Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  “You ready to check out?” she said when my turn came, not really looking at me.

  “I want to check in. My room key didn’t work when I got in at nine-thirty last night, but there wasn’t anyone working the desk. I had to spend the night in my car. Now I’d like your help in getting into my room so I can get a little benefit from the bed I paid for.”

  Her jaw dropped and her eyes widened. “You—I—they told me you’d be—that I shouldn’t—”

  “So you were on duty last night? And you’re still at it this morning? Why—you wanted to stick around to see if they killed me?”

  “No,” she whispered. “I—they—we’re short-staffed. I’m pulling two shifts.”

  “So some people came in last night, asked for a key to my room, you gave it to them because the hotel is short of rooms and everyone is doubling up?”

  “I—no. Of course not. I—I don’t know what you’re trying to say, but let me get you a new key so you can use your room, of course.”

  She took a plastic blank from a drawer and programmed in a new key.

  “And can you come down to the room with me? I’d hate to walk in on some kind of disaster, which I’m afraid might be why the door wouldn’t open last night.”

  “I—Walter—he’s the building engineer—I’ll get him.”

  She picked up the front desk phone and asked Walter to come to the front to help a guest. Walter was a middle-aged man in jeans and a T-shirt that sported a photo of a motorcycle rally.

  “No one on duty at nine-thirty last night? That’s strange. Bethann comes on duty at eight. We’re the only hotel for quite a distance, so we stay open twenty-four-seven just in case. Maybe one of her kids needed her; she’d have been gone only twenty minutes.” He sounded reproachful, as if I should have waited for her to come back.

  At my room, I tried the new key. The door opened onto chaos. My clothes were flung around the room, the big window shade had been slit, the lampshades were on the floor along with the mattress. I peered into the bathroom, which lay just to the right of the entrance. The shower rod had been dismantled.

  “No one has ever wrecked a room like this. What went on in here last night?” Walter faced me with a motorcycle gang expression. “You dealing drugs? You a whore?”

  “Don’t be crude as well as stupid.” My voice was cold with anger. “I wasn’t here last night. Remember? My room key didn’t work and Bethann was conveniently off the premises. I’m calling the police. They can fingerprint the room—the shower rod should hold some good prints so don’t touch it. We’ll phone from the front desk.”

  Walter was quiet as I put a do not disturb sign on the door and pulled it shut. When we got to the front desk, Bethann was handing a departing couple a copy of their bill. Her hands were shaking, I was pleased to notice.

  “Bethann, this lady here wants to call the police on account of the damage in the room. Her clothes are every which way and somebody pulled apart the lamps, the bed, even the shower. You get any complaints about the noise? The cops are going to want to know.”

  Before she could speak, I said, “How much did they pay you to let them into the room and then disappear?”

  “I—I’m sorry.” Her voice was barely a whisper. “They said—they said they were old friends from college who wanted to surprise you.”

  “And then they said they’d take care of my room bill, because they’d whisk me away and I wouldn’t be checking out?” I suggested.

  She nodded, her face white. “They didn’t say ‘whisk.’ Some other word, but pretty much that was it. And they told me to go home for half an hour. I—” She started to cry.

  “Must have been a lot of money,” Walter said. “You know that was wrong. This is gonna cost you your job, Bethann. I can’t cover this up for you.”

  “It wasn’t the money so much,” she whispered, “but there was something about them—they were—it was like out of a movie. Gangsters or Mafia, something like that.”

  There’d been two, she said when I asked.

  “What did they look like?”

  She shook her head. “Like men who could break your arms if you didn’t do what they wanted.”

  “Old? Young? Did either of them seem to have on expensive clothes?”

  “They had on sports coats,” she said. “That’s why I thought they looked like Mafia. You know, in movies they’re always going around in those heavy dark suits. These two, they had jeans on but still they wore heavy dark jackets. Of course I could tell they had guns underneath.”

  “How?” I wondered if that was an embellishment or if she’d really noticed the shape, but Bethann looked at me scornfully.

