Breakdown (40 page)

“I don’t want to cause any more panic than the parents in your program already feel, but they need to know there’s a possibility the vampire killer may attack other kids in the group. He may worry that they have his face on their phone screens.”

The doorbell rang as she was hesitating—she was afraid calls like that would further jeopardize her job.

I assumed it would be Gabe Eycks at the door with a bodyguard for the girls, but it turned out to be Terry Finchley from Area Six. I buzzed him in and told my cousin that I would bring the matter up with the police.

While Finchley climbed the stairs, I dashed to the bedroom to tell Kira and Lucy they needed to stay there until I came for them. However far beyond corruption the Finch was, if he knew one of the girls he was trying to trace was with me, he’d jump on her—and me—with both feet.

Peppy remained in bed with the girls, soulfully looking at their crusts of bread. Mitch felt that a knock on my apartment door was his call to action, but I forced him to stay in the bedroom—I didn’t think he’d add anything to a conversation with the police.

“Detective!” I opened my front door with a flourish.

Elizabeth Milkova followed Finchley into my living room, her white shirt limp with sweat under her bulletproof vest. Finchley, as always, looked freshly cleaned and pressed, but his mouth was set in a hard line.

“Victoria Iphigenia—did your mother name you that so the rest of us would always know how ignorant we are around you?”

My smile turned brittle: jokes that mention my mother rattle me. I needed to be careful not to let Finchley’s angry ribbing cloud my judgment. “What is making you feel especially ignorant today, Lieutenant?”

“Bodies in my jurisdiction that no one tells me about.” He sat on the arm of my couch, right leg dangling. Milkova stood next to him with parade-ground stiffness, hands clasped behind her back.

I gestured toward a chair, but she shook her head. I looked at Finchley. “Unless it’s a job requirement that your underlings stand in your presence, please command your officer to sit. She’s making me so uncomfortable that I doubt I can focus on your questions.”

The frown lines in Finchley’s face deepened, but he said, “Take a pew, Liz. And you, V.I., tell me about Xavier Jurgens.”

“The techs were saying that all the evidence pointed to Jurgens having committed suicide. You don’t agree?”

“That was before we looked at the vodka bottle: it had been wiped clean of prints. That made us ask Vishnikov to do a complete autopsy: Jurgens’s hands had been bound before he passed out. It’s looking like someone force-fed him a bottle of pill-laden booze, then untied him. So talk to me about Salanter’s granddaughter and the hospital orderly.”

“What—the FBI isn’t sharing?”

“Oh, the feds, they never share with us CPD lowlifes. But if you’d called me yesterday to report Jurgens’s death, I might have had a crack at questioning Jana Shatka.”

“What happened to her?” My mouth was unpleasantly dry: I’d been assuming Shatka had run away, but maybe the death-dealing vampire had reached her first.

“She was on the five-twenty-five to Warsaw last night. She landed in Kiev at six-thirty this morning, Chicago time. Who knows what time it is there.”

“She’s from Lithuania,” I said. “Is she moving to Ukraine?”

“I don’t care where she goes in Foreignland, but for what it’s worth, the consulate told me Shatka’s mother moved to Kiev last month. They said anti-Russian feeling is running high in the Baltic states.”

“Can you extradite her?”

Finchley’s mouth was a thin bitter line. “No treaty with Ukraine. That’s why the Ukrainian mob sits over there, happily hacking into our bank accounts. Why in God’s name couldn’t you call me yesterday when you found Jurgens?”

I felt my eyes turn hot. “I am thoroughly sick of every cop in the six-county area blaming me for their problems.
I
found Jurgens,
I
saved Arielle Zitter’s life,
I
got Leydon Ashford to the hospital after she was pushed off the Rockefeller Chapel balcony. I did all this even though I’m a one-woman shop and you have a team of thirteen thousand. Go yell at the evidence techs who went over Jurgens’s Camaro. Scream at the patrol team that responded to my 911 call, but get off my back!”

Finchley frowned at me for a moment, then gave a reluctant nod. “Point taken. Tell me everything you learned from Shatka. I know you talked to her—Burbank let me interview the neighbors.”

