What if secrets were a cancer? What if you cut away the cancer and there was nothing healthy left?
Silva saw him, and he hated her for it. He hated the way she’d tried to smugly wheedle his darkness out of him. Every look she’d given him had been predatory, grasping, greedy. She handled him as though he were unstable, the human equivalent of a ramshackle wagon of nitro rolling over a pitted road. It just showed how much she didn’t know. He knew what he was. Tainted, a creature of habits, of types. He was the cancer, the curse.
Smiling, he closed the door behind him and headed out, pushing through the hospital’s front doors, filling his lungs with freedom, starting again at zero. At thirty-two.
He passed through the gate and down the road where he knew Amelia would be waiting. He stopped when he saw his sister leaning against a silver Mercedes convertible, her arms crossed in front of her. Even in a weathered field jacket and worn jeans, her auburn hair a messy mop, she looked like she held the world on a string, like a model on a Ralph Lauren photo shoot. No makeup because none was needed. Flawless. Even Am knew she was exceptional. Was that her power? Knowing? Bodie loved that about her, but part of him resented her too.
Am smiled and lifted off the car when she saw him coming. She ran to him, grabbed him up in a big bear hug, and kissed him on the cheek. “C’mere, Bod. You’re sprung, you idiot.”
Bodie leaned into the hug and squeezed his sister back. Am smelled like paint and plaster, tools of her artist trade. He wished he had a trade, something he was good at. He could have been a doctor or a dentist—or an accountant like . . .
Am gave him the once-over. It didn’t look like she appreciated what she saw. “Good God, you’re a bag of bones. Weren’t they feeding you?”
“It’s not a five-star resort,” he said, sliding into the passenger seat, the smell of expensive leather snaking up his nose. “What happened to that rattletrap Land Rover you had?”
“I sold a piece. Traded up. Hungry?”
“Sure. Congratulations, by the way. On the piece.”
“Thanks. Pizza?”
“Fine.”
She stared at him for a moment, like she was taking inventory. “And?”
He sighed. “And I gave them nothing.”
He didn’t mention his pass. Am didn’t need to know. He gave Westhaven’s gate a final look before Am sped away.
CHAPTER 4
The presence of a half dozen squad cars parked along Upper Wacker with their lights flashing had attracted quite a crowd of curious onlookers along the bridge at Michigan Avenue. Foster ignored the heckling and jeering directed at them as she and Lonergan descended the metal steps to the Riverwalk. A few people standing up top yelled out recriminations and taunts, calling for the city to “defund the police.” There’d been protests all summer, their intensity unabated in the fall. In fact, just the day before, a well-attended march had wended its way through the streets, snarling traffic as protesters made their way with banners waving and horns bleating from CPD headquarters to Daley Plaza. People were angry, frightened. It was better not to engage.
“Sure got here quick, didn’t ya?” an onlooker shouted down. “Wasted no time, matter of fact.”
Foster didn’t look up, feeling the sting of the snide remark about their response time here off the Mag Mile compared to what it was perceived to be in neighborhoods where complexions were darker and bank accounts less robust.
“Defund the police?” Lonergan muttered. “Can you believe that? Who’re they gonna call when some jackhole carjacks ’em? Streets and San?”
Foster flicked him a look. The partnership hadn’t started off great, and it had been a quiet ride over in the car. The less she said, the better, she figured, at least on day one.
“You got nothing to say to that shit?” He cocked his head toward the hecklers.
Foster swept her eyes along the bridge, watching the faces of those who considered her the enemy, knowing full well how the high-profile police shootings and racially tinged arrests had gotten them here, how they had galvanized the us-versus-them battle lines. Most of the heat she could understand; some she even endorsed. No good cop stood for a bad one. So why was Lonergan, the self-proclaimed “old-school cop,” taking the heckling as a personal affront? She had her theories.
“No,” she said, then walked away from him.
A dead body found on the Riverwalk was unusual. Occasionally, there would be a mugging reported down here, some tourist asked to “break yourself” and hand over their wallet by an opportunist who could smell the cluelessness on them. Or there would be a drowning—some blitzed, overgrown frat boy who had tottered out of a bar at 2:00 a.m. and into the river, too drunk to save himself.
The Mag Mile was just up a level, with its high-end shops dotted along the popular ten-block stretch of prime real estate—Nordstrom, the Apple Store, Saks, the iconic Water Tower farther north, and the pricey high-rise mall that sprouted up across the street from it. The exclusivity extended down here to the Riverwalk, too—the multimillion-dollar mixed-use project combining trendy riverside bars and restaurants with public art displays, pedestrian paths, and stone steps for lounging as the water taxis and tour boats slid past under the series of bascule bridges.
Foster eyed one of the tour boats moored beside a canvas overhang and signs announcing the hours of operation and cost per passenger. The promise of festiveness was incongruent to the grim reason they’d been called here. The yellow crime scene tape marking the outer perimeter had a female patrol officer standing at it, but Foster and Lonergan moved through, their stars hanging from chain necklaces around their necks. Foster’s attention slid to a bird-thin white woman in neon-pink running gear crying on a bench a few yards away. Another female PO stood beside her, trying to calm her down. Foster noted, not for the first time during her career, that women were often charged with these duties—guarding the perimeter and comforting frightened children and distraught women. “You gals are better at it,” she’d had a male sergeant once tell her. “It’s the estrogen.” She’d bristled, then, and though things were better today, there were still those bosses, predominantly male, who made it standard practice to consider gender when assigning tasks.
“Okay. What we got?” Lonergan dug into his pocket and plucked out a package of Juicy Fruit, then popped a stick into his mouth.
Foster watched as the PO straightened up and consulted her notebook. Foster’s eyes flicked over the gold nameplate on the officer’s uniform blouse. Hernandez. It didn’t appear Hernandez had been on the job long. She still looked fresh, clear eyed, eager. Foster knew it was only a matter of time before the streets changed that. The scarring and jadedness were accumulative, years in the making, and inevitable.
“Elyse Pratt, thirty-eight, lives across the river in Marina Towers. Out for her morning run. She’s running east at about zero seven thirty hours, clears the bridge, gets to about the kayak rental hut there when she sees the leaves piled up over by the fence, then the foot sticking out. She loses it and runs. That’s when she sees the young man with blood on his jacket. Her screaming got everyone’s attention up top there. When we arrived, she was a mess. We couldn’t get anything else out of her.”