Keep Them Close(28)

Now I’m ready for my daily routine, a 1.5-mile walk to Conger’s, our local grocery store on Main Street in Grace Village, which opens at six. I exercise to stay fit, to stay healthy—Mom again: To stay thin!—but this week, the workouts have helped still my nerves as well.

It’s not just nerves, either. It’s been exhausting, talking with Luke over this last week as if I don’t know what really happened. First, he wants to plead guilty and take the blame. Then he suspects Finley. If only he’d relax and trust me, I’ll get him through this.

I grab two nylon recyclable bags from the bunch in my mudroom. They’re from Treasure Island, the grocery store we frequented when we lived in Chicago. The Treasure Island stores are long shuttered, but my memories remain, back when Fin and I were newly married, when things between us were great, when I was giddy with love, when I was sure we’d be forever.

Now I know better. If I hadn’t learned that already with Anna Cortese, I did last month, when I crossed under Lake Shore Drive and saw it with my own eyes, when I watched my husband sneak into the rear of our condo building with his new mistress, Trinity Casto.

It was bad enough when Finley ran around on me with a woman from the country club whom I barely knew. But Trinity? Someone who’d been so close with Luke, who knew that Luke loved her, who’d been in our home?

These were my options. One, take the high road: confront Fin, divorce him, and move on. I preferred door number two: doing all that plus burning Trinity to the ground.

But I wasn’t going to put myself at personal risk. I didn’t want a repeat of Anna Cortese—guns, gas cans, lit matches. I would hurt Trinity from a distance.

A new idea began to form—as it turned out, from an old one. I’d been sincerely wary of Max, a former drug dealer, and by extension Trinity—her weekday trips to see him, how easily a business owner could launder money, how commonly drugs move through gyms. I was never certain of my suspicions. But after watching Trinity traipse into my condo building with Fin, I decided that it didn’t matter if my suspicions were true. I would make them true.

I prepared, of course. I always prepare. I could claim this was ingrained from years of trial work, but the truth? I’ve always been this way. It wasn’t trial work that made me good at disciplined preparation. It was disciplined preparation that made me good at trial work.



* * *





After I saw Trinity and Finley together, I put my plan into action. I went to Luke’s townhouse in Grace Park when I knew he wasn’t home. I had a key and knew the alarm code.

Wearing gloves, obviously, I started for the bathroom, hoping she might have used a hairbrush or something, but I saw something better resting on the glass table in Luke’s family room: a tube of Trinity’s lipstick.

It was hard to think of a better option than lipstick. Her fingerprints, for sure, would be on the outside tube. Her DNA, no doubt, would be on the lipstick itself.

Next, I needed the right bag, not as big as a grocery shopping bag, but not tiny, either. One quick peek at Luke’s recycling bin gave me what I needed: a medium-sized bag from Trinity’s studio, made of some eco-friendly sustainable fabric, dark purple in color, bearing the word Trinity in its customary periwinkle. She must have brought over some of those multivitamins he likes from her studio. A nice gift for Luke. An even nicer one for me.



* * *





The oxycodone was the easy part; I never had to leave my house. Finley had never used the ninety-day supply—two pills a day, 180 total—prescribed to him after his knee injury.

Why did I fill and refill the prescription when he didn’t want them? I file that under the category of you-never-know. You never know, for example, how your husband might behave, especially with his history.



* * *





I had two choices of location—Trinity’s home or her studio—to plant the pills in her car. When home, Trinity parked her car behind her residence, a small parking bay for three cars, matching the three condos in her building. That would have been preferable, but my first stealth pass back there revealed a surveillance camera.

So that left me with the other place she parked her car—in the alley behind her fitness studio in Dearborn Park, narrow and cluttered with recycling bins and stacks of wooden pallets. I scouted it carefully, walking the length of the alley twice from both ends, trying hard to look like just another woman on her way somewhere, scarf pulled up against the wind.

I looked up at the brick walls, noting the utility poles and fire escapes, the backs of the buildings, the dumpsters. No cameras. Not one red-eyed lens staring down at me. The only thing along the brick wall at all, near the back door to Trinity’s studio, was a rusty junction box that appeared to be in disrepair. That would work.

When the time came, nobody would see me.



* * *





The final step: accessing the trunk of her Corolla. Enter Ralphie the scrap dealer, a guy in his late fifties whom I met fifteen years ago when I was a federal prosecutor and Harp was still with the Bureau. Ralphie had been one of Harp’s snitches, a man with more information than Wikipedia, as she put it. A mousy-looking character with wiry hair and narrow shoulders, Ralphie showed me a wide smile of uneven teeth when I entered his shack.

If I wanted to spend a few minutes in someone’s car, I asked him, how would an amateur like me go about that?