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her beautiful back, her young back, with a zigzag of tiny moles across it. God, she was gorgeous. He wanted her again.
    She didn’t want him.
    â€œNo tip for you today,” he said, trying to be funny.
    He wasn’t.
    He tossed an envelope on the bed and made a pot of coffee.
    The woman walked over to the window. The sun was just coming up over Lake Michigan, bulging the horizon and tinting the Gold Coast’s high-rises pink. She watched it break free from the water, which kidnapped it every night, as her grandmother once told her, kidnapped it and held it deep in the depths where dragons slept and thunder was brewed, but at dawn each day the angry sun would turn the lake into a caldron and burn itself free, as it was doing right now, streaking the edge of the eastern sky red. She slid the tall window open a crack and flicked her cigarette out. It fell to the pavement below, hardly varying its course. Already the day was hot. She felt the sludgy air worming its way into the air-conditioned room.
    â€œHey,” Lachlan called to her. “Let’s go. I have work to do.”
    She slid the window shut. “Cab?” she asked.
    â€œTake the Red Line.”
    â€œYou are too kind.” She bent over and gathered up her hair. She could smell him on herself. “May I please use a shower?”
    â€œSorry,” Lachlan said. “I’ve got work to do.”
    She pulled on her jeans and tucked in her T-shirt, wishing she knew a curse to leave him with, wishing she’d listened more closely to hergrandmother’s tales, her grandmother who would stick a knife into a loaf of bread and spin it on the floor whenever there was lightning, her grandmother who liked to scare her with stories of the shadow monsters who lived in bottomless puddles and cut children to pieces and ate them.
    â€œCome on,” Lachlan said, taking up a pile of submissions. “This isn’t the Playboy grotto. I work for a living.”
    She said nothing. She cursed her secret curses, grabbed the envelope off the bed, and left. Out the apartment door, down the windowless hallway, into the mirrored elevator, taking her 30 percent out of the envelope on the way down, through the lobby and the gawking security guards, outside, muggy, the walk to the “L”, the Red Line to work, crowded, hot, the stench of him on her still. Into the Bank Street Diner, busy, she handed her money over to Savva, grabbed her uniform and a dish towel, went into the bathroom, kicked off her pants and underwear and soaped herself, washing between her legs. She took off her shirt and scrubbed her stomach and breasts till they blotched red. She scrubbed them again, put on her uniform, tightened her apron, and went to work.
    In his Gold Coast condo, Kevin Lachlan poured a third cup of coffee and skimmed the opening paragraph of yet another magazine submission, hoping this time to discover an original thought. He didn’t. He tossed it into the trash and reached for another submission.
    â€œThe hell?” he said, examining a thick envelope.
    It was one of those padded envelopes that so many writers like to use, as if there’s something fragile about their stories, for Christ’s sake. It was sealed, and had no postmark. Just his name was written on the envelope. There was something heavy in the bottom of it. He opened it and reached in—
    â€œJesus Christ!” he screamed. He dropped the envelope and backed away, fumbling for his cell phone. “Jesus fuck! FUCK!”
    A t the end of a long hallway, on the second floor of Chicago police headquarters, inside a room known only as Room 70, detective James Mangan waited for the shitty coffeepot to stop gurgling so he could pour himself a cup of shitty coffee. Room 70 was off limits to the public and most other detectives. The door, always shut. A handwritten note inthe hallway: No Press. The room was home to the Violent Crimes Task Force—the VCTF—which