Rogers Park still hadn’t found the incident report, but Freeman thought he’d persuaded them to back away from harassing me about Nicola Aguinaldo’s death. Mary Louise had helped, by having Finchley call over to the station and letting them know I essentially had a police witness on my team.

“Thanks, Freeman. Out of curiosity, are the cops doing anything else to find who killed Nicola Aguinaldo, now that they’ve decided I’m not an easy arrest? And are they doing anything to find her body? No one at her old address knows where her mother is living these days.”

“Vic, that’s none of your business. I told the State’s Attorney that we had no compelling interest in her death and that if they let you alone you’d leave her alone. I don’t know what got that bee buzzing in their brains to begin with, but I don’t think you have anything else to worry about on this. So leave Aguinaldo’s death to the cops. You know the story on hit–and–runs as well as I do: with seven hundred murders a year in this town, manslaughter has to take a backseat. You don’t need to stand there like Aimee Semple McPherson haranguing sinners if they don’t put round–the–clock teams on finding who hit her.”

He paused, as if inviting my response; when I didn’t say anything he added, “I’m going to Montana for the weekend to do some fly–fishing with a client, so try not to get arrested until Tuesday, okay?”

“I guess that’s funny, so I’ll laugh, but next time you make a promise in my name to the SA, talk to me first.” I hung up with a snap.

So all that excitement with Detective Lemour and my car had been a tempest in a teapot? But someone had killed Nicola Aguinaldo. And those women in Oak Brook knew she was dead before I told them. Okay, Murray was right: one of them was married to the head of the company that ran Coolis for the state, and the woman had been his kids’ nanny. So probably he had been notified ahead of the rest of the world. But in the absence of an autopsy, and with no news reports on Aguinaldo, how had those women known she’d been assaulted?

“Don’t touch it, Vic. Leave it alone or it will come back and bite you,” I admonished myself.

I went back to the Georgia problem with a dogged intensity. I was deep in a reverse directory on the computer, looking for people who lived near the garage that was outfitting Continental United’s trucks with new tires, when the phone rang.

It was a woman, with a low smooth voice like cream. “I’m calling from Mr. Baladine for I. V. Warshawski.”