I put the magnifier over the notebook, but it didn’t tell me anything. Dark leather or vinyl, could be brown or black, or really any dark color. No lettering, no embossed letters proclaiming Annie Guzzo, Her Private Thoughts on Boom-Boom Warshawski and Sol Mandel.

I went back to piecing together the rest of the collection. There were several shots whose place in the order I couldn’t figure out, but in the one where Annie’s white shirt was dirty, she no longer had the book. I studied her face for a long minute, saw the streak of dirt on her forehead and along her right forearm. Her expression was a mix of guilt and glee—she’d done something she shouldn’t have and gotten away with it.

Whatever that book was, she’d left it somewhere in the bowels of the ballpark. What was in it that she couldn’t keep at home, but thought she could retrieve if she left it at Wrigley? She didn’t know anyone there, unless she was taking for granted that Frank would get the nod from the Cubs that he so desperately wanted.

Boom-Boom couldn’t be bothered with things like journals and diaries; there wasn’t a hope that he’d written about the day, even if Annie’s behavior had meant something special to him. And I doubted he would have paid much attention to the book, not unless it was his, and she was teasing him by running off with it.

I looked at it again, wondering if it might be something else, not the diary that Stella had hammered into my head. A dossier, perhaps? I put the magnifying glass down in frustration—it was impossible to make out any detail. All I could say was that it wasn’t a conventionally shaped diary or book, which was why I’d thought at first it was a clutch purse.

That break-in at Villard’s house. My head was so thick today that I only just put that incident together with Annie.

Thieves had taken some valuable baseball memorabilia, but they’d also stolen photographs. And they’d done it after the story appeared about my bogus biography project. Maybe it was coincidence—maybe the story told random thieves that Villard had valuable Cubs memorabilia in his home. But maybe whoever was pulling the strings in South Chicago knew Annie had taken something to the park that they wanted to make sure stayed buried there.

I felt cold suddenly, and found a sweatshirt on a hook behind my door to wrap around my neck. “Boom-Boom, what were you involved in?” I whispered, shivering. I thought I knew him inside and out, but there was a piece of his life about which I knew nothing.

“You didn’t kill Annie Guzzo, I know that much,” I said to his face on the table. “But what secrets died with you?”

I pulled the pictures together and laid them between sheets of acid-free tissue paper for protection until I had time to scan them. I placed them in the wall safe in my storeroom, looked longingly at my cot, but reminded myself that duty was the stern daughter of something or other. Anyway, Murray was a good investigator, and I was definitely at a point where an extra head would be useful. For the first time in a long time, I was looking forward to seeing him, working with him.

SUICIDE SQUEEZE

I was shutting down my system, stowing one backup drive in the safe, the other in my briefcase, when the building front bell rang. I looked at the monitor: Conrad Rawlings, with an acolyte. I took my time, closed my safe, walked deliberately down the hall to the front door, trying to gather my energy: it is not easy to be at your witty and alert best, which you need in a police encounter, with a broken nose and a head cold.

“Good evening, Lieutenant,” I said formally, stepping into the street and closing the door behind me.

“I need to talk to you,” Conrad said. “Can we do it inside?”

“Can I have a hint?” I asked. “Is this the kind of visit where you hurl abuse at me and threaten to cuff me, or is it information gathering?”

It was hard to read Conrad’s expression in the fading light, but he told his companion to wait for him in the car. I typed in my door code and led him back to my office.

“Wagner got you good, didn’t he,” Conrad said, inspecting my face.

“Wagner?” I repeated.

“How many fights you been in lately? Look in the mirror in case you’ve forgotten.”

“Is Wagner the Dragon’s name? He hadn’t been ID’d when Bernadine Fouchard and I made our statements.”

Conrad thumbed through his iPad. “That’s right. We didn’t know him then, but we printed him this morning when he came out of surgery. He’d been arrested a good few times and did a nickel in Joliet for assault. I need to know if you were anywhere near him today.”

I backed away, astonished. “Any special reason you’re asking?”

Conrad took my shoulders in his hands so he could look directly at my face. “Can you prove where you spent the day?” He spoke with an unsettling urgency.

“What is going on?”

“Arturo Wagner is dead.”

I sat down hard. Not that I would shed a bucket of tears over him, but it’s hard news to handle, the news you’ve killed another person. “They told me his jaw was broken and he was concussed, but no one suggested his life was in danger.”

“No one thought the boy was going to die. Which is why I need you to tell me how you spent your day.”

I stared at him. “Could you please tell me what’s going on? Your bangers beat me pretty hard and I’m not up to solving riddles.”

“Answer the question and then I’ll tell you.”

“You know, I think I’m going to record this conversation,” I said.

“I’m trying to keep this from being a police matter, or a state’s attorney matter, Vic.”

“And a recording will help.” I brought my system back up and turned on the recording software before I spoke again. In the background my cell phone barked: Murray texting, wanting to know where I was. I ignored Conrad’s growl to let it keep and wrote back, Soon. Cops in my face.

“Does the state’s attorney plan to give my name to a grand jury?” I asked Conrad.

“Vic, please believe me—this is for your sake: tell me where you were this afternoon.”

“He was murdered this afternoon? Not as a result of our fight?”

Conrad nodded. “He was too doped up to answer questions this morning, but when I sent one of my guys over to the hospital this afternoon, Wagner was dead. The hospital pathologist says he was suffocated. You know Saint Raph’s—it’s almost as big a warren as County. Nurses are stretched thin, no one keeps a regular eye on the wards, and our only worry was having a violent perp there, so he was cuffed. And the state’s attorney will fry my guts if she knows I told you all this. Where were you?”

Prisoners are always handcuffed to the bed when they’re hospitalized. It’s inhumane, makes it hard for people to recover from gunshots and other debilitating injuries, but in Arturo Wagner’s case I didn’t find myself minding too much.

“I was videoconferencing at one-thirty; at two-thirty I was driving to Evanston. I spent the afternoon with a retired member of the Cubs front office, so it would be hard for anyone to make a case that I was forty-five miles the other way. Okay?”

Conrad’s shoulders sagged in relief. “Thank God for that, Ms. W., thank God for that. Someone sent an anonymous message to the state’s attorney saying you had an animus on account of the Fouchard girl being related to your cousin, and that you went over to Saint Raph’s to finish off Wagner.”

I was silent for a beat, remembering Stella. I told Conrad about her lunchtime call, ordering me to South Chicago.

“You didn’t go?” he said. “And I can believe this?”

“That’s my rap, isn’t it,” I agreed. “I drop everything and gallop off in all directions at once.”

I played the voice mail for Conrad.

“The Guzzos have been so unpredictable and so angry that I thought they might be trying to get me to violate the restraining order so they could have me arrested. Only—now it looks as though they were trying to frame me for murder. But on whose command?”