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“Interesting theory. You mind if we work the case, though? Take statements, canvass, at least ID our victim? Maybe we can wait until the ME has actually had a chance to look at her?”
He scowled. “Never said we weren’t gonna do all that, but we’re ahead of the game here. Sometimes killers are stupid, Foster. It’s okay to take the win. Stop trying to work so hard.”
Lonergan walked away, heading for their witness, Pratt, leaving Foster to bring up the rear. There were things she could have said in the heat of the moment but didn’t. Right now, there were more important things, like identifying their victim. She just wished they didn’t have to do it in a fishbowl. The bridge was packed. News cameras and on-the-street reporters now clogged the rail, their cameras pointed right at their crime scene tape.
“We’ll probably find her clothes and ID in the river too,” Lonergan said when she caught up to him. He snapped his fingers again, getting the attention of the nearest officer, which made Foster cringe. “Hey, you. Take a couple of your buddies and check along the edge there, will ya? See if you see anything floating that could be hers. And do not come back here and tell me you’ve found another body.”
Foster stopped. “Are you always like this?”
“Like what?”
“Condescending. Disrespectful.”
The blank look on his face answered her question. “A by-the-book cop and a bleeding heart? Boy, did I hit the jackpot. Look, Foster, I can take one but not both, all right?”
An officer ran up holding a pink backpack that was dripping wet. “Found this floating a few yards east. It was caught up on debris. Could be hers.”
He handed the bag to Foster, who unzipped it and peered inside, picking through the contents. Lonergan was suddenly interested. “A wallet,” Foster said. “Thank God.” She opened it, finding a driver’s license stuck inside the clear plastic slot, the photograph matching the face under the leaves. “Margaret Ann Birch. Nineteen.” Foster checked everywhere before pulling out a campus ID. “A student at DePaul.” She handed the wallet to Lonergan. “That’s a start.”
She kept looking, rifling through the pack and plucking out a compact paisley umbrella, a handmade accessories pouch with the name Peggy stitched on the outside, and a small handmade sign with the words JUSTICE NOW. The black marker was still legible, though the laminated cardboard it was written on was soaked through and near pulp. Foster also slid out a waterlogged paperback copy of Paradise Lost. “Milton. English major, maybe? And Peggy instead of the formal Margaret.” She gingerly held up the sign. “Looks like she was at yesterday’s march.”
Lonergan searched the wallet. “Besides the license and the school ID, there’s a dorm key card; Social Security card; Starbucks rewards card, two ticks left on; a folded-up dry cleaner’s ticket; and a butt load of quarters in a coin purse.”
“For her laundry,” Foster said. “The machines.”
“Wouldn’t know. Didn’t go to college. I went to the Marines instead. Didn’t need quarters.”
Foster lifted her head out of the backpack. “No cell phone. What nineteen-year-old kid doesn’t have a cell phone?”
“Ainsley probably tossed that too.”
“Maybe it was tossed,” she said, “and maybe it was Ainsley.”
“You’re complicating my life, here.” Lonergan walked away, sliding his phone out of his pocket as he went. “We’re going to find her clothes, her phone, and that knife at the bottom of the river,” he called back to her. “Count on it.”
She stared at the lonely spot where Peggy Birch had been found. They didn’t know much at this point, despite Lonergan’s confident pronouncements, but at least they had her name and a way to contact her people.
She called to a PO. “We need a thorough search all along here, please,” she said, pointing along the riverbank, a quarter mile at least toward the lake. “We’re looking for anything that could be hers. And could someone get me another update on the guy they took to the hospital? Thank you.”
She gripped the pink backpack as though she were keeping it safe for Birch, who’d carried it just a few hours ago, likely giving her bag little thought or care. Just a pack, until it was everything.
Foster tilted her head up past the destruction and the mess and the work to the wide, open autumn sky. “Peggy Birch.”
CHAPTER 5
Amelia breezed into her studio, peeled off her jacket, and flung it on the slouchy, catchall couch pushed against the wall. She had gotten Bodie settled back at his apartment, but that hadn’t settled her. In fact, the opposite was true. Bodie was out of Westhaven and on his own again. As long as he’d been in there, she hadn’t had to worry where he was or what he was doing. He’d been somewhere he couldn’t harm himself or—she loathed to say—anyone else.
