Dead Land

by Sara Paretsky

  A photo in the business presses showed Quintana shaking hands with various New York officials and with a couple of high-rolling developers when Minas y Puentes broke ground for a luxury complex in Brooklyn. I stared at the screen so long that my eyes began to hurt.

  Guillermo was the man in the beautiful shirt at the SLICK meeting. Every person who’d seen him had remembered his clothes more than his face: his face was cold, indifferent—it didn’t invite people in, and so they looked instead at his clothes.

  I looked again at the blurry blueprint on my monitor. Minas y Puentes had drawn up plans for a luxury development on Chicago’s South Side. Was Filomena Quintana’s old pal Larry Nieland involved in the plan to repurpose the lakefront through his Capital Unleashed consulting firm? Or had he come to the SLICK meeting with Guillermo to support his friends?

  I went back to Nieland’s website, where his face, framed with unruly silver curls, beamed on the world like Santa Claus. Nieland was on the boards of nine companies, four in South America, five in the United States. Only one of the South American companies was publicly traded. Its principal shareholders included Minas y Puentes, and Capital Unleashed.

  Capital Unleashed was Nieland’s privately held company. Nieland had been Filomena Quintana’s professor and mentor. And now here they all were together, happily divvying up Chicago’s lakefront.

  I imagined the amounts of money that Capital Unleashed dealt with—hundred-dollar bills filled large black cauldrons, the kind witches hover over in cartoons. Larry and his curated clients leaned over them, peering anxiously to see if the capital was cooked enough to be unleashed.

  Had Nieland invited Minas to invest? Had Minas had the brainstorm and involved Nieland? It didn’t really matter. However it came about, Park Super Taggett was easily persuaded to get on board with the project. Maybe Taggett had been thinking of a new beach at Forty-seventh Street, and Nieland saw this as a great opportunity to turn an underpopulated area into a billionaire’s private preserve.

  How had Simon Lensky ended up with a copy of this proposal? I couldn’t imagine the SLICK trio as coconspirators. They were ordinary people who volunteered to help care for Chicago’s parks. Taggett would have enlisted them to sell the Forty-seventh Street beach to the community; he wouldn’t have involved them in a development project on the scale this blueprint suggested.

  My best guess was that Taggett hadn’t realized the drawing was in a packet he’d given Simon to help with the beach presentation. Simon fussed over it as he studied all his papers before that last fatal SLICK meeting.

  I thought back to the dinner at the African Fusion café, right before the meeting, where the trio were nervous about my seeing any of their documents. I could imagine Mona, maybe even Curtis, worrying over what the drawing meant. Mona would perhaps have favored a direct question to Taggett, but none of them knew what to do. And then Leo had forced everyone’s hand when he’d knocked all Simon’s drawings to the floor.

  Leo had snapped photos because he’d seen enough to be troubled. And when Simon revealed how troubled Leo was—to whom? To Mona Borsa? To Gifford Taggett himself?—someone had dealt expeditiously with the problem. They had killed Leo, gotten rid of his phone, his computer, scoured both his apartment and Bernie’s to make sure there weren’t any pesky little flash drives or printouts lying around.

  And then they realized Simon must know they were behind Leo’s murder, so he had to be eliminated as well.

  “Oh, Murray, what did you do?” I whispered. “Did you submit a FOIA to the Park District for a copy of the plans? Or for correspondence between Taggett and Nieland or Taggett and Quintana? And so you, too, became a threat? Don’t die, don’t die, don’t die.”

  I needed to see Lotty. I needed her and Max to use their influence to get a guard on Murray’s room down at the university hospital.

  I badly needed a car. I didn’t want to rent one—the longer I could go without putting out an electronic signal that I was home and in action, the better. I ran through a list of the friends I could go to for help, but none of them owned more than one car. The Streeter brothers, who often helped me with surveillance projects, had an extra van they might lend me. It had bulletproof siding but didn’t maneuver well. I’d give them a call if nothing else came to me.

