Breakdown (4 page)

What startled me was his peaceful expression. It seemed as though such a terrible murder should have left a trace on his face—shock, fury, some emotion. In the Middle Ages, people believed a dead person’s eyes would hold the image of his killer, and maybe I’d been expecting something like that. This man looked as though he’d lain down for a nap.

I put my hand on his neck again, wondering if I’d been mistaken before. His damp skin was already colder, stiffer than it had been when I’d found him an hour earlier.

“We know he’s dead,” one of the patrol officers said.

Blood loss had turned his skin a waxy yellow, so that he seemed more like a mannequin than a dead person. Even the blood that had leaked from under his windbreaker and pooled onto the floor didn’t look real.

“He couldn’t just have lain down there for someone to murder,” I said. “But that’s what it looks like. He must have been alive when the spike went into him for so much blood to have spilled, but—was he drugged? Did someone carry him here?”

“Yeah, when we need your guidance on how to run the investigation or the autopsy, we’ll get back to you,” Sergeant Anstey said. “Meanwhile, I think it’s time you answered a few questions about what you were really doing in here. Don’t tell me you knew nothing about this poor twerp.”

I was silent.

“Well?” he demanded.

“I can’t speak,” I said. “You don’t want to hear that I knew nothing about this poor twerp, but that’s all I can tell you about him.”

The sergeant told his team to secure the crime scene for the evidence techs. He took me back to the station for a heart-to-heart. While I huddled, shivering and sneezing—and eyeing my mud-stained evening dress in dismay—someone phoned with the victim’s identity. Miles Wuchnik, he’d been when he was alive. And, like me, an investigator. Anstey couldn’t believe I didn’t know him.

“Sergeant, there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of investigators in Illinois. Most are not detectives—they just do research for law firms or work in security.”

Anstey ignored that answer and started to imagine a scenario where Wuchnik had been muscling in on one of my clients and I’d murdered him to get him out of the way.

I rolled my eyes. “First you wanted us to be drug dealers who’d fallen out, or lovers having a quarrel. Now, at least, you’re respecting my professional status, but your theory is still a million miles from reality.”

I sneezed again. “You’ve got your air-conditioning turned on too high. Save the city a dime, save the planet, turn it down. I’m freezing. If that’s the best you can do, I’m out of here.”

He didn’t try to stop me; he probably didn’t even really suspect me. He just was hoping the murder would solve itself for him, and I was handy.

No one offered me a ride back to my car, but they didn’t tail me, either, so I walked straight to the Dudek apartment.

3.

BEDTIME STORIES

W
HEN
I
RANG THE BELL AT THE
D
UDEK PLACE,
P
ETRA CAME
down to let me in. I’d called her right after I’d sent the girls over the cemetery wall, warning her of the imminent arrival of the gang of seven, and telling her not to let them leave unless she inspected their escort.

“Vic! Thank God you’re here. Tyler is the only one who showed up, besides Kira, I mean. What happened to the others? Kira said she didn’t care if the rest all ended up in jail, but where did they go?”

“I don’t know.” My eyes widened in dismay. “Have you texted them?”

“They’re not answering. Anyway, I’m not sure who all was there—Arielle Zitter, I know, and if she was there, Nia was with her, but I don’t know the names of the other three. Tyler, all she does is cry and say how her dad will beat her up, and then Kira says, well, at least you’ve got a dad, and they start in on each other.”

I shut my eyes for a moment, hoping that when I opened them I’d be home in bed, waking up from a dream. Unfortunately, when I looked around, I was still in the ill-lit foyer, my eyeballs aching and scratchy. My seven dwarfs: Achy, Scratchy, Cranky, Crabby, Grim, Truculent, and Bellicose.

“I was trying to spare them being picked up on a curfew violation, not to mention giving them a chance to talk to their folks about this escapade first,” I explained as I followed my cousin up the stairs. “Are those girls good enough friends that they would all stay together? That would keep them safe on the street, even if the police nail them.”

The door to an apartment at the top of the stairs opened. A man stuck his head out and hissed at us to keep it down, people were trying to sleep. I felt jealous of anyone with the luxury of trying to sleep right now, but I smiled contritely and tiptoed behind Petra to the end of the hall, where she pushed open the door to the Dudek apartment.

