The Shadow Side
Linda Castillo

Excerpt

Prologue

Blood ran like tears over the palazzo tile, trickling thick and dark down the walkway and into the cracks of the sidewalk beyond. Rivulets that gleamed black and wet in the stark glare of the porch light. The smell of violent death hung heavy in the air, like the zing of ozone after a lightning strike.

She lay on her back, alive, watching him through eyes glazed with shock. Eyes that had gone calm from blood loss and the acceptance of her impending death. Even in the throes of dying, she was lovely. Her robe had fallen open just enough for him to see the curve of her breast. The same breast he'd touched gently and lovingly countless times in the last four years. The hem of her robe rode high on her legs, exposing the silky flesh of her thighs. The image of her lying there helpless and dying shouldn't have aroused him, but it did.

He stood silent and still beneath the light, shaking with rage, and watched her life drain away. He'd never seen so much blood, didn't know a human body could bleed so much. The sight of it fascinated him, rousing something dark inside him, horrified him until he thought he would vomit.

God in heaven, what had he done?

He looked down at the gun in his hand, shocked yet strangely comforted by its deadly weight. Never taking his eyes from her, he opened his mouth and set the muzzle between his teeth. His hands shook, the cold steel rattling against his incisors. The barrel tasted of old gun oil and powder and the pungent tang of his own fear. He would join her now. They would be together in death as they had been in life. Together. Forever.

Closing his eyes, he squeezed the trigger.

And the world shattered.

Chapter 1

Adam Boedecker woke as he had nearly every morning for the last three years—with a headbanger of a headache and the final vestiges of a nightmare clinging to him like a leech. He closed his eyes against the pounding in his head only to realize the sound was emanating from the living room. Someone was knocking on the door. Glancing at the clock next to the bed, he cursed. Who the hell was hammering on his door at four o'clock in the morning?

Not bothering with the light, he rose gingerly and set his bare feet on the floor. Two seconds of dizziness and his head cleared. Every morning he was faced with the same moment of truth. Every morning he uttered a silent, but heartfelt thanks that the dizziness passed quickly. There had been too many mornings in the last three years when it hadn't. Grabbing his sweat pants from the foot of the bed, he stepped into them and walked shirtless to the living room. At the door, he flipped on the porch light and looked through the peephole. A jab of alarm speared his gut when he saw the uniformed police officer and a disheveled- looking detective standing on his porch, their expressions grim. Adam recognized the detective from his days at the precinct. Ned O'Brien, homicide. The patrol officer beside him was young enough to be his son and looked more like a high school football star than a cop. Adam didn't want to ponder why two of Chicago's finest were standing on his front porch at four o'clock in the morning. He opened the door. "Detective Sergeant Boedecker." O'Brien stuck out his hand. "Adam. Sorry to bother you so early this morning."

Adam stared hard at the detective and felt a sinking sensation in his gut. The other man stared back, his cop's eyes telling him the news wasn't good. He had that look about him. A look Adam had possessed too many times himself not to recognize as a precursor to tragedy. "This is Officer Miller." The detective motioned to the patrol officer.

Numbly, Adam shook the younger man's hand. "What's this about?"

"Lieutenant Henderson asked us to stop by and talk to you personally. I'm afraid we've got some bad news."

Adam braced, shoring up the scattered remnants of defenses that were too battered to do him much good. "What happened?"

"Your brother has been involved in a shooting."

"Michael? Jesus. Are you sure?" Adam couldn't seem to get his brain around the words. A shooting with regard to his older brother didn't make sense. Michael had always been the good one. The successful one. The brother who'd devoted his life to keeping his nose clean.

The detective nodded.

"How bad?" Adam asked.

The patrol officer looked over his shoulder at the street beyond, fiddled with a non-existent speck on his jacket. The detective grimaced, glanced down at his shoes. "I'm sorry, Sergeant, but he's dead."

