Mary Louise called sharply to Emily to hang up the phone when she got the bedroom extension. In another moment the fighting in the background was switched off.

“I was out of my ever–lovin’ mind the day I thought fostering three kids would be a simple management problem,” Mary Louise said. “Even with Fabian paying enough for good home help, it’s relentless. Maybe I’ll switch from law to social work so I can counsel teenagers on how grueling it is to be a single mom.

“Anyway, the news on Lemour is kind of disturbing. Terry says he has a bad rap, even among cops, that there’ve been around a dozen complaints against him over the years for excessive violence, that kind of thing. But what’s more troubling is that Rogers Park lost the incident report. Terry asked them how they knew to come to you if they didn’t have the report, and they didn’t have a good answer for that. I didn’t get the names of either of the officers on the scene last night, did you?”

I felt ice start to build around my diaphragm. No, I hadn’t done anything that elementary. We could track down the paramedics—they should have a copy of the report. That would be another time–consuming search, but an uneasy impulse was making me think I’d better make the effort.

“Before you go, there’s one other thing,” I said. “The woman we found is dead—poor thing had some kind of advanced abdominal injury. She was on the run from Coolis. Could you find out when she was arrested, and why?” I spelled Aguinaldo for Mary Louise.

I didn’t want to dive into Nicola Aguinaldo’s wreck, but it felt as though someone had climbed up behind me on the high board to give me a shove.

Even after Detective Lemour’s idiotic hints that I’d been driving drunk this morning, it hadn’t occurred to me to call my lawyer. But if Rogers Park had lost the incident report I needed Freeman Carter to know what was going on. If a lazy detective decided to slap a manslaughter charge on me, Freeman would have to bail me out.

Freeman was on his way out of the office, but when I gave him a thumbnail sketch of the last twenty–four hours, he agreed it was too serious to turn over to his intern. After I told him Rogers Park claimed to have lost the incident report, he had me dictate a complete account into his phone recorder.

“Where is your car, Vic?” he asked before hanging up.

“The last I saw it, it was hugging a fireplug in Edgewater.”