Miss Claudia lingered for almost two weeks after I had found the negatives in Lamont’s Bible. I tried to visit her most days, just to sit with her, talk to her quietly, sometimes about my ongoing search for Lamont, sometimes about nothing much at all.

Harmony Newsome’s murder had become page-one news once again. It seemed as though the whole country was glad to feast on Chicago’s notorious corruption. We were a welcome break from the grim economic news and the predictable disappearance of the Cubs.

Bobby Mallory was at his bleakest during those weeks. He was taking part in a special housekeeping task force, and, from everything I was hearing, he was unsparing in his investigation. But it was painful for him to have to recognize the history of corruption and abuse among the men he’d spent his life with.

Dornick and Alito were by no means the only culprits. They could never have treated suspects so vilely without active collusion up and down the chain of command. Sixteen other officers who’d served at the Racine Avenue station came under federal investigation for allegations of brutality. It was shocking to see that the torture of suspects had continued at least into the nineties. Given the climate of torture cultivated by the U.S. Department of Justice in recent years, some cops apparently felt they had no reason to hold back on their own forays into “extreme rendition.”

Bobby wouldn’t talk to me about it directly, but Eileen Mallory came over to my apartment one afternoon for coffee and told me how betrayed he felt by the relentless revelations of abuse. “The department’s been his whole life. He’s feeling that he dedicated himself to, I don’t know, you could say to a false god. And besides that, he always measured himself against your father, and he feels it deeply that Tony was willing to write a letter protesting the torture and that he, Bobby, did nothing but request a transfer so he wouldn’t have to work with Dornick or Alito. That letter ended your father’s career, you know. He never got another promotion after that.”

“But Tony didn’t stop it!” I burst out. “He watched it! He went into the room and told them to stop, but Alito said, ‘We’re doing it for your brother. For Peter,’ and Tony walked out again.”