She looked around her place at the blank canvases leaning against the walls, the paint-splotched floors, and the unused paint—ready for her brushes—stacked in a corner. Then she stood in front of the large painting that ran almost half the length of the space, floor to ceiling. She approached it almost reverently and took in the swirls of color, the brushstrokes, the smell of the oil paint, and placed her hand on it as though feeling for a heartbeat. Hers. All of it. Bodie needed something that was his.
She rolled her sleeves up, anxious to get started, and slipped into a big shirt that served as a painter’s smock. She felt restless, uneasy for the first time in a month, because Bodie was outside, where anything could happen and where whatever happened, she would have to fix it.
Following women. Stalking. That was what he was into? It was creepy, but she couldn’t pretend she didn’t know when he’d begun to obsess over pretty girls with big blue eyes, though he always seemed to vacillate between wanting them and fearing them. She could pinpoint it to the very day, in fact, the very moment when they discovered at twelve who their father was and what he did in the basement he’d padlocked shut. Until it wasn’t. Until they ventured below . . . and saw. Bodie became awkward and sullen, disconnected afterward. She found art. She discovered that she could pour everything she felt or thought or feared into a canvas and have her world all make sense. She could bring order to chaos, perspective to the incomprehensible. Art, her art, was life and emotion, the air in her lungs, her every breath. It was alive, and it was hers, and no one could take it away.
Amelia slipped out of her shoes and socks and stood barefoot on the painter’s tarp surrounded by the painter’s things that saved her and fed her and made her different from her brother.
She heard a rattling from the back room and turned to see her studio mate, Joie Lenk, stroll up front, startling when she saw her.
“Oh shit! I didn’t hear you come in,” Joie said. “How long have you been here?”
Amelia smiled and watched Joie, her brown face dusted and smeared with plaster of Paris. She wiped her hands clean on a wet towel. Joie was artsy through and through, from the purple streak in her dark curly hair down to her plaster-splattered pink Crocs.
“Not long,” Amelia said. “I didn’t think you’d be here.”
Joie stuffed the towel into the pocket of her dusty overalls. “I had a spark of inspiration and wanted to test it.” She padded over to her work in progress, a sculpture of Winged Victory that she’d been working on for months, only Joie’s Nike wore combat boots and a Wonder Woman tee. The plaster creation stood six feet tall, its wings spanning three feet across, the piece commissioned by a women’s outreach center in Andersonville. “But I didn’t expect to see you today. It’s Monday. You never come in on Mondays.”
“I needed to paint,” Amelia said.
“Well, if you want the place to yourself, I can bounce. That inspiration I thought I had isn’t panning out.”
“No worries,” Amelia said. “Stay. I don’t mind the company.”
The scrape of dog claws on hardwood broke their exchange. They’d woken Winston, Joie’s English bulldog, whose doggy pad was in the back room.
“Uh-oh,” Joie said. “You’ve done it now. Prepare yourself.”
Amelia waited for it, grinning as Winston, a waddling meatball of a thing, ran into the room, his nails clicking against the floor, mouth open, pink tongue out. The dog made a beeline for her. Though Winston went home with Joie, Am knew he loved her best, and the feeling was mutual.
She plopped down on the dusty tarp and scratched Winston behind the ears, rubbing his belly and kissing him on the snout.
Joie peeked from behind the plaster. “You’re spoiling him.”
Amelia gave him one last snuggle. “He deserves to be spoiled. He’s a prince.”
Joie grumped. “A prince that eats like a horse.”
“All right, boy.” Am stood and dusted off her jeans. “Enough cuddles for now. Next time it’s my turn.” Winston studied her for a moment, his big head cocked to the side, then waddled away and plopped down at Joie’s feet.
Joie donned protective glasses, ready to get started. “Everything okay with your sister?”
