Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  She went on to detail a visit to the Orestes factory in Utah where the gun that killed her son was manufactured. She followed it to its first buyer, and then managed to trace it through several online sales: she was a dogged and skillful investigator.

  I was engrossed, reading about the day the killer—whom she refused to call by name; I will not add to his quest for glory—when my phone rang: blocked caller ID, but it was Elisa Palurdo on the other end.

  “Why are you looking for Lydia?” she asked, after we established that I was me and she was Elisa.

  “To make sure she’s safe. If I can see her and know that she’s where she wants to be, and that she’s not abused or exploited, I will protect her privacy. If not, I will try to get her to people or a place where she feels safe.”

  We both knew Elisa wouldn’t have called if she wasn’t willing to see me. After a few more perfunctory questions, she told me to meet her at a branch of the public library on Devon Avenue.

  Palurdo arrived on foot about five minutes after I pulled into a parking space. She was in her sixties, with gray hair piled onto her head by a wide clip. The early photos I’d found of her had shown a striking woman with humor lines at the corners of her eyes. Those had gone. She looked about warily when I approached her, and gave a perfunctory smile that did nothing to ease the deep lines around her mouth.

  “We are reasonably safe here,” Palurdo said. “Schools are the most dangerous locations for shootings in America. Then malls and places of work and worship. So far libraries have mostly been exempt. Not completely.”

  She led me into the building, nodding and exchanging greetings with staff at the main counter. I followed her to an alcove that had a view of the front door. A woman sitting on a bench there was frowning over her phone while a toddler grabbed at her pant leg, whining in a soft miserable voice—the child wasn’t expecting attention.

  Elisa took two padded chairs and turned them so that we had a semblance of privacy. “Every time I see something like that, I want to shake the mom—or dad—and say, ‘Look at your child, you don’t know how precious your time with that child is.’ I remember all the times I didn’t pay attention to Hector when he was little, all those ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy’ moments that drive you mad—and after your child is dead, you think—what would it have cost me to be patient for twenty seconds?”

  “I never had children, but I have had plenty of impatient moments. And regrets. My mother died when I was sixteen and I have all those regrets of disappointing her—when she was alive and even now, when I think of her dreams for me. The valley of regrets can pull you down into its quicksand bottom: it’s best not to linger there.”

  Palurdo produced her unhappy smile again. “That could be a good title for an article—‘Quicksand in the Valley of Regret.’ Lydia—I have worries about her, as well—especially after seeing the news.”

  I asked the last time Palurdo had seen or spoken to Lydia.

  “Maybe eight or nine months ago.” Palurdo frowned, thinking back. “She had come completely unraveled. She spent a few months with me—she’d been to her parents and felt they didn’t or couldn’t grasp the magnitude of the horror she’d been through. She was standing behind him, you know, behind him on the stage, and his blood was all over her.

  “When she was here, she was nervous, angry, overwhelmed with grief. All understandable, but it was hard to share the house with her because I myself was barely putting one foot in front of the other. My husband had died eighteen months before Hector’s murder and to lose both of them—!”

  “You were married a long time?”

  She nodded bleakly. “Forty years. He came as an immigrant who spoke no English, and he was always shy, even a bit fearful. When Hector started speaking in public about asylum seekers, and about the disappeared in Chile, Jacobo was angry in case it brought attention to us.”

  “From the U.S. government?” I asked.

  “No, from Chile’s, even though by then, Pinochet had been out of power for years.”

  “Was your husband a political refugee?”

  “He was a welder. And never political. But you couldn’t live under the regime without developing fear, I guess.” She sighed.

  I asked how Jacobo had died—wondering if there were some trail of murder that led from Chile to him to his son.

  Elisa burst my conspiracy bubble. “Coronary. He was a heavy smoker. I always told him cigarettes were more lethal than the remnants of Pinochet’s army.” She gave a small smile, the remnant of intimate moments.

