CHAPTER ONE
Icy slush seeped into Annalisa Vega’s left boot as she stood over a disappearing crime scene. The snow had picked up intensity, filling in the mugger’s footprints by the trees and diluting the victim’s bloodstains on the pavement. Annalisa’s boots were five years old, the soles worn and separated, but she gave all her extra money to Sassy now, and replacing them never seemed like a priority until she was standing outside in the Chicago deep freeze. Their female mugging victim had been hauled away unconscious in an ambulance, and forensics was busy at another scene. At four-thirty in the afternoon, their perpetrator was already receding into the shadows. “Looks like he waited for her behind those trees over there,” she said to her partner, Nick Carelli. “She had a winter hat and scarf on, probably never even saw him before he grabbed her.”
Nick’s phone flashed as he snapped a few more photos. “A crime of opportunity,” he concurred. “He attacked the first vulnerable person to walk by.” He craned his neck back to peer up at the nearby apartment building. “The top floors over there facing the park have a pretty good view. Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone saw something.”
“Sure, maybe.” Residents in this area had long ago learned to keep their eyes to themselves. She eyed the hulking brick building with dread at the idea of climbing all those floors for nothing. “What are the odds it has a working elevator?”
“Aw, come on, Vega.” Nick gave her one of his easy grins. “I know you like working up a sweat with me.”
“You’re not allowed to say that stuff anymore,” she told him as she started walking toward the building.
“Since when?” He fell into step beside her.
“Since the ink dried on the divorce papers fourteen years ago. Didn’t you complete the department’s sexual harassment training?”
“Yeah, but turns out there’s a loophole.”
She stopped walking to look at him. “What loophole?”
“If the two parties have seen each other naked in the past six weeks, then it’s flirting, not harassment.”
She winced inwardly. New Year’s Eve, four weeks ago. A champagne headache that felt like it was still wearing off. “One night in fourteen years does not change the rules,” she told him.
“That’s why I’m angling for another. Speaking of, what are you doing later?”
“Having dinner with Sassy and the girls. Assuming we’re not still canvassing this building by then.” Sassy would probably rather she canceled. Just sent the money. Not have to host Annalisa at her dinner table and pretend everything was normal.
“Okay, what about tomorrow night?” They reached the building’s entrance and Nick’s cell phone rang. He held up a finger to her as he went to answer it. “Hold that thought. Yeah, Carelli here.”
Annalisa waited at the door while he finished the call. “Well?” she said at the brightening in his eyes.
“The victim regained consciousness en route to the hospital. Her name is Estelle Roberts. She works at the printing shop two blocks that way and walks through the park to get to the L every afternoon after her shift.”
“So maybe it wasn’t random after all.”
“I’m going to get over there now to interview her.”
She widened her eyes at him. “And leave me going door-to-door through the whole building?”
“Hey, at least you’re out of the weather, right? And we only need to talk to witnesses on the east side. If I get anything useful from the vic, I’ll let you know.” He jogged off through the falling flakes and Annalisa suppressed another epithet as she let him go. Her ex-husband was better at talking to people than she was, and she’d been counting on his charm to open doors. But the most important witness right now was the one lying in the hospital, so Annalisa had to agree with his priorities.
The building had eighteen floors and one working elevator car, which moved with the same lurching speed of a downtown bus in rush-hour traffic. Annalisa disembarked, vaguely seasick, on the top floor. No one answered her first two knocks. The third produced a groggy Black male, maybe thirty years of age, wearing pajama pants and a Major Lazer T-shirt. “Sorry, I got off-shift at the hospital at noon, and I’ve been sleeping since then.” He showed her a nurse’s badge for Northwestern.
The next tenant at home was an elderly white woman with thick glasses and too many cats. Annalisa glimpsed at least four of them, including a tabby that zipped out the door into the hall. She tracked the feline down and handed her back to the owner. Annalisa tried four more doors with no success, at which point she took the stairs down one flight to do the units on the seventeenth floor that faced the park. The first door, she heard loud music playing on the other side, but no one answered her knock. She banged harder and eventually a white male cracked the door open. She smelled pizza and pot emanating from the other side. “Yeah?” he asked.
She displayed her ID. “I’m Detective Vega, and I’m investigating a mugging that took place about ninety minutes ago in the park outside. Were you home at that time?”
