Critical Mass (35 page)

Dr. Memler’s work will be of vital importance in advancing America’s rocket and nuclear weapons program. Your cooperation in issuing an immediate visa is greatly appreciated.

I stared at the letter for several minutes, as if the text held some secret that would appear if I looked long enough. Alison turned in her sleep and muttered something in Spanish. I stuck the letter into the back pocket of my jeans and switched off the desk lamp.

31

MUSCLE CAR

I
T WAS THE
MIDDLE
of Tuesday afternoon before I woke again. I showered in Kitty’s bathroom, which made me uncomfortable, as if she were sitting on the bed watching me. In the kitchen, I found Alison eating peanut butter out of a jar with a spoon.

“We threw out all the bread last night,” she said. “I found a package of bagels in the back of the freezer, but I didn’t know if it was okay to turn on the toaster.”

“I don’t think anyone’s monitoring the power use, so go—” I broke off mid-sentence: I’d just realized Alison was texting one-handed while she continued to lick peanut butter from the spoon. “What are you doing?”

“Letting my roommate know I’m okay, why?”

“You told me last night that you left Mexico City without telling anyone, but here you are, broadcasting your location to anyone who knows your phone number!”

“It’s my Harvard roommate, not the one in Mexico City,” Alison assured me. “She’s working with an NGO in Botswana, and we text each other, like, twenty times a day, so she was upset when she didn’t hear from me.”

“Alison. Ms. Breen. You’re the Whizzo Wizard of Computerland, not me, but don’t you know that anyone who knows your phone number,
whether it’s your father or Jari Liu or Ramona in Mexico City, can track your location if your GPS signal is transmitting?”

“Oh,” she said in a small voice. “I’m so used to texting, it never occurred to me—I looked at my phone when I got up and thought I’d forgotten to take it out of airplane mode, and Caitlin, my roommate, she said if she didn’t hear from me by the end of the day in Chicago she’d text my mom. What should I do?”

“How long have you had your phone on?”

“Since I got up, maybe thirty minutes ago. I kind of do it automatically. I had about twenty texts from the people in Mexico, and then my roommate, and my folks had both texted saying they’d heard from my program director, and they called Harvard, so—”

“So you’d better get up to Lake Forest and let them know you’re okay,” I finished for her.

I hadn’t thought this through last night. Too much Echezeaux had made me overlook how many people would start looking for Alison the instant she disappeared.

“But what can I tell them? I don’t want to say I came back hoping that Martin might show up.”

“No, but can’t you tell them a part of the truth? Tell them siccing the FBI on members of your Mexico program is undoing all the good work you’ve been putting in. Tell them you needed to have this conversation face-to-face, that it’s too delicate a matter to handle by texts and phone calls.”

I wasn’t really paying attention to her problem; I was wondering whether there were unusual noises coming from the side of the house.

“And if they realize from my GPS signal that I was at Martin’s house?”

“Ask them why they were tracking your cell phone and tell them you’ll get a burn phone that you throw out every month if they don’t stop breathing down your neck.”

There were unusual noises on the perimeter. I leapt across the room to the kitchen door and stood flat against the wall, gun in hand.

“Get down,” I said to Alison, “get under the table. Someone’s here. I don’t want to hit you if I have to shoot.”

Alison stared at me, still holding her peanut buttery spoon.

“Get on the floor,” I hissed in fury.

She was too frightened to move: we both had seen a face appear in the window over the kitchen sink. The flaming hair topping it off was unmistakable. I put my gun back in my holster and left the kitchen through the garage door, since the back door was boarded over.

“Voss Susskind,” I called, stepping into the Binders’ yard. “What are you looking for?”

He spun around, his eyes wide with terror. “Who are—oh. You’re the detective who’s looking for Martin. Have you found him?”

“I’m not even close. What are you doing here?”

He’d been standing on a cement block under the kitchen window. He hopped down, his face almost as red as his hair.

“Ever since you came to see my folks, I’ve kind of been keeping a watch on the house. When I got home from school just now I thought I saw something in the kitchen so I came over to investigate before I called the cops.”

“Well done,” I said with a heartiness I didn’t feel. “We were looking for any clues the police had missed. You didn’t happen to be watching the night Ms. Binder was murdered, did you?”

