Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  “Old is hot, as well? Thank you, but I have an active real detective practice.”

  “A hundred thousand an episode,” Bolton said, “with a guarantee of a minimum of six episodes, even if the series never airs. We’d start with Lydia Zamir—follow you as you try to trace her. And, you know, people love being on camera—if we put out a call saying that anyone who’s seen Zamir gets a cameo on the show, we’d get the public involved in the investigation.”

  “Wow,” I said. “As Lieutenant Kojak used to say, a hundred—no, six hundred thousand—is sure a lot of balloons. And having a whole lot of strangers underfoot while I tried to track down a lead—that makes it irresistible. And yet, I will persist in resisting.” I permitted myself a small tight smile, self-congratulation at my witty riposte.

  Murray kept his eyes on the floor, but Bolton said, “One-twenty an episode.”

  “Don’t you have a legal team that handles these kinds of negotiations?”

  “I’m on the Global executive committee,” Bolton said. “We have fluid lines of command. Believe me, the board, including Oscar Taney, is behind this project.”

  I didn’t need Siri to tell me that Taney was the majority owner and chair of Global Enterprises.

  “We want to find Lydia Zamir,” Bolton said. “We owe her a good outcome to her story after our TV crew frightened her into running off—even though it was totally unintentional and certainly within the bounds of modern journalism.”

  “Always good to check the liability box,” I agreed gravely. “Have modern journalism’s bounds expanded to include chasing people into the path of danger?”

  This time Bolton did frown, but he decided to overlook the comment. “You find her, we get her medical care, it’s win-win—especially for you, since you walk away with close to three quarters of a million.”

  He pulled some papers out of his breast pocket and laid them on the glass tabletop in front of him. “The details are in here. In fact, we’ll make it one-twenty-five.”

  He took out an elegant little fountain pen, found the relevant page, and wrote in the new amount. When he put the pen back inside his jacket, I longed to see it leak all over the tan linen weave.

  I looked at my watch. “Gentlemen, you were so beguiling I let you have nine minutes. Now I have real-life clients, who don’t want their business on cable for the world to watch. Fino al prossimo.”

  Bolton got to his feet. “Offer’s good for twenty-four hours, Warshawski—you’d be smart to take it.”

  I walked him down to the outer door, basically wanting to be sure he actually left the building. Murray stayed behind. When I got back to my office, he was standing at my desk, playing with a letter opener that a knife-making client had created for me.

  “Explain to me what in Conan Doyle’s name was going on just now. No way does Global think they want me in a docudrama. There wasn’t even the pretense of a screen test, for one thing, and for another, that’s not how people at Bolton’s level operate. He’d send a flunky down, and it wouldn’t be for this kind of money. Either the company is so desperate to get hold of Lydia that they’ll go through this ridiculous charade, or they’re dangling all these balloons in front of me to keep my attention from something that they don’t want me to see. Am I working on a project that touches Global’s interests?”

  Murray shifted uncomfortably. The letter opener started to fall and he grabbed at it, slicing his fingers.

  “Go bleed over that ludicrous contract while I get a wet cloth,” I said. “Real blood on the paper will make it seem like an authentic docudrama.”

  While Murray tended to his cuts, I scrolled through my list of open projects. I didn’t think any of them connected to Global’s interests, but Global has a thousand tentacles—any of them could be attached to one of my clients without my knowing.

  “Okay, I’ll bite,” I said. “What made you be a party to this repellent idea?”

  “Bolton pitched it differently when he called me this morning.” Murray kept his attention on his fingers, drying them one at a time before taping over the cuts. “He said everyone at Global knows how much I want to get back to significant journalism—and you know that’s true. He said there’s a lot of talk around town about work we did together—they even teach the Humboldt Chemical investigation at Medill.”

  Medill, Northwestern’s journalism school, wrestles with a few other universities for top national billing.

  I sat on the corner of my desk. “You get a royalty for the case study?”

