Breakdown (39 page)

I scrubbed my hands at the kitchen sink, spraying them with Clorox and washing myself up to my elbows. I looked again at the landline. I had checked the incoming calls but not outgoing. The landline didn’t give a long history, not like a cell phone, but it did let me see the last five numbers dialed. One was an 800 number, which turned out to be Polish Airlines. The most recent was a local cab company. I was about to try a third, in the 312 area, when I realized I knew that number. It belonged to the main switchboard at Crawford, Mead, my ex-husband’s firm. They’d changed buildings, but the phone numbers were the same they’d been when he went to work there twenty-five years ago.

A plane made its final approach overhead, the noise drowning the hum of the refrigerator and a distant lawn mower. I sat down gingerly on one of the kitchen chairs and tried to think.

The sequence of calls Jana had made yesterday: she’d called 911 to report me to the police. She’d called Crawford, Mead. And then she’d booked a flight and fled town as fast as possible.

What had made her run? Me, with my news that her lover had been murdered, had that scared her into bolting? Or had it been her conversation with Crawford, Mead?

Miles Wuchnik had done occasional freelance work for the firm. Eloise Napier and her rodent-looking pal, Louis Ormond, had denied using Wuchnik recently, but this phone record made them look like a couple of liars. Wuchnik had gotten Xavier to let him into the locked wing, and somehow, Xavier had found out that Wuchnik was doing it for my ex’s firm. On behalf of a mystery client.

If I called Crawford, Mead, I wanted to make sure I had a good escape route planned. Maybe I could hole up in the Umbrian hills, where my mother’s father had hidden during the war.

I drove slowly back to the city, concentrating on the traffic, looking for anyone who might be staying close to me. I thought I was clean. I stayed south, returning to the University of Chicago. The closest parking was half a mile from campus, nothing when you’re fresh and the air is, too, but a wilting walk in the muggy late-morning.

I found the Slavic languages and literature department. The young man working the reception desk reluctantly put aside the thick volume he was reading when I said hello for the third time. He unwrapped himself from his chair to see what I wanted, proving to be such a tall, thin stick of a guy that I wondered how blood made it from his feet to his brain. I showed him the Cyrillic aerograms, explaining I was hoping to get them translated. He brightened: he was a graduate student in Russian literature; he could do the work in an evening. We agreed on a hundred dollars, but he waved aside my offer to give him half up front.

“Send me a check when I’ve finished. Just write down your phone number and your e-mail for me.”

He made copies of the letters for me on a machine behind him and was coiled back in his chair over his book—in Russian—before I’d left. It made me wistful to see someone so deeply in love with the written word that money seemed not to matter to him. So different from the world where I spend most of my time, filled with the dying or the lying.

Back in my office, I stared blankly at the database giving me the list of inmates in Ruhetal’s forensic wing.

The Umbrian hills hadn’t really kept my mother’s father safe—there are always neighbors like the women on Jana Shatka’s street who know what you’re doing, and inevitably, one of them will betray you, in exchange for safety, or money, or, in wartime, for a little extra food. Perhaps that was Chaim Salanter’s wartime secret—not the grand plots that Wade Lawlor wove around him but something he was too ashamed to admit now.

Salanter had encased himself in a vast fortune here in the New World, but it hadn’t been enough to protect his granddaughter. I sat up abruptly. Whoever had doped her and put her in the trunk of the Camaro to suffocate would have no qualms about going into her hospital room and putting something nasty into her IV.

I called Lotty’s clinic to see if her staff could work their hospital networks to get me an update on Arielle Zitter, explaining my fears about her security. “I don’t need to know what hospital she’s in, but the Salanters should have security professionals in place to inspect any meds or food she gets and any visitors who come.”

Jewel Kim phoned back twenty minutes later to tell me that Arielle’s mother was moving her to a private rehabilitation clinic in Israel, where the family felt her security could be guaranteed until she recovered. She’d flown out on the Salanters’ private plane this morning. That was reassuring. If Arielle was fit enough for a ten-hour flight, she must be recovering fairly quickly.

