Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  Dedication

  For Heather and Rob, Matea and Noah, Niko and Sam—

  for many different reasons, all of them good

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1: Babe in the Woods

  2: L Stop

  3: Sister Act

  4: Queens Dressed in Silk

  5: Team Player

  6: Crank Call?

  7: Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?

  8: Best Kind of Tenant

  9: Jousting

  10: Good Cop, Good Cop

  11: Leroy of Arabia

  12: Free Fall

  13: An Apple a Day . . .

  14: Who Loves Ya, Baby?

  15: Bodywork

  16: Family Dinner

  17: Vacation Spots

  18: Safe Space

  19: Special Delivery

  20: The Fish-man

  21: Lawrence of Chicago

  22: Outreach

  23: Pay Stub

  24: Hitchhiking

  25: A Strong Hand on the Bridle

  26: Housework

  27: Part of the Furniture

  28: Bringing a Dog to a Knife Fight

  29: Safety Measures

  30: All This Could Have Been Yours

  31: Safe House

  32: Metalworks

  33: Blindsided

  34: The Accused

  35: Home Without a Minder

  36: Treasures of Saraqib

  37: Batwoman

  38: The Things They Carried

  39: Fit as a Fiddle

  40: A Patch of Blue

  41: The Bravest Girls in Chicago

  42: Rough Rider

  43: Disturbing the Peace

  44: Purest Water in the Well

  45: My Lucky Day

  46: Sensitivity Training

  47: Side Tracks

  48: A Good Wine with Stale Cheese

  49: Interlude with Archaeologist

  50: Unguarded Comments

  51: Making Grandpa Tony Proud

  52: A Nod Is as Good as a Wink

  53: Payday

  54: In the Cleanup Spot

  55: Transgressions

  56: Missing Persons

  57: National Security v. Murder

  58: A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall

  59: The Purloined Dagon

  60: The Frozen North

  61: Assault from Above

  62: Fire and Ice

  63: Border Crossing

  64: Self-Justification

  65: True Gold

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Sara Paretsky

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Babe in the Woods

  The deputy turned without warning into an uncut thicket. Felix and I stumbled after him, following his bobbing flashlight as best we could, the suckers from the bushes and trees snapping back to whip our faces. When I called to him to slow down, he merely picked up his pace.

  The meager light from my phone wasn’t much use; I skidded on a pile of wet leaves and tumbled into a thorny bush. Mud squelched over the tops of my shoes, down into my socks. Felix tried to free me, but he ended up tangling his own scarf in the brambles.

  The deputy was well ahead of us by the time we extricated ourselves, but we could still see slices of his light through the trees and beyond those, finally, the glow of arc lamps. I pushed toward them through the undergrowth.

  The deputy was standing behind one of the lamps. He looked around in annoyance when we arrived and said, “About time,” then called to someone beyond the light: “Got the kid, boss. He brought someone with him. Claims she’s a lawyer.”

  “That’s because I am a lawyer,” I said, my voice bright—I’m here to help, not obstruct.

  “Bring them over here.” The boss had a gravelly voice, hoarse.

  After twenty minutes in the dark woods, the high-wattage lights were blinding. I blinked, looked aside, and then tried to make out details of the site. Crime scene tape marked off an area of trees and tangled bushes. A number of officers were searching beyond that perimeter, while techs collected their discoveries—cigarette butts, condoms, beer and cognac bottles—bagging them and marking the locations with yellow evidence flags.

  Felix shoved his hands deep into his pockets and stumbled after me into the clearing. He tripped on a branch and nearly fell, but brushed aside my arm when I tried to steady him.

  Felix was usually a lively young man, as easy with my generation as with his peers, but he’d barely spoken since I’d picked him up an hour earlier. Nerves: understandable, but when I’d tried probing—why did the sheriff’s police think Felix could ID a dead person? was one of his friends missing?—Felix snapped at me to be quiet.

