Fire Sale (27 page)

31

The Walking Wounded

M
y office had a forlorn, abandoned feeling to it, as if no one had been inside it for months. My footsteps echoed off the floor and seemed to bounce around the walls and ceilings. Although I’d stopped by two days ago, I wasn’t really working here these days—I was just dropping in between treks through swamps.

My lease partner, Tessa, who’s a sculptor, was vacationing in Australia. I dropped her mail on her drafting table. Her work space was meticulously tidy, every tool hung on a Peg-Board, drawings put in neatly labeled drawers, her blowtorch and sheets of metal carefully covered with drop cloths. Quite a contrast to my own side of the building, with files on the edges of tables and office supplies that seem to migrate at will.

In a way, my space is too big, the ceilings too high, the way they can be in these old warehouses. I’d had fake ceilings put in in places, but the windows were around the perimeter at the top; I hadn’t had the money to tear down a wall to let in outside light. I did put up partitions to make the area more human in scale, with my desk in one, my supplies and printers in another, and a bed for when I needed to crash away from home in a third, but the big room at the west end was where I did most of my actual work.

There’s a little alcove with the couch and some arm-chairs to have casual meetings with clients, a setup with a screen for more formal presentations, a long table where I map out work in progress, a desk for my assistant, if I ever get off my butt and find a full-time person. I looked at the stacks of paper on the long table and decided I wasn’t ready to face them yet.

I walked down to the corner to drop my peacoat at the cleaners. Ruby Choi, who has cleaned spaghetti sauce off silk shirts and tar out of wool slacks for me, looked at it dubiously. “This coat has been through too much. I try, I do my best, but I promise nothing. You take better care of your clothes, you make my job much easier, Vic.”

“Yeah, that’s what the doctor said about my body, which, believe me, looks a lot worse than the coat.”

On my way back up Oakton, I stopped for a cappuccino and bought myself a large bunch of flowers, big red spiky things that stood out even in my warehouse. Welcome back, V. I., we missed you!

The fax from Sanford Rieff at Cheviot Labs was waiting for me, as he’d promised. He’d looked at the little froggy soap dish from its bulging eyes to its stubby feet. It had been made in China, surprise, out of a pewter alloy whose rough surface didn’t hold fingerprints well. Underneath the smoke stains, Sanford could still detect oil from human fingers; perhaps it would be possible to get a DNA sample, although he wasn’t optimistic.

The soap dish part of the frog was the back, which was hollowed out and had a hole in it for drainage. Someone had put a rubber plug in the hole and then poured nitric acid into the dish. The acid had burned out the plug, but traces of it remained, melted into the sides of the drainage hole.

“Nitric acid dissolves soap,” Sanford concluded, “so there was no soap residue in the bowl of the dish, but I took some samples from the sides; whoever used it for its intended purpose used a heavy-scented rose soap, probably Adorée, a cheap brand sold in most drugstore chains and discount stores. I have the frog secure in a specimen box. Let me know if you want it returned or if we should store it until it’s needed as evidence.”

I stared at the fax, willing it to mean something more than it did. What was it doing at Fly the Flag. Why did it have nitric acid in it? Maybe acid was used somehow in the manufacture of flags. Maybe they dissolved glue with it, or something, and tried to use the froggy as a container, but the acid burned out the rubber plug.

My precious clue didn’t seem to mean much, but I still went to my desk and typed up labels for a set of files: Fly the Flag, Arson, By-Smart, Billy, and put Rieff’s lab report in the Fly the Flag folder. That was productive. Standing at my worktable, I shut my eyes, trying to visualize the back of the plant, where the fire had started. I’d been inside only twice, very briefly both times. The mechanicals were down there, the drying room, the storage area for fabrics. I made a rough sketch; I couldn’t remember enough detail, but I was pretty sure the heart of the fire was in the drying room, not the fabric storage area.

R-A-T-S, I slowly wrote. Glue. Everything that had been done to the plant had slowed down production, not put them out of business. Was the arson a final act, because Zamar hadn’t heeded the warnings? Or had this been intended as another warning, but one that went out of control? The punk I’d surprised at Fly the Flag two weeks ago, that
chavo banda
Andrés had driven from his construction site, he held the key to this. I needed to find him. And it wouldn’t hurt to get some corroboration of what had happened at the fire.

