“What proof do you have that this is the envelope that held the so-called diary?” Bobby asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t open my mail expecting to have to prove I got it. When I saw what was in the envelope, I drove up to Cheviot Labs with it. They checked for fingerprints, and for DNA on the gummed label, but whoever sent it used tap water, not saliva, and apparently handled it with gloves.”
I held out the notarized report from Cheviot’s fingerprint specialist. Bobby grunted and handed it, with the envelope, to his forensic tech.
“A written receipt, please,” I said. “Or I can photograph your expropriation.”
I switched on my phone camera, but Bobby, with an exaggerated scowl, called to his secretary to bring me a receipt. I was supposed to feel guilty for making them do extra work while seizing my property.
Conrad and Bobby exchanged glances; Bobby nodded at Conrad.
“Vic, whether what you’ve put out is really Annie Guzzo’s diary or if it’s a forgery, you could be lighting a fuse on a powerful piece of dynamite,” Conrad said.
Meaning, I was in serious danger. “You think it’s a forgery?” I asked.
“With you, I think anything is possible,” Bobby said. “You and the law know each other well, but you don’t always respect the acquaintance.”
“Unlike people with money and with access to the Illinois Speaker,” I said. “They are sans reproche. That’s comforting.”
“I’m not going to argue that with you,” Bobby said. “You know Illinois politics better than you know the law. Rawlings and I are just saying, it would have been better to bring those pages to us, instead of publishing them first.”
“Got it.” I stood to leave, but Bobby asked Conrad and the tech to step outside.
“Vicki, Rawlings told me about the letter the old Fourth District watch commander wrote, saying he’d sent someone off to the Seventh District. He said you assume that was Tony, right?”
“Right.”
Bobby fingered the fold of skin above his necktie, as if the knot were too tight. “It might have been. Say it was, say Brattigan did send your dad off to face the danger of—well, the dangers he did face in the Seventh. Say it was Rory Scanlon who put him up to it. This diary you’ve conjured wouldn’t be payback for that, would it?”
“Conjure. That is a very loaded word. No one used it when Stella burst forth with a diary of Annie’s that mysteriously appeared in a drawer twenty-five years after her sister-in-law had been pawing through the same place looking for cash.”
“Tap-dance around, clown around, but did you hire someone to create a forgery so you could try to get at Rory Scanlon? If you’re framing him as punishment for upending Tony’s life, you are playing a dangerous game.”
“Tap-dancing, clowning and playing a dangerous game? Way more energetic than I’m up to after getting my nose broken and a whole lot of other injuries.” I leaned forward and kissed Bobby’s cheek. “You know my parents’ memories are sacred to me, Bobby, so anything is possible, but I’m more concerned about someone getting a green light for murder just because he put a new piece of stained glass over a church altar.”
Bobby’s staff officer drove me back to my office. It wasn’t until he dropped me off that I started to feel that prickle along the back of the neck, that fear you get when someone is following you or is training a sniper’s rifle on your neck.
I went through the day with as much focus as I could manage, met with Darraugh Graham and a couple of other Loop clients, took the dogs to the lake, borrowed Jake’s Fiat to go grocery shopping—Luke Edwards had reclaimed the Subaru after our shoot-out near Dead Stick Pond—he’d seen the damage to the rental Taurus on YouTube and hadn’t wanted to risk the Subaru in my hands a day longer.
They struck in the middle of the night. Fast, ruthless, jimmying open the building door, hydraulic ram on my apartment’s steel front door, thugs at the kitchen exit when I tried to escape through the back. The dogs were barking ferociously from Mr. Contreras’s place, but the goons had me bound, gagged, a hood on my head, and flung into a pickup bed before the old man could get them outside. I’d gone to sleep in my clothes, just in case, but they’d moved so fast I didn’t have time to put on shoes.
Three in the morning, couldn’t tell where we were going. Expressway, maybe. South, maybe. Wind whipped underneath the hood, rubbing against my face. After a time I smelled the lake through the sack, and then my eyes were tearing, I was coughing and choking behind the gag. Pet coke dust. We were close to the Guisar slip.