Kitabı oku: «Red, White & Dead»

Praise for the novels of

LAURA CALDWELL

Red, White & Dead “A fresh, intelligent and emotional thriller. Laura Caldwell writes with an assured ease, showing a true sense of style and story, delivering a brilliant and complicated heroine.” —New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry

Red Blooded Murder “Aims for the sweet spot between tough and tender, between thrills and thought—and hits the bull’s-eye … A terrific novel.” —No.1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child

“Take Izzy McNeil to bed tonight. You won’t get much

sleep, but you’ll spend tomorrow smiling. Red Blooded Murder is smoking hot and impossible to put down.” —Marcus Sakey, author of Good People and The Blade Itself

Red Hot Lies “A legal lioness—Caldwell has written a gripping edge-of-the-seat thriller that will not disappoint.” —New York Times bestselling author Steve Martini

The Good Liar “A massive achievement, in one novel, launching a woman right up there with the top thriller writers around.” —International bestselling author Ken Bruen

The Rome Affair “A fabulous, hypnotic psychological thriller. Laura Caldwell is a force we can’t ignore.” —New York Times bestselling author Stella Cameron

Look Closely “A haunting story of suspense and family secrets … you won’t want to put it down.” —New York Times bestselling author Mary Jane Clark

The Night I Got Lucky “Caldwell is one of the most talented and inventive … writers around.” —Booklist

The Year of Living Famously “Snazzy, gripping … an exciting taste of life in the fast lane.” —Booklist

A Clean Slate “A page-turner about a woman with a chance to reinvent herself.” —Chicago Tribune

Burning the Map “A touching story of a young woman at a crossroads in her life.” —Barnes & Noble.com on Burning the Map, selected as one of “The Best of 2002”

RED, WHITE & DEAD

LAURA CALDWELL

www.mirabooks.co.uk

Dear Reader,

The Izzy McNeil series is fiction. But it’s personal, too. Much of Izzy’s world is my world. She’s proud to be a lawyer (although she can’t always find her exact footing in the legal world) and she’s even more proud to be a Chicagoan. The Windy City has never been more alive for me than it was during the writing of these books—Red Hot Lies, Red Blooded Murder and Red, White & Dead. Nearly all the places I’ve written about are as true-blue-Chicago as Lake Michigan on a crisp October day. Occasionally I’ve taken licence with a few locales, but I hope you’ll enjoy visiting them. If you’re not a Chicagoan, I hope you’ll visit the city, too, particularly if you haven’t recently. Chicago is humming right now—it’s a city whose surging vibrancy is at once surprising and yet, to those of us who’ve lived here a while, inevitable.

The Izzy McNeil books can be read in any order, although Izzy does age throughout, just like the rest of us. Please e-mail me at info@lauracaldwell.com to let me know what you think about the books, especially what you think Izzy and her crew should be doing next. And thank you, thank you, for reading.

Laura Caldwell

Thanks also to everyone who read the book or

offered advice or suggestions, especially Dustin

O’Regan, Jason Billups, Liza Jaine, Rob Kovell,

Katie Caldwell Kuhn, Margaret Caldwell, Christi

Smith, William Caldwell, Matthew Caldwell,

Meredith Caldwell, Liz Flock, Kris Verdeck

and Les Klinger.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you so very much to Margaret O’Neill Marbury, Amy Moore-Benson and Maureen Walters. Thanks also to everyone at MIRA Books, including Valerie Gray, Donna Hayes, Dianne Moggy, Loriana Sacilotto, Craig Swinwood, Pete McMahon, Stacy Widdrington, Andrew Wright, Pamela Laycock, Katherine Orr, Marleah Stout, Alex Osuszek, Erin Craig, Margie Miller, Adam Wilson, Don Lucey, Gordy Goihl, Dave Carley, Ken Foy, Erica Mohr, Darren Lizotte, Andi Richman, Reka Rubin, Margie Mullin, Sam Smith, Kathy Lodge, Carolyn Flear, Maureen Stead, Emily Ohanjanians, Michelle Renaud, Linda McFall, Stephen Miles, Jennifer Watters, Amy Jones, Malle Vallik, Tracey Langmuir, Anne Fontanesi, Scott Ingram, Deborah Brody, Marianna Ricciuto, Jim Robinson, John Jordan and Brent Lewis.

Grazie mille to Andrea Rossi in Rome for answering my many questions about the Camorra and the anti-Mafia efforts in Italy, and grazie to Francesco Marinuzzi and Laura Roberts for their assistance with all things Italia.

Much gratitude to my experts—Chicago Police Officer Jeremy Schultz; criminal defence lawyers Catharine O’Daniel and Sarah Toney; pilot Jonathan Sandrolini, private investigator Paul Ciolino; journalist Maurice Possley and physicians Dr Richard Feely and Dr Roman Voytsekhovskiy.

PART I

1

When it happened, it happened at night, the way bizarre things often do.

For a Sunday, and nearly midnight, the restaurant was buzzing. That’s the way Sundays work in Chicago. Often the city is quiet—most people tucked under sheets by 10 p.m., newspapers sprawled on the floor below them. Other times, on a Sunday in June like that night, when the weather plays nice—the occasional puffed cloud skimming across a crystallized blue sky, a sky that gently settles into a soft black without losing the day’s warmth—things can get a little raucous. And I’m the kind of girl who likes a raucous Sunday now and again.

So even though Rush Street wasn’t my usual hangout, if I’d been surrounded by friends at that corner table at Gibsons Bar, the one by the windows that looked onto the street where people still strolled and lights still burned, I would have been very happy. But I wasn’t with friends.

Dez Romano threw his arm over the back of my stool. Dez, short for Desmond, had dark black hair, even though he was surely a few years past forty, and it curled in pleasing twists, like ribbons of ink around his face. The somewhat thick bridge of his nose was the only coarse thing on Dez Romano’s face, and he managed to make that look spectacularly handsome. He was so confident, so lit up with energy that you began to think every man should have such a face.

