Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  “Don’t get your undies in a bundle, Warshawski.” Taggett stopped about ten feet from me. “You’ve been to see me uninvited and unannounced, I’m returning the favor.”

  Bear’s haunches were quivering from the strain of holding himself in check. I didn’t know what commands Coop used with him. I tried “At Ease,” “Free,” and “Sit,” but he kept himself combat-ready.

  “Your staff gave you the message I left?” I was surprised.

  “Oh, yes.” He smiled, a big rictus that showed off big horsey teeth. “It’s important to know what hot spots are developing around the city parks, fix ’em before they grow too big to repair. You definitely seem to be a hot . . . spot.”

  Word and tone were charged with innuendo. He was goading me into reacting—so he could have his punks kill Bear? Or me? Or just knock me off mental balance.

  “Sorry, Super, I’m just a simple taxpayer wondering what you’re up to in the Burnham Wildlife Corridor.” My own voice steady, bored.

  “After I read your note, I talked to some people about you. You’re a solo op who acts like your dog there, thinking you’re big enough to take on people fifty or a hundred times your size. I can assure you—you’re not.”

  “That’s good to know,” I said. “Do you think you’re fifty or a hundred times as big as me?”

  “Easily. I have friends in every department in this city, from Streets and San to the police and everything in between. Cops can start checking whether your dogs have their rabies shots up to date and whether your car has any repair issues. Your water might get turned off. Streets and San can forget to pick up your trash. I understand your neighbors in your condo aren’t too happy with you. If they learn you’re the one letting the trash build in the alley, that would be the last straw. You’d be looking for a new home in a month.”

  “That could happen even without your help,” I said, “but it does amaze me how many places Devlin & Wickham pop up. Of course, they are one of America’s biggest law firms, so I suppose it’s not surprising that they have you on their books. But I hope they don’t represent the Park District. Sixteen hundred dollars an hour for legal advice when every park in the city needs its paths rebuilt?”

  The muscles around his mouth tightened and twitched. He hated that I knew something that was supposed to be secret. Of course, it was a guess, but who else was going to tell him about a feud between tenants in an unimportant building? Clarence Gorbeck may have told my neighbor to play nice with me, but something I was doing was bothering Devlin, or at least one of their clients, so much that he’d told Taggett about me.

  Don’t taunt the viper, my mother used to warn me. When she is threatened she strikes quickly.

  Taggett took a step toward me. Bear growled softly. What a good dog.

  Taggett said, “Why do you care about that park improvement, Warshawski? It’s way out of your neighborhood.”

  “Is that what this is about?” I said. “Northsiders can’t go south? We can’t have a sense of community and care about the whole city? Really, though, I’m helping investigate Leo Prinz’s and Simon Lensky’s murders.”

  “We have a police force,” Taggett said. “It would be a good thing—a healthy thing—for you to let them solve these murders and for you to fix your own problems.”

  That was supposed to scare me. Actually, it did, but I said, “Chicago police only clear seventeen percent of our homicides each year. They need help, and as a trained investigator that’s something I can do for my city. About the maps, Superintendent?”

  “There’s nothing about the maps. Lensky was working with a preliminary plan that we scrapped because it was getting too much pushback from the community. Mona Borsa, who is the kind of hardworking volunteer this city depends on, told me Lensky lost all his documents in a mugging after the last SLICK meeting. It’s a shame, because if we had his papers I’d be able to show you that he was looking at a very old plan.

  “The cops have a suspect for his killing. They just have to find him. Unless you’re hiding him, they don’t need your help. Save your Girl Scout badge for something you know about. Which, believe me, is not the city’s parks. Leave them to the experts.”

  He turned back to the Escalade. His triggermen exchanged regretful looks with Bear: both had hoped their principals would unleash them into a fight.

  The SUV pulled away from my parking lot with a great squealing of rubber. A squad car trailed them. I’d been so focused on Taggett and his goons that I hadn’t noticed he had his usual police escort.

  I squatted on the pavement next to Bear and put my arms around his neck. “If you’d gone for their throats, the cops would have testified they killed you and me in self-defense. Don’t do it, boy. Let’s survive to find Coop.”