He traced a circle in the hard-baked yard with the toe of his sneaker. “If I say, will you promise not to tell my mom?”

“Scout’s honor,” I agreed solemnly.

“It was two guys. I saw them break down the back door, and I ran to get my mom, but before she could even call 911, we heard these shots, and my dad, he said, better stay out of it.”

“Can you describe them?” I said. “If you can, I promise I won’t tell the police it was you I heard the details from.”

He shook his head unhappily, looking at the circle he’d been drawing. “They wore dark jackets, or sweaters, and their faces were all flattened-out funny. I think they’d put ladies’ pantyhose over them, that’s what I decided later, you know, I was talking about it to Aaron Lustic at school the next day and we agreed ladies’ stockings would squish your face out funny.”

“But you’re sure they were both men?”

“It was how they walked,” he said simply.

I smiled. “You have the makings of a superior investigator, Voss. Now I wonder if I could ask a favor. That’s Martin’s girlfriend in the kitchen; she’s been helping me search the house but she needs to get up to her folks’ place in Lake Forest. Can she borrow your bike? She’d get it back to you tomorrow.”

“I, gosh, sure, yeah, I guess, but she should take Toby’s if she can handle it. He left it here when he went to Rochester.”

We went back into the kitchen through the garage. I introduced Voss, whose eyes widened when he saw Alison: he hadn’t expected Martin to have such a cool-looking girlfriend. He became both shy and aggressive. He’d show her how to handle Toby’s bike, he’d ride over as far as the Hubbard Woods bike path to make sure she didn’t get lost.

Alison was as used to youthful adoration as she was to avuncular elderly men. She thanked Voss with suitable flattery, telling him she’d love the escort since she didn’t know Skokie. I shooed them both out of the garage. When Alison turned to thank me I told her it could wait until we were all home free, just to get going.

As soon as she and Voss disappeared across the alley, I started to look for the Subaru’s keys. For once, I was lucky on the first pass: Martin had left the car keys in the garage, on a hook by the garage bay door. I didn’t see much point in leaving surreptitiously. With Voss’s
arrival and departure, anyone on the block who was watching would know we’d been in the house. I made sure I had everything I’d arrived with: gun, picklocks, flashlight, toothbrush and Boom-Boom’s jersey.

The Subaru had that musty, moldy smell that unused cars get, but the engine turned over immediately. I needed to drive to my office, to see what havoc Homeland Security had wrought there, but I stopped at home first. Mr. Contreras deserved an update; besides, I’d left my laptop and iPad with him last night.

I parked the Subaru six blocks from my apartment and walked home by a zigzag route that let me check for tails. After telling Mr. Contreras about our night, and Alison’s decision to go home—with his predictable criticism of my letting her bicycle off with a neighbor kid—couldn’t I have driven her to Lake Forest? What was wrong with taking extra time to give the girl the support she needed?—and getting the dogs a much-needed workout, I headed down to my office in the Subaru.

My leasemate, who wrestles gigantic sculptures out of steel and railway ties and any other really big piece of material, was in Cape Cod with her parents this week. Usually when I come in, there’s some kind of blowtorch or bandsaw going, along with her music mix. The quiet in the warehouse we share was unnerving, as if monsters were lurking in the shadows.

I flipped on all the lights, got Natalie Maines to sing “Not Ready to Make Nice” for me at top volume, and set to work. Homeland Security hadn’t been as destructive in my office as they’d been in my home. I guess because they’d taken the drives from my Mac Pro, they didn’t think they had to dump all my documents onto the floor. They’d left my cabinet drawers open, with enough disarray in the files to let me know they’d been in them, but they hadn’t strewn paper about, for which I was grateful: my tax dollars at work.

I shut the drawers without trying to reorganize them. I’ve always thought of housework as a spectator sport, not a participatory one, and
I’d done more cleaning in the last week than I usually do in a year: scoured out a meth pit, cleaned up a major crime scene at Kitty Binder’s, and started putting my own apartment back in order. Enough.

Without my big computer I was somewhat hamstrung, but I still had all my reports backed up in the Cloud, assuming some zealous federal official hadn’t erased them. I managed to return client calls and get a respectable amount of work done. I saved all my work to thumb drives to keep it out of the Cloud.

