Shell Game

by Sara Paretsky

  If Reno recognized someone whom Dick knew or worked with, it could have happened in one of two ways: either she’d been in his office or home and saw someone whom she re-encountered in St. Matthieu. Or she’d had a bad interaction with someone in the Caribbean and then saw them in his office, or at Dick’s house. Maybe even seen their photos on the Crawford, Mead website.

  I turned my desk lamp back on and looked up the financials again for Green Grow and Climate Repair, trying to get their board members’ names, or at least a registered agent. The firms were remarkably secretive, but they shared one detail: both had used the services of the firm of Runkel, Soraude and Minable in Havre-des-Anges, St. Matthieu, to handle their incorporation.

  That wasn’t just interesting: it brought Dick perilously close to something that was potentially illegal or even fraudulent. Pink sheet companies often existed only on paper as a way to seduce the greedy and credulous into parting with money. Had Reno discovered that on her Caribbean vacation? Is that why she came to see Dick?

  Those documents were so threatening to someone that showing them to the wrong person put her life at risk. She’d talked to someone about what she’d learned. Surely not her uncle. I stirred uneasily in my chair. Dick would not, no, he could not have hired those brutal hit men to torture his own sister’s child.

  Reno had dressed for her meeting with her abductor: someone she wanted to impress was coming to see her but had snatched her instead. That was why her keys were home but her phone and computer were missing. When she saw she was in danger, she’d blurted that she’d put her evidence in writing and hidden it. The thugs had gone back to her apartment, where they’d torn it apart, looking for her secret document. Bit by bit as they tortured her, she’d revealed more, finally giving up the secret of the locket, but concealing her locket in the floor beneath her.

  “Poverina, poverina, che corragio,” I muttered.

  It was too late to try to see Donna Lutas at the Rest EZ branch in Austin. I could barge in on her at home, I supposed, but maybe I should start with Harmony. She was nearer, and she might be able to interpret her sister’s notes.

  I left my office as cautiously as I’d entered, but neither the two hulks nor any less obtrusive assailants seemed to be hovering. That was nerve-racking in its own way, wondering when the next boot would stomp.

  I turned off my phone, along with all location permissions, in case someone cared enough about my movements to be tracking my GPS. I still parked a quarter mile from Arcadia House and took several side streets to make sure my back was clear.

  The evening staff didn’t know that I was coming. They could see me on their security monitors, though, and they buzzed me into the foyer, which was separated from the house itself by another door made of bullet-resistant glass. The person who came to the door recognized me, but still made me show ID. Since I was in charge of security recommendations for the premises, I was glad to see that they took the protocol seriously.

  Harmony met me in the same little room where we’d spoken yesterday morning. Her eyes were bright, but it was a feverish brightness, not a sign of buoyancy.

  “Did Dr. Lotty let you know I found Reno?” I asked.

  She nodded. “She says Reno is really sick and isn’t talking. Is she—did they hurt her brain?”

  “She was out in the woods without a coat. She lost a lot of weight and is suffering from exposure, so they won’t know for sure until she’s feeling stronger, but Dr. Lotty tells me the brain scan looks good.”

  “Why couldn’t you tell me yourself?” Harmony said, her eyes bright with tears. “You wouldn’t even have known she was missing if it wasn’t for me.”

  “I know, sweetie, but I was pretty wrecked myself. I only found Reno by chance. She’d been wearing her blue scarf and it snagged on bushes as she was carried through the woods to a decrepit shed. The same horror stories who attacked us in the park on Tuesday locked her inside. By the time I found her, she had lost consciousness. It was lucky that I got there when I did, but her assailants came back before I could move her.

  “I fought them, they were too strong for me, they locked me in the shed with her. I had to set fire to the place to get us out, and then I carried her through the woods to my car. I got her to Dr. Lotty, but that took my last ounce of strength: I fainted and spent the rest of the day and all the night asleep. I came here as soon as I possibly could, even though it wasn’t as soon as you needed or deserved.”