Pain jolted Adam like the shock from a stun gun. He didn't believe it; his mind couldn't absorb the meaning of the words. Michael couldn't be dead. Not his only brother. Certainly not by an act of violence.

"Are you sure?" he heard himself say, realized with a keen sense of irony that was the first thing everyone asked when someone they loved was killed.

The detective jerked his head once, but his eyes said it all. There was no mistake.

Denial welled like blood on a wound. A dozen questions droned in his head, but Adam didn't trust his voice to speak. Because the two men were fellow cops, they understood and gave him a moment to pull himself together.

"Jesus Christ." Raising his hand, he put it against the jamb and leaned, his mind reeling. "When?"

"We got the call a couple of hours ago. Neighbor heard shots, went around to the back patio, saw...blood. Patrolman swung by and called it in."

Blood. Christ. Adam closed his eyes, let out the breath he'd been holding. "How did it happen? Robbery? Home invasion? What?"

The two cops exchanged looks. Adam had been a cop long enough to know that look, too. And he knew the news of his brother's death wasn't the worst of what he would hear before all was said and done.

"Is there someone we can call for you, Sergeant?" the detective asked quietly. "Family member? Girlfriend?"

"The only thing I need is for you to tell me what the hell happened."

"Uh, we don't know the details."

That was the standard line cops used when they knew damn good and well what had happened—and didn't want to discuss it. Adam had used it a time or two himself over the years. It irked the hell out of him that they were using it on him now.

"I can handle it," he heard himself say.

"Sure you can, Sergeant. I didn't mean to imply otherwise."

The detective's politeness annoyed him. Adam didn't want polite. Not when the questions were punching through his brain with increasing ferocity. He wanted answers. And he damn well wanted them now.

"Were you at the scene?" he asked.

"You and I both know this isn't the time to get into the specifics," the detective said.

"There isn't ever a good time to talk about murder when it hits close to home."

Detective O'Brien didn't have anything to say about that.

Adam stared at him, incredulous that a fellow officer was going to stonewall him. "Cut the bullshit, detective. Goddamn it, I'm a cop. I want to know what the fuck happened."

"You know I can't speculate—"

"I'm not asking you to speculate. Just tell me what you know."

"All I know is that a patrolman found two bodies. Both deceased from gunshot wounds. That's all we know at this point."

Two bodies. The words struck him like a jab to the solar plexus. That meant Michael's wife, Julie, had been killed as well. Adam had only met her a few times, but he'd liked her. Julie was a dark-eyed beauty with a pretty smile and quick wit. He wondered if the cops knew she'd been pregnant.

"Who do you want us to call for you, Sergeant?" the detective asked again.

Adam looked at his hands, realized they were visibly shaking. "Have you notified NOK?" he asked.

"The female's parents live in Miami. We're working on getting in touch with them."

"If you need phone numbers..."

"We've got them."

"What about...my mother, Nancy Boedecker?" A woman he hadn't seen in nearly six months, even though she lived less than an hour away in the suburb of Fox River Grove. "Has she been told?"

"We've got two detectives en route. That okay with you? If you'd rather be the one to break—"

"No. That's good. She'll need someone." Someone who could look into her eyes and tell her the son she'd loved most was gone forever. "You going to be all right, Sergeant? Do you want one of us to stay with you until someone gets here?"

Adam ignored the question. In the last three years, he'd seen to it that there wasn't anyone to call. Not for him. Certainly not now. "Did this happen at Michael's house?" he asked.

"3553 Holland. Up in the Gold Coast area."

"Who's the primary?"

The detective looked uncomfortable. "Sergeant Deaton."

Scrubbing a hand over his face, Adam muttered a curse. Just when he was certain the situation couldn't get any worse, it did—exponentially. His ex-partner was the last person he wanted to deal with. It was bad enough losing his brother. But facing off with a man who'd betrayed him in the worst possible way a man could be betrayed promised to put this day at the top of a long list of bad days. Adam had had a lot of those in the last three years. He figured one more heaped atop a few hundred others wasn't going to make much difference now.

