Джеймс Паттерсон - The Red Book

Billy, his lap and shirt covered in blood, cradling Valerie.

Holding his Glock, his service weapon, lazily in his hand.

“Oh, no,” she heard herself say.

“I…did this.” His voice nothing but a whisper of air, pitched high with emotion.

She didn’t know what to do, what to say. Her feet wouldn’t move.

But her head did. She turned and looked into the bedroom closet. The door open. The gun safe against the back wall. The safe’s door open, too.

She looked back at Billy. “She killed herself,” she heard herself say. “She couldn’t…it was too hard for her. She killed herself.”

Billy, staring at the floor, shaking his head. “I did this,” he whispered.

Patti looked back at the gun safe, its open door.

And she knew he was right.

Chapter 86

LATE MORNING. Carla Griffin locks the front door of her house, wearing sunglasses, a T-shirt, and shorts, looking like summer even with the gauze and tape on her face. She puts the suitcase in the back of her Honda and closes it up. Her mother-in-law, silver-haired and stooped, waddles over to the passenger side and gets in.

The boy, Samuel, belted in behind his grandmother.

Carla jumps in, starts up the car, backs it out of the driveway, and starts heading north. Wisconsin Dells, here we come!

This is the last fucking thing Porter should have to be doing, standing on the periphery of a baseball diamond in South Deering, binoculars to his eyes. But this isn’t something he can delegate. Delegating it would be bringing in someone else, and he needs another person knowing about this like he needs a third tit.

He lowers the binoculars.

It’s time. Carla’s out of the way now, taking Porter up on his offer to send her to a water park in Wisconsin. Harney is working alone on this for the time being.

Okay, Harney. You wanted a one-man crusade? You wanted to keep this quiet, do this solo?

Here’s your chance, pal.

He pulls out his burner phone and dials it.

“Let’s fucking finish this,” he tells Disco.

Chapter 87

AFTER TALKING to Antoine Stonewald at Stateville, I get on the Stevenson and head to work. I fit in my earbuds and check my phone for J Crew’s number, dial it.

“Yo yo yo. To what do I owe this great honorary privilege?”

Jay Herlihy grew up down the street from us, a cop’s kid like me. He was built like a linebacker and had the approximate IQ of a football, but he was a good seed overall. Except that one time, second grade, he made the mistake of punching Patti in the mouth. The three Brothers Harney didn’t think that was funny. We tackled him after school and rearranged his face. My mother was livid with us but delegated the punishment, as always, to Pop. Pop pulled the three of us into the study, heard our side of it, but you shoulda seen the color his face turned when he heard about Jay giving Patti, his prized possession, a bloody lip.

You boys screwed up, he said. You shoulda broken his arm .

Water under the bridge. Jay turned out all right. Ran with my crew, drank with us in the cemeteries, but he got a little wild in college and couldn’t make it into the Academy.

So he became a corrections officer.

When the small talk’s over, I get to it, lay it out for J.

“This Antoine Stonewald, he was in for murder—so Division 9, right?”

“Right,” I say. “Had to be. This would have been four years ago.”

“Yeah, well, for maximum—yeah, you’re right, some suit shows up unannounced and wants to talk to a detainee, we tell him to pound sand. Ya gotta schedule ahead, ya gotta be on a list, and that list is small—immediate family or the lawyer. But you’re saying his lawyer had just died.”

“Right.”

“Right, so, yeah, if this guy can show us his bar card, we can be sure he’s really a lawyer, yeah, we’d sign him in and let him talk to the detainee.”

“But he’d sign in,” I say.

“Most definitely.”

“No other way he gets in, J? Maybe he wants to come in quietly. Maybe a guard would help him sneak in, keep his name off the books?”

“Fuck yourself, Harney.”

“Didn’t mean you, J. But you know what I mean.”

“Yeah, yeah. No, here’s the thing. Someone wants to send a message to a detainee, they might try to get to him inside, through another detainee. In the yard or the mess hall. But a visit? No. There’s too much security. You couldn’t just buy off a guard. You’d have to buy off a dozen.”

“Bottom line,” I say, “some suit wanted to meet with the detainee, he’d have to go through the front door.”

“Most definitely. He’d sign in.”

“Good. So can you help me out?”

He sighs. “Division 9? You got an approximate date?”

More than approximate. The date of Valerie’s and Janey’s death is burned into my brain. And I was decent at math, so I can count out four days later, when Antoine formally pleaded guilty. It had to be within that short interval of time that someone waltzed into Cook County Jail and threatened to kill Antoine’s entire family.

“Might take me some time,” he says.

“I need this, like, yesterday, J. No fuckin’ foolin’. Any chance you can put your foot on the pedal for an old friend?”

I punch out the phone. The traffic finally opens up, and I floor it. Gotta make the most of my time with Carla gone.

I make it to headquarters in less than an hour. Vitrullo, at intake, nods to me. “Someone to see you or Griffin,” he says. “Griffin took a sick day, you probably know.”

“Right. Where?”

He juts his chin. “Over there. The girl.”

I turn. It’s a girl, probably late teens. Dirty blond hair back in a ponytail. A tank top, shorts, sandals.

And on her ankle, a tattoo of a black lily.

Chapter 88

I WALK the girl to an interview room. I say girl, because I’m guessing late teens, even though she looks more like early twenties. Heroin does that to you. It ages you, weathers you, beats the shit out of you while it loves you.

This girl has user written all over her. Undernourished. Dark, dead eyes. Bad skin.

She has nice features, though, a pretty girl. A party girl, if you tease that hair up, apply some makeup, put her in a nice dress. Sure, she’s a hottie, a top-drawer prostitute, when dolled up.

No tracks on her arms, which means she probably smokes, doesn’t shoot. Makes sense, if you’re projecting glamour. Evie had needle tracks on her arms, but she’d also escaped the clutches of her traffickers for at least the week she spent with Shiv and maybe longer, and it’s easier to inject than smoke.

I sit next to her, not across from her, because these interview rooms don’t project warmth. This isn’t a friendly atmosphere. We want our suspects intimidated, which we can use either way—scare them with our attitude, or be sugary sweet and ingratiate ourselves with them.

I’ve always known which way to play it. One of my strengths, reading people.

This time, I don’t know what to do. So I default to letting it play out.

“My name is Sadie,” she says. A thick accent, eastern European.

Not likely, but okay. “Last name?”

“Do I have to tell you that?” She’s nervous, fidgeting, scared or upset or both.

“No. That’s okay.” I put my hand on the table. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re here?”

Why don’t you tell me who put that tattoo of a black lily on you?

“My…friend,” she says. “My roommate. She…”

“Something happened to a friend of yours?”

She nods, bites her nails, which are long, manicured, dark purple.

“Okay, what’s your friend’s name?”

“Evie,” she says. Just like I’ve heard it. Evie-rhymes-with-Chevy.