Blacklist (23 page)

Maybe Geraldine Graham had seen my light and called the sheriff, in which case the deputies would make a brief survey and leave. But if fiddling with the lock had set off the alarm, or if Renee Bayard had summoned the law, then we were in trouble.

Benjamin Sadawi was shaking too hard to help me. I looked around the kitchen. He’d suffocate in the refrigerator. But he was a small, slim boy and the bread oven was big. I hustled him over to it.

“I’m not going to leave without you, unless I’m arrested and can’t help it. But you stay in this oven until you hear from me.”

He insisted on taking the book with him. I pulled the racks from their shelves, stacked them behind the refrigerator, and half-lifted, half-bent him into place. I took one of my work gloves and used it to keep the door open a crack, enough that he could breathe and hear, and then ran back to the outside door.

I was practically weeping with weariness, but I forced myself to work methodically. If the newcomers were outside the back door … I couldn’t let my mind wander toward unknown terrors. Keep your head in the game, Vic.

One pick in place, now the second. The third tumbler rolled back just as I heard footsteps moving on the uncarpeted floor toward the kitchen. I opened the back door, pushed in the lock to keep it from closing on me again, and stuffed my makeshift tools into the nearest drawer.

“Who’s there?” I shouted, pressing myself against the wall behind the swinging door.

Two uniformed deputies came in, holding flashlights so powerful I couldn’t make out their faces; I could just see that a third figure loomed behind them.

A man’s voice said sharply, “If it isn’t the Chicago dick. I thought we told you to stay the hell away from DuPage County.”

CHAPTER 27

Well, Howdy, Lieutenant

It was Lieutenant Schorr, the sheriff’s officer who’d been so aggressive Sunday night. Next to him, silent and ramrod stiff, stood Deputy Protheroe. “Lieutenant!” I smiled an exuberant greeting. “You know how it is with us inner-city kids-we get one whiff of country air and we long for more. It’s so clean and pure out here. Except when people drown remote from cars, trains and home, I mean.”

Protheroe spoke quickly, before Schorr could react. “Warshawski, you are definitely the bad penny in this Larchmont soap opera. How did you get into the house?”

“The kitchen door was open, so I came in. Is that why you’re here? The alarm get triggered?”

“Why we’re here is none of your business, but why you’re here is our business.” Schorr walked to the door to check that it was, indeed, open.

I pulled myself up onto the counter floating in the middle of the kitchen-not as easily as I would have done if I hadn’t been wall climbing, diving and the rest of it already this evening, but forcing Schorr to come between me and Benjamin’s oven if he wanted to see me. Now that he was holding his flashlight away from my eyes, I could see that the third member of the party was the lawyer’s dogsbody, Larry Yosano.

I gave Yosano a friendly hello before adding, “Lieutenant, Marcus Whitby’s family doesn’t share Sheriff Salvi’s easy optimism about their son’s death. They’ve hired me to investigate. I came out to look into the pond, which I did with interesting results.”

“So you admit to trespass,” Schorr said.

“We keep having problems with that verb, don’t we?” I sounded as chipper as a cheerleader with a home-team victory. “I agree that I was on this land. I assert that Ms. Geraldine Graham and her son Darraugh Graham, CEO of Continental United Group, asked me to come onto this land to see who was in this house. I submit that you, Lieutenant, dismissed Ms. Graham’s claims that she saw lights in the attic. I suggest that you thought she was demented and failed to investigate. I contend that I did not share your view. So tonight, when I finished raking through the pond, I decided to take one last look at the house. The back door was open, and I announce, without hesitation, that I took the opportunity to come inside.”

Schorr frowned heavily. He didn’t speak, not because he’d been wowed by my delightful banter-which I thought impressive, given how tired I was-but because I’d reminded him that I had friends in high places. Before he had to say or do anything that might cost him face, two young men barged through the swinging door. They were breathless with excitement.

