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“Was there any sign that Vince Bagby was involved in the Fugher murder?”

“You have a hard-on—”

“Disgusting expression, especially when talking to me,” I said. “The Sturlese brothers didn’t have an interest in anything Annie Guzzo may or may not have hidden under Wrigley Field. I’m trying to find out who planted that in their tiny minds, or in the Grozny Mob’s brains. If it was Vince Bagby—”

“I’m not digging into Bagby on your say-so,” Conrad said coldly.

“He was at
Say, Yes!
the night that Bernadine and I were beaten up, and he’s been popping up every time something dramatic happens. I don’t know if it’s coincidence, or because he’s keeping an eye on me for Scanlon.”

“I can’t help you there. Maybe he knows you’re an unguided missile and he’s trying to make sure you don’t land on his trucks.”

Derek swallowed a grin.

I curled my lip. “I suppose mocking me is the easiest way to assuage your guilt over not getting to the Sturlese brothers before they dragged Bernadine Fouchard to South Chicago. Thank goodness Mr. Contreras and I rescued her before she died.”

Conrad shifted in his chair. “Sorry. Out of line. But I’m still not going after Scanlon, or Bagby, because you have an itch you want to scratch.”

I sucked in a breath, held it for a count of ten, waited for the red to fade from in front of my eyes. “There’s the business of Annie Guzzo, and what she was hiding in the tunnel at Wrigley, and why she was murdered. And all of that leads back to Rory Scanlon.”

“There’s no connection to Scanlon. And definitely not one to Bagby, who wasn’t even running the trucking company when Annie was killed.”

“Bagby and Scanlon are cousins, and Bagby is the younger one. He wanted the big boys to let him play with them when he was little, so he’d do whatever they said. It got to be ingrained. Now that they’re all grown, Bagby still does what the older boys want so he can be part of the gang.”

“What, now you’re a family therapist? They’re cousins, they do things together, so Bagby helps support
Say, Yes!
I’ll admit you were a big help two days ago in South Chicago, but I’ve got enough real crime in the Fourth to keep me going until my granddaughter’s in college—and I don’t have a kid of my own yet. I’m not going to start inventing crimes where the system is running smoothly.”

“The system is exactly what runs smoothly only for the people running it!” I cried, exasperated. “Scanlon is funneling money through that
Say, Yes!
foundation to stuff that’s either illegal or would get his insurance license revoked. Back when Annie Guzzo worked for Mandel & McClelland, she uncovered evidence that Scanlon was using the kids in his
Say, Yes!
foundation to beat up local businesses and push them into buying their insurance through his agency. Joel Previn overheard Scanlon and Mandel talk about using foundation funds to bankroll Spike Hurlihey’s first political campaign.”

I told them what I’d learned from Joel, from Frank Guzzo, from Mr. Villard and from the photographs themselves.

Conrad rubbed his forehead. I could see past my anger to the fatigue lines gouged in his face.

“I am not a fan of Stella Guzzo,” I added, “but the night Annie Guzzo was murdered, two other people came to the house while Stella was off playing bingo: first, Joel Previn, and after he left, Sol Mandel.”

Conrad sat upright. “What? What crystal ball spat that detail out twenty-five years after the fact?”

Derek interrupted to ask who we were talking about.

“Joel told me he was there,” I said after Conrad and I had explained the Guzzo murder story. “I never could understand why Mandel & McClelland took the case, or why poor Joel, who had a crush on Annie, agreed to represent Stella, but he told me Mandel saw his car outside the Guzzo house and threatened to turn him over to the cops if he didn’t defend Stella. It had never occurred to him that Mandel could have been Annie’s killer.”

“Maybe because Joel had already killed her himself,” Conrad snarled.

“Yeah, right, that’s a possibility. I don’t believe it after spending a lot of time with Joel.”

“Convenient to blame it on the dead partner.” Derek chipped in his two cents.

“Yes, but there’s a living person who had a stake in what Annie had uncovered,” I said. “I’m betting he came along for the ride, if not for the deed.”

