Dead on Arrival

Chapter 1: The Body in the Apartment

The elevator in Tatiana Antonov's building was broken again.

She climbed the six flights to her apartment on West Huron Street with her laptop bag cutting into her shoulder and a container of cold pad thai in her other hand. It was quarter past nine on a Thursday in October, and the stairwell smelled like someone had been smoking inside it despite the signs posted on every landing. Her calves burned by the fourth floor. She made a mental note, as she did every Thursday, to start using the gym membership she'd been paying for since January.

The hallway on the sixth floor was quiet. Most of her neighbors were young professionals who kept irregular hours, but by this time on a weeknight the floor was usually still. She fished her keys from her coat pocket and stopped.

Her door was unlocked.

Not just unlocked—slightly ajar. A thin line of darkness showed between the door and the frame. Tatiana stood there for a moment, keys suspended in her hand, and listened. Nothing. No movement, no sound of a television or running water. Just the low hum of the building's heating system cycling on somewhere below her.

She should have called the police right then. She knew that later, replayed it in her mind a thousand times. But in the moment, standing in her own hallway with her takeout dinner growing cold, the most logical explanation seemed the most likely. She'd left the door open herself. She'd been rushing that morning, late for a nine o'clock meeting with a client whose books were a disaster, and she could have forgotten to pull it shut behind her.

Tatiana pushed the door open with her fingertips.

The apartment was dark except for the ambient glow of the city filtering through the windows. She reached for the light switch on the wall to her left, found it, and flipped it on.

The overhead light in the entryway clicked to life and threw a harsh white circle across the hardwood floor. Tatiana saw the shoes first. Black ankle boots with low heels, pointed toes, the kind of boots she would never buy for herself. They were attached to legs in dark jeans, and the legs were attached to a body lying face-up in the narrow space between the kitchen island and the living room.

The pad thai container hit the floor. Tatiana didn't hear it land.

She knew the face. She knew it as well as she knew her own, because for twenty-nine years it had been a mirror of her own. The same sharp cheekbones, the same dark hair, though the woman on the floor had cut hers shorter than Tatiana remembered. The same gray-green eyes, though these were open and fixed on the ceiling and would never close again.

Karina.

Tatiana's twin sister lay on the hardwood floor of Tatiana's apartment with a single dark hole in the center of her chest. The blood had pooled beneath her and spread in a wide, almost perfect circle, soaking into the edge of the area rug Tatiana had bought at a flea market in Andersonville the previous spring. Karina's right arm was flung out to the side, and her left hand rested on her stomach, fingers slightly curled, as though she'd tried to press against the wound before giving up.

Three feet from Karina's outstretched right hand, Tatiana's Smith & Wesson M&P Shield lay on the floor.

Tatiana had purchased the gun two years ago after a break-in at her previous apartment. She kept it in the top drawer of her bedroom dresser, unloaded, with the ammunition in a separate box beside it. She was meticulous about it. She'd taken the concealed carry course, passed the background check, logged her range hours. She'd never fired it outside a shooting range.

Now it was on her living room floor, and her sister was dead beside it.

Tatiana didn't scream. She didn't cry. She stood in the doorway of her own apartment and felt the world tilt beneath her like the floor of a ship in rough water. Her vision narrowed to a tunnel—Karina's face at the center, everything else dissolving into gray static.

She called 911 at 9:23 p.m. The call lasted forty-seven seconds. She gave her name, her address, and said, "My sister has been shot. She's dead. Please send someone." Her voice, when she listened to the recording later, sounded flat and mechanical, like a woman reading from a script.

The first officers arrived in six minutes. Two patrol cops from the 18th District, both young, both visibly shaken when they saw the scene. They secured the apartment, called for detectives and a crime scene unit, and sat Tatiana down in the hallway.

"Ma'am, can you tell us what happened?" the taller one asked. His nameplate read OROZCO.

"I came home and found her," Tatiana said. "That's my sister. Karina Antonov."

"You live here alone?"

"Yes."

"Does your sister have a key?"

"She—" Tatiana stopped. "She used to. I gave her a key years ago, when I first moved in. We had a falling out. I never asked for it back."

Officer Orozco's partner, a compact woman whose nameplate read FISHER, was writing everything down. She looked up. "When was the last time you spoke to your sister?"

