“Cayne,” I said, picking up the phone.
“Solve your case yet, hotshot?”
It was Burke.
“The ducks are starting to line up,” I said.
“Don’t bullshit me,” Burke returned. “You’re still looking for threads to pull. How was your visit with Culpepper?”
I didn’t have to ask Burke how he had heard about our little tea party. He had eyes and ears everywhere, even in K-Town. “Things were chummy,” I said.
“Be careful with that crew,” Burke said. “Culpepper will order you killed just as easy as he gets his thousand-dollar shoes shined. The man has absolutely no heart. Life is like one of his old suits. When he no longer has any use for it, he just throws it away.”
“And thus the name Ice.”
“For good damn reason,” Burke said. “The thug killed his own brother-in-law to consolidate power over his cartel.”
“A real family man.”
“Culpepper has one family—his bank accounts. Just watch your back and front. You ruffled some feathers over there. He put a call in to check on you.”
I wasn’t surprised. Chicagoans were well versed in how the city really did its business. It was widely accepted that “creative businessmen” like Ice Culpepper had an unwritten understanding of coexistence with CPD. They weren’t friends and they weren’t enemies, but they stayed out of each other’s way and went about their own work. Sometimes they had conflicts of interest and settlements had to be negotiated; other times they relied on each other for information and help. A mutually beneficial barter system. Ice had someone on the inside. They all did. And there were some cops who drove expensive foreign cars and lived in houses way above the means of their city salaries. That was how business was done in Chicago.
“Ice specifically wanted to know who had your back,” Burke said.
“And you held the winning ticket.”
“Let’s just say he knows you’re not a lone ranger.”
“Your support is overwhelming.”
“Just move tight on this,” Burke said. “He’s got plenty of friends upstairs. I don’t wanna get fucked. Remember that winning ticket I’m holding is still just a piece of paper. It can be thrown away.”
The line went dead.
8
I WAS SITTING OVER a delectable plate of barbecue baby back ribs and a loaded baked potato at Bandera, one of my favorite lunch spots on the northern part of Michigan Avenue. This was the first time I had eaten here since Julia left me a year ago, breaking off our engagement by running off to Paris with some stockbroker she had met during a spin class at the East Bank Club. This had been one of our favorite restaurants, so I had avoided it in hopes of suppressing the memory of all the great times we’d had here. My therapist said that two years was enough time. It was unhealthy for me to continue blacking out areas of the city that Julia and I had once enjoyed. So, here I was taking another step in my recovery, and positioned across from me was Carolina Espinoza, the administrative supervisor at police headquarters in the Bureau of Investigative Services. She looked equally smart and beautiful in a tapered black pantsuit.
“You haven’t asked me to lunch in months,” Carolina said. “And when you do, you need a favor. Any other girl might start feeling some kind of way about that.”
“Guilty as charged,” I said, raising my hands. “Would it matter if I apologized?”
“Only because you look so damn cute in that shirt.” She winked, then used her fork to separate the bacon bits from the rest of her salad. “Tinsley Gerrigan was quite a busy girl.”
“A good busy or a bad busy?” I asked.
“Depends on your perspective,” Carolina said. “I’d be willing to bet that it wasn’t the kind of busy that would’ve met her family’s approval.”
“That is if they knew about all of her busyness.”
“Yes, then there’s that.”
We were at my favorite table in the window tucked into the corner. Julia and I’d always sat here. Now I shared it with Carolina and felt okay with it. I could see the heavy lunch crowd flowing along Michigan Avenue like a giant organism. Street performers beat drums and juggled bowling pins; panhandlers kept one eye on their tattered signs and the other eye on the lookout for menacing cops. This was the Gold Coast, after all, the pride and joy of Chicago’s downtown shopping district. God forbid someone walking out of Hermès be asked for a quarter as they slipped into the back seat of their Bentley with their $35,000 crocodile Birkin bag.
Carolina reached into her handbag—which was not a Birkin bag—and produced a large envelope and slid it across the table. I reluctantly pulled myself from the pile of ribs, wiped my fingers carefully, then examined the envelope. Three different groups of papers had been stapled together. There also was a single spreadsheet with several highlighted areas.
“I took Tinsley’s number and formed a timeline,” Carolina said, leaning over to show me her work. “The spreadsheet groups the calls two ways. First by the caller. Then by the date. It also tells you the time of day they spoke and for how long.”
She took one of the stapled packets and flipped it to the last page. There was a list of names, some of which I recognized immediately. One of them was a starting forward for the Chicago Bulls. Maybe he had been a previous boyfriend.
“I don’t have her text messages yet,” Carolina said. “But these are all the people she either called or who called her. I’ve ranked them from the greatest number of calls to the least. And next to their names I’ve put how many times she’s spoken to them over