“No one’s here now, Lieutenant, but someone’s definitely been living up in the attic. Lookee what we found.” The speaker held out the books that had been on the attic desk, with Benjamin’s Arab-English dictionary on top.

“One of the windows was open on the third floor,” the second deputy said. “We think he heard us coming and jumped down: you can get to the porch roof from the third floor and slide down the columns to the ground.”

“Did anyone run past you when you were coming in?” Stephanie Protheroe asked me.

I shook my head. “He must have left when he heard me arrive, because no one was in the attic when I got up there. And I didn’t see any open windows when I circled the house looking for a way in. I was just about to start exploring the basement when you guys showed up.”

“There any place to hide in the cellar?” Schorr demanded of Yosano.

The lawyer gave a shrug. “I’ve never explored the house, but, as far as I know, only the usual stuff is down there, furnaces, laundry, no secret cupboards or anything like that.”

“We’ll search just in case,” Schorr said, adding to the two young men, “Good work, you two. You start combing the grounds, see if this guy is hiding-these fields could conceal a lot of people. Arab, likely a terrorist on the run, he could have any kind of weapon, so you see him, don’t hesitate. Just shoot.”

The two young men saluted and departed, almost tripping over each other in their excitement. Puppies admitted to the hunt for the first time, so eager to get their fox they’d probably kill a unicorn if it crossed their trail.

Schorr shone his flashlight smartly in Protheroe’s face. She winced and turned her head away. “You go through the cellar just in case, Steph. These AlQaeda guys, they’re smart enough to make you think they’ve jumped out a window, when all the time they’re hiding in the basement. Yosano, you get the power turned on. We need to see what the hell we’re doing.”

When Yosano said it would have to wait until the start of normal business hours-Com Ed wouldn’t regard this as an emergency-the lieutenant slammed a hand against a stainless steel cabinet, and then swore as the hard metal bit his bone. “This fucking is an emergency, an Arab terrorist out here in New Solway. Get on it!”

Yosano kept his voice patient with an effort. “It will have to wait until morning, Lieutenant Schorr.”

Schorr got half a swearword out, but bit it off to run to the door and call out to his two young deputies. When he didn’t get a response, he turned back and shouted at Deputy Protheroe, who had found the stairwell leading to the basement.

“Before you go down there, call over to headquarters, see if they can send us out a generator, get something rigged up so we can see what we’re doing. I don’t want us shooting each other because we’re crashing around in the dark.”

So he wasn’t totally stupid, only giving a good imitation. I slid off the counter and moved toward the cellar door, still trying to keep attention away from Benjamin’s oven.

“Should we call Ms. Bayard first?” Stephanie Protheroe asked, her hand

still on the doorknob. “Some camera crew is going to be scanning our calls, you know, and they’ll get here. We might want to let her know we think there was a terrorist here before a TV outfit shows up trying to ask her questions.”

So they were here because Renee Bayard had decided on a preemptive strike. I wondered how this would affect Catherine’s relations with her grandmother.

The flashlights cast menacing shadows around the kitchen, turning Schorr’s heavy frown into a gargoyle grimace. “Yeah, I’d better do that. Any place to sit and have a private conversation in this mausoleum?” he added to Yosano.

“All the furniture was taken out when the previous owners had to leave,” the lawyer said.

“There are chairs and a desk in the attic,” I said. “Ms. Graham probably forgot she had discards up there when she sold the house.”

“You have a lot of slick answers, don’t you?” Schorr said. “How do you know they’re her things?”

“I don’t. Really, I suppose Arab terrorists could have stolen them from some of the houses around here and carried them up to the attic. We can’t be too careful about anything these days.” I opened the basement door. “Where the fuck you going?”

“You got your deputies searching the grounds and ordering generators; I thought I’d start on the cellar.”

“You stay right here. Don’t move from the kitchen until I get back from phoning. Yosano, you lock this back door so Princess Twinkle Toes here doesn’t go dancing off into the night before I have a chance to check on her felony warrants.”

