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“I was in charge,” Billy corrected. “It will be my fault.”

“But I was in charge of the inventory, the search.”

Trying to stop Kate from worrying about something was as easy as trying to stop a freight train at high speed. Kate did everything fast and hard. There was no second gear for her.

“The mayor needs to deflect this,” she said. “He needs the story to be about something besides him. He wants it to be about us.”

“So,” said Billy, “we’ll find the little black book today at the manager’s house.” Last night, after they interviewed the manager of the sex club—Ramona Dillavou—and searched the brownstone without any luck, Billy sent uniforms over to Dillavou’s house to seal it off.

“We better.” Kate bounced off the bed. “Or we’re dead.”

Twelve

“WE’RE DEAD,” said Kate.

“We’re not dead . You’re overreacting.” Billy peeled off his rubber gloves. He was standing in the foyer of Ramona Dillavou’s house in Lincoln Park. Managing a house of prostitution must pay well, because her three-story brownstone on Belden was gorgeous—shiny hardwood floors and expensive artwork, updated fixtures and appliances, a cinema-size TV screen in the basement, complete with rows of the type of chairs you’d find in a movie theater, a master bathroom with a full-size sauna and a shower the size of Billy’s living room. This house had everything you could ever want.

Everything, that is, except a little black book.

It could be anything, Billy had said to the officers and technicians assisting in the search. It could be an actual book, or it could be a computer or tablet, or it could be something on a flash drive or an SD card. It could look like a phone directory or an accounting ledger. It could be in code. It could be scribbled in pencil on the back pages of a novel sitting on a bookshelf. It could be anything. It could be anywhere.

But after eight hours, they had found nothing. Ramona Dillavou had an iPad and a personal computer, and the technicians had downloaded the contents of each onto an external hard drive for later review, but an initial examination by one of the techies showed nothing helpful.

Billy chugged another bottle of water. His mouth felt like the Sahara desert. He tried to think strategically, as Ramona Dillavou would. If I had something valuable like that, something I wanted to keep totally confidential and untraceable but couldn’t lose, where would I put it? The problem was that his thoughts and ideas were navigating through a storm of lightning strikes and clashing cymbals and jackhammers trying to blast through the interior of his skull. The worst hangover ever.

“Oh, this is great. Look at this.”

Kate handed Billy her phone, this time displaying an online article from one of the city’s mainstay newspapers, the Chicago Tribune. Billy scrolled through the headlines, all of them about the arrest.

will mayor resign?

mayoral wannabes lining up

archdiocese statement vague

But amid those stories, this gem:

questions raised about police conduct

There wasn’t much new in the article. The second half was a cut-and-paste job, a summary of the arrest and all the prominent people busted. But the first three paragraphs said that the mayor had hired a lawyer, a high-powered attorney who served as the nation’s attorney general under the first George Bush, who was claiming that the police “turned innocent conduct into criminal behavior and stormed into a private residence without any cause to do so.”

Billy smiled and shook his head. His default reaction to bad news. His general view of things, after everything that had happened three years ago, was that he’d taken the worst life had to offer, and everything else had to be put in perspective.

But this was his job, and it mattered to him. It was all he had now. And as much as Kate tended to exaggerate, she wasn’t the only one sounding alarms about what might be coming down the road. Mike Goldberger had, too, and Goldie had a sense for things like this more than anyone Billy knew.

“It’ll be fine, Kate,” Billy said, trying to convince himself as well as her.

And then a buzzing sound in Billy’s hand, and on Billy’s belt, too, where his own phone was encased. Both of them had received a text message at precisely the same time. Billy felt a chill pass through him.

He handed Kate her phone while he checked his. It only took them a second to read the message and realize that they both got the same thing.

A text from Wizniewski:

Report to 5th flr of Daley Center in 1 hr.

The fifth floor of the Richard J. Daley Center was the principal location of the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, the top prosecutor of all crimes in Chicago and the county’s surrounding suburbs.

Kate looked at Billy. “We’re dead,” she said.

Thirteen

“THE STATE’S attorney will see you now.” The man pushed open the blond-wood door. The first thing Billy saw through the picture window in the large corner office was the darkness outside. Then he saw photographs and keepsakes lining the walls—vanity photos, not surprising for a politician.

Then he saw two people in the room: the superintendent of police and the Cook County state’s attorney.

The police superintendent, appointed by the mayor, was a man named Tristan Driscoll, whom the mayor had hired away from his previous job running the police department in Newark, New Jersey. Driscoll’s brother was a lobbyist and fund-raiser who had raised millions for Mayor Francis Delaney in the last election, so even though the mayor heralded the fact that he was bringing in an “outsider” to “clean house” in the Chicago PD, he was also bringing in the brother of one of the people to whom he was most indebted for winning his reelection. Welcome to Chicago.

Next up, the Cook County state’s attorney, Margaret Olson, who had served as an alderwoman for three terms before she decided that she wanted to be the county’s top prosecutor. She’d only practiced law for a couple of years, but she won the race after receiving significant support from—take a wild guess—Mayor Francis Delaney.

Aware that many people doubted her qualifications for the job, Margaret Olson decided to be the toughest, most aggressive prosecutor the county had ever seen—never dropping a case, always refusing plea bargains. It quickly earned her the nickname “Maximum Margaret” for her tendency to seek the harshest sentences for all crimes. The judges hated her. Civil rights advocates protested her. Cops didn’t appreciate the fact that every single case, no matter how slam-dunk, no matter how small, required their in-court testimony because Margaret wouldn’t cut deals. The only people who liked her were defense lawyers, because Maximum Margaret was good for business.

A third person was in the room, a woman, fairly young, probably Billy’s age, dressed smartly and focused like a laser on them, staring at Billy so intently that he thought she was trying to read his mind.

If she could read his mind, this is what she’d take away:

Superintendent Driscoll is a soulless asswipe. State’s Attorney Olson is a political hack who’d indict her own mother if it would boost her favorables by a single percentage point. And both of them owe their positions to the mayor, whom I just humiliated and ruined. And what’s your story, gorgeous? Italian, I’m guessing. Maybe Greek, with that silky ink-black hair and those haunting dark eyes. You look like Kate Beckinsale with a law degree. That’s the good news. The bad news: you seem about as pleasant as a case of genital warts.

“Detectives,” said Margaret Olson, sitting behind her walnut desk, her graying hair cut short. “You know the superintendent, of course.”