I tried Sanford Rieff again out at Cheviot Labs. This time I reached him at his desk. When I’d thanked him for the report, and told him to log the frog into their safe, I asked if he had an electrical engineer, or arson expert, who could meet me at Fly the Flag sometime soon.

“I’d like an expert to look at the wires with me to see if it’s possible to tell where or how the fire started. The police aren’t putting real resources into this.”

And why should I, for even less money than the cops? I imagined the conversation with my accountant. Because my professional pride was wounded: I’d been watching when the factory went up in flames. What should I have seen if I’d been paying closer attention?

Of course, Cheviot had just the expert I needed; he’d get her to give me a call to set up an appointment. Just so I knew, the company billed her time at two hundred dollars an hour. That was good to know: it was good to know I was sinking thousands of dollars into an investigation I hadn’t been hired to take on while I abandoned the business that made money for me.

If I didn’t finish three background checks for Darraugh Graham, my most important client, I’d be living on cat food in an alley pretty soon, and not the good stuff, either. I tapped my teeth with my pencil, trying to figure out how to juggle it all, then remembered Amy Blount. She’d earned a Ph.D. in economic history a year or so ago; while she looked for a full-time academic appointment, she sometimes did research projects for me, among other odd jobs she found. Fortunately enough, she was free, and willing, to pull things together in my office for a few days. We agreed to meet at nine in the morning to go over my caseload.

I walked aimlessly around the big room. Who had been gunning for Marcena, and why? Was it because of her that Bron had been killed or because of Bron that she’d been attacked? When we were talking to Conrad, Morrell had said she’d had a couple of meetings with Buffalo Bill Bysen since our initial prayer meeting two weeks ago. She’d presumably used her father’s imaginary war experience as her entrée, but maybe they’d touched on something relevant. Buffalo Bill had crashed my apartment, and the Mt. Ararat church service; I could drive out to Rolling Meadows and tackle him unawares.

It was an appealing thought, but I didn’t have enough information to put any questions to him. Fly the Flag was connected to By-Smart because they were manufacturing for the behemoth, first flags and now sheets. I wondered if Buffalo Bill paid enough attention to small details to look at sheets or if that was something that Jacqui handled. I could talk to Jacqui, anyway.

Billy the Kid was connected to Bron and Marcena because he had given Bron his cell phone, and Morrell’s flask, which Marcena was using, had been in Billy’s car. Billy was connected to Fly the Flag because he was dating Josie. Had run away with Josie. I hoped. I hoped she was with him and not—I shut my mind: I didn’t want to imagine the horrible alternatives.

Where were those two kids? Maybe Josie had confided in April. I picked up my phone to call Sandra Czernin and then decided it would be easier to talk to her in person, especially if I wanted to speak to her daughter. I owed her a courtesy visit, anyway, since I’d been the person who found her dead husband. And I wanted to talk to Pastor Andrés. It was time for him to answer a few direct questions. Like, was that
chavo
connected to the fire? And where did he hang out? I’d round out my afternoon in South Chicago with a visit to Patrick Grobian—Billy had had a meeting with the warehouse manager sometime just before he disappeared.

I put my labeled files into a drawer and collected what I needed for an afternoon in the cold. I was wearing a parka, bulkier and much less chic than my navy coat, but maybe better for standing on a street corner on a cold day. This time, I remembered gloves, or, rather, mittens: my fingers were still so sore and swollen from Tuesday night’s escapade that I couldn’t work my gloves over them. If I needed to use my gun, I’d be in trouble. I took it with me, though: whoever had attacked Bron and Marcena had a scary imagination. Binoculars, phone book, peanut butter sandwiches, a flask of coffee. What else did I need? A new battery for my flashlight, which Mr. Contreras had left in my car, and my picklocks.

I’d told Morrell I’d be doing desk work today; I thought about calling to say I’d changed my mind, but I didn’t want to go into a long discussion of what I felt fit enough to do. If I were truthful, I’d have to admit that twenty-four hours in the hospital hadn’t been enough for me to feel fully recuperated. And if I were smart, I’d go home and rest until I did feel fit enough again. I hoped this didn’t mean I was dishonest and stupid.