  I pulled out my phone and showed her pictures of the shed, and of her sister comatose next to the wall, but not of her sister in chains, or naked and bleeding from the waist down: she didn’t need that image burned onto her visual cortex.

  Harmony looked and looked away. “So now you’re a hero. You saved Reno.”

  “I hope I saved Reno,” I said soberly. “She hasn’t yet regained consciousness. If you want to see her, I will take you to her. Hearing your voice might be the best therapy for her right now.”

  Harmony started scraping the dirt from under her fingernails with the nail of the other hand. The nails had broken off and there was blood on the ends of two of her fingers.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” she muttered.

  “Whenever you want to go, all you have to do is let me know.”

  “Whenever I want to go, I’ll go. I don’t need your permission to see my own sister.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “I think I understand why she was kidnapped and why you were attacked. She had some papers that her attackers wanted. She’d put them in a lockbox and hidden the key in her locket. They thought your locket was the one they were looking for.”

  Harmony’s hand again went reflexively to her throat.

  “Reno had hidden hers under the floor in the shed where she was imprisoned; her captors never found it.”

  “Well?” Harmony demanded. “Where is it?”

  “I put it around her neck,” I said. “The nurses are afraid she may choke on it, but wearing it seems to bring her some comfort.”

  “You should have brought it to me. The nurses can steal it. You didn’t have the right to decide what to do with it. I’m her sister. Don’t you think I should decide what’s best for her?”

  “Hey, Harmony, what’s going on here? You came to me for help—I didn’t fly to Portland and demand that you come to Chicago so I could risk life and limb on your behalf. Now all of a sudden I’m the bad guy?”

  “There’s no ‘all of a sudden’ about it. For two weeks I’ve done everything the way you said it should be done and all that’s happened is my own locket got stolen, I got beat up, and Reno almost died. And now I’m like some prisoner in this place. I want to leave, I want to see my sister, I want to go back to Oregon.”

  I felt a headache build behind my eyes. “You can do all those things. I just don’t want you hurt again, which the two men who attacked you are well able to do. If you decide to leave, please be very careful. Don’t go places alone, don’t lead people to your sister, because she’s at risk as well.”

  Harmony reddened. Fresh tears spurted from the corners of her eyes—fury, impotence.

  She didn’t say anything else, however, so I pulled a copy of the documents I’d found from my briefcase and showed them to Harmony. “Do any of these company names sound familiar? I’m hoping Reno might have discussed them with you.”

  Harmony took the papers from me, but only glanced at them briefly. “Reno always was interested in money, how to make money, I mean. She followed the stock market and tried to get Henry and Clarisse to invest, but they didn’t trust it. So maybe these are two companies that she thought would be good investments. Look how cheap the stock is—you could buy a thousand shares for twenty-five dollars.”

  I nodded politely. “You could be right. What about the loan between Legko and Trechette?”

  “How should I know? I never heard of either of them. Did you ask Uncle Dick? What did he say?”

  “I didn’t discuss the documents with him, but he does now say Reno called him
when she got back from St. Matthieu. She complained about some of the men who were at the resort. He says Reno wanted him to put together sensitivity training for Rest EZ managers.”

  “She did?” Harmony’s eyes widened. “Why did she do that?”

  “Not saying she did. That’s what Dick says happened.”

  Harmony’s mouth returned to its mulish lines. “I forgot: you’re the only person who knows the truth. Maybe she did call and ask him to do it and you’re completely wrong about him.”

  I was feeling my own flash of fury and impotence, but it would be a mistake to give rein to it. I got to my feet. She looked small and fragile, hunched in her chair by the empty fireplace, but when I tried to hug her, she pushed me away.

  48

  A Good Wine with Stale Cheese

  Harmony turning on me felt physical, a kick in the stomach, but I could understand it, even if it made me angry. Her world had spun out of control and now she was by herself—yes, living in a large house with many residents, but she didn’t know any of them; the only person in Chicago she felt close to was close to death. She’d been assaulted; when her chain was stolen she’d lost her iconic connection to her foster parents. I could understand why she was acting out, but I still hated it.