  The deputy pushed us toward a man of about fifty, jowly, heavy through the waist but not fat. Lieutenant bars were on the shoulders of his uniform jacket.

  “Felix Herschel?” the lieutenant grunted, adding to me, “You’re the lawyer?”

  “V.I. Warshawski,” I said.

  The lieutenant ignored my offered hand. “Why’d the kid need to lawyer up? You got something to hide, son? Innocent people don’t need lawyers.”

  “Innocent people need lawyers more than the guilty, Lieutenant”—I squinted at his name badge—“McGivney. They don’t understand the criminal justice system and forceful interrogators can intimidate them into bogus confessions. So let’s talk about what Mr. Herschel can do for you here.”

  McGivney studied me, decided not to fight that battle, and jerked his head toward the center of the arc lamps. “Bring your client over, Warshawski. Make sure you both walk in my footsteps: we want to minimize contamination of the crime scene.”

  I had to stretch my hamstrings to match his stride, but I pulled up next to him, near a log, where the arc lamps were concentrated. Felix stopped behind me but a deputy prodded him forward.

  The log was over three feet high at the base, the remnant of some old oak or ash that had crashed in the woods. The bark had rotted to a rusty brown. A black tarp covered its base and a lump beyond it.

  McGivney nodded at a crime scene tech. She pulled the tarp back to display the bruised and swollen body of a man. He’d been stuffed headfirst into the hollow bottom of the log. The body’s original position was outlined in white—only his feet and part of his legs had been visible, but the deputies had pulled him out.

  He was dressed in blue jeans and a dirt-crusted hoodie, unzipped to show a badly bruised torso. He’d been beaten so savagely that his head was a pulpy mess. His hair might once have been brown but was too caked now with mud and blood to be sure.

  My muscles clenched. Violent death, nauseating death. Next to me, Felix made a feral gurgling sound. His face was pale, glassy, and he was swaying. I put one hand on the small of his back and pulled his head down roughly with the other, pressing his face as close to his knees as I could.

  “You have water, Lieutenant?” I asked.

  “No, and I’m not carrying smelling salts, either.” McGivney gave a sharklike smile. “Do you recognize the vic—the body, the victim, son?”

  “Why do you think Mr. Herschel knows him?” I said before Felix could speak. I had warned him in the car to consult me before he answered questions, but in the shock of death he wouldn’t remember.

  McGivney’s mouth bunched in annoyance. “We have a good reason.”

  “Perhaps you do, but aside from being pretty sure this is a man, I don’t know how anyone could identify him without DNA or dental records. And if you just found him, you couldn’t have any of that information already.”

  “Do you recognize him, Mr. Herschel?” McGivney was keeping control of his t
emper, but it showed in his clenched jaw muscles.

  Felix was looking away from the clearing, away from the body. His color had improved, but his expression was still glassy.

  McGivney grabbed his shoulder. “Do you know this man?”

  Felix blinked. “Who is it?”

  “That’s why we asked you out here. We figured you knew.”

  Felix shook his head slowly. “I don’t know him. Where is he from?”

  “What difference does that make?” McGivney pounced on the odd question. “Is there a missing person in your life?”

  I removed the sheriff’s hand from Felix’s arm. “He’s said he doesn’t know the dead man, which means we’re done here, Lieutenant.”

  “We’re done when I say we’re done,” McGivney snapped.

  “Oh, please. You’ve given us zero reason for hauling Mr. Herschel out here at two in the morning. We’ve looked at a murdered man and felt the horror of his death, which you no doubt intended. Neither of us has seen him before. We can’t help you. Good night, Lieutenant.”

  I took Felix’s arm and turned him around, telling him to step in the footprints we’d followed in.

  “Why did the guy have Herschel’s name and phone number in his jeans?” McGivney demanded.

  Felix looked at me, his dark eyes wide with fear.

  I muttered to him, “Don’t say anything,” before calling over my shoulder to McGivney, “I’m not a medium, so unfortunately I can’t answer any questions about this poor dead man’s acts or motives.”