  35

  Found in the Shuffle

  I drove home slowly, rattled by the encounter. Chicagoans know that politics ain’t beanbag, as Mr. Dooley put it all those years ago, but Taggett’s threats were out of proportion to my asking about the maps for the Forty-seventh Street beach project. Some people like to use muscle just to show they have it. Taggett had some of that impulse, but he was a savvy player. His threats to me implied I was threatening a deal he’d done over the Burnham Wildlife Corridor.

  Money was already changing hands, the woman from the community had said bitterly. Money people had come to the SLICK meeting. Larry Nieland had significant resources, but it was the Off Duty guy who’d been there and at Taggett’s home who looked like the real money tree. He wouldn’t have been at a small community meeting if he didn’t see the lakefront sprouting rich greens that he could harvest.

  “I can imagine that putting in a new beach is a serious engineering challenge,” I commented to Bear, “but it wouldn’t bring global investors to a South Side meeting.”

  At home, I wrote down the names of everyone I’d talked to over the last month, from Lydia Zamir and her mother, through the SLICK managers, Coop, Norman Bolton at Global Entertainment, Donna Lutas, her coworker Rikki Samundar. Leo, Bernie, Taggett. Murray. Elisa Palurdo. Her husband’s friend Jesse.

  I was looking at two murders, Lensky and Prinz, whose deaths had nothing to do with Lydia Zamir’s disappearance, whose only connection was Coop: he was the cop’s main suspect in the murders. And he had vanished with Zamir.

  I sketched a tree with all the different names on branches to see which ones connected to one another. Coop’s, SLICK’s, and Zamir’s branches were knotted together. Norm Bolton was linked to Murray through Global, of course, but that didn’t explain why he’d wanted to film my search for Lydia.

  It was the lawyers who seemed to run through the tangled collection of stories, like the trunk of a real tree that all the branches sprouted from. I’d never gotten word back from Murray on whether Global Entertainment was a Devlin & Wickham client, but Devlin had represented the mass murderer who killed Zamir’s lover; they had taken out an order of protection against Lydia, and if my deduction was correct, they had given information about my domestic fracas with Donna Lutas to Park Super Taggett—who was, of course, tied to SLICK.

  Rikki Samundar said Devlin & Wickham had gotten involved to protect Sea-2-Sea’s water from poisoning, but pro bono work on a capital case to protect a client sounded thin to me. Global Entertainment was involved, too, I reminded myself. My tree’s branches were getting too tangled to keep straight.

  I hadn’t dug into Global shareholders to see if one of them might be the reason Norm Bolton had wanted to film me chasing Lydia Zamir all over Chicago. I took the time now to see who held big enough stakes in Global and in Sea-2-Sea to cross the SEC’s minimum threshold for reporting holdings. Nobody on my tree drawing appeared in those lists, but a firm called Minas y Puentes held a biggish stake in Global.

  I’d seen their name on Larry Nieland’s site—this was one of the Chilean firms where he was a board member. It was a closely held Chilean company, and so didn’t have to report its shareholders to U.S. authorities; it was only because Nieland put
it on his own web page that I’d heard of it. When I looked it up, I found it was a firm started by the Aguilar family, which owned Chilean copper mines.

  Jacobo Palurdo’s father had worked in the Chilean copper mines in Tocopilla. This had to be significant—but of what?

  I drew roots on my tree. Some were in Kansas, some in Chicago, some in Chile. Flying to Chile wouldn’t be useful: I don’t speak Spanish, and an investigator who knows neither the language nor the local customs is someone who will be easily duped. Maybe Rikki Samundar and Donna Lutas were hoping I’d fall into that trap—that could explain why they’d spun me a line about Hector’s aunt working for Devlin in Santiago.

  The dogs had been nipping at each other for some minutes while I created my tree. I took the three to the lake and let them swim, although Bear stayed close to shore.

  On the way home, my phone rang, the dramatic chords I use for my private contact list. I fished the phone from my back pocket while trying to hold all three leashes in my left hand.

