I had no idea just how "interesting" it would be.

13.

THAT AFTERNOON, I PUT IN A CALL TO JOEL LIGHTNER, private eye extraordinaire-just ask him-and put in for a favor. Then I stared at the ceiling and thought about Adalbert Wozniak and Ernesto Ramirez. I had to start with the safe assumption that their murders were related. And the federal government had more or less conclusively fingered Wozniak's actual killer. It was that teenage Cannibal-Eddie Vargas was the name, if memory served. But a sixteen-year-old gangbanger didn't commit that murder without say-so, without some direction. And that same person saw Ernesto as a threat and ordered his death.

Good. I had mastered the obvious. Also, one plus one equals two.

What had Essie said? She thought my initial visits with Ernesto had been successful. I'd appealed to him. But then one day he returned home upset. Decepcion. Disappointed. Upset. La verdad no importa, he'd told his wife. It wasn't worth prison, he'd told her. Prison-for Ernesto? Had he been part of something illegal? I didn't know. But clearly, my powers of persuasion had moved him to talk to somebody. And more to the point, somebody had talked to him. Threatened him. He'd gone from wanting to come forth with his information to sealing the vault. He'd cut me off at the knees when I'd called him.

The truth doesn't matter. It's not worth prison.

Whatever it was, clearly someone, at that point, knew that Ernesto had information and had discouraged him, to put it mildly, from sharing it with me.

And then I'd returned. I caught him at the YMCA working out with some friends. I walked into Liberty Park and slapped a subpoena against his chest. Highly visible, each of those encounters. A mistake on my part. A fatal mistake. Born of necessity at the time, I thought.

I had three avenues of pursuit. One was to figure out who ordered the hit on Bert Wozniak. Find him and I'd find Ernesto's killer. No problem, right? Piece of cake. Except that the federal government had marshaled all of its considerable resources and couldn't pin it on anyone. Christ, they even knew who the shooter was, and still they couldn't crack that nut. And that's to say nothing of our investigators, led by one Joel Lightner. We would have loved to come up with an alternate theory for Wozniak's murder, obviously, and we'd come up dry.

The second line of pursuit was to figure out what information Ernesto possessed. Same result, if successful. But difficult. He didn't tell his wife, presumably for her own protection. Maybe he told a friend. But if that person were any kind of friend, he would have told the polica investigating Ernesto's murder. Even anonymously. One way or the other, he would've gotten the word to the cops. So it felt unlikely that Ernesto had told anyone at all.

The third avenue was to forget about Wozniak and answer this question: Who knew that I was hounding Ernesto at the end of the trial? That was a critical two-day period of time. After all, nobody killed Ernesto after I first spoke with him. It seemed, in fact, that someone gave him a stern warning. But they didn't kill him. Then, suddenly, come Friday, June 22, they take him out in a drive-by at Liberty Park. The intervening cause was me. So they got word, somehow, that I reinitiated contact.

I remembered two gangbangers, Latin Lords, standing with Ernesto at the basketball court at Liberty Park. One stockier guy in a tank top with a scar across his forehead; one younger, scrawny kid in blue jeans. Could I remember their faces if I saw them again? Maybe. Then there was the YMCA. A handful of guys there, at least one of whom knew Ernesto well enough to be spotting him during bench presses. I didn't know their faces well at all. But I could find them again easily enough and get their names, unless they dropped out of the Y.

And what about that diagram Ernesto had written on the back of my business card:ABW PCB IG CC?

"ABW" was Wozniak's company. "CC" probably meant the Columbus Street Cannibals. Other than that, I was at square one. I don't like being at square one.

"Hello, Sunshine." Joel Lightner strode into my office, pulling a wheeled cart that held three bankers' boxes of papers bound together with a thick elastic strap. "If there's anything, it's in here," he said. In the workup to Hector's trial, we had pulled records of every phone call made by Wozniak in the six months preceding his death; every document from his corporate and personal computer; every website he'd ever visited; every contract his company, ABW Hospitality Supplies, had ever entered into. Any of that information, theoretically, could have been a lead, but only if you had some hint of what you were ultimately seeking. We didn't. We'd taken several shots. Employee grievances at ABW. Disputes with other contractors, even a couple lawsuits over time. Nothing that panned out. Nothing worth killing over.

But now, at least, I had something. Cryptic initials on the back of a business card, but at least something.

"Say thank you to Riley for this," said Joel, pulling a laptop computer out of his shoulder bag. "This is the database." High-tech firm that Shaker, Riley was, we'd had a paralegal scan in every document obtained from ABW and put them on a searchable database. "The hard copies are there if you need them, but the computer should be all you need. Return it in good condition. He says hello, by the way."