  “After Jacobo died, Hector wanted to find his Chilean roots. He had studied Chilean history in college but he became obsessed with it. He wanted dual citizenship, which Jacobo had always opposed: my husband came here without papers. He became a U.S. citizen during the Reagan amnesty, but he was still afraid of deportation if Hector came to official notice, either here or in Santiago. After spending time in Chile, he became obsessed with land reform, first there, and then he began raging against land use in the United States as well. Lydia only encouraged it in him, which annoyed me. It’s why they were taking part in that event in Kansas.”

  “I didn’t know the Kansas thing was about Chilean émigrés.”

  “It wasn’t. It was about protecting the land but also helping people who work on the land. Hector thought the big agricultural companies were as exploitive and damaging to workers and the environment as the hereditary landowners in Chile.” Her eyes pinched shut, holding tears at bay. “And then an ordinary, nonpolitical mass murderer killed him.”

  “Do you think Hector would have been so passionate about these issues without Lydia?” I asked.

  She paused. “I wanted to say, no, never, but the truth is they wound each other up. And then—it was his heritage, after all. It troubled him that we never traveled as a family to Chile, for example. We often took vacations in Mexico, but Jacobo said Chile was filled with unhappy memories. His parents were dead; poor people often die young, and his only sister— he came to Chicago like my own grandparents did—looking for a better life.

  “My mother hated me marrying a foreigner and one with no college degree. I suppose that’s why I could sympathize with Lydia—her mother saw Hector as a foreigner, a Communist, someone who was leading her daughter astray.” Elisa smiled sadly, twisting the wedding ring she still wore. “That’s why I put up with Lydia’s extreme emotions for a long time. She didn’t seem to realize I was in mourning, too. We might have ridden it out, if only she hadn’t been called to testify at the killer’s trial.”

  The Kansas state police had caught Arthur Morton fairly quickly. He was hiding in the hills near Ellsworth, Kansas, where he’d built a makeshift cabin and had stored his cache of rifles, guns, ammunition, and bullet-resistant clothing, along with food and water.

  “Did you ever think Lydia knew Arthur Morton, or anyone in his family, before the killings?” I ventured.

  Palurdo’s mouth tightened in anger. “You know this kind of slaughter is meaningless. The FBI, their forensic psychologists want to dig into the killers’ motives, but that’s always superficial. Such people have weapons, they have anger, they find a target. Anyway, if this creature was targeting Lydia he could have killed her easily—she’d flung her body over my son’s.”

  I didn’t say anything, but Palurdo laughed derisively. “Oh, you think maybe he wanted Hector out of the way so he could have Lydia? What drove Lydia to the brink was at the trial he was represented by an expensive law firm. They were able to plead his sentence from the death penalty to life in prison. For me, that was—I don’t want to say it was okay—but what good would taking his life do? But Lydia—she was confused. She opposed death, she opposed war and senseless slaughter, but they had to restrain her in the courtroom—she tried to attack the killer right there, at his attorney’s table.”

  Elisa Palurdo stopped to take a bottle of water from her handbag and drink. Her face was covered with beads of sweat.

  “She screamed that she wanted to pu
ll the heart from his chest with her own fingernails. I—I wouldn’t have thought such cries would affect someone capable of that kind of slaughter, but in fact, a week after the sentencing hearing, the killer did commit suicide.”

  “What? Was he out on bond?”

  “In his cell.” Palurdo’s lips set in a tight line. “I had zero interest in his fate so I can’t tell you the how’s or if he’d shown signs. All I can tell you is that his death didn’t assuage Lydia’s anger: she attacked the lawyers. Not physically, mind you, but with emails and letters. She stood outside the building downtown where they have their offices, holding a big cardboard sign. They got a restraining order on her and she tried to stay with me again, but by then—oh, my God, having her here was awful.”

  “The law firm was here in Chicago?” I interrupted.

  “The main office is here. Who knows where the vermin or his family found money to pay those kind of fees.”

  I asked for the name of the firm, but Elisa couldn’t remember it.

