Critical Mass

by Sara Paretsky

  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?

  The downtown streets were empty. I didn’t think anyone was tailing the cab, but I was too tired to pay close attention. And really, what difference did it make? The important question was how Homeland Security knew I’d found the bureau drawers, but didn’t know they’d been stolen from me soon after. Either the right hand didn’t know what the right fingers were doing, or a second party cared about the papers Martin Binder might have dropped in the meth pit.

  I dozed in the cab. When the driver pulled up in front of my building on Racine, I woke with a jolt. “They read my e-mail,” I said out loud. “That’s why Martin went dark.”

  “It’s eighteen dollars, Miss, whether you e-mail it or text it, and whether it’s dark or light.”

  I fished in my pocket for my wallet before I remembered it, too, had been in my briefcase. I hoped it was Mr. Contreras who’d found my case, not Moe or Curly, or the angry second-floor tenant.

  At least my keys were in my pocket. The cabdriver cursed me, but he had to wait while I went inside for some money. My first piece of good luck: Mr. Contreras had left a note saying that he had my briefcase. I found it inside his own front door, with my wallet and laptop still inside. By the time I got back to the cab, the meter was at twenty-one dollars. Homeland Security is not cheap, but then, what worth having is?

  Back in my own apartment, it wasn’t just the damage Homeland Security had done that got me down, but the sense of vulnerability, that they had let themselves into my home, touched my things, touched my mother’s music, even her concert gown. I took the keys to Jake’s apartment from a dish in my kitchen cupboard.

  Jake’s place looked as tidy as when he’d left. I rinsed off federal agent dirt in his bathroom and crawled thankfully into his bed.

  My dreams were turbulent, but I slept deeply and didn’t waken until almost noon on Monday. I remade the bed, tidily, the way my mother had taught me, corners squared off. My own bed I usually don’t bothe
r with, but the squalor in my place had given me an urge to be neat.

  I’d gotten a five-figure bonus from a case I’d worked in the summer. Part of it had gone to a high-end home cappuccino machine. While the boilers heated, I cleaned up my kitchen. Why had Moe and Curly been so destructive? Usually when the law sneaks in without a warrant, they’re careful not to leave a trace behind, so why had this pair been so wanton? Were they hoping I’d think street punks had broken in?

  I fussed around with the machine, discarding shots until I pulled a couple of perfect ones. I couldn’t bear to have anything second-rate right now. I took my cappuccino with me while I worked on my home: folding my mother’s concert gown back into its protective tissue paper, replacing the score to Don Giovanni, putting books back on shelves.

  If Moe and Curly knew I’d e-mailed Cheviot Labs, announcing the arrival of the dresser drawers, they had hacked into my server and were helping themselves to my correspondence. That meant the confidential report I’d sent Darraugh Graham yesterday was government property.

  My temper was rising again. I wanted to act, to sue the government or blow away Moe and Curly, or—don’t do it, I counseled myself. Anger is the surest route to making terrible mistakes. Calm down, think it through.

  Question one. Why was Homeland Security reading my e-mail? We all know that various government agencies, from local up through the National Security Agency, troll through e-mail looking for some set of dangerous words. Which ones had I been using that made them care about the meth house in Palfry?

  I sat at my dining room table, a copy of Sciascia’s Il Contesto that I’d been about to reshelve in one hand. It wasn’t the meth house. It was Martin Binder that they wanted. Homeland Security had learned I was looking for him, probably from Cordell Breen: he’d told me he was going to sic the FBI on finding out if his daughter was hiding Martin down in Mexico City.

  Roberta had spread the story of our inspecting Agnes Schlafly’s bureau drawers far and wide at the football game. Anyone could have passed the news on. Homeland Security knew I’d found the drawers because they were monitoring my e-mail—they’d read my message to Cheviot Labs.

  Since Homeland Security didn’t have the news that the drawers had been stolen, that meant two sets of people were looking for Martin. Set One broke into the Mustang while the Feds were waiting to intercept the drawers when I got back to Chicago. So Set One were drug dealers. In that case, the sheriff’s deputies who’d come to the motel at four yesterday morning were right—meth heads thought I’d dug up treasure and they wanted it.

  If Cordell Breen was tracking Martin, he could have bribed anyone to let him know whether they found anything at the meth house. My head ached from chasing my ideas in circles. I could see drug dealers murdering Ricky, I could see them thinking that Judy had run from Palfry with a chunk of Ricky Schlafly’s money. And then imagining that I’d found gold in the meth pit when the stories began circulating at the football game.

  “DTs,” I printed in block capitals, short for Drug Thugs. “DTs killed Schlafly and Kitty (probably). HSTs—Homeland Security Thugs—are monitoring my e-mail because Cordell Breen has asked FBI to find Martin Binder. Cordell thinks Martin is selling Metargon secrets, but there’s been no whiff of buyer or seller.”

  The DTs probably would just trash the bits of paper on the dresser drawers. In fact, they’d trash the drawers, too, when they realized that the only treasure there was fool’s gold.

  What did the HSTs imagine I’d found? Not the bank account. The document from the Department of Commerce about Innsbruck? But that was something obtained through the Freedom of Information Act; anyone could read it.

  I pulled my laptop out of my briefcase and started to power it up, but stopped. If the HSTs were monitoring my e-mail they could be embedded right in my accounts, looking at every search I made. They’d see the laptop’s ISP and come trundling along looking for me and my machine. I needed a computer where someone wouldn’t be tracking me. I put Il Contesto away, but left the rest of the books on the table.