  “I’ve been around guns my whole life. I can tell what a holster underneath a jacket looks like.”

  “Let’s get the police over here. I’m dead on my feet and I need to get to bed, someplace.”

  “Do you have to call the police?” Bethann said. “If—if you want to stay another night we can put you in the bridal suite, free of charge. I can’t lose my job.”

  “I don’t want a bridal suite; I want a room no one is going to bust into.”

  Walter said, “If you want to take a nap right now, I’ll make sure no one bothers you.”

  I actually didn’t want the police, in case, like the Salina cops, someone in Chicago had been on to the Ellsworth department, alerting them to my presence in the town. I was pretending to waver, when Eddie from the body shop showed up, looking worried.

  “Hey, Bethann, hey, Walt, that lady from Chicago—oh.” He broke off when he saw me. “You okay?”

  “Did you send some thugs over here last night?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “That idiot Rick who works for me. At least, he didn’t send anyone, but he posted a picture of the Mustang on his Instagram page. Some guy saw it and said he wanted to make sure it wasn’t his car, said it had been stolen up in Chicago. Rick didn’t think he needed to check with me, met him over to the shop. Guy looked all through the car, like he’d left something in it—Rick thought maybe you stole it with his phone in it or something.”

  “Did she steal the car?” Walter said. “Is this what that tore-up room is about? Someone coming after—”

  “I didn’t steal the car. It’s mine, I have the title. Or I do if the guys who came by didn’t take it.”

  “That’s the point,” Eddie said. “Rick offered to call the cops and they said they’d take care of it private, so Rick told the men the only place in town you could be staying was here at the Tales. When he told me all this, I came over to see what happened. But you’re okay, so I guess it was a false alarm.”

  Walter said, “They did come here. Bethann let them spin her a story about them being this lady’s old friends. They busted the place up pretty good, looking for something. We should call the cops, except Bethann doesn’t want to lose her job.”

  If my would-be assailants had been pawing through the Mustang, and taking apart shower rods and window shades, I had a feeling they were looking for the Creedmoor casings. While Walter and Eddie debated whether to call the cops, I asked Bethann to check me into a room.

  “And don’t tell anyone, even Walter and Eddie, the number.”

  She nodded nervously, looked at her computer, cut a key. “I—can I bring you your stuff? If you’re not going to get it fingerprinted?”

  “Yes. But I want my clothes washed. I don’t like the idea of putting on a bra that some vermin handled.”

  She agreed eagerly, and I moved into a room on the second floor, wedged a chair under the door, took a long shower, and fell into a quiet sleep. When I woke up again, a little after twelve, I found a note from Bethann pushed under the door. My suitcase was all packed with my clean clothes and Walter had it; he would take care of checking me out so that the day clerk didn’t make a fuss about the payment. She had signed the message with four large hearts followed by “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  I called down to the front desk, where the woman who’d c
hecked me in yesterday was now on duty. She hunted up Walter for me. He brought me my suitcase and said he thought everything was okay, although Eddie had taken the Impala back to the shop to make sure no one tried to fiddle with the brakes or anything.

  I dressed in clean jeans and my running shoes, a welcome change from my heavy boots. I wished I had a way of getting in touch with Cassie or Alsop, to find out how Lydia was doing, but I squared my shoulders and carried my suitcase up the street to Eddie’s. I was afraid I might have to plead with him to let me borrow the Impala for another few days, but to my astonishment, he’d fixed the Mustang.

  “My dad’s sister’s husband has a cousin with a Ford dealership over to Hutchinson. I told him to get me the windows and a new steering column; I’ll send him the ones I ordered when they come in next week. Just charging you labor. Parts are on the house.”

  Labor in Ellsworth, Kansas, ran to about half of what it did in Chicago. Maybe I’d move here when I finished figuring out who killed Leo Prinz.

  “Just thought it would be best for everyone if you got out of town quick, don’t you know?” He grinned shyly, only half kidding and not sure whether I could take it.

