“I can’t figure out background noise on this,” I said, listening to the recording again. “Was Sebastian in the room with a device, or did he plant a bug, or was he eavesdropping?”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass if he was standing on his head juggling beer bottles while he recorded it.” Tyler’s expression was fierce. “He’s a punk. As of this morning, he is barred from this job site. If he’s smart, he will find a new line of work, because I will make sure no one hires him again as an engineer.”

I had an uneasy feeling that Sebastian wasn’t ever going to work at anything again, but I only said, “It would help to know what project they’re talking about, even if it isn’t one that your firm, or the contract firm Sebastian works for, cares about.”

Tyler said, “This is a needle in a haystack, Warshawski. Too many projects, too many building and zoning permits in play all over the Metro area.”

He turned to Aliana. “Make a copy of the file for Warshawski. Put another on a thumb drive for me and then delete it from the hard drive. And then we’d better stop wasting the Virejas project’s money and get back to work.”

While Aliana uploaded the recording to a couple of clean drives, Tyler unlocked the door. Angry—and vocal—young architects and engineers crowded into the room.

“Easy, boys and girls,” Tyler said. “Aliana discovered a security breach in one of our machines this morning. We called in this woman here to try to sort it out. We’re good to go now, so let’s get going.”

I put the drive into my hip pocket. All the way down to the ground, all the way across the pockmarked dusty ground, I felt as though the device were burning through my jeans into my butt. I drove quickly to my office, keeping a jittery eye out for tails, and got the file uploaded to the Mac as soon as I was in the door. It wasn’t until I’d stored it both in my backup drives and in the Cloud that I finally stopped to think.

Pay to play. That is the phrase that defines Illinois politics. The speaker was threatening to block permits for some kind of project. The recording was unclear, but the word might have been “zoning” or “building.”

Zoning permits are the fiefdoms of Chicago’s aldermen. Pay isn’t great for service in City Hall, but contractors put campaign donations into the pockets of their alderman in exchange for zoning permits and zoning exceptions. Rory Scanlon was the Tenth Ward committeeman, which meant he played a role in routing those donations to the Tenth Ward alderman’s nest egg.

Uncle Jerry, down there on the South Side, he could have been doing dirty work for Rory Scanlon. I tried to imagine a big project in South Chicago that some crony of Rory’s needed to bid on, something big enough that it was worth threatening the project owner. There was a lot of talk of putting housing, offices and even a theme park on the two thousand acres where the old USX Works had stood, but if Scanlon wanted friends of his considered for those jobs, he’d go directly to the project owners himself. No threats necessary, just his friendly offers to make people feel at home in the Tenth Ward.

And if a project was outside the Tenth Ward, Scanlon wouldn’t have any power to block permits, not unless he was involved in a conspiracy with the city or with the other ward’s officers. I didn’t know if Scanlon was a crook, or a pedophile or neither or both, but whatever he was, he was too savvy a player to put himself at the mercy of a lot of weak links—the other aldermen, or Sebastian Mesaline himself.

Pay to play. Spike Hurlihey, Speaker of the House, was the consummate paymaster. He couldn’t help or hinder a Chicago building project, unless it was through the shenanigans he’d pulled on Virejas Tower—getting a special law passed exempting the project from an environmental assessment. But he wouldn’t have needed intermediaries to threaten the Virejas project. He was an owner himself, for one thing, so he had a say in who bid on the work, and besides, work was too far along to add new players. It had to be a project where work hadn’t started yet.

Looking for a big project not yet underway seemed like a really good way to waste a couple of months. It might be easier to start at the other end: Uncle Jerry had promised Sebastian he’d clear the debt forever if Sebastian did something connected to this meeting.

It was frustrating not to know whether Sebastian had been in the room, secretly recording the conversation on behalf of one of the threateners—or the threatened—or hovering outside, trying to get a version of events he could use for his own purpose.

I took out one of my burn phones to call Viola. She didn’t want to come see me: it was the middle of a workday, she couldn’t keep taking off, she was a clerk, not a manager, she could lose her job.

“Sebastian recorded a meeting and loaded the file onto one of his computers at work; they found it this morning and gave it to me. I’m hoping you can tell me who’s speaking, and what they’re talking about.”

I hooked my speakers up to the computer and played the file through for her, twice. At the end, when she didn’t respond, I realized she’d ended the call. I took that as confirmation she knew who was speaking, although maybe it merely meant her supervisor had walked by. I turned off the speakers with an angry twist—Viola was at least as tiresome to work with as the Guzzo family.

LAND OF THE DEAD

I sat for a while, staring at nothing. My office phone roused me from my stupor some minutes later. Stella Guzzo. This time, I answered the call, instead of sending it to voice mail and alerting my lawyer.

“Is this the whore’s daughter?” she demanded.

“Nope. Wrong number,” I said, and hung up.

An instant later, she phoned again. “I’m looking for Warshawski.”

“Right this time,” I said. “But you have an order of protection against me. You can’t be calling me.”

“I can do whatever I goddam well want. I told you to come down here Saturday and you never showed up.”

“The order of protection,” I repeated. “I come see you, you get me arrested, and then I’m in jail and lose my license.”

“But I needed to see you.”

I knew Freeman would kill me for not hanging up, but instead I said, “You didn’t have anyone left to insult?”

“I can say what I want to whoever I like, and if you and your family—” She cut herself off mid-rant. “Frank came to see me last week.”

“He’s a good son.” I kept my voice neutral.

“Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t. You look at him, and he’s the image of my dad and my brothers, but inside, he’s just as soft as his own old man.”

I couldn’t imagine any way to respond to that.

After a moment, Stella went on broodingly. “I could tell he had something on his mind, but it took him all night to spit it out. What’s this you’re saying about Betty?”

“Nothing.” I was astonished.

“Don’t lie to me! All you Warshawskis lie faster than you talk. Frank told me you thought Betty killed Annie while I was at the bingo.”

“No, ma’am. I thought if you hadn’t actually killed your daughter when you punched her in the head, there was only one person you might have taken the fall for, and that was Frank. If you thought his wife had killed your daughter, there was a sliver of possibility you wouldn’t have said anything so that his children’s mother stayed out of prison.”

“Listen, you. You know as well as me that you’re trying to cover up for your old man stealing evidence from the crime scene. You want this to be about my family, but you won’t admit that it’s really about yours.”

She hung up.

Every time I talked to Stella, I felt about a hundred years old. I leaned back in my chair, eyes shut. I was paying an awfully high price for the brief comfort Frank had brought me all those years ago.