“We need the public’s help in identifying this woman.”

“What else can I say?”

“She may be the victim of a crime.”

“And what about Ellsworth?”

“I’ll tell you what I can, but don’t say that she was found at Ellsworth yet, okay? We’re not ready to officially open the story to the press.”

“And what about unofficially? The Post has the damned story, Linds,” Cindy said. “Everyone does.”

She was mad, but she was clutching the drawing and not letting it go.

“I’ll tell you officially when I can. But we can go off the record now.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“Seven heads were exhumed. All of them are female, buried over the course of a number of years. We can’t identify any of them. We don’t have a clue what happened to them, how they were killed. We don’t know anything.”

“If I write that, I’m going to have to apply for a job at the post office.”

I guess my frustration was showing, and maybe some panic too, because Cindy was saying, “Okay, okay, Linds. Calm down. Take it easy,” as Yuki and Claire came in together.

Cindy settled the tab. About forty-two seconds later, the four of us were at our booth in the back room and had ordered jerked pork and pitchers of beer. Yuki was off to the races about how in love she was with Jackson Brady.

And speak of the devil: Brady picked that minute to call me and tell me he needed my butt back at the Hall.

Chapter 32

THAT NIGHT, REVENGE sat in his Hyundai SUV, engine running, under a shot-out streetlight on Sunnydale Avenue, an ugly and dangerous artery that wound through the decrepit heart of the Sunnydale Projects. All around him, packed tight and wall to wall for a square mile, were squalid housing units on streets dominated by two violent and warring bands of thugs, the DBG and Towerside gangs.

A four-dimensional map of these badlands and its occupants was engraved on his mind — every unit and alley in the projects, every felon, juvenile offender, innocent citizen.

Revenge was watching both vehicular and pedestrian traffic centered on the Little Village Market up ahead at the intersection of Sunnydale and Hahn, and he was also focused on a block of tan stucco housing units to his right: two stories high with bars on the lower windows and burned-out grass between the footings and the street.

A shadow emerged from between two units.

It was Traye, a slouching young man wearing a ball cap and baggy gangsta clothes that swallowed his slight build.

Accompanied by the pulsing music pounding out of cars and windows, Traye made his way across the avenue, slipped into the passenger side of Revenge’s car, and slumped below the line of sight.

He was nineteen and had burn scars on his neck and arms from a meth-lab explosion that had occurred inside his housing unit while he was playing outside, almost out of harm’s way.