So that was why he’d brought the lawyer: to unlock the doors for him. “I still don’t understand how a terrorist got in here without a key. The alarm has not been breached; despite what Ms. Warshawski is saying, we checked the house each time Mrs. Graham phoned in a complaint,” Yosano said, but he obediently did up the lock I’d struggled so hard to open.

His remark made Schorr decide he ought to search me to see if I had a key to Larchmont or, heaven forbid, had used picklocks to get in. Despite Protheroe’s presence, Schorr patted me down himself, a little more roughly than necessary. I thought of Benjamin’s cry of “You woman”-“You man,” I wanted to say “hands off,” but I stood very still.

When Schorr found my house and car keys in my day pack, he made a big show of comparing them to the house alarm key. He thought he was going to pocket them, but I took them from him.

Again, before her commanding officer could escalate hostilities, Deputy Protheroe intervened. “I’m going out to the car, sir, to order the emergency generator. Do you want to come with me to phone Ms. Bayard? It will probably be more comfortable in the car than the attic because we can run the heater.”

“Yeah, okay. Stay here with her, Yosano. I don’t have an extra deputy to keep an eye on this gal, and I don’t trust her.”

Yosano squirmed in embarrassment. “Really, Lieutenant. It’s not as though Ms. Warshawski has a criminal record. She’s working for the Graham family.”

“Or says she is,” Schorr snapped. “Every time something fishy has happened out here this week, this Chicago dickette has been in a front-row seat. I’d kinda like to know why.”

“Is it all right if I use the bathroom?” I asked in a meek little voice. “There’s one just off the pantry here and my cramps are starting to get the better of me. You don’t have a tampon, do you? Mine are in my car.”

Like many he-men, Schorr was disgusted by talk of real women’s real bodies-he was out of the kitchen before I finished speaking. I went into the bathroom, switched on my diver’s lamp and climbed up onto the toilet seat to undo the window locks. There was an extra bolt in the window for security, but that was to keep outsiders away: the key was on a hook next to the frame.

The bottom sash was stuck through years of disuse; flushing the toilet a couple of times covered the sound I made forcing it open. The alarm would definitely go off now, but since it rang in Lebold, Arnoff’s office, and they already had their dogsbody on the scene, I hoped they’d think the deputies had tripped it looking around on the upper floors. I took a quick look out: the window faced south, toward the road. The deputies were searching the north.

Back in the kitchen, Yosano was fiddling with a handheld, trying to play some game by the computer’s backlight. I didn’t know how long Benjamin

could keep quiet in that oven; I needed some strategy for getting the lawyer out of the kitchen.

“They interrupt your private life to bring you over here tonight?” I asked.

He nodded. “But I’m only on call one week a month. And usually we don’t have such dramatic crises: usually it’s just a client wanting to change a will, or being lonely in the night.”

“Did Mr. Taverner call you in out of loneliness?”

He continued fiddling with the keys; the computer binged every time he made a score. “Oh, yes. And like many of the old ones, he thought of me as a servant. Oh, they all think the lawyers are their servants, but being a Japanese-American, I’m like a gardener in their eyes. They need to pee, I’m supposed to help them with their bottles and bedpans.”

“Sounds horrible. Surely you could get a less demeaning job.”

He shrugged. “The money is incredible. And some of it’s interesting: we work for such powerful people, you’re sort of part of history sometimes. Like these papers that Taverner had, it’s been so long since Mr. Arnoff’s done dayto-day work with the clients, he probably wouldn’t know about them, but Taverner was a lonely old guy. He’d tap that locked drawer and say he knew people in New York who’d pay ten million bucks to get their hands on them.”

I thought of Benjamin in the oven, but I couldn’t miss this chance to ask Yosano what was in the papers.

“I never saw them.” The computer made a derisive sound to let him know he’d bombed. “But he used to say they’d make the Hollywood Ten look like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and it was a shame he was a man of honor who gave his word not to divulge them.”