  It wasn’t until I was closing my files that I remembered Angela Creedy’s Subaru. She’d left her car keys with me so I could move the car on street-cleaning days. It had been ten days since she and Bernie had left Chicago; I hoped she hadn’t already collected parking tickets—I’d have to pay them.

  I took a taxi to Evanston. Angela’s Subaru was a block away from the house where she and Bernie had been living. It was the perfect car for my needs: it was old and dirty, free of parking tickets, and it started on the first try. The only downside was that the seat adjustment was locked and Angela was five inches taller than me. Sitting bolt upright to drive would keep me awake.

  I went first to Beth Israel, the hospital in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood where Lotty had her privileges. Max Loewenthal was the executive director, but was also a friend from Lotty’s refugee childhood—and now that he was widowed, her lover as well. It was his PA who’d booked my flight this morning. If Lotty was at her clinic, a call from the hospital number would go unnoticed.

  Cynthia was delighted to see me and happy to track down Lotty, who turned out to be in the hospital, making rounds. Cynthia put me in Max’s conference room to wait, where I could entertain myself either with Beth Israel’s annual report or journals from the American Hospital Association. Half an hour later, Lotty lifted my head from an article on a “Comprehensive curricular blueprint for resident education.”

  “I see you’ve found the perfect substitute for Ambien,” she said dryly, but when she looked at me her expression turned to alarm. “Victoria! You didn’t tell me you’d been injured. You need to be in bed yourself.”

  I blinked back tears: it had been a while since I’d been greeted with love and concern instead of being told I turned people into burnt offerings. Lotty examined my hands and arms, sent Cynthia to the pharmacy with an order for antibiotic liniment and bandages, and demanded an account of my week away.

  I gave her the highlights and skirted lightly over my fall from the clifftop in Horsethief Canyon. “How is Murray?”

  “A little good news this morning: he was able to breathe for five minutes without the respirator. They’ll keep upping that, but they’re keeping him in a protective coma—too much blood loss, too big a shock to his system.”

  “Lotty, he was working on something that I pointed him to. It’s—no matter what the police say, this wasn’t a random mugging. He was shot to try to keep him from digging into a construction project, some scam between the Park District and a Chilean developer. I want to get a guard at his room, and I’d prefer no one knows he’s improving, however minuscule the improvement is.”

  She kept her hands on my shoulders. “We don’t have any authority in the university hospital, but I’ll ask Max to make some calls. Do you think his company, the Global people, could they provide a guard?”

  “I’d like to keep his Global people as far from him as is possible,” I said. “It’s even possible that they’re the ones who attacked him to begin with.” I told her about Norm Bolton and his efforts to monitor what I knew about Lydia Zamir.

  “But that has nothing to do with the park,” Lotty objected when I finished.

  “I know. But Murray was trying to get permission to run the story and Bolton turned him down. Murray must have connected some dots, or asked too many questions—I don’t know. And the police tell me his phone and laptop and so on are missing. The cops could get a search warrant for Murray’s server, but they won’t.”

  I didn’t like that part of Pizzello’s story one little bit. Taggett, the chief of detectives, Bolton—they were connected and not in a good way.

  54

  His Guy Friday

  Peter Sansen had been trying to reach me. He
missed me, he wanted to know I was safe.

  I called him, but he was offline. I wrote a long message, trying not to sound whiny or scared. I wrote that I’d been shot at, then deleted it—he was six thousand miles away, and he’d be worried and feel impotent. Instead I wrote about the canyons and caves I’d seen in Kansas; I would never think the state was flat again. I’d met an herbal healer who lived in a dugout. She used solar panels to run her house. And I missed him. Missed having someone put his arms around me and give me comfort in the night. Missed someone who admired what I did and how I did it—you do these things so well, Peter often told me.

  Three of my paying clients were demanding results. They were justified in complaining, but I felt like someone in a batting cage bombarded with balls I couldn’t swing at fast enough. I called my clients to say I was making good progress on their problems and would have reports by the end of the week. If I lived that long.

