Джеймс Паттерсон - The Red Book

I release my grip, pushing him back. He collapses to the porch.

I reholster my gun.

“Blinderman,” I whisper.

She wasn’t an assistant state’s attorney. She wasn’t a federal prosecutor. She was an assistant public defender who kept her maiden name professionally.

Valerie Blinderman was my wife.

Book II

Chapter 39

FOUR YEARS ago.

Billy, seated next to her in the office of the Cook County medical examiner, catatonic, expressionless, immobile, as the office door opened and clanged shut.

Dr. Fernando Cruz—Doc Fern, the cops called him—the county’s chief medical examiner, a long, tired face, gray hair combed back, reaching the back collar of his lab coat. “Billy,” he said. “This is my final report. Again, I’m so sorry for your loss.”

“What’s the verdict?” Patti asked, taking Billy’s hand in hers.

“Suicide,” said Doc Fern. “No question about it.”

Patti pushes away that memory, breaks ten different traffic laws on the way over. Her SUV flies into Billy’s driveway, bouncing harshly over the curb, screeching to a halt only inches from the garage door and its peeling beige paint.

She has a key to his town house. She always has.

She pushes open the front door and starts to call out his name, but she hears her brother in the family room. She walks in and finds Billy sitting on the floor amid a mess of papers strewn over the hardwood, in piles on the area rug, stacked on chairs.

Going through Val’s old files, her legal work. Looking for clues.

“Oh, kiddo,” she whispers.

He looks up at her, his hair, short as it is, standing on end as if deliberately mussed. His eyes shadowed, his expression…

She’s seen that look on his face before. She saw it when she came to this very town house some four years ago, as Billy sat in the master bathroom, his dead wife’s head cradled in his lap, rocking her as if she were a child. He never looked younger, she remembers thinking back then, never more vulnerable.

Billy blinks. “You think it’s—”

“No.”

“—true?”

“No,” she repeats. “I do not. Of course not. Val took her own life. She had depression. She’d just lost Janey, for God’s sake. She…did this to herself, Billy. You know that. Deep down, you know that.”

His eyes drift. He shakes his head absently. “Do I? What do I remember? I don’t…I don’t even remember it. Not really. The details, I mean. It’s…like a fog.”

That must have been exactly how it felt after watching Janey die and coming home to his wife. He wasn’t in investigation mode. He wasn’t in cop mode.

She reaches into her purse, unfolds the final autopsy report, stares at the first page.

Office of the Medical Examiner County of Cook, Illinois

Report of Postmortem Examination

Name: Harney, Valerie Blinderman

She flips to the back page, folds it over.

Cause of death: Self-inflicted gunshot wound

Manner of death: Suicide

She drops it down next to him. “Doc Fern was the best ME we ever had in Cook County,” she says. “He called it a suicide.”

Billy picks up the report and flings it at Patti. “Don’t show me that.”

“What do you mean—”

Billy leaps to his feet, lunges toward Patti, fire in his eyes, his contorted expression. She startles and draws back. It’s the first time in her life that she fears her own twin brother.

He stops just short of her. “Don’t fucking show me that report! How do you explain what he told me?”

“What, that guy Pavlov? Some ex-con who—”

“Pavlo,” he spits. “Pavlo Demchuk.”

“Okay, whatever, Pavlo. This guy tells you a tattoo of a black flower is the symbol for some Russian sex-trafficking gang, and so now you think Val was murdered? And maybe your K-Town shooting wasn’t just some street-gang turf fight? Your whole life has to turn upside down now, just because some thug you put away—”

“How could he have known what he knew? He knew her name, for chrissake. A female lawyer named Blinderman, killed four years ago, made to look like a suicide. You’re gonna tell me that’s a coincidence? Huh?”

He stares at her, chest heaving, sweat on his face, eyes glistening. It’s more than rage. He’s pleading with her, she realizes. He wants to be wrong. He wants her to make this right, to make this all go away.

She’s not cut out for that role. It’s always been the other way around. Billy was always making it right for her . “Billy,” she whispers.

“No, don’t Billy me.” He jabs a finger at her. “Tell me one possible reason why I shouldn’t listen to what he told me. One! ”

His breath hot on her face. She opens her hand and smacks him across the cheek.

“Hey, brother, you wanna take it down a notch or two? You want a reason? You wanna stop yelling at me and listen?”

She shoves him backward. Billy stumbles a bit but keeps his feet.

“Listen to what I have to say,” she says.

Chapter 40

“WELL GO ahead,” says Billy. “I’m listening.”

Patti puts out her hands, stalling while she puts it together. “Okay, maybe this super reliable ex-con buddy of yours is right, and Val was looking into some Russian traffickers,” she says. “So they were nervous. And then Val committed suicide, just like Doc Fern said, just exactly like it looked, for the obvious reason that she was grieving and depressed over the death of your daughter. The two things happened together, yes. But they were totally unrelated.”

Billy flaps his arm. “And then—”

“Shut up and let me finish,” she says. “So these Russian traffickers, these guys have reputations to keep up, right? They want to be feared, right? They want to be tough guys, right? So they spin the story like they killed her. Not only killed her—but killed her and made it look like a suicide. So they look ruthless and brilliant.”

Billy shakes his head. “You don’t believe that.”

“Right, because it would be the first time in the history of organized crime that some mobster told a fib. That’s what these guys do. They lie and bullshit and con their way through life. They took credit for her death, Billy. It doesn’t mean they actually killed her.”

“Bullshit.” His hands on his hips, his head shaking furiously, the reservoir of rage quickly refilling. He walks in a circle, then lashes out, knocking a mess of papers off the coffee table. “That’s bullshit, and you know it!”

He gets his hands under the coffee table, a wide circular walnut job, and turns it over, a plate and glass of water shattering on the hardwood floor, papers flying everywhere. He kicks one of the upturned legs of the table, nearly knocking it from its hinge.

Jesus, she’s never seen him like this.

He drops into a crouch, taking gasping breaths, a deep moan.

“And if I heard you right over the phone,” she says with trepidation, afraid that if she says it, it will be true, “you think these same Russian traffickers were behind the K-Town shooting? That it wasn’t the Imperial Gangster Nation? It wasn’t a turf war?”

Billy doesn’t answer, buries his head in his hands.

“So…” She shakes her head. “So in addition to reopening four-year-old wounds, probably for nothing,” she says, “you’re also going to take a wrecking ball to a solve that just made you cop of the year and basically guaranteed you a career on the force.”

Billy gets out of his crouch, turns his back to Patti. “When I make their acquaintance, I’ll be sure to ask them if they shot up that house in K-Town.”

“You’re not going to ask them anything,” she says, walking toward him. She can’t believe she’s about to say these words, but she’s never believed anything more.