“It’s a long and dusty road. / It’s a hard and heavy load,” I sang to myself as I picked up the southbound expressway. I was getting very tired of this route, the leaden sky, the dirty buildings, the endless traffic, and then, after the eastbound cutoff from the Ryan, the ruined neighborhood that used to be my home.

The exit at 103rd goes right by the golf course where Mitch had found Marcena and Bron. I stopped briefly to look at it, wondering why their attackers had chosen this spot. I took a side road south and looked at the entrance to the course. Enormous gates were padlocked for the winter. The gates were pretty solid, attached to a razor-wire fence that wouldn’t be easy to scale, or even climb under.

I slowly drove back to 103rd, inspecting the fence for access, but the razor wire had been rolled out with a lavish hand. The side road wound past a police pound, the graveyard for a thousand cars. Many were wrecks, twisted hunks of metal that had been scraped off the Dan Ryan Expressway, although some seemed to be whole cars that had been parked in tow zones. While I watched, a little fleet of the city’s blue tow trucks trundled in, pulling cars behind them, like a team of ants carrying food to their queen. Empty trucks were leaving, going off to forage in the countryside. I wondered if Billy’s little Miata was in there now or if the family had collected it.

On beyond the pound, razor wire continued to divide road from the marsh. I parked on the verge at the spot where Mitch had left the road for the swamp. The fence was still down there, and you could still see a faint wheel track through the gray-brown grasses.

I didn’t understand why their assailants had taken Bron and Marcena through the marsh and then dumped them at the edge of the golf course. If you were going to break down the fence, why not just leave the bodies in the marsh itself, where rats and mud would obliterate the flesh fast enough. Why take them to a pit on the edge of a tony golf course, where someone might stumble on them at any moment? Even at this time of year, there were groundskeepers wandering around. And why go into the marsh at all—it took so much work. Why not just come up Stony Island from the south and drop them in the garbage dump?

I got back in my car, unsatisfied with the whole setup. As I put the car in gear, my cell phone rang. I looked at the readout: Morrell. I felt guilty, being caught out far from my office, and almost let his call go through to voice mail.

“Vic, are you on your way home? I just tried your office.”

“I’m in South Chicago,” I confessed.

“I thought you were staying close to home today.”

He sounded resentful, which is so out of character for him that my own visceral anger at being monitored didn’t kick in. I asked what the problem was.

“The most outrageous thing—someone broke into my place and stole Marcena’s computer.”

“What—when?” A By-Smart eighteen-wheeler honked furiously as I stepped on the brakes and pulled onto the verge.

“Sometime between five this morning, when I left to go down to the hospital, and now, I mean ninety minutes ago, when I got home. I lay down on the couch to rest for half an hour, then went into the back to get things organized for Rawlings’s detective. That’s when I found someone had been through my papers like a wind machine.”

“How do you know they took Marcena’s computer? Wouldn’t she have had it with her?”

“She’d left it on the kitchen counter. I put it by her bed when I was straightening up Sunday night. It’s gone now, along with my jump drives. As far as I can tell, nothing else is missing.”

His jump drives, the little key-sized gizmos he uses to back up his data, which he does every night, storing the neatly labeled drives in a box on his desktop.

“They didn’t take your computer?”

“I had it with me when I went to the hospital—I thought I might write a little while I was sitting with you—not that I did, but it turned out to be a good thing, since it saved my machine.”

I asked about his other electronics. His fancy sound system was intact, along with the TV and DVD player.

He’d called the Evanston police as soon as he discovered the loss, but, from the sound of it, they’d only gone through the motions, figuring drug addicts were responsible. “But my place hadn’t been broken into. I mean, whoever did this came in through the front door with a key, and those are very good locks. Which doesn’t sound like an addict, and, anyway, an addict would have taken the portables, like the DVD.”

“So someone with sophisticated skills wanted Marcena’s files, and those only, and doesn’t care that you know it,” I said slowly.

Morrell said, “I called Rawlings, and he swears it wasn’t the Chicago police. Should I believe him?”