“I been here all afternoon.”
“Did you see anything?”
“No.”
Annalisa repressed a sigh as she dug out another one of her cards. “Okay, if you think of anything or see anyone suspicious hanging around, call me at that number.” He stuck out a hand for the card and she saw he had an intricate tattoo across his hand. “Nice ink,” she remarked, holding the card back.
“Thanks. It’s a Komodo dragon.”
Her phone rang. Nick. “Excuse me one moment.” She turned away to take the call. “Yeah, what’ve you got?”
“Victim says it went down like we thought. He was hiding behind the pine tree and grabbed her when she walked by. He hit her with a rock and took her bag with everything in it.”
“Can she ID him?”
“He’s a white guy. Pretty big by her account. She says he was wearing a hat pulled down pretty far over his face, so an ID might be difficult. But she does remember he had a lizard tattoo on his hand.”
Shit. She turned around to see if the guy had closed the door on her, but he stood there, filling most of the frame, waiting obediently for her card. “I’ll call you back,” she said to Nick, her gaze on the tattoo on the man’s hand. “Sorry about that,” she said, forcing a smile, keeping her tone neutral as she stepped toward him. “You were saying how you’ve been home all afternoon, Mr.…?”
He bolted. Shoved her hard into the wall and ran like hell for the stairs. She cursed and grabbed her radio even as she started in pursuit. “This is Vega,” she said as she pounded down the stairs. She could hear him racing ahead of her, several floors below. “I’m in foot pursuit of a suspect in a robbery/assault case, and I need backup at West Granville and North Leavitt. Suspect is a male white, approximately thirty years old, two hundred and fifty pounds, with a Komodo dragon tattoo on his right hand. Dressed in jeans and a black sweatshirt.”
He blasted through the emergency exit into the alley with her just seconds behind. “Heading south on Leavitt,” she said into her radio as she ran after him. The street had slow-moving pedestrians bundled up against the snow. He grabbed a young woman and threw her backward in Annalisa’s direction. The woman screamed as she went down, ass first, in the slush at Annalisa’s feet. Annalisa paused to give her a hand up. “Are you all right? You’re all right.”
The suspect had crossed the street but he was still visible through the snow in the distance. Annalisa took up pursuit again and updated the chase coordinates on her radio. Where the hell was backup? The man turned right into another alley and disappeared from view. Breathing hard, Annalisa rounded the corner to follow him. He hit her with a trash can, sending her careening into a brick wall. Her radio hit the pavement and shattered. “Stop!” she hollered at the guy as she clambered to her feet. “You’re under arrest.”
He vanished out the other end of the alley. Annalisa followed, ignoring the pain in her flank from where she’d hit the wall. Her feet hit the ground in rhythmic slaps. The cold air burned in her lungs as she ran in the direction she thought he had turned. Yes. There he was. He was bent over one block ahead, winded, and the sight made a laugh escape her. All those years running track in school finally paid off. He looked up and saw her coming, his expression one of disbelief. He took off again but tripped on the slippery curb. She grabbed him as he scrambled to get out of the oncoming traffic.
“I said,” she repeated, panting hard, “you’re under arrest.” The snow melted over her hot neck, sliding down her collar in an icy trickle. The man put up only a token resistance as she applied the handcuffs.
A squad car flashed its lights and pulled to a stop alongside her. The window powered down and the passenger, a lifer beat cop named Harry Finneman, sipped from a paper cup as he looked on with mild interest. “Your pants are wet,” he observed to Annalisa.
“Where the hell were you guys? Getting coffee?”
“Hey, we got here as soon as we could.”
“Sure, you did.” Ever since she’d turned in her ex-cop father last year, the boys in blue seemed slow to answer her calls. “I was bird-dogging this guy for ten straight minutes, and he almost got away. You should’ve been here backing me up.”
Harry raised bushy eyebrows at her. “What are you going to do, report us?”
She bit back a tart reply. “Can you at least take him downtown for booking?”
“Sure thing, Detective Vega, ma’am.” Harry looked to his younger partner at the wheel. “Stephens, it’s all you.”
Stephens took custody and Annalisa half limped her way back to her car, where she used the leftover napkins from her sandwich at lunch to mop up her wet face. Nick met her at the station, where the stale heat made the whole place smell like feet and dried wool. “Are you all right?” he asked with a frown as he rolled his desk chair over to hers.