  “No.” He flushed but kept fiddling with the Band-Aids, not looking up. “Just saying, you and I have a reputation. Bolton said if we both wore a wire while we hunted for Zamir it would be a ratings bonanza and would open the door to other reporting assignments.”

  “And you bought it? How could you be so totally naive? Wearing a wire while talking to witnesses? Protecting the source—that’s what you do when you’re digging deep. And there’s no deep digging here, anyway. Just titillation. Did Bolton know you’d asked me to find Zamir?”

  “No. He’s been pounding on me from the moment Zamir disappeared from Provident, although at first it seemed to be coming down the pipe to me through the Star’s editorial team. When you showed up on different news feeds because of the Fouchard kid being connected to Prinz, they thought they could work out a deal with you—of course they know we have a history.”

  I digested that. “Murray, turn on your J-dar. Guy is flattering you and trying to buy me off. There’s something he doesn’t want us to know, or maybe he wants to be there doing damage control if we find it out. I can’t believe Zamir is important to them.”

  He finally looked up. “Yeah, but I don’t know what it could be. I read everything I could find on Zamir after they started bird-dogging me. It’s a big story, but big like an opera—not big like a cover-up. Global is mad about gun control, I mean mad against it, and the Zamir story starts with that mass murder in Kansas. But that was four years ago. It’s been superseded by Parkland and El Paso and way too many others.”

  “Elisa Palurdo is living with death threats from mass slaughter deniers,” I said, “but even that will only be news if one of the freaks actually kills her. As for Zamir, she’s afraid, or she wouldn’t have fled the hospital, but I can’t believe she’s afraid of a living, breathing threat, or she wouldn’t have been living openly on the streets before your story ran.”

  “Tell me the truth, Warshawski. Did you find Lydia Zamir? Do you know where she is?”

  I smiled sardonically. “You know what Mencken said—the smallest atom of truth comes from the agony of someone who dug it up. You don’t throw it about like loose change.”

  21

  Combing Through Trash

  Time was when I would have trusted Murray with the information about Lydia’s hideout. Not now. He might imagine he was being loyal to me, to the story, to the source, but his first allegiance would be to the person he thought could advance his career.

  I felt a painful mix of grief and anger when I escorted him out the front door. His red hair was streaked with gray, and he had deep grooves around his mouth. He was like a man in a rowboat, desperately trying to catch up with a departing ship, and I hated it. Our work had made us closer than lovers at times. I hated thinking I could not trust him.

  As I skimmed through the contract that Bolton had left, I wondered if it was standard in any way. It spelled out what Warshawski would do for the consideration of money, which basically amounted to an open-ended agreement for Global to record my every move. My first impulse was to put it through my shredder, but on second thought I sent it to Freeman Carter, my lawyer, asking him to check for any hidden bombs—like whether just touching it made me Global’s indentured servant.

  I put in an hour for my paying clients, but another aspect of Lydia Zamir’s unraveling nagged at me. Her rage at the lawyers from Devlin & Wickham, who’d undertaken the defense of her lover’s killer. Elisa Palurdo said Lydia had jumped Arthur Morton in the cou
rtroom and had to be pulled away from him. She’d then gone after the lawyers. It wasn’t surprising, but I wondered how extreme her behavior had been, both in court and here in Chicago at the firm.

  The Wichita Eagle had covered the trial, which of course wasn’t solely for Hector Palurdo’s murder: sixteen other people had been killed in Horsethief Canyon, which seemed to be part of a state park in central Kansas. The Eagle had a paragraph for each of the victims; they’d ranged in age from seventy-five to a baby whose mother was also killed—two bullets went through the baby’s tiny chest and into the mother’s heart. The photos and descriptions made for sickening reading, but I pushed through it, entering all the names into my Bernie-Zamir case file and searching to see if any of the victims had cropped up in the news in other ways.

