I turned around and went back to my office, where I once again called up the images from my video camera. It was impossible to tell who was who. If not for my aunt Rachel’s insistence, I wouldn’t have known the figure in the middle was Petra. Today, magnifying details as much as I could, it seemed to me that the man on her left was gripping her arm. His cap was pulled low over his face, his coat collar was pulled high around his chin, but the general shape could have been Alito’s.

I tried to imagine what it would take to get him to tell me the truth about whether he’d been there. Certainly not my girlish charm. Would a threat that the FBI was involved worry him? Not if it came from me. He would have too many contacts from his years in the force to worry about veiled and vague threats from me. Only the possibility that Strangwell and his pals would leave him to take the fall might persuade Alito to start talking.

I looked up his phone number and called the house up in Lake Catherine. When Hazel answered, I asked for her husband.

“Larry doesn’t want to talk to you,” she said in her gravelly South Side voice.

“I don’t want to talk to him, either,” I said, “but there’s something he needs to know. I figure I owe him a tiny favor, since he used to work with my dad. He’s been identified as one of the men who forced my cousin Petra to break into my office two days ago.”

She was silent.

“I’m going to call Bobby Mallory, but I’ll wait four hours before I do. You be sure to let Larry know, okay, Ms. Alito? Larry is one of the guys who—”

“I heard you the first time!”

The connection went, and I stared at the phone. I’d promised to wait four hours to call Bobby, but I hadn’t mentioned the press. I called Murray Ryerson’s cellphone and gave him the same message. Unlike Hazel Alito, Murray had a bucketful of questions, starting with who had made the identification.

“Murray, there’s a good possibility that every call I make is monitored, either by Homeland Security’s Chicago office or by Mountain Hawk Security, or both, so I’m not giving away confidential information over the airwaves. Anyway, it’s not a rock-solid ID. I’d double-check with Les Strangwell at the Krumas campaign—”

“Strangwell?” Murray’s normal baritone rose an octave. “What were you sitting on that the Krumas campaign cares about? Why would they hire—”