She flopped down into her seat. “I worked up that sweat you were so concerned about. My cardio is complete for the whole week.”
A uniformed officer dropped off paperwork at Annalisa’s desk. “Here’s the booking report from downstairs,” she said.
“Great, thanks.” Annalisa looked it over. “Suspect’s name is Greg Martinez.” She scanned down for additional details and stopped when she noticed the cop’s name filled in at the bottom. Arresting officer: Harry Finneman. “That sonofabitch,” she murmured.
“Problem?” Nick looked up from where he’d rolled back to his own territory.
“Clerical error,” she announced as she stood up. “Nothing some Wite-Out won’t fix.” She wished she could Wite-Out the whole last year and a half. Or at least dump a bucket of it over Finneman’s head.
“About that dinner,” Nick said as he rolled to block her path. “I’m buying.”
She rolled her eyes. “I told you I can’t.”
“So, we make it another night,” he said, his face open and full of hope. “Name the time.”
She hesitated. She’d blown up her whole life last year and Nick was the only one left standing in the ashes. “I’m sorry,” she said, not without real regret. “I just can’t.”
CHAPTER TWO
“Am I imagining things, or does this snowman have fangs?” Annalisa held her wineglass in one hand as she squinted at the child’s art tacked up on Sassy’s refrigerator. The garish snowman had a misshapen oval head and tiny triangle teeth. Cotton balls had been glued on to form the body.
“Oh yes. If you look closely, she also drew staples on his neck. Mrs. Davis wouldn’t let her use the actual stapler.” Sassy had her own wineglass, deep into a second pouring of the discount pinot noir Annalisa had brought with her to dinner. Folklore said in vino veritas, but Annalisa was finding the opposite, that the rituals of serving and consuming the alcohol gave them something to do in place of real conversation. The trick was getting out of Sassy’s place before the third glass.
“Carla made this?”
“Not only did she make it, Carla told the class it’s a vampire snowman that goes out at night to consume the carrot noses of the other snowpeople,” Sassy said, leaning against the fridge with a sigh. “Her teacher gave her points for imagination but also called to ask me if Carla should be in therapy.”
“Should she be?” Of course she should. Carla was six years old and her father was in prison for murder. Annalisa knew this because she had put him there.
Sassy set down her wineglass and began clearing away the dinner dishes. They joined a pile waiting in the sink. “Putting a first grader on the couch? No, thanks. If anyone’s going crazy around here, it’s me. The new budget at the library is ten percent smaller than last year and my boss said he can’t keep justifying my extra shifts at the expense of keeping other people on full-time. Carla’s overdue to see the dentist and Gigi needs new shoes. Meanwhile, the place is a wreck.”
Annalisa’s gaze slid past the dirty dishes to the avalanche of mail, broken crayons, and unopened plastic snack containers, half full of cheesy crackers, that covered the countertop. “It’s not that bad.”
Sassy gave a dark laugh as she started the faucet. “I give Gigi one cookie and she somehow manages to leave fingerprints over the entire house—all of them tiny and two feet off the ground.”
“If you want, I could give you the name of the cleaning service that does my condo. Better yet, let me schedule them—”
“No!” The word came out as a desperate yelp. Sassy squeezed her eyes shut and raised her palms. “No,” she repeated more softly. “You’ve done enough.”
Annalisa had brought groceries with her to dinner and a check to help cover the mortgage; it didn’t feel like nearly enough. “I love the girls. I love you. I want to help.”
“You know what you can do to help.”
Annalisa turned away. She knew what her friend wanted from her, but she couldn’t make herself say yes. “I can help with the dishes,” she said with forced cheer. “I’ll wash, you dry. It’ll be like the old days when you and me lived in that apartment on Central. The one over the tire store? The whole place reeked like rubber.”
“Anna.” Sassy’s voice was soft as she took up a dishrag to dry.
Annalisa focused on scraping dried oatmeal off the side of a bowl. She shook her head, the barest of gestures. “I can’t,” she said tightly. “I’ve thought about it and I just can’t.”
“He’s your brother.”
Annalisa dropped the bowl in the sink with a loud clatter. “Yes, and he’s also a convicted murderer.”
Copyright © 2022 by Joanna Schaffhausen
