Gallagher Justice

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 but a spill of blond hair. He felt his gut tighten as he mentally braced himself for what else he might see.

Meredith Sweeney, a petite, dark-haired assistant medical examiner, glanced up as he approached, and when she nodded, two detectives from Doggett’s unit, Jay Krychek and Skip Vreeland, glanced over their shoulders. Krychek immediately turned back to the body, but Skip nodded and spoke. He was a tall, thin man with a grim expression and stooped, narrow shoulders that made his rumpled suit jackets constantly ride up in the back.

Krychek was partial to the gangster look—dark shirts, light ties, and in the daytime, he was never seen without his badass cop sunglasses.

“Yo, Doggett, how’s it going?” Skip greeted him.

“Not too bad.”

Krychek turned back around to Doggett. “Took your sweet time getting here.”

Doggett shrugged. “Fog’s a bitch out there.”

“Tell me about it. Playing hell with Forensics. They won’t be able to find shit out here.” Krychek stepped back, making room for Doggett. “Take a look.”

“It’s bad, kid. Blood all over the place. You don’t want to look.”

The woman was lying on her back, eyes closed, her expression almost peaceful. To Doggett’s surprise, there really wasn’t much blood. On first glance, she appeared to be sleeping, but someone who looked like her wouldn’t be snoozing in an alley. She was beautiful, a real knockout. Blond. Young. No more than twenty, if that.

Damn shame, Doggett thought.

There was a dark stain on the pavement beneath her head, and her hair was matted with dried blood. She wore a light dusting of makeup—eye shadow, mascara, pale pink lip gloss—that didn’t detract from her natural beauty. The black dress she wore was short and slinky, her shoes spiked and sexy. Expensive and seductive clothing designed to attract the attention of the opposite sex.

By contrast her jewelry was simple and unpretentious—tiny diamond studs in her earlobes and a pearl ring on the third finger of her right hand. The presence of the jewelry seemed to rule out robbery as a motive.

“She was shot in the back of the head,” Krychek told him.

“Do we know who she is?” Doggett asked.

Krychek shook his head. “Not yet. CSU found an evening bag in the Dumpster that we think belonged to her. The wallet was missing, but they found a phone number scribbled on a piece of paper inside a gold compact. We’re checking the cross directory now to see if we can come up with a name.”

Doggett’s gaze was still on the body. “Who found her?”

“Wino by the name of Teddy Scranton. Says this alley is on his regular beat. He hangs around Restaurant Row until midnight or so, then heads over here where it’s quieter. When he spotted her, he walked down to the corner store and had the night clerk call 911. We’ve got him in one of the squads right now, trying to sober him up with coffee and food, but I don’t think he’s going to be much help. Claims he didn’t see anything.”

“Could he have been the one who stole her wallet?” Meredith asked. “Somebody turned her over. Maybe he was looking for her purse.”

“Don’t think so.” Krychek ran his hand down his tie. “If he lifted the wallet, why hang around and call 911? He would have hightailed it out of here ASAP. He got what he wanted for his good deed—a free meal and a little attention.”

A cynical observation, but Doggett figured Krychek was probably right on the money.

Doggett stood with his hands behind his back, a habit he’d picked up at the academy so as not to inadvertently contaminate the crime scene. When the tech gave him the go ahead, he donned surgical gloves and squatted beside the body, still careful not to touch anything as he examined the wound in her head.

“Looks like a .45,” he murmured.