Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  My thoughts made me dizzy. That and exhaustion. Peter and I stumbled to bed, leaving the dishes where they were, which meant when I got up the next morning, I had a table full of cheese-crusted plates and silver.

  Bernie was at the kitchen table, picking pieces of trecce out of the pot I’d left in the sink. She was pale; the shirts I’d bundled her into last night hung on her, making her look like a street waif. Peter made espressos for the three of us, but didn’t linger: he was getting ready to leave for a dig in Turkey and the preparations were exhaustive and exhausting.

  “I’m supposed to be in Humboldt Park this morning,” Bernie said when he’d left. “The program starts in an hour.”

  “If you’re up to doing the job, I’ll drive you, but it would be better if you took some time off.”

  She shivered and pulled one of the T-shirts over her hands. “I don’t know what to do. Mama wants me to come home, Papa says I should tough it out. Also, he said you told them I am not permitted to leave.”

  “That’s right,” I said, “but they are hiring a proper lawyer for you, one who has an active practice and will make sure the police don’t act rashly.” I told her about Freeman Carter and the notable cases he’d handled.

  “I cannot tell the police anything, because I do not know anything.” Her dark eyes were troubled, and she spoke without her usual fire. “I guess one of those homeless men must have hit Leo to rob him.”

  “How well did you know him?” I asked.

  “Are you trying to say he had a secret life that got him killed?” Her eyes came to life with anger.

  “I’m not saying anything, but unless I know something about him I can’t begin to start an investigation.”

  “You will investigate? But this lawyer, this Carter—”

  “He’ll represent you with the police or in court if, God forbid, it goes that far. My job is to get the facts to make his job easier.”

  “Oh.” She subsided. “Our relationship, it wasn’t that long. I told you—I met Leo when we were talking to SLICK about sponsorship for our girls soccer team. We met for coffee now and then.

  “When I was arrested—I was very angry about this man, Coop, that he started the fight and then nothing is done to punish him. He attacked Leo in the meeting, and nothing happened. Me, I was taken into a police station, just for talking to Lydia Zamir, but this Coop—the police take him from the SLICK meeting where he’s trying to attack Leo, and they kiss him on both cheeks! I thought Leo and I could trick him, maybe, into doing something where it would be his turn to be punished.”

  I looked at her uneasily. “What did you imagine doing?”

  “Nothing.” She looked disgusted. “Leo is not a fighting kind of person. Leo wants—wanted—he said let a sleeping dog lie, and I said a sleeping dog wakes up in two seconds and goes for your throat.”

  She sat up straighter, remembering the argument—slumped again as Leo’s death came back to her.

  “Why on earth was Leo going to the park at night?” I couldn’t imagine why anyone, especially someone who didn’t like fighting, would want to go after dark to a place filled with drunks and addicts.

  Bernie’s face pinched with worry. “We were supposed to go there together, after dinner. He wanted to see for himself what kind of animals were in the park at night. It is called a wildlife preserve, you know, but no one ever sees any wildlife there.”

  “He was a zoologist?” I asked. “Besides being a web designer?”

  She shook her head. “No. He was doing a degree in urban planning. Yes, he can do web work, but it is—was—his side occupation. He could do things for small, poor places like SLICK, who need something simple, not a big project with hundreds of pages. He is—was—more of an expert with data analysis, which SLICK needs very much for their new project. He wanted to see for himself if animals would be disturbed by building in the park.”

  “But they weren’t going to—the new construction would have been across Lake Shore Drive.”

  “To animals it is all part of one thing,” Bernie said.

  “Perhaps,” I said. “Data gathering in a wild park in the dark. Did that sound romantic to you?”

  Despite her misery, Bernie couldn’t hold back a giggle. “Not romantic, no, but Leo said he sometimes has seen Coop in the park with that dog and—and—”

  She broke off, looking at me slantwise.

  “You hoped you could confront Coop away from the street where it would be less likely the cops could intervene?” I suggested.