  Arlette Fouchard spoke before I could say “hello.”

  “It is terrible, Victoire. Someone broke into the apartment. They hit Angela, knocked her out. We are at the ’ospital, the room for urgence. I cannot let Bernadine stay in Chicago, not one more night.”

  I tied the leashes to a bicycle rack so I could focus on the call.

  “Was Bernie hurt?”

  “No, no, we are coming home from Bernadine’s coaching day, we are finding Angela, and the girls’ apartment, ma foi, it is a disaster. I am staying with Angela until her own mother can be here and then, poof, we are in Quebec.”

  “You called the police, right?”

  “Naturellement. And they are saying, girls living off campus in a ’ouse that is falling down, of course someone breaks in. The other two girls, they ’ave moved back into their sorority, but Bernadine, she will return to Canada. That is final.”

  Her tone bristled with challenge, but I thought she was right. I ran home with the dogs and explained the situation to Mr. Contreras. He was eager to go to the hospital with me, mostly to make sure Bernie really was all right. When I explained that Arlette was with her, and that Bernie was unharmed, he reluctantly agreed to stay home. I promised to let him know if she had been hurt and left him pacing anxiously in the living room, Mitch at his heels.

  By the time I reached the hospital, Angela had been moved from the emergency room to a regular room. When I found her, Bernie was sitting by the bed, her vivid face stretched tight over the cheekbones.

  “Vic!” She flung herself against my chest. “This is—this is too horrible. What is happening? Why did they attack Angela?”

  “Because I was there.” Angela’s eyes fluttered open. “I was taking a nap and then I heard them break open the kitchen door. There were two. I tried running out the front door but one of them caught me. He knocked me out, not long—I’ve been hit like that once before in a hard game. When I woke I heard them still in the apartment, so I lay still until they left. I tried to get to my phone to call 911 but they had stolen it.”

  It was Arlette who brought her to the hospital. She’d seen too much brain damage in her years as a hockey spouse to take a head blow lightly.

  “They have done the scan,” Arlette said. “There is not internal ’emorrhage, but she must stay the night here. Her mama will be here, but until then, we take care of her.”

  “My uncle is driving her,” Angela murmured thickly. “Morning, early morning, maybe. Shreveport a long way ’way.”

  Angela’s monitors had been beeping at the nursing station and one of the nurses came in to clear us out of the room.

  “Arlette, I’ll drive Bernie to the apartment to pack some things for you both. You go ahead and book your flight. As soon as we come back you can go to O’Hare; I’ll wait with Angela until her mother gets here.”

  An old Victorian house a block from the university had been turned into apartments; Angela and Bernie were renting the second floor with the two young women who’d moved back into their sorority. When we got there, I went up the back stairs to look at the door the intruders had broken down. They’d skipped the first and third floors: this had been a targeted attack.

  “Vic—” Bernie’s voice trembled. “They were coming for me, weren’t they?”

  “Baby, they think you know something or saw something or have something that is connected to Leo. You said he wanted to write some FOIA’s after the meeting. Did he say anything else? Show you anything?”

  She shook her head.

  “What about the FOIAs—what did he say about them?”

  “I wasn’t really listening,” she said. “I told you this, that we were arguing against each other over how he should fight this Coop. The foyer thing, he wanted to know about the map he saw, that’s all I know.”

  “Did he say what was on the map?”

  “No. He said Simon took the paper from him so quickly he could see only a small piece of it.”

  “It wasn’t the map of the proposed beach, then,” I thought aloud. “That wouldn’t have startled him, because he knew about that. The drawing was big, eighteen by twenty-four or even twenty-four by thirty-six. That’s not something that would be tucked into the corner of a backpack.”

  “What are you saying? That Leo stole something?” A ghost of Bernie’s spirit flared up.

  “No, baby, just trying to figure out what the goons are looking for. Get me your mother’s suitcase; I’ll pack her things. You take care of yourself.”

  Arlette had been sleeping on a daybed in the living room. Her toiletries—including an array of skin care products with names like “Luminescence Recovery”—were neatly organized in a travel bag. She’d hung her clothes in the hall closet. I folded everything I could find into her case, with the toiletries on top so she could get at them in the airport.

