Chapter 99: Felony Review
The Cook County State’s Attorney keeps its child abuse unit at 2650 South California, on the fourth floor, behind a door with a keypad.
I had been there twice before as a witness.
The eighteenth of December I went there as something else, and I did not have a word for what.
Assistant State’s Attorney Teresa Vukovich gave me eleven minutes because I had asked for five.
She is somewhere in her forties and wears the same gray jacket in every memory I have of her.
She drinks tea out of a mug that says WORLD’S OKAYEST GOLFER.
I put the sleeve on her desk, laid the coding sheet and the certified copy side by side, and talked for ninety seconds.
I had practiced the ninety seconds on the bus.
She read the coding sheet. Then the Articles. Then the coding sheet again.
She said nothing for a while, and I let her.
Filling the silence is how you get shown out.
“Where did this come from,” she said.
“A household record.”
“That is not an answer, and you know it isn’t.”
“I’m not going to say.”
“Then I can’t use it.” She put the mug down. “That is the first question defense counsel asks. If there’s no answer, the paper is worth less than the ink.”
She turned the certified copy around so it faced me.
“This part is real,” she said. “This is a public record. The state filed it, the state certifies it, nobody can argue with it.”
“Then—”
“It shows a company existed. Companies exist. Two hundred thousand of them exist in this state.”
She held up the coding sheet by one corner.
“This shows a number beside a name on a page nobody has authenticated. Not a statement. Not an invoice. Somebody’s bookkeeping shorthand.”
I said, “It’s dated fifty days before a woman died.”
Vukovich set it down carefully, which was worse than if she had thrown it.
“I’m going to tell you three things,” she said, “and none of them are what you want, and all three of them are true.”
I got the notebook out. She waited until I had the pen ready, which I have never forgotten.
“One. My case is a battery in a foyer on the fourteenth of September 2026. That is the charge.”
“A payment made in October 2025 is not evidence of a battery eleven months later. I’d be arguing other-crimes evidence. I would lose, and I’d hand her lawyer a mistrial for free.”
“Two,” she said. “A grand jury subpoena is not a form I fill in when a citizen is curious. It attaches to an investigation.”
“There is no open investigation into Ana Reyes-Blackwood’s death.”
“There’s an exhumation,” I said. “Mr. Blackwood had her—”
“I know what Mr. Blackwood did. I read about it like everybody else.”
“An exhumation is not an investigation. It is a man paying for a procedure. Until a pathologist gives me a cause of death that is not natural, I have no homicide. And without a homicide I have nothing to subpoena a bank about.”
“Three.”
“Three is the one you’ll like least.”
She leaned back.
“You are a witness. A very good one, which is rare. But witnesses do not steer.”
“The more you gather, the more you look like a woman building a case. A woman building a case has a motive. Marina Kessler will spend two hours making you into a grievance with a recorder.”
I said, “I know what she’ll say.”
“You know part of it.” She glanced at a folder on the left of her desk. “She filed on the twelfth. Motion to suppress the recording. Illinois eavesdropping statute. We’ll deal with it in February.”
That was the first I heard of it, in December, in a sentence she dropped sideways.
I wrote it down. 12 DEC — MOTION — EAVESDROPPING.
“Can she do that,” I said.
“She can file anything. Whether she wins is a different building.”
She stood, which meant the eleven minutes were over.
I gathered the papers back into the sleeve. My hands were not steady and I hated that she could see it.
At the door she said my name.
“Ms. Carter.”
I turned.
“If somebody with standing goes and gets that invoice and that bank record — somebody who has a legal right to ask, and asks through a court, and it comes back through a clerk with a stamp on it —”
She stopped and reconsidered the sentence, the way lawyers do.
“Then I will read it,” she said. “That is all I am promising. I will read it.”
I said thank you and took the stairs, because the elevator was full of deputies.
Outside, on California Avenue, it had started to sleet.
Somebody with standing.
At the bus shelter I made a list in my head of every person alive with a legal right to ask.
The list had one name on it, and he had not spoken to me since the ninth of November.