Gallagher Justice. Amanda Stevens
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What more did a girl need really?
Flipping off the light, she returned to her bedroom long enough to pull on a robe over her pajamas, then she padded on bare feet down the hallway to the living room. Her apartment was small, cramped and drafty, with lots of creaking floorboards and noisy water pipes, but Fiona didn’t mind. The quiet, once-elegant neighborhood on the Near North Side of Chicago with its well-kept lawns and shady streets more than made up for the inconveniences.
And it was a long way from Bridgeport, she reminded herself ruefully as she glanced out the window at the fog-shrouded street below her. Maybe not in miles, but in culture and attitude.
Her parents had grown up in the same blue-collar neighborhood on the South Side where they still lived in the same house they’d bought when they first married. They had the same neighbors, the same circle of acquaintances, the same values and expectations. They’d raised four kids in that neighborhood, and two of Fiona’s brothers had moved only a few blocks away from the family home.
By contrast, the ambitious, thirtysomething professionals who flocked to the renovated brownstones in Fiona’s neighborhood guarded their privacy like rabid rottweilers. She had a nodding acquaintance with only a handful, knew even fewer by name. Like her, most of them came home late—briefcase in one hand, cell phone clutched in the other—to close themselves off from the rest of the world until it was time again to rush off to work the next morning.
There were hardly any families in the neighborhood, no children playing on the stoops. The streets were sometimes almost unnaturally quiet, and if this deepened Fiona’s sense of isolation and the occasional bout of loneliness, well, there was also no one there who knew about David. No one to look out their front window when she drove home each night to shake their heads and wonder how such a nice girl like Fiona Gallagher, someone with her brains and education, the daughter of a cop, no less, could have fallen in love with a killer.
In their own way, though, they were still proud of Fiona in the old neighborhood. She was a rising star in the State’s Attorney’s office, a tough, bare-knuckles prosecutor who fought crime just as ferociously as she battled her inner demons. In the past six years, she’d won every major case, including a high-profile murder trial that had put her on the radar of Chicago politics.
Fiona had been so ruthless in her cross-examination of the defendant, a well-known businessman, that a reporter from one of the local papers had dubbed her the Iron Maiden, the prosecutor who wasn’t afraid to take on anyone, including the rich, powerful and politically connected.
“No one is above the law,” she’d been quoted in the papers, and if she and her brother, Tony, were the only ones who could fully appreciate the irony of her motto, that was just the way it had to be, Fiona had long ago decided.
Turning from the window, she walked over to the small dining table she used as a desk and surveyed the usual mess: an empty Diet Coke can, a greasy paper plate with a half-eaten slice of pizza, stacks of files, police reports and a yellow legal pad with a blank sheet of paper staring up at her.
She’d been working on the closing argument for the DeMarco case when she’d staggered off to bed just after midnight. Staring at the blank page now, Fiona frowned. She hadn’t made much progress earlier, and she knew why. She was nervous about this case. Nervous in a way she hadn’t been in years.
It was a rape case, for one thing, and, aside from the fact that she’d worked almost exclusively on homicides for the last four years, rape cases were notoriously unpredictable. In this instance, there wasn’t even DNA evidence to corroborate the woman’s testimony. Vincent DeMarco had used a condom. He was also a cop, a veteran detective who worked under Frank Quinlan’s command.
Quinlan was one of those clout-heavy cops who was virtually untouchable. Fiona had found out just how well connected he was when she’d cooperated with an Internal Affairs investigation into Quinlan’s interrogation methods.
A man she’d successfully prosecuted for murder, who was currently serving a life sentence at Stateville, had brought a lawsuit against the police department alleging that Quinlan and some of the detectives under his command, including DeMarco, had forced his confession by using physical and verbal intimidation, i.e. torture.
Fiona had been outraged. She always set out to win in the courtroom, but the last thing she wanted was to send an innocent man to prison or have a legitimate conviction overturned because of sloppy investigative work or police misconduct. It reflected badly on her and on the office of the state’s attorney, and she took the allegations personally.
Eventually the lawsuit was dropped, and Quinlan was exonerated by a police review board. But to this day, he carried a fierce grudge against Fiona. He’d refused to cooperate with her in the DeMarco investigation, partly out of loyalty to one of his own cops, but mostly, Fiona suspected, because he wanted to see her fall flat on her face.
A possibility that seemed more likely with each passing day. The case wasn’t going well and Fiona knew it.
She stared at the blank page for another moment, then jotted down the first statistic that came to her mind. One out of every three women in this country will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime. One out of every three...
When the phone rang, she continued to write as she automatically reached behind her for the cordless unit on the counter. Then her hand froze as she realized the time. It was after two o’clock in the morning. No good news came after two o’clock in the morning.
“Hello?”
“Fiona? It’s Guy Hardison.”
At the sound of her boss’s voice, Fiona frowned. “Do you have any idea what time it is? What’s going on?”
“I just heard from Clare Fox,” he said referring to the police department’s deputy chief of detectives for the North Side. “We’ve got a problem. Could be a big one.” The smooth, polished timbre of his voice always took Fiona by surprise. Like her, he’d been raised in Bridgeport, but any trace of the stockyards had long since been stripped from his speech.
He was Fiona’s immediate supervisor in the Homicide/Sex Crimes Unit and over the years, the two of them had managed to hammer out a fairly congenial working relationship in spite of their sometimes huge philosophical differences. Guy was a shrewd, ambitious prosecutor who’d long ago mastered the art of political expediency and compromise. Fiona had not. Her passion for justice was only equaled by her temper and by her natural inclination to leap before she looked, a tendency that almost always landed her in hot water.
“A woman’s body was found in an alley at the corner of Bleaker and Radney tonight,” Guy continued. “Looks like a professional hit, and if it is, the press will have a field day. It’s just the kind of thing some ambitious reporter would love to sink his teeth into, particularly considering the latest headlines.”
He was alluding to a recent Justice Department report that showed Chicago moving ahead of New York in the number of murders per year. The crime statistics had made the front page of all the local papers, and the mayor, facing reelection in a few months, was livid.
“The police department is taking a lot of heat from both the mayor and the press.” Guy’s voice sounded tense, as if he might be catching some of the flak himself. “Clare wants to make sure this one is handled strictly by the book. No mistakes. No one walks on a technicality. She’s asked for an ASA on the scene to advise.”
He paused. “I’m assigning you as lead prosecutor, Fiona. You’ve got credibility with the press right now, and they like you. Plus, another capital murder conviction under your belt could make certain people sit up and take notice.”
Fiona wondered if he was throwing her a bone after the DeMarco case debacle, or if he had an ulterior motive up his sleeve. “You said Radney and Bleaker, right? That’s Area Three.” Frank Quinlan’s territory.
“You’re not afraid of Frank Quinlan, are you, Fiona?” His voice held the merest hint of a challenge, one he knew she wouldn’t be able to resist.
She scowled. “Hardly.”