Trigger City (Ray Dudgeon Series #2)

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Chapter One

"Forty-four is too young for a woman to die." Isaac Richmond sipped black coffee from a U.S. Army mug, then fixed his ice-blue eyes on the framed photograph in his other hand. He rested the mug on the coffee table. "You don't agree."

"It's only right for you to feel that way, Colonel Richmond," I said. "But no, I don't think there's such a thing as 'too young to die.' " I drank some coffee. It was instant, but I like instant. Guilty pleasure.

Isaac Richmond had been retired from the army for twenty years, but a cursory examination of his study told me a lot. There were photos of Richmond in full dress uniform receiving medals and commendations, shaking hands with generals. In other photos he wore green camouflage BDUs—boarding a transport plane, standing in a mess hall, sitting in a jeep on a downtown Saigon street. There was the framed degree from West Point. And the coffee mugs. Not one thing gave testimony to the two decades of Richmond's life since he retired his commission.

And then there was the man himself. He was harder at seventy-four than I was, still (if barely) a year shy of forty. He held himself in perfect posture and even his silver hair stood at attention, trimmed just slightly longer than a standard-issue crew cut. Clearly this was a man who defined himself by his military service, so I addressed him by rank and he didn't correct me.

"You have children, Mr. Dudgeon?"

"No, sir."

"Believe me, there is such a thing as 'too young to die.' If you ever have kids, you'll understand." He cleared his throat and handed me the photograph."My daughter. Joan."

Joan Richmond looked remarkably like her father—the same erect posture, the same blue eyes, the same compact features. Sharp chin, sharper nose, thin lips. On Isaac Richmond, the features conspired to make him look like a hard-ass, whereas on Joan the overall impression was that of a shy librarian. Proper, but not a prude. Not beautiful, but pleasant to look at. Friendlier than her father. And fragile.

Before coming to Richmond's house in Dearborn Park, I'd read over the newspaper coverage of his daughter's murder, six weeks earlier. Joan Richmond was single, lived alone. She was the head of payroll for HM Nichols, a midsize department store chain. The man who killed her, Steven Zhang, was a naturalized American citizen who'd come from China thirteen years earlier. He was a freelance IT consultant Joan had hired to update the employee payroll system and optimize the database. After shooting Joan to death, he'd gone home and killed himself, leaving behind a wife and young daughter. And a written confession that sounded all kinds of crazy. The cops investigated and collected the results of various forensic tests and cleared the case within two weeks.

So why had Mike Angelo sent Richmond my way?

"Colonel Richmond, I am sorry for your loss but I'm not sure what I can do for you. Do you think the police got it wrong?" I set the photograph on the coffee table between us. Isaac Richmond's mouth tightened, twitched once.

"This is a very intimate business between us, Mr. Dudgeon, and I am not accustomed to discussing my personal life with strangers." His mouth tightened again and, although I hadn't noticed any room for improvement, his posture got even straighter. "I'm sorry," he said, "that's not fair. I called you, you didn't call me."

I reached into my briefcase and withdrew a form, signed it, and handed it to him. "Standard nondisclosure agreement. I'm not in the habit of spreading the details of my clients' personal lives around the schoolyard, Colonel."

"No, I'm sure . . . I didn't mean to imply." He put the form on the table, next to the photo of his dead daughter. "It just goes against my nature to discuss such things. I spent twenty-six years in military intelligence. Our division motto was Learn All, Say Nothing. I've been living by that motto since I was a very young man. It made me a somewhat distant husband and father, I'm sorry to say. My wife—Joan's mother—died when Joan was only seven years old. Bad heart . . . genetic. Joan grew up on military bases all over the world, raised really by a succession of army matrons, and I was not there very often. She was like an orphan with a wide assortment of kindly aunts, but we were redeployed regularly and even those relationships never had the time to deepen."

He sat for a minute saying nothing. The look on his face suggested that he was back in time, on army bases in Germany and Korea and who knows where else.

"I'm sorry, where was I? Yes, right. I was absent for much of Joan's upbringing. She developed into an exceedingly intelligent young woman but very inward, quiet, not as socially confident as she should have been. Eventually she moved stateside, matriculated from Northwestern—double major: Economics and Accounting. Summa cum laude." He drank down the rest of his coffee, which had long since gone cold. "She could've done so much. But she was a whiz at math and I suppose a career in accounting shielded her from having to deal with people, to some extent. And she was good at it.

"My parental failings notwithstanding, Joan welcomed me into her life when I eventually settled in Chicago and we managed to build a friendly relationship. A good relationship. There were boundaries I could not cross—she was not going to pretend that we had much history and I was not invited to offer fatherly guidance. And she insisted on calling me Isaac, never Dad or Father. But we spoke on the phone almost daily, and we dined together every Saturday. I suggested that we make it a weekday—Saturday is prime dating time for young working people—but Joan didn't seem interested in dating. I don't think she was a lesbian, and even if she were, one presumes she would still go out on dates. She just seemed uncomfortable with the idea of romantic relationships of any kind. No doubt a result of her upbringing. Collateral damage of my service, I'm afraid." Richmond shook it off with a rueful chuckle. "Listen to me. An old man wallowing in his regrets, while you sit nodding politely and wondering what the hell any of this has to do with you."