Dane looked up at the time line thumbtacked to the wall, at the photos of the four people murdered. Chief Kreider squeezed Dane’s shoulder on his way out.
Delion said to Dane, “I’ll bet our guys even have their moms working on this thing, Dane. We’ll nail the guy, you’ll see. Now, we’re scheduled to see the medical examiner. Dr. Boyd promised he’d do Valerie Striker first thing. How’s Ms. Jones?”
“She’s fine. She swore to me she wouldn’t leave the hotel.”
An eyebrow went up. “You believed her?”
“Short of locking her up, I really didn’t have a choice, but yeah, I do.”
“You get her cleaned up?”
“Oh yes. She looks like a grad student.”
“A grad student? You know, maybe that’s a possibility. She looks brainy, speaks real well.”
Dane shook his head. “She’s smart, she’s too scared to hide that. Graduate student? She seems a bit old for that, but who knows?”
Delion said, “I’m told by my sister-she’s a professor of anthropology over at UC Davis-that there’s a lot of cutthroat stuff in academia, more vicious, she says, than the business world. Of course, she doesn’t really know what she’s talking about but do you think our girl could be running from a badass professor?”
“Could be,” Dane said, and burst out laughing, just couldn’t help himself. “A killer professor. I like that, Delion. Let’s stop by and see whose fingerprints are on this glass.”
“Ms. Jones?”
“Yes, a beautiful clear thumb. If she won’t tell us who she is, just maybe her prints are on file. You never know. And, Delion, thanks for making me laugh.”
“No problemo.”
Dr. Boyd met them at the morgue counter. “Valerie Striker was garrotted,” he said. “Nothing more, nothing less.”
Dane said, “Can you give us a time, sir?”
“It’s difficult, but I’d say it was toward the middle of the night, Sunday night.”
“Good enough.”
Dr. Boyd said, “Same man who killed Father Michael Joseph?”
Delion nodded. “Yeah, if that’s when she died, then it was probably him. She was a loose end.”
“Now for my good news, gentlemen. Ms. Striker didn’t go easily. She may have got some of him under her fingernails, probably skin from his neck.”
“DNA,” Delion said, and did a little dance.
“Get me a match and we’ll fry the guy, Inspector Delion.”
They watched Dr. Stephen Boyd walk away, pause to speak to one of his investigators, then continue toward his office.
“Hot damn,” Delion said. “You know, no one ever even makes a joke about that man? No Sawbones, no Doctor Death, nothing like that. He’s a straight arrow, smart, does what he says he’ll do. When the pressure builds, the brass are really heating things up, Dr. Boyd never panics, just lowers his head and keeps marching.”
“Good for him,” Dane said. “On the other hand, if he did panic, the person on the slab wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it.”
“True enough. Now, if that sample’s got DNA in it, it’s our first real break.”
TEN
Nick had never been so happy in her life. Well, maybe when she’d had her Ph.D. diploma placed reverently into her hand, but that was more a huge sense of relief than pure, unadulterated happiness. It was because of her fiance, John Kennedy Rothman, senior senator from Illinois. “No relation,” he’d told her, a lowly new volunteer in his reelection campaign three years before. That was before his wife, Cleo Rothman, disappeared, just up and ran away with one of his senior aides, Tod Gambol. Because everyone knew he loved his wife dearly, her abandoning her husband had given him an incredible sympathy vote and he’d been swept back into office by a 58/42 margin over his opponent, who’d been portrayed as too liberal for the fiscal health of both Illinois and the country, though he really hadn’t been at all. Truth was, John’s overpowering charm, his ability to look straight at a person and have that person believe that he would be the best at whatever he tried, was the overriding reason he was voted in.
And now she was going to marry him. It was heady. There were nearly twenty years separating them, but she didn’t care. She had no parents to gainsay her decision, only two brothers, both Air Force pilots, both in Europe, both younger than she.
She knew all about campaigning now, what it would be like to live in a fishbowl. But the media really hadn’t come after her yet, and she prayed they wouldn’t, at least not until after they were married and she’d be able to simply step behind John as she smiled and waved.
It was a dark night, the wind whipping her hair back from her face, because it was, after all, Chicago. When you were walking the deep canyons, buildings soaring up on either side, and the wind swept off Lake Michigan, funneling through those buildings, whipping the temperature down, it could make your teeth chatter and your bones rattle. She ducked her head and walked faster. One more block and she’d be home. Why hadn’t she taken a taxi? No, ridiculous. When she got home, she’d sit in front of her small fireplace, pull over her legs the heavy red afghan that her mom had knitted eight years before, and read some essays from her senior medieval research class.
She looked both ways, didn’t see a single soul, and stepped into the street. It happened so fast, she wasn’t certain what had actually happened after she was safely back in her apartment. A black car, a big job, with four doors, swept up the street, lights off, and veered straight at her. She saw that it was accelerating, not slowing, not swerving out of the way. No, it was coming straight on, and it was going to hit her.
She hurled herself sideways. She hit a fire hydrant and went crashing down on her hip. She felt the hot air, smelled the sour rubber of the tires as the sedan sped by. She lay there, pain pulsing through her hip, wondering why no one was around. Not a single person was stupid enough to be out in this weather. Oh God. Would the car come back?
She got up, tried to run, but ended up hobbling back across the street. She saw a bum in the alley just next to her condo building. He’d seen everything.
“Crazy bugger,” the guy said, lifted a bottle to his mouth, and drank down a good pint.
She fumbled with her building door key, finally got it to turn, and almost fell into the lobby, so afraid that she just hung there, leaning against a huge palm, breathing hard. There was a neighbor, Mrs. Kranz, standing there. The old lady, the widow of a Chicago firefighter, helped her to her condo, stuffed aspirins down her throat, and sat her down as she built up the fire in the fireplace.
“What happened, dear?”
Dear God, it was hard to speak, hard to get enough saliva in her mouth. She finally got out, “Someone-someone tried to run me down.”
Mrs. Kranz patted her arm. “You’re all right, aren’t you?” At Nick’s nod, because she really couldn’t speak, Mrs. Kranz said, “A drunk, more like it. Right?”
Nick just shook her head. “I don’t know. I really don’t know.” A drunk? She’d felt all the way to her bones that it was someone who wanted to hurt her. Maybe even kill her. Was that unlikely? Sure it was, but it didn’t change how she felt. A drunk. That might be right. Damn.
She thanked Mrs. Kranz, forgot the papers she was going to grade, and went to bed. She shuddered beneath the covers, cold from the inside out.
When she finally slept, it was only to see that big dark car again, then another and another, all around her. She saw a man driving each car, and each man was wearing a ski mask pulled over his face. There was a kaleidoscope of madness in each man’s eyes, but she didn’t recognize any of them. There were so many, she didn’t know where to look. She was spinning around, with all the cars coming toward her. She woke up screaming, breathing hard, soaked with sweat. She jerked up in bed. As she sat there in the predawn gloom, she saw those eyes again with their stark light of madness and thought they looked somehow familiar. When she was breathing more easily, she got up, went to the bathroom, leaned over the sink, and drank from the faucet. No, that didn’t make any sense. There was no one who wanted to hurt her. She didn’t have any enemies except for maybe one of the ancient professors at the university who didn’t believe women should know anything about medieval history, much less teach it. Her hip throbbed with pain, and putting any weight at all on that leg made her groan. She took three aspirins and crawled back into bed.