  I had deliberately not given Harmony Beth Israel’s name. If she was enterprising enough to track that down, more power to her, but I didn’t want to go out of my way to send her to her sister on her own. On top of my hurt and the anger was fear. The puppet master pulling the strings here was amoral and ruthless.

  I drove toward my home, stopping to pick up enough food so that I could at least make sandwiches. I parked on one of the side streets near my building. My miner’s headlamp had been destroyed in the shed yesterday, but I still had a high-power flash in the glove compartment, which I brought with me. I used the flash to study the cars on both sides of my block, walking down the west side and coming back up the east. I also inspected the shrubbery around my own building as well as several ones nearby.

  Right now, I seemed to be in the clear, but I was still nervous: Was the thug-master planning a new attack that would come from an unexpected direction?

  I stopped at Mr. Contreras’s place to check on him and the dogs. Mitch was starting to put weight on his injured leg. I took him on a short walk with Peppy, still without finding anything untoward. When we got back, I filled my neighbor in on what I’d done after leaving the apartment. In exchange he gave me a word-for-word of the encounter between the sheriff’s deputy and the woman in 1B.

  “I think she’s deranged, doll. You look out for her. She’s the one who buzzed those goons into the building the other night, and she talked so crazy to the deputy, it was like she’d throw them a party if they killed you. She’d let them in again for nothing, just ’cause she hates the dogs, but she’ll report on you for pay.”

  He offered to make me dinner, but I turned him down. As I headed upstairs, I shone my flash around the dark corners of the second-floor landing, the upper rails where someone could lurk and jump me, the corridor between my apartment and Jake’s. I even went into Jake’s place, which I hadn’t locked after McGivney left. The hair on my neck was standing up, but this time no one was lurking.

  The past few days had been so stressful that I deserved a treat. I took one of my mother’s red Venetian wineglasses and opened a bottle of Brunello. Deep red, rich body. The perfect wine to go with a toasted cheese sandwich, which I ate lying on the living room floor, watching the Cubs play the Marlins.

  I drifted off in the bottom of the sixth. The downstairs buzzer jolted me awake. I knocked over the wineglass as I scrambled to my feet, red wine spreading across the floor. My heart was hammering when I pushed the communications button on the intercom.

  “I’m here to see Ms. Warshawski.”

  Mr. Contreras had beaten me to the bell. I went out to the hall and leaned over to listen: my neighbor demanded to know if the visitor had an appointment.

  “Is she out? I was in the neighborhood and stopped by on a chance—if she’s busy I’ll send her a text.”

  I trotted down the stairs, calling, “It’s okay, I know him.”

  Mr. Contreras was in the entryway, shouting through the outer door. The door to 1B was cracked open. I blew the woman a kiss as I hurried to the foyer. Peter Sansen was there, hands jammed into the pockets of a navy windbreaker.

  I let him into the building and performed a flustered introduction, since Mr. Contreras was looking at Sansen as though he were a live grenade.

  “We been having a lot of trouble in this building.” Mr. Contreras was truculent. “People barging in, beating up on Cookie here, trying to kill the dogs, sheriff thinking he can ride roughshod over us ’cause he’s got a badge. It’s better if we know in advance you’re planning on showing up.”

  “Is that your father?” Sansen asked as he followed me to the third floor.

  “Old friend. We share the dogs. He’s a good guy, but he hates knowing he can’t rip an enemy battalion in half with his bare hands anymore.”

  “I should have called before I came,” Sansen apologized, “but I was at a restaurant in the area and read your text over dinner. My modern Arabic isn’t as good as, well, Fausson’s, for instance, but it’s good enough that I read the message chain. The texts were so startling that I wanted you to see them right away.”

  When we went into my apartment, I hurried over to where I’d been lying and picked up the wineglass. I held it to the light, twisted it slowly. It was intact. I’d been holding my breath over that—I’d already damaged three of Gabriella’s glasses. It would break my heart if I lost another.

