I reeled. Marta trudged in, looking like she’d just been batted around by a jungle cat. She flicked her head toward the interview room and then headed that way. I followed.

“Hey, Shana,” I heard Scott say. “I say only one comes out standing. Put you down for twenty?”

I headed for Marta. “If you’ve got twenty burning a hole in your pocket, Scottie, put it in the damn money jar!”

A round of applause went up from around the room, cops catcalling Scott. I left them to it. Marta was standing by the table, watching Jung sleep, when I walked back into the room. She slammed the files she carried down on the table hard, the reverb finally startling Jung awake. He looked at Marta, then me. “Get out,” Marta told him.

Jung blinked. “I can go?”

“You could’ve gone hours ago. Why the hell are you still sitting here?”

He glanced over at me, staring as though he’d never seen me before. “Wait for me in the hall,” I said.

Jung got up and hurried out, and I closed the door behind him. Marta turned to face me. “Spada’s got times, dates, and witnesses that put him nowhere near Darby or Symonds. We’ve got no physical evidence linking him to anything. The nurse hasn’t opened her mouth since she got here. He came in when we asked him to, so that’s on his side, but he arrived with an entire law firm trailing behind him. Each one of the little stiffs was dressed in a five-hundred-dollar suit, each one ready to tap-dance all over my spleen and foul up my pension.” She lifted the folder. “See this? Legal mumbo jumbo that basically says we, meaning the Chicago Police Department—and, by extension, me—cannot talk to, contact, or even think about Nick Spada in regard to Ayers, Symonds, or Darby. If we do, we get our asses chewed up and handed back to us.”

“There wouldn’t be any physical evidence leading back to him. He hired the work out—Darby, the psycho nurse.”

“We may think it, but we can’t prove it.”

“Then get the nurse to flip.”

“What do you think I’ve been trying to do? We’ve got Florence Nightingale solid for aggravated battery against you and Stella, and we’re investigating her for the dead nurse in the trunk. But, like I said, she hasn’t said a word about that or about Spada, and until she does, we’ve got nothing else. And, let’s get real here, though we’ve got Stella Symonds’s nonverbal account that Spada threatened her, she’s a dying woman. All he has to do is wait her out. Long story short, we took a bite of the apple and got nothing. We go back for a second bite with nothing more than we have now and we get bulldozed.”

“Where’s Spada now?”