online

  This was what she figured: somehow, in some way, it had become a competition between them over Billy. Kate wanted to be closest to Billy, but she couldn’t because of his twin sister.

  You’ll never know him like I do, Kate. It will never happen.

  “Congrats on the big night,” she said to Kate.

  “Thanks,” Kate said, her eyes still on the stage.

  “I go to church at least once a month to seek absolution for my sins,” said Billy to the audience. “Tonight was the first time a priest confessed to me.”

  The crowd liked that—big whoops and exaggerated groans. Everyone liked Billy. He played to the crowd well. He was playing to his phone, too, perched upright on a stool on the stage. Billy recorded his comedy routines on his phone and uploaded them to some Facebook page he shared with a guy named Stewart, whom he’d met at the hospital three years ago, back when Billy went through all that horrible stuff.

  God—three years ago? It still felt fresh to her. And look at Billy, still going strong after all that shit, tragedy that would have broken most people. It would have broken her. But Billy, he just kept motoring forward with that placid expression, like the entire shitstorm that came his way just slid off him, no problems, no worries.

  It changed him. It must have, in ways even Patti couldn’t understand. But you could put a gun to Billy’s head and he wouldn’t let on.

  She watched Kate watching Billy and didn’t like what she saw. Kate, she had to concede, was drop-dead gorgeous, her reddish-brown hair pulled back, her large green eyes, her hard, athletic body—the kind of beauty that would render her unapproachable to most men. Billy was pretty easy on the eyes, too, tall and well built, with that killer smile that came so naturally. The thought had occurred to Patti more than once that he and Kate could be a thing. But she’d never actually seen either of them flash any sign of that until tonight, until right now, when she was looking into Kate’s eyes as she listened to Billy on stage.

  Yes, there it was, in her eyes, while her guard was down, while the alcohol tangled with her emotions, while she thought nobody was watching.

  But I’m watching, Kate.

  When Billy was done, he raised his beer in a salute, and everyone applauded. When it died down, Patti put her drink on the table and got close to Kate.

  She was so near now that Kate couldn’t ignore her without being rude, so Kate reluctantly turned toward Patti, raising her eyebrows.

  “Billy’s one of the good guys,” Patti said.

  “He’s the best,” Kate agreed.

  “He’s still getting over everything, y’know.”

  Kate pulled a sip from her bottle of beer and set it down. “I know that.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes, Patti, I do.”

  “Don’t hurt him,” said Patti. “Don’t hurt my baby brother.”

  Kate drew back. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “You know what it means. And you better know I’m serious.” Patti wanted to say more, but she’d had a lot to drink herself, and who knew what might come out of her mouth if she didn’t disengage? Her insides burning, she set down her drink and headed straight for the exit.

  Ten

  BILLY TOOK one of the tables at the back of the bar and considered the beer and the shot of whiskey before him. He couldn’t remember the last time he drank so much. Someone had put a plate of fries out, too. He couldn’t imagine eating them. The grease would probably make him puke.

  Kate dropped down next to him, and he scooted over. The place was dying down now. It was past three in the morning. The place closed at four. It was last call.

  “What a fuckin’ night,” he said to her.

  “I know, right?” Kate’s hand touched his leg underneath the table.

  Her hand…on his leg.

  “Hey!” Some drunk guy—in this bar, that was a redundant phrase—plopped down across from them. “What was the mayor like?”

  “He was a gentleman throughout the process,” said Billy. “He accepted his fate with grace and dignity.”

  The guy laughed. So did Kate.

  Her hand slid upward. Billy was drunk and beaten down, but another part of his anatomy sprung to attention.

  “That must have been a thrill and a half, catching him like that,” said the guy.

  Kate turned to Billy, who wasn’t sure what kind of facial expression he was sporting at the moment. “Was it?” she asked, her hand moving farther up his leg. “Was it a thrill, Detective?”

  Billy looked into Kate’s eyes. There was no misunderstanding. That hand sliding up his leg was no accident.

