The female Chicagoan on the metal tray—pale gray in her dead nakedness—was getting the kind of exam that doesn’t do the patient much good, no matter how thorough Dr. Pravene might be.
In his late thirties, a bland, blandly handsome East Indian in white, from lab coat to pants and even shoes, Dr. Pravene was just about to begin his autopsy, which seemed overkill, considering the cause of death just might be the three bullet wounds, one in the throat, another in the chest, last in the stomach.
Rafe and I were keeping a respectful distance. Autopsies don’t make me sick but they aren’t my idea of a good time. And if it had been any more unpleasantly cold in that cement-block chamber, our breaths would’ve been showing. Everybody’s but the corpse’s, anyway.
Rafe was saying, “Dr. Pravene found something interesting in the vic’s tox screen.”
Pravene, a scalpel in hand, paused, as if he’d been about to slice a birthday cake but somebody at the party reminded him that first the candles needed blowing out.
“Rohypnol, Ms. Tree,” Pravene said.
“Roofies?” I squinted at the doctor, as if trying to bring him into focus, then looked at Rafe the same way. “No offense to the deceased, gentlemen, but why would Richard Addwatter need a date rape drug to ply his charms on this debutante?”
Pravene placed the scalpel in a small tray and came over to give me his full attention; his patient didn’t seem to mind, even though the physician gestured at her in a dismissive manner.
“The drug wasn’t in the female victim’s blood,” Pravene said.
Then he moved over to another metal slab, where his next patient awaited: Richard Addwatter, who had taken bullets in the forehead, center chest and lower belly. The doctor gestured to my client’s late husband.
I said, “The male vic?”
Pravene nodded. “Female’s screen did show heroin, among other things—plus she was HIV positive.”
Rafe was at my side. “Hooker,” he said.
I gave him a frown. “You think?”
He ignored that, adding, “Rap sheet thicker than a Stephen King.”
“And probably at least as frightening.” I drew in a breath, regretting it instantly as a chemical taste invaded. “So...what’s a high-end john like Richard Addwatter doing with such a low-rent date?”
Rafe’s face was placid but his eyes weren’t. He answered my question with one of his own: “What do we get if somebody drugs the husband, hires a hooker who won’t be missed, and sets the psychotic wife in motion?”
I shrugged. “I dunno—instant dead Dick, maybe? ...But who wanted Dick dead?”
Rafe didn’t respond, not right away. Instead he nodded a thank you to Dr. Pravene, who nodded back and returned to his work as the homicide cop led me gently by the arm out into the hallway.
“Want to know who wanted Addwatter dead?” Rafe asked. “How about somebody whose books he’d cooked? Or maybe whose books he wouldn’t cook?”
I was shaking my head. “Addwatter Accounting? With their spotless rep?”
“Michael, since when do you buy P.R. bullshit?” His grunt was almost a laugh. “Anyway, a term like ‘spotless’ can’t be applied to certain of the illustrious firm’s clients.”
“Don’t be coy, Rafe. Drop a name.”
“Okay.” He grinned at me and there was something ruthless in it. “How about I drop this one? Muerta Enterprises International?”
As cold as the morgue had been, the chill up my spine was colder.
“Muerta,” I said, the word sounding half prayer, half curse. “They’re supposed to’ve gone entirely legit, since—”
One eyebrow hiked itself into a sort of question mark. “Since your husband put the family patriarch away? Since Mike Tree brought Dominic Muerta down?”
I said nothing.
“You really buy that, Michael?”
And for a while there, as Rafe stood glowering at me, I wasn’t any more talkative than the other residents of the morgue.
But finally I found words and my voice and put them together.
“Let’s see what Captain Steele thinks.”
Rafe didn’t argue.
“Captain Steele,” the doctor said. “He was your husband’s partner.”
“Yes. He heads up the Organized Crime Unit now.”
“They were quite a team, I understand.”
I nodded. “Put Dominic Muerta away—last of the Capone gang godfathers.”
“It was a close friendship, Mike and Captain Steele?”
I whipped a frown his way. “You know how close it was!...Sorry.”
I shouldn’t have snapped at him. The doctor was, after all, merely trying to maintain a professional decorum. He had been my husband’s psychiatrist long before I’d come here for therapy—Mike had been involved in several shootings during his time on the force, making counseling mandatory, and Dr. Cassel was one of the approved shrinks the department used.
“Captain Steele,” he was saying, “was your husband’s best man, at the wedding?”
“Yes. But, Doctor, there’s something...something I haven’t told you that colors all of this.”
“Go ahead.”
“If you don’t mind...I’ll get to it, but...in my own way.”
“Fine. Please. Go on.”
Captain Charles “Chic” Steele was a well-tanned blue-eyed blond, with an endless smile and a cute cleft chin, and had he been twenty, not thirty-five, and in California, not Chicago, you might have taken him for a surfer dude. Not that his attire was in the least bit gnarly: he looked sharp in a tan herringbone sportcoat with a light blue button-down shirt and a gold tie, his slacks a darker tan.
Right now he was on stage at police headquarters, in a big meeting room that bordered on an auditorium, which was filled with police officers, men and women under thirty, a mix of uniformed and plainclothes officers, with a few in “street undercover” attire stirred in.
Behind him, on a huge screen, a succession of images was being projected—images of criminals of various ethnicities. This was a slide show, and a young redheaded policewoman (I knew her a little—Sharon Davis) was running it from a computer at the rear.
“The pitfall,” Chic was saying, “is thinking of these elements as gangbangers—they are not. They are sophisticated criminal organizations. Take the Russian group, for instance—the R.O.C.—which is tied to Miami Colombian groups.”
Russian gangsters, on the screen, were followed by Colombians.
“Now each of you is assigned to one faction,” he told his rapt audience, “but watch for contact between R.O.C. and this new Salvadoran group, spun off from M-13 in California, and these Asian gangs, the Hip Sing and On Leong especially....”
As he continued, Sharon kept the faces coming, Russian, Hispanic, Asian, sometimes mug shots, mostly surveillance photos.
Rafe and I were taking this in at the rear, not far from where Sharon perched at her computer post. The lecture continued for another ten minutes or so, but then the lights came up and the attendees started filing out. Lt. Valer and I moved against the tide to catch Chic, still up on the stage, chatting with a couple of lingerers.
Chic grinned when he saw us and came down the four steps. He extended a hand to Rafe, and they shook, while the OCU captain nodded at me and I did the same back.
Rafe said, “Hope you don’t mind us crashing the party.”