Tunnel Vision

by Sara Paretsky

  I wanted to let her rest, let her move away from her misery, but I had to ask one more question, about the bat. Where had she found it?

  “When I got off the floor from under the desk.” She was still whispering. “Suddenly I saw it lying there, covered with—with—you know. That’s why I knew for sure Daddy had been there. I took it home with me and hid it behind my radiator. I was thinking—I don’t know what I was thinking. If he came in in the night again I would yell at him that I’d tell the police about the bat and how he killed her.”

  She started giggling again, not with mirth but with agony. “Of course I didn’t. He just came on in when he felt like it and I just lay there like—like a mouse.”

  Higgins rocked Emily against her chest, crooning softly to her. I squeezed my eyes tightly to keep the tears inside. I didn’t want my voice to shake when I spoke.

  “You were very brave, Emily. You tried to get help, you tried to look after your brothers. We’re going to let you get some rest now, but I’m not going to abandon you. When you’re strong enough to leave the hospital we’ll find some safe place for you to go.”

  “See if Dr. Morrison is on the floor,” Ellen Higgins said to me. “It would be a good thing if we got her a sedative and let her sleep this off for a while.”

  When I stood up my muscles had frozen again. I moved to the door with a slow shuffle, as if the water from the tunnels had poured into my feet, weighting them down too much to lift. I found Dr. Morrison and Dr. Golding in the hallway outside the door. They’d clearly been listening in, but I don’t know how much of Emily’s whispered words they might have heard. Dr. Morrison gave me a quizzical look, started to speak, then moved quickly into Emily’s room.

  By the time I found my own bed again I was shaking so badly I thought I might fall before I reached it. When the attendant came half an hour later with the wheelchair I couldn’t imagine what she wanted me to do. I looked at her blankly while she kept telling me they were going to wheel me over to the other building to take a picture of my brain.

  She must have decided I had some kind of brain damage—she went off to get a nurse to help her lift me into the wheelchair. As we made our way to the NMR building I tried to imagine what a picture of my brain would show. How the technician would recoil in horror, faint, leave me pinned in the machine at the sight of my thoughts: Emily’s agony printed over and over again on X-ray paper, like a shredded flower.

  47

  Brain Scan

  It was while I was trapped in the metal tube of the NMR scanner that a frightening insight came to me. The machine made an ear-shattering clanking noise; the space was about big enough for a cigar. To keep from having a claustrophic freak-out I tried to turn my mind to something pleasant—the dogs at the beach, an evening with Conrad—but I kept coming back to Emily’s story.

  In her overwrought state it must have seemed wholly believable that her father could have gone downtown, killed Deirdre, returned to the house to attack his daughter and returned once more to the Loop to do something to the computer. In her terror Fabian seemed omnipresent, trapping her wherever she turned. In reality Fabian must have been home as he’d been claiming all along.

  The thought that he really hadn’t killed his wife was so disappointing that I lay flinching from the racket of the scanner for some minutes before the rest of the story dawned on me. Someone else had killed Deirdre. And maybe when Emily thought she’d seen her father standing on the corner as she left the Pulteney it had in fact been the murderer.

  Say that was so. The murderer was waiting for—who knows? A cab? A confederate? Anyway, he sees Emily leave the building. And he debates—is this a witness to his killing? He doesn’t think so—he’s been careful, he would have noticed anyone in the halls or office. She must just be a tenant leaving late at night. He doesn’t try to accost her. Only after the bat was discovered in her bedroom does he realize Emily must have been in my office, and now he needs to find her—desperately—to see whether she can finger him.

  That’s why I wasn’t killed on Saturday. They thought I was sitting on her and could lead them to her. Which meant Jasper definitely knew who killed Deirdre. It was him or one of the other musketeers. Maybe the contractor, Charpentier. The man who’d come to Emily’s hospital room in the middle of the night, that was neither a reporter nor a friend of Fabian’s. It had been the murderer.

  Sweat oozed down my neck into the hospital gown. I was trapped in a steel cigar tube with noise pounding into my head. Panic rose in me, choking me.