Am smiled. It was one of her many reinventions, necessary to fit who she was now. A new person who had a younger sister, not a twin brother prone to mental breakdown. This new person also had a mother in Florida and a father who’d died when Am was just eighteen. She had added in a hardscrabble upbringing in a small midwestern town far from here. It made her success now all the more impressive to people. It also made her seem interesting, industrious, relatable. The truth was, she hadn’t laid eyes on Tom Morgan since he’d dropped her and Bodie off at the University of Michigan with their tuition paid and a nice nest egg set aside. Then he’d ghosted them. He was just gone, moved, without leaving a forwarding address. Bodie, she knew, was fine with that. He had feared their father and needed to believe that he was dead. But Amelia knew he wasn’t dead. She could still feel him, sense him, and she wasn’t afraid. Where could he be now? she often wondered. Was he in another country? Had he chosen a new name? She supposed, in the end, it didn’t really matter. He’d made his mark. “She fell and broke her ankle,” Amelia replied. She conveyed just the right amount of sympathy and concern. “My sis has always been a bit of a klutz. Six weeks, then out of the cast and back to her life.”
Joie went back to her plaster. “I have a cousin like that. She’s broken practically every bone in her body, and she’s barely forty. I told her she needed to roll herself in Bubble Wrap.” Joie peeked around again, this time with a devilish grin. “She told me to go fuck myself.”
Amelia picked up a brush, letting it breathe in her hand, then she approached her canvas, deciding where to start. “Family, huh? Can’t live with them—”
Joie chuckled. “Can’t strangle them for the insurance money.”
Amelia took a bead on her feelings, then lightly dipped her brush in gray paint. She thought about Bodie, still rudderless at their age. She thought of the old Am and their house of secrets. It was a wonder she and Bodie had survived to do as well as they were doing, but that just showed how resilient people could be. Life always found a way. Amelia painted a small padlock, then moved back to assess it. There were many locks in the painting. She gently dipped her right index finger into the paint and smeared crimson against her thumb, then stepped forward again and pressed her finger lightly to the canvas. Then she painted a door around the mark. There were also many doors.
If she closed her eyes, she knew she’d see what she always did. A woman. The basement steps. The stillest, bluest eyes and hair like fire. She hadn’t been able to tear her eyes away from the unimaginable—severed feet and hands, a savaged middle, and blood snaking down the basement drain. Her father’s doing. A father to whom she and Bodie were inextricably bound. A father who killed for sport. Could a healthy tree grow from a twisted root?
“Families are complicated, that’s for sure,” Amelia said as she wiped her fingers off against her thigh. “Some more than others.”
Joie peeked around her work in progress, her eyes blinking inside the goggles. “What’s that?”
“Nothing,” Amelia said, sweeping her brush over the image of the door, watching the mark disappear. “Just talking to myself.”
CHAPTER 6
Foster and Lonergan swept into the ER and badged their way through to the treatment area. They were feeling a bit raw, having just come from the home of Peggy Birch’s parents to notify them that their daughter, their baby, was dead. Foster could still hear Peggy’s mother’s wailing in her ears and see the ruined look on her face. No one wanted to be the cop who relayed the news that would cripple a person forever, but it came with the job. And it had to be done delicately, with compassion. It had surprised her that Lonergan had managed to do both, that his heavy-handedness and assholery had limits. They hadn’t spoken in the car, not wanting to move on from the Birches’ misery quite so quickly. Instead, they’d sat in the moment, giving solemnity its due and bracing for the next hard thing.
Ainsley had been placed in a back bay as far away from other patients as the crowded, busy space would allow. There was an officer standing in front of the drawn privacy curtain when they approached. He hopped to, ready to give his report.
“The doctor’s in there with him now,” Officer Morton said, his hazel eyes sharp and tuned in. “Evidence techs were in gathering up his clothes, taking photos. They left about a half hour ago. Kid was slow to wake up. He was really out of it.”
“You get anything out of him?” Lonergan asked.
“Not much. Don’t think he was sure where he was. He obviously got a bad batch of something. I’ve seen a couple of these. It’s not booze. It’s gotta be drugs.”
“That your medical opinion, Officer Morton?” Foster asked pointedly.
