On beyond the pound, razor wire continued to divide road from the marsh. I parked on the verge at the spot where Mitch had left the road for the swamp. The fence was still down there, and you could still see a faint wheel track through the gray-brown grasses.

I didn’t understand why their assailants had taken Bron and Marcena through the marsh and then dumped them at the edge of the golf course. If you were going to break down the fence, why not just leave the bodies in the marsh itself, where rats and mud would obliterate the flesh fast enough. Why take them to a pit on the edge of a tony golf course, where someone might stumble on them at any moment? Even at this time of year, there were groundskeepers wandering around. And why go into the marsh at all—it took so much work. Why not just come up Stony Island from the south and drop them in the garbage dump?

I got back in my car, unsatisfied with the whole setup. As I put the car in gear, my cell phone rang. I looked at the readout: Morrell. I felt guilty, being caught out far from my office, and almost let his call go through to voice mail.

“Vic, are you on your way home? I just tried your office.”

“I’m in South Chicago,” I confessed.

“I thought you were staying close to home today.”

He sounded resentful, which is so out of character for him that my own visceral anger at being monitored didn’t kick in. I asked what the problem was.

“The most outrageous thing—someone broke into my place and stole Marcena’s computer.”

“What—when?” A By-Smart eighteen-wheeler honked furiously as I stepped on the brakes and pulled onto the verge.

“Sometime between five this morning, when I left to go down to the hospital, and now, I mean ninety minutes ago, when I got home. I lay down on the couch to rest for half an hour, then went into the back to get things organized for Rawlings’s detective. That’s when I found someone had been through my papers like a wind machine.”

“How do you know they took Marcena’s computer? Wouldn’t she have had it with her?”

“She’d left it on the kitchen counter. I put it by her bed when I was straightening up Sunday night. It’s gone now, along with my jump drives. As far as I can tell, nothing else is missing.”

His jump drives, the little key-sized gizmos he uses to back up his data, which he does every night, storing the neatly labeled drives in a box on his desktop.

“They didn’t take your computer?”