Karen Rose: I’m Watching You

Kay and Marc Conterato, for help on all things medical.

Sherry and Barry Kirkland, for so kindly inviting me to the Tonitown Grape Festival and answering my questions about bullets with nary a raised brow.

Susan Heneghan, for information on the structure and cross-functional workings between the Chicago Police Department and their forensic and prosecutorial counterparts.

Jimmy Hatton, Mike Koenig, and Paula Linser, for modeling the epitome of teamwork. Those were good years.

Chicago,

Monday, December 29,

7:00 p.m.

The sun had gone down. But then again, it tended to do that from time to time. He should get up and turn on a light. But he liked the darkness. Liked the way it was quiet and still. The way it could hide a man. Inside and out. He was such a man. Hidden. Inside and out. All by himself.

He sat at his kitchen table, staring at the shiny new bullets he’d made. All by himself.

Moonlight cut through the curtains at the window, illuminating one side of the shiny stack. He picked up one of the bullets, held it up to the light, turned it side to side, round and round. Imagined the damage it would do.

His lips curved. Oh, yes. The damage he would do.

He squinted in the darkness, held the bullet up to the shaft of moonlight. Studied the mark his handcrafted mold had pressed into the bullet’s base, the two letters intertwined. It was his father’s mark, and his father’s before him. The symbol meant family.

Family . Carefully setting the bullet on the table, his fingers ran down the chain around his neck, feeling for the small medallion that was all that was left of his family. Of Leah.

The medallion had been hers, once a charm on her bracelet that had jingled with her every movement. Engraved with the letters in which she’d once based her faith.

He traced them, one by one. WWJD.

Indeed. What would Jesus do?

His breath caught, then released. Probably not what he was about to do.

Blindly he reached to his left, his fingers closing around the edge of the picture frame. He closed his eyes, unable to look at the face behind the glass, then opened them quickly, the more recent picture in his mind too agonizing to bear. He never believed his heart could break yet again, but every time he gazed into her eyes, frozen forever on film, he realized he’d been wrong. A heart could break again and again and again.

And a mind could replay pictures hideous enough to drive a man insane. Again and again and again.

With his left hand he measured the weight of her picture in its cheap silver frame against the flimsy weight of the medallion he held in his right.

Was he insane? Did it matter if he was?

He vividly remembered the sight of the coroner pulling back the sheet that covered her. The coroner had decided the sight was too gruesome to be done in person, so the identification had been done by closed-circuit video. He vividly remembered the look on the face of the sheriff’s deputy as her body was revealed. It was pity. It was revulsion.

He couldn’t say he blamed him. It wasn’t every day that a small-town sheriff’s office discovered the remains of a woman intent on ending her life. And ended it she had. No pills or slit wrists. No veiled cries for help from his Leah. No. She’d ended it with determination.

She’d ended it with the business end of a.38 against her temple.

His lips curved humorlessly. She’d ended it like a man. So like a man he’d stood, nodded. But the voice from his throat was that of a stranger. „Yes, that’s her. That’s Leah.“

The coroner had nodded once, acknowledging he’d heard. Then the sheet went back up, and she was gone.

Yes, a heart could break again and again and again.

Gently he set the frame back on the table and picked up the bullet, one thumb stroking the pressed mark that had belonged to his father, the other the mark that had been Leah’s. WWJD. So what would Jesus do?

He still didn’t know. But he did know what He wouldn’t do.

He wouldn’t have allowed a twice-convicted rapist to roam the streets preying on innocent women. He wouldn’t have allowed the monster to rape again. He wouldn’t have allowed his victim to become so wretchedly depressed that she saw taking her own life as her only escape. He certainly wouldn’t have allowed that rapist to escape justice a third time.

He’d prayed for wisdom, searched the Scripture. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord , he’d read. God would have the final justice.

He swallowed hard, feeling Leah stare at him from the picture frame.

He’d just help God grant His final justice just a little bit sooner.

Chicago,

Wednesday, February 18,

2:00 p.m.

„You’ve got company, Kristen.“ Owen Madden pointed toward the window to the street where a man stood in a heavy winter coat, his head tilted in question.

Kristen Mayhew gave him a brief nod and he entered the diner where she’d escaped the enraged protests inside the courtroom and the barrage of questions from the press outside its doors. She stared into her soup as her boss, Executive Assistant State ’s Attorney John Alden sat on the stool beside her. „Coffee, please,“ he said and Owen got him a cup.

„How did you know I was here?“ she asked, very quietly.

„Lois told me that this is where you come for lunch.“

And breakfast and dinner, too, Kristen thought. If it didn’t come in a microwavable carton, it came from Owen’s. John’s secretary knew her habits well.

„The local station interrupted programming for the verdict and reaction,“ John said. „But you held your own with the press. Even that Richardson woman.“

Kristen bit the inside of her cheek, anger roiling at the memory of the platinum blond’s microphone in her face. She’d so wanted to shove that microphone up Zoe Richardson’s… „She wanted to know if there would be ‘repercussions’ in your office because of this loss.“

„You know this is not a performance issue. You’ve got the best conviction record in the office.“ John shivered. „Damn, I’m cold. You want to tell me what happened in there?“

Kristen pulled the pins from the twist that held her hair in severe check, a raging headache the price of curl control. There was enough compressed energy in her bobby pins to fuel downtown Chicago for a year. Her hair sprang free and she knew she was now Little Orphan Annie. With eyes. And no dog named Sandy. And certainly no Daddy Warbucks watching over her. Kristen was on her own.

She massaged her head wearily. „They hung. Eleven guilties, one innocent. Juror three. Bought lock, stock, barrel, and soul by the money of wealthy industrialist, Jacob Conti .“ She singsonged the last, the press’s description of Angelo Conti’s father. The man she knew had corrupted the system and denied a grieving family justice.