  Two of the dead were organizers of the event where Palurdo and Zamir were performing. It had originally been an annual music festival called “Tallgrass Sings,” which raised money for organizations that protected the remaining prairie lands in Kansas. They’d changed the name to Tallgrass Meet-Up some years earlier and for some time it had collected money for a number of people or groups that used the land or worked on the land. After a number of immigrants who worked on the area’s big ranches were detained and deported, the organizers decided to use part of the money they raised for immigrant aid.

  Despite Kansas’s reputation for extreme conservatism, there’d been a lot of local support for the fundraiser. Ranchers depended on the Mexican cattle hands. Feedlots depended on the Somalis who were willing to work in the slaughterhouses. A number of big-ag companies made sizable contributions—Sea-2-Sea kicked in fifteen thousand with a lot of fanfare, but feedlots and other big-ag companies gave as well.

  According to the Eagle, this wide-spectrum support only fueled the rage along the dark web fringe. I found some of the posts the news report mentioned. I learned: Jews control big agricultural companies, Muslims want to impose Islamic law on Kansans, Mexican immigrants were all criminals who want to murder women and rape cattle.

  At Arthur Morton’s trial, the Devlin attorneys painted a picture of a youth unbalanced emotionally by the unfair loss of the family farm. Morton had been susceptible to the messages hammered into him day and night by the dark web—as if the websites had jumped off the screen and entered into his room in the middle of the night against his volition.

  Morton’s defense resonated with those jurors who spoke to the Eagle after the trial. Some had families who’d farmed in Kansas for over a century. They knew the struggles to keep a family farm going when all the government did was offer handouts to criminals, not help to American farmers.

  In fact, the support Sea-2-Sea and other agricultural behemoths had given the festival made some of the jurors support opinions on the websites Morton had cruised before the murders. The jurors agreed that evidence proved Morton had acted alone, that he’d killed seventeen and wounded many others, but they saw him as a victim, too, and undeserving of a death sentence. I also found some astonishing defenses of Morton in leftwing blogs, who claimed him as a victim of late-stage capitalism.

  Reading the reports left me feeling dirty. Everyone was doing the same dance, over and over, throwing filth, acting outraged, and nothing changed, except hatreds became more entrenched and more people felt entitled to commit mass murder. Even so, I was going to have to swim in the cesspool until I figured out why Global Entertainment was trying to oversee my inquiries around Lydia Zamir.

  I created a database that included the names of all the victims and wounded from the massacre. I also included the names from all my current open investigations. While my search engines crawled around the web to find any connections among them, I phoned Bernie, to see how she was holding up.

  Despite her mother’s claim that running around coaching soccer was the best therapy for her, Bernie sounded despondent. “In my head I keep asking what was Leo doing, going into the park instead of meeting me for supper. Why did he not even text me?”

  “Was that typical of him, to be focused so intently on something he would forget what was going on around him?” I asked.

  “Typical? I can’t say typical; I knew him such a short time.” She paused, thinking, then added, “I told you how after the meeting, the one where he ran away from Coop, he needed to do something about the foyer. I couldn’t understand, since he went straight to his computer. So yes, I was annoyed then, but maybe that was typical. And I am the same, after all.”

  “Is that what drew you together?” I asked. “You’re both intense?”

  “Oh, he wasn’t intense, just focused when it was a problem to solve. Why I liked him—he listened to me. He was not interested in sports, but he started to study hockey after he met me. He learned about Pierre and Boom-Boom, and started asking me how I play, how I keep my teeth from being broken, and even the rules of hockey. No boy ever truly listened to me before.”

  I let a respectful silence pass before going back to my questions. “He’d been upset about some paper that the SLICK people hadn’t told him about. Did he talk about that? Is that what he was trying to look up?”

  “He was upset that they did something without telling him—something about the plan for the new beach, that’s all I know. And I guess he wanted to check on it. Maybe he wanted to know if it was legal? Or even if it was possible as an engineering project? I don’t know. I told you this—he wanted to see what wildlife lived in the Wildlife Corridor.”

