My half brother’s face was hard, but his curiosity seemed genuine. How could I answer his question? Summarize five hundred years of tragic history? Or would that simply be an evasion? Was the fault my father’s alone? I thought back to the report I’d received from the Chicago private detectives I’d hired three weeks before. Their information was sketchy, but what it revealed sobered me. In almost every way, Lincoln Turner and I are mirror opposites. While I was reared as the son and heir of a highly respected physician and a mother who could have modeled for a poster from the Eisenhower era, Lincoln grew up in government-subsidized housing on Chicago’s South Side, with an alcoholic mother and a brutal con man stepfather always in trouble with the law. Statistically speaking, my success and Lincoln’s failure were practically foreordained. While I was striving for a baseball championship and attending American Legion Boys’ State, Lincoln was scrapping in the streets and running from the Chicago PD. When his stepfather—whom Lincoln had believed was his real father—wasn’t in prison, he was gambling away his wife’s salary. It was a miracle Lincoln made it through law school without being convicted of a felony himself. And while I was transitioning from a successful legal career to a more lucrative one as an author of legal thrillers, Lincoln was slaving in a small firm, chasing small-time cases until he was finally busted for embezzling escrow funds from a client trust account. According to my sources, he did this in a desperate attempt to save his “father” from a long prison term, but that didn’t stop the Illinois State Bar Association from suspending his license.

Was it any wonder, then, that the eyes watching me from the truck window burned with such resentment? What galling rage must eat at his insides every time he thinks of the married white Mississippi doctor who impregnated his mother and abandoned her to the frozen Chicago ghetto? What must he see in my soft white skin and expensive clothes? In my reputation and my political power, however modest? In my lovely daughter with her blessed future? What did he feel, I wonder, when he heard that Caitlin had been murdered? One atom of sympathy? Or did he revel in unexpected schadenfreude and see Caitlin’s death as a gift in his quest to tear down all that my father has built in the years since he abandoned Viola Turner?

“You got a mama,” Lincoln said bluntly. “My mama’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

Contempt curled his upper lip. “Sorry don’t help her. Sorry don’t help nobody.”

“Are you sorry that my wife is dead? Or my fiancée?”

“I didn’t know the ladies. They were both rich, though, from what I hear. They had their time.”

“You think money takes away the pain of life?”