  It scared me when I thought about how my business was suffering while I wrestled with a giant octopus—one arm the Burnham Wildlife murders, another Lydia Zamir’s problems, a third the mysterious stranger taking shells from the morgue where Hector Palurdo lay. Murray, SLICK, Larry Nieland, Guillermo and Filomena Quintana. It scared me when I thought of Murray lying close to death: someone wanted me dead, too.

  Bernie and Angela, another arm. In the course of the morning, I heard from both mothers: Arlette called to say she was having trouble keeping Bernie caged up in the Laurentians; when did I think she could return to Chicago? Angela Creedy’s mother had sent a similar message from Shreveport. I put the mothers in touch with each other—why didn’t Arlette invite Angela to escape the muggy Louisiana summer in the mountains of Quebec?

  I wished I could go, too. Way better than driving around in the muggy heat half asleep. My back was bugging me from leaning forward in the Subaru. I pulled into a strip mall where I picked up a cushion that would move me closer to the Subaru’s steering wheel. I found eye drops in the pharmacy section—maybe lubricating my tired eyes could create the illusion of sleep. The sight of myself in the restroom mirror was unsettling. Despite my shower this morning, my T-shirt was already wilted and my hair had clumped into wads. I’d have to take the time to go home to change. Run the risk of being spotted. Talk to Mr. Contreras, try to avoid my bed.

  Conversations with my neighbor are never short, but they can also be healing. Even though I had a list of people I needed to see, the hour we spent together in the garden helped me feel more like myself and less like a tsunami of hazardous waste. Mitch and Peppy greeted me with little whines of pleasure, we ate sandwiches with tomatoes picked from Mr. Contreras’s plants, and we caught up on the trivia of daily life—his grandsons, his wins and losses at the track, my news from Peter Sansen, news from Bernie, a raccoon I’d seen on my way to collecting Angela’s car. The hard thing about being on your own is no one is interested in those little things.

  I took a second shower and changed into business casual clothes—summer-weight beige trousers, a white short-sleeved cotton top, and flat-soled shoes. I opened my bedroom safe and looked at my gun. People were shooting at me, after all. But if the man who’d tracked me into Horsethief Canyon was perched on a rooftop somewhere with his Bergara, my handgun wouldn’t be much use. I locked the safe with the Smith & Wesson still inside.

  It was mid-afternoon by the time I reached the Herald-Star’s offices. They were housed in an old warehouse along the Chicago River where they could see their rich parent’s headquarters. Global One, where the streaming and cable and talk shows and so on took place, was up above, along Wacker Drive. Before I talked to Bolton, I thought I’d start with Murray’s coworkers at the paper.

  Despite the dingy building, the Herald-Star still had a security protocol. I showed my ID and asked to speak with Gavin Aikers, the regional news assignment editor. “Tell him I want an update on Murray Ryerson’s projects.”

  Aikers came out to the front desk in person and ushered me inside, one hand on the small of my back, the power play. He was a short stocky man, muscled, not fat, with a shock of brown curls that made him look more cherubic than he probably was.

  He clucked his tongue over Murray’s fate. “The paper is offering a twenty-thousand-dollar reward for finding his attackers. Murray is one of our most valuable investigators.”

  The Star used the open floor plan so beloved of management, meaning a maximum of noise with a minimal possibility of concentration. Maybe this is why the paper didn’t do much serious journalism anymore—too hard to follow the thread of a complicated story when the sound level was equivalent to an active runway at O’Hare.

  As an assignment editor, Aikers rated a small office. It wasn’t soundproofed, but when he closed the door, we could at least hear each other.

  Aikers’s face was solemn. “It’s a shocking business. The city’s become so dangerous—”

  “Especially for a journalist. That wasn’t a mugging, Mr. Aikers. Murray was looking at documents connected to the Park District’s plans to expand the beach at Forty-seventh Street. A kid named Leo Prinz who was looking at plans for that beach was murdered there a month ago. Did Murray file any stories about the park or the murder?”

  “What do you mean?” Aikers asked.