Morton pulled up. “He’s not my first blissed-out druggie. But you’re right. I’m not the doc. Could be a lot of things.”
The beeps and pings and blips from the machines underscored the hurried medical inquiries from harried nurses and doctors speeding from bay to bay, trying to do fifty things at once, knowing there was a full waiting room outside.
Foster stared at Morton. “We’ll see.”
A Hispanic doctor stood at the bedside, shining an ophthalmoscope into the eyes of a young Black man sitting up in bed. He was wearing a mint-green hospital gown. Foster’s breath caught. Ainsley was a boy, a kid, with big brown eyes, tawny beige skin, and short curly hair. For a moment, she saw her son lying there as she’d seen him countless times in similar faces on the street and in the grocery store and in sappy TV commercials. But this moment was particularly glaring. Ainsley was nineteen, as Reggie would have been in just over a week. She was acutely aware the day was approaching, that the passage of time was as steady and foreboding as the measured sweep of a metronome’s needle.
Foster stepped closer to the bed and addressed the doctor. “We’d like to talk to him, if he’s up to it.” She glanced down at the doctor’s ID hanging from a lanyard festooned with bits of tape, pens, and clips. He was Raphael Santos, the attending physician. “Dr. Santos.”
Santos stepped back, peeling off his medical gloves, tossing them into the biohazard bin behind him. “He’s awake but foggy. Up to him if he talks. I’ll leave you to it, but I’d appreciate some efficiency here. Your techs were buzzing around here like crazy, now you guys. Last thing we need is a circus, all right?”
Lonergan, who’d eased in behind Foster, nearly growled at Santos. “It’ll take what it takes, Doc. You don’t see us tellin’ you how long to take to yank an appendix out, do you?”
“Just keep it down,” Santos said, uncowed. “It’s a hospital, not the county jail. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have patients to see.” He sneered at Lonergan before walking off.
Ainsley’s eyes darted around the room as though he were trying to orient himself to where he was and how he’d gotten here. He looked scared, small in the bed. This was the unconscious man with blood on his jacket?
Lonergan moved around to stand on the opposite side. It must have been an intimidating flank to the kid, and as she looked over at Lonergan’s full-on cop face, she was sure he meant it to be just that.
She cleared her throat. “Keith Ainsley? I’m Detective Foster, Chicago Police. This is my . . . partner, Detective Lonergan. We’d like to ask you a few questions. Are you okay with that?” She was aware she had stumbled over the word partner and looked up to see that Lonergan had noticed.
Ainsley fixed glazed eyes on her, his face a wall of confusion. “I guess. What’s going on? Why am I here? Why’s there a cop outside, and why were they taking my picture?”
“There’s been an incident,” Foster said. “We’re hoping you can help us clear it up. Okay?”
He flicked a frightened look at Lonergan. “What kind of incident?”
“Where were you last night around midnight?” Lonergan asked.
“Did somebody jump me? Is that it?” Ainsley asked, his voice cracking. “Where are my clothes? Did they get my wallet? My phone?”
Lonergan frowned. “Jumped you?”
Foster shot Lonergan a warning look and gave a slight shake of the head. She didn’t want him antagonizing the kid, shutting him down. Lonergan scowled and let her take the lead, but he didn’t look happy about it. “Do you remember being on the Riverwalk?” she asked. “Maybe meeting someone there?”
Ainsley’s brow furrowed, as though he was trying desperately to recall something. Anything. “The Riverwalk? No, I don’t remember being there. I was . . .” He stopped. “Somewhere else.”
She focused on his face. It appeared he was being truthful. “Alone?”
“And what’s ‘somewhere else’ mean?” Lonergan asked.
“I’m a little fuzzy . . .”
“You were found unconscious on the Riverwalk,” Foster said. “In close proximity to a murder victim. A young woman. She’d been stabbed.”
Lonergan took a step closer to the bed. “And you had blood on your clothes. Remember anything now?”
“What? No. I . . . I . . .” Ainsley’s eyes searched the walls for anything that would ground him. “That doesn’t sound right. You’ve got the wrong guy.”