  “You think she might be hiding in their building, hoping to kill them? This long after the trial?” Her eyebrows rose in skepticism, but then she shrugged. “Anything is possible when everything that anchors you to the planet is taken from you.

  “Lydia even destroyed her music. She gave a concert in Hector’s memory, and then she took an axe to her favorite guitar and chopped it to bits. ‘An axe for the axe,’ she said. She made a bonfire of the guitar and her sheet music and sang the Irish ballad ‘The Minstrel Boy.’ Over and over. She was—it was as if she was skidding in the atmosphere, cloud-surfing. I couldn’t persuade her to get medical help. I couldn’t persuade her to respect my own grief. She said the medication fogged her mind and made her forget Hector and she never wanted him far from her mind. It was terrible, terrible.”

  She covered her face with her hands. I didn’t try to touch her, just sat quietly. The woman with the whining child had vanished at some point. Another woman approached our space, felt the level of emotion, moved on.

  At length Palurdo drank more water and looked up at me, her eyes bleak. “I rented an apartment for her, but I couldn’t be around her. And then I found she had moved out, and was living on the streets. Hector had gone to university there. I guess she felt some kind of closeness to him in that neighborhood—I don’t know. I went down to try to talk her into moving back to the apartment, or getting medication. By that time she couldn’t speak, at least not to me. And now this—” She waved her arms, encompassing the recent drama around Lydia.

  “There’s nothing I can do to help you find her,” she finally said. “She isn’t with me. She doesn’t have friends here, at least not as far as I know.”

  “What about Hector’s friends?” I asked. “Would she have gone to them?”

  Elisa hunched a shoulder, said snappishly that she couldn’t possibly know, but eventually gave me the name of a boyhood friend and a college roommate her son had been close to.

  I took out my phone and showed her a picture I’d taken of Coop at last night’s meeting. “Does he look familiar? I only know him by one name, but he seems heavily invested in Lydia’s welfare.”

  Palurdo took the phone from me and frowned over it. “He showed up at the house one evening. That made me angry, because Lydia had given him my address: she knew I was getting death threats because of my blog posts. I’d stressed to her the need to keep the house a private place.”

  “Who is he?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Someone who’d been at the event where Hector was murdered. He had a strange name, Hawk, Bird, something like that.”

  “Coop,” I said.

  “Yes, I think that was it. I never knew who he was. Lydia talked to him, but I wasn’t part of the conversation. He took off, with a dog that he’d tied to a streetlamp, I remember that. He came another time, but I’d moved Lydia into her apartment by then. I haven’t seen him since.”

  When I got up to leave, I begged her to let me know if she heard from Lydia. Palurdo nodded perfunctorily. She stayed in her seat, rolling the water bottle between her palms, looking at the floor.

  13

  The Usual Suspects

  Arthur Morton had grown up on a ranch in western Kansas, near a town called Salina. In 2009, as the family’s debts mounted in the midst of a prolonged drought, they’d been forced into foreclosure. The loss of land that had been in the family since 1869 was too much for Arthur, Senior: the day after the foreclosure, he shot himself.

  At his father’s death, Arthur had dropped out of high school, drifting from job to job with the big agricultural combines that dominate the state. He’d blamed the family’s woes on the usual suspects—Muslims, Jews, gays, feminists. He’d subscribed to websites that fueled his rage, he’d stockpiled weapons.

  I thought of Elisa’s comment that Hector had been killed by a nonpolitical mass murderer. She’d been thinking of the government-sponsored death squads of Latin America. I wondered if members of Chilean or Guatemalan death squads were ever as politically passionate as someone like Arthur Morton.

  His trial had been held in Salina, Kansas. Sometime between the state police finding him and the start of the trial, his public defender had been replaced by a team from the firm of Devlin & Wickham.