Everyone was leaving Chicago. Maybe Lucy and Kira Dudek should, too—go to their
tata
in Poland. They didn’t have the Salanters’ private jet to whisk them behind Mossad’s protective radar. If it was Kira’s phone that had been used to summon Arielle to Mount Moriah two nights ago, the assailant might well think Kira knew something about him—or her, I added, conscientiously.

I called my cousin to make sure she and the girls were still all right. She’d left them with “Uncle Sal” while she went in to work.

“I just talked to him ten minutes ago, and he’s getting kind of worn out. Anyway, the girls want to go home, and their mom doesn’t like them being away, either, especially since you and Uncle Sal are strangers.”

“I don’t want them to go home if I can’t guarantee their safety,” I fretted. “Things are looking ugly and scary from where I’m sitting. If I could hire—” I broke off; the words gave me an idea. “Hold that thought: I’ll get back to you in a minute.”

I called Chaim Salanter’s PA. “Ms. Balfour, I understand that Arielle is out of the country, in a safe place.”

“How did you know that?” she said. “Only the family—”

“Don’t worry about it; I’m not passing the word along. But there are two girls from Arielle’s book group at the Malina Foundation whose safety has been compromised by Arielle’s shenanigans. Their mother scrapes out a living cleaning hotel bathrooms. It would be an act of charity if Mr. Salanter would spring for a private guard for them so their mother can stop worrying about them while she’s at work.”

She dithered, she dickered, but I told her she had nothing to bargain with, since it was her boss’s mania for secrecy that had put the Dudek girls at risk. Finally, she put me on hold while she conferred with Chaim. He came on the line himself, asked a few questions, such as how I knew where Arielle had gone: had I been spying on her?

“No, sir. I don’t even know what hospital she was taken to. But nothing involving more than one human being can be kept secret forever.”

“The Dudeks—is that their name?—have no claim on my generosity.”

“Your granddaughter was the ringleader of the group that sucked them into her cemetery adventure. Arielle took advantage of Kira’s mother working all night to use the Dudek apartment for her private meetings. If not for Arielle, Kira Dudek wouldn’t have been in Mount Moriah cemetery two weeks ago. The loss of her cell phone was a financial blow to Kira and her mother, but if it had incriminating photos or texts on it, whoever attacked Arielle may well try to find Kira to silence her. I’d say that was a pretty large moral claim on your generosity.”

I did my best to keep the bitterness out of my voice, but he wanted to know next whether I was threatening to disclose Arielle’s location if he didn’t help the Dudek girls.

“No, sir,” I said. “Even if I wanted to dicker over their safety, which I don’t, you could keep moving Arielle and I don’t have the energy to follow her.”

“How long will it be before the police discover who was behind the assault on my granddaughter?”

“I can’t speak for the police, Mr. Salanter, but I am hard at it. With more information, of course, it would be easier.”

“Nothing in my life story would illuminate these crimes, Ms. Warshawski, but I will ask Gabe Eycks to arrange a guard for the girls; he’ll call you for the details.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding. “Thank you, sir. Perhaps you might worry a bit about Sophy Durango’s daughter, too.”

There was a pause on the other end, then an energetic agreement. Nia would enjoy a trip to Israel, to help Arielle with her recovery; he should have thought of that himself.

39.

CHASING SHADOWS

“
I
’M GOING TO HAVE TO START BILLING YOU,
V
IC, IF YOU COME
around here all the time.”

That was Dick’s idea of a joke. I smiled and got to my feet. “That’s okay. I’ll just bill you for my waiting time.”

I’d called Crawford, Mead as soon as I finished talking to Chaim Salanter, but Dick couldn’t see me until the end of the day. He hadn’t wanted to meet with me at all, but after I said I was investigating what his law firm was doing at a murder victim’s home, he—or, really, his secretary, who was crisply relaying messages between us—said he’d fit me in at six-thirty, before dinner with clients. It was nearly seven before he stepped into the waiting area, a vision in pale gray summer suiting.

Since I’d had the afternoon free, I’d been able to go home and wait for Gabe Eycks to turn up with a bodyguard for the Dudek girls. Mr. Contreras was worn out, as my cousin had said, and was glad to turn the energetic sisters over to me. While they danced under the jet from the backyard sprinkler, I changed out of my wrinkled T-shirt into a tailored knit top in my favorite gold, with a light rayon jacket to cover my shoulder holster.