The database made my job infinitely easier. I could do word searches for the initials Ernesto had written down and see what hit.

"So, you were right about that guy Ramirez? He had some information?"

"Never felt so wrong to be right."

Lightner nodded and appraised me. I don't like being appraised. "You didn't put the information in the guy's head," he informed me. "You just asked for it. That was your job."

"Roger that."

"Not your fault, I'm saying."

"Heard you the first time. Understood you the first time."

"Yeah, well, aren't you full of piss and vinegar today." He looked around the office. He didn't look impressed. I wasn't, either. He looked at his watch. "Let's go have a pint across the street. My treat."

"Joel, in contemporary American society, the phrase 'my treat' indicates that you are willing to pick up the tab for the other person. I realize there's a first time for everything, but I wanted to make sure you intended to convey that message. Would you like to rephrase?"

He hitched his thumb toward the door. "Before I change my mind."

I patted the computer lightly.

"C'mon, Kolarich. It can wait. It's got nothing to-well, anyway."

I could have finished the sentence for him. It's got nothing to do with what happened to your wife and daughter. He wasn't completely off base here. I was motivated to investigate this by Ernesto's death, because it sure seemed like he had correctly feared retribution if he gave up his information, and I forced him past the point of no return with the subpoena. But it wasn't lost on me that the reason Ernesto never got back to me on that fateful Friday was that someone put a few bullets into him, and that delay led to my waiting pointlessly in my office instead of traveling with my wife and daughter.

Yes, that was part of it. But not all of it. This morning, I looked into the eyes of a woman who lost the love of her life, and who would now raise her two children alone. Ernesto Ramirez had the right to keep whatever information he had to himself. But I publicly confronted him and got him killed.

"Have it your way." Lightner stopped on his way out. "Okay, so you've never taken my advice before, but I'll give it, anyway. Have that hot little partner of yours handle this matter. Let this one go."

"That's probably good advice," I conceded. "And I'm sure Shauna will be flattered beyond words."

As soon as he walked out the door, I booted up the computer.

14.

BLESS THESE COMPUTERS, BUT THEY'RE ONLY AS GOOD AS the moron directing them, and I didn't have much to go on other than conducting searches for the "PCB," "IG," and "CC" initials that Ernesto Ramirez had written on the paper. My money had been on "PCB," because it sounded more like an acronym. What it stood for, I had no idea, and the search came up empty. I'd had a fleeting thought that it referred to that chemical that had leaked into public drinking water supplies years ago, causing death, mayhem, and barrels full of money for lawyers. I briefly warmed to the notion of a grand conspiratorial cover-up about poisoned water in our city's sanitation system.

I tried a Google search on my office computer with the initials "PCB" and found all sorts of hits, but I didn't think Adalbert Wozniak had been killed by the Pakistan Cricket Board or because of a printed circuit board in a video game.

My curiosity and, more to the point, stubbornness kept me in my office well past normal hours, poring through the database until I finally got lucky. I decided to look at lawsuits involving ABW Hospitality, because, by definition, those cases involve two things that can lead to murder if pushed to the extreme-hostile feelings and money. Turned out that ABW Hospitality Supplies had filed suit in April 2003 over the denial of a contract to supply beverage and vending services to the state's Department of Motor Vehicles' affiliate offices. As a governmental contract, it was let out for public bidding, and the entity handling the bidding-also one of the defendants in the lawsuit-was the Procurement and Construction Board-the "PCB."

These days, as someone recently reaffirmed to me, litigation is part of all public contracting. You get passed over on the government contract, you sue. Why not? Take a shot at getting the contract. You're no worse for trying. So I didn't see a lot of significance here.

But then I said out loud, "The government," and it appeared to me from the recesses of my memory, my conversation with Ernesto Ramirez over the phone. I'd told him that if he talked, I'd cover him, that I'd have the government protect him as a material witness.

The government, he'd repeated, emphasis on that last word. Man, you don't get it.

I'd meant the federal government-the U.S. attorney-not state. But maybe Ernesto wasn't splitting that hair. Regardless, his emphasis on that word, which I hadn't appreciated, had to be significant. He was saying the government was part of the problem here. Surely, it deserved further inquiry.

I switched back to my office computer and did some due diligence on the state's Procurement and Construction Board. It listed all kinds of contracts for work performed throughout the state, ranging from consulting and professional services contracts to road repair work to building construction and everything in between. It was rather staggering, the number of contracts our state entered into with outside vendors ("Child Care Technology Project Manager;" "Nastrum Center Elevator Repair and Maintenance;" "PSD Foam, Mattress Core for Marymount Penitentiary"). The list reached the thousands.

Lots of money. Hundreds of millions, possibly billions. All running through the Procurement and Construction Board.

