Джеймс Паттерсон - The Black Book

—but focusing on my sister’s words, fighting off all other images and gripping tightly to Patti’s words. Everything’s gonna be fine now.

When I opened my eyes again, my alarm was screaming at me. Unforgiving sunlight was piercing through my window. Patti was gone.

But the television was on. The same news channel I typically watched.

A TV reporter, standing outside a house in Lincoln Park, with police tape behind her, police officers and Forensic Services technicians moving up and down the stairs.

“…authorities believe she was tortured before she was killed…”

I knew that house. I had searched that town house, top to bottom.

It was the house that belonged to Ramona Dillavou, manager of the brownstone brothel.

Forty-Seven

I PULLED my car within two blocks of Ramona Dillavou’s house. It was the second morning in a row that I’d arrived at a crime scene filled with media trucks and reporters. A patrol officer was trying to direct early morning rush-hour traffic around the barricades.

The first person I saw was Goldie. Of course he was there. The guy was everywhere. He nodded at me and waved me toward the front door.

“The maid found her this morning,” he said. “She died sometime last night.”

We took the stairs up to the second floor. Ramona Dillavou was staring right at me, sitting in a chair, her head lolled to the right, a hopeless grimace on her face, her eyes lifeless.

Her mouth was bloodied. I thought maybe part of her tongue had been cut, but that was just a guess.

She was wearing a silk blouse that was unbuttoned. Her bra had been removed. One of her nipples was missing, replaced with dried blood. She had cuts all over her midsection—not slashes but slow, careful, painful incisions.

Her hands, tightly gripping the arms of the chair, had been butchered, too. Several of her long polished fingernails had been removed entirely. Her left pinkie had been cut off at the knuckle.

But her bare feet were in the worst condition. Several of the painted nails had also been removed, and several of her toes had been smashed so hard that they looked like mashed potatoes.

It didn’t take a whole lot of detective work to realize that Ramona Dillavou had been brutally tortured.

“Someone went Guantánamo Bay on her,” said Goldie.

I moved closer, taking care where I stepped. I saw ligature marks on her wrists and feet. They were thin, not wide. They’d cut through the skin.

“He handcuffed her wrists and ankles to the chair,” I said. “Made it easier to torture her.”

“Somebody really wanted to find that little black book,” said a voice behind me.

My body went cold. I turned and saw Lieutenant Paul Wizniewski. He was staring directly at me, the words he’d just spoken an accusation.

“We might have some questions for you about this,” he said, nodding toward the victim.

Yeah? Well, I have plenty of questions for you, Wizniewski .

And then it hit me. Maybe it was seeing the Wiz in the same room as Ramona Dillavou. But suddenly it smacked me like a roundhouse punch I should have seen coming long ago.

I remembered the night I first met Ramona Dillavou, the raid on the brownstone brothel.

The raid that the Wiz tried to talk me out of making.

I wasn’t supposed to raid the brownstone that night. Nobody knew I was going to. Hell, I didn’t even know. I wasn’t a Vice cop. I was a homicide detective. I only went to that brownstone because that’s where my suspect in the University of Chicago murder had gone.

I had accidentally stumbled upon a brothel where Chicago’s elite and powerful came to get their jollies.

It had always struck me that it was incredibly risky for these prominent people, these millionaires and politicians, to visit a house of prostitution. But now I realized why they didn’t consider it so risky.

They knew they wouldn’t be arrested. Because they had protection.

And then suddenly I show up, unannounced, investigating a murder with a small band of my trusted fellow cops, and I arrest the whole lot of them.

That’s why Wizniewski tried to stop me from raiding the place that night. When I insisted, he had no choice—too many of us had seen too much—but first he tried very hard to talk me out of it.

We’re not Vice cops, he said to me that night. We don’t make a habit of arresting johns and hookers.

You fuck this up, he’d warned me, it could be the last arrest you ever make. It could tarnish your father. And your sister. You could get into all kinds of hot water over this. You don’t need it, Billy. You got a bright future.

I thought he was just being a chickenshit, trying not to ruffle feathers by arresting prominent politicians and the archbishop. I thought he was just playing it safe.

But he wasn’t playing it safe. He was trying to help the people who were paying him for help.

The brownstone brothel was part of his protection racket.

Nobody knew that better than Ramona Dillavou. She knew the cops protecting her, and she knew the brothel’s clients who were being protected. She had a treasure trove of information in that brain of hers.

And now she was dead. Now she could never talk about a protection racket. Now she could never name names.

I stared into Wizniewski’s eyes. I knew he killed Camel Coat, the guy from the subway. No way was that a coincidence.

And now, I realized, he probably did Ramona Dillavou, too. He was tying up all the loose ends.

“Let’s start with this question,” said the Wiz. “When was the last time you saw the victim?”

The last time I saw Ramona Dillavou? Well, the last time I saw her she was secretly meeting at Tyson’s, a bar on Rush Street, with my sister.

As if on cue, as if a director had called into his headset Enter stage right, my sister, Detective Patti Harney, walked up the stairs and looked at the dead, tortured victim.

Then she looked at me.

Everything’s gonna be fine now, little brother, she said to me last night in my drunken, self-absorbed stupor. Everything’s going to be okay .

No, I thought to myself. No. It couldn’t have been Patti. Not Patti.

“I’m waiting for an answer,” said the Wiz.

I looked at Wizniewski, then back at my sister.

What the hell was going on?

The Present

Forty-Eight

THE SMELL of bratwurst sizzling on the grill moves my stomach in a positive direction. And the sound of my brother Aiden cursing when some brat juice squirts in his eye as he hovers over the grill takes me back to a comfortable memory.

“Almost ready,” Aiden announces, stepping off the deck into the soft grass in the backyard, wiping sweat off his forehead. “They’re gonna be perfect .” He makes an okay sign with his fingers.

“Like brats are hard to cook,” Brendan mumbles out of the side of his mouth as he hurls a football in Aiden’s direction. “Hey, Chef Pierre, just burn the shit out of ’em and throw buns over ’em.”

It’s my father’s sixty-first birthday. We’re keeping it low-key, just a backyard barbecue with immediate family, Brendan flying in from Dallas and Aiden driving up from Saint Louis. Pop said he wanted nothing special, as we had a big blowout for his birthday last year (the big six-oh), but I know the real reason is me. Everyone looks at me—the baby brother, the victim of a traumatic brain injury, and oh, by the way, the sole survivor of a double murder that took the lives of Detective Katherine Fenton and assistant state’s attorney Amy Lentini—as though I were a fragile porcelain doll. Let’s not have a big party, they probably said to one another. Billy’s not ready.