  “Oui,” she agreed.

  “Okay, step me through it. You waited at African Fusion, Leo didn’t show, you walked to the park and retreated from the parking lot to the street?”

  She nodded, picking at her cuticles.

  I pushed on her: how dark was it—she would have been there about half an hour after sundown, when the sky was still light. She really made no effort to look for Leo or for Coop?

  “Okay, I did go into the park for a little distance. I couldn’t understand—he wasn’t answering my texts and he hadn’t shown up at the restaurant. I thought maybe I was mistaking when we should meet. When I got to the park I saw a path, it goes maybe two hundred meters and then divides in two—I walked to where it divided.

  “A man and a woman were sitting on a bench, sharing a bottle. I described Leo, I described Coop, but they were not caring about anything except their bottle; they could say nothing of who else was in the park. They did offer me a swallow from the bottle. Then it started being too dark and a man was coming down the path, shouting angry words, you know how people do when they are drunk or high or—or crazy. I started feeling too alone, so I left and went to the street.”

  “This is different from what you told the police last night,” I said. “When they realize you actually went into the park, not just the parking lot, they’ll jump on you, like Boom-Boom and Pierre on a loose puck.”

  “Who will tell them?” Bernie said.

  “Just because those people on the bench were drunk doesn’t mean they won’t remember you,” I said. “If they feel pressured by the cops or the state’s attorney, believe me, they’ll put you on center ice. If they confront you, it’s not a hard problem to fix—you were in shock after seeing your lover—”

  “We weren’t lovers,” Bernie protested. “I mean, yes, maybe we had sex, but it’s not as if we were—I don’t even know the word. We weren’t in love.”

  “That’s not how Sergeant Pizzello will see it. She’ll wonder if you had a quarrel, if you picked up a tree branch or a discarded bottle and smashed in the back of his skull.”

  “Vic, no!”

  Her face took on a greenish pallor. I shoved her head down to her knees. When her breathing became less shallow and she’d drunk some water, I said in a softer, more coaxing voice, “I need to know what really happened last night—you went up the path looking for Leo and turned around without seeing him? Or you found him dead and panicked but didn’t leave the site?”

  “It is what I said last night: this one man comes running out, aghast, a dead man in the bushes. I ran in and saw Leo. I called 911.” Bernie clenched her teeth to keep them from chattering. “But when the police arrived, they treated me—they treated everyone in the park—like criminals. They brought us to that space, and then, you know, they grabbed my phone from me when I was talking to you.”

  “You never saw Coop?”

  She shook her head. “I did wonder—I thought I saw his dog on the hillside that leads to the railway track—but everything was so confused. Anyway, maybe it was a coyote. People say there are coyotes in all the parks, although me, I have never seen one.”

  My questions had worn her out to the point that she agreed to go home to rest instead of trying to get to work. Before I drove Bernie to her and Angela’s Evanston apartment, I called Nick Vishnikov in the medical examiner’s office. He won’t always answer questions about people in his morgue, but today he was willing to tell me that Leo Prinz had been killed by blows to
the head.

  “Multiple? More than one hand involved?”

  “One skillful hand as nearly as I can make out. He was hit four, maybe five times, but the first blow would have sufficed. And if you’re helping the police uncover evidence, it’s a smooth object you’re looking for. Not a tree branch.”

  “Baseball bat?” I suggested.

  “Wounds suggest something smaller in diameter.”

  “It was after sundown when someone came on his body,” I said. “Any idea how long he would have been dead?”

  “Not an exact science, Warshawski. This can’t be said in court, but my best guess is maybe an hour before he was found.”

  “How tall was the assailant?”

  “You think this is NCIS? Too many variables—like was he sitting or standing.”

  “Just wondering—hoping, I guess―that the assailant had to be taller than five-foot-four.”

  “You got a shrimp for a client, do you? Victim was a hair under six feet. A short assailant would have to have stood over him, or found him sitting. By the way, Warshawski, what’s this about nicotine patches?”