The story I’d been told by John Mayburn, the private investigator I moonlighted for, was that Dez had been named by his mother after a Catholic cardinal whom she admired. The religious connotation hadn’t helped. Dez was now the head of his family business, as in the family business. Dez was, as Mayburn had said, “the new face of Chicago’s organized crime.”

Dez smiled at me now. I thought a smile by such a man would be flashy, a surface grin that easily revealed danger underneath. But it was genuine. Or at least it appeared so. I’d been told that, in some ways, Dez was the new kind of Mafia—the kind who had friends from all walks of life around the city, who opted, when possible, for courting rather than strong-arming, who made large donations to charities, not because he or his family business wanted something from them, but simply because every respectable business did so.

I returned Dez’s smile, thinking that the problem with Dez wasn’t his looks and it wasn’t that he lacked generosity, whether toward a woman like me, whom he’d met at the bar, a woman supposedly stood up by a flaky friend or toward his associates. The problem was, at least according to the suspicions of the federal government, Dez ran an intricate business, an arm of the Italian Camorra, believed to be more ambitious and more ruthless than the Cosa Nostra faction made famous by The Godfather movies. In other words, Dez was also the old kind of Mafia. He wasn’t afraid of strong-arming or something much more violent. No, not at all.

“So, Suzanne,” Dez said, using the alias I’d given him, “where to from here?”

I laughed, looked at my watch. “It’s almost midnight. I’d say home is where I’m going from here.”

“And where is home?”

“Old Town,” I answered vaguely.

I really did live in Old Town. When Mayburn first taught me to assume a cover name in order to conduct surveillance, he told me to always blend in some reality—some truth that couldn’t be easily tied to your real life—or otherwise you’d forget or confuse yourself, and you could land in some very real trouble.

The blending of such truths hadn’t exactly helped. My occasional moonlighting gig for Mayburn had gotten me into more than a little trouble, but I hadn’t been able to turn him down this time.

I need a favor, Izzy, he’d said, earlier that night. I want you to hang out at Gibsons. Act like you’re meeting a friend at the bar, act like the friend canceled on you. Dez Romano is always there on Sunday. Throw that red hair over your shoulder and give him the famous Izzy McNeil smile. Talk to him. See if he says anything about Michael DeSanto.

I didn’t say that there was no “famous Izzy McNeil smile” that I knew of. I didn’t point out all the things that could go wrong with this little “favor.” Instead, I agreed rather quickly. Not because I needed the money, which I did, but because Mayburn was in love, the first time I’d witnessed such a thing. And yet it appeared he was about to lose his beloved to Michael DeSanto, a banker we’d helped put in jail for laundering money for the Mob. Correction: laundering money for Dez Romano.

“My car is outside,” Dez said. “Let me give you a lift.”

“That’s all right. I’m a taxi kind of girl.” I pointed out the window, where a few Yellow Cabs and Checkers floated by. “I won’t have a problem. But thank you for dinner.” I waved at the table toward the bottles of wine and grappa and the desserts in which we’d barely made a dent.

Dez answered that it had been wonderful, that he’d like to see me again. “I guess I should have asked before,” he said, with a shy shrug that surprised me. “You’re single, right?”

I answered honestly—”I am.”

A few short months before, I’d juggled three men, and then suddenly there were none. Today, one was staging a comeback, and I wasn’t sure what to do about that. In the meantime, although I was occasionally tortured about those who had left my life, I was free to date whomever I wanted. Even a ranking member of the Mafia, if only as a part-time job.

If I hadn’t known who he was and what he did for a living, I wouldn’t have blinked before agreeing to go out with Dez. I was about to turn thirty, and with my birthday fast approaching, it seemed the dating gods had flipped a switch in my head. I had never dated anyone much older than me, never really been interested, but now Dez’s forty-some years compared to my twenty-nine seemed just fine.

Dez leaned his elbows on the green-and-white tablecloth and shot me a sexy kind of smile. “Would you go out with me sometime? Officially?”

Officially, I was about to say, Sure, This was what Mayburn had hoped would happen. I would listen for anything having to do with Michael DeSanto, and if nothing came up, I’d establish a contact with Dez so I could see him again, so I might learn something about Michael in the future.

I looked out the window once more, thought about how to phrase my answer. And then I saw him.

He was standing across the street at a stop sign, wearing a blue blazer and a scowl. He glanced at his watch, then up again, and as the cars slowed, he began to cross the street, right toward us.

I opened my mouth. I must have looked shocked because Dez followed my gaze.

“Hey, it’s DeSanto,” he said fondly. He looked back at me.

I clamped my mouth shut and met his eyes, trying to cover my panic with a bland expression.

His eyes narrowed. “You know DeSanto?”

“Urn …” What to say here? Actually, we met when I was pretending to be friends with his wife, Lucy, in order to sneak into his office and download files to incriminate him. Isn’t that ironic?

Mayburn and I had decided that if I was successful tonight and got to Dez Romano, and if I could somehow steer the conversation toward Michael DeSanto’s name, I would ask about Michael, maybe volunteer that I’d once met Lucy—the woman Mayburn was now in love with—at my gym, or someplace similarly benign. But that plan had assumed I wouldn’t actually see Michael; it assumed that Michael wouldn’t pull open the door to Gibsons, and walk right in, and find me with his buddy, Dez.

I stood up. I leaned forward, hoping to distract Dez with a little cleavage. It worked. His narrowed stare relaxed. He glanced up at me and, to his credit, then kept his eyes there.

Meanwhile, my eyes shot toward the door. And there was Michael DeSanto, stopping to say hello to the maître d’.

Frig, I thought, attempting to stick with my stop-swearing campaign despite the circumstances. But I gave up quickly. Fuck, I thought. What is he doing here?

According to Lucy, her wayward husband was out of jail on bond, and although he was friendly with his compatriots of old, like Dez (all of whom had managed to avoid prosecution through one loophole or another), he wasn’t doing business with them anymore. Rarely saw them much at all. As such, Lucy had felt it her duty, especially for her kids, to break up with Mayburn and give it a go with Michael, the father of her children, the man she was, or at least had been, in love with. And so their Lincoln Park home once again blazed bright, as did the lights on the security gates surrounding it. The whole thing had rendered John Mayburn bordering on positively vacant, which spooked me. Which was why I’d found myself agreeing to try and infiltrate the world of organized crime.

