Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  He deposited me at Cassie’s place. She had me strip and climb into a sunken tub, a kind of pool in a room farther back under the hill than I’d been before. It was filled with an herbal rinse that stung my flayed skin but then began to soothe it. I drifted off to sleep again, but when she shook my shoulders I managed to wake enough to hoist myself out, butt on steps, slithering up onto the edge, into a big towel, and then half-walking, half-crawling to a bed. Drinking something hot, nasty tasting. My last conscious image was of Bear, anxiously licking my face.

  52

  Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

  Murray was lying between life and death at the University of Chicago hospital. Lotty had sent me text after text. Mr. Contreras had phoned a dozen times, and there were messages as well from Sergeant Pizzello. Cassie didn’t have Wi-Fi or cell service. I saw the messages only after I was in the Mustang on my way east.

  After a night and a day of Cassie’s unguents and potions, I was not healed but I was well enough to leave, and everyone agreed it was high time I was gone.

  Franklin Alsop put it baldly: “Warshawski, I believe you mean nothing but good, but your good creates burnt offerings in the world. I know you came down here hoping to sort out Lydia’s and Coop’s problems, but you brought ravening hyenas with you. And I’m not sure what you found out, except that someone doesn’t like you and is going to a lot of trouble to prove it. If people think there’s any chance you’re hiding at Cassie’s, they’ll come looking and then it won’t just be you with a bullet, but Cassie and Lydia, too.”

  Cassie didn’t think my hands had healed enough to drive to Chicago, but she agreed with Alsop: if people were hunting me, they’d run me to earth sooner rather than later. Literally run me to earth at her dugout.

  I didn’t argue the point. Lydia was starting to walk around the house and to spend time on the flagstones outside Cassie’s door, with Bear as her constant companion. It was hard to know, looking at the sky, whether hawks or drones were circling overhead. Nothing I’d learned in Salina or Horsethief Canyon explained why someone would work that hard to find Lydia, but best not tempt fate.

  Lydia still wasn’t speaking, but when she encountered me in the big room late in the afternoon, when I was drinking a last herbal brew, she knew—maybe not who I was, but the context where we’d met. She was agitated, making small chirping noises. Alsop thought she felt me as a threat and started to bustle me out the door, but Lydia shook her head, pointed at me, then at the ground.

  I was bewildered, but I sat, and then she sat, cross-legged. Her eyes were shut and she began to produce a hoarse crooning sound. She made the swanlike gesture with her arms that I’d witnessed when I found her in her hole in the ground.

  “I think she misses her music,” I said. “I think she wants her piano. Can you find one for her in Salina?”

  “We can’t carry a piano out here,” Alsop said.

  “She played on a toy model, which disappeared when she ran away from the TV cameras in Chicago. Hopefully some store in Salina will have one.”

  Cassie clapped her hands with delight. “That’s a splendid idea. Franklin, can you go over tomorrow to look for one?”

  Alsop made a mock bow. “When three women all want the same thing, what can I do but say yes.”

  The atmosphere around me lightened for the rest of my short stay. Cassie urged me to take a nap. It was close to eleven when she roused me. The Clarina Prairie was shrouded in a darkness so complete it felt like a physical weight as I once again followed Alsop through the high grasses.

  Alsop had moved my car into an abandoned barn in the Black Wolf region. When he led me to it, he adjured me not to reconnect with my smartphone until I was on the far side of Salina: if someone was tracking my GPS, they’d be less likely to trace me to Cassie.

  “I still need to talk to Coop,” I said, before getting into the car. “He is the one person Lydia may have talked to, to explain what she had learned from Hector before he was killed.”

  “I told you before—”

  “Yes, even if you knew how to reach him you wouldn’t let me know. If he gets in touch, let him be the one to decide. If Lydia confided in anyone, it would be Coop. And despite what you think of me and my work, knowing what secrets she’s harboring will make it possible for me to create a place of safety for her in the world.”

  He frowned; he didn’t like it. I guess, even though he’d saved my life, he didn’t like me. But he thought through what I’d said and let me give him a business card.