I looked up the members of this board, hoping that it would net me the initials "IG" or "CC." No luck. Gregory Connolly was listed as board chairman. The other four members were Alex Morris, James Clark, James Hathaway, and Antonia Harris.

I read through the allegations contained in ABW's suit against the PCB, which had been dismissed after Wozniak's death and the close of his company. According to the complaint, ABW had been the lowest bidder on a beverage contract, but the PCB had rejected its bid and given it to the next lowest bidder, Starlight Catering.

I sent an email to Joel Lightner, asking him to take a look under the hood of Starlight Catering. Then I looked through my Rolodex-and by Rolodex, I mean a mess of business cards shoved into the drawer of my desk-and found Hector Almundo's cell phone number. I dialed it up, not expecting him to answer, and I wasn't disappointed. I left him a quick message.

"Hector, it's Jason Kolarich. About that thing we discussed," I said.

15.

I SPENT THE NIGHT IN, READING WITH THE TELEVISION on, but I spent more time simply looking out the window. A light snow had dusted everything, casting a serene blanket over my neighborhood. I don't ordinarily welcome winter, but the change of seasons felt oddly cathartic. And I'd grown tired of summer and fall. I used to think that if grief were a color, it would be gray. Not black-too extreme, too intense. Gray is that fuzzy compromise, lacking its own identity. But after I lost my wife and child, I colored it green-vibrant, flourishing life mocking us, highlighting our irrelevance, cruel and indifferent to our pain. I wanted to cut down every tree, uproot every plant and flower. I wanted to pull the sun down out of the sky, bathing the earth in darkness. Even the orange and browns of our brief autumn disgusted me, its simple beauty a grotesque and sniggering insult.

But it was becoming different now. Maybe not better, but different. The cymbals did not crash as often between my ears. The nightmares had subsided. The throat-gagging, pulse-pounding, breathtaking pain was replaced with a quiet ache, a soft echo in a large, empty house.

HECTOR SAID HE COULD spare fifteen minutes for me in the late morning. I went to the monolithic state building in the city's downtown and found the Department of Commerce and Community Services on the thirteenth floor. An elderly uniformed man sat at a desk, under a large photo of a beaming Governor Carlton Snow-his thick mane of brown hair and that goofy smile. I showed my identification and he made me fill in my name and purpose-of-visit in a schedule book.

These offices could not be mistaken for anything other than government-thin carpeting, unimaginative beige walls, cubicles made of a cheap cloth. But I'd spent most of my career in the county attorney's office, so this was more what I was accustomed to than the princely surroundings of Shaker, Riley and Flemming. After winding my way through the maze, I was inside Hector Almundo's office, nothing fancy but a decent picture-window view of the commercial district's north side. Hector was done up like always: bright yellow shirt, chocolate-brown braces over his narrow shoulders, a tie the color of a falling sun, propped up by a collar pin.

"The PCB," he laughed, after I made my request. "You've been doing your homework. Definitely where the action is."

"If it's a string you can't pull," I started, appealing to his ego.

"No, no. No, no." Hector, I had gathered for some time now, wanted to impress me. I had seen him at his worst, at his most terrified. I had listened to his darkest secrets. If there was anyone in the world who might think ill of Hector-aside from the federal prosecutors-it should be me. He wanted to please me. He also wanted to show me how much power he still had. Hector was in rebuilding mode, having overcome the wrath of the federal government but losing his senate seat in the process. Some people in his situation would just be happy to have avoided prison and would opt for the quiet life. But Hector wanted everyone to know that he was back-or at least on his way.

"How would this work?" I ask. "I put my name on a list? Fill out some application? Do an interview? Do we even know there's an opening?"

Hector was giving me a paternalistic smile before I'd even finished. "There's an opening if we say there's an opening. A list," he chuckled. "I'm sure Charlie will want to meet you."

Charlie. None of the PCB board members were named Charlie. "Charlie Cimino," Hector said, in response to my inquisitive look. "Everything goes through Charlie."

Charlie Cimino. So maybe the "CC" Ernesto had scribbled on the back of my business card hadn't been the Columbus Street Cannibals, after all. "He's some director of something?"

"Charlie? No, Charlie's the-well, call him an unofficial adviser. Be nice to Charlie, Jason. He can . . . make life difficult."

That last piece of advice was intended to be lighthearted, but I sensed a tension behind the words, that Hector wasn't really kidding. I didn't know this guy Cimino, but he already had an ominous aura given his presumed inclusion on Ernesto's diagram.

I left with the promise that I'd be hearing from someone soon. I got a call later that afternoon, setting something up for tomorrow. So much for inefficient government-it had taken two hours to work my application, such as it was, through the channels. Tomorrow, I would meet Charlie Cimino.

