“Should I just get you a key?” Lynch asked. “Save you some time?”
“Wouldn’t save me that much time,” said Ferguson. “You’ve got a shitty lock.”
“Matter if I got a better one?”
“Not really.”
“So who’s your friend?”
“Friend might be pushing it. She’s a sociopath that works for me. Say hi to Lynch, Chen.”
Chen nodded.
Lynch nodded back. “OK, Ferguson, what do you want?”
“Wondering if maybe you’ve had any second thoughts about my last offer.”
“Why? Something changed?”
“You got pulled off the case, for one thing. Can’t be real happy about that.”
“No.”
“Thing is, I got pulled off, too. You might have heard about it. Little thing at the Palmer House?”
Lynch paused a moment at that.
“Guess when your guys pull, they pull a little harder.”
“Think of it as an early retirement offer. I declined.”
Lynch held his coat open, showed Ferguson his gun. “I gotta take this out again, break it down, all that shit? Or can I just sit down?”
“Old friends like us? Just have a seat. You do anything I don’t like, Chen’d kill you before I could anyway.”
Lynch sat on the couch.
“So, your offer,” Lynch said. “Yesterday you were offering the full if unofficial cooperation of the United States intelligence community to augment an official investigation by the Chicago Police Department. Now, I’m off the case. You’re off the case. So now you’re offering what? You and a tiny Chinese sociopath augmenting, basically, just me. I got that right?”
“Pretty much.”
“Guys from the hotel still trying to kill you?”
Ferguson raised his face, his eyes hard.
“Guys from the hotel are dead.”
“Point taken. To rephrase, whoever sent the guys from the hotel still trying to kill you?”
“Seems likely.”
“They gonna send more guys?”
“Probably.”
“And if I’m around, they’ll kill me, too?”
“Could be we kill them.”
“Always nice to have that to fall back on,” Lynch said. “You want to explain to me why I want in on this?”
Ferguson sighed, his voice getting pedantic, like Lynch was a deliberately willful student.
“Because you’re pretty sure that whatever is going on now has something to do with your father’s murder. And you’re pretty sure that if the Hurleys and my bosses have their way, it all goes back under the rug.”
Lynch leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
“I thought you wanted it under the rug. Wanted it buried with your shooter. Fisher, right? Ishmael Fisher?”
Ferguson raised his eyebrows. “So you got the name.” Turned to look at Chen. “Told you he was good.” Chen just nodded. Ferguson turned back to Lynch.
“Yeah, under the rug looked pretty good up until they tried to kill me. Now my only shot at living through the week is to bring the whole thing down around their ears.”
Lynch turned to Chen. “That your position too?”
Chen nodded.
“OK,” said Lynch. “How do we do it?”
“Get all the info you can to your reporter friend. Once her editors hear about this, they’ll start having visions of Pulitzers and book deals, and the calls will start. Gonna take them a while to run things down, check facts, but word will percolate, and that will keep the pressure on the other team. Puts them on a tighter clock. Keeps them from spending much time looking for me, for one thing, because they’ll know they gotta close the book on Fisher ASAP. More pressure we put on, the better the chances that somebody makes a mistake. Meanwhile, we find a way to get Fisher and my ex-boss and all his boys in the same place at the same time.”
“I might be able to help with that,” Lynch said. “Theory we’ve got right now is this Fisher is targeting descendants of people tied to all this from 1971.”
Ferguson nodded. “Pretty much the theory we got right now, too.”
“There’s someone most people don’t know about who’d be way up on his list.”
Ferguson raised his eyebrows. “Yeah?”
“You know Stefanski had a kid?” Lynch asked.
“No,” Chen said.
“She can speak?” Lynch asked.
“Doesn’t often,” Ferguson answered. “Tell me about this kid.”
Lynch told Ferguson what he knew about Stefanski, Delatanno, the adoption. As he talked, Chen started clicking away on her laptop.
“But you got no name?” Ferguson asked.
“No.”
“Give me another minute,” Chen said. More clicking.
“Don’t suppose you need my WiFi password?” Lynch asked.
Chen looked up for a moment, the typing paused, shook her head, then looked back down at the keyboard.
“Adoption records will be sealed,” Lynch said. “That’s not going to be on a public server anywhere.”
“Neither is your banking information,” Chen said without pausing. “You currently have $5,412.34 in checking.”
Chen kept banging away, jotting the occasional note. Finally, she looked up.
“Pearl Spritzen. Born March 13 1964. In and out of foster homes, juvenile record, then several arrests through the early Eighties. Drugs and prostitution mostly. Died of AIDS on August 6, 1989. She had a daughter, who was adopted out of Catholic Social Services. Andrea Manning, born November 30, 1980. She lives on the north side at Broadway and Sheridan. She is, apparently, a Catholic. The closest Catholic church is Saint Mary’s. Manning is listed in the current church bulletin as a lector and the director of their religious education program, so we can assume she is devout and therefore attends confession.”
“It’s Holy Week,” Lynch said.
“So?” said Ferguson.
“You’re Catholic and you’re the confession going type, the one day of the year you’re probably going to go is Good Friday. Check the church, Chen. I bet you they’ve got a penance service on Friday.”
More clicking. “11am,” Chen said.
The room went quiet for a minute.
“Target, time and place,” Ferguson said.
“Do we figure Fisher knows?” asked Lynch.
“Every time we figure he doesn’t know something, we get our ass kicked,” said Ferguson.
“And do we figure Weaver knows?”
“We can make sure he does,” said Chen.
“So you’ll have everyone you need in the same place,” Lynch said.
“Right.”
“And then?”
“Then we shoot them.”
Clean up after one bloodbath by arranging a new one? Lynch thought. But he figured he’d keep that to himself. Still had time to find an angle, work this out some other way. In the meantime, he needed Ferguson and Chen on his side. He looked up and saw Chen staring at him like she could read his mind.
“You two want to get out of here maybe?” Lynch said. “I got my mother’s wake tonight, got some personal business to tend to.”
Ferguson just nodded, stood up, slid the .22 into his coat. Chen closed the laptop and the two of them walked to the door.
“We are sorry about your loss,” she said reflexively as she passed him, the words coming out of her like they were preprogrammed and somebody’d hit the right button. The bullshit official phrase of condolence. Lynch thought back on all the times he’d said that, families of victims, friends of victims. Hoped he’d managed a little more sincerity, a little more feeling.
Be hard to manage any less.
CHAPTER 49 – CHICAGO
“We sure on this?”
Weaver was talking to Paravola, pushing back on some new intel that might point at Fisher’s next target.
“I’ve hacked it all the way back to the womb. This Spritzen was Manning’s mother, and Spritzen’s mother was Tina Delatanno. Hired at Chicago’s Streets and Sanitation summer, 1963, and fired a few months later. She was Stefanski’s secretary. Intel on Stefanski we already have says he used to screw all his secretaries, so yeah, she matches up every way I can match her. I got hospital records, adoption records, Chicago employment records, Social Security. Now, Stefanski knocking this Delatanno up, that lead came out of your people. Still, if this is accurate, then you’re going to love this next bit…”