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.” She’d proved that, hadn’t she?
“Then get over there and make sure his detectives don’t screw up the investigation before they even make an arrest. Take Milo with you.”
Milo Cherry was Fiona’s second chair. He was a young, eager prosecutor with a quirky sense of humor and a nearly photographic memory.
After several tries, Fiona finally managed to reach him on his cell phone. She could hear music and laughter in the background, and assumed he was at a late-night party or nightclub, which surprised her, considering they were due in court at nine that morning. But as long as he did his job, came through in a crunch, his social life was none of Fiona’s concern. And he certainly didn’t seem to mind being summoned at such an ungodly hour. He readily agreed to pick her up in ten minutes.
Fiona hurried to get dressed, and in the flurry of activity, she completely forgot about the nightmare that had awakened her earlier. But on her way out, the dream came back to her suddenly and she paused at the door, the uneasy notion that David Mackenzie’s ghost might be lurking on the other side niggling at her confidence.
For one brief moment, she couldn’t bring herself to turn the dead bolt, to step into the dimly lit hallway, to go downstairs and wait for Milo by the front door. She couldn’t seem to move at all.
This was crazy, she told herself firmly. David Mackenzie was dead. It wasn’t his cologne she smelled in her apartment. He wasn’t the killer who had dumped that poor woman’s body in an alley. David was dead and buried, and he wasn’t coming back.
But as Fiona mustered her resolve and stepped out into the hallway, something made the hair on the back of her neck stand on end.
For one split second, she could have sworn she felt an invisible presence in that hallway. A ghost from her past that had risen from the grave to demand justice.
CHAPTER TWO
THE MURDER OF RAY DOGGETT’S first wife had haunted him for twenty years, but it had been on his mind more than ever lately. She’d been on his mind. He didn’t know why, but he’d been remembering little things about Ruby that he hadn’t thought of in years. Things she’d said. The way she dressed. Her smile. He’d been dreaming about her, too, and obsessing about the murder.
That was why Frank Quinlan’s call earlier had hit him so hard. “...a body found in the north alley of Bleaker and Radney. Young, female Caucasian. Get your ass over there, Doggett. Sounds like a bad one.”
In all the years Doggett had been with the Chicago PD, he’d seen his share of homicides. He’d seen some he knew he would never forget. But it wasn’t another young woman’s death that was eating at him tonight so much as the fact that her body had been found in an alley. That brought back memories.
Ruby’s body had been left in an alley, too. She’d been missing for three days when they found her.
The call had come in from dispatch just after midnight, Doggett remembered. He and his partner, Joe Murphy, had the third watch that night and they responded to the call immediately. But by the time they arrived, another squad car was already on the scene. Murphy got out and headed down the alley, but instead of following him, Doggett walked slowly toward the street. He’d spotted something beneath one of the streetlights.
He recognized the shoe at once. A red high heel trimmed with ruby rhinestones. The kind of shoe an unsophisticated farm girl from Indiana might think was glamorous.
“Look, Ray! Aren’t they beautiful? Don’t you just love them? They’re my ruby slippers. Get it? Ruby’s slippers...”
Doggett turned and started running toward the alley. Murphy met him halfway down, grabbed his arm, threw him up against the wall when Doggett fought him.
“Take it easy, kid.”
“Let go of me, Murphy. Let go of me, damn you. It’s Ruby.”
“I know.”
Doggett closed his eyes. He’d been praying he was wrong, but Murphy’s words confirmed his darkest fear. “I have to see her. I have to see for myself—”
“No, you don’t. You don’t need to see her like that.”
“Let go of me, damn it!”
When Doggett tried to fight his way free, Murphy strong-armed him again. “You can’t go down there. You hear me? It’s bad, kid. Blood all over the place. You don’t want to look. That’s not the way you want to remember her.”
But that was exactly the way Doggett had remembered her for months after her death. He couldn’t seem to remember her any other way. He hadn’t viewed the body at the crime scene, or even later at the morgue, but he’d witnessed enough crime scenes to imagine the blood-splattered clothing, the vacant, staring eyes.
Twenty years later, that image was still with him, at every crime scene, in every investigation. The knowledge that her killer was out there, unpunished and unrepentant, still kept him awake at night.
Maybe he was getting old, Doggett reflected. Dwelling on the past because his life hadn’t turned out the way he wanted. But to hell with it, because now he had another murder to worry about, another killer to find. That was one thing about being a cop. Always plenty of bad guys out there to occupy his mind.
He pulled to the curb and parked behind one of the squad cars. The dense fog softened the flashing lights, and at such an early hour, the scene was still relatively quiet. No spectators to be kept at bay. No news cameras, yet. It was an almost surreal calm, as if he were still caught in one of his dreams, Doggett thought. But when he got out of his car, the scratchy transmission of a squad unit radio grounded him firmly back in reality.
He followed voices down the alley, showing his identification to the young patrolman manning the perimeter. Then he stepped under the crime scene tape and glanced around.
The buildings that rose on either side of the alley were several stories high, stark and graffiti-tagged, with only a few windows that overlooked the alley. Several blocks over on Rush Street, bars and clubs would still be rocking with the young and the hip who were looking to have a good time or score a few drugs, but the immediate crime scene vicinity was a no-man’s-land, an area trapped between the affluence and glamour of the Gold Coast and the misery and desperation of the projects.
Most of the buildings housed small offices and mom-and-pop businesses that had closed up shop hours ago. Even the cleaning crews had long since gone home. The potential for witnesses was pretty much nil. Doggett wondered if the killer was familiar enough with the area to have planned it that way, or if he’d just gotten lucky.
A few feet from where he stood, a crime scene tech photographed the body from several different angles while another narrated as he videotaped. Deeper inside the alley, flashlight beams bobbed up and down as officers searched the ground for evidence.
The victim laying in front of a trash bin, but in the semicircle of officers and detectives that had formed around the dead woman, Doggett could see nothing