Chapter 3
Down in the private study, Mateo Richi was pouring himself a coffee, and he took one look at the aura rolling off his boss and set the pot down without drinking any of it.
“How’s the girl?”
“Her name is Khloe.” Lorenzo walked past him to the desk and pulled the top drawer. “And she belongs to me now.”
Mateo choked.
“Belongs to— Lorenzo.” He set the cup down with a click. “With respect. Bringing a stray into the penthouse is a security catastrophe. We don’t know her. We don’t know who sent her. That’s not paranoia, that’s the job.”
“I said what I said, Mateo.”
The glare pinned him to the rug.
“She stays under my protection. Level four protocol on the penthouse as of tonight. Nobody goes up there but you, me, Dr. Hayes, and Maria. Nobody. I don’t care if it’s Wright. I don’t care if it’s my own mother.”
Mateo exhaled through his nose, and had the sense not to argue with that particular look. He had seen it four times in eleven years. Three of those times, somebody had died within the week.
“So what’s the play?” he said. “She in trouble?”
“Detective Aaron Miller.” Lorenzo pulled a manila file from the drawer and dropped it on the blotter. “He’s the one who did it.”
Mateo’s eyebrows climbed.
“Miller? Miller the narc. Boss, he’s on our payroll. He’s been useful to us. He’s got two of our names in his desk and he hasn’t used them.” He spread his hands. “If we touch a cop—”
“I don’t care if he wears a badge or the Pope’s hat.”
Lorenzo’s fist came down on the desk. The blotter jumped. The lamp rattled.
“He put his hands on her. He left her battered in a gutter and she crawled into my club because she had nowhere else on this earth to go.” He was up and pacing to the window, and out past the glass the whole grey city lay below him, every tower and every ward and every man in it, all of it his, and none of it any use to him at all in the last eleven hours.
He had spent his life surrounded by people who wanted his money, his power, or his life.
Khloe Bennett had looked at him like he was shelter.
“He’ll kill me,” she’d said, and then, “He has the law.”
The law in my city.
“I want you to pull all of Miller’s debts,” Lorenzo said, and his voice had gone back to that flat, terrible calm. “Every bookmaker, every shark, every casino cage in Cook County. Find out who he owes. Then buy the debt. All of it.”
Mateo was writing.
“Then go to the warehouse district. Have the boys set up the soundproof room. We’re going to invite Detective Miller in for a conversation.”
“And if the precinct comes looking for him?”
Lorenzo turned from the window. There was a smile on his face, and it was lethal, and it was cold.
“Let them. By the time I’m finished with Aaron Miller, the police department will be begging me to keep him.”
For three days, Khloe Bennett did nothing.
She ate soup that Maria brought in on a tray with a linen napkin folded into a triangle. She slept in three-hour increments because her ribs would not permit more. She stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows in the borrowed cashmere shirt and watched the rain come through the city in sheets, and she thought about the fact that she had not once, in three days, flinched at the sound of a door.
She noticed that too. That was the thing she couldn’t stop noticing.
Nobody in this house raised their voice. Not once. Not at each other, not at her, not on the phone. The men who came and went from the penthouse carried weapons and spoke to her with a courtesy so formal it was nearly Victorian, and every one of them called her Miss Bennett, and every one of them meant it.
On the second night she heard Lorenzo in the other room, on a call, and she could not make out the words but she could hear the register of a man speaking very quietly to somebody who was not going to enjoy the next thirty days.
On the third morning, Maria brought her a photograph in a plain envelope and set it on the tray with the coffee and said, “He asked me to give you this. He said you should know it’s done.”
Khloe opened it.
It was a newspaper clipping. Small, page nine, three inches.
May you like
CHICAGO NARCOTICS DETECTIVE FACING FEDERAL INDICTMENT.
She read it four times. Then she folded it in half along the crease and set it down and went to the window and cried, standing up, for a person she no longer had to be.