  “You have to lie still in there,” a voice said over a loudspeaker. “If you move you ruin the image and we’ll have to start all over again.”

  My brain was roaring, almost splintering from the clanking of the machine. “I have to get out of here.”

  “We’re almost done.” The metallic voice was Olympian in its assurance. “Try to relax and not think about the exam. It will be much easier for you if you take some deep breaths and remain calm.”

  The smooth sides of the chamber were a coffin burying me alive, the racketing sound an exquisite torture. My fingers dug into my palms hard enough to draw blood. I felt an overwhelming fury with Lotty for subjecting me to this at such a moment. It was the rage of helplessness, what Emily must have felt the moment she hurled the plastic cup of water across the room.

  My mind had stopped working in my urgency to be gone, to get moving before anyone else got to Emily. In the infinity of five minutes that I lay helpless I tried to marshal all the figures I’d encountered in the last two weeks, from Phoebe Quirk to Gary Charpentier, in an orderly procession through my mind. As a distraction the exercise worked, but the faces and facts lay jumbled in my brain.

  The clangor finally stopped. The pallet slid free of the tube. I sat up and swung my feet over the side of the table. When the technician came in with a glass of water and a cheery, “That wasn’t so bad, now, was it?” I wanted to paste him, but I merely smiled grimly and climbed down from the table.

  “We want you to sit out here for a few minutes while the doctor reviews the pictures to make sure we have everything we need. You drink this water and you’ll feel better. We’ll call transport to get a wheelchair for you.”

  I took the water and followed him to the waiting area. My muscles were still stiff, but I was most emphatically not going to hang around while they fetched first a radiologist to look at my brain and then a wheelchair. I collected my skimpy hospital robe from the changing room. As soon as the technician left the waiting area I shuffled outside.

  My paper slippers were only slowing me down. I kicked them off and jogged across the rough asphalt in my bare feet. I was panting, with a stitch in my side, when I got back to my room.

  I opened the plastic bag full of fetid clothes and dumped it on the bed. The stench made me fight back a gag. I held my breath while I pulled my jeans and T-shirt free of the overalls, then rummaged in the overall pockets for my keys and the Smith & Wesson. My wallet was still in my jeans pocket. I had one leg inside the foul pants when Conrad came in.

  “Ms. W.! What are you doing? I thought you were taking it easy today.”

  “Conrad! Thank goodness. Did you bring my clothes?” I thankfully took the jeans off again.

  “It’s good to see you upright and lively, girl. You had me good and scared last night.” Conrad hugged me close, then backed away, wrinkling his nose. “What have you got here? The CID landfill?”

  Despite my sense of urgency I couldn’t help smiling. “Worse: city sewage. These are the clothes I was wearing yesterday. Only desperation made me want to put them back on.”

  Conrad tied the plastic bag shut and led me to the bed. “What are you so desperate about? You got seven people out of a tunnel yesterday. You’re a hero. You even tried to let me know before you went underground, so you’re a hero I can feel good about. Rest easy, girl. Take some time off.”

  “There is no time,” I said impatiently. “Emily saw her mother’s murderer. He thinks she can fin
ger him. We’ve got to get some protection for her.”

  “Damn it, Vic, I don’t understand a word you’re saying. Pretend you’re glad to see me and take it from there.”

  I almost screamed with frustration. “I am glad to see you. But I can’t take time to worry about personal things right now. Someone went into Emily’s room in the middle of the night. It was a fluke that the night nurse saw him. I don’t want to leave her alone.”

  He gave a twisted smile. “You ought to be a marine sergeant, Ms. W.—with you the job is first, last, and foremost. I still don’t know what you’re talking about, though. Who went into the girl’s room in the middle of the night, and why is that something to worry about?”

  “Oh.” I realized I hadn’t been very coherent. Taking a minute to marshal my thoughts I led him through my conversation with Emily. When I finished her story I explained the train of thought that had panicked me as I lay in the scanning tube.

  “And you believe her?” he asked when I finished.