  When I finished, Bernie was still standing in the room she shared with Angela, unable to focus. A canvas holdall and her backpack were open on the floor, and she’d put some T-shirts and her hockey stick into the holdall, but she couldn’t seem to figure out what to do next.

  The backpack was sky-blue, with the Canadiens logo in the bottom right corner. I frowned at it—I’d seen its twin—where?

  “Bernie—did you give Leo a Canadiens backpack?”

  “What? No, we exchanged no presents. Why?”

  “I thought I saw one in his apartment.”

  “It was the same color, but not our logo. I—I offered to get him the appliqué, but he said he couldn’t wear a badge for a team he had no interest in.” Her smile wobbled. “Now it is impossible to imagine why I thought he was special.”

  She started stuffing underwear and jeans into the holdall.

  “Did you have the backpack with you today?”

  “But of course, Vic, it is how I carry what I need, my records on the students, the laptop, the water bottle. Tous!”

  She stared, openmouthed, as I picked it up from the floor and emptied it onto the bed. Her laptop, a notebook, hairbrush, sunscreen, a paperback (Ayesha at Last), a bicycle lock, a hockey puck with Canada’s National Women’s Team logo. Wedged into a crease on the bottom, in between some tampons, an energy bar, and a scrunchy, was a flash drive.

  “Is this yours?”

  She hunched a shoulder, still openmouthed. “I don’t remember it, but it must be, no?”

  “Let’s look at it, shall we?”

  I felt as though I were walking on eggshells, but Bernie opened her laptop and inserted the stick.

  Leo had taken five photos of the document, very fast, with his phone. It must have been while he and Simon were arguing over the page. The resolution was poor. The best I could tell was that the document showed the Chicago lakefront around Forty-seventh Street, with the proposed new beach laid out in a dotted line. More dotted lines indicated where new landfill would create a promontory that jutted a good quarter mile into the lake.

  Laying the photos side by side on the screen, I saw that each had a fe
w different details—17th hole, the money shot was marked on the promontory. So the Park District wanted to put a golf course along the lake. That would take some ingenuity—there wasn’t a lot of land there. Except that as I looked at the pictures, I realized that Lake Shore Drive was missing. They wanted to take up Lake Shore Drive and put in a golf course? That made no sense at all.

  Bernie shook my shoulder. “I have to go, Vic. Mama is texting me, worried that we’ve been attacked. We must get back to the hospital.”

  “Sorry, babe. These pictures—they are dynamite of a kind. I’m going to make sure the Park District knows I have them and then you should be safe. But you go back to Quebec. I’ll talk to your program head tomorrow and get your job sorted out.”

  36

  Long Night’s Journey into Day

  I spent a long night in the hospital, dozing next to Angela’s bed. On my way back there with Bernie, I’d detoured to my building so that Mr. Contreras could say goodbye to her in person.

  “Don’t you stay away permanent, young Bernie,” he said. “Vic and me, we’ll get this sorted out, okay?”

  Bernie gave him a convulsive hug, spent a few minutes with Mitch and Peppy, but was anxious to return to her mother. The next commercial flight to Quebec wasn’t until six-thirty the next morning, but Pierre Fouchard had persuaded the Canadiens owner to send the team jet down to collect his wife and daughter. It was already in Chicago airspace when I bundled the two women into a taxi.

  Arlette texted me at midnight to let me know they had landed in Quebec City. Pierre was driving them to their summer home in the Laurentians, where he had good security, including neighbors he trusted. Even though it was a major relief to know Bernie was safe, I had so many other dragons to fend off that I couldn’t relax. Hospitals, with their PA systems, their frequent interruptions to check on vital signs, aren’t conducive to rest, anyway.

  Angela’s mother and her mother’s brother Jamison arrived a little before six, haggard from their all-night drive. I waited with them while they talked to the doctor, the nurses, the social worker. I drove ahead of them to the Victorian house, stayed while they packed up Angela’s things. Hugged Angela, shook hands with her mother and uncle, promised to stay on top of problems here.