  27

  DERRICK, KING OF THE DAMNED

  A GOOD FRIEND OF mine had died in a bad fall earlier this summer. I’d put her private documents into my safe while she lay unconscious in the ICU. When she died a few days later, trauma and grief put any thought of her papers out of my mind. I came on them when I was checking my safe, to make sure Homeland Security hadn’t been inside it.

  Leydon Ashford had been not just a loving and energetic friend, but a risk-taker who enjoyed thumbing her nose at authority. I figured she would applaud my borrowing her identity for a few days.

  I took public transportation down to the South Side so I could use the University of Chicago library. Before I went, I checked in with Mr. Contreras. He started to ask me what had happened to me last night, but I put a finger over his mouth and took him outside with the dogs. While we stood on the beach throwing balls for them, I told him what had happened last night with the federal magistrate. I asked him not to discuss any aspect of this current case when we were at home or in my car.

  “Those Homeland Security guys have got me nervous. If they’ve hacked into my e-mail account, they might easily be bugging my phone, or the car or our building.”

  The warning made my neighbor angry: this wasn’t what he’d risked his life for at Anzio all those years ago. Far as that went, it wasn’t why he’d worked hard at Diamond Machining for forty years, creating struts for B-52s.

  I couldn’t offer him any consolation. It wasn’t what I’d worked all my life for, either. “The trouble is, they seem to think I know something about our nuclear policy, or weapons or something, and until I figure that out, I don’t have a way of getting them to leave me alone.”

  Back at home, I took the battery out of my phone so that its GPS signal wouldn’t betray me. I left my iPad and laptop with Mr. Contreras so I wouldn’t be tempted to check my e-mails.

  I wasn’t going to drive, in case someone had bugged my car. On my way to the L, I stopped a couple of times, to tie my shoes, to buy a paper, but I didn’t see any obvious signs of tails. Either the HSTs were too subtle for me or I was exaggerating my importance to them. Still, it would reduce my carbon footprint to ride the L: I felt virtuous as the train made its languid afternoon run into the center city.

  That was about the one positive in the day. Until I knew for sure why Homeland Security was focusing on me, I wasn’t going to be a very happy detective. A government audit had shown that Homeland Security monitors e-mails and phone calls from Americans without even trying to connect us to terrorism. They don’t have a budget, they just do what they want. The problem is that once the government starts monitoring you, they invade all aspects of your life, not just the little bit they think they need.

  I needed to talk to Judy Binder. She surely told her son about the bank account Benjamin Dzornen had set up, but I bet Martin didn’t care about that—it would have been ancient history to him. He’d gone to his mother because he thought Judy had some documents about the significance of Martina’s work, something neither Judy nor Kitty had recognized or cared about.

  I liked that, because it meant that was why Ricky Schlafly was murdered. Ricky overheard mother and son arguing. He figured Judy was sitting on valuable documents. For any dopehead, something was valuable if it could be sold or bartered for drugs.

  Ricky tried to sell the documents. I’d never met him alive, but I assumed he was as lazy and greedy as the addicts I used to represent. He wouldn’t have done anything subtle, like gone to archivists with offers of important papers. He’d have gone straight to eBay or Craigslist, and then anyone would have known about the documents: Julius Dzornen, some other drug dealer or even Homeland Security, come to think of it.

  Downtown, I left the L to ride a bus down to Hyde Park. If Chicago really had rapid transit, I wouldn’t drive so much: the fifteen-mile run from my home down to the university took
eighty minutes.

  At the library, they let me inside with Leydon’s driver’s license. I couldn’t borrow books, but I could use the collection, including the computers.

  I logged on first to the online auction site Virtual-Bidder. I tried to imagine how Schlafly might have thought. He probably hadn’t known Martina Saginor’s name, but I started with her, anyway, tried Benjamin Dzornen, moved to physics in Vienna, and finally hit pay dirt, so to speak, with “Nuclear Weapons,” where there were hundreds of thousands of hits: manuals from the Nevada Proving Grounds, photos from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, videos of old movies with names like Atomic Bomb.

  A seller named King Derrick had been offering “Authentic Nazi Nuclear Secrets.” King Derrick, ruler of the Empire of the Damned. I saw his decimated body again, the eyeballs gone, the crows circling, and shivered.

  Starting bid for his authentic secrets was suggested at a hundred dollars, but the auction had been shut down. A large red-and-black banner covered most of the page, announcing that the auction had been in violation of Virtual-Bidder rules. Behind the banner, parts of a screen shot that King Derrick had called “Proof of real Nazi weapons secrets” were visible.

  If keff = 1, then . . . is critical. If neutrons . . . added . . . by . . . external . . . and if the system is not quenched by a strong . . . absorber, they can trigger an explosion. An external Ra-Be neutron . . . at Innsbruck emitted S0 = 106 neutrons/second . . . know the neutron-mul . . .

  At the bottom of the page was a small circle with a kind of design in it. It seemed to be interlocking triangles with another symbol that was too blurry on the screen image to make out. I wondered if it might be some symbol of authentication that collectors of Nazi memorabilia looked for.

  The part of the text visible behind the banner meant nothing to me, except that it concerned the weapons facility where Martina had spent part of the war. A weapons expert would know whether it proved they’d been building the bomb in Innsbruck. Was this why Homeland Security was on my case? Not because of Martin and the Metargon code, but because they thought I knew something about nuclear weapons?