  In the excitement around Leo and Bernie, I’d forgotten emailing him about Arthur Morton’s suicide.

  “Kansas guy who died in custody, supposedly of a nicotine patch overdose.”

  “Could be done, I suppose, but you don’t usually get access to enough patches, especially not in prison. Did he have the patches on him when he died?”

  “I guess—I don’t know, but why else would they have given that as the cause of death?”

  “It depends on how big he was, his health, his tobacco tolerance.”

  I didn’t know that, either, but I thought Morton had been a biggish guy.

  Vishnikov muttered under his breath, doing calculations in his head. “Eight patches would do it in nine or ten hours, I suppose, assuming prescription strength, assuming no one noticed. If the guards were doing their job, they should have seen him covered with sweat, clawing for air. Horrible way to go. Later, Warshawski.”

  I packed the dogs in the car when I drove Bernie home. She called her boss, the program director for the citywide sports mentoring program, to explain why she’d missed work. The call went through my car speakers so I heard the director’s frosty response to Bernie’s apology.

  “I thought I saw your face on the news. If you’re involved in a murder investigation, that isn’t the most stable leadership for girls who live in high-risk neighborhoods.”

  “Seeing Ms. Fouchard rise above that level of trauma will be a great leadership example for the girls,” I butted in. “This is V.I. Warshawski; I’m Ms. Fouchard’s lawyer and I’ll be glad to meet with you to discuss the situation. Just give me your address and I can be there in half an hour.”

  There was a pause on the other end and then a grudging, oh, very well, as long as Bernie showed up tomorrow.

  Bernie made a face as the call shut down. “Really, what she knows is that no one else will go to Humboldt Park for the tiny money this program pays me.”

  16

  Found?

  The iron gates in front of the parking lot at Forty-seventh Street were padlocked, with yellow crime scene tape draped lavishly around the entrance. A couple of squad cars sat in the lot, inhabitants chatting with each other through the open windows.

  I took side streets and parked west of the train tracks at Forty-first. The streets here rose steeply above the tracks. A crumbling limestone wall was supposed to keep people from tumbling onto the trains below. Standing there, I could see the landscape laid out in strips: first four sets of tracks, then the narrow wildlife park, the wide lanes of Lake Shore Drive, and beyond them the lake, glittering under the sun, begging me to stop detecting and start swimming.

  Directly below me, plants had been bulldozed to create a staging area for construction refuse and equipment. A steam shovel sat in the middle of a gravel and dirt clearing, broken concrete, rebar, and ordinary dirt piled behind it. A freight train was lumbering past, filled with the oil tankers we’ve been told are banned from heavily populated areas.

  It was more fun to watch the lakefront and the beach. From this perspective it looked as though everyone was having a good time, frisking with dogs, with children, with beach balls and volleyballs. On Olympus, you don’t hear the quarrels.

  I didn’t know if the police had searched for a weapon this far north, but they didn’t have any presence here. I went back to my car for my day pack, then scrambled down the hillside. I waited as the long line of freight cars rumbled by, waited for a little commuter train to zip north, then picked my way across the rails to the park.

  Past the construction area, the park continued north in a halfhearted way until it ran into the giant parking lot that served the McCormick Place Convention center. Near the north end I came on a set of wicker huts and benches. A sign told me this was one of the “gathering places” in the park, where local artists had been invited to create installations. A trio of cyclists had stopped there to repair a wheel.

  I looked in the huts but didn’t see anything—like Lydia, or Coop, or a murder weapon. I showed the cyclists the photo of Coop on my phone, but they didn’t recognize him. As I worked my way south, I checked around the dirt mounds and other rubble in the construction area. There was plenty of rusting metal, but nothing with the highly polished finish the weapon supposedly had.

  I didn’t really expect to find the weapon, but I hoped for a trace of Coop and his dog Bear. They were so liable to show up around any excitement in the park that I wondered if he might have a campsite hidden in the bushes.

