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By Root 626 0

of perfectly rational violence ten years ago, owed a long debt to the power and cleverness and resources of the Thousand for not just her position but her freedom. That night, she had watched from her car as her husband and Erica Liu rendezvoused inside her husband’s big Cadillac SUV. They were in plain sight, in a metered space on Division, but also invisible behind the opaque windows of the truck. It was less comfortable but far more discreet than a hotel. And it was also very dirty, which was part of the allure for the thing that her husband had become. She knew how expert Solomon was at making those rear seats go away, and there was no doubt plenty of room, even for his large frame to be enjoined with a doll-like, dirty cello-playing slut in their filthy, adulterous sex. But Elizabeth was not bothered by her husband’s incursion between the whore’s legs so much as she was by his indiscretions into her ears. He was telling her too much. Hinting at the grand visions he was allowed with that damn robot chip in his head, the chip Elizabeth never wanted him to have, and now he wanted her daughter to have one, too, and soon Canada would turn against her, as well, the family turned against itself. She couldn’t let that happen. She was a mother. She would keep the family together.

At any cost.

When she noted the slight, almost imperceptible side-to-side sway of the parked vehicle, she left her own car and walked quietly up beside her husband’s truck and with her own duplicate fob and key she beep-beeped the driver’s door open and slid into the seat. The screams from the whore, the shouts of “Lupa! No! Lupa!” could no doubt be heard outside, but it was late and the street was empty. As one of the mathematici, she had used the power of numbers, the tension between order and chaos, to eliminate untold numbers of people anonymously and from a distance. The whore needed to be done up close. The acusmatici way. In front of her husband, who needed to be taught a lesson.

Ten years later, sitting in this beautiful, neglected church, she grieved for him and for the estrangement of her daughter—another fact for which the lawyer would have to pay—and listened to the performance with a widow’s pride, tears welling behind the tiny holes for eyes cut into her wolflike mask.

• • •

In a tree near the church ruins, the ex-detective perched with a camera and a long lens, snapping photos as they arrived, preparing himself for more when they departed. He hadn’t anticipated the masks, which would obscure their identities. But the photos might go partway toward redeeming him.

In Chicago, he was now known as an incompetent cop who had let the murdering Solomon Gold off the hook with sloppy policework. They called him a drunk, a philanderer, a sex addict even, a serial harasser. A conspiracy theorist. An obsessed ex-lover. A stalker. A liar. The evidence was allegedly on his computer at his desk at Area 3. It was also in his delusional statements about an ancient society of number worshippers, about Solomon Gold’s daughter, Canada (who, Bobby alleged, had killed a man), and about the wanted murderer Wayne Jennings, whom Kloska had claimed to have placed in custody, however briefly. They said he had no evidence for any of this and that reliable and credible witnesses, including some of the city’s most respected citizens, even contradicted him directly. A mathematics professor in Indiana, whom Kloska had said could back up some of his most outrageous assertions, declined to comment as he mourned the sudden and tragic deaths of his wife and daughter in a car accident.

Kloska had tracked his ex-lover across an ocean and two continents, something he doubted even two of the traitor detectives in Area 3, and none of the goddamn backstabbing sergeants, lieutenants, captains, commanders, and certainly not the fucking deputy chief, who had sold him out before the first scandalous Sun-Times article hit the sidewalk tin cans, could do. Della no longer spoke to him, even had a restraining order, one with fantastic and outrageous assertions that any asshole