Conrad stared at me. “You’re back on Scanlon’s ass. God
damn
it, Warshawski—”

I bared my teeth in a ferocious grin. “I have a handwritten note to my dad, rubbing his face in the fact of his transfer to West Englewood. Whoever wrote it implied that he put word out that Tony snitched on his brother officers—in order to make sure Tony was in maximum danger on the street. My father was almost killed, not once but many times, because the boys at the Seventh didn’t get him backup. The stress—he might still be part of my life today if it weren’t for whoever made sure he got put there!”

Conrad said, “And you think it was Scanlon? What proof, Ms. W.? What proof?”

“The letter! I’ve sent it to my lawyer for safekeeping, but—”

“We could run forensics on it,” Derek offered.

“I don’t want to risk it evaporating while it’s out of my custody,” I said coldly. “But I’m betting Conrad can at least ID who wrote it, even if not the taunting message to my dad. A facsimile is up on the Annie Guzzo’s Murder website.”

Conrad’s copper skin darkened to mahogany. “You did what? You set up a murder site on your own without talking to the police? And you complain when I say you take the law into your own hands?”

“We were working against the clock. I was keeping in touch with you, but the police apparatus, you couldn’t move on this as fast as I could.”

Conrad gave me a withering look, but buried himself in his smartphone, looking up the URL. I gave him and Derek the password Mr. Contreras and I had created.

Conrad looked up after reading the letter, anguish in his eyes. “I know that handwriting: Oswald Brattigan. He was my watch commander at the Fourth when I was first transferred in there. If that sentence to your father was written by Scanlon—” He broke off, his chin collapsing against his chest.

“I don’t want to believe this, or deal with it,” he mumbled after a moment. “Rory Scanlon—if he’s been using the kids in
Say, Yes!
to extort or intimidate—my God—it’s going to be an unholy war down there. He’s so connected, Vic: he’s got the Speaker in his pocket, the local parish—”

“But if Joel’s report on what he overheard Scanlon and Mandel talk about is correct, they were using both client accounts and foundation money to fuel political campaigns. Spike Hurlihey owes his Speaker’s gavel to illegal money.”

Conrad smacked his thigh. “That doesn’t mean he knew the money was illegal. Assuming it was illegal, which is a big ‘if.’ An overheard conversation twenty-five years ago by an alkie who couldn’t cut it at the firm? I don’t believe it and neither will a jury.”

“The prosecutor for the Northern District is going to want to take a look,” Derek said. “If the paper trail is there—we can subpoena records from Continental Illinois. Do a handwriting check on this ‘FYI, Law and Order Man’ scrawl. Maybe we can roll on one of the
Say, Yes!
kids to wear a wire.”

“They’re used to prison,” Conrad said. “It doesn’t frighten them. They build new gang networks there, they learn new street skills.”

“Okay, someone in the law office, or someone in Hurlihey’s office,” Derek said. He looked sympathetically at Conrad. “I don’t have to work there every day, it won’t bother me any.”

“And Annie’s murder,” I said stubbornly.

Conrad thought it over. “There’s no forensic evidence, Vic. I told you I had the files sent up when the story broke about Boom-Boom. It looked so cut and dried, girl dies from bleeding into the brain after mom beats her on the head, we didn’t look for other prints at the scene. There’s nothing to tie anyone—not even Previn—to the murder scene now.”

I let it go at that. He was right, for one thing, and for another, I was too exhausted to argue any further.

Conrad held the door open for Derek, but came back to my bed after the Fed had left. “You know that call, warning you away from South Chicago after the Dragons attacked you? I found out that Sid Gerber did it.”

“Sid?” My dad’s old pal who was the desk sergeant now down in the Fourth. “Conrad—no, he can’t have been part of—”

“No, he wasn’t, stupid old goat. He was worried about you, thought he’d be doing your old man a favor by scaring you away. When he saw what had happened down in Dead Stick Pond, he talked it over with one of the boys, who came to me with the news. I decided to pretend I hadn’t heard about it—guy is six months from retirement. I just told him that the quickest way to get you stung by a thousand wasps was to tell you to stay out of their nest.”