As I returned calls and filled in the blanks on some of my reports, I kept wondering if I should tell my clients that their confidential files had been broached. Yes, they had a right to know. No, they’d never trust me with their work again.

My mother’s voice rang in my head the summer I was ten. I’d gone to Wrigley Field with my cousin Boom-Boom, traveling our usual route: scrambling up on the platform of the commuter train so we could board without paying the fare downtown; climbing the girders to the L at Roosevelt Road, hoisting ourselves over the back wall into the bleachers. And we’d been caught. Boom-Boom shrugged it off, but I was grounded for two weeks. When I tried to lay the blame on my cousin my mother was angry and contemptuous:
“Don’t add
viltà
—cowardice—to your other problems.”

Right, Gabriella. I sent an e-mail to each client, explaining that an investigation had roused Homeland Security wrath, that they had impounded my hard drives, and that while I would take extra precautions in the future (what, I didn’t say because I didn’t know) I couldn’t guarantee the safety of their confidential data in the present.

Sometimes not only is honesty the best policy, but it actually helps. One of the law firms I work for wrote back to say that they were talking to the federal attorney for the Northern District to demand guarantees of privacy for all my data. Another client, also a law firm, was going to the federal magistrate to demand the return of my drives. A couple of customers weren’t so happy. They asked for refunds on their retainers,
but on the whole, I felt it was V.I., the Solo Op, 1, Homeland Security 0.

I was writing out the last of the refund checks when I got a call that the ID identified only as coming from Palfry. I was tempted to let it go—I didn’t think I could take Sheriff Kossel’s hearty laughter—but picked it up right before it rolled over to my answering service.

“I’m looking for the detective? V. I. Warshawski?” a woman said.

I knew the voice but couldn’t place it. “Yes, speaking. And you are—?”

“This is Susie Foyle from Lazy Susan’s?”

“Of course, home of the world-famous BLT. What’s up?”

“This—I’m not sure I should be telling you this, but Bobbie Wenger and I talked it over this morning with Jenny Orlick, because she’s Glenn’s partner, and we finally decided you ought to know.”

I made reassuring noises.

“This is a bit awkward, you know, because what if we’re making something out of nothing?”

“If it’s something out of nothing I will not do anything with the information,” I promised.

“It’s Glenn, Glenn Davilats, the deputy, you know.”

We established that I knew who she was talking about: the deputy who’d waited with me while his pals went into the cornfield after Ricky Schlafly’s body. Jenny Orlick was his partner.

“He’s driving a new Charger. I know for a fact he’s got two babies and a mortgage that he’s behind on, so where he got money for a brand-new muscle car, it’s worrying Jenny, so she talked to Bobbie. Bobbie’s her aunt, you know.”

I didn’t know, but in a small town everyone is connected.

“Anyway, well, like I say, maybe he won the lottery, and if he did, I’m embarrassed to be bothering you with this.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not a bother, and don’t be embarrassed.”

As Susie continued to talk herself into a happier frame of mind, two
Palfry images came to me: standing in the motel parking lot at four in the morning, watching a Dodge Charger roar away from me with the two punks who’d busted my trunk lock to steal the dresser drawers.

Even more vivid was the memory of standing by the cornfield in the hot sun. I’d asked Deputy Davilats to help me put Delilah, the emaciated Rottweiler, into my car. She’d been gentle with me, she was sweet with everyone at the clinic, but she’d bared her teeth and shown hackle at Glenn Davilats.

32

CHOP SHOP

M
Y FIRST IMPULSE
was to call Sheriff Kossel, but for all I knew, the whole Palfry County sheriff’s department was working with local drug dealers. Roberta and Frank Wenger had said there were at least two other meth houses in the county.

It could be that one of the dealers had bribed Davilats to work with him, but no one else in the county knew about it. My experience of police corruption said otherwise. You didn’t usually get a solo bad apple: people don’t feel immoral when they’re doing what the group is doing. The two deputies who’d answered the 911 at the motel had been unenthusiastic about tracking the Charger: maybe they only suspected it belonged to their buddy. On the other hand, they could be getting a cut.