  “I would call it unexpected,” he said.

  Her hand moving again, getting close to pay dirt in his lap.

  “Unexpected in a good way?” she asked. “Or a bad way?”

  And…bingo. There it was, Kate’s hand finding his main artery, wrapping her hand around it, squeezing it, stroking it.

  “It could be bad,” he said, watching the guy across from him, the drunk cop who was more interested in the french fries.

  “That’s true,” said Kate, nodding as if nothing was going on beneath the table while she artfully unzipped his pants and slid her hand inside. “It could be very bad.” Still stroking the throttle. If she kept going like that, it was going to be blastoff.

  “I need to take a piss,” said the drunk guy, who scooted out of the seat and left them alone.

  “Bad can be good sometimes,” said Billy. His right hand reached down and found Kate’s leg, her blue jeans. At that moment, he wished it had been a skirt. Kate’s legs, together under the table, parted, and Billy accepted the invitation, sliding his hand upward.

  “If it’s just one time,” said Kate. “If it’s not complicated.”

  Billy was having trouble breathing now. He wasn’t blind. He knew Kate was a knockout. He’d just never let himself go there. She was his partner. He had just closed his mind to it.

  But now that barricade was coming down. Of course—of course the thought had passed through his mind. You couldn’t look at Kate every day, spend eight-hour shift after eight-hour shift with her, and not have it cross your mind. Look at her.

  Which he did. But now he wasn’t picturing Detective Katherine Fenton. He was picturing Kate, naked, her back arching, her hair in her face, her legs wrapped around his back, a primal moan escaping her lips, her body writhing in response—

  “We don’t need complications, do we, partner?” she said.

  “No…no complications.” He could hardly speak he was so aroused. He was about to launch, right here in front of a handful of drunken cops, none of whom seemed to notice, thank God in heaven.

  Then they were waving to the rest of the crowd and making their way to the exit.

  “Just one time is no big deal,” he said.

  A row of cabs waiting outside. They got into the first one.

  “Not a big thing,” he said.

  “No?” She put her hand back where it had been when they were sitting in the booth. “It felt pretty big to me.”

  When the cab sped away from the bar, he was on her, tearing at her clothes, shoving his hand inside her blue jeans, her breath hot in his ear.

  Just one time, he told himself. No big thing.

  Eleven

  “OH, SHIT. Holy fuck.”

  Billy stirred in bed, moaned, rolled over, and opened his eyes to a squint, the pain ricocheting through his skull.

  “You gotta see this, Harney.”

  He felt the bed depress, Kate falling onto it. She was wearing running gear, the shirt wet against her chest, her hair pulled back, gym shoes still on.

  Figures. Rain or shine, big night of drinking or not, Kate is up at the crack of dawn doing her miles.

  “Look at this.” Kate held her phone in front of his face.

  He could hardly state his own name much less read something off a small screen. The lasers of sheer agony crisscrossing through his brain made him briefly consider whether someone wa
s reenacting a scene from Star Wars between his ears.

  Then his eyes focused on it, and he concurred with Kate’s initial impression: holy fuck.

  It was a headline from ChicagoPC, an online newspaper-blog—the concepts were merging these days—that covered politics (P) and crime (C) in Chicago. The byline was credited to Kim Beans, an investigative reporter whom Billy had met on a few unpleasant occasions. Unpleasant was an understatement. Kim Beans had the tenacity of a pit bull and the charm of a rattlesnake.

  The headline: GREEN BAY PACKERS QB A REGULAR AT SEX CLUB?

  Wow, thought Billy. That didn’t take long.

  “Video footage,” Kate says. “It says they have video footage of him visiting the club.”

  “Not last night, though. He wasn’t there last night.” He read through the article. It said that ChicagoPC had “come into possession” of video footage of the starting quarterback from Green Bay walking into that brownstone sometime last summer.