Yet now Michael was here, just out of jail, clearly stopping in to see Dez Romano. And about to come face-to-face with the person who was instrumental in putting him in jail. Me.

I took a step away from Dez, muttering, “Be right back.”

I moved in the direction of the bathrooms, but when I realized it would put me in a collision course with DeSanto, I shifted, started to go the other way. I froze when I realized the exit and the bathrooms were both just beyond where Michael was standing.

He stopped then, completely still, looking at me with his eerily light brown eyes. He froze in exactly the same way an animal does when assessing a dire situation—with the knowledge that this might be the end, this might be the time to meet the maker, but with a sure clarity that there was going to be a fight before the end came.

I froze, too. I wished at that moment that I was better at this stuff, but no matter how much I’d learned from Mayburn, the whole undercover thing was simply not in my blood.

And so, lacking anything better to do, I gave Michael DeSanto the same smile I gave lawyers at Chicago Bar Association events when I didn’t recognize them—a sort of Hi, how are you? Good to see you kind of smile.

Physically, DeSanto looked a little like Dez Romano, but he wasn’t even glancing at his friend right now. His intent stare stayed focused exactly on me. He cocked his head ever so slightly. His face jutted forward then, as if he were straining to understand. And I knew in that moment that it was one of those situations—he’d recognized me, sort of, but he couldn’t place me. Yet. I was sure he’d figure it out any second.

I didn’t wait for the wheels to start clicking in his mind. Instead, I averted my gaze and hightailed it to the right, then veered back behind him. I glanced across the room at the front door. It was clogged with a huge group of people saying goodbyes, giving each other boozy pats on the back. I could sense Michael turning around to stare at me, so I darted up the staircase and bolted for the bathroom.

I panted inside the stall, trying to work out what to do. Should I somehow try to say goodbye to Dez? Should I give up on the infiltration job and just take off for the calm confines of my condo?

It wasn’t much of an infiltration job anyway, just a job that required chatting up someone at a bar, a task I used to be rather good at, if I say so myself. However, that skill had gone rusty over the last few years. Who could blame me after my series of, shall we say, unfortunate circumstances. Two friends killed and a disappearing/reappearing fiancé, who was now officially off the map, had caused me to spend a lot of time in my condo, licking my wounds.

Eight months ago, I’d been on top of the world—the highest paid associate at a big, glitzy law firm, en route to partnership not only with the firm but with my fiancé. And then poof, all gone, rendering me tired and stunned and jobless. What I’d been doing for the last few months consisted of nothing more than feeling guilty about doing nothing.

Shortly, my funds would literally drop to zero, causing my fears about being forced to sell my Old Town home to become a reality.

And so this request from Mayburn, who believed Michael DeSanto wasn’t as squeaky clean as he was telling his wife, led me to Dez Romano. But enough was enough. Heartbroken or not, Mayburn would understand that I had to get out of there.

I left the bathroom, went down the first flight of stairs, peeked down the rest of the way, my hands on the silver banister. I saw no one. The large group appeared to have left. I trotted down as fast as my high heels would allow, past the signed photos that plastered the walls—everyone from local judges to international celebrities seemed to have autographed a glossy for Gibsons.

My breath was managing only shallow forays into my lungs, so I stopped once to suck in air. A few more steps and I was at the bottom, the front door only a few feet away.

The maître d’ gave me a bored nod as if to say goodnight. But then he glanced to the right, and a questioning expression overtook his face. I peeked to see what he was looking at. Michael. Across the room, Michael was talking to Dez, his arms waving, gesturing.

Right then, Dez looked over Michael’s shoulder and saw me. “Hey!” he said, his eyes narrowed in anger.

There were only a handful of diners in the restaurant, but Dez’s voice was loud enough to get everyone’s attention. They looked at Dez, then at me. Suddenly, Dez and Michael were on their feet and coming toward me, the furious expressions on their faces enough to catapult me into action.

I reached down, pulled off my high heels and dashed out the door onto Rush Street.

“Cab!” I yelled, waving at one. But the taxi’s light was off, and it blew by. Same with the next one and the next.

I took off running toward Oak Street, hoping desperately for the shimmering vision of a cab with its light on.

I heard someone shout. Glancing back, I saw Michael and Dez sprinting after me. Behind them was another man, also running, his head down, face obscured by a baseball cap. Was he security for Dez?

I tucked my shoes under my arm and ran faster. When I reached a tiny alleyway, I dodged down it, running until I came to a parking garage.

“Ticket?” a sleepy valet said.

I heard footsteps pounding behind me in the narrow alley. Frantically, I looked around. The garage’s entrance was on State Street. I could leave that way, but if I did, surely Dez and Michael and their muscle would see me and keep up the chase. To the left, though, was a steep ramp that quickly curved up and out of sight. If I could get up the ramp before they reached the garage, I could hide and call Mayburn for help. I could call the police if I had to.

I started in that direction.

“Miss!” the valet yelled. “Your ticket?”

“My car is up here,” I said as I kept moving.

“No, miss! Only valet here. You have a ticket?”

I hesitated for a moment. I thought about reversing and bolting for State Street, but it would take too much time. They would see me for sure. Then it dawned that if I kept running up the ramp, the valet would probably follow me, which would be a good thing, since he couldn’t tell Dez and Michael where I’d gone.

I was about to start climbing the ramp again, but it was too late. Dez and Michael pounded into the garage. No sign of their security guard.

Dez and Michael both wore blazers; both had that great Italian black hair. And both looked as though they would very, very much like to kill me.

They ran up the ramp as if to do just that. I turned and sprinted off.

When the ramp curved to the right, I figured I had only a few seconds to vanish. There were rows of cars parked in spots marked Reserved. I dodged behind a green Jaguar and crouched there, my heart banging violently against the walls of my chest. My dress, made of lavender silk, was damp with sweat and clinging to my body.