  The day was hot. At the north end of the park, little restoration planting had been done and most of the ground cover was the kind of tough scraggly weed that attracts ugly biting insects. I’d brought a water bottle but had worn only a baseball cap, not a hat with a protective brim. Light glinting from the windshields of passing cars on the Drive made my eyes ache.

  I found a number of hidey-holes in the shrubbery where people had staked a claim. The hideouts were filled with blankets and old shopping carts, Styrofoam containers holding half-eaten food, shaving supplies, one with five cartons of tampons. Most were empty, the inhabitants off doing their daily routines, whatever those were. I stumbled on a sleeping man with a large shepherd, who growled and flicked his tail when I came too close.

  I hadn’t brought gloves with me. I didn’t want to touch the stashes I came on with my bare hands, but I poked at them cautiously.

  At one point, I passed a clutch of birders. They were happy to chat but they didn’t recognize the photo of Coop on my phone. The bright sun made it hard to see the screen, but even tenting it under our hats didn’t produce oohs of recognition. The birders also hadn’t heard about the murder in the park—they’d wondered why the cops had the south end cordoned off, but they hadn’t asked, just walked along the shoulder of the Drive and come into the park through the brush.

  A quartet of German tourists showed up as I was talking to the birders: they were walking the eight miles from the Loop to the University of Chicago campus and seemed undaunted by the heat, the insects, and the possibility of a killer in the weeds—indeed, they seemed to think that killers were a routine part of Chicago life, almost a tourist attraction.

  I left the two groups chatting about crime, restaurants in the area, and the American or German names of the birds flitting through the high grasses.

  Farther south, prairie grasses, milkweed, and other new plantings made the landscape less grim. The park widened. I crisscrossed it from train embankment to road, swatting at flies and mosquitoes, not seeing anything that looked more out of place than the usual array of cigarette butts, empty snack bags and bottles, until I came on a place on the embankment where the grasses and bushes were mashed down and ringed with crime-scene banners.

  Flies were sucking greedily at a dark blotch among the leaves and grass stems. The remnants of Leo’s blood and brains. Bernie had seen Leo lying here, the terrible sigh
t of blood and splintered bone and brain, just as Lydia had seen Hector. You never put that vision behind you; I hoped, in time, it would stop being the central image in Bernie’s mind. I was less optimistic for Lydia.

  Broken grasses fanning out from the murder spot showed the search area. I was surprised that the police hadn’t stationed an officer to protect the crime scene, but maybe, even though they’d been searching at night, aided only by arc lamps, they’d found everything they needed. Besides, unless Leo’s phone showed up, or some other concrete evidence, finding the killer would be almost impossible.

  The broken grasses went all the way up the embankment. The techs probably searched the tracks if they’d climbed this far, but they’d been searching at night. I climbed the hillock to the tracks, following the trail left by the scene of crime team.

  Every time a chipmunk ran through the undergrowth, the skin on my back prickled: I kept sensing someone behind me swinging a smooth blunt instrument, one that was missing microscopic paint chips. I would twirl around, but never saw anyone behind me.

  The limestone wall I’d seen at Forty-first Street continued down here. It wasn’t much of a wall anymore—after a hundred and fifty years or so of Chicago winters and no maintenance, large sections had collapsed. When I clambered over the tumbledown stones, I loosed a small avalanche of dirt.

  I stayed close to the wall, despite the rough terrain, not trusting my balance if another freight roared along. Scrubby trees grew along both sides of the wall, giving enough shade to keep the worst of the sun at bay. The birds kept up a bright chirping as I moved along. The insects, too, buzzed happily as they helped themselves to my blood.

  I kept a hand on the stones to steady myself, but even so, about a hundred yards shy of the platform, I tripped over an exposed root and fell heavily into a hole near the wall.

  The landing jolted my tailbone. I moved my arms and legs cautiously; nothing seemed broken. I sat with my elbows on my knees, my head in my palms, glad to be out of the glare of the August sun.