  He’d put Kansas plates on my Mustang, taken from a car abandoned near the river for some months—it might keep local LEOs from pulling me over. And so I followed unlit side roads, using a route mapped out by Alsop until I’d worked my way far enough east to be off the radar of Ellsworth or Salina cops.

  As I tried to avoid the animals that crisscrossed the road, tried to stay alert to dark, unmarked cars, I worried about who had been feeding information about me to the person who’d shot at me in the canyon.

  Rick, the guy who worked in Eddie’s body shop, had alerted my hunters when he posted pictures of my shot-up Mustang on social media. Maybe they’d seen him as an exploitable link. He could have told anyone that I’d taken his RAV4 to Horsethief Canyon. A man on horseback would have had no trouble finding me, the city woman slipping and sliding on the muddy trails.

  Everyone out here knew one another. The woman at the lovely old railway hotel sent me to Franklin Alsop. She also knew about Coop—so did the women I’d met at the state university.

  Someone gunning for me wouldn’t even have had to suborn a witness. Except for Cassie and Alsop, everyone seemed happy to share anything they knew with a stranger, including the man at the path lab who’d told me about the bullets. I hoped he didn’t have a crisis of confidence and start talking, because that could mean his own death warrant. And could increase pressure on me.

  My brain thrashed round and round, keeping me company like some horrible talk show. The trash talk took me around Salina to the next big town going east. I followed the signs to the interstate. At a gas station near the entrance I pulled off to fill up and to check in with my smartphone. And there were the messages about Murray, the calls from Mr. Contreras, the demands of Sergeant Pizzello.

  I phoned Lotty at once.

  “Victoria—thank God you’re okay. I’ve been calling your neighbor, calling Sal at the bar, no one had heard from you.”

  “I’m still in Kansas; I’ve had to go dark—I’ll explain when I see you. How is Murray? What happened?”

  Birders had found him yesterday morning in the Burnham Wildlife Corridor. He’d been shot and left to die.

  “They took him to the University of Chicago hospital. They have a good team in place and I’m getting regular updates, Victoria, but it’s a serious injury. He’s only alive by a miracle—the bullet went through his lungs but missed the main arteries. What was he doing there? They said it’s the same park where Bernadine Fouchard’s lover was killed. Was Murray hunting down the murderer?”

  “I—I was rough on him.” I was fighting back tears of self-recrimination. “He didn’t tell me he had a lead; I think he was trying to prove to me he was still a good investigator.”

  Alsop’s words rattled through my head: I created burnt offerings in the world around me.

  “I’m two hours from the Kansas City airport,” I said to Lotty. “Can you get Max’s PA to book me on the first possible flight? I’m not taking time to call Mr. Contreras—can you let him know I’m safe, at least for the moment?”

  I forgot everything my father had drilled into me about road safety and put the accelerator down hard. Kansas had a speed limit, but it seemed to be more a theoretical than practical number. Even with the limited lights lining the road, traffic carried me along at close to ninety. My hands sweated on the steering wheel; the gauze Cassie had wrapped them in came loose, but I didn’t stop to rip it free.

  I was on the outskirts of Kansas City when I had a text fr
om Max’s PA, Cynthia; she’d booked me on the 5:50 flight to O’Hare.

  I put the Mustang into long-term parking and managed to rouse a shuttle to take me to the terminal, which didn’t open for another hour. I lay on a stone bench near the entrance and called Sergeant Pizzello’s cell. She answered on the ninth ring, in the mumbly voice of someone awakened from sleep. I was perverse enough to find that cheering.

  “Talk to me about Murray Ryerson, Sergeant,” I said.

  A brief silence, the sound of bedclothes rustling, checking the screen for the caller name. “Where the fuck have you been, Warshawski, that it’s taken this long to call—on a mountaintop contemplating your tan lines?”

  “That’s a clever line,” I said, “but not even my tan lines are more important than Murray Ryerson. What happened to him?”

  “We got the report just about twenty-four hours ago. He was found close to where the Prinz kid turned up, but they think he was shot on the bridge over Lake Shore Drive and carried into the underbrush to die. This was deliberate and premeditated. His phone was gone, his laptop, any backup drives are all missing. What was he working on?”