I held my breath, afraid to make a sound. But meanwhile, I heard no sounds of Michael or Dez. Surely, they’d seen me. Surely, they were just behind me. I swiveled my head around, feeling exposed. All they would have to do was look around the side of the car and they would spot me. And then what would they do?

I kept holding my breath. Silently, I placed my heels on the ground, bent down farther and tried to see under the carriage of the car. It was so low I had to kneel. Jagged concrete dug into my skin. My curly hair fell over my eyes. I brushed it away, bent lower and looked under the car.

My breath filled my lungs with a rush, almost like a punch. Because there, on the other side of the Jaguar, were two pairs of beautiful Italian loafers. Michael and Dez were standing there. They clearly hadn’t heard me yet. But they were just waiting for me to make a sound.

My mouth opened in a terrified O. I began to pant again, this time silently.

I looked behind me and saw a door, maybe leading to an interior staircase. I peeked under the car again, and to my horror, I saw those beautiful Italian loafers start to move.

I stood and lunged for the door. Locked. Fuck. I was immediately chastised by my internal swearword replacement monitor, but once again Frig just wasn’t going to cut it.

I spun around and faced them, shooting frenzied looks around the place, trying to figure out if I could dodge them and make a run for the street. They were still on the other side of the car, moving slowly, almost creeping. Dez was nearly to the front of the Jag.

“So what’s your real name, little girl?” Dez said.

“It’s not Isabel Bristol,” Michael growled. Isabel Bristol was the name I’d used when I first met him.

“And it’s not Suzanne,” Dez said, no shyness about him now, only a sinister sneer. “C’mere, little girl.”

I took a step back, then another. I was backing myself into the locked door, I knew, but the only impulse my body could muster was to recoil from Dez and Michael. My eyes swung wildly. Where was their security guard?

I took another step back. My bare feet stepped on something oily, then on the heels of my own shoes. Swiftly, I reached down and picked them up, thinking of some TV show I’d seen once where a stiletto was used to kill someone. I tucked my purse tighter under my arm. I brandished my high heels like ridiculous satin-covered weapons. There was nowhere else to go.

I tried to think of something to say, but it was clear there would be no chatting with these guys, no talking my way out of the situation.

It didn’t matter anyway, because Dez charged around the car toward me. Instinctively, I moved back again, bouncing against the door. And then I was propelled forward as the door opened behind me. I was only a foot from Dez now, Michael behind him.

I felt a hand grip my arm and yank me back, hard, into the stairwell. The security guard. It must be.

“No!” I yelled, thrashing against him. “No!”

But the guy pulled me in farther, and then he did the strangest thing. He slammed the door, right on the puzzled faces of Dez and Michael.

It was black in the stairwell. I could see nothing. Dez’s and Michael’s fists battered the door from the outside, sounding like tribal drums, loud and menacing and alerting everyone of more danger to come.

I struggled against the grip of the security guard, and to my surprise he let me go.

“You’re okay,” he said.

I trembled a little, wanting to run but unable to see anything, not knowing where to go. It sounded as if Dez and Michael were pounding the door handle now, trying to break it.

“You have to leave,” the man said. “You need to get out of here.”

Why did his voice sound familiar, as if I were listening to the note of a song I had heard only a few times?

I felt a touch on my wrist. “Stop!” I yelled out of sheer instinct, pulling it away. In the deep dark of the stairwell, the movement made me feel dizzy, and I willed myself to stand straight.

“Let me show you the banister,” he said. “Walk down the steps and out onto the street. Get away from here as fast as you can.”

“But …”

Scratching sounded from the direction of the door handle now, as if Michael and Dez were putting something in the lock.

“Hurry,” the man said. “They’ll be in here very soon.”

Enough of a threat to get me moving. I tucked the purse tighter under my arm and clutched both shoes in my left hand. The man touched the wrist of my right hand again, and this time I let him lead me to the banister.

“Hold tight,” he said. “Be careful. But please go as fast as you can.”

I took one step, then another. Then I stopped. “Thank you,” I said.

“You’re welcome.” Again, there was a distantly familiar quality to his voice.

I turned and put one foot on the lower step and then the next. I began to get the hang of it, despite the blackness around me. When I got to a landing, I shuffled my feet forward, looking for where the next steps began. Upstairs, I could hear more thrashing at the door.

Then, for a moment it quieted, and I heard the man speak. “Go. You’re okay now, Boo.”

The pounding at the door continued. An injection of fear kept me moving, finding the staircase, taking the steps faster this time, until I reached the street and pushed open the door, the streetlights hitting my eyes like a blast. I blinked and looked around. No sign of Michael or Dez. Not yet.

I saw a cab, lights on, across the street. I ran to it, yanked open the door and hopped into the back. Breathlessly, I gave my address on Eugenie Street.

It was only when the cab had driven eight blocks that I stopped looking behind me. Then I closed my eyes, laid my head on the back of the seat and let myself hear the last words the man had said.

You’re okay now, Boo.

Was that right? Had he actually said that?

I forced myself back to that moment, listening intently to the memory.

You’re okay now, Boo.

Boo was the nickname my mother used for me. No one else had ever called me that. Except my father.

And he had been dead for almost twenty-two years.

2

“Let’s get tattoos.”

I looked at my friend Maggie. “What are you talking about?”

It was Monday, the day after my night with Dez Romano, and needing a warm and welcoming face or two, I had texted my best friend, Maggie, and my former assistant, Q, and was happily surprised when they were both available for lunch. Q, who was also unemployed but living with his very wealthy boyfriend, picked me up and took us into the Loop to meet Maggie at a pub near her office.

Maggie and I ordered the fish and chips. Maggie ate greedily, the way she does when she finally remembers to stop working and eat, while I sort of picked at the fries and poked at the fish with my finger, unable to muster an appetite. Q, who was eternally on a diet to avoid a persistent belly, his personal nemesis to the perfect gay physique, gave a sullen stab at his plain chicken breast and pushed it away.

You’re okay now, Boo.

I’d called Mayburn when I got home last night, telling him about the debacle at Gibsons, about being chased, about hearing those words. He wasn’t too impressed by the “Boo” thing, but he’d been worried and upset about Michael and Dez being after me. He told me to keep a low profile, to watch for anyone tailing me. I don’t think he would consider having lunch in the Loop “low profile,” but sometimes you’ve simply got to be with friends.

