The Big Keep: A Lena Dane Mystery (Lena Dane Mysteries) by Melissa F. Olson Page A

I whispered.
    “We used to talk about kids. You used to talk about kids, right before you left the force. And then with everything that happened...I understood. But we’re a little older now, and I’m done with school, and we have the money. But suddenly every time I bring it up you need to go somewhere, or talk about something else.”
    I ignored his words, seething between his arms. I hate being trapped. I hate it, and Toby knows that. I turned my head away.
    “Is it your cases? Is it these cases you keep taking, where kids are in trouble and you’re the only one who can save them?” My right arm closed into a fist. Five seconds, I vowed. If he didn’t let me go in five seconds I was gonna deck him. I could, too. “Because I hate it when you take these cases, Selena, I really do. As your husband.”  
    Without thinking about it, really, my weight shifted back to my left, and he knew I was close to the breaking point. He released me entirely and took a step back, shaking his head.
    “Fine. Do what you want. You will, anyway.” He didn’t stomp away. In his heart, he’s a gentle man, no matter how angry I might make him. But when I looked up again, he was gone. And at the very moment I felt his absence, I felt something else, too, in my stomach. Most women get morning sickness much earlier in the pregnancy, but it was just like me to do everything backwards. Surprised, I turned around – and vomited my dinner into the sink.  
    Broccoli. Gross.

    Nate Christianti was up late. Tom had had two bouts of coughing that scared both of them, and Nate had dragged a big chair into Tom’s bedroom to keep an eye on him during the night. Tom protested, of course, but Nate insisted he could fall asleep just fine in a chair – and proceeded to fake it. Around 1:30 Tom managed to drift off, but Nate didn’t want to go to his own room until he was absolutely sure. Instead, he cracked open his laptop and did a search for Selena Dane in Chicago. Instantly a couple dozen articles jumped the queue of responses. To his surprise Nate saw a whole series of newspaper articles on Lena, all from around five years earlier.  
    Nate began reading through them as chronologically as he could, clicking links that referenced earlier reports, piecing the whole story together. Around five years ago there was a series of attacks on prostitutes in Chicago. The paper kind of danced around the details, but it sounded like someone had been carving on the women with a knife, only none of them would talk about it. They were traumatized and disfigured, and the cops couldn’t get anywhere on the investigation for almost a year.  
    Then Lena had joined the case. She was only twenty-five, still a uniformed officer, although no longer really a rookie. Somehow she’d gotten some of the prostitutes to talk to her. She’d learned that the mutilator was another cop, a robbery-homicide detective named Matt Cleary whose grandfather had been Commissioner of the department. Lena had gone to Internal Affairs and tried to get him investigated, but nobody believed her, and the working girls refused to testify. Cleary had put the fear of God in them, convinced them that he had the whole police force in his pocket and there was nowhere they could run.
    Eventually, Cleary had caught on to Lena’s insistence that he was a suspect. He’d come after her as she was leaving her Chicago PD station after work. There was a struggle, the paper claimed, and Lena had shot him in the face. Cleary had died. Nate searched further, and found a crime blog that had followed the story, dissecting every decision from the department. He tried to pick apart the subtext, and got the impression that Lena’s fellow officers hadn’t liked how she’d handled the whole thing. After his death, the prostitutes identified him as their attacker, but there was no other evidence linking Cleary to the assaults, and he had a lot of friends in the CPD. One of the articles Nate found was an