“Didn’t you wish he’d show them to you?”

“Oh, sure,” Yosano said. “But we’re his executors, I knew I’d see them sooner or later. And then, you always wonder if it really is going to be such a big deal. It’s human, when you get that old, to hope you’ve done something so big the rest of us will never forget you, but a lot of the time it’s something no one cares about anymore.”

I was about to argue that someone cared, or Marcus Whitby wouldn’t have drowned outside the room we were standing in, when a gunshot ripped open the night.

CHAPTER 28

When You Need a Ride —

Steal a Car

When you hear a .45, you never think it was a backfire or a firecracker. Yosano and I froze, and then he ran through the swinging door to the front of the house.

As soon as the door swung shut, I opened the oven.

“Come with me. Don’t ask questions, and don’t speak,” I told Benjamin. He was giving off the sweet sickly sweat of fear, and he couldn’t stand, he’d been lying doubled up so long. I slung him over my shoulder, firemanstyle, and humped to the bathroom double time. He was clutching his book still, and it dug into my sore shoulder. He was fifteen or sixteen, but such a skinny kid it wasn’t as hard a ride as I’d feared.

Inside the bathroom, I set him down and worked on his legs. He was still shying away from my touch, but fear and cold had made him numb; he didn’t resist. As soon as he could stand, I turned off my headlamp, opened the window and looked out. We could hear the excited yelling from the front of the house, but we were clear here in the back.

“I’m going to give you a boost up to this window” I spoke in the flat, tongueless speech you learn in prison because it doesn’t carry far. “You slide through, you drop to the ground. You lie flat on your stomach and wait for me. Got it?”

I felt rather than saw him nod. I gave him a boost up to the sill and helped him wriggle his legs through. As he twisted, he dropped his book. He cried out.

I stuck up my hand and covered his mouth. “I’ll hand it to you. Get through and get down.”

When he seemed unwilling to leave without it, I pushed him. He clung briefly to the sill, and then fell. He didn’t cry out again, so I assumed he’d landed without breaking anything. I climbed up on the toilet seat, dropped his book through the opening and hoisted myself onto the sill. The stab of pain between my shoulders was so intense I had to hold back my own cry.

I sat for a few seconds, gathering my breath, then began the hard job of wriggling through the window-a grown woman’s hips are wider than a skinny adolescent’s. When a second shot reechoed, it startled me so that I landed in a heap almost on top of Benjamin. The fall knocked the wind out of me and I lay gagging for air, trying not to make any noise.

We were at the southeast corner of the mansion. We could hear excited shouts as the puppies and Schorr tried to figure out where their prey had fallen. They had shot at … a raccoon or a deer. They had not shot-notan ardent teenage girl running through the fields to protect her protege.

I wanted to dash to the back, what are you morons doing, you machodrunk fools, shooting at shadows and children? I grabbed the grass in front of me, tying myself to the ground here. If I joined the hunt, I’d leave the boy here where he would be found, arrested, if not shot. And Schorr was jumpy enough to arrest me or even shoot me if I showed my face.

“What they doing?” Benjamin cried in an undervoice.

“They shot at something. Probably a raccoon, an animal. As soon as they figure that out, they’ll be looking for me, so let’s move.”

“Animal? You think not-” he thought better of finishing the sentence. “Come on,” I said roughly. “We’re going. We are going to go straight across the lawn here. The house will keep the people in back from seeing us. When we get to that tall grass, we are going to go through it. You will stay right behind me, got it?”

He stumbled to his feet. We couldn’t go fast. He could barely walk, and certainly not run. Cold, hunger, confusion, far from home in a country

that wanted to put him in prison for being-what? If he was a terrorist, I’d deal with that down the road, but if he was just a kid in the wrong place at a time when fear was holding the horse’s reins in America, I needed to deal with that, too.