“We need something new,” Maggie said. “At least I do.” She dunked a piece of battered fish into a ramekin of tartar sauce and popped it in her mouth. “And a tattoo is a way to signify something new in your life, like a new chapter.”

“Who told you that?” Q asked.

She shrugged. “That’s what people say.”

“That’s what they say after they get a tattoo, so they can justify it. So they can live with themselves.”

Maggie stopped eating and gave a slightly dejected look.

“Mags,” I said. “Your family would kill you if you got another tattoo.” Maggie came from a big South Side Irish family, and they barely tolerated the tiny shamrock she got on her ankle during a college spring break.

“I’m thirty,” she said. “I can do what I want. I don’t care what they think.”

Q and I laughed. Maggie did, too. Yes, Maggie was very much an adult, helping to run the criminal defense practice started by her famous lawyer grandfather, trying cases in courthouses all over the state. But her family was as thick as the thieves she represented. They spent most of their free time together, they knew everything about each other, and Maggie very much cared about their opinions.

I bit into a french fry, thinking about my recent exposure to tattoos. The last guy I dated—a twenty-one-year-old wunderkind of the computer world named Theo Jameson—had boasted a plethora of tattoos around his stunning body. A gold-and-black serpent slithered sexily around one arm, a red ribbon on the other. High on his left pec was an Asian-looking symbol. I’d never learned what it meant. We only dated a short time. He’d been too young for me, although that wasn’t why we broke up.

Lately, Theo lingered in my mind just as much as Sam, my ex-fiancé, maybe more so because Theo had started texting me again recently.

I miss you … he’d say. I think about you 300 times a day. And the last one—I have blood oranges.

One late night a couple months ago, Theo came to my apartment with a bag filled with small oranges tinged a sultry crimson color. He made us screwdrivers. He squeezed juice on my wrists and licked it off.

I smiled as I chewed now, thinking about it.

Q saw my look. Knowing me well, he asked, “Theo?” before attempting another bite of his chicken breast.

“Yeah.”

Q and Maggie hadn’t met Theo, but I’d given them a detailed description of him, as well as a somewhat sanitized version of the nights we’d spent together.

“Is he still texting you?” Maggie asked.

“Yeah.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“I have no idea.”

“Do you want to see him?”

“I haven’t had sex in almost two months. And that kid is sex on a stick. What do you think?”

Maggie groaned, stopped eating momentarily. “I so understand.” Recently, Maggie had taken a second shot at a relationship with an older, scoundrel type named Wyatt. And for the second time, Wyatt proved his scoundrel status, landing Maggie and me into singledom at the same time, something that hadn’t happened since we’d met our first year in law school.

“A sexual dry spell?” Q said, smiling despite the lunch he’d pushed away again. “I can’t even remember what that’s like.”

“Shut up,” Maggie and I said in unison.

Q kept smiling.

“What about Sam?” Maggie asked me.

“What about Sam?” I repeated, as if by saying the question out loud someone external, or maybe someone deep inside me, would answer definitively. But as usual, only more questions popped up: Could we ever recapture what we had? Should we stop wondering about recapturing and consider redesigning? And then came that question, always that brutal question that scared the others, and even the other possible answers, into complete silence: Was it over between us for good?

Sam and I had met through Forester Pickett, a Chicago media mogul we both worked for—me as a lawyer and Sam as a financial advisor at a private wealth management firm. When Forester was killed, our worlds spun out of control. And I’m not using that phrase—out of control—the way I previously used it when I was on trial or in the middle of a particularly nasty contract battle. Everything is so out of control, I would say back then, having no idea what that really meant.

In the aftermath of Forester’s death, we tried to put back together the team that was Sam and Izzy, Izzy and Sam, but something was missing. And lacking the tools to adequately describe it, or maybe just lacking the tools to adequately ride it out and shift our worlds around, we dated other people and then officially broke up. The breakup came right about the time Theo and I ended, too—right about the time I ended the minor romance that sprung up with my friend Grady.

And so for the last two months, it had been just me. I spent time with Q and Maggie. I saw my family, too— my brother, Charlie, my mom and her husband, Spence. That friend and family time had helped me to arise from the fog I’d started carrying around, but I agreed with Maggie that maybe we both needed something new.

“Look,” I said, ignoring the question about Sam. “Tattoos aren’t going to help. We need something else.”

“You do,” Q said. “It’s almost your birthday.”

“That’s right!” Maggie said. “Ten days from now. What do you want to do?”

I thought about it. “I guess I just want to be around family and friends. Does that sound too boring?”

“Kinda,” Q said.

Maggie pushed her plate away. “No, c’mon, you need something.” Suddenly, she sat up tall, brushing her wavy, golden-brown hair out of her eyes. “A vacation!” she said. “That’s it! We’ll celebrate your birthday by getting the hell out of Dodge.”

“Shane and I are going to St. Bart’s,” Q said. “You could come with us.”

I leaned back against the booth. “I don’t have the cash for a vacation.”

Maggie sighed. “And what am I talking about? I don’t have the time. I’m on trial later this week. But maybe if we just started planning something it would motivate us, give us something to look forward to. We’ve always talked about going to Prague.”

“And Paris.”

“And London.”

“And back to Italy.” Now I sat upright. Maggie and I had done a study-abroad program after our first year in law school.

Maggie saw my excited look and read my thoughts. “Is your aunt still living in Rome?”

I nodded fast. “As far as I know.”

“Do you think we could stay with her?” Maggie asked. “That would help with the cost.” The truth was Maggie made more than enough to head to Rome for a week or two or four, but I appreciated that she was trying to be sensitive to her newly cash-strapped friend.

“I haven’t talked to her in a long time, but I could ask.” I could definitely ask, and not only because we wouldn’t have to pay for a hotel, but because other than my mother and brother, my aunt was the only person who had also known my father. Elena, my father’s sister, had been living in Rome for decades. When Maggie and I went to school there eight years ago, Aunt Elena had taken us to our first meal in Rome—at a restaurant right next to the Pantheon called Fortunato. But unfortunately, she had been out of town the rest of that month, and we didn’t get to spend any more time with her.

