I looked out the kitchen window. Chicago, grey and indifferent, going about its morning the way it always did regardless of what was happening inside any particular house.
"Send me the detective's direct line," I said. "I'll call within the hour."
We spent forty minutes building the timeline together — Adaeze on one end with her legal precision, me on the other with Reeve's raw data, the two disciplines locking together into something that would eventually need to survive a courtroom or a grand jury or both.
By the end of it I had a document that traced, cleanly, the entire arc: the operative in Seattle, the stand-down that I now understood had been premature, the December calls, the stolen car, the attack, the financial trail. Not proof beyond doubt. But a pattern no reasonable person