Tatiana had to think about it. The answer shamed her. "About eight months ago. A phone call on our birthday. It lasted maybe five minutes."

"And before that?"

"We weren't close."

That was the understatement of a lifetime. Tatiana and Karina Antonov had been inseparable as children—the way twins often are—and had spent their adult lives becoming strangers. Their parents, both first-generation immigrants from St. Petersburg, had died within two years of each other: their father from a heart attack when the twins were twenty-two, their mother from pancreatic cancer when they were twenty-four. The grief should have drawn them together. Instead, it cracked open every fault line that had been forming since high school.

Tatiana was the careful one, the planner, the one who got a degree in accounting from DePaul and passed the CPA exam on her first attempt. Karina was the restless one, the charmer, the one who dropped out of college twice and moved to four different cities in five years. They fought about money, about responsibility, about who had done more for their mother during her illness. The last real conversation they'd had—not counting the stilted birthday calls—had been a screaming match in the parking lot of the funeral home after their mother's service. Karina had accused Tatiana of being cold. Tatiana had accused Karina of being selfish. They were both probably right.

Now Karina was dead on Tatiana's floor, and none of those accusations mattered.

The detectives arrived at 10:15 p.m. The lead was a heavyset man in his mid-forties with thinning reddish hair and the kind of face that looked like it had been assembled from spare parts—a broad forehead, a crooked nose, small eyes set too close together. He introduced himself as Detective Brian Mullen, Area Central.

"Miss Antonov." He shook her hand. His grip was firm, his palm dry. "I'm sorry for your loss. I need to ask you some questions."

"Of course."

They moved to a neighbor's apartment—the neighbor, a graphic designer named Tomoko, had offered her living room and then retreated to her bedroom with her headphones on. Mullen sat across from Tatiana at Tomoko's kitchen table and took out a small notebook.

"Walk me through your evening."

Tatiana did. She'd left work at 7:30, stopped for dinner at a Thai place on Division Street, taken the El home. She'd arrived at her building around 9:10, climbed the stairs, found the door open, found her sister.

"The gun on the floor," Mullen said. "You recognize it?"

"It's mine. I bought it two years ago. It's registered in my name."

Mullen wrote something down. "Where do you normally keep it?"

"Top drawer of my bedroom dresser. Unloaded."

"Was it there this morning when you left for work?"

"I don't know. I didn't check. I don't check every morning."

"Anyone else have access to your apartment?"

"Just Karina, apparently. I didn't know she still had the key."

Mullen nodded slowly. He had a way of pausing after each answer that made the silence feel deliberate, like he was giving her room to say something she hadn't meant to say.

"Tell me about your relationship with your sister."

"We were estranged. We hadn't seen each other in person in over two years."

"Why?"

"We were different people. We didn't get along."

"Different how?"

Tatiana felt a flicker of irritation. "Is this relevant right now? My sister is dead."

"Everything's relevant right now, Miss Antonov."

She told him what she could. The estrangement, the birthday calls, the fact that she didn't know where Karina had been living or what she'd been doing. Mullen listened, made notes, and asked the same questions in slightly different ways, the way detectives do when they're testing for inconsistencies.

At midnight, he told her she could go. Not home—her apartment was a crime scene. She called her friend Yelena Petrov, who lived in Lincoln Park and who came to pick her up without asking a single question, which was the kindest thing anyone had done for Tatiana in a long time.

In Yelena's guest bedroom, Tatiana lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and tried to make sense of what had happened. Karina was dead. Karina had been in Chicago. Karina had been in Tatiana's apartment. Karina had been shot with Tatiana's gun.

Why?

The question circled in her mind like a bird that couldn't find a place to land. Why had Karina come to Chicago? Why had she gone to Tatiana's apartment? Who had killed her, and why had they used Tatiana's gun?

She didn't sleep that night. She lay in the dark and listened to the sounds of the city outside Yelena's window and thought about the last time she'd seen her sister's face alive. It had been at their mother's funeral, in that parking lot, both of them red-faced and shouting. Karina had been wearing a black dress that was slightly too tight and shoes that were slightly too expensive, and Tatiana had thought, with a meanness she was ashamed of now, that Karina always managed to make everything about herself.

Now Karina would never make anything about herself again.

Tatiana pressed her face into the pillow and cried, silently, for a long time.