Джеймс Паттерсон - The Black Book

“You’re a fuckin’ shark,” Sosh said to the screen.

A shark. The same thing Kate said about Amy. The same Amy who swore to me, up and down, cross her heart, hope to die, that Margaret Olson wasn’t prosecuting the mayor for political reasons and that Olson would never, ever run for mayor.

I felt something sink inside me—that feeling again, cascading through my chest, burning my throat, that I didn’t have the entire story.

That feeling, again, that I didn’t know which way was up.

Seventy-Eight

AMY LENTINI got off the elevator at the Daley Center after hours, after darkness had long been settled over the city. Her eyes were down, intent, something on her mind, the weight of the world on her shoulders. She moved so swiftly that she almost didn’t notice Patti.

Patti shifted so that she was blocking Amy’s path.

Amy looked up, startled, and stopped in her tracks.

“Patti,” she said simply.

“Amy, I’ve told you this before.” Patti drew the words out. “I want you to stay away from my brother.”

Amy snapped out of her fog. Eyes narrowed. Whatever had been bothering her before she saw Patti seemed to combine with this confrontation, and the mixture was toxic. Amy looked to be at a boiling point, at her wit’s end.

Patti said, “Did you know that three years ago, his little girl died of a stroke? Did he tell you that? I’ll bet he didn’t. He doesn’t like to—”

“He didn’t tell me,” said Amy, “but I knew. I looked into his history.”

“And did you know that his wife, Valerie, couldn’t handle it? Did you know that while Billy literally lived at the hospital for weeks on end waiting for his daughter to come out of that coma, his wife stayed away? Drank herself nearly to death?”

Amy studied Patti, shifted the bag on her shoulder. “I know most of that. I know she committed suicide afterward.”

“ Right afterward,” said Patti. “Immediately afterward. Billy came home from the hospital, having just lost his baby girl, and found his wife dead in the bathroom.”

“Patti—”

“She took Billy’s service weapon out of their safe, walked into the bathroom, and blew her brains out with it.”

“Okay, but—”

“So on top of losing his little baby, on top of literally living in the hospital for weeks, just on the off chance that his daughter might open her eyes one time, he also got the privilege of feeling guilty for doing that, for not taking better care of his wife.”

Amy didn’t answer.

“He’s broken, Amy. It snapped him in half. He plays it like he’s okay; he jokes around and does his job, he’s everybody’s friend, but he’s not okay.”

Amy stepped back from Patti. “So he can never have another relationship? Ever again?”

“Not with you,” she said. “Not with someone who’s using him.”

The fire flared in Amy’s eyes. Patti could feel the heat coming off of her.

“I’m using him?”

“You’re investigating him,” said Patti. “You always have been. Now your boss wants to be mayor? And I suppose there’ll be a nice job in it for you, now that you did your part and cleared the path for her.”

“Patti, listen to me—”

“I see that Congressman Tedesco stepped out of the way this morning,” Patti interrupted. “How nice of him. How convenient. The clear front-runner decides that the job he’s always wanted, mayor of Chicago—suddenly he doesn’t want it so much after all. Oh, and he thinks Margaret Olson would be the perfect candidate!”

Amy didn’t respond. Patti stepped closer to her, so tight they could feel each other’s breath. “So how’d that work, Amy? What did you guys have on him? Was Congressman Tedesco in the little black book? Did you threaten to publicly expose him if he didn’t step aside and endorse Margaret? Is that what all those photographs in Kim Beans’s column were for? Threats to Tedesco? Weekly taunts? You could be next, Congressman. You could be in next week’s photo. Is that what you really want? ”

Amy, up close, so close Patti couldn’t accurately gauge her expression, went cold, frozen like a statue.

“How’m I doing so far, Amy? Am I getting warm? Blazing hot?”

Amy still didn’t speak, remained motionless. Her eyes avoided Patti’s, looked off in the distance, but not a hazy stare—an intense focus, like she was trying to locate a fixed point far away.

You’re wondering how I figured it out, Patti thought. Maybe dumb little Patti, the little girl everyone had to coddle, the one who didn’t quite measure up to her twin brother, the black sheep of the family, ain’t so dumb after all.

Patti grabbed her arm. They locked eyes. Amy could see it. Patti was sure of it. Amy could see that Patti was no longer joking, was no longer issuing a friendly warning.

“Stay away from my brother,” she hissed. “It’s the last time I’ll say it.”

Patti turned and left the building. She walked through the plaza, the brutal cold, the whipping wind. Then she stopped and turned back, looked through the large glass windows of the Daley Center.

Amy was still standing in the lobby, but now she was looking back at the elevator she had just gotten out of. She stood there a long moment, staring at that elevator.

Finally Amy started moving again. But she didn’t leave the building. Instead she turned and disappeared back into the elevator, went up to her office, long past the time that everyone else had gone home.

It was too cold outside to wait. So Patti retreated to her car, drove it back around so she was parked alongside Daley Plaza.

And she waited. Two hours passed. Even longer.

It wasn’t until close to ten o’clock, when downtown was frozen and desolate, that Amy Lentini appeared once again, walking quickly through the lobby, hailing a cab outside and jumping in.

Patti considered following Amy home, but she didn’t bother. She already knew where Amy lived.

Seventy-Nine

IT WASN’T as hard as Patti thought it might be.

Amy Lentini left for work the next morning at seven—quite the early morning riser, but Patti wasn’t surprised. Amy was the kind of person who always put in the extra effort, determined and ambitious and single-minded as she was. First to arrive at the office, last to leave—as Amy demonstrated last night, leaving near ten o’clock.

Getting past the locked front door of Amy’s apartment building would be hard, but it just required the right timing and a few precautions. The timing part wasn’t difficult. The apartment building housed young professionals on a budget as well as students from city colleges who kept irregular hours. People were coming and going at all times of day.

She waited until noon, accepting the fact that there would never be a perfect time to break into Amy’s apartment. There was no such thing as perfect.

She screwed up her courage and got out of her car. The wind slapped her face, and the cold immediately penetrated her outer layers and chilled her skin.

But it only took a few minutes before someone came out of the front door. A student, presumably—a young, squirrelly kid with a goatee and nose ring, a backpack over one shoulder.

Patti made sure she was there to catch the door. That was the timing part.

The precaution part: she was wheeling a carry-on suitcase behind her. Looking the part of a young professional returning from a trip. Looking nothing like someone breaking into an apartment.

And she held her phone up to her ear with her other hand, talking into it, saying, “I’m finally home! What a nightmare of a trip!”

Those things together, the suitcase and phantom phone conversation—and, yes, the fact that she was a woman—meant that she did not present the slightest hint of a threat to the college kid, who barely paid her any notice at all as he held the door open for her.