  “I’m on my way,” I assured him. “Ellsworth’s way too rough for me—I need a tame city, like Chicago.”

  49

  CSI

  “I’m not saying you did a sloppy job, doctor. The prosecution presented ammunition from thirteen people’s bodies to the jury. I’d like to know if all the bullets were examined and if they were all Wolf seven-sixty-twos. And if there were any other calibers, what were they?”

  I was in the pathology lab at Salina’s Santa Fe Medical Center, trying to persuade Ida Markovsky to ask the police for a complete ballistics report from the Horsethief Canyon murders. Markovsky was the hospital pathologist; she also headed the county coroner’s office. She’d performed the autopsies on the victims and had supervised the chain of evidence on bullets taken from the wounded.

  The hospital and the lab were new buildings, and Markovsky seemed to have access to all the newest, shiniest machines. A couple of technicians were doing something in a corner with slides and microscopes. A hospital path lab, after all, looks more at cells from living people than bullets from dead ones.

  I knew from some preliminary research that Dr. Markovsky was only forty-two, but she had a brittle, stooped body that might have passed for seventy. Her hair looked as though she had dyed it black with shoe polish. She seemed to take offense easily, although perhaps as a woman coroner she’d been disrespected too many times, and so had an array of barrage balloons in position in case a strange PI came along asking questions.

  I’d driven to Salina from Ellsworth the previous day and had spent the afternoon at the courthouse, reading the transcript of the Morton trial. The transcript ran to over a thousand pages, so I focused on what I most wanted in the moment: ballistics. Prosecutors like to present every scrap of evidence to juries, including each bullet used in a murder, even if everyone agreed all of them came from the same gun. When I was with the public defender, I thought they did it to intimidate me and my client—see, we have so much evidence we can bury you.

  In big shootings, it’s mind numbing for everyone to go through each bullet. At the Morton trial, they’d entered into evidence “only” sixty-five of the total seven hundred–odd rounds fired.

  When the courthouse shut down for the day, I’d found a big anonymous motel on the town perimeter where I rented a room as Halina Sestieri—my Warshawski grandmother’s first name, my mother’s birth name. I’d parked the Mustang on a town street about half a mile from the motel, where I’d managed six hours of uneasy sleep.

  Before going to bed, I’d bought a new burner phone to call Mr. Contreras from an espresso bar. Come to think of it, anyone who knew my habits would know to lie in wait for me in an indie coffee shop. I hoped my adversaries weren’t that insightful.

  My neighbor had been worried sick when I hadn’t phoned the day before. I did my best to skate over the shooting and the abortive attack at the motel, but he’s known me a lot of years; he suspected I was in more trouble than I wanted to admit.

  “Who done this, doll?” he demanded. “Who wants you dead?”

  “I wish I knew. Nothing is coming together for me,” I said.

  I was reasonably sure the goons who’d come to the motel were looking for the shell casings, but that didn’t explain who’d shot at me in the first place. Devlin & Wickham, acting for—whom? Surely no self-respecting law firm would shoot someone for even the most important and wealthy of clients. Then I thought of Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort and what they’d been willing to do for their clients. A full-service law firm might do anything for a powerful person with money.

  When Mr. Contreras finally was willing to end the call, I phoned Donna Lutas. “It’s V.I. Warshawski. Does Clarence Gorbeck know I’m still alive?”

  “I—what are you talking about?” she stuttered.

  “Could you let him know that I’ve sent the shell casings to a forensics lab? They’ll test them for prints and DNA and whatnot, but the big point is, I don’t have them, so he doesn’t have to waste valuable resources trying to kill me to recover them.”

  I waited a moment for her to respond, but she didn’t seem to have anything else to say.

  In the morning, I went back to the county offices, wanting to see the complete ballistics report, not just the sixty-five entered into evidence. The DA’s office told me to go to the police. I gritted my teeth, crossed to the other side of the building, and went in to talk to Chief Corbitt.