We were halfway across the lawn when two more squad cars squealed up the drive, lights flashing. I turned to Benjamin and pulled him smartly to the ground, lying flat next to him until the cars were at the house. Lifting my head, I watched the side of the house we were facing. They hadn’t found the open bathroom window yet: all the action was in the fields and gardens at the back.

“Let’s go. Hands and knees. You go forward, I’ll keep an eye out.”

The work gloves shielded my hands from the stickers growing in the untended lawn, but Benjamin didn’t have any protection. When I saw him unable to put his hands down, I stripped the gloves off and forced them onto his hands. “Move. It’s our only chance, while they’re doing what they’re doing.”

We crawled through the unmown grass to the untended field beyond. I was lightheaded with fatigue and hunger, my shoulders ached, I was scared. Only the snuffling from the boy in front of me, tears manfully suppressed, air sucked painfully in, kept me going.

The deputies had rigged up the searchlights while we were stumbling through shrubs. The sudden light arcing through the night sky behind us startled me. I tripped on a fallen branch and landed in rotting leaves. At least if they sent dogs after us they wouldn’t find us by our smell.

When we reached the ditch by the side of Coverdale Lane, I cautiously poked my head through the shrubbery to survey the road. A squad car blocked the intersection of Coverdale with Dirksen, where I had left my Mustang. I couldn’t see clearly at this distance, but they had probably found the car, might be waiting next to it for me.

I sank back down into the ditch, close to screaming with fatigue and frustration. We were trapped. I fought back panic. Benji whispered, “How we are going to do?”

The only possibility was to cross Coverdale and fight our way through the hedge to Anodyne Park on the far side, taking a chance that they

wouldn’t see us in the road. If I had the wings of a dove or the shovel snout of a mole. A mole. If that culvert I’d stumbled on yesterday came this far … Under cover of sirens and of a helicopter that had arrived on the scene, I explained to Benji as best I could what I was looking for. I would explore east, toward my car, he would crawl along the ditch to the west.

“Let it open up here, on this side of the road,” I begged the whimsical ruler of the universe. “Let me find it, before they find me.”

I crawled along slowly, patting the embankment, praying for it to give way. About fifty feet from where the squad car stood, Benji tapped my shoulder with a soft, timid hand. He had found the entrance.

I crawled back after him. The opening was a black hole on the road side of the ditch, not high enough for me to stand upright but just wide enough for us to move side by side. It smelled of mold and animal droppings, and it was as dark as the entrance to death. We couldn’t afford to show a light. I grabbed Benji’s left hand with my right. He didn’t try to withdraw; indeed, he clung to me, trembling, as we squelched along the muddy floor.

It should have been a quarter mile, getting to the hedge, going under Powell Road, coming up in Anodyne Park, but the tunnel seemed to stretch endlessly in front of us. What if we weren’t under Powell Road at all, but were shuffling into the Deep Tunnel? We could wander for hours until we collapsed and died of hunger and thirst. No one would find our bones for years, if they ever came on them at all. Morrell, Lotty, everyone I loved who cared about me, they would forget me. Already they were so far away that they didn’t exist.

My breath rasped dry against my tonsils. My back ached from walking in a stoop, red darts flashed across my eyes. And then we were suddenly breathing fresh air, smelling the juniper berries, scrambling uphill, standing upright on asphalt.

I shuddered in relief. We stood trembling for a few minutes, stretching sore muscles, listening for pursuit. All was blissfully quiet. Anodyne, the healing of pain. All we needed was a car, and we’d be home free.

I led Benji up the winding path toward the town houses, where cars were parked for the night in the drives that lay behind them. In this wealthy

enclave I didn’t expect to find an old car, the kind where I could break the steering column and pull out the ignition rod. But the fifth house we came to, luck favored us: someone had left their keys in a Jaguar XK-12. I’d always wanted to drive one of these. I opened the door for Benji.

“You are stealing this car?”

“Borrowing,” I grinned. “The owner will get it back tomorrow”