Dan O'Shea - Penance

Rusty walked back into the room. “Gave birth at County. Put the kid up for adoption. What I’m told, she maybe got leaned on a little about how this had to be done on the QT, so the adoption ended up going through some Jewish group, whole different circle there, put a little distance between the kid and Stefanski. Far as I go.”

“Got a name on the kid? Know what became of this Delatanno?”

Rusty just shook his head. Lynch staring him down, Rusty taking another sip of the whiskey, looking at his hands.

“OK,” Lynch said. “Listen. I’m running into some stuff about dad’s murder. You ever hear anything at the time made you think something was off?”

Rusty looked up slowly, his eyes red, wet, looking old and frightened. Shook his head again.

“Like I said, Johnny, far as I go.”

Lynch looked at him, knew he knew. Not everything, probably, just something. Or at least that there was something, Lynch wondering what it’s like spending half your life sitting on your own brother’s murder, thinking he should be pissed but just feeling sad, sad and tired.

“OK,” Lynch held Rusty’s eyes. The old man looked away, Lynch needed a drink all of a sudden. Picked up Rusty’s glass, downed it, set it down. Rusty looked back up.

“I probably won’t be stopping by for a while,” Lynch said, saw the old man’s face sag like Lynch had put a knife in him.

“I…” the old man paused, his eyes wet now. “See you tonight, though, if I’m welcome.” Lynch’s mother’s wake.

Lynch just gave a short nod, turned and headed for the door.

The old man called to his back, “Johnny, watch your ass. You don’t know these guys like I do.”

Lynch didn’t turn to face him.

Back at his building Lynch ran into McGinty, McGinty holding out a piece of paper.

“You piss in somebody’s coffee, Lynch?”

Lynch looked at the sheet. A Notice of Violation from the city building department. So it was going to be like that.

“I’ll straighten it out,” Lynch said, and headed up the stairs.

When he opened his door, he saw Ferguson sitting in the same chair as last time, holding the same gun on him. Tiny Asian woman standing in his kitchen, a laptop open on the counter in front of her.

“Should I just get you a key?” Lynch asked. “Save you some time?”

“Wouldn’t save me that much time,” said Ferguson. “You’ve got a shitty lock.”

“Matter if I got a better one?”

“Not really.”

“So who’s your friend?”

“Friend might be pushing it. She’s a sociopath that works for me. Say hi to Lynch, Chen.”

Chen nodded.

Lynch nodded back. “OK, Ferguson, what do you want?”

“Wondering if maybe you’ve had any second thoughts about my last offer.”

“Why? Something changed?”

“You got pulled off the case, for one thing. Can’t be real happy about that.”

“No.”

“Thing is, I got pulled off, too. You might have heard about it. Little thing at the Palmer House?”

Lynch paused a moment at that.

“Guess when your guys pull, they pull a little harder.”

“Think of it as an early retirement offer. I declined.”

Lynch held his coat open, showed Ferguson his gun. “I gotta take this out again, break it down, all that shit? Or can I just sit down?”

“Old friends like us? Just have a seat. You do anything I don’t like, Chen’d kill you before I could anyway.”

Lynch sat on the couch.

“So, your offer,” Lynch said. “Yesterday you were offering the full if unofficial cooperation of the United States intelligence community to augment an official investigation by the Chicago Police Department. Now, I’m off the case. You’re off the case. So now you’re offering what? You and a tiny Chinese sociopath augmenting, basically, just me. I got that right?”

“Pretty much.”

“Guys from the hotel still trying to kill you?”

Ferguson raised his face, his eyes hard.

“Guys from the hotel are dead.”

“Point taken. To rephrase, whoever sent the guys from the hotel still trying to kill you?”

“Seems likely.”

“They gonna send more guys?”

“Probably.”

“And if I’m around, they’ll kill me, too?”

“Could be we kill them.”

“Always nice to have that to fall back on,” Lynch said. “You want to explain to me why I want in on this?”

Ferguson sighed, his voice getting pedantic, like Lynch was a deliberately willful student.

“Because you’re pretty sure that whatever is going on now has something to do with your father’s murder. And you’re pretty sure that if the Hurleys and my bosses have their way, it all goes back under the rug.”

Lynch leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

“I thought you wanted it under the rug. Wanted it buried with your shooter. Fisher, right? Ishmael Fisher?”

Ferguson raised his eyebrows. “So you got the name.” Turned to look at Chen. “Told you he was good.” Chen just nodded. Ferguson turned back to Lynch.

“Yeah, under the rug looked pretty good up until they tried to kill me. Now my only shot at living through the week is to bring the whole thing down around their ears.”

Lynch turned to Chen. “That your position too?”

Chen nodded.

“OK,” said Lynch. “How do we do it?”

“Get all the info you can to your reporter friend. Once her editors hear about this, they’ll start having visions of Pulitzers and book deals, and the calls will start. Gonna take them a while to run things down, check facts, but word will percolate, and that will keep the pressure on the other team. Puts them on a tighter clock. Keeps them from spending much time looking for me, for one thing, because they’ll know they gotta close the book on Fisher ASAP. More pressure we put on, the better the chances that somebody makes a mistake. Meanwhile, we find a way to get Fisher and my ex-boss and all his boys in the same place at the same time.”

“I might be able to help with that,” Lynch said. “Theory we’ve got right now is this Fisher is targeting descendants of people tied to all this from 1971.”

Ferguson nodded. “Pretty much the theory we got right now, too.”

“There’s someone most people don’t know about who’d be way up on his list.”

Ferguson raised his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

“You know Stefanski had a kid?” Lynch asked.

“No,” Chen said.

“She can speak?” Lynch asked.

“Doesn’t often,” Ferguson answered. “Tell me about this kid.”

Lynch told Ferguson what he knew about Stefanski, Delatanno, the adoption. As he talked, Chen started clicking away on her laptop.

“But you got no name?” Ferguson asked.

“No.”

“Give me another minute,” Chen said. More clicking.

“Don’t suppose you need my WiFi password?” Lynch asked.

Chen looked up for a moment, the typing paused, shook her head, then looked back down at the keyboard.

“Adoption records will be sealed,” Lynch said. “That’s not going to be on a public server anywhere.”

“Neither is your banking information,” Chen said without pausing. “You currently have $5,412.34 in checking.”

Chen kept banging away, jotting the occasional note. Finally, she looked up.

“Pearl Spritzen. Born March 13 1964. In and out of foster homes, juvenile record, then several arrests through the early Eighties. Drugs and prostitution mostly. Died of AIDS on August 6, 1989. She had a daughter, who was adopted out of Catholic Social Services. Andrea Manning, born November 30, 1980. She lives on the north side at Broadway and Sheridan. She is, apparently, a Catholic. The closest Catholic church is Saint Mary’s. Manning is listed in the current church bulletin as a lector and the director of their religious education program, so we can assume she is devout and therefore attends confession.”