cases, Roy was laid-back and soft-spoken, his west-Texas drawl as pronounced as it had been the day he’d left El Paso nearly thirty years ago.
He was a tall man, wiry and grizzled, with a handlebar mustache that might have looked more at home on a Texas range than it did on the streets of Chicago. A second man, the building manager, John guessed, dogged Cox’s steps, his gravelly voice muted by the rain and wind. John switched on his flashlight, catching the man in his beam. Wide-eyed and startled, he looked like a deer trapped in headlights.
Cox called out, “Hey, that you, Johnny boy? Glad you could finally make it. I reckon even you gung ho-types have trouble tearing yourselves away from a warm body on a night like this.”
John refrained from telling him that the only female in his bed lately was Cassandra, the temperamental Persian Meredith had left behind when she’d moved out. But Cox was his partner, and a nosy one at that; John suspected he already knew. “McGowan said you found a suicide note on the victim.”
“Damn straight we did.” Cox walked over and handed the bagged note to John. The words had been typed on a sheet of plain white bond paper.
“Short and sweet,” John muttered, training his light on the note.
“Just the way I like my women.” Cox grinned, his face pale in the cast-off glow from his flashlight. Water dripped from the brim of Cox’s cowboy hat, the battered one he always wore in inclement weather. “Looks like this is our lucky night, Johnny.”
“What do you mean?”
Cox held up a second plastic bag and aimed his flashlight beam on the contents—an expensive-looking beige handbag. “Found it on the deck over there by the wall. Victim must have dropped it just before she jumped. We’ve ID’d her from her driver’s license.”
“Who is she?”
“Name’s Gail Waters. She had a press pass…”
The name hit John like a physical blow. Stunned, he stared at his partner as a shock wave rolled through him. “Who did you say?”
Cox gave him a quizzical glance. “Gail Waters.”
Son of a bitch, John thought, trying to hide his surprise.
Cox rubbed the salt-and-pepper whiskers on his chin. “I’m getting some bad vibes here, Johnny-O. Are you trying to tell me you knew the victim?”
“I never saw her before in my life,” John answered truthfully. But he knew the sound of her voice. He’d talked to her on the phone less than forty-eight hours earlier, when she’d called the station wanting to interview him about his father’s disappearance seven years ago. It was a case that had not been solved to this day.
Gail Waters had been a reporter for and the managing editor of a small newspaper on the near north side of town. She specialized in stories involving disappearances and missing persons. Although she was a print journalist—and had taken pride in pointing out that fact to John—she had also been the co-producer of a cable show called Vanished!, which explored intriguing cases the police hadn’t been able to solve.
Why she’d suddenly decided to investigate Sean Gallagher’s disappearance, John had no idea. But her death had to be a coincidence. It couldn’t have anything to do with his father.
But even so, names from John’s past flashed like a strobe through his head: Ashley Dallas, the young woman whose murder Sean had been investigating at the time of his disappearance; Daniel O’Roarke, the man convicted of Ashley’s brutal murder, who now sat on death row; and John’s own brother Tony, who had been in love with Ashley at the time of her murder.
For some reason Gail Waters had wanted to dig up that old tragedy, expose secrets that had been buried for more than seven years.
And now she was dead.
A coincidence, John told himself again. But a cold finger of dread traced up his backbone as he stood in the icy rain.
“You want to notify the old man or should I?” Cox was asking.
The “old man” Cox was referring to was John’s uncle and their commanding officer. Liam Gallagher kept himself apprised of every investigation the detectives conducted under his watch. His knowledge of all the uncleared cases in his jurisdiction was nothing short of phenomenal, and John had always held his uncle in the highest esteem.
But now a tiny doubt began to niggle at him. Liam had worked on the Ashley Dallas case, too. Had Gail Waters talked to him about John’s father’s strange disappearance?
“Let’s hold off on that.” John stared at the note for a moment longer, then handed it back to Cox. “A type-written suicide note always worries me. I’d like to do a little more digging before we call in.”
Cox groaned. “I don’t like the sound of that. You’re going to get a hard-on about this one, aren’t you? You’ve got that look.”
“I’m going to do my job,” John said grimly. “And so are you. Until we get the coroner’s report, we’re going to treat this as a homicide investigation.”
Cox muttered an oath as his radio crackled. He pulled it from his belt and walked a few feet away to respond. John used the opportunity to examine the wall and floor of the roof at the spot from where he judged the victim had fallen. Slipping on a pair of latex gloves, he knelt and scoured the area with his flashlight, knowing all the while the rain had probably washed away whatever trace evidence, including fingerprints, that might have been left.
“Meat wagon’s here,” Cox called from the stairwell door. “You coming?”
“I’ll be there in a minute.” John stood and gazed over the side of the building. Down on the street, a handful of bystanders had gathered at the fringes of the yellow tape.
As if sensing John’s gaze, one of them, a man wearing a black parka, a stocking cap and a muffler covering the lower part of his face, glanced up at the roof. Even five stories away, John felt a tug of recognition.
He knew the man only as Fischer, an informant he’d used successfully in the past. John had no idea about the man’s real identity, but he seemed to have an uncanny knack for showing up at crime scenes, particularly the ones John was called out on. He suspected Fischer not only had a police scanner, but an inside line into the department. Whatever his connection, his information had proved invaluable in the past.
As John watched, Fischer turned and headed down the street, his shoulders hunched against the sharp blast of wind from the lake.
John rubbed the back of his neck where the hair had suddenly stood on end. Fischer always gave him a case of the jitters, although he couldn’t say why exactly. Maybe because there were elements of danger and distrust involved with all informants.
The door to the stairwell slammed shut in the wind and Cox disappeared. John saw that the building manager remained and had started across the roof toward him.
He was a short squat man, somewhere in his forties, who breathed in sharp, almost gasping puffs of air. In the dim light he looked eager and excited, his small dark eyes greedily taking in every last detail of the search.
“Detective, if I may be so bold…” Rain glistened in the fringe of brown hair that circled the man’s bald pate like