  “The last time we talked he was trying to make sense of some architectural drawings that showed a major overhaul of the Burnham Wildlife Corridor. He couldn’t tell who had done the drawings and he didn’t know if they came from the Park District or if they were a proposal from a developer. What does Gifford Taggett say?”

  A car pulled up to the curb by the terminal and a man emerged from the passenger side. I put the phone down and braced myself, but a woman got out of the driver’s seat, kissed the man, and drove off. The man moved to a bench facing mine and lit a cigarette.

  I had to ask Pizzello to repeat her last few comments, which were mostly irritated sputtering about my suggestion that she talk to the parks super.

  “If Murray thought he was looking at plans to repurpose the park, he would have made an appointment with Taggett,” I said. “Or he submitted requests under FOIA. Can’t you get his emails from his server, even without his phone?”

  There was a long silence at her end before she muttered, “My chief has told me to treat this as a random mugging. They won’t let me ask a judge for a warrant to search his computer files. Was Ryerson working on anything else, besides drawings I’ve never seen? And that I can’t believe have anything to do with Taggett?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Ask the Herald-Star’s assignment editor.”

  The cigarette smoke was making me sick to my stomach. I hadn’t eaten anything for two days besides Cassie’s prairie soups. My body also resented not having caffeine.

  “They had me talk to the head of their cable division, guy named Norm Bolton,” Pizzello said. “He told me Ryerson was involved in this series about what happened to formerly famous Chicagoans. He was working on a painter who used to have big museum sales but is in prison for running a meth ring out of his studio.”

  “Meth rings always attract a lot of criminals,” I said. “Maybe Murray got too close to one of them. You’d have to ask Bolton what he’d reported back.”

  “Everyone at the Star says Murray was closer to you than to anyone,” Pizzello said. “He must have confided something in you.”

  “Closer to me? That was in a different media era, Sergeant. I see Murray twice a year, once at Wrigley Field, and again at a Blackhawks game. Every now and then we have a drink at the Golden Glow. Get over your fear of your chief of detectives and have someone talk to Taggett.”

  A van pulled up and a couple of people in TSA vests got out and unlocked the terminal doors. It was still two hours before my flight, but I hung up on Pizzello and moved inside, away from the smoke and thick damp air.

  53

  Homecoming

  I wasn’t one of those clever investigators with a dozen driver’s licenses and identities to slip in and out of: anyone tracking me would know that V.I. Warshawski had flown from Kansas City to O’Hare, landing at 7:23 a.m. No one fired at me as I walked from Terminal Two to the L, so perhaps I was a half step ahead of my Bergara-toting shooter.

  The train was packed: airport workers leaving the graveyard shift for home and road warriors heading into the city for a day of meetings. I wedged myself into a corner at the end of the car and dozed until we reached the stop near my office.

  In the coffee shop across from my building, while I greedily downed shots of espresso, I used my phone to look at my office’s security footage for the past two days. A man had come around looking at the parking lot and checking the front door locks earlier this morning; he’d been there yesterday as well. Not someone in expensive clothes, just an ordinary street thug in a sports coat and blue jeans, with a bulge suggesting a gun.

  I took my third espresso to the front of the coffee shop and scanned the street. It seemed clear; my stalkers must have lost track of me while I was at Cassie’s and weren’t sure whether I was home or away.

  My shadowy companions had money to burn—they carried expensive rifles and ammo; they hired high-end hackers to break into Artie Morton’s computer; they went into canyons and morgues and had thugs on call to shoot out car windows or take over motels. Maybe they were monitoring my home and my neighbors’ phones, but I couldn’t worry about every possible danger or I’d stop acting altogether.

  I called Mr. Contreras to assure him I was safely back in Chicago. He needed a long conversation. I extricated myself as gently as possible, with a promise that we’d catch up before the end of the day.

  Inside my office I didn’t turn on lights: even on a bright August day they’d show through the skylights. I went straight to the shower in the back of Tessa’s studio for a scrub down. I changed into the last pair of clean jeans and socks in my carryall.