  “You’re at a murder site, not Comedy Central, Warshawski,” McGivney snapped. “Your client needs to explain his connection to the dead man.”

  I turned around. “My client has told you he has no connection. If your search of the body turned up a phone with Mr. Herschel’s name in it, then you can learn his identity without any help from us.”

  “It was on a scrap of paper,” McGivney said.

  “If we can look at it, we might be able to help you,” I said, using the soothing voice of a kindergarten teacher.

  McGivney frowned, but he was a reasonable cop, just one I’d pushed on harder than he liked. He beckoned one of the techs, who produced a labeled evidence envelope: removed from left front jeans pocket, 1:17 a.m. Inside was a scrap of paper with Felix’s cell phone number, handwritten with such care that the numbers looked like artwork.

  “What do you know about this, Herschel?” McGivney demanded.

  Felix looked at me, his face alight with fear. I felt sure he recognized the writing.

  “It’s been torn from a bigger sheet of paper,” I said quickly, before he could give himself away. “Good quality, too. Not just a Post-it or notebook.”

  “You are Sherlock Holmes,” McGivney growled.

  “No monographs on paper stock, Lieutenant, just observation and experience.”

  “And how do your observation and experience explain why your client’s number is in the vic’s pocket?”

  “Still no crystal ball, Lieutenant.” I moved from the scene, my hand locked on Felix’s forearm.

  McGivney followed us. He was phoning orders to underlings, but stopped when we reached the edge of the thicket we’d struggled through on our way in.

  “One last question, son,” he said to Felix. “Who were you expecting to see back there?”

  “I—no one,” Felix stammered.

  “You asked where he was from,” McGivney said. “Where did you think that would be?”

  “I don’t know,” Felix said, shifting unhappily from foot to foot.

  Before McGivney could pressure him further, I said, “Who found the body? It was shoved into that log, right? And there’s no direct path into that clearing.”

  McGivney sighed. “High school kids out smoking and drinking. Weed, beer, vodka, cigarettes. Be a while before they do that again.”

  “You don’t think they killed him themselves? Some Lord of the Flies fantasy that ran out of control?”

  “What, and came back to get stoned at the scene and celebrate the murder? They were scared shitless.”

  “Whoever killed him didn’t want him found,” I said.

  “You think?” McGivney’s upper lip curled in derision. “Let me know if you have any other insights, Sherlock.”

  2

  L Stop

  On our way back to the city, I stopped at a gas station to buy Felix a bottle of water. “You shouldn’t buy bottled water,” he muttered.

  “I agree, but you need to hydrate yourself. You’ll feel better all the way around.”

  “I’m not a baby,” he said, but he drank part of the bottle.

  He began to shake, his teeth chattering, his arms wrapped around himself in an effort to stay warm. I turned the heat on high, and gradually, as we got back onto the expressway, he calmed down and drank the rest of the water.

  “Thank you for driving with me, Vic,” he muttered, staring out the window. “It was . . . quite horrible.”

  “Yes, that body—the face—were terrible to look at,” I agreed. “Do you really not know him?”

  “Do you think I’m lying?” he cried, jerking around to look at me.

  “I don’t think anything. I’m here to help you in any way I can, but I need facts before I can go forward.”

  “I don’t know how anyone could recognize him,” Felix said, his voice hovering on the edge of tears. “I never saw him before. Only when they said he had my phone number in his pocket, I couldn’t help being afraid. It seemed like that lieutenant wanted to nail me and I probably wasn’t very smart.”

  “Where did you think he was from?” I asked. “Is someone from your EFS group missing?”

  “I can’t take any more questions right now, Vic, please!”

  EFS—Engineers in a Free State—was a group Felix had joined this past winter. Right before Christmas, he and a dozen or so other foreign students had been picked up in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement dragnet. He’d been held in a windowless room in a building whose location he’d never learned. He wasn’t allowed water or a bathroom or permission to phone for help.