He turned on his heel and marched out before I could respond. I went back to sleep, but was awakened an hour later by Murray Ryerson, who’d bullied or charmed his way past the nursing staff, demanding an exclusive. He’d found photos from Mr. Contreras’s and my rescue at Dead Stick Pond that one of the hard hats had posted on Facebook and wanted my story.

I gave him most of what I knew but didn’t tell him that Derek might get the Feds to look into the
Say, Yes!
foundation accounts—I didn’t want to short-circuit a potential investigation with a media broadside. Instead, I told him my growing doubts about Stella’s guilt in her daughter’s death. For Murray, an old crime reporter, this was like a gazelle wandering in front of a lion. He agreed there wasn’t enough to print yet, and also no way to get evidence linking either Mandel, Scanlon or one of the juniors in Mandel’s firm to Annie’s death.

“Why did Previn have to be reckless enough to go up to Wrigley to find the papers and then such a twitcher that he fled as soon as someone confronted him?” Murray grumbled.

“Doesn’t matter,” I yawned. “The documents wouldn’t have survived the damp, let alone the rats, after all this time. The unbelievable thing is that the binder itself was still there for that prize idiot Sebastian to discover.”

Jake arrived after lunch to bring me home. I spent the afternoon listening to him rehearse the Martinsson concerto, and in the evening went with Lotty and Max to hear him perform.

All my houseplants had died from neglect. The next day, I went to my office so that my practice didn’t suffer a similar fate. In the evening I went back up to the hospital to collect Mr. Contreras, and to bring the dogs home from the doggy B&B where they’d been boarding. While we rehashed our glorious rescue mission over a picnic supper, Pierre and Bernadine showed up.

“We’re flying home tomorrow,” Pierre said, “but—I called you a lot of bad names when this
petite monstre
was cracking my life apart. I need to say that I am sorry.”

Bernie flushed and drew a semicircle on the floor with the toe of her boot. “I’m sorry, too, Vic, I—I almost died. Twice in one night and two times you almost died to save me.”

Mitch bounded over, pushed his big nose between Bernie and me, turning the awkward moment into a laugh.

“You had a horrific time,” I said. “Does it mean you’re going to turn your back on Northwestern’s scholarship?”

Bernie made a moue. “Cornell, Syracuse, they want me, too. I will decide after I visit them, but—”

“But only with Arlette,” Pierre said. “This
tourbillon
goes nowhere alone until she is forty.”

“Papa!” Bernie protested.

“Very well. If you behave and endanger no one’s life for ten years, I will reduce the sentence to age thirty-five.” Pierre smiled, but he pulled his daughter to him in a ferocious hug.

LOADING THE BASES

Life began
returning to a semblance of normal: clients, concerts or dancing with Jake, helping Mr. Contreras get his handkerchief garden in shape. TV and Web media rushed in to cover the drama of Bernie’s rescue, but it was easy to deflect them to the dockworkers who’d come to our aid.

The spring continued cold and wet, but I ran the lakefront with the dogs, played basketball with my friends on Sunday mornings. I spent time with Mr. Villard, visiting him first at the rehab place where he went after surgery, and then in his assisted living apartment when he was strong enough to go home. Adelaide continued to look after him: the daughters had tried to fire her, but Mr. Villard insisted that he was to blame for getting shot:

“I should have told Ms. Warshawski it was Gil Brineruck’s voice on that recording, instead of thinking I could confront him alone. He was a terrible disgrace to baseball and to the Cubs. Adelaide knows how to look after me without turning me into a three-year-old. Adelaide stays.”

I even went back to working on my voice. My mother had once presented me with a music list for my birthday: songs about Victoria or Victory or music by women named Victoria. I was trying to learn madrigals by the Renaissance composer Vittoria Aleotti, with Jake playing the counterpoint. Love songs often ended with a practice session in bed, which helped make my hellish twenty hours in tunnels and swamps recede to the background of my brain.