Flash Point
1
He was waiting outside my office when I arrived that morning, a tall lean man with a hint of sandalwood aftershave about him. It was the smile that got to me, though, that lazy, lurking smile that says, “We both know this is a game, but it’s fun to play it.”
“Knock it off, Warshawski,” Murray Ryerson said. “I want to know how you got involved with the Teichels.”
“He had legs that wouldn’t stop,” I said, “and those soft bronze curls—”
“That tell us your client was a giraffe,” Sal Barthele interjected. “Are you writing a zipper ripper or giving Murray deep background on the case?”
I was at her bar, the Golden Glow, with Murray, recovering from an exhausting day. I didn’t feel like talking about the Teichels, but I had promised Murray an exclusive.
“It started with sex, or with me misinterpreting a question about sex,” I said. “And knowing Murray, or his corporate masters, I figured men whose glinting good looks make bishops kick holes in stained-glass windows—”
“Philip Marlowe said that about a blonde. A woman,” Murray objected.
“I’ve known a number of blond men,” I said. “My ex-husband for starters. Igor Palanyuk for another. Both made me want to kick things, but the passion they inspired was about as far from lust as you can get.”
“Begin at the beginning,” Murray said. “And I’d like another beer.”
“You’re buying, remember?” I said. But I began at the beginning, a Tuesday afternoon in Minna Simms High School.
2
“Have you ever, like, slept with a suspect to get information?”
A titter ran through the room and the kid turned crimson. The guidance counselor on the stage with me stiffened and glared at the youth, but I answered gravely.
“It’s important to stay alert, even on dull assignments. Booze, drugs, sex, anything that might make you sleep, especially with a suspect, should always be avoided.”
A snicker and some catcalls arose from the back of the room on the right. “Maybe that’s how losers get a sex life, Cory,” one guy yelled. “That makes this a good career for you.”
“Suspect has to be trying to get in his pants, dude, what self-respecting girl wants to be there?” another clever guy chimed in.
I’d misjudged the question and the questioner. Cory turned red; he blundered along the row of kids, heading for the exit.
“Cory, I’m sorry,” I said into the mike. “I assumed you were with the feral group in the back. Please don’t leave.”
It was too little, too late. He stumbled up the aisle and out the auditorium door.
I was taking part in a career fair at Minna Simms High School on Chicago’s northwest side, describing life as a private investigator. I’d explained to the room full of slouching adolescents that solo ops were a rare breed; most investigators work for giant firms like Tintrey, which require a background in law enforcement or an advanced degree in law or criminal justice. I’d finished covering old-fashioned tailing—how to blend in with your surroundings—when Cory had stood to ask his question.
“That’s a good example of the wrong way to conduct an investigation,” I said to the now-silent room. “Jumping to conclusions about where a conversation is going. The more you can exhibit empathy with a witness, the more easily they’ll talk to you. When you make fun of someone instead of listening to them, you lose the chance to gain information.”
At the end of my hour, when students had asked about guns and data mining, and how to protect your own privacy if you were the target of an investigation yourself, I asked the guidance counselor how to find Cory.
Cory Teichel should have been in third-semester calculus, but he’d left the high school campus without saying anything to anyone. The guidance counselor who’d been chaperoning me said it was against school policy to give out an address or phone number. I left a note for Cory with her and went back to my office.
Impulse control. I should have told the kids impulse control was a good quality in an investigator. Follow hunches, take quick decisive action, but don’t let the chip on your shoulder fly into your eye and blind you. In other words, I was annoyed with myself, but I had a heavy workload, and by the end of the afternoon I’d put Cory Teichel and my gaffe out of my mind.
I was forced to think about him again the next afternoon. As I was shutting down for the day, someone rang the bell to the outer door. I looked at my security camera feed and saw a young woman in leggings and a layer of tank tops and shirts, carrying a backpack almost as big as she was. Her hair was thick and fell over her eyes and cheeks, so that it wasn’t possible to make out her expression.
I buzzed her in and went down the hall to meet her.
“You’re the detective?” Her voice was unexpectedly deep.
I nodded.
“You’re the one who made fun of Cory yesterday?”
I nodded again. “Were you at the career fair?”
“I went to the session on architecture. But I heard about you from someone at your session. It was very unfair of you to say what you did.”
“You’re right, at least up to a point,” I agreed, “the point being that the question was pretty snarky. Did you come here to chew me out?”
She bit her lip. “Cory disappeared. No one knows where he went.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You need to find him.”
I cocked an eyebrow at her. “Who are you, and what’s your relationship to him?”
She flushed. “I’m a friend.”
“Well, friend, here’s the scoop. I don’t know who you are, I don’t know if Cory Teichel is missing, and if he is, I don’t know if you have a legitimate interest in having him found.”
Her flush deepened. “I see exactly how you behaved to Cory. That’s why he ran away. If this is how you treat everyone who wants help, I’m surprised you stay in business.”
“Do you always leap to conclusions like a young chamois in the Caucasus?” I was exasperated. “You come in demanding that I find Cory Teichel, but for all I know, this is a scam you and he have put together to embarrass me for having embarrassed him. I go looking for him and he’s sitting in your basement playing video games.”
