Critical Mass (29 page)

“Yeah, right.” I kept my gun pointed at the man on the floor.

Someone let the cops in. They pounded up the stairs, phones crackling, shouting questions. The woman who sold bar supplies was putting in her furious two cents, Peppy was barking. Mr. Contreras was shouting instructions to the cops. In another instant the room was filled with people in riot helmets and flak jackets. I backed away from the thug on the floor, grabbed Mitch’s leash and managed to haul him off the man’s chest.

For a moment all was confusion: guns, shouted questions, dogs, neighbors, the Soong baby’s howls. The police made me and the two thugs hand over our weapons and then demanded an accounting.

“We’re federal agents—” the second thug began.

“I live here,” I interrupted. “I just got home. My dog sensed an intruder and when the guy on the floor opened the door to shoot us, my dog jumped him and knocked him to the ground. They’re pretending to be federal agents in the hopes you won’t arrest them.”

“We shot because you were attacking—”

“Shut up!” I snapped. “You do not break into people’s homes and shoot them when they return home. Not unless you are drug dealers pretending to be Feds. If you are Feds, you produce credentials, and even then you’d damned well better have a warrant, and even then you don’t break in. You wait for the homeowner to return.”

“Okay,” the police sergeant said. “Let’s take this one at a time. Who is the homeowner?”

“She is,” Mr. Contreras said. “Like she just told you, she just got home—”

“Do you live here, sir?” the squad leader asked.

“On the ground floor, but her and me, we share the dogs, see, and when we got in from their last walk—”

A woman in the unit came over to Mr. Contreras and asked him to join her on my couch. “Let’s let the sarge sort this out, okay, sir?”

The sergeant decided to start with the intruders. “What were you doing here?”

The man who’d been on the floor had joined his partner over by my piano. I saw that they’d opened the back and had been searching in the strings and I felt my blood pressure start to rise.

“What were you looking for in my piano?” I said. “If you’ve damaged the strings, I don’t care if it’s Janet Napolitano or Pablo Escobar you’re working for, you are paying for every dime of repairs—”

“Ma’am,” the sergeant said, “I understand you’re angry, but let’s sit down and talk this through quietly.”

“I want to search the apartment first,” I said. “If they broke down the back door I need to call an emergency service. I also want to see if there’s anyone else lurking in here.”

The sergeant thought that was reasonable; one of his officers escorted me through my four rooms. I took Mitch with me; every time one of the thugs spoke, his hackles rose. I didn’t think Mr. Contreras could hold Mitch if the dog thought they needed another lesson in manners.

The goons had pulled my old trunk out of my hall walk-in closet. They’d tumbled music and papers onto the floor, including Gabriella’s hand-marked score of
Don Giovanni.
Three or four pages had been torn in their carelessness. I blinked back tears of fury and grief.

In my bedroom they had dismantled my dresser drawers, they’d searched the books on my bedside table. I glanced in the closet. They hadn’t stumbled on the safe behind my hanging shoe holder, that was one mercy.

In the kitchen they’d dumped ten days’ of recycling onto the floor.
I looked at the back door. All the locks were in place. They’d come in through the front, with some pretty sophisticated tools.

In the dining room, where I use the built-in china displays as bookshelves, they’d pulled off most of the books and left them open on the table. A number had fallen to the floor. I squatted next to the cupboard where I keep my most precious possession, the red wineglasses my mother brought with her when she fled Italy in 1941.

The glasses were safe; the rest of the wreckage I could deal with. I picked up the books and realized that my work papers were gone.

“All the papers I was working on at my dining room table are missing,” I said. “I can’t tell at a glance if they’ve taken anything else—the chaos is too horrible,” I told the officer.

The officer texted the information to her sergeant. We returned to the living room, where we found that the thugs had produced federal credentials.

The sergeant looked sourly at the two men. “These may be legitimate, but I’m going to call to verify them. You were in here without a warrant and without the homeowner’s knowledge.”

“We are conducting an investigation connected to our national security. This gives us certain warrantless rights.” This was the thug whom Mitch had knocked over. What a good dog.