  I whistled under my breath: Elisa Palurdo had said they were a big firm, but I hadn’t been expecting one of the mammoths. Devlin & Wickham routinely charge a hundred fifty dollars for six minutes of their expert advice. How had an indigent ranch hand managed their fees? His mother had been working at a bakery in Salina since her husband’s death—not an income that could cover a six- or seven-figure legal bill.

  Despite his high-powered counsel, Morton had been found guilty of most of the charges against him—murder, grievous bodily harm, various weapons violations. Morton had been interviewed by multiple psychiatrists, chosen by both defense and offense, and they agreed that he was not mentally incompetent, but that he had been derailed by his life experiences. Lonely and poor, he had been an easy target of the kind of hate messages posted on the dark web.

  The jury had taken all this on board; they’d found him guilty but had recommended he be spared the death penalty. However, between the verdict and the sentencing hearing, he’d been found dead in his cell. He hadn’t hanged himself, as I’d assumed, but had overdosed on nicotine patches. Like most states, Kansas had a tobacco-free policy in its prisons. Morton had apparently been a smoker, someone had given him a bunch of patches. Maybe his mother had bribed a guard. Maybe his lawyers had come through for him.

  I looked through the list of Devlin & Wickham’s partners. I recognized some of the names but didn’t know any of them personally. I actually did know someone who worked at Devlin, but it was Donna Lutas, my ground-floor neighbor who thought I was a menace to the condo. Maybe if I promised to move out by Labor Day, she’d go through the company files to find information on Arthur Morton for me—like, had his lawyers smuggled a whole bag of nicotine patches into his cell? And who had paid his legal fees? And why had anyone cared?

  I called one of the managing partners and spoke to his administrative assistant. I explained that I’d been hired to find Lydia Zamir.

  The voice on the other end became so frosty that I wished I’d put on my parka. “We have nothing to say to you.”

  I ignored that. “I know Devlin & Wickham had an order of protection against her. Did she come back to your firm in the last day or two? Did you have to call the police?”

  The woman put me on hold, which lasted long enough for me to do my hamstring stretches. When she finally returned to the phone, it was to hand me off to the head of Devlin’s security team.

  We chatted about who I was and what right I had to involve myself in Devlin’s private business. “I’m trying to locate Lydia Zamir,” I said. “If you can’t tell me whether she returned to your building in the last forty-eight hours, it makes me wonder if you kidnapped her from Provident and are holding her someplace where you don’t want h
er found.”

  The security chief found my suggestion completely outrageous. He also advised me to be careful about committing libel, since Devlin was a firm with a lot of power.

  “Slander,” I said. “If Devlin doesn’t know the difference between libel and slander, they shouldn’t be practicing law.”

  That somehow annoyed him further. He hung up on me, but I called the managing partner’s office again.

  “The defense that Devlin conducted for Arthur Morton—you did some amazing work there.”

  “What’s your point, Ms. Warshawski?”

  “I’ve handled murder trials,” I said. “They are big time eaters and you bill in six-minute segments.”

  “Many firms do.”

  “Arthur Morton was technically indigent and had been assigned a public defender when Devlin & Wickham stepped in. I wonder how he came to be a client?”

  “We don’t discuss our clients’ business, Ms. Warshawski. If you’ve done death penalty pleadings, then you know enough law to understand confidentiality rights.”

  “Of course,” I agreed. “Someone paid those bills. I was wondering who?”

  “You cannot seriously imagine we’d share that information with you.”

  “Just living hopefully,” I said. “My other question has to do with your client’s death. If you turn me over to the people who actually represented him, then I can ask them. Basically, I’d like to know if they brought him those nicotine patches themselves, or if they, or even his mother, paid a guard to do it for them. I’m betting it was the former, because Saline County wouldn’t be like Cook County, where it’s possible to do a quid pro quo, so to speak, with a guard—”

  She hung up on me midsentence.

  All I knew about death from nicotine patches was what anyone who’s watched Thank You for Smoking knows—that it is possible in a movie. I looked it up online and came away with hazy information. Thirty patches would perhaps do it in three hours, but there seemed to be some obstacles.