“Oh.” She deflated. “I hadn’t thought of that. If I tell you my name, will you keep it secret?”
“Keep it confidential, you mean. Yes, unless you’ve committed a felony.”
She came into my office, scuffing her toes like a six-year-old going to the doctor. When I showed her to the alcove where I see clients, she dumped her backpack on the floor, kicked off her boots, and sat cross-legged on the couch. Under the cascade of dark hair, she still had the soft round face of childhood, but the expression in her eyes was fierce and intelligent.
After another demand that I not tell anyone she’d come to see me, she gave me her name: Erica Leahardt. She and Cory had known each other since middle school because they lived only five blocks apart. They usually rode the Peterson Avenue bus together in the mornings, but Cory hadn’t been on the bus and he hadn’t been in any of the classes they had together.
“And you know he’s not home sick?” I asked.
“He’s not answering his phone and then I went to his place, but no one was home.”
I suggested different possibilities—a family emergency had taken him out of town, for instance, or he was brooding with his earbuds in and didn’t hear the bell.
“It’s just Cory and his father. His mother took off when he was little, he doesn’t even remember her, and he doesn’t have any other family.”
“Why don’t you ask Mr. Teichel where Cory is?”
She made a horrified face. “I couldn’t, it would be too weird.”
“You don’t think it would be extremely weird if I asked him? I don’t work for the school, I don’t have a legitimate reason to call him out of the blue to ask him about his son.”
“You couldn’t, like, hack into Cory’s cell phone
to find out where he is?”
“That’s illegal, Ms. Leahardt, even if I knew how, which I don’t. It wouldn’t be weird for you to call your friend’s father to say you need to talk to Cory about—anything. Your calculus assignment, your upcoming camping trip, whatever it is the two of you do together. You don’t have to say you think he’s missing, just ask the question. He’ll tell you where Cory is.”
“You don’t know why that would be really hard for me.”
I invited her to tell me, but she clammed up mulishly and finally left, with a sullen comment about my incompetence.
I took a moment to look up the two families. Mike Teichel—original name Dmitri Teichel—had come to this country from Ukraine as a teenager before the fall of the Soviet Union. If he’d married Cory’s mother, there wasn’t a record of it. If his own parents were still alive, I couldn’t find them. He was a freelance designer of computer games who rented office space near Northwestern University’s Evanston campus—he apparently taught a seminar in their computer engineering department every winter.
Erica’s parents were divorced. She lived with her mother, a systems analyst at Metargon, the big electronics firm in Northbrook. Her father was in Seattle running an art gallery.
Single dad a game designer, single mom at a big electronics firm. I thought back to Cory’s question about sleeping with a suspect. Had Cory Teichel been worried that Erica’s mother slept with his father to wangle gaming secrets from him? Maybe he suspected Erica was sleeping with his father. Or, à la Dustin Hoffman, was Cory sleeping with Erica’s mother?
The possibilities reminded me of Professor Wright’s efforts to teach me the mathematics of permutations and combinations. The possibilities were all there, but the probabilities were impossible to calculate.
In the morning, I called Candace Mehr at Simms High School. She was the guidance counselor who’d shepherded me through the career fair two days ago.
“Candace, V.I. Warshawski. I’ve been feeling bad about the kid I embarrassed on Tuesday. Any chance I could meet with him in person, apologize, find out what was on his mind when he asked his question?”
She said she’d check with him, get back to me, but when she called an hour later, it was to say that Cory hadn’t been in school for two days. “In fact, his father was just in the principal’s office, trying to find out where Cory is. He hasn’t been home, either. I gave him your name.”
Mike Teichel called almost as soon as I’d hung up: he needed to see me at once to discuss his son.
“At once” when you have to cover four miles during Chicago’s morning rush means three quarters of an hour. I had time to finish a report and reorganize my morning meetings before Teichel showed up.
He was belligerent. Like Erica Leahardt yesterday afternoon, he blamed me for Cory’s disappearance. He’d heard from Candace Mehr how I’d embarrassed his son in front of the school; it was my job to find him.
“Have you talked to the police?”
“Absolutely not. If I wanted to go to the police, I wouldn’t be coming to you!”
I sat back in my chair. “Mr. Teichel, your son asked an absurd, and on the surface, insulting question in front of the school. There’s a myth about the world of private eyes, that they’re hard-bitten lonely men who have sex with glamorous and dangerous women. When Cory asked if I ever slept with a suspect, I thought he was trying to draw a laugh from his classmates by playing into that myth. He obviously had something else on his mind. You’re his father—you tell me what that was.”
Teichel breathed hard through his nose, a kind of bull-in-the-ring sound. “Cory’s seventeen. That’s not an age where someone confides in his father,” he said at last.
“Who would he confide in? His mother?”
The bull-ring snort grew more pronounced.
“Friends?” I finally asked, when it was clear the mother wasn’t going to be talked about.
“He’s a loner. I don’t think he has friends.”
“Erica Leahardt?”
“That lying little bitch?” he shouted. “Are you a friend of hers, or that mother of hers?”