16.

I TOOK A CAB OVER THE RIVER THE NEXT MORNING TO the near-north side, where the streets were mobbed with shoppers at the high-end boutiques just two weeks before Christmas. I had a headache from lack of sleep and my back was sore from the three-hour interval in the dead of night when I actually did nod off, albeit in the love seat in my family room. I do that a lot these days. Sleep is easier when I'm not in our bedroom. Because now it's just my bedroom. I knew I'd have to sell that townhouse one of these days-meaning my brain was telling me that, but so far I had resisted.

Suffice it to say, I wasn't looking forward to Christmas, my first without what we affectionately dubbed Team Kolarich. I didn't connect any memory of the holiday with Emily Jane, as this would have been her first, but Talia and I always enjoyed that time of year, jealously reserving some time just for us and away from our families. My brother, Pete, was down in the Caribbean right now nursing some wounds from a rough few months-long story-and he'd asked me to join him for that week through the New Year. Maybe. Otherwise, I had no family with which to spend the holiday, unless I drove up north to visit my father in prison, the probability of which I put just below the likelihood I would shave my head and become a Tibetan monk. Although I hear Tibet is lovely this time of year.

I missed the warmth of the cab, though not the smell of body odor, once I stepped into the frigid air outside. What little snow had fallen over the last day had been ground into dirty slush, which I tried to avoid because I hate wearing rubbers over my shoes but I also hate wet shoes. Life's full of conflict.

Ciriaco Properties was out west, a ways from the lake, away from the boutiques and closer to the trendy lofts and restaurants as the city gentrified west. I signed my name with a doorman and took a gold-plated elevator to the twenty-third floor. I checked the walls for a sign, which direction to turn, when I realized that the entire floor was this one company. I pushed through a glass door and found a woman at a tiny reception area who could have been plucked out of a swimsuit competition.

The place could best be described as hip modern, with abstract art filled with primary colors along the walls, designer rugs, sharp geometric angles. I followed the receptionist-about six feet tall, maybe a hundred twenty pounds after a full meal, which to her was probably a couple of celery stalks; shiny blond hair; a simple, formfitting black dress-down the hallway to an office with a gold plate stating MR. CIMINO.

The guy had the entire south wall for an office, floor-to-ceiling windows showcasing the city's south and east, a view to the suburbs on the west. The north side was a paneled wall featuring a gigantic flat-screen television carrying a cable news channel, as well as a door that, I assumed, led to a bathroom. I thought I should look both ways for an airplane to land before I approached the desk.

Ciriaco "Charlie" Cimino's primary business was real estate development. From what I could gather online, he held property all over the city, as well as other places in the country and overseas. He had something like twenty or thirty million dollars' worth of real estate, but that didn't mean he was worth twenty or thirty million. It might, but it could also mean he was leveraged to the hilt. The real estate market wasn't so great these days, and wealth on paper did not translate to wealth in your pocket. It meant you were always making deals, always juggling a lot of balls, living and dying with the roller-coaster market.

Cimino was talking on a headset, his hands moving expressively, as he stood looking out the south window. It was the portrait of the man looking over his city, which I suspected was exactly the profile he'd hoped to convey.

"Let me know," he concluded, then turned to face me. He didn't smile. He was a barrel-chested Italian, olive complected, dark through the eyes, with a thick mustache that lent an overall scowl to his face. He was dressed in a suit that looked like it had been tailored for him overseas, a glossy smoke-colored piece of silk.

"Jason," he said, without a hint of warmth. He tried to shake my hand more strongly than I did his, and I let him. "Have a seat."

His desk was modern, a long slice of steel with thin legs. He sunk into a high-backed leather chair and crossed a leg. He trained those hawkish eyes on me. I saw no reason to speak until he did.

"Tell me about me," he said.

"I've been practicing-" It took me a moment before I realized what he'd said, another moment to be sure I'd heard him correctly. "You have more than a dozen corporations under Ciriaco Properties. You own several million dollars' worth of property. And Governor Snow trusts you."

He nodded, just once. "What else?"

"You have excellent taste in receptionists."

One side of his mouth budged, maybe a centimeter. "About forty million. Depends on the day." He glanced at his bare desk and tapped his fingers. He wanted to show me that he was unimpressed by that gargantuan figure. "So you saved Hector's ass."

"The jury did."

"To listen to Hector, you turned water into wine. Did you?"

"The feds overcharged."

That comment seemed to find a soft landing. "The feds always overcharge. It's a negotiation. An opening bid."

I couldn't disagree with that. But I didn't take it personally, and it sounded like Cimino did.

"And now you want to work for the PCB."

I lifted a shoulder. "Hector and I discussed some options. It sounded interesting."

"Why?"