A little girl in a yellow-flowered nightgown was standing next to a narrow couch, crying. I supposed that was Lucy, whose call to Petra had set my night in motion. Next to Lucy, not looking at her sister—or, indeed, at anyone—was Kira Dudek, the girl with the long, fair hair I’d seen at the cemetery.

The new initiate, Tyler, sat across the room at a small table that seemed to double as a desk—it held books and a computer as well as the remains of dinner. Both girls had changed from their wet clothes into dry shorts and T-shirts. Tyler looked at the open door with some alarm, but Kira didn’t even move her head when Petra and I came in.

The couch, the table, and four laminate chairs pretty well filled the room, although the couch faced a wall unit holding a modest television and four or five shelves of books. An icon to the Virgin above the couch and a crucifix on the wall behind the table made up the Dudek family’s art collection.

It was a small room, too small for the tension between the girls. Petra ignored the older two and made a beeline for Lucy, who grabbed my cousin’s leg. With that anchor, she felt safe enough to stop crying and stare at me to see what new drama I was bringing to the night.

I pulled a chair away from the table and placed it halfway between Tyler and Kira. “Okay, my sisters: it’s time you started talking. What was going on tonight?”

“Nothing,” Kira muttered.

“Only it was ‘nothing’ in the middle of a graveyard during a thunderstorm. This was an initiation into the cult of Carmilla—”

“The cult of Carmilla?” Petra exclaimed. “What were you guys doing? That is not part of our book club.”

“It’s something we do on our own. Or at least something the creeps at Vina Fields do on their own,” Kira said.

“We’re not creeps,” Tyler said. “It’s not my fault if my folks send me to school there.”

Vina Fields was one of those private academies where diplomats’ and entertainers’ children mingled with the heirs to Chicago’s great fortunes. Parents shelled out the equivalent of the price of a new home to give their children an early leg up in the race of life.

“You’re not even part of our book club, but you came barging in like you owned it!” Kira said.

“That’s not fair. I’d come if my dad would let me, but he won’t, it’s only ’cause he’s out of town this weekend that I even got permission to spend the night at Arielle’s,” Tyler said hotly.

“Only, really, you came to Kira’s,” I said.

Tyler started picking at the skin around her cuticles. For the first time, I noticed how raw her fingertips were.

“Yes, she came here with all the big girls and then Kira left, even though she’s supposed to
mind
me, and I was all alone and I was scared. And I’m going to tell Mama!” Lucy’s indignant treble startled all of us, she’d been standing so quietly.

“Whoa, there, missy. Two in the morning and you’re in the living room? That’s what I’m going to tell your mama, unless you hop like a bunny back into that bed of yours!” Petra said firmly.

Lucy eyed my cousin, trying to gauge whether she meant it. Petra scooped her up and carried her from the room. I guess those five younger sisters had given her plenty of experience. We heard water running in the bathroom, Petra’s bright chatter, a giggle from Lucy. After another moment, my cousin rejoined us.

“She was asleep before I left the room. Too much for a little one in one night.”

“Too much for all of us in one night,” I agreed. “But it’s high time I started hearing some truth. Fast, before Kira’s mother gets home. Let’s start with the simple stuff—names and phone numbers of the girls who were there tonight.”

Kira and Tyler exchanged glances and shrugged. I looked at my cousin. “We know Arielle and Nia. We have Tyler and Kira. Who were the other three?”

“Lucy told me Beata Mizwa was here. She’s one of our Malina girls, like Kira here,” Petra said.

“So Tyler and the others aren’t part of Malina?” I asked.

“They’re from Vina Fields. I told you last winter, Vic: my boss started this experimental program, pairing girls from Malina with Vina Fields. The VF girls get community-service points for participating, and the theory is they’ll be kind of like big sisters to the Malina girls.”

“What, patronize them, make them go to cemeteries? Sounds very sisterly!”

Petra made an impatient gesture, but Kira was startled into a spurt of laughter.

“Even though school’s not in session, your book group is still going strong?” I asked.

“The book clubs meet year-round so that kids who aren’t reading at grade level can use the summer to play catch-up,” Petra explained.

“Is it working?”