  The article also promised that there was more video, of more celebrities, to come.

  “This isn’t good,” Kate said. “It’s all going to be about this little black book that we didn’t recover. You know they’re already asking questions about it, don’t you? Wizniewski even said something to me last night, the little prick.”

  Goldie had said the same thing to Billy. But to Billy, the more interesting question was, who took this video? And why?

  “This is bad,” Kate said.

  “Look on the bright side,” said Billy.

  “There’s a bright side? What’s the bright side?”

  “This might give the Bears a shot at the NFC North this year.”

  “Jeez, Billy, you don’t see this as a problem?” She directed her finger back and forth between them. “This is going to be your and my fault. We were in charge of the investigation.”

  “I was in charge,” Billy corrected. “It will be my fault.”

  “But I was in charge of the inventory, the search.”

  Trying to stop Kate from worrying about something was as easy as trying to stop a freight train at high speed. Kate did everything fast and hard. There was no second gear for her.

  “The mayor needs to deflect this,” she said. “He needs the story to be about something besides him. He wants it to be about us.”

  “So,” said Billy, “we’ll find the little black book today at the manager’s house.” Last night, after they interviewed the manager of the sex club—Ramona Dillavou—and searched the brownstone without any luck, Billy sent uniforms over to Dillavou’s house to seal it off.

  “We better.” Kate bounced off the bed. “Or we’re dead.”

  Twelve

  “WE’RE DEAD,” said Kate.

  “We’re not dead. You’re overreacting.” Billy peeled off his rubber gloves. He was standing in the foyer of Ramona Dillavou’s house in Lincoln Park. Managing a house of prostitution must pay well, because her three-story brownstone on Belden was gorgeous—shiny hardwood floors and expensive artwork, updated fixtures and appliances, a cinema-size TV screen in the basement, complete with rows of the type of chairs you’d find in a movie theater, a master bathroom with a full-size sauna and a shower the size of Billy’s living room. This house had everything you could ever want.

  Everything, that is, except a little black book.

  It could be anything, Billy had said to the officers and technicians assisting in the search. It could be an actual book, or it could be a computer or tablet, or it could be something on a flash drive or an SD card. It could look like a phone directory or an accounting ledger. It could be in code. It could be scribbled in pencil on the back pages of a novel sitting on a bookshelf. It could be anything. It could be anywhere.

  But after eight hours, they had found nothing. Ramona Dillavou had an iPad and a personal computer, and the technicians had downloaded the contents of each onto an external hard drive for later review, but an initial examination by one of the techies showed nothing helpful.

  Billy chugged another bottle of water. His mouth felt like the Sahara desert. He tried to think strategically, as Ramona Dillavou would. If I had something valuable like that, something I wanted to keep totally confidential and untraceable but couldn’t lose, where would I put it? The problem was that his thoughts and ideas were navigating through a storm of lightning strikes and clashing cymbals and jackhammers trying to blast through the interior of his skull. The worst hangover ever.

  “Oh, this is great. Look at this.”

  Kate handed Billy her phone, this time displaying an online article from one of the city’s mainstay newspapers, the Chicago Tribune. Billy scrolled through the headlines, all of them about the arrest.

  will mayor resign?

  mayoral wannabes lining up

  archdiocese statement vague

  But amid those stories, this gem:

  questions raised about police conduct

  There wasn’t much new in the article. The second half was a cut-and-paste job, a summary of the arrest and all the prominent people busted. But the first three paragraphs said that the mayor had hired a lawyer, a high-powered attorney who served as the nation’s attorney general under the first George Bush, who was claiming that the police “turned innocent conduct into criminal behavior and stormed into a private residence without any cause to do so.”

  Billy smiled and shook his head. His default reaction to bad news. His general view of things, after everything that had happened three years ago, was that he’d taken the worst life had to offer, and everything else had to be put in perspective.