* * *

Adam knew better than to show up at the crime scene. He was breaking a long list of departmental regulations that dealt with a police officer's personal involvement in a case. On the other hand, he'd never put much weight in rules. There were some things a man needed to do, rules be damned. Finding out how and why his brother had died was one of them, even if he knew that bitch fate wasn't going to make it easy.

But while the part of him that was a cop—that would always be a cop— knew coming here was a mistake, the part of him that was a brother couldn't stay away. It didn't matter that he hadn't been on active duty for three years. Half the cops here wouldn't even remember him. The other half would watch him very, very carefully.

Slamming the door of his Tahoe, Adam turned up the collar of his trench coat against the driving sleet and headed for the flashing lights. Michael and Julie's townhouse was located in an upscale section of town that catered to the upwardly mobile crowd Adam had never quite fit in to. The normally quiet area was lit up like a football stadium. Police cars blocked both ends of the street, diverting through traffic even though there wasn't much at this ungodly hour. Uniformed cops swarmed within the maze of cars, their breath spewing white vapor into the cold air as they spoke into their police radios. Curious neighbors in designer robes stood on their front porches and watched the scene unfold with the same fervor as if they were watching an episode of NYPD Blue. The Crime Scene Investigation Unit van was parked curbside directly in front of the townhouse, its engine rumbling, the smell of diesel fuel filling the air. Next to it, the Medical Examiner's van eased away from the curb and pulled onto the street.

Adam tried not to think about the two bodies inside. The two vital people whose lives had been cut short by violence. He couldn't think of them on a personal level. Not when his emotions were scraped raw and the guilt sat like a boulder in the pit of his stomach. He needed to get through the next few hours first. He had to find out what happened before he let himself feel, before he let the grief overwhelm him.

Adam walked up the sidewalk toward the front door. Yellow crime scene tape stretched around the narrow porch, the ends flapping in the bitter wind coming off Lake Michigan a few miles to the east. A frazzled- looking female patrol officer had been assigned the crime scene perimeter, and she didn't look happy about it. Adam didn't envy her duty, but he wasn't going to make her job any easier. She shot him an annoyed look when he reached for the tape and ducked under it.

"I'm sorry, sir, this is a secure area. Step away from the tape."

"It's Detective Sergeant Boedecker." He flashed his badge and a nasty smile. "I've got a free pass." Ignoring her sour expression, he crossed the porch. She snapped something at him behind his back, but he didn't turn around, and he didn't stop.

The front door stood open. Adam paused at the doorway a moment, trying to get his bearings, and watched the crime scene techs work. He could feel a headache building at his temples, like a thunderhead gaining momentum and promising a violent release. The worst of the shaking had subsided, but his hands weren't yet steady. He didn't want to face Chad Deaton like this, not when he was aching inside and not sure how he was going to handle any of it, but Adam didn't think his emotional state was going to improve in the next five minutes, so he put the thought out of his head and concentrated on getting through this one minute at a time.

He entered the foyer. The crime scene team had spread out in the living room and begun the tedious task of gathering evidence. A young female tech videotaped the scene with a camera small enough to fit in her palm. An African-American man wearing tiny round glasses knelt and plucked minute particles from the carpeted floor with tweezers and placed them in plastic bags.

Adam scanned the living room, the familiarity of it striking a chord within him. The big-screen TV Michael had bought Julie for Christmas last year stood silent and dark. The coffee table where Michael had liked to put his feet when the Bears played on Sunday afternoons held a coffee cup and the morning edition of the Tribune. Adam tried to remember the last time he'd been here, realized he couldn't. How long had it been? One month? Two? How many times in the last year had Michael called him with an invitation? How many times had Adam not even bothered to return his call? Grief encroached, an invading army pushing forward and gaining momentum. He tried to slap it back, put it in a compartment for later, but the emotion was snarling and sharp and ripped into him like a rabid beast. Shoving his hands in the pockets of his trench coat, Adam stepped into the living room and tried to look at the scene through the eyes of the cop he'd once been, realized he couldn't. It had been three years since he'd worked a crime scene, and the mindset eluded him. Simply vanished. As if it had never existed, as if he'd never been a decorated homicide detective with one of the highest solve rates on the force. Three years was a long time to be away from the job. He felt like an intruder, a foreigner.