  “About what in particular? I believe she went downtown that night, in a state of considerable distress. I believe she saw her mother’s dead body sprawled across my desk. I believe she hid under my desk while a man came in and fiddled with my computer. I don’t think the man was Fabian, although I wish it were—that would be the only surefire way I can think of to keep the guy from getting custody of her again.”

  He clasped his hands in his lap. “She won’t talk to us. Terry sent Mary Louise in, thinking a woman might have better luck, but she couldn’t pry a word out of the girl.”

  “I’ll be happy to tell Officer Neely what I just told you. Don’t you see, Conrad—if I’m right in my interpretation of who’s been tailing me, and why, Emily’s in considerable danger right now.”

  He looked unhappily at his hands. “Her story made a deep impression on you. But we have to consider the possibility that she did kill her mother—that the rest of her remarks were ... not necessarily—”

  “No!” I felt color flame up in my cheeks and tried to make myself speak temperately. “If you had heard her—heard the anguish—you wouldn’t doubt her. A nurse sat in on the interview, Ellen Higgins. She can corroborate everything I’ve just told you.”

  “I’m not saying Emily’s deliberately trying to dupe you, Vic, but she could be putting up a hysterical defense between herself and her acts that evening. She’s at an age where she would naturally be resenting her mother, and I gather the kid had to do her share of housework. If she was pushed hard enough to crack, she could have forgotten what she did and be displacing it onto her father.”

  I felt as though the bed beneath my body had turned to quicksand, sucking me in so fast that I would suffocate in another minute. I took a series of diaphragm breaths, holding them, exhaling slowly, trying to think.

  “Fabian,” I said suddenly. “You’ve been talking to Fabian about her.”

  “Yeah. Guy’s her father. He’s got a right to be worried about her, to talk to us. She screams when he comes into the room. He’s going off his head. He says he’s been worried about her for some time—that she had to carry a lot of the load in their house for Deirdre—Mrs. Messenger—because his wife had an alcohol problem. Drunk, we say on the South Side, but the got-rocks have alcohol problems. Anyway, little Emily was doing so much around the house that she started having fantasies about supplanting—”

  “Spare me,” I interrupted. “Fabian’s using the crudest trick in the book, one started by good old Dr. Freud himself. We can’t believe a respected man rapes his daughter, so we’ll say she’s having a fantasy about having sex with him. So not only does she get violated physically, we deny her her story and she gets violated emotionally.”

  “Calm down, Vic. The first thing you have to learn as a cop is not to be a partisan. Everyone wants to put their story out there for you. You got to weigh the probabilities. Maybe you should talk to the Finch, see what he knows about the father, before you jump in foursquare for the daughter.”

  He took my hands between his own and looked me full in the eyes. His own were dark pools, in whose depths lay compassion, not cynicism. To dig a channel between us would be like cutting off a piece of my heart. But to abandon Emily to salvage my life with Conrad would mean cutting off a chunk of my soul.

  “I will try to keep an open mind about Messenger,” I said slowly, “if you will get a guard outside Emily’s door before we take off.”

  Conrad looked unhappy. “I can’t authorize that just on your say-so, Vic.”

  “Someone did try to go into Emily’s room in the middle of the night last night—claiming to be a friend of Fabian’s. The night nurse saw him.”

  “The night nurse thought it was an enterprising reporter,” Conrad pointed out. “She could be right.”

  “She could be at that.” I don’t know when I’ve ever felt so bleak. “Did you bring some clothes for me? Why don’t you let me wash up and change. I’ll meet you outside in a few minutes.”

  Conrad studied my face, then said he’d bring the car around to the Huron Street entrance. He handed me his canvas gym bag and left the room. As soon as he’d gone I phoned the Streeter Brothers, a collective that does furniture moving as well as bodyguarding. We’ve worked a lot together. I got Tim and explained Emily’s situation.

  “As soon as she’s fit to move I’m going to get her out of here. But that may not be for a few days. When you get here talk to a nurse named Ellen Higgins. I’ll try to reach her before I leave, but she’s the one person who will go to bat for Emily right now.”

