The good part was that if Tim was threatening her, then Drew wasn't. That was a relief, right? So why didn't she feel relieved?

"He lives around here," Audie offered, still staring out the front windows.

"I'll let the detectives know about this little coincidence."

Just then, Audie realized she was glad Tinley was at her side.

She moved to the front of the line with a sigh and began to order. "Good morning. I need one medium house blend with skim only please, plus one banana nut muffin, one chocolate chip biscotti, and a double espresso mocha freeze grande. Oh-and if you could dump a big mound of those little chocolate shaving things on top of the whipped cream I'd really appreciate it."

To his credit, Rick Tinley said nothing. But his shoulders were shaking in silent laughter.

"Like I said on the phone, I don't got a crystal ball, Oleskiewicz." Detective Ted Kerr stood up from his seat at the conference table and stretched his hands toward the ceiling. "Unless you got one laying around in your fancy new office here that we can borrow."

Stanny-O shot Quinn an amused glance and slapped the files closed. He stacked them in the center of the table.

"And if you recall, Helen Adams was one of eight hundred and seventy-six homicides in the City of Chicago last year," Kerr added, leaning his hands on the back of the chair. "We did what we could, then moved on to something that stood a chance in hell of getting solved. You know the drill."

They knew it well, Quinn thought. Just like they knew that Helen Adams's file had already spent several months languishing in the cold-cases unit, where it had plenty of company.

"Like we told you on the phone, we didn't have shit on Homicide Helen." McAffee smiled, enjoying his own turn of phrase. "None of our street weasels knew a thing about it-just your basic wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time mystery-and public figure or not, we had to eat that case for lunch, despite all those god-awful editorials in the Banner."

Quinn sighed. It was true that Helen Adams had made the quintessential easy target-an older lady, alone, at night.

He and Stanny-O had practically memorized these files by now, but they wanted this chance to meet face-to-face with the detectives who'd handled it, and so far, Quinn had no complaints with how they'd done their jobs.

The first cops on the scene had found Helen Adams sprawled out in an alley behind a warehouse on the Near West Side, barely alive. Robbery was the likely motive. Her purse had been ripped from her arm, and the bag and its contents were strewn on the asphalt around her. Any cash she'd carried was gone.

Her car keys were missing. A watch had been ripped from her wrist. Pierced earrings had been pulled from her earlobes and the little fourteen-karat gold clasps were found a few feet away on the concrete. Her Porsche was found the next day, parked along the Chicago River near the Merchandise Mart.

Autopsy results eventually showed blunt trauma to the back and side of the skull with what appeared to be pressure-treated wood. But the weapon was never recovered. There were no witnesses. No significant evidence was extracted from the car.

There were a few things that bothered Quinn about this case, however, besides the fact that the victim was Audie's mother.

First off, what the hell was a sixty-two-year-old woman doing in that neighborhood at night? The file said that earlier in the evening Helen Adams had had dinner with Banner CEO Malcolm Milton at Spago's on the Near North Side, and a number of witnesses saw them leave separately. But the security camera at Lakeside Pointe never recorded Helen arriving home that night.

So what had happened after the tiramisu and before the trauma unit? How did she get from point A to point B?

The four detectives had already discussed Quinn's main concern-a cell phone call Helen received a little after ten on her way home. It was the only loose end he could find in McAffee and Kerr's investigation.

They'd traced it to a pay phone near Lincoln and Fullerton, but it lasted just seconds and may have been a wrong number. They found no witnesses who recalled seeing anyone in the booth at that time. It was a dead end-and it bugged him.

Everything at the crime scene indicated she'd been attacked where she lay, and the Porsche was found without a scratch on it, not stolen or stripped, the keys in the ignition. Did the offender drive it there after attacking her? Did Helen leave the car there and drive off with the offender to the scene of the crime?

There were no self-defense wounds on Helen Adams-no marks on her palms or forearms and no material under her fingernails that would suggest she fought against anyone. That meant she went to that parking lot willingly and was surprised by the attack.

So what was she up to? Did someone set a trap for her? Who would want her dead?

Quinn knew they might never get the answers to these questions, because Helen Adams hadn't regained consciousness long enough to talk about the events of that night. The files said she managed a few words to her daughter on the way to surgery, then died.

Whatever those words were, they'd been enough to convince Audie that she owed her mother, big-time. One last guilt trip for the road, apparently.

Quinn sighed, twisting his own mother's claddagh ring around his left pinkie finger, thinking, thinking…

"Aside from the phone call, do you know what else really bothers me about this?" Quinn looked up at Kerr and McAffee, thinking out loud.

"I have a feeling you're going to tell us," Kerr said, returning to his chair.

"Yeah. I am." Quinn reached for the files again and gazed at the color postmortem photographs. "She was hit in the face. Not the first time, the second time." He ran his finger along the image of Helen Adams's brutalized cheek.

"First one to the back of the head-she's down. But that's not enough. Then one to the side of the face. Why? Wasn't her purse already on the ground? Why the extra hit?"

"And to the face," Stanny-O added. "Muggers don't usually go for the face."

"Exactly," Quinn said, turning to his partner with appreciation. "It's too personal. There's too much anger there for a random mugging, especially of an older female."

"What are you guys after?" Kerr rolled an unlit cigarette through his fingers like a miniature baton. "You saw the case files. We must have talked to half the city looking for someone with a grudge against that old bat."

Quinn grunted a little. What had Audie said the other day about her fame? "They love Homey Helen. They don't love me."

This homicide case may very well be about Helen Adams the person, not Helen Adams the public figure or Helen Adams the random mark.

As he'd wondered many times before, could the same person hate the mother and the daughter?

"But Andrew Adams was at the yacht club all night," Stanny-O said out loud, as if following Quinn's silent reasoning. "And there were about two hundred people to back him up on that, right?" He looked to the other detectives.

"Right," McAffee said. "And everybody else we talked to had an alibi as well, including Malcolm Milton, your girl Autumn, and the business partner, Marjorie Stoddard-about fifty people saw her at a dog obedience class that night."

"Which brings us exactly to slit, like we said." Kerr inserted the unlit cigarette between his lips and let it dangle there as he talked. "Which is exactly what you seem to have on your case, too. Which is why you're grabbing at straws trying to find a connection with her mother's case. But Helen Adams never received threats as far as we found."

"Nope. She didn't," Quinn said. "One of the first things we did was run an FBI database search for similar threats, and there wasn't anything, anywhere."