  “Do you know if he fought—argued—with Simon—the documents guy—after the meeting?” I asked.

  “I keep telling you! Leo was not a fighter, even though I told him that is the only way with bullies, but he was like, like one of those willow trees that bend down under the wind.”

  “At least they’re still alive after a tornado goes through,” I said dryly.

  “No, Vic, you are wrong. He is not still alive. Maybe if he fought, he would be.”

  I apologized—I’d spoken thoughtlessly. “I’m very sorry he died, very sorry you had to see his dead body.”

  “Merci, Vic,” she said in the same small voice. “I hope you will find that canaille who murdered him.”

  “I’ll do my best, sweetheart.”

  After we’d hung up, I wondered, though. Leo wasn’t a fighter, but he was a data analyst. If Simon Lensky had been fudging data, Leo could have pressed him in a way that made Simon defensive, angry. I tried to imagine Simon luring Leo into the Wildlife Corridor and hitting him on the head to stop him questioning Simon’s authority.

  I couldn’t picture it. The SLICK triumvirate didn’t seem organized or capable enough to commit murder—as I’d told Coop earlier, they could barely run a meeting. Of course, angry incompetent people can still commit murder. I probably should check on what the SLICK trio knew of Leo’s movements after the meeting.

  All the SLICK officers were volunteers, so they must have paying jobs doing something else. Simon Lensky worked in the billing department at one of the big downtown hospitals. It wouldn’t be easy or even sensible to confront him at work. Curtis Murchison, the angry gaveller, was a security guard at a West Side branch of the Chicago Public Library.

  Mona Borsa was retired, after thirty-seven years teaching first grade, and so might be the easiest to confront in the middle of the day. I would never have guessed she’d been a primary school teacher. I imagined her in a classroom, striding back and forth, whacking her palm with a pointer every time an unfortunate child stumbled over a new word.

  I called, said I was looking into Leo Prinz’s death and wanted to talk to her about background. Mona surprised me by being genial and happy to meet. She was helping plant trees in one of the South Side parks, but she said if I wanted to bring a sandwich she’d talk to me during her lunch break.

  I didn’t have time to stop for food, just headed straight for Rainbow Beach Park at Seventy-seventh Street. Mona was sitting with a small group at a picnic table on the grassy sward west of the beach. They had finished eating; Mona was collec
ting everyone’s trash in a paper bag.

  When I came to the table, her surprising geniality continued, as if our confrontation before the SLICK meeting hadn’t happened. She introduced me to the other volunteers and told me I could talk to her while she worked. The volunteers separated, each pulling a wagon that held a sapling and digging tools.

  “What did you say you want to talk about?” Mona asked when we got to her spot.

  “Leo Prinz,” I said. “You know I’m an investigator, right? And I’m looking into his murder.”

  “The police are handling that,” she said, her voice sharper.

  “I have an interest: my goddaughter was dating Leo. She and her parents have asked me to get involved.”

  Borsa eyed me narrowly, the way she must have looked at her first-graders to see who really had stolen the other kids’ lunch money. She grunted something that might have been an invitation to go ahead.

  “Leo Prinz was studying urban planning. Is that why you hired him?”

  “We didn’t need an urban planner. We needed someone who could put our presentations together for the Park District and for community meetings. He knew how to do that kind of design, and he was asking less money than more experienced designers.”

  She took a plastic bag from her wagon and handed it to me. “You can start cleaning up the area while I get the hole dug.”

  I squatted, but my hamstrings were still stressed from yesterday’s hard slog. I sat cross-legged and reached in a circle around me for the wretched refuse of Chicago’s park users.

  “At one point in Leo’s presentation, he got flustered and knocked a bunch of Simon’s papers off the table. When he picked them up, one of the documents took him by surprise and he wanted to know why it wasn’t in the presentation.”

  “So?” Mona paused in her digging to wipe her face with the kerchief she’d tied around her throat.

  “So—what was in the document that it got Leo’s attention?”