  But this was his job, and it mattered to him. It was all he had now. And as much as Kate tended to exaggerate, she wasn’t the only one sounding alarms about what might be coming down the road. Mike Goldberger had, too, and Goldie had a sense for things like this more than anyone Billy knew.

  “It’ll be fine, Kate,” Billy said, trying to convince himself as well as her.

  And then a buzzing sound in Billy’s hand, and on Billy’s belt, too, where his own phone was encased. Both of them had received a text message at precisely the same time. Billy felt a chill pass through him.

  He handed Kate her phone while he checked his. It only took them a second to read the message and realize that they both got the same thing.

  A text from Wizniewski:

  Report to 5th flr of Daley Center in 1 hr.

  The fifth floor of the Richard J. Daley Center was the principal location of the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, the top prosecutor of all crimes in Chicago and the county’s surrounding suburbs.

  Kate looked at Billy. “We’re dead,” she said.

  Thirteen

  “THE STATE’S attorney will see you now.” The man pushed open the blond-wood door. The first thing Billy saw through the picture window in the large corner office was the darkness outside. Then he saw photographs and keepsakes lining the walls—vanity photos, not surprising for a politician.

  Then he saw two people in the room: the superintendent of police and the Cook County state’s attorney.

  The police superintendent, appointed by the mayor, was a man named Tristan Driscoll, whom the mayor had hired away from his previous job running the police department in Newark, New Jersey. Driscoll’s brother was a lobbyist and fund-raiser who had raised millions for Mayor Francis Delaney in the last election, so even though the mayor heralded the fact that he was bringing in an “outsider” to “clean house” in the Chicago PD, he was also bringing in the brother of one of the people to whom he was most indebted for winning his reelection. Welcome to Chicago.

  Next up, the Cook County state’s attorney, Margaret Olson, who had served as an alderwoman for three terms before she decided that she wanted to be the county’s top prosecutor. She’d only practiced law for a couple of years, but she won the race after receiving significant support from—take a wild guess—Mayor Francis Delaney.

  Aware that many people doubted her qualifications for the job, Margaret Olson deci
ded to be the toughest, most aggressive prosecutor the county had ever seen—never dropping a case, always refusing plea bargains. It quickly earned her the nickname “Maximum Margaret” for her tendency to seek the harshest sentences for all crimes. The judges hated her. Civil rights advocates protested her. Cops didn’t appreciate the fact that every single case, no matter how slam-dunk, no matter how small, required their in-court testimony because Margaret wouldn’t cut deals. The only people who liked her were defense lawyers, because Maximum Margaret was good for business.

  A third person was in the room, a woman, fairly young, probably Billy’s age, dressed smartly and focused like a laser on them, staring at Billy so intently that he thought she was trying to read his mind.

  If she could read his mind, this is what she’d take away:

  Superintendent Driscoll is a soulless asswipe. State’s Attorney Olson is a political hack who’d indict her own mother if it would boost her favorables by a single percentage point. And both of them owe their positions to the mayor, whom I just humiliated and ruined. And what’s your story, gorgeous? Italian, I’m guessing. Maybe Greek, with that silky ink-black hair and those haunting dark eyes. You look like Kate Beckinsale with a law degree. That’s the good news. The bad news: you seem about as pleasant as a case of genital warts.

  “Detectives,” said Margaret Olson, sitting behind her walnut desk, her graying hair cut short. “You know the superintendent, of course.”

  Sure, I know Tristan. Hey, Tristan, what the fuck kind of a cop’s name is Tristan? Were your parents hoping for a girl?

  “Of course,” said Billy. Kate only nodded, didn’t speak.

  “This is assistant state’s attorney Amy Lentini,” said Olson, nodding to the beauty queen with the steely expression in the corner.

  Italian. That was my first guess.

  “She handles special investigations for my office. Sit, Detectives, sit.”

  Billy and Kate took the two seats in front of the desk. They were flanked: the top cop to their left, the top prosecutor dead ahead, and Amy Lentini, the special investigator, to the right.