  Sansen took in the wine I’d spilled. “You were fighting?”

  My own cheeks flamed. “Wine. Let me mop this up and I’ll pour you a glass.”

  I turned off the television and took Sansen into the dining room so we could spread papers and devices out on the table. I took out another of Gabriella’s glasses and poured wine.

  Sansen twisted his glass, watching the red of the wine against the diamond lines. “These are the wineglasses your mother carried through the Italian mountains on her way to Chicago? No wonder you treasure them.”

  He paused for a respectful moment before turning to the business at hand. “The document your computer wizard dug out is a text thread between Fausson and Tarik Kataba, the poet.”

  Sansen held the phone close to his face to read. “It starts with Fausson: he writes, ‘Did you take it? They blame me.’ Kataba says, ‘It is not for you. It is for history,’ something like that—perhaps he’s saying, ‘It’s important historically.’ Then Fausson wants to know where he is.”

  Sansen looked over the top of his phone at me. “Arabic doesn’t conjugate verbs the same way Indo-European languages do. Fausson might be asking, ‘Where are you, Kataba?’ but he might also be asking about the object itself. Kataba doesn’t answer. Fausson then asks if Kataba is with his daughter or if he is hiding with the daughter’s Canadian friend.”

  “That would be Felix Herschel. He’s an engineering student at IIT who has a relationship with Kataba’s daughter. I got involved because he’s the great-nephew of an old friend of mine—Lotty Herschel, who’s a perinatologist at Beth Israel. . . .”

  My voice trailed off; Sansen asked what was wrong.

  “Not wrong, but I’ve been tense all day over when or where the uglies would strike again. Now I’m wondering if they’re lying low because I can link them to the murders. Whoever is paying their bills may be rethinking strategy.” I stirred uneasily in my chair.

  “Frightened?” Sansen asked.

  “Terrified. They’re hired muscle, horrifyingly strong and totally without affect. I’m only walking around because of sheer damned luck.”

  I gave a half laugh, trying to cover up the fear I’d felt in the shed. “From their accents, I think they’re Eastern European. The one set of words I could make out clearly was when I whacked one of them on the head with a shovel. It was like
whacking a steel bollard—he blinked a few times, then fought back. Anyway, he shouted something that sounded like ‘Shto za chort?’”

  Sansen nodded. “You have a good ear. Russian, for ‘What the hell?’ At least you made an impression on him.” He put a hand over mine and pressed it gently. “You are an incredible woman, Ms. Warshawski, memorizing Russian while fighting for your life.”

  I ducked my head, pleased by the praise but embarrassed as well. I spoke quickly, to cover the moment.

  “I hope whatever they think of next doesn’t involve a grenade to the building or something like that—there are too many innocent bystanders here.”

  Sansen’s lips twitched. “I thought I’d left IEDs behind when I evacuated Tell al-Sabbah. I should have known a lady who would hang upside down out the Institute windows could attract her own quttae at-taruk.”

  “Which are?”

  “Brigands, bandits.”

  “They sound more dramatic in Arabic. . . . Is there anything else in the text thread?”

  Sansen had been laughing with me about the brigands, but when he looked at his phone, he became sober at once. “Kataba never wrote back, after that one reply. There’s one final message from Fausson, terrifying when you know what happened next. He says, ‘Please, I beg of you; they are giving me only one more day to find it.’”

  One more day. Who had given the poor fool that day? Surely not Dick. Gervase Kettie? Had Fausson lifted something from Kettie’s office? But then why was he trying to get it from Kataba?

  My brain felt like a merry-go-round, thoughts rising up and down poles, horses’ legs trampling me and Reno and Felix. Sansen caught my wineglass as it slipped from my fingers.

  “You need to get to bed,” Sansen said. “You don’t have to prove you’re the toughest camel in the train—I already believe it. Come on, detective. Up you get.”

  He helped me to my feet, his calloused hands unexpectedly gentle.