“And among those rights is the right to shoot the homeowner on her return?” It took a major act of will, but I kept my tone conversational.

“We were acting on information and belief that you have documents that affect our national security.” That was Thug Two.

“So you broke into my home and ripped up my mother’s music?”

“We didn’t rip it up, we were looking for documents. It was a logical hiding place.”

“And then you stole my work papers—”

“We confiscated them,” Thug Two snapped. He had a nice mop of wavy brown hair that he clearly spent a lot of time tending.

“Ooh, good one, Curly, confiscation. When I was with the public defender, a lot of my clients had confiscated cameras, jewelry and so on. I wish I’d known that we could have been pleading national security. ‘Your Honor, we held the plaintiff up at gunpoint and confiscated his belongings because we believe his wallet affected national security.’ I still have colleagues in the PD’s—”

“That’s enough,” the sergeant said. “I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong here, but even if you two are federal agents, firing a gun in a populated apartment building is a recipe for a disaster. There are babies in this building. There are old people.”

He got a squawk on his cell phone, exchanged a few words, turned to me. “Looks like they are really federal agents, not scam artists, Ms. Warshawski. Beats me why they don’t have a warrant, but the local federal magistrate ordered us to stand down.”

He looked at the thugs, or Homeland Security agents as they liked to be called. “You going to give the lady a receipt for those papers?”

“When it’s an issue of national security with a potential tie to terrorism, we don’t have to have a warrant or give a receipt,” Mitch’s agent said. Moe, for short.

“I’ll include that in my report,” the sergeant said. “Ma’am, could you give me a list of what papers they’ve taken? If they’re valuable, and they show up somewhere, at an auction or something, we can produce a police report stating they were taken from you during a home invasion.”

“It’s not a home invasion,” Curly said. “We had—”

“Yeah, I know, I know,” the sergeant said. “Do you want to tell me how you got access to the lady’s apartment? I looked at the locks. You’d need safecracker tools, not just street-grade picklocks.”

“Why are you so bent on obstructing our investigation?” Moe asked. “You verified our IDs, you know we have good reason to be here—”

“That’s what I don’t know,” the sergeant said. “I don’t know why you think this lady’s ma’s music needed tearing apart. I know that this lady’s
father trained my dad when my old man joined the force, and that Mrs. Warshawski, her ma, was quite a singer, according to my old man. There wasn’t a better officer in Chicago than Tony Warshawski, ask anyone from the old days. When I was a boy, my dad always quoted him to me: Tony used to say the only end that justifies the means is laziness. A lazy cop is as bad as a bent cop, that’s what Tony Warshawski taught my dad, and I’m betting he taught this lady here the same. Am I right?”

I sat up straighter, blinking back tears. “Yes, Sergeant.” I’d cheated once on a social studies quiz. When Tony found out, he got me out of bed an hour early every day for a month to run errands for a housebound woman on our street.
Your mother and I have been letting you get lazy. You run these errands for Mrs. Poilevsky and you’ll work the lazy out of your system. Don’t let me hear of you cheating a second time
.

The sergeant gathered up his unit, bent to scratch Mitch under his chin, and took me out into the hall. “They’re going to take you down to question you. I’m leaving your gun with your downstairs neighbor. I don’t want you making your problems worse by shooting one of those federales, however tempting it seems.”

He handed me his card: Anton Javitz, Town Hall Station. “You need anything, you give me a call, okay?”

He was gone before I could do more than stammer out my thanks.

26

MIDNIGHT RIDE

I
SPENT SEVERAL HOURS
talking to Curly and Moe, while a federal magistrate hovered nearby. As they were carting me off, Mr. Contreras promised to call my lawyer. Partway through the interrogation Deb Steppe, one of my lawyer’s associates, showed up.

It was good that I had Deb with me, because when I learned that the federal agents had been in my office before they came to my home and that they’d taken the hard drive from my big computer, the room turned red in front of my eyes. Deb had a hand on my shoulder as I started to my feet.

Curly warned me for a second time that I could have the charge of assaulting a federal agent added to anything else they chose to charge me with. I whispered to Deb for a few minutes.