He didn't feel like a cop anymore.

"Adam."

He jolted at the sound of his name, turned to see Detective Chad Deaton stride toward him, his face set. Unlike Adam, the other man hadn't changed much in the three years since they'd worked together. He still looked more like a movie star than a veteran homicide detective. Back when they'd been partners, they'd gotten a good laugh out of his good looks and penchant for Italian suits and leggy blondes. Neither of them were laughing tonight.

Chad wore a troubled expression that was half surprise, half annoyance, and a custom-made suit that was badly wrinkled and smelled of coffee and cigarettes.

"You look like you've been up all night, Chad. What do you have?" Adam asked.

"What are you doing here?" Deaton stopped less than a foot away, his gaze level. "You shouldn't be here."

"This involves me."

"You know better than to show up here."

"It's nice to see you again, too, Chad. How's tricks?

Deaton scowled at him. "Go home, Adam."

"How's my wife?"

"Dammit, Adam. This isn't the time or place—"

"Sorry. Ex-wife. Give her my best, will you?"

Rubbing his hand across his mouth, Deaton cursed. "Why the hell aren't you with your mother and sister, for chrissake? They need you a hell of a lot more than I do."

"Because I'm a better cop than I am a son or brother." Adam looked past him, toward the kitchen where another detective stared at them, shaking his head. "This is where I need to be." "I'm sorry about Michael."

Adam winced. The last thing he wanted was this man's sympathy. "I need to be in on this."

"You know I can't allow that." Deaton grimaced. "For too many reasons to count, let alone that you're the deceased's brother, for God's sake." "Tell me what happened."

Deaton sighed unhappily. Adam figured the other man would rather be anywhere than where he was at this moment. He would have drawn some satisfaction from that knowledge if the feeling hadn't been so goddamn mutual. He and Chad Deaton went back a lot of years. They'd once been friends. Fifteen years earlier they'd gone through the academy together. They'd partnered up in some of Chicago's toughest neighborhoods for the better part of six years. They'd passed the sergeant's exam together, gotten their detective shields within a year of each other. Deaton had been Adam's best man when he got married. Deaton had been with Adam the night of the shooting. The night a fifteen- year-old kid with crack in his veins and a grudge against cops stuck a Saturday night special against Adam's head and pulled the trigger.

"Let's take a walk."

Deaton tried to take his arm, but Adam shook it off. "Fuck that."

"Don't make this any more difficult than it already is, Adam. You may think I'm a son of a bitch, but you know I'll do right by Michael."

As much as Adam disliked Deaton, he knew the other man was a good cop. But the knowledge didn't take his temper down.

"Let's go." Deaton started for the door.

Knowing a confrontation would be counterproductive at this point, not certain if he was up to it in the first place, Adam fell into step beside him. They walked in silence down the sidewalk toward the street. The crowd had thinned. The curious neighbors had gone back inside to their down comforters and flannel sheets. Only the crime scene van, a couple of police cars and a television news van remained. The sky was still dark, but dawn was only an hour away. The sleet had stopped, but a bone-chilling wind had kicked up off the lake and Adam felt the cold all the way to his marrow.

They stopped curbside. Adam looked back at the townhouse, felt another punch of shock as the finality of what had happened sank in a little deeper. Two people he'd cared for deeply were dead, their lives stolen by a senseless act of violence. The side of him that was a cop ached to be part of the investigation, to find the person responsible. The side of him that was a brother cried out with the pain of his loss and the shadowy need for revenge.