  I used two monitors to lay out all the documents and notes I’d kept since Bernie’s panic-stricken call after finding Leo Prinz’s dead body, an event that felt so remote it might have happened back when the Smoky Hill River started carving Horsethief Canyon.

  I made notes by hand, using the Aurora fountain pen my mother had received on graduating from secondary school. I keep it in my office safe and use it only when I want to write carefully, in ink.

  Murray, Leo Prinz, Simon Lensky

  I wrote:

  All connected to the mysterious plan to repurpose the Burnham Wildlife Corridor and adjacent lakefront. Larry Nieland, Nobel Prize–winning economist, had come to the SLICK meeting with a well-dressed man who had not been introduced.

  Murray had said the mechanical engineer who drew the plans was named something like Mina Y. Punter. The letters on Leo’s photo of the drawing had been as blurry as the photo itself. Maybe the name was Mona, not Mina. Perhaps SLICK’s Mona Borsa was involved in the lakefront plan but pretended not to know about it. I had pegged her more as Taggett’s cheerleader than as a major player, but I could be wrong.

  I uploaded my copy of Leo’s flash drive onto my desktop monitor and looked for the name of the mechanical engineer, printed by hand in a Gothic calligraphy. The script was hard to read, but I couldn’t enlarge it too much without losing resolution. The first name was clearest: Minas, not Mona or even Mina. Minas y Puentes.

  Spanish. Not the name of the mechanical engineer who’d drawn the plan. The name of one of the Chilean firms on Larry Nieland’s website. I hadn’t paid attention to it when I first looked him up, but now I went into the business press to find out everything I could on Minas y Puentes.

  Their website mentioned projects in China, Brazil, India, one in Southern California. The company had been formed in the 1980s by a merger of Puentes y Torres with Minas Aguilar de Tocopilla.

  One Guillermo Quintana was the president; Filomena Quintana Aguilar was the company secretary. I knew that name, as well: she was the woman who’d been on Global’s Digging up the Deep State with Larry Nieland. Aguilar would have been her birth name, Quintana her married name. She’d married Guillermo and her family’s mining business married Guillermo Quintana’s Bridge and
Tower company.

  I wrote all the names down carefully, in block letters, feeling as though a large explosion might occur if I made any sudden moves. The mines of Tocopilla. When Hector had come home from visiting them, he’d been furious about the conditions, furious with his mother—for what? Not telling him what she knew about the mines? Not telling him that his family was connected somehow to a Chilean mining heiress?

  I tried to think it through. Did Palurdo have a sister with the same name as the mine owner’s? Was the mine owner Jacobo Palurdo’s sister? Maybe Jacobo had changed his name when his sister married the company boss? Then he thought she was dead to him and left Chile in disgust?

  My stomach muscles were so tight that they were pushing my diaphragm up, making it hard to breathe, let alone think.

  I searched for information about Guillermo and Filomena.

  The oldest story was in El Universal, a Chilean paper. A story in 1974 covered the lavish wedding of Guillermo Quintana to Filomena Aguilar. The photos, digitized from microform, were grainy, but you could see Aguilar’s satin gown, the two page boys in miniature soldiers’ uniforms holding her long train, the floor-length veil pinned to her swept-up blond hair.

  Guillermo was darkly handsome in a military dress uniform. The ceremony had been held at the cathedral of St. James in Valparaíso, with four bishops presiding. Besides the page boys, the bride was attended by eleven cousins and friends. The bride’s father, Fernando Aguilar, beamed with pride. The bride’s brother, also named Fernando, was not at the wedding: an acute stomach virus, the society editor said they’d been told.

  I traced the couple through some dozens of stories in Spanish. Both had studied economics at the Pontificia Universidad in Santiago. Guillermo joined the army as an officer, he’d been part of the Pinochet government, developing an initiative to privatize health care and Chile’s pension system, and when Fernando Aguilar died, he’d been made chief executive officer of Minas y Puentes. Filomena did hands-on work managing the Tocopilla mines before she discovered her gifts as a public speaker and television presenter.