Yet she was exactly the person I wanted to spend time with now.

You’re okay now, Boo.

I hadn’t told Maggie or Q about last night. Under Mayburn’s rules, I couldn’t tell anyone about the fact that I was his part-time, off-the-books employee.

I’d started working with Mayburn last fall when Sam had disappeared after Forester’s death, and in return for looking into the matter, I’d agreed to freelance for Mayburn. The whole reason I need you, he’d said, is because you’re a typical, normal North Side Chicago woman. If there’s any inkling that’s not the case, if anyone knows you do P.I. stuff on the side, it won’t work. I had argued that I should be able to tell my close friends, but Mayburn wouldn’t budge. If one of those people lets it slip to someone else, he’d said, it wouldn’t end there; word would get around.

I wasn’t so sure I cared anymore about a freelance investigator gig, especially when it got me into the kind of scariness it had last night. I’m a girl who likes to be chased as much as the next, but only in a romantic sense, not in a Mob-is-about-to-kill-you kind of sense.

And yet I couldn’t shake the sound of that man’s voice, the way he’d called me by my childhood nickname, Boo. Or at least that’s what I thought I’d heard. The further I got away from it, the more I doubted myself. But I still wanted to poke around a little, to see if I could find anything out about my father, if there was anything to find out. The man had been dead for almost twenty-two years after all. But no one aside from my mother, used that nickname.

A way to fish around about my dad was to reestablish contact with my aunt Elena.

“Mags,” I said, “I think you’ve got something here.” I lifted my napkin and tossed it onto my plate. “I’m calling her tonight.”

3

He watched her leave the restaurant, her steps casual, unhurried. And yet her shoulders were tight, her head swiveling. She pivoted once or twice, as if she couldn’t decide which way to go, but then he recognized what she was doing. She was getting a feeling, sensing surveillance. And she was right. He watched as she stopped at the window of an office-supply store. To passersby she probably looked as if she was simply smoothing the front of her yellow summer dress, merely tugging a few stray red curls into place. But he knew what she was really doing.

She couldn’t identify the source of her suspicion, he could tell, and so after another few fast glances in the glass at the people around her, at the cars on the street, she turned and kept moving. Her body appeared more relaxed now. Apparently, she had decided she wasn’t being followed.

She was wrong.

He just hoped he was the only one.

4

I walked home from my lunch date to savor the summer weather—crisp without being cool, sunny without being blazing, breezy without the lake winds blowing your skirt around your ass. Usually, I would be on my scooter—a silver Vespa—but Q had driven me to lunch. With so much time on my hands and considering the fact that Chicago receives approximately four and a half-perfect weather days like this, I figured I had to make the best of it.

The streets were crowded with people. Everyone had a bustle to their steps, it seemed. Everyone had a purpose. You could tell the lawyer types who were dashing to court or a deposition. You could spot the salespeople pulling product in small wheeled suitcases. When I’d been one of those dashing lawyers, I was always jealous of someone like me, someone dressed casually the way I was in flip-flops and a yellow cotton dress, someone who clearly didn’t have to rush anywhere. But being on the other side was starting to depress me—knowing that I wasn’t just playing hooky for the afternoon or taking a much-needed sabbatical, knowing that I was out of work and out of prospects and almost out of my twenties.

Plus, all those people on the street, and the fact that a crowd made it easy to tail someone, began to make me nervous, made me think about Dez and Michael, and wonder if they knew who I was, if they were looking for me. And of course, thinking about Dez and Michael made me think of that stranger in the stairwell.

It was one night, when I was about five years old, that my father had given me my nickname. I’d woken up crying after a sinister dream. He tried to console me, but nothing worked. In the span of six hours, I’d grown fearful of the dark. My dad told me then that if you were afraid of something, you should look it straight in the eye. I didn’t know what he meant, and he must have seen that.

“What are you afraid of in here?” He gestured around my bedroom, lit only by the tiny lamp in the shape of a shell that sat on my nightstand.

I looked around. Nothing appeared particularly scary. “I don’t know.”

“Ghosts? You’re scared that they’ll say, ‘Boo’?”

“I guess.”

“Well, there’s nothing scary about that. Nothing scary about ghosts, either. They’re just people who aren’t here anymore, stopping back in to say hi. Except they say boo.”

That sounded rather simple. And not at all terrifying.

“Okay?” Under his round copper glasses, my dad’s eyes sparkled, as though a laugh was just about to hit him. I loved when he looked like that. It made everything seem fine.

“I guess …” I said again, the fear still lingering a bit the way bad dreams do.

“You guess? What kind of answer is that?” My father looked at the ceiling and acted as if he was thinking hard. “I’ll tell you what. I’m going to call you Boo. Just for a little while, so that if you ever do see a ghost and they say that to you, you won’t be scared. You’ll have heard it before. Okay, Boo?”

I liked it. I’d never had a nickname before. “Okay.”

It had been a thing between the two of us, just my dad and me. After he died when I was eight years old, my mother picked up the nickname, as if by using it she could keep him a little bit alive. But I had never seen a ghost, never heard one. Until last night in the stairwell.

When I got to the Chicago River, I began to feel I was being watched. I swung my head around, but it didn’t appear as if anyone was following me. I kept walking, paying attention to everyone I passed, and it seemed as if a lot of people were looking right at me, expressions of recognition on their faces. It was hard to tell if any of the people were tailing me or if their expressions were simply the type I’d witnessed frequently over the last couple of months—looks that said, I saw her on the news, I think. Yeah, she did something wrong.

The fact was, I hadn’t done anything wrong, but after my friend died in the spring, the Chicago cops had suspected me of her murder. As a result, my image was flashed across the news stations for a week or so. Thankfully, mine was a flash-in-the-pan story, but I still got those looks with some regularity. I hoped Dez hadn’t seen the story, or hadn’t remembered it.