I told him everything I knew, everything except the aerograms I’d dropped off at the university. I couldn’t see the point of adding to Terry’s workload by sending him after the translator—for all I knew, those were letters from Shatka’s mother, telling her the cabbage crop had failed and she’d better stay on in Chicago, collecting disability checks. I also didn’t tell him about finding the Crawford, Mead phone number on Shatka’s landline—he could discover that for himself, after all.

“How’d you get involved with Shatka, anyway?” Finchley said.

“My friend Leydon Ashford. She was a patient at Ruhetal, where Xavier Jurgens worked. Jurgens took Miles Wuchnik into the locked ward, and Leydon was convinced Wuchnik was there, spying on her. Which may not have been a paranoid delusion. Someone at Ruhetal called the family to report that Leydon was stirring up the inmates.

“Sewall Ashford and his mother sent a minion out to the hospital to stop Leydon. They didn’t tell the therapists they were intervening, or interfering, whichever it looks like to you, so the therapists don’t know who the family sent. You could talk to Vernon Mulliner, the head of security at the hospital. Or maybe Leydon’s mom, or her brother, Sewall, will be more forthcoming with you than they are with me.”

“Sewall Ashford? Oh, great, Warshawski. You couldn’t have a connection to someone a little more accessible, could you?”

Meaning someone who would respond to police threats. “I wish! I’ve been banging my head against inaccessible people all week. Dick Yarborough, Eloise Napier and Louis Ormond at Crawford, Mead. Harold Weekes and Wade Lawlor at Global. Chaim Salanter. Maybe you can come up with a more subtle approach.”

Finchley gave a sharkish grin. “Anything I do would be more subtle than you, Warshawski. What else about Shatka?”

“If you look at Jana Shatka and Xavier Jurgens, she was the strong-minded member of the couple. Whatever Jurgens knew, if Shatka thought it was valuable, she bullied it out of him. Someone paid Jurgens a bundle, and I’m betting Shatka knew who that was. If you pull her phone records, you should be able to find who she talked to without needing to extradite her or anything.”

“Pull her phone records!” Terry snarled. “You’re like all the juries in Cook County, you think we have the time and resources to gather evidence on every case the way they do in
CSI.
We searched the premises, but there wasn’t a piece of paper in the place. She was smart.”

“She was scared: her lover had been murdered. And she was pretty sure she knew who did it, pretty sure it was the same person who killed Miles Wuchnik two weeks ago.”

“You can’t know that,” Finchley objected.

“Please, Finch—both of them at the same cemetery? Have you interviewed Jurgens’s coworkers at Ruhetal? Do they know where he got the money for the car?”

Finchley shook his head. “He just showed up with it one day, bragging about it. Perhaps what his girlfriend told you is right. Maybe the Camaro has nothing to do with his death—maybe he bought it with money he saved skipping lunch. It was how my grandfather bought his first Continental, after all.”

I bowed my head briefly, acknowledging his grandfather’s frugality. “Have you talked to the kids in Arielle Zitter’s book club?”

Finchley stared at me. “Why should I do that?”

“The feds really have kept you in the dark.” I told him about the text message Arielle had received. “Arielle wants to uncover Chaim Salanter’s history, which somehow plays a role in this story. For all I know, the kid hired Wuchnik to investigate her grandfather, and Salanter killed him for his pains.”

“Yeah, I can see my watch commander’s face when I tell him that cute theory. We don’t interrogate people in Salanter’s income bracket, let alone their granddaughter or her friends. Not unless we’ve found their DNA smeared an inch thick on a piece of rebar. Which, before you ask, was free of any evidence except Wuchnik’s blood. And skin tissue and so on.”

“Terry, the kids saw something, or the killer thinks they saw something. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have targeted Arielle, using a cell phone from one of the girls in her group. I heard that Sophy Durango’s daughter is leaving the country today or tomorrow, but—”

“How did you hear that?” Finchley demanded.

“By listening to what people tell me,” I snapped. “I am an investigator, Terry, and every now and then I stumble on a fact. I can’t track down every girl who was in that cemetery two weeks ago, or make their parents talk to me, but you can. And you can get a warrant allowing you to look at the pix on their cell phones, to see if one of them got a good shot of the killer. And you can warn the parents to keep their kids close to home until we get this maniac. We owe it to these children.”

“I don’t need you to tell me how to do my job,” Finchley said.