“Let’s see where we are so far, Mr. Teichel: you say your son is missing. You claim I’m responsible. You won’t go to the police. You won’t discuss his mother. You don’t know who his friends are. Is Cory really missing?”
Teichel’s lips were pressed in a thin angry line. “He is really missing. Now tell me how you know the Leahardt females.”
I shook my head. “People tell me you’re a software designer—gaming software, right?”
“So she is trying—”
“I can’t believe you can write code if you work on untested assumptions. I won’t talk about the Leahardt women because you’re not asking a rational question about them. And unless you want to hire me to find your son and to answer some questions yourself, there’s no reason for us to continue speaking.”
I pulled out my phone and started returning emails, or at least pretended to. Teichel walked to the door, hesitated, walked back again.
“Very well. I wish to hire you to find Cory. But only if you are not playing some game with those Leahardt fe— With the Leahardts.”
He was still making tiresome assumptions, but I let it pass. “I met Erica Leahardt briefly, once, and don’t know her mother. When Ms. Leahardt told me she was worried about your son, I told her to talk to you, but she said she couldn’t.”
His nostrils flared again, cornered bull. “Damned right. Not since the day I found her snooping in my home computer.”
I raised my brows.
“Her mother works for Metargon. They are notorious thieves of other people’s work. Erica claimed she was looking for a document that Cory had created—she had come over on the pretext of a study date with my son. That was the last time she was allowed in our home.”
“How did Cory feel about you banning her from the house?”
“He didn’t say anything about it. He probably realized she was using him, but it didn’t seem to bother him.”
“Maybe it did him terrible damage for you to exclude his friend,” I suggested. “She seems to like him—she came all the way down here on the bus to ask me to find him.”
That didn’t set well with Teichel, but he wasn’t stupid, only angry and confused. After railing at me for a moment, he stopped and thought.
“I suppose. After all, it’s her mother who wants my files. Berenice Leahardt could have been exploiting her daughter’s interest in Cory.”
I asked what proof he had that Berenice Leahardt was trying to steal his designs.
“The work I do is on the edge, where AI meets traditional gaming. Defense industries are among my clients, and anything you do for defense rouses interest around the globe. Metargon is a player, anyone who works for Metargon—”
“In other words, more assumptions, but no proof,” I snapped. “Do you think your son’s disappearance is connected to your work?”
He suddenly became very still, as if his entire mind had retreated to a remote place. When he spoke again, it was quietly, without bluster.
“I hope not. But—if it is—the faster you find him the better. And without police, FBI, none of them. They will care more for the software than for Cory.”
I talked him through the basics—when had Teichel realized his son was missing?
He hadn’t become seriously concerned until this morning—he’d been in San Francisco Tuesday, meeting with a corporate client, got home late yesterday. “I thought maybe he’d gone to bed early—I didn’t land until eleven last night; his room was dark, I didn’t try to wake him up. Then this morning, I saw the message from the school, that he hadn’t been to his classes yesterday. He wasn’t in his room, he wasn’t at school. I drove there at once, of course, and they told me about you. Your humiliating him.”
“Yes, we’ve covered that,” I said. “You’re sure he wouldn’t be with his mother?”
He went quiet again. “Cory’s mother disappeared from
our lives before Cory’s third birthday. She has never written, she has never been in touch, but someone told me she returned to Ukraine, to Simferopol, where we both grew up. Except that city is now in Russia, not Ukraine.”
The only detail Teichel had, or at least was willing to share, was his ex-wife’s name: Nina Lavrentovna. “I don’t know what last name she is using now—mine, Teichel? Her birth name, Serova? Maybe she even married again. Since I never have heard from her, I don’t know.”
He didn’t know if she’d remarried, and whether she worked, but the two had met in the States as engineering students, gravitating to each other since they were both from Crimea. “Russian and Ukrainian women work, as a rule. If she has a job, it is in electrical engineering.”
I went back to the question of Cory’s friends. Teichel finally dredged up the names of two kids who Cory sometimes went with to nature preserves. “He likes that kind of thing, wetlands, birds, the ecosystem. He volunteers in a prairie restoration project.”
I asked if Teichel monitored his son’s whereabouts. After another round of defensive hostility, he admitted that he’d put stealth software into Cory’s Android, but that he hadn’t been able to track him past yesterday afternoon.
“He went to the Sulzer Regional Library yesterday morning and he spent the day there. And he left his phone there. I picked it up this morning on my way to the school.”
“Do you have it? Did you see who he was calling or texting?”
“No one since Tuesday afternoon.” He stopped, then added reluctantly, “He texted Erica: ‘The PI totally bricked me. Hope the architect was better.’ I still think she was trying to use Cory to steal my secrets. Took a computer gaming class to make sense of what she saw in my office.”
Bricked, as in dropped a ton of bricks on him, I supposed.
I sidestepped another argument about the Leahardt women. “What’s been on Cory’s mind lately? He came to my session for a reason. He wanted to know if it was okay to have sex with someone in order to get information from them. Who would he have been wanting information from?”
Love & Other Crimes Page 9
