ONE
“I’M LATE,” ANNALISA SAID INTO THE PHONE AS SHE STOOD IN THE SHOWER, BAREFOOT BUT WEARING HER PAJAMAS, WITH THE CURTAIN CLOSED FOR EXTRA PRIVACY DESPITE THE FACT THAT SHE’D LOCKED THE DOOR AND NICK WAS STILL SNORING IN HIS BED.
“It’s not even seven,” her friend Sassy replied with a groan. “Your shift doesn’t start till eight.”
“Not that kind of late,” Annalisa said darkly, and after a beat, Sassy caught on.
“Oh! How late?”
Annalisa blew out an anxious breath. “Two days?”
Sassy turned disappointed. “That’s all? Two days is nothing.” Annalisa heard her flop back down on her bed. “My cycle is twenty-eight days, plus or minus a week.”
“Not mine.” Annalisa pressed herself against the tile wall like she was trying to pass through it. “I’m never late.”
“So go to the drugstore and take a test.”
“I don’t want to take a test.”
“Why not?”
“Because what if I am?”
“Anna. I know you got an A in biology because I sat next to you sophomore year, so I’m positive you’re aware that whether you’re pregnant does not depend on if you pee on a stick. It’s an entirely different kind of stick that’s involved here.”
“Oh my God. Could you not right now?” Annalisa’s stomach had dropped at the word pregnant and now she started sweating as Sassy giggled on the other end of the phone.
“I’m sorry. Really,” Sassy said as she tried to pull herself together. “But what do you want me to say? I’m not an oracle. I can’t tell you if you’re pregnant or not.”
“You had two babies. You know about this stuff.” Annalisa’s littlest nieces, Carla and Gigi, were the loves of her life.
“Yeah, and you know how I knew I was pregnant with them?”
“How?”
“I peed on a stick.”
“Okay, okay. I get it.”
Sassy rustled the bedcovers. “Would it be so bad?” she asked tentatively. “If you were?”
“Well, it wouldn’t be good.” Annalisa heard Nick whistling from the other room as he began his morning routine. Any moment, he’d be banging on the bathroom door.
“I thought you wanted kids.”
“I did. I do. But—not like this. We’re not married. We don’t even live together.” She’d been sleeping with Nick for eight months now, but she kept all her stuff at her place, save for a toothbrush and a bathrobe. Nick had cleaned out a dresser drawer for her and made room in the closet without asking or explaining why he did it. The empty space just sat there, waiting for her, like a question she had yet to answer.
“You were married to him,” Sassy pointed out. “Once.”
“Yeah, and look how that turned out.”
Nick rapped on the door. “Hey, Vega, you redecorating in there or what? I need the john.”
“Gotta go,” Annalisa whispered to Sassy. “Talk later.”
She stepped out of the shower and opened the door, finding herself face-to-face with her bare-chested ex-husband. He was unshaven with his hair standing partly on end, and when he smiled, he looked as sexy as the day she’d met him at age nineteen. “Good morning,” he said to her with a hint of a growl. He took her face in both hands and kissed her soundly on the mouth. “You were primping a long time for a woman who’s already this beautiful.”
“I was in the shower.” He did a brief double take at her dry hair and pajamas, but she shoved him over the threshold before he could respond. “I’ll make eggs,” she called through the door as she heard the shower turn on.
She unzipped the hanging bag she’d brought and put on her usual inexpensive gray suit. Her holster and weapon lay on the dresser next to Nick’s. She left them there while she went to start the toast and eggs. The slide of the whites across the pan and their vaguely sulfuric scent triggered a wave of nausea. A symptom? Or maybe she’d slept poorly. They had been working long hours on the Chicken Bandit case—a lone male in a chicken mask was holding up corner stores and late-night delis—and all she had to show for it were the rings under her eyes and a pile of empty coffee cups in her car. Her body chemistry was off. Sleep involved hormones, right?
The toast jammed and burned, sending black smoke up to the ceiling and triggering the alarm. She cursed and unplugged the toaster but the alarm continued to shriek. Nick came running bare-assed into the kitchen just as she climbed on the counter to fan the smoke alarm with a dish towel. “The broom,” he hollered over the noise. “You need the broom.” He grabbed the broom from the closet and used the handle to poke the “reset” button on the alarm, ceasing the alarm, but a sharp trill carried on from the next room.
“My phone,” she said, still looming over him on the counter. Smoke started to rise again, and she looked down to see the eggs turning to charcoal. “Oh, no, the eggs!”
“Answer your phone. I’ll handle this.” He helped her down with one hand as he removed the pan from the stove with the other.
The caller ID read Zimmer, L., which meant the commander was on her personal phone, not at the precinct. Zimmer rarely did fieldwork, especially not at this hour, so Annalisa braced herself for bad news before she answered. “Morning, boss.”