“You know you would’ve done this two weeks ago if you hadn’t gotten that directive to minimize your investigation into Wuchnik’s murder. I’ve been spinning in circles, trying to follow up on Wuchnik’s sister, his missing electronics, and these girls. I don’t think they were involved in killing him, but I do believe someone went to a lot of trouble to get Wuchnik and them to the same place at the same time. You have the resources to find what was on their phones—including any spyware Wuchnik might have uploaded.”

Finchley glared at me, but he was a good cop, and he knew I was right. “Liz, make a note. Make it a priority when we’re back in the car.”

Officer Milkova nodded stiffly and pulled a pad from a pocket beneath her vest. Finchley got to his feet; Milkova rose as if on remote-controlled marionette strings.

“If you think of anything, or if you find another corpse, you call me, Warshawski,” Finchley said. “I don’t care if it’s two in the morning and the body is on Mars. If you find it I want to know about it.”

“Copy that, Lieutenant. Officer Milkova, a glass of water before you leave? It’s a miserable hot day out there.”

She flushed but spoke her first words of the afternoon. “No, thank you, Ms. Warshawski. We’ve got water in the car.”

I followed them down the stairs to make sure they really left the building. As I climbed back to the third floor, I felt a grudging respect for Jana Shatka. Maybe Terry would have gotten something from her if he’d been able to interrogate her with the might of the law behind him, but I didn’t think so. Instead, she’d be dead, because whoever killed Jurgens and Wuchnik would think she’d ratted him—her?—out to the cops.

I went back into my apartment. “Prosper in Kiev, Ms. Shatka. Stay away from Ukrainian mobsters; they’re easily as ruthless, or more so, than their American counterparts.”

I parodied a toast with my coffee cup, but saying the words aloud made me think again that the case might revolve around drugs. I should have suggested that to Finchley. Perhaps Shatka had a connection to a Ukrainian mob, or perhaps she was tied to a South American cartel.

That flight of fancy didn’t take into account a possible connection to Salanter, though. Nor had Shatka seemed much like a mobster in our two encounters. She had seemed like what she was: a two-bit con artist milking Social Security for a disability check, but smart enough to run from murder.

It was hard to believe Chaim Salanter had ever given in to blackmail. I could see those remote eyes looking unflinchingly on murder if he thought Wuchnik and Jurgens were big enough threats. But these had been strenuous murders, or at least Wuchnik’s had been. Salanter would have required help to get Wuchnik’s body onto a slab, and I couldn’t picture him leaving himself vulnerable to further blackmail by letting Gabe Eycks in on his secrets. And would he have put his own granddaughter in the trunk of a car? Despite what Dean Knaub had said earlier, about the impenetrability of the human heart, I didn’t believe it.

I went to my bedroom to tell the Dudek girls they could come out. They’d used the time to dress the dogs again, putting a straw hat and scarf on Peppy and one of my silk blouses on Mitch. They’d also painted his toenails red. He looked at me, and then dropped to his belly in mortification. I was about to protest their raiding of my wardrobe, but Mitch’s face was too much for me. I was laughing so hard my sides hurt when Gabe Eycks showed up with his bodyguard.

Eycks’s years with Arielle had given him a good sense of what kids respond to: the guard, Teodoro (
everyone calls me Teddy)
Martinez, was young, peppy, nice-looking without being in love with himself. Mr. Contreras, who came out to inspect him when the doorbell rang, had a rare moment of bonding with another man. I didn’t know if that should be a warning sign, since he’s bristled at every guy I’ve ever dated.

I quietly searched my databases for Teodoro while Kira and Lucy conferred in Polish. By the time I’d rejoined the group, confident that Teodoro was the guard he claimed to be, without any noticeable criminal record, the girls had apparently decided he was a status symbol; they would love showing him off in their neighborhood. They got into his Jeep, after some snivelly farewells to Peppy and Mitch.

When the Jeep was out of sight, Mitch pawed at me to undress him. “I don’t know, boy. If putting clothes and makeup on you calms you down, maybe we should keep you gussied up.”

“Come on, doll,” Mr. Contreras began. “Oh, you’re teasing. I was glad to have those girls here, they livened up the place, but you take that dress off Mitch. I’m going down to watch the last race at Arlington.”

I got Mitch out of my flowered blouse without tearing more than one armpit seam and losing a button. And still had time to drop in on Nia Durango before my six-thirty appointment with Dick.

40.

LAWYER FEES: IMPRESSIVE!