The Littlest Witness

FIRST THING Monday morning John went around to his uncle’s office at the station and knocked on the open door. “You wanted to see me?”

Liam Gallagher glanced up from the report he’d been reading and motioned John into his office. Pushing sixty, Liam was still a handsome man with a shock of snow-white hair and bright blue eyes, which reflected his humor almost as often as his quick temper.

He was a seasoned detective who’d started out as a beat cop on Chicago’s south side nearly forty years ago, just as his father had before him and his younger brother, Sean, had after him. Liam’s son, Miles, worked in Narcotics. They were, as John had told Thea Lockhart, a family of cops.

Liam waited until John was seated, then said, “I asked Lieutenant McIntyre to send you down here because I wanted to talk to you about the report you and your partner filed yesterday morning.”

“You mean the Gail Waters case?”

Liam stuck a pair of bifocals on his broad Irish nose and glanced down at the paperwork on his desk. “McIntyre said you’d requested a follow-up investigation.”

“Is that a problem?”

His uncle glared at him over the rims of his glasses. “You know it is. We’re short over two hundred detectives in this division, and only half the homicides in this city get solved. I don’t have the time or the manpower to waste on a case that should be cleared.”

“I know, I know.” John sighed, all too familiar with the shortage of detectives and the stack of uncleared murder files waiting on his desk. He’d pulled a double watch for so long now he couldn’t remember what it was like to get home at a decent time or have more than four or five hours of uninterrupted sleep at night. He plowed an impatient hand through his hair. “I’m not convinced Gail Waters killed herself.”

“The evidence says otherwise.” Liam opened the folder containing John and Roy Cox’s reports and the preliminary autopsy findings. “No defense wounds, no hair, tissue or blood beneath her nails. No trace evidence or fingerprints at the scene. Toxicology tests clean. Contrecoup contusions to the brain, which means she was killed by the fall.” He closed the folder with an unmistakable finality.

If it walks like a suicide, quacks like a suicide…

John shifted in his chair. “Look, we spent most of the day yesterday canvassing the building and interviewing the tenants. We haven’t even had a chance yet to talk to her co-workers and family, let alone go through all her files. She has a database with hundreds, maybe thousands, of names from missing persons and fugitive reports she collected from every major police department in the country. One of those names could be a lead, but it’ll take days to go through that list.”

“And if you don’t find anything?”

John shrugged. “Then I don’t. All I’m asking is for a little more time. We haven’t been able to find out much about this woman except that she was a newspaper reporter. We still don’t know why she was at that building on Saturday night or who she went to see.”

As John spoke, an image of Nikki Lockhart came to his mind. The little girl’s dark eyes and solemn face haunted him, and he couldn’t shake the notion that she might have seen something that night. Might know something she couldn’t tell him.

And what about the kid’s mother? What was she hiding? John didn’t like to admit it, but Thea Lockhart haunted him, too. He hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind all day yesterday after he’d left her, and all night last night when he’d tried to catch a few hours’ sleep.

It wasn’t so much that he was drawn to her, he told himself, but that he was intrigued by her. She was extraordinarily feminine with her soulful eyes and dark curly hair, but John had the distinct impression her appearance was deceiving. There was something about the way she carried herself, the fierce way she guarded her little girl that made him think she would be a formidable adversary if crossed.

“There’s something else you need to know,” John said hesitantly. “Something I didn’t put in the report.”

His uncle frowned. “What?”

John got up and closed the office door. The squad room was crowded and noisy as always, but he didn’t want to take the chance his conversation might be overheard. “Gail Waters called me a few days ago and wanted to interview me for a piece she was doing on Dad’s disappearance. She’d done her homework, Liam. She knew all about Ashley’s murder, the frat party, Tony and Miles. She’d even been up to the prison to talk to Daniel O’Roarke on death row.”

In less than a minute Liam Gallagher aged ten years. The vitality drained out of his still-muscular body, leaving him stooped, haggard and old. He slumped in his chair. “What did you tell her?”

John shrugged. “Nothing. I didn’t have time to talk to her, and I didn’t feel like dredging up all that old business. But…”

“But what?”

“Now she’s dead.”

A spark of life ignited in Liam’s eyes. “What are you trying to say, Johnny?” His tone was angry

“Nothing. It may be just a coincidence. But it’s a piece of the puzzle I don’t think we can overlook.”

“You told anybody about this? McIntyre?”

“No.”

“Not even Roy Cox?”

“You’re the first person I’ve mentioned this to.” But John didn’t like keeping things from his partner. He’d be madder than hell if Roy pulled something like this on him.

Liam stared at John for a long moment, then said softly, in a voice traced with an Irish accent, “You’re sure about this, Johnny?”

Sure about what? That Gail Waters had called him or that she’d been murdered? “The only thing I’m sure of is that she called me and now she’s dead.”

Liam sat back in his chair and steepled his fingers beneath his chin. “Okay. You did the right thing bringing this to me. I’ll handle it from here.”

John didn’t like the edge in his uncle’s voice. “What are you going to do?”

Liam shrugged. “Follow procedure. There’s nothing in these reports that warrant a follow-up investigation.”

“I disagree.”

“Let it go, Johnny.” There was a warning note in his uncle’s voice.

“I don’t know if I can do that.”

In a sudden burst of temper Liam picked up the file and flung it at John. The contents spilled over his desk. “That wasn’t a request, goddamn it, that was an order.” His blue eyes glittering with fire, he folded his arms on his desk and leaned toward John. “You’ve always been a good cop, Johnny, and one helluva detective, but sometimes you remind me too much of Sean. You don’t know when to let go. You gotta think about this one, son. You gotta think what it would do to the family if you started asking the wrong questions. Think about your brother. Ashley’s murder nearly did Tony in back then. Look what it’s done to his life. I’ve had to appear before more review boards on his behalf than I care to remember. The kid’s always been hanging on by a thread. What do you think would happen to him if he had to relive all that?”