Chapter 4
The air in the warehouse smelled of rust, damp concrete, and metallic fear.
A single industrial bulb hung from a reinforced steel beam and swung, and the shadows it threw across the concrete moved slowly back and forth like something breathing. Detective Aaron Miller sat strapped to a heavy steel chair in the middle of them.
His wrists were zip-tied so tight the plastic had bitten a line into his skin. A black bag had been over his head for the first hour, and when they took it off, the arrogant sneer had been replaced by something loose and wet around the mouth.
He had been taken from his unmarked squad car in the lot behind a 7-Eleven. Two hours ago. Nobody had said a word to him since.
Mateo Richi stood at the edge of the light, cleaning under his fingernails with a stiletto blade and not saying anything, which was worse.
The steel doors groaned.
Lorenzo Marchesi walked in wearing a three-piece midnight blue suit, and he looked like a man arriving at the opera — hair perfect, cuffs perfect, the coat buttoned — and that was the detail Aaron Miller would remember, if he was going to remember anything.
“Marchesi.” Aaron forced a chuckle up out of a dry throat. “Look, if this is about the docks shipment last week, I swear to God I didn’t touch it. I skim a little off the street dealers, you know that. Everybody knows that. But I would never go near your family’s direct line.”
Lorenzo didn’t answer.
He walked a slow half-circle around the chair, and his footsteps echoed in the cavernous dark, and he stopped directly in front of the man and looked down at him. There was nothing in his face at all. Not anger, not appetite. The look of a man assessing an insect that had made the mistake of being indoors.
“You have heavy hands, Detective Miller,” Lorenzo said softly.
He pulled a pair of black leather gloves from his coat pocket and drew them on, one finger at a time.
Aaron frowned. “What? What are you talking about?”
Lorenzo reached into his breast pocket and took out a photograph. He held it up into the harsh light of the bulb.
Dr. Hayes’s medical photograph. Khloe Bennett’s collarbone and shoulder. And around her throat — printed into the pale skin in five distinct bands — the shape of a man’s hand.
Aaron’s face drained.
“That—” he said. “That crazy— She went to you. Listen to me. She’s a liar. She’s hysterical, she makes things up, she’s—”
Lorenzo moved faster than a striking snake.
The gloved fist connected with Aaron Miller’s jaw with the wet crack of bone giving way. His head whipped sideways and a tooth came out of his mouth and skittered across the concrete.
“Her name,” Lorenzo whispered, seizing him by the hair and wrenching his head back, “is Khloe. And you will not speak of her again. You will not think of her. You will not even breathe in a way that suggests you remember she exists.”
“You can’t kill a cop.” Aaron’s voice was thick with blood. He was crying, and he hadn’t noticed. “The department will tear you apart. They’ll bring the feds. You kill me and you sign your own death warrant.”
Lorenzo let go of his hair and stepped back and straightened his cuffs.
“Kill you?” he said. And he smiled.
“Aaron. Death is a release. It’s a mercy.” He inclined his head a fraction of an inch. “And I am entirely out of mercy tonight.”
He signaled, and Mateo stepped forward and set a thick manila folder on Aaron Miller’s lap.
“While you were busy beating a defenseless woman,” Lorenzo said, “my accountants were busy. We bought your outstanding gambling debts from the Petro Syndicate. All two hundred thousand dollars of it. That is the small item.”
Aaron stared down at the folder with his one good eye.
“We also wired two million dollars from an offshore cartel account directly into your personal bank account, and we did it in a way that will survive forensic audit. Twenty minutes ago, Mr. Richi placed three phone calls — Internal Affairs, the Bureau, and the Drug Enforcement Administration. And we left a ledger in your apartment, on your desk, in your handwriting, detailing how you have been selling out undercover agents to the Sinaloa cartel for four years.”
“No.” Aaron thrashed against the zip ties. “No, no, no — the cartel will slaughter me—”
“The cartel will find you,” Lorenzo agreed, “because you will be in federal custody, in a system you have spent your career exploiting, with two million dollars in a traced account and the death of a cooperating witness on paper with your signature on it. The Mexicans will want the money and the Bureau will want the files, and both of them know where you sleep.”
He leaned down, and his voice dropped into something almost intimate.
“You are going to a federal penitentiary where a dirty cop does not last a week. But you will not die quickly. The inmates will see to that, and you will spend the rest of a long, small, miserable life looking over your shoulder for the knife in the dark.” He straightened. “And in those final moments, I want you to remember the girl you thought was powerless.”
He turned his back on the sobbing man.
“Mateo.”
“Yes, boss.”
“Break his hands. Both of them. Make sure he never makes a fist again.” Lorenzo walked toward the doors, and his voice carried back without any effort at all. “Then dump him on the steps of the federal courthouse.”
“With pleasure, boss.”
Mateo picked up a length of heavy steel pipe from the corner.
Lorenzo walked out into the cold Chicago night, and behind him the muffled screaming began, and it followed him across the lot and then the rain took it, and he stood for a moment with his face turned up into it.
He felt nothing. He had arranged for a man to be destroyed with the meticulous cruelty of an actuary, and he felt absolutely nothing, and it occurred to him — standing there in the wet, with the door shutting behind him on a sound he had heard too many times to count — that the nothing was the problem.
May you like
He had not felt anything for eleven years.
And a girl had shown up bleeding on his rug, and he had felt everything at once.