He looked at Deaton, felt another emotion unfurl, an uncomfortable awareness he had absolutely no desire to deal with. Adam's ego had taken a beating over the last three years. He might not be a cop anymore, but he was damn well still a man. Enough of a man to think about the woman who was keeping Chad's bed warm while he was out on this godforsaken night.

Jesus Christ. What a mess.

Deaton reached into the pocket of his trench, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit up. He offered one to Adam, but he declined. A man in his condition chose his vices wisely. Smoking wasn't one of them.

"Tell me what happened," Adam said after a moment. When Deaton didn't answer, Adam shot him a hard look. "You owe me, goddamn it."

"I don't owe you a thing," the other man snapped. "I could have busted your balls back there, but I didn't."

"You didn't bust my balls because you owe me."

Deaton looked toward the townhouse, took a drag off the cigarette. "It's ugly, Adam. You're not going to like it."

"My brother is dead. I already don't like it."

Taking another drag off the cigarette, Deaton tossed it to the ground and crushed it with the toe of his wingtip. "Christ, it's cold out here. Let's go sit in my car."

Deaton's unmarked Crown Victoria was parked curbside. The two men crossed the street. Deaton slid behind the wheel and started the engine. Adam took the passenger seat. He wondered why Deaton wouldn't look at him, felt the hairs on his nape prickle.

"It looks like a murder/suicide."

Adam felt the words like a sharp instrument twisting just behind his breastbone. Denial tangled with grief. He stared at Deaton, looking for a lie, praying for a lie. "That's not possible," he heard himself say.

"You asked. That's my preliminary finding."

"Your preliminary finding is wrong. Michael wouldn't... For chrissake, he wasn't in that frame of mind." God, he sounded just like the dozens of faceless, nameless civilians he'd devastated with terrible news in the course of his career.

"We'll check ballistics and prints, but it's cut and dried. I saw the bodies. I've seen enough to know what happened. He cut her. He shot her. Then he shot himself."

Holy Christ. "There's got to be a mistake..."

"There's no mistake. I'm sorry. Damn it, you asked. I'm telling you the way it is."

Adam looked out the window toward the townhouse. Grief was a lead weight on his chest. He didn't believe the brother he'd grown up with would murder his wife, then take his own life. Not the Michael who'd seen Adam's career as too violent. Not the Michael who'd reached out to Adam and seen him through some of the darkest days of rehab.

"Did you find any brass?" he asked.

"We dug one slug out of the wall. Sent it to the lab for ballistics." Deaton turned up the heater. "It's not going to change anything." "I want in on the investigation."

"That's not going to happen. You're not even on the active roster, for God's sake."

"So I'll get back on the roster."

Deaton made a sound that was half exasperation, half laugh. "I hate to remind you of this, buddy, but you're on long-term disability."

"I'm ready for full duty. I've been ready for weeks."

"That's not my call. You do what you have to do, but you're not going to work this case."

"Henderson wants me back. He's been trying to reach me."

"Yeah, and from what I've heard, you haven't bothered to return his calls."

"I've been busy." Adam rolled his shoulder, wondering about the rumormill. "I've got physical therapy two days—" "Cut the bullshit. You've been avoiding coming back because you don't want a desk job. Ruffles your ego."

For a moment, Adam wanted to point out that what ruffled his ego was when Deaton had slept with his wife while he'd been in the hospital recuperating from a devastating brain injury. But Adam figured they both had enough on their plates at the moment without getting into ancient history. He didn't want Shelly back, but it never ceased to infuriate him that the two people he'd trusted most had been carrying on while he'd been fighting for his life.

"I want in on this," he repeated.

Deaton cut the engine. "Go home, Adam. I would imagine your mother could use a shoulder to cry on right now. Go home to your mother and sister. They need you. I sure as hell don't."