I joined them in the yard. As we threw tennis balls for the dogs, I casually asked Kira what she’d seen at the cemetery the night of the shape-shifting ritual.

She stiffened instantly and looked at the back door, as if ready to run to Mr. Contreras for shelter. “Just rain.”

“Kira. You know why you’re here with me and Mr. Contreras, right? And why we’re getting a bodyguard to look after you and Lucy?”

“To keep us from getting hurt by the person who hurted Arielle,” Lucy piped up.

“Do you know why he might want to hurt you?” I asked.

Lucy said, “Because he’s a big mean stranger danger,” but Kira turned her head away, glowering.

“It’s not about you being illegal, or whether the Vina Fields girls act snobby to the Malina girls. It’s about what you saw. You girls were all taking pictures with your cell phones, but you dropped yours. I think whoever picked it up saw that you’d gotten a perfect shot of the person who was hiding near your group.”

“The vampire!” Lucy danced in her excitement. “You took a picture of a vampire, Kira. If you find your phone, we can sell the picture, we’ll be rich, we can buy a horse!”

Kira turned to her sister and ordered her in Polish to shut up. Lucy fired back some insult of her own and marched off in a huff with Mitch to a far corner of the garden.

“There wasn’t a vampire in the cemetery. It was a—a person.” I bit off the word “murderer.” Kira probably guessed that was who’d been near the Carmilla ritual, but putting it into words would make it seem real and terrifying.

“I need to know who or what you saw. The sooner I know, the sooner I can see that your life returns to normal.”

“Tyler screamed that there was a vampire,” Kira whispered after a minute. “I turned around and took a picture, and then, when I lost my phone, I thought it was the vampire’s power that took it from me.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t know, it all happened so fast, and it was rainy. He had a black shiny hood over his head, and his face was white, I thought he was Death, that’s what Death looks like in Lucy’s and my picture Bible. When Arielle almost got dead I thought he cursed her, for seeing him, and now he’ll curse me, too.”

“You’re sure it was a man? Could it have been a woman?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have a sense of how tall he was?”

Kira was starting to cry. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

I pulled her to me. She stood stiffly in the circle of my arm, tears running down her face. When Lucy saw her sister was crying she rushed back over, her own sense of injury forgotten. She grabbed Kira’s hand and tried to pull her from me, shrieking at us to say what was wrong, what had happened.

“Oh, just go away,” Kira sobbed. “I want to go home, I want my mom, I want my
tata
, I want life to be like before he left us.”

The dogs began twining around her, licking her legs. Their mewling made her relax inside my embrace. She leaned against my breast, her chest heaving with her sobs. Lucy clung to my other arm, frightened at seeing her big sister so vulnerable.

After a time, when Kira’s tears had eased, I took the girls upstairs and filled the tub with lavender salts. Both sisters climbed in. When Mitch wanted to join them, I left Kira to deal with him. Fighting him would take her mind off her own fears.

From the shrieks and splashes I heard while I tidied the bedroom, it sounded as though Mitch had brought a sense of normality back to the girls. I fixed lunch on a tray so they could sit in bed like princesses, watching TV and eating peanut-butter sandwiches. Mitch, his black fur drenched, but smelling sweetly of lavender, bounded into bed with them.

As I mopped the bathroom floor and strained black hairs from the tub, I mulled over the skimpy information Kira had given me. No wonder the man in the black rain slicker looked like a vampire or death itself: he’d just murdered a man. It must have sent a shock through him to have that group of girls show up singing and dancing seconds after he’d stabbed Wuchnik.

Or had it? I went back to the question I’d been asking all along: had he chosen the cemetery, along with a vampire-style killing, because he knew the Carmilla girls would be there already?

But then, how had he known? Wuchnik was the blackmailer, the eavesdropper. I was assuming he was the person the Ashfords had sent out to Ruhetal to put a stop to Leydon’s work on behalf of her mentally incompetent client, but what was the connection between the Ashford family and the Carmilla club in the cemetery?

I called Petra over at the Malina Foundation: it was just possible that Trina Ashford—Leydon’s niece—belonged to one of the Malina book groups. Petra clicked through computer screens while I waited but came up empty.