“It is for my groups, because we’re reading
Carmilla
,” my cousin said
.
“Kids just gulp these books down! I can’t believe you never heard of them.”

“I spend too much time reading about the vampires in our financial institutions,” I said. “That’s all the excitement I can handle. Let’s get this business here sorted out. You girls need to tell me what was going on in the cemetery tonight. Tyler, what happened when you were in the middle of that circle with Arielle?”

Tyler stared at me blankly. “Nothing.”

“You said you hated them and their stupid club and you didn’t care what they said about you. What—they’ll put it out on Facebook that you’re a coward? Is that what worries you?”

“Maybe.” Tyler began picking at her cuticles again.

“You said this initiation into Carmilla isn’t part of your book group,” I said to my cousin. “Do you know what it could be, or what reprisals the girls wield against people who squeal?”

Petra’s mobile face displayed a pantomime of ignorance. “There are clubs, I know that much, you write in and get a charter or something. When my friends and I got hooked on the books, only the first two or three had been published. The clubs and things came later.”

“So is Carmilla a vampire?” I was thinking of the cry—Tyler’s cry?—that she’d seen a vampire.

“Good grief, no. She’s a shape-shifter—the Raven! Vic, I’m embarrassed that my own cousin is so illiterate!”

“They were initiating Tyler,” I persisted. “Everyone warned her it would hurt, but she wanted to go through with it anyway. Were they imitating a raven? Did Arielle peck your eyeballs?”

Tyler giggled nervously, but Kira said, “No. Arielle and Nia, they stick—”

“You can’t say, we swore an oath not to tell!” Tyler exclaimed.

“That was just Arielle and Nia, and they didn’t even come back here tonight. You Vina Fields girls, you make me sick, acting like you want to be friends with Beata and me, but really, you only come here because you know my mom works nights, so you can sneak out and not have any grown-ups listen in.
You’re
not even in our book group. I never even saw you before tonight, so don’t go telling me what to say or not say in my own home!”

“Don’t blame me!” Tyler replied. “They told me you liked to hold the meetings here on account of you have to babysit your little sister.”

“No one’s going to be meeting here again, so it doesn’t matter,” I said, “but, just out of curiosity, Kira, why did you take part in this group?”

“In case it’s true,” Kira whispered. “We thought, at least Arielle had this idea, maybe we could become shape-shifters, you know, like Giralda in the book. She learns to be a raven, and, well, I know it’s a sin, calling up magic spirits, but I thought if I could turn into a raven, I could fly to Tarnow, that’s where my
tata
—my dad, he left us, I thought—”

She turned a muddy pink and stopped talking.

“I think it would be good if you told me about how Arielle and Nia stick you,” I said. “I won’t be angry, but I need to understand.”

“Arielle and Nia, they stuck each other in the palm with these big sewing needles,” she whispered, speaking so fast I could barely understand her. “Then they licked each other’s blood, and then they stuck me and the others and we all kissed each other’s hands.”

“Oh, gross! Why didn’t you guys talk to me?” Petra’s mouth twisted in disgust. “I could have told you there’s nothing like that in any of the books. Vic, you have to believe I never talked about trying to turn into a vampire or a shape-shifter. I mean, everyone knows about Dracula and vampires, but we never talked about licking each other’s blood.”

I smiled faintly. “The power of the imagination. You should be proud you could unleash it.” I turned back to Kira. “Is that what happened the time Lucy saw you? Is that why you went out to the cemetery this time?”

Kira nodded. “Arielle and Nia, they couldn’t come last month, but the full moon before that, back in May, Lucy heard us. Jessie kind of screamed when she got stuck, so Lucy came out just when they were sticking me, and she screeched her head off. Arielle and Jessie and them took off. And then Lucy told my mom next morning at breakfast. I said some of my friends came over for a study group and we were practicing first aid and Lucy didn’t understand what she was seeing. But tonight, for Tyler, Arielle and Nia decided we’d better go outside, in case Lucy saw us again.”

“Everyone met up here?” I asked. “Arielle and Nia and the others?”

Kira nodded. “I told them to be quiet, but I guess Lucy woke up and saw us leave. She knew Petra’s number because I wrote it on the refrigerator for Mom, so she called Petra.”