  Vesna, the dispatcher I’d encountered last week, was behind the front desk. She’d taken my request in to the chief. This time, instead of telling her to send me into his office, he’d emerged to perform for an audience of Vesna, the charge sergeant, and a member of the public trying to weasel out of a speeding ticket.

  “You’re like a horsefly at a barbecue, Warshawski. No one wants you but no one can swat you hard enough to make you leave.”

  “That’s an interesting image, chief,” I said. “Would shooting up my car be an effort to swat me hard enough to make me leave?”

  “Your car got shot up? You report it to the police?”

  He knew that I hadn’t: Ellsworth was the seat of the next county over, they surely shared regional crime reports.

  “I figure if I let the attorneys at Devlin & Wickham know about it, cops down here would hear soon enough,” I drawled. “Did Clarence Gorbeck think you were important enough to tell you in person, or did he give the job to Donna Lutas?”

  That made him frown and change the conversation back to my wish to see the complete ballistics report created by the Kansas Bureau of Investigation’s labs.

  “I don’t think you have any legal standing here, Warshawski. Unless you can give me a good reason to open up police evidence to a civilian from out of state, the answer is no.”

  It was clear I was never going to have a good reason unless I could find a judge who would issue a subpoena for me, and I could easily imagine how much time that might take.

  “One other thing, chief, before I go. The nicotine patches that helped Arthur Morton end his life—I can tell you it’s hard enough to get your hands behind your back to fasten a bra, but to put eight patches there—Morton must have moved like a circus performer.”

  “Maybe he was, maybe he was. Jail belongs to the county. You go over there and show them how to fasten a bra.” The chief had chuckled and rubbed his hands together. “Vesna! You can wipe out Harold’s ticket. We got him so many times already it’s like he’s paid for the new coffeemaker.”

  The member of the public smiled sheepishly and thanked the chief. I left with what dignity I could.

  The trial transcript had included Dr. Markovsky’s name. I tracked her down in the morgue at the Santa Fe Hospital.

  “I took out all the bullets, all that I could find,” Markovsky said. “I gave them to the police, who sent them to the state for
ensic lab. That’s all in the trial transcript, which you say you read. Now you’re trying to say I overlooked some bullets? I’d like to see you in a morgue full of dead babies and mothers, ripped apart by seven-sixty-twos, and see you respect those bodies and remove those bullets. Every bullet went into a bag labeled with the name of the person we took it from, okay? If you want to double-check, go to the police and look at the lab report.”

  “Doctor, I won’t pretend to imagine how horrible it was to deal with all the dead and wounded. The trial transcript shows that you and your staff worked as hard as the first responders after 9/11. All I’m asking is that you go to the police with me to request the complete ballistics report, not just the report the DA submitted to the jury during the trial.”

  “You go—you like bothering people who are working hard at what they get paid to do,” Markovsky said.

  “I just came from the police,” I said. “The chief doesn’t want to share, so I’m begging you for help. Evidence suggests there was more than one shooter at the scene; the complete ballistics report could confirm or deny that.”

  “What evidence?” she demanded.

  “You share the report, I’ll share the evidence.” I held my arms out wide, expansive; we were all pals who wanted to help each other.

  She wouldn’t budge. She knew and was sworn to secrecy, she was afraid of the chief and the district attorney, she was protecting the sanctity of the chain of evidence. I squared my shoulders and smiled cheerfully—never let the winner see you care.

  I was pretty much out of ideas for what to do next. Drive back to Chicago, I guess. Stop in the Kansas Bureau of Investigation office on my way to see if I could persuade them to share the Morton trial ballistics report.

  It was a couple of miles from the hospital to where I’d left the Mustang, farther than I wanted to walk in the middle of a muggy day. I was standing in front of the building, opening my smartphone to use the Lyft app, when a man in scrubs approached me. He was thin, older, with lanky gray hair pulled back in a ponytail and a pronounced Adam’s apple that bounced as he talked.