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Not a cry of pain, though. Like I said, I wasn’t hurt. I had just realized something that made too much sense not to be right. I knew then that the man who had tied me up in the apartment had been wearing a Chicago PD uniform.

3

I was all swollen, my throat sore, eyes burning. I sat in the back of the Lincoln, between Taylor and Cliff. Uncle Woody rode up front, next to Sim.

I guess it was kind of funny. Cliff, Taylor, and I had done nothing wrong. We merely reported finding a dead body. But Dan Zuni, supposedly a murder suspect, had probably been much better treated than we were. Hour upon hour at the station house, we were given no food, nothing to drink, no air, no breaks, and made to stand for long periods or sit on back-killing hard benches. I bet they’d have kept us all night—hell, if Norris had his way, they’d have just taken us out and shot us—if Woody and his attorney hadn’t shown up.

Woody took us to the all-night diner on Belden. There was a trippy symmetry in that. The Belden Deli was exactly where we were headed that morning, before Cliff spotted the Volvo.

We ate like wolves. I polished off three waffles and enough sausages to fill a sidecar. Taylor finished an enormous hot roast beef platter and then, while he waited for a second one, tried to interview Woody. I thought at first that Cliff was too shell-shocked to eat, but when his bacon cheeseburger was set in front of him, he devoured it just as greedily as the rest of us were eating, and followed it with two helpings of cherry pie.

Over coffee, I put the picture together for Woody and the others. The cops, ably assisted by Annabeth Riegel, were running some kind of surveillance operation on us, with special focus on Wilton. I remembered that Jack Klaus, that first day I’d gone to see him, had called Annabeth just “Beth.” He’d shortened her name in the same overly familiar way he always called me Cass, like my family did, like he knew me. That had stayed with me ever since, way at the back of my mind.

The night of Wilton’s and Mia’s murders, the cops pulled Dan Zuni in for questioning; they knew he was innocent, but for some diversionary reason, they decided to keep him under wraps, pretend they were still hunting for him over the next three days. That same night, they picked up Barry Mayhew, only they let him go. Because he was a known informant and they had other plans for him.

“And how did he get hold of Dan’s car?” Taylor asked.

“That’s no longer a mystery. The explanation’s pretty simple. Dan just lent it to him that morning, and none of us knew about it.

“At any rate, a couple of days later Barry was bopping around the South Side. I spot him and think he’s hiding Dan. But that isn’t it. He’s probably doing drug business. He’s in hot water with the police. They’re using him to gather evidence against some bigger fish. Could be he was wearing a wire or setting them up in some other way. But his South Side drug connections were onto him, and they killed him.”

Woody was watching me, his eyes narrowed. Trying to prevent him from asking me about drugs and the South Side, I started talking faster. “I’m speculating here,” I said. “But it does add up, right?”

“Yeah,” Taylor said, “it does. But it doesn’t seem like Barry’s got much to do with the Wilton thing. So go back to him and Mia.”

“Right, Wilt and Mia. A nice white girl from a good family and the son of a prominent black attorney—true, they’re not Mayor Daley’s kids, but there’s got to be some pressure on the cops to solve the case. Why haven’t they made any progress? Because they already know who killed them. They’re just waiting to make an arrest, stalling.”

“Stalling for what?” Cliff said.

“I don’t know that yet. I only know it’s tied in with the reason they were spying on Wilton. They’re about to drop a big bomb. And they must be close, damn close to doing it. That’s why Norris is so furious at me for getting in their way.”

“You say the police must know Wilton was carrying on some kind of monkeyshines up in Michigan,” Woody said. “How do you