“Vega.” The commander’s voice sounded thick as wet cement. “Sorry about the early hour.”
“No problem. What’s up?”
“I need you to meet me at Rosehill Cemetery. Probable homicide, special circs.”
“Special circumstances” could mean multiple victims or a hate crime. Or the deceased was a kid or someone famous. Annalisa started kicking out of her pajama pants even as she held the phone to one ear, hopping on one leg. “Okay, but I’m already on the Chicken Bandit thing.”
“I’m leaving Carelli on the Chicken Bandit for now. You’re with me and I’ll show you why.” Zimmer sent her a picture. It showed a dark-haired man hanging from a tree. His face wasn’t visible but there was a word written in white paint across his gray shirt: PIG.
Annalisa eased backward until she found the edge of the bed and sank down on it. “It’s a cop?”
“Ex-CPD. Been a PI for more than a decade.”
But the slur said pig. Annalisa rubbed her head with her free hand. “With all due respect, boss, I don’t know if I can take another dirty cop case right now.”
“He wasn’t dirty.”
“But—”
“He was a friend.”
Annalisa shut her mouth. After a beat, she said, “I’m leaving now.” She hung up with Zimmer and pulled on her suit. Nick, now wearing pants, caught up with her as she was trying to comb her hair and brush her teeth at the same time.
“I take it there really is a fire,” he remarked, noting her hurry.
“Zimmer called. She wants me at a scene in Rosehill Cemetery.”
“Just you?”
She met his eyes in the mirror. “For now, yeah.” Their gaze held as she told him the rest of it. “Probable homicide, and the victim is an ex-cop. A friend of Zimmer’s, apparently. She swears he’s clean.”
“But she asked for you,” he said.
She spat in the sink and rinsed her mouth with a handful of water. When she raised up, she met his reflection again. “I’m guessing she has doubts.” Annalisa had turned in the most notable ex-cop of all: George Vega, her own father. Since then, Zimmer deployed her like a specialized weapon in tough cases involving other officers, and with predictable results. Annalisa had become the kid alone at the lunch table. Even Nick joked that she slept with him just so she’d have one friend on the force.
She gathered her unruly brown hair into a thick knot with Nick still crowding her from behind. He wrapped his arms around her as she moved to go. “Watch your back.”
“I will.” She couldn’t, of course. She’d be out there alone. As much as her fellow officers no longer trusted her, she no longer trusted them. Even the one holding her so sweetly. Nick had told her so many lies when they were married. He kissed her neck now, almost in apology, and she tilted her head to let him do it. They made a pretty picture in the mirror—even half-dressed and unshaven, Nick was always pretty. But she had a wedding album full of beautiful photos and knew what they were worth. When his hand stole over her middle, low across her belly, she sucked in a breath.
He drew back. “You okay?”
“Fine.” She disentangled herself and gave him a perfunctory kiss. “See you later.”
* * *
AS SHE DROVE WEST THROUGH RUSH-HOUR TRAFFIC, SHE WOLFED DOWN A PROTEIN BAR SHE’D FOUND IN THE GLOVE BOX. She made only lurching progress on the road, but her mind raced ahead to the crime scene. Based on the picture Zimmer had sent, the victim appeared to be an above-average-sized male, well built. It would have taken someone, or multiple someones, of considerable strength to wrestle him into a noose and suspend him from the tree. Also, the P in PIG on his shirt was backward. Perhaps it had been painted backward on purpose to underscore the slur: cops aren’t just pigs; they’re stupid too. Or maybe the killer was dyslexic. Or maybe it was a mistake, done in a hurry by someone perched in the dark on a tree branch. Rosehill Cemetery’s name was a mistake itself. Some clerk had written it down wrong ages ago, when it was supposed to be named Roe’s Hill, after nearby farmer Hiram Roe. Roe had sold his land to the city on the promise that the cemetery would memorialize him, but a slip of the pen had rendered him as anonymous as the worn-down old gravestones dotting his land.
Annalisa reached her destination and slowed to a crawl. At a hundred acres and a hundred thousand graves, Rosehill was the largest of Chicago’s cemeteries, and it contained hundreds of mature trees. The victim could be suspended from any one of them. She circled the perimeter until she found the telltale black-and-white units parked outside. She slid her Honda in behind them and entered through the nearest path. In early November, the usually lush trees looked like half-eaten turkey legs, brown and missing chunks of foliage. Annalisa located Zimmer, a half dozen uniformed cops, and Joe Biggs from forensics. He wore a full-body protective suit, as though the crime scene might be on Mars, and he crouched to take photos of the corpse. Zimmer spotted Annalisa and wandered over to greet her. Her boss held a paper cup half-full of coffee and Annalisa’s mouth watered at the sight of it. “The coroner’s been here and gone,” Zimmer reported, squinting past Annalisa to the trees beyond her.
“Time of death?”
Copyright © 2023 by Joanna Schaffhausen
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