“End. Of. Story.” Korigan growled. The sound was almost guttural, making Will take an involuntary step back. When he looked up again, though, Korigan was back to normal, smiling and slick as ever as he stood up from his desk. “Go home, Detective,” he said, turning to grab his heavy felt overcoat from the hook on the wall. “You’ve been working too much, and it’s starting to affect your judgment. Don’t make me put you on medical leave.”
The tone was friendly, but Will knew a threat when he heard one. He was starting to see how Korigan had wormed his way into the top law enforcement office in the city. The man was a smooth operator who knew how to control those below him. He certainly had Will by the balls. With those two terrifying words—“medical leave”—the chief had all the ammunition he needed to take Will off the case entirely. At this point, Will’s only choice was stand his ground and possibly lose everything, or back down and play along. Neither appealed to him, but Will was used to hard choices, and just because he was being forced down didn’t mean he was out of the game entirely.
“If you say so, sir,” he said quietly, looping his thumbs through his belt. “But where are you going? Little late for an opera, isn’t it?”
“My affairs are none of your business,” Korigan replied. “But for the record, I’m off to a party.” He flashed Will a sharp smile. “An active social life is important for maintaining mental health. You should try it sometime.”
Will scowled, but before he could think of a comeback, Korigan walked around his desk to open the door. “Thank you for telling me your concerns, Detective. My door is always open to my officers—although next time I’m going to insist you actually knock. But I’m afraid I have to get going. Good night, Mr. Tannenbaum.”
The obvious dismissal made Will bristle. It was not in his nature to back down from a fight. He’d learned long ago that the only way to get what you wanted in life was to bite down and never let go. Tonight, though, the practical cynicism from a decade of police work told him that pushing back now would only make things worse, so he forced himself to let it go, stepping back out into the dark hallway seconds before the police chief closed the glass door in his face.
The cold silence of the empty hall was insult to injury. But while Chief Korigan could threaten his job, he couldn’t tell him what to do during his free time, and all of a sudden, Will was in the mood to do a little driving. That thought brought a smile to his face, and as fast as he’d been kicked out, Will changed course, hurrying out of the building with only a brief stop at his desk to print out a copy of the case file that was no longer marked priority to anyone but him.
The moment Tannenbaum was gone, Victor Korigan locked his office and walked down the hall to the private elevator that went down to the underground lot reserved for high-ranking government officials. After checking his bow tie one last time, he climbed into the armored Hummer the city provided for his safety and told the driver to take him to the address on the invitation he’d been waiting for all day.
The one he’d received mere moments before Tannenbaum had charged into his office.
That had been unfortunate. Men like Tannenbaum were ticking time bombs—overinvested, convinced of their own righteousness, and, worst of all, highly resistant to bribes. Even so, he’d hoped to put off dealing with him for a little while longer. Obnoxious as he was in other ways, Tannenbaum was a good detective. He did his job, kept his nose clean, and was popular on the force, all of which made him difficult to remove. But removed he would have to be. Korigan had been given control of the Chicago PD precisely to keep chaos elements like Tannenbaum from disturbing carefully laid plans. It was a position he’d fought long and hard for, and if Tannenbaum insisted on threatening his cultivated equilibrium, then the detective would have to go. Simple as that.
But that was tomorrow’s problem. Tonight, he had far bigger, far better fish to fry, as the engraved summons in his hands proved. Technically, it was an invitation to a party, but the name at the top told Korigan that it was so much more than that, and he could hardly keep himself still as his driver followed the GPS through the slushy, frozen streets of late-night Chicago until he reached the giant brick-faced four-story mansion sprawling at the center of a mile-long stretch of Lake Michigan–bank property on the edge of the city limits.
Despite the fact that it was now nearly 2 am, the party inside was still in full swing, the energy coming from the house almost tangible. The moment Korigan’s Hummer pulled up to the front entrance, a uniformed valet rushed out to get his door, welcoming him without once glancing at his face. Returning the favor, Korigan ignored the man and dismissed his driver with a wave as he walked toward the entrance, climbing the carefully swept and salted stone steps to the Gilded Age mansion’s elegant double doors.
Stepping inside was like walking into Hollywood’s ideal of debased opulence. Everywhere Korigan’s eyes fell, beautiful people—male and female—were lounging on antique furniture, gazing up at the fat, graying bodies of Chicago’s elite with the sort of overt sexual excitement only lots of money could buy. White-coated waiters circled through the rooms offering guests silver trays laden with flutes of champagne, delicate French pastries, and mountains of coke. In one parlor, two huge men were trying to kill each other on the billiard table while a circle of gentlemen in tuxes cheered them on, yelling out bets and trading huge rolls of cash every time a punch landed. In another, a pair of identical girls lay naked on the dining table, their slender bodies covered in a rainbow of beautifully cut sushi that guests removed with long silver chopsticks.
The excessive debauchery made Korigan’s pulse quicken, but not for the usual reasons. He’d sold his military services to dictators and kings for decades now. Sins of the flesh were just part of doing business. Even to his jaded eyes, though, this was a party for the ages, but he’d expected nothing less from the home of Christopher St. Luke.
St. Luke was Chicago’s most eccentric billionaire. Notorious, too. His weekly parties were the stuff of tabloid legend, as were the untold millions he’d donated to the campaigns of local politicians. But what the papers didn’t know was that the lion’s share of St. Luke’s fortune wasn’t due to his pharmaceutical empire or the massive Chinese corporations he partnered with, but from a ruthless, multi-decade effort to take over the illegal drug market in the Midwest. A highly successful effort, as poor Tannenbaum was only now finding out.
Thinking about the detective made him chuckle. Poor boy would have had a heart attack if he knew where his boss had been headed when he’d burst in. But even if Korigan had laid out his evening plans in full, Tannenbaum couldn’t have grasped a tenth of what it really meant. His worldview was simply too small to comprehend the full scope of St. Luke’s ambitions. Korigan, however, understood them all too well, which was why he was here tonight.
Because he wanted in.
He’d courted St. Luke’s favor—protecting his opium farms in Afghanistan, punishing his enemies in Africa and South America, even bringing in a sub to sink his rival’s drug-running shipments off the coast of Florida—Korigan had finally hit the big time last summer when St. Luke had personally invited him to be part of his main team in his home base at Chicago. The promotion had cost him more than he was wise to give, but Korigan had learned the hard way that power in this world—real power, the kind that outlasted death—was a matter of birth and privilege. After years of scrapping in the dirt, he’d turned his pack of war dogs into one of the world’s most profitable mercenary companies. But even then, despite all his work, all his money, he’d been a fly to men like St. Luke. No matter how far he’d climbed, the glittering world of real power was always as far above him as the stars above the desert. Now, though, his work was finally paying off. After almost a decade of service, the dragon had finally looked down and taken notice, and Korigan was determined to do whatever it took to climb the last few rungs of the ladder and take his rightful place at the top of the world.