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Praise for the novels of
LAURA CALDWELL
Red, White & Dead “A fresh, intelligent and emotional thriller. Laura Caldwell writes with an assured ease, showing a true sense of style and story, delivering a brilliant and complicated heroine.” —New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry
Red Blooded Murder “Aims for the sweet spot between tough and tender, between thrills and thought—and hits the bull’s-eye … A terrific novel.” —No.1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child
“Take Izzy McNeil to bed tonight. You won’t get much
sleep, but you’ll spend tomorrow smiling. Red Blooded Murder is smoking hot and impossible to put down.” —Marcus Sakey, author of Good People and The Blade Itself
Red Hot Lies “A legal lioness—Caldwell has written a gripping edge-of-the-seat thriller that will not disappoint.” —New York Times bestselling author Steve Martini
The Good Liar “A massive achievement, in one novel, launching a woman right up there with the top thriller writers around.” —International bestselling author Ken Bruen
The Rome Affair “A fabulous, hypnotic psychological thriller. Laura Caldwell is a force we can’t ignore.” —New York Times bestselling author Stella Cameron
Look Closely “A haunting story of suspense and family secrets … you won’t want to put it down.” —New York Times bestselling author Mary Jane Clark
The Night I Got Lucky “Caldwell is one of the most talented and inventive … writers around.” —Booklist
The Year of Living Famously “Snazzy, gripping … an exciting taste of life in the fast lane.” —Booklist
A Clean Slate “A page-turner about a woman with a chance to reinvent herself.” —Chicago Tribune
Burning the Map “A touching story of a young woman at a crossroads in her life.” —Barnes & Noble.com on Burning the Map, selected as one of “The Best of 2002”
RED, WHITE & DEAD
LAURA CALDWELL
Dear Reader,
The Izzy McNeil series is fiction. But it’s personal, too. Much of Izzy’s world is my world. She’s proud to be a lawyer (although she can’t always find her exact footing in the legal world) and she’s even more proud to be a Chicagoan. The Windy City has never been more alive for me than it was during the writing of these books—Red Hot Lies, Red Blooded Murder and Red, White & Dead. Nearly all the places I’ve written about are as true-blue-Chicago as Lake Michigan on a crisp October day. Occasionally I’ve taken licence with a few locales, but I hope you’ll enjoy visiting them. If you’re not a Chicagoan, I hope you’ll visit the city, too, particularly if you haven’t recently. Chicago is humming right now—it’s a city whose surging vibrancy is at once surprising and yet, to those of us who’ve lived here a while, inevitable.
The Izzy McNeil books can be read in any order, although Izzy does age throughout, just like the rest of us. Please e-mail me at [email protected] to let me know what you think about the books, especially what you think Izzy and her crew should be doing next. And thank you, thank you, for reading.
Laura Caldwell
Thanks also to everyone who read the book or
offered advice or suggestions, especially Dustin O’Regan, Jason Billups, Liza Jaine, Rob Kovell, Katie Caldwell Kuhn, Margaret Caldwell, Christi Smith, William Caldwell, Matthew Caldwell, Meredith Caldwell, Liz Flock, Kris Verdeck and Les Klinger.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you so very much to Margaret O’Neill Marbury, Amy Moore-Benson and Maureen Walters. Thanks also to everyone at MIRA Books, including Valerie Gray, Donna Hayes, Dianne Moggy, Loriana Sacilotto, Craig Swinwood, Pete McMahon, Stacy Widdrington, Andrew Wright, Pamela Laycock, Katherine Orr, Marleah Stout, Alex Osuszek, Erin Craig, Margie Miller, Adam Wilson, Don Lucey, Gordy Goihl, Dave Carley, Ken Foy, Erica Mohr, Darren Lizotte, Andi Richman, Reka Rubin, Margie Mullin, Sam Smith, Kathy Lodge, Carolyn Flear, Maureen Stead, Emily Ohanjanians, Michelle Renaud, Linda McFall, Stephen Miles, Jennifer Watters, Amy Jones, Malle Vallik, Tracey Langmuir, Anne Fontanesi, Scott Ingram, Deborah Brody, Marianna Ricciuto, Jim Robinson, John Jordan and Brent Lewis.
Grazie mille to Andrea Rossi in Rome for answering my many questions about the Camorra and the anti-Mafia efforts in Italy, and grazie to Francesco Marinuzzi and Laura Roberts for their assistance with all things Italia.
Much gratitude to my experts—Chicago Police Officer Jeremy Schultz; criminal defence lawyers Catharine O’Daniel and Sarah Toney; pilot Jonathan Sandrolini, private investigator Paul Ciolino; journalist Maurice Possley and physicians Dr Richard Feely and Dr Roman Voytsekhovskiy.
PART I
1
When it happened, it happened at night, the way bizarre things often do.
For a Sunday, and nearly midnight, the restaurant was buzzing. That’s the way Sundays work in Chicago. Often the city is quiet—most people tucked under sheets by 10 p.m., newspapers sprawled on the floor below them. Other times, on a Sunday in June like that night, when the weather plays nice—the occasional puffed cloud skimming across a crystallized blue sky, a sky that gently settles into a soft black without losing the day’s warmth—things can get a little raucous. And I’m the kind of girl who likes a raucous Sunday now and again.
So even though Rush Street wasn’t my usual hangout, if I’d been surrounded by friends at that corner table at Gibsons Bar, the one by the windows that looked onto the street where people still strolled and lights still burned, I would have been very happy. But I wasn’t with friends.
Dez Romano threw his arm over the back of my stool. Dez, short for Desmond, had dark black hair, even though he was surely a few years past forty, and it curled in pleasing twists, like ribbons of ink around his face. The somewhat thick bridge of his nose was the only coarse thing on Dez Romano’s face, and he managed to make that look spectacularly handsome. He was so confident, so lit up with energy that you began to think every man should have such a face.
The story I’d been told by John Mayburn, the private investigator I moonlighted for, was that Dez had been named by his mother after a Catholic cardinal whom she admired. The religious connotation hadn’t helped. Dez was now the head of his family business, as in the family business. Dez was, as Mayburn