  Felix was Canadian; he’d come to Chicago to do graduate work in mechanical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. His grandfather was Lotty Herschel’s brother, Hugo, who’d escaped with her from Vienna to London ten days before the start of World War II. After the war, when Lotty came to Chicago for her obstetrics fellowship, Hugo moved to Montreal, where he married and started a family. Hugo and Lotty remained close, with family visits to Chicago each summer. For Felix, choosing a Chicago university had seemed like a natural decision.

  That was before his detention. Afterward, Felix told us that while ICE claimed to be checking the immigration status of all foreign students, only those from Middle Eastern or South American countries were actually detained. As was Felix, whose walnut-colored skin and dark curly hair made him look like Omar Sharif’s grandson.

  “They held me for five hours. Every now and then someone would come in and ask me the same questions the previous person did, like they were trying to trick me. When I got out, I learned the Europeans and Chinese—and white-looking Canadians—only had to show their passports—no questions asked of them.

  “Even when they finally looked me up in their system and saw I was Canadian, they kept demanding my visa. They didn’t seem to know that Canadians don’t need visas to go to school in the States. Bullies and stupid with it.”

  Two of his fellow students, a man from Paraguay and a woman born in Sudan, were detained, pending deportation. They’d been DACA kids, the so-called Dreamers, who had come to the States as children but didn’t have citizenship or green cards. Like many other Dreamers, they were having trouble raising the five hundred dollars to apply for authorization extensions.

  The woman’s deportation made Felix even angrier. I wondered if they’d dated, but he said they were just lab partners. “Kitoko’s life’s in danger in Sudan. Her brother was murdered, her mother was raped. She grew up in t
he U.S. and everything she knows is here. But that counts for nothing!”

  He’d gone to the Canadian consulate and tried to get them to offer Kitoko asylum, but by the time the consul responded, the United States had deported her.

  Felix had talked about staying in Montreal after the Christmas break. He’d also talked about some alarmingly radical actions. Over New Year’s a group of his fellow IIT students had formed Engineers in a Free State. When Felix learned about the group, he’d returned to Chicago to join them. He’d continued his studies, but he’d also started going to community meetings with students from Latin American and Middle Eastern countries.

  He used to come to Lotty’s for dinner on Sundays, but he now spent most of his spare time working with his friends. “Peace initiatives. We’re following the example of Engineers Without Borders,” he said when Lotty asked why he visited infrequently.

  Lotty was uneasy. “Yes, it’s good that he’s standing up for what is right, but I don’t want him in his rage to do something irreversible.”

  When Felix called me at two this morning, panicking because sheriff’s deputies were pounding on his apartment door, I was frightened that he had crossed that line.

  I’d been heavily asleep after a long day, but when he said “cops at the door” I’d jolted wide awake.

  “What do they want?”

  I was pulling on jeans, sweater, shoes while telling him to let the police know his lawyer was en route; he’d talk to them as soon as I arrived, but until then he wasn’t opening the door.

  I am a lawyer, at least on paper: I keep up my membership in the Illinois Bar Association so that I can claim privilege if I’m interrogated about my clients. Or so I can put a thin barrier between them and the law until I find them a heavier legal hitter.

  I’d phoned Lotty on my way to Felix’s place. I hated to alarm her, but she wouldn’t forgive me if Felix were arrested and she found out only after the fact. She’d agreed that it would be best if I handled the situation myself, but to call if he needed the Canadian consul or my own criminal defense lawyer.

  It took some doing when I reached Felix’s building, but I’d persuaded the sheriff’s deputies to reveal their mission: Felix wasn’t a suspect in a crime—they wanted to see if he could identify a dead body. They didn’t know anything else, or they wouldn’t say anything else, except to fight me over driving Felix myself instead of letting them stuff him into the back of a squad car. They lost that argument, too, which probably explained why the deputy left us to flounder through the bracken unassisted.