  “If I get booted, where do I reach you?” Tim asked.

  “Leave a message with my answering service. And if you do get booted, can you figure out a way to hang around, make sure no one goes injecting strychnine into her IV tube?”

  When he’d agreed, with the laconic good humor that was the Streeter brothers’ hallmark, I climbed into the clean jeans Conrad had found for me. He’d stuck a single rosebud into the pocket of the T-shirt. I felt my heart twist in my chest. I took an extra minute to comb my hair and place the rose over my ear with an IV clip I found behind the bed.

  Before leaving the room I paged Ellen Higgins, to let her know the Streeters would be around. Emily was sleeping, the nurse told me, from a sedative that would probably keep her knocked out for the rest of the afternoon. Higgins didn’t know if Fabian or Dr. Morrison would allow me to keep a guard there, but she would accept Tim for the time being.

  Ken Graham came in as I was hanging up, clutching a bunch of tulips. “I thought I was going to have to plant these on you, but you can carry them instead. How come you get to gondola through the tunnels of Chicago while I have to sit on my ass in Kenilworth persuading Darraugh I’m not a psychopath?”

  “Is your dad home? The flood knock out his building?”

  “Yeah, they don’t have power, but he’s directing operations from an emergency bunker. Being Darraugh, he was smart enough to bag space in a Gold Coast Hotel yesterday morning while everyone else was wringing their hands. Except for people like you hogging the fun stuff down under, I mean. This episode may finally unwind the last screw in Darraugh’s brain: they can send people into his building to get papers, but for some kind of screwy safety reason they can only go one at a time. So the physically fit are going one at a time to fetch vital papers. On foot, up forty flights, because there’s no power. I did one load for him and he still thinks I’m a psychopath. So I came to see if you would marry me.”

  “And you brought a bridal bouquet. How truly thoughtful. You put any energy into my accounts lately? Taxes are due tomorrow.” I picked up my bag of filthy clothes with one hand and took his proffered flowers with the other.

  “The IRS is giving everyone in the Loop a filing extension—it was on the news this morning.” He put his arms around me. “If I reconstruct your files in time, will you marry me?”

  I dropped the flowers and the bag and extricated myself from his clasp. “If you reconstruct my files I’ll see tha
t a 501-c(3) counts it as community service. You need that much more than you do a wife. ... I want to write a note for a pediatric patient. Will you take it over to one of the nurses, please?”

  I tore a blank page from my chart and wrote a careful message to Emily, in care of Nurse Higgins, telling her who the Streeter brothers were. With an exaggerated sigh Ken tucked it next to his heart. He had to return to his father’s hotel to act as a messenger boy, but he’d get back to my accounts tonight, he promised.

  “I don’t think my calves are up to scaling Darraugh’s building again. Why do you have to leave so soon? We could rest in this cozy little bed together.”

  I picked up the bag and left the room without answering.

  48

  The Three Musketeers

  My fatigue pushed me into a deep sleep, but it was filled with tormented dreams. Sometimes I could hear Emily crying but couldn’t see her. I would follow her voice through the unlit water-laden tunnels without finding her. At other times, I was trapped in a steel coffin through whose walls I could see Fabian torturing his daughter while Conrad and Terry Finchley laughed at my immobility.

  When I finally came to, my mouth was thick and my arms felt as though someone had systematically pounded them with bricks. I gasped when I looked around, unable to recognize my surroundings, thinking for a moment I had plunged into the kind of nightmare where you think you’re awake but you’re not. After a few seconds my heart rate returned to normal: the scrupulously tidy room was Conrad’s. I laughed a little to myself—I’d have to tell him that when I wake up to clean surroundings I think I’m having a nightmare.

  His bedside clock read a little after five. I’d been out almost four hours. I could hear Conrad moving around in the living room. Wrapping myself in his terry-cloth bathrobe I went to join him. It turned out to be Camilla, settling herself in front of the television with a plate of chips and dip. When she saw me she switched off the sound.