“Oh, I think so. He doesn’t know what happened to Lamont, but it involved Johnny Merton, and it was so terrible that it shocked Merton into silence. And Merton … You’d have to know him to understand that a death he’d find shocking might turn you or me as mad as … as poor Steve Sawyer.”

I gently dislodged Lennon’s hand. “Something about Lamont, or Johnny and Steve Sawyer and the Anacondas, is connected to my cousin. The man who’s running security for the Krumas campaign, where my cousin worked, he was the cop who interrogated Sawyer forty years ago and tortured him into confessing.”

Karen gasped. “Torture? Are you sure?”

Sawyer-Kimathi’s mangled, burned body flashed in my head: “They say I the song-and-dance man … They laugh.” Would I ever be able to forget that? “Yes, oh yes. I wish I wasn’t, but … I know it happened. I don’t understand it, not all of it, but my uncle, and Harvey Krumas, the candidate’s father, they grew up together, and they still watch each other’s backs. The murder that happened in Marquette Park all those years ago, they’re both implicated in it, and that means—”

I couldn’t bear to go on, couldn’t bear to add that that meant my own uncle was implicated in Sister Frankie’s murder because his old buddy Harvey rushed a contracting crew over to her place to bury any evidence I might be able to dig up. I pressed my hands against my temples as if that would push all that knowledge out of my head.

“This is terrible, Vic. Why aren’t you going to the police?”

My smile was twisted. “Because Dornick is an ex-cop with lots of pals on the force, and I don’t know who there I can trust anymore.”

Karen started to ask me how Lamont was tied to Dornick, but my own words reminded me that Bobby Mallory had been trying to reach me. I interrupted her to ask if I could use her office phone to make a few calls.

We rode down to the second floor in silence, Karen shaking her head as if mourning all the sorry souls I’d told her about. While she unlocked her office door, I once again connected my cellphone long enough to look up Bobby’s unlisted home number.

Eileen Mallory answered. “Oh, Vicki, I’m so sorry about Petra. This is a terrible week. We never knew Peter at all well, but please tell him and Rachel that if there’s anything we can do, anything at all—a place to stay, extra help from Bobby’s team—they must let us know.”

I thanked her awkwardly and said Bobby had been trying to reach me. He hadn’t come home yet. She gave me his cellphone number. And another message, a personal one for me, so warm and loving it made my eyelids prick.