  I smiled, more a sneer, that I hoped looked as ugly as I felt. “Since I’m not a journalist, maybe I don’t have the jargon right. You know how it is in Chicago—you want to build something, you have to see that the right parties get their campaign funds bulked up. It’s not what you do or who you know, but how much you can pay.”

  Aikers shifted uncomfortably, but no respectable journalist could deny the state’s and city’s infamous unwritten “pay to play” code.

  “Had Murray written about any payers or players? Did he tell you about Norm Bolton’s plan to film a joint search for Lydia Zamir? Did Murray find something Bolton or Global’s lawyers want kept secret? You’re his editor, so you must have seen what he was working on.”

  Aikers drummed his thick fingers on the desktop. “If he’d written anything, it was preliminary, not something he was ready to show me. I hoped—Norm hoped—he’d sent early drafts to you, since he trusted your judgment.”

  “I can’t think of a single time in all the years I’ve known him where Murray shared a draft with me. He’s like writers everywhere—he wants all the glory.”

  “We hoped he’d told you what he was working on. You were involved with the Zamir woman. You were involved with the Prinz kid’s murder. You must know something!”

  I shook my head. “If I knew anything I wouldn’t be here trying to get information from you. Sergeant Pizzello told me that Murray’s phone and laptop are gone. Had he submitted FOIAs for information about the Forty-seventh Street beach expansion?”

  “We don’t know,” Aikers said. “Murray’s status—Pulitzer, decades of experience—he could follow a story where it took him until he was ready to share. Everyone says he was closer to you than anyone; we’ve all been sure you knew what he was doing.”

  “The police said the same thing in the same words, which makes me guess that’s a line you fed them. I’ve known Murray Ryerson a long time and we covered some big stories together, but I’d say we were competitors more than BFFs. When he stopped being able to work on white-collar crime our paths stopped crossing, so I don’t know what he was doing, besides that series on Chicagoans who used to be famous. Was he investigating the murders of the two men involved in the meeting where the plan was presented?”

  “Murray mentioned their deaths, but the police had identified a suspect. A homeless guy who wanders the lakefront with his dog. I didn’t think we should get involved in looking for him,” Aikers said stiffly.

  “But you still cut Murray a lot of slack and let him go where his nose led him?” I couldn’t hide my contempt. “Anyway, now that he was left for dead in the same place as Prinz, you’ve assigned a reporter to trace a connection between their deaths and the attack on Murray, right?”

&
nbsp; “The police are treating it like a copycat attack,” Aikers said. “You know how it is with criminals—they want to be on TV, so they try to copy high-profile crimes and methods. Murray had a good rapport with the police and he said you did, too, being a cop’s daughter. That’s why I’m asking you to tell me what you know about the investigation—whether this sergeant you mentioned has said anything that suggests a suspect.”

  “Not how Hildy Johnson got results,” I said.

  “Hildy who?” Aikers repeated.

  “Johnson. His Gal Friday. She would have been embarrassed to shift her reporting responsibilities onto the cops.”

  Maybe I should have taken a nap after all. I was having trouble keeping my temper under control.

  “Norm Bolton talked to you, didn’t he?” I changed the subject. “He had this idea about filming me trying to find Lydia Zamir after she disappeared. He was trying to get me to believe that Global felt guilty when she fled in terror, first from the TV cameras and then from the hospital.”

  “We did,” Aikers protested. “Responsible, I’d say, not guilty. Murray had written the story, so it was a Star issue more than a Global one. Norm and I talked it over together.”

  “So Murray could have been looking for Zamir and run afoul of whoever has her. Assuming she’s even still alive, of course.”

  Aikers fiddled with a pen cup. “Everyone says that the man who killed the two guys in the park snatched the Zamir woman and has her hidden someplace. What do you know about that?”

  “Nothing at all.” I got to my feet. “When you next talk to Bolton, ask him if he’s on the board of Minas y Puentes. He may not be grand enough, but he probably knows if your great-grand-boss belongs.”

  “Now what the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Oscar Taney. He’s Global’s majority shareholder, in case you are really as ignorant as you’re pretending to be.”