She turned to the agents. “You apparently watched Ms. Warshawski’s office until she finished work for the day at five-forty-five. You then entered, using advanced electronic technology. We haven’t had time to inspect her office, but if it resembles the condition of her home, you acted without restraint in searching for material that you refuse to identify.”

Curly started to repeat his worn-out slogan about national security, but Deb held up an authoritative hand. “You took Ms. Warshawski’s hard drives; it would be easy to pretend you cared about national security, but you used that as a cover for theft. Ms. Warshawski is well
known in Chicago. If she’s working on a case that overlaps a federal investigation, it would have been simpler for you to come to her with a warrant and an explanation. What were you looking for?”

It was their turn for a sidebar, this time with the assistant federal magistrate catching weekend duty. Deb and I couldn’t hear the conversation, but the magistrate looked startled, then angry. She said a few sharp words to the agents, then called Deb and me back to the conference table.

“Ms. Warshawski, you came in possession of some documents yesterday in Palfry, Illinois, that these agents are anxious to retrieve. If you can produce those documents, the agents will return your computers and proceed with their investigation.”

I could feel my eyes growing large. “My investigation has nothing to do with terrorism. It’s a sordid story of drug users and dealers.”

I gave a précis of Judy Binder’s story. “I went back to the meth house yesterday, hoping there might be something that would tell me why she was shot. I found an abandoned dresser with papers glued to a drawer; I was bringing them to a private forensics lab to see if they could restore any of the text. Someone broke into my car in the motel parking lot at four this morning and stole the drawer and the documents. The local sheriff’s police came out; you can talk to them to see if they’ve turned up any leads.”

“Pretty convenient,” Moe sneered. “It’s a great story.”

I ignored him and spoke to the magistrate. “If the agents had any inkling that the meth pit held secrets about terrorism, they had a week to go down there and excavate. Since they broke into both my office and my home, I assume they are the same guys who broke into my car.”

The prosecutor asked Moe and Curly what they knew about the theft from my car.

“Nothing. It’s a great story, but she had all day to dispose of the papers,” Curly said. “Of course we went to the Cheviot labs, but they claimed the perp—”

“The what?” Deb Steppe interrupted.

“The suspect,” Curly corrected sulkily.

“How about, ‘the detective’?” Deb said.

“How about, ‘Ms. Warshawski,’” the magistrate said dryly. “It’s midnight. Let’s adjourn this episode of ‘he said, she said.’ If the lab doesn’t have the documents, and Ms. Warshawski doesn’t have them, they are most likely in the possession of whoever took them from her car. If she scanned them into her computer, it should be easy to inspect the hard drives and sort out what’s there. I’ll talk to Judge Frieders, but I’m sure he’ll set a time limit on how long you can keep the drives.”

“Your agents have walked away with my client’s entire work life. They are destroying her livelihood for a fishing expedition,” Deb said sharply. “I’ll be in front of Judge Frieders first thing tomorrow morning myself to demand the return of the hard drives and the documents that they admit taking from Ms. Warshawski’s home.”

“We need the machine for at least a week,” the agents protested.

“Your computer division must be pretty pathetic if you can’t copy my drives and give them back to me right now,” I said. “Not that I want my confidential client information in your grubby—”

“Vic!” Deb rapped out warningly. “I thought we agreed that I would do the talking.”

The magistrate shut her eyes and rubbed a circle in the middle of her forehead. She was tired and she wanted this case to go away.

“I’ll talk to Judge Frieders, but Ms. Warshawski has a point: if you want to inspect the drives, just copy them.”

Deb hustled me out of the magistrate’s office before Moe or Curly actually charged me. Just as well: I was feeling pretty Mitch-like over the theft of the drives from my big office computer. I still had my laptop. At least, I hoped it was still in the briefcase I’d dropped on my way up the stairs tonight, but it couldn’t hold all my detailed reports and client data.

Deb waited with me while I flagged a cab. Time was starting to
blur. Was it day or night, was I in Palfry or Chicago, had Homeland Security broken into my car at the motel early this morning, or had it been random punks, as the sheriff’s deputy wanted to believe?