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bigger guy. We’ll focus on what he looked like rather than what he did. Close your eyes and try to picture him. When you’re ready, we’ll start with the shape of his face.”
    I closed my eyes and thought about Muscles. His face was wider at the bottom than at the top, like he’d worked on his jaw muscles as much as his biceps. Scott and I scrolled through the head shapes, which were the top of the head down to the ears, and then the jaw shapes, until we found the right combination. Scott asked if I wanted anything made bigger or smaller and then we chose some hair, made it blond, and moved on to the eyes. For each feature there were several categories and then a ton of little thumbnails to choose from. More than a few times we chose an element and it just didn’t look right, so we changed the size and the position or swapped it for another one. Eventually, after a little over an hour, we had a picture that looked like Muscles. A bit too symmetrical, but good enough to see it was him. When I looked at the finished product, something clicked.
    “Cicero.” I said.
    “What?”
    “He said something about Cicero.”
    “This guy?”
    “Yeah. I remember now, he said ‘I told Cicero and I’m telling you, stay out of Patterson’s business’. I think that was it.”
    “Who’s Cicero?”
    “Got me.”
    “Maybe Patterson would know,” suggested Scott. “Shall we start on the second guy? Maybe you’ll remember the bit where they told you who killed Susan.”
    We made much quicker progress on the composite of Muscles’ friend but I had trouble with the eyes. Everything else was done, and we’d been through lots of different pairs of eyes before we finally settled on Deep Set pair number 221, which were the closest but were sadly lacking in crazy. Scott said he didn’t know how to add crazy, so we settled on what we had and he sent both images to the printer in the squad room. By the time we got out there, Sgt. Freedman already had the image of Muscles in his hand.
    “What’s Tommy Byrne got to do with this?” he asked.
    “You know who he is?” I said.
    “Sure,” said Freedman. “He runs the drugs trade across most of the South Side.”
    “He’s a dealer?” I asked, confused at why a drug dealer would warn me off the Patterson case.
    “He mostly gets involved with the larger shipments, splits them up amongst the local street level dealers at a premium and then collects street tax from them if they want to sell in his territory.”
    “How does he get away with that?”
    Scott was already at his desk, studying Byrne’s details on his computer. He provided the answer.
    “He’s connected. Irish Mob.”
    “The Irish Mob? But I thought the bosses all went down last year when Patterson got off.”
    “It’s not like the Italians,” said Freedman. “There’s no capo di tutti capi . Irish Mob these days is more like a collection of gangs. There’s a loose hierarchy, but those convictions barely made a dent in the bigger picture. Byrne’s father-in-law is Michael Coughlin, one of the gang bosses that pretty much runs the South Side.”
    “But the gangs are linked? I mean he warned me off the Patterson case and Patterson was accused of getting in bed with the Irish Mob. It’s pretty obvious there’s a connection. Do you know who this guy is?” I asked Freedman, showing him the composite of Byrne’s companion.
    “Face doesn’t ring a bell”, he said, “but if we look at Byrne’s known associates I bet we’ll get an I.D. Maybe we should pick them up for questioning.”
    “Based on them beating me up and me identifying them? And what happens when you can’t hold them? I don’t like my chances.”
    “Jake’s right,” said Scott, leaping to my defense. “We need to have something more solid before we get into it with them. We’ll hold off for now. But thanks, Jake. It’s a good start.”
     
     

Chapter 10
     
    I didn’t sleep much. I rarely do. The alarm went off at 8.30, but I was