I dropped my gaze as I crossed the bridge in front of the Merchandise Mart, not wanting to meet anyone’s eyes for too long. I reached into my bag for my cell phone.

“Hey, Iz.” My brother answered on the first ring, which he almost always does. He’s one of the few people I know who actually answers their phone on a consistent basis.

“What are you doing? Want to take a walk in the park or something?”

“Yeah, meet me at Mom’s. I’m over here, using their printer.”

“Are they home?” “They” was my mother, Victoria McNeil Calloway, and her husband, Spence. The two were mostly joined at the hip, and mostly at home now that Spence had retired from his business—a real estate development company that provided consulting around the country.

I loved being with my mom and Spence, but I wasn’t ready to see them now. You couldn’t just waltz up to someone on a beautiful Monday afternoon and say, “Hey, any chance your husband, who died two decades ago, is alive?” I could barely ask myself that question. It was really too ridiculous. But Charlie was hard to fluster.

My mother lived on State Street in an elegant gray-stone house, a few blocks north of Division Street. Charlie was waiting for me on the steps, his tall frame leaning back casually on his elbows. His loose, curly brown hair glinted in the sun with a hint of red I’ve always told him he got from me.

He came down the steps and we hugged, then wordlessly started walking down State Street to Lincoln Park. We wandered behind the Chicago History Museum, crossing the street and passing by the entrance to the zoo.

When we reached Café Brauer, we went behind it to the small pond, where paddleboats were rented by tourists or families. Some of the boats were forest-green, others white and shaped like huge swans.

Charlie pointed. “Remember when Mom used to take us on those?”

I nodded. “Mom and I would paddle and let you think you were doing all the work.”

Charlie shook his head. “Yeah, and being the sucker I am, I believed it. Thought I was the man of the house.”

“You were the man of the house.”

We both laughed. Charlie has always possessed a lazy streak. It’s not that he’s stupid. Quite the contrary. Charlie is a reader of history, a lover of art and music. And trumping those things, Charlie is a lover of red wine and naps.

In fact, most of his friends—and sometimes even my mom and I—had taken to calling him “Sheets” because he spent much of his time in bed, a trait that had intensified after college. Charlie had graduated with a degree in English and a desire to do absolutely nothing. A friend’s father took pity on him and gave him a job driving a dump truck to and from work sites, which Charlie liked just fine because during down times, he was allowed to doze in the trailer. He might have gone on like that for decades, but one day the truck turned over on the Dan Ryan Expressway when a semi cut him off. He broke his femur, screwed up his back and ended up with a fairly hefty settlement from the semi’s insurance company. In his usual cheerful way, “Sheets” took it as a windfall and had spent the last few years sitting around, reading, getting the occasional physical-therapy session and, yes, drinking red wine.

“Let’s sit.” Charlie pointed to a bench at the side of the lagoon that was shaded by a patch of vibrantly green trees.

He took a seat, his long arm on the top of the bench. I arranged myself cross-legged and looked at him, trying to figure out how to tell Charlie what I’d heard, or thought I’d heard, last night. I stared across the pond at a bridge that spanned one edge of it, at the Hancock building and the skyline beyond that.

Ever since Charlie and I were little, I was the more serious, the one who worried enough for everyone, the one who analyzed a situation ten ways before deciding what to do, while Charlie mostly rolled along. I needed him to analyze this one with me, though. I wouldn’t tell him about working for Mayburn, but I had to tell Charlie that I thought I’d heard our father’s voice.

“So I was on Mom’s computer,” Charlie said, before I could form my words.

“Working on something for You Tube?” Charlie produced funny little movies filmed on the streets of Chicago. He shot them in black and white and set them to old-fashioned French music. It was kind of hard to explain, but they were really quite charming, and he had developed a coterie of people, mostly female college students, who loved them and as a result, loved Charlie, as well.

“I was working on my résumé.”

“Really?” I tried not to sound surprised. Charlie had talked about looking for a job—after years of living off his settlement check, it was starting to dry up—but somehow it was impossible to imagine him getting up and doing something besides deciding between merlot versus cabernet.

“Yeah. Actually, I think I already have the job. They just need my résumé for office purposes, to put it in my file.”

“What’s the job?”

“An internship at WGN. The radio station.”

“The one with the glass studio on Michigan Avenue?”

He nodded.

“Wow.” I couldn’t hide my astonishment. “That sounds like a big gig.”

“No, it’s being an assistant—or intern or whatever—to the producer for the midday show.”

“So you’ll be going there every day?” Somehow this concept seemed impossible.

“Yeah. I’m going to be working, Iz.” There was a note of pride in his voice I didn’t recognize. He studied my face. “I mean, c’mon, I don’t know what I want to do with my life. Actually, I wish everyone would stop asking me what I want to do with my life. What does that even mean?”

I shrugged. I couldn’t be of any help there.

“But it’s time to do something,” he continued. “Maybe this radio thing could be for me.” He shrugged, too. “You know Zim?”

I nodded. “Zim” was Robby Zimmerman, a friend of Charlie’s from high school.

“Well, his dad is in radio sales, and he got me the job. There’s no money in it, like no money, but—”

“You’re going to work for free?” Financially, I was appalled, but this sounded more like the Charlie I knew.

“Yeah. At least at first. Because I have to try something, Iz. I’m twenty-seven.” He said this like, I’m eighty-three.

Charlie’s birthday was just a few days ago, and he was taking it even more seriously than I was my upcoming thirtieth.

“I can’t sit around on my ass forever.” He frowned and looked out at a duck being chased by a toddler who was being chased by her mother.

“Why not? You do sitting on your butt better than anyone I know.” Somehow, this whole notion of Charlie as a member of the working class freaked me out, made me feel as if my world was shifting even more. Things in my life kept skidding around, and I hated the fact that I had no idea where they would all land.

Charlie laughed. “You don’t want me to get a job, because you don’t have a job.”

