“Remember how you got shot a couple of years ago when you were helping me out? I don’t want to involve you like that again. Anyway, I need to make a bunch of copies so I can get it into the public arena as fast as possible.”

He protested his willingness to take on any punk his size or bigger, but I took the report upstairs with me. I wished there was someone I could talk to—about the LifeStory report, or the putative connection between Baladine and Officer Lemour, or even the story Murray was running on Frenada. I hadn’t realized how dependent I’d grown on Murray over the years. This was the first major investigation I’d taken on that I couldn’t discuss with him, or tap into his vast knowledge of local corruption. And I badly needed help. This wasn’t even an investigation. It was some kind of demon’s cauldron I’d fallen into. I was bobbing around with the newts’ eyes and bats’ wings, and I wasn’t going to have too much more time to figure out the brew before I drowned in it.

I suddenly thought of Morrell. He didn’t have Murray’s local connections in politics, but he had an entree into Nicola Aguinaldo’s world. Vishnikov vouched for him. And I didn’t think anyone knew I’d been talking to him.

I looked up his home number on my Palm Pilot, but as I was dialing I remembered his own nervousness about talking on the phone. If BB Baladine was really riding my ass, he could have a tap on my line or even a remote device to pick up anything I said in my building. That might explain why I hadn’t seen any obvious surveillance on the street: if they knew they could track me at home, they could jump me on my way out, without having to leave a man in place twenty–four hours a day.

I don’t like having to be paranoid about everything I say and do, but I switched on a Mozart CD on my stereo and the Cubs on television and sat between them with my cell phone. It was hard for Morrell to understand me over the interference, but once he did he readily agreed to meet me for a drink.

If I was right about Baladine not doing on–site surveillance, then I could probably leave again as long as I was quiet about it. I waited until the roar from Wrigley Field rose to a fever pitch, both on the streets behind me and on the set in front of me, and slipped out my door in bare feet, carrying my sandals to avoid making noise on the upper landing. An hour later I was back at Drummers, in Edgewater.