He grunted.
That was a yes.
In the car, Kohn started complaining. “Let’s take mine. This is like going back in time.”
“It’s vintage.”
“It’s shit,” he confirmed. “For fuck’s sake, Jones, there aren’t even any air bags in this.”
I changed the subject, because I had to drive. I had a whole thing about other people driving; it was only because Ian was such a dictator about it that I gave in to him. “So what witness are we transporting?”
“Nina Tolliver,” he said, grinning. “And I heard you like her, so that’s good, right?”
“I don’t make judgments,” I lied, flat out, because of course I did. I was human, after all. “And I don’t like her like I wanna pick out china patterns with her. I just think she’s a good person who totally won big in the ‘I married a psycho murdering scumbag’ department.”
Drew Tolliver had started out as muscle in the Corza crime family and worked his way up and up until he was a major player in prostitution, drugs, loan-sharking, protection, and guns, and his newest addition right before the feds busted him was assassinations. His wife had been blind to all of that. What she did see, the day he stopped beating only on her and started in on his twin boys, age seven and a half, was that he was a bad man.
“I can’t imagine being a prisoner in my own house,” Kohn said thoughtfully. “It was smart to send her kids off to boarding school. I mean, sucks for her not to see them, but at least they were safe.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “And it gave her time to get a new hobby.”
The amount of incriminating evidence Nina Tolliver had collected on everyone who came to their home was staggering. By simply leaving her laptop on in the living room when men dropped by to see her husband and turning on a web camera no one ever noticed, she got hours of damning footage. Murders were planned, people were named, and every face was captured, so there could be no doubt about who was talking, who was giving orders, and who was carrying them out.
Then, to get away, she’d begged him to take her along on a trip to Atlantic City, and he’d relented. “She’s really brave,” I interjected, because it had to be said. “And it was brilliant to freak out on the plane with an air marshal. They took her off in cuffs.”
“Yes. Brilliant.”
“And now she gets to finally be with her kids in a safe, secure place.”
“As soon as she testifies,” he reminded me. “Which the first part of is her deposition.”
“Which she does today.” I sighed. “So let’s get her there so she can put her husband away for life. The quicker she starts this process, the faster he rolls, and guys even higher up the food chain can be put away.”
“You know her husband doesn’t deserve to go into the program.”
“WITSEC doesn’t judge; it depends on what he saw,” I said sagely.
“Yeah, I know. It just sucks.”
THE SAFE house in Brookfield was not federal, but a Chicago PD property, and as such, it lacked many of the amenities that usually came with ours. It was a small ranch-style suburban tract home with a huge basement. It was older, had only radiators for warmth, and basically reminded me of one of my least favorite foster homes, down to the pink tile and frosted glass sliding doors in the bathroom. There were some missing ceiling tiles in the kitchen, so if you were cooking, you could glance up and observe spiderwebs above you. The whole place gave me the creeps. It smelled like Pine-Sol and mold. I was glad protection rotation only came around every three or four months. Sometimes marshals did transport, sometimes protection, sometimes relocation. They moved us around so we stayed sharp. It was also supposed to make it impossible for anyone to ever be able to say with any kind of certainty which marshal would show up for what duty.
It was why Topher Cassel, Joshua Rybin, Ted Koons, and Keith Wallace, the four Chicago PD detectives there when Kohn and I showed up, had no idea who was going to walk through the door. They probably didn’t expect the GQ model Eli Kohn resembled. Between the clothes, the three hundred dollar haircut, and his lean and muscular build, they probably thought someone was screwing with them.
“Hey,” Kohn greeted, pulling his badge from the breast pocket of his stand-up collar trench coat. “Lemme see yours, gentlemen.”
They brought out badges for him, which were basically redundant since we were only there because we had clearance to be. After we all shook hands, I turned to talk to our witness.
Nina Tolliver was a tiny woman. It was the first thing I thought. Her long brown curly hair hung to the middle of her back, and it was held away from her face with an octopus clip—which I recognized because I had roommates in college, four of them, all women, and the bathroom had been littered with everything from rubber bands to lacquered chopsticks. None of my annoying, loving friends had hair as long as Nina’s, though. So to be saying something as I walked up to her, hand out, I commented on it.