“Exactly. It’s the beginning of summer and both the McNeil kids are lazy good-for-nothings. Let’s make the most of it and spend the summer on the lake.” Suddenly, I could envision it—Charlie and I walking from my mom’s house to North Avenue Beach, maybe sitting on the roof deck of the restaurant that looked like a boat and eating fried shrimp for lunch, lying under an umbrella in the sand for the rest of the afternoon, barbecuing with my mom and Spence in the evenings. Ever since the breakup with Sam—and Theo and Grady—I craved my family like never before. Even more so now that it felt as if I was about to lose Charlie somehow. Or at least the Charlie I knew.

“You should do that,” Charlie said. “Have yourself a lazy summer. Pretend you’re me, and I’ll go to work and pretend I’m you.”

I frowned. I wasn’t enjoying the prospect of suddenly being the sloth of the family. I didn’t think I could pull off slothful with exuberance and elegance the way Charlie had. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to.

Then I had an idea. “How about we go to Italy? Tell the radio station you can start in a month or even a few weeks.” If we could stay with our aunt and I could use my airline miles, it might be doable. Charlie loved the concept of traveling, had been talking about Europe the last year, and if I planned the trip for him, the ease of it all might just push him over the hump and get him to agree.

“Can’t. Their other intern quit. They need me on Wednesday.”

“Like in two days, Wednesday?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow.” I hardly knew what to say. “Congratulations, Charlie.” I squeezed his hand.

“Thanks.” He smiled—that great Charlie McNeil smile that made the few freckles on his face dance and his hazel eyes gleam. If there was a famous McNeil smile, as Mayburn had suggested, it belonged to Charlie, not me.

I turned and looked at the pond, at a dad with twin girls on a paddleboat. The girls were laughing, pointing. The dad appeared stressed and was trying to stop them from falling over the side.

“Remember when we got to do things like that with Dad?” I gestured at the boat.

Charlie crossed his arms and studied the family. “Not really. I don’t remember much about him at all.”

“Really?”

“I remember a few things. I remember what he looked like. I remember what Mom wore on the day he died. Remember that belt she had on?”

I nodded. I could see the scene as if it were playing in front of me.

When I was eight and Charlie five, my mother had to tell us that our dad was dead. We lived in Michigan then. It had been a magnificent, sunny fall day, and Charlie and I were playing in the leaves in the backyard. I would rake and form piles, then Charlie and I would take running, shrieking leaps and dive into them. Then Charlie would sit, and I would rake, and we would do the whole thing again.

We had been doing that for at least an hour when my mother came out of the house. She wore jeans and a brown braided belt that tied at the waist. She walked across the lawn slowly, too slowly. She was usually rushing outside to tell us it was time to eat or time to go into town. The ends of her belt gently slapped her thighs as she walked. Her red-blond hair was loosely curled around her face, as usual, but that face was splotched and somehow off-kilter. I remember stopping, holding the rake and studying her, thinking that her face looked as if it had two different sides, like a Picasso painting my teacher had shown us in art class.

She sat us down on the scattered leaves and asked us if we knew where our dad was that day.

“Work!” Charlie said.

My father was a psychologist and a police profiler. I knew that much, although I really didn’t understand what those things meant.

“No, he—” my mom started to say.

“The helicopter,” I said, jumping in. My father already had his pilot’s certificate and was training for his helicopter rating.

“That’s right.” My mom’s eyes were wide, scared. The helicopter my father was flying had crashed into Lake Erie, she explained. And now he was dead. It was as simple and awful as that.

Charlie seemed to take the news well. He furrowed his tiny brow, the way he did in school when he knew he was supposed to be listening to an adult. But when she was done, he leapt to his feet and scooped up an armful of leaves with an unconcerned smile.

“I’m surprised you remember that,” I said to Charlie now. “I thought you didn’t really understand what was going on.”

“I didn’t, not until later. But I remember that day. Always will.”

We both stared at the pond. The father had gotten his twins to sit still, and they paddled away from us, all of them laughing.

“Do you ever think you see him?” I asked Charlie.

“Who?”

“Dad. You know, do you ever think you see him or hear his voice?”

“You mean, someone that reminds me of him? Not really.”

“I do.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Charlie turn his head and look at me. “What are you talking about?”

I said nothing for a moment, then, “I think I saw him last night.”

“Are you serious? You think you saw Dad?”

I nodded.

“C’mon, Iz, don’t start losing it on me now.”

I forced a fake laugh. “Maybe I am losing it. But last night …” How to explain? I took a breath, and in a rush, I poured out the story, leaving out the fact that I was working for Mayburn, making it sound as if I’d had some trouble with some weird dudes I met at a bar, but telling Charlie exactly how the man saved me, telling him exactly about those words—You’re okay now, Boo.

Charlie said nothing for a while. I could tell he was thinking hard, turning over what I’d said in his mind. Charlie was the type who couldn’t be hurried, and he couldn’t be shamed into pretending to comprehend something he didn’t.

Finally, he looked at me.

I turned my body to face him. “What do you think?”

He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I think this guy probably said something, and you heard it as ‘Boo.’ I think it was a stressful situation, and you wanted someone like your father to save you.”

It was possible. I’d heard that endorphins and adrenaline could do strange things to your mind. “You don’t think it was him?”

“Iz, he’s dead.”

“Supposedly.”

Charlie searched my face.

“I know,” I said. “I feel like a prize idiot now that I’m saying this out loud, but there was something familiar about him when I saw him.”

“You said you didn’t really see him. He had a hat on and then it was dark in those stairs, right?”

“Yes.”

“And are you positive he said Boo? I mean, it could have been any word. He could have said you or something like that.”

“I guess. That’s what I’ve been telling myself. It’s silly, right?”

Charlie leaned forward and ruffled my hair. It gave me a pang of wistfulness because it seemed like something I would do to him. I was usually the stalwart of common sense, the logical one, and now it was Charlie getting a job, Charlie forcing reality into his sibling’s world.

He looked at his watch. “I have to get back to that résumé.”

“Right. I’ll walk you.”

We strolled to my mom’s house in silence. We climbed the front steps and went inside. I thought I’d get a glass of water, then go home. But my mom and Spence were there, in the kitchen—a room with an octagonal breakfast table tucked into the big bay window. They were taking food out of grocery bags, talking rapidly as if they’d just run into each other, not two people who spent nearly all their days together.