Breakdown (33 page)

A message from Kira’s phone would show up on Arielle’s screen as a number she recognized. No, he must have blocked the number: I remembered Arielle’s e-mail to Nia,
one of our Ravens
, she’d said.
Very mysterious
. But he’d have to have signed it in a way that made Arielle believe it was from someone she knew. I imagined the message:
Meet me in the cemetery. Raven.

But why did the finder want to lure Arielle from home? And why had she slipped out once again in such a secretive way?

Perhaps the text read,
Meet me in the cemetery; I can tell you your grandfather’s secrets. Raven.

When I parked outside the cemetery’s padlocked gates, the clouds were thickening, swirling, and the wind was picking up. We hadn’t had a storm since the night I’d found the girls and Miles Wuchnik, and I’d forgotten to bring any rain gear with me.

The police tape had come undone from one of the posts and was trailing across the broken sidewalk. A cache of empties and the remains of some kind of carry-out food lay nearby—something about the crime-scene tape had attracted picnickers. I jogged up Leavitt to the gap in the fence we’d all used ten days ago and made my way to the Saloman family mausoleum as fast as I could in the failing light.

Police tape still festooned the pillars. I slipped under it. The tomb where Miles Wuchnik had lain still had his bloodstains on it, but it was empty. I picked my way through more empty Colt 45 bottles, more cigarette butts, and condoms on the mausoleum floor but couldn’t find anything that looked as though Arielle or her Raven had been here.

I’d been convinced I’d find something—afraid it would be Arielle’s body but sure there would be some trace of her. Now I was so disconcerted I didn’t know what to do next. As if to underscore my failure, a loud clap of thunder sounded; a moment later rain poured down in thick sheets.

I stood under the tomb’s small rotunda to call Special Agent Velpel, to tell her that all of the girls denied having been in touch with Arielle in the night. If Velpel had any news herself, she didn’t report it, just said she would call Petra to get the girls’ numbers.

I told her about Kira’s missing phone, and the possibility that someone who’d picked it up had used it to lure Arielle out of her home.

Velpel agreed it would be helpful to try to trace Kira’s phone—if it were still turned on—and the Bureau had the resources to do that. She even agreed that my theory was plausible, so I overlooked her reiteration that she needed to talk to Petra and the Malina girls herself. I didn’t tell her that I’d sent Kira and Lucy to my own place—I wasn’t comfortable with handing over a couple of girls who might be illegal to the Bureau. Even a soft interrogation could lead to their mother’s deportation.

The rain started blowing into the little mausoleum, soaking my legs. I might as well continue my search, if I was getting wet anyway. I went into the downpour and made a slow circuit of the clearing where the girls had been dancing.

The rain was beating the ground, digging up little pebbles and bits of glass, and it was impossible to tell if anyone had walked through here—or dragged an unconscious girl through here—recently. Lightning kept crackling, so close that the hairs rose on my arms several times. I knew that it was dangerous to stay here among the stones and the trees, but I was too frightened about Arielle’s fate to worry about my own safety.

By the time I finished exploring the area, my T-shirt was clinging to my wet torso. Not only was I having trouble thinking clearly, I was blinded by the rain dripping from my hair into my eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to leave the cemetery, though, until I had retraced the path the girls and I had taken after their Raven ritual.

The thunder had died to a faint growl and the rain had lightened to a mist by the time I reached the cemetery’s east wall. I found the place where I thought I’d sent the girls over and scrambled to the top, my running shoes slipping on the wet bricks.

I jumped down to Hamilton Street and continued my blind search of the grass and the gutter. And found myself looking at some Sportmax wire wheels, picked out in red trim. They were attached to a red Camaro, its paint shiny in the wet. The tinted windows were hard to see through in the rain, but I thought there was a body inside.

I had my picks with me, but it was no time for finesse. I pried two loose bricks from the wall. Used one as a hammer and the other as the nail and smashed the window. When I opened the door, I saw Xavier Jurgens in the driver’s seat, his head flopped against the steering wheel.

Jurgens had thrown up violently. The vomit had already begun to rot in the thick July air. The stench was so horrible that it was all I could do to make myself feel for a pulse. I didn’t find one, but the vomit was well mixed with alcohol; he might be alive at some minimal level.

The keys were still in the ignition. I’ll never know what impulse made me do it, but I pulled them out and opened the trunk. Wedged against the spare wheel, her head near the backseat pass-through, was Arielle Zitter.

33.

SUICIDE OR MURDER: TAKE YOUR PICK

A
RIELLE WAS GOING TO MAKE IT, ALTHOUGH
I
DIDN’T GET THAT
reassuring news from anyone on Schiller Street. When I realized the Salanter ménage, including Gabe Eycks, was on lockdown, not answering calls, I had tried the FBI’s Christa Velpel.

“How is Arielle?”

“Her condition isn’t something I can discuss with you.”

My eyebrows and temper went up at the same time. “Ms. Velpel, you and I both know you’re a truly skilled investigator because you told me that about a dozen times this morning. I’m just the bumbling private eye who found Arielle Zitter. Now I want to know if she’s going to  make it—she wasn’t in good shape when I bumbled my way to her location this morning.”

Somehow that approach didn’t make the fed feel more cooperative. It was Lotty who finally got me some news; she worked her network and found someone at the hospital where the EMTs had rushed Arielle.

“She was given a strong antipsychotic, in fact, some of the Abilify that you say was at the scene. She would have suffocated if she’d been in that car much longer. What kept her alive until you found her was that she’d vomited up a lot of the drug and miraculously hadn’t sucked it back into her lungs. They’re flooding her, trying to wash the rest of the Abilify out of her system.”

“Abilify?” I said. “Isn’t that some kind of antidepressant?”

“Oh, it’s one of those drugs that TV is begging doctors to prescribe,” Lotty said. “It does a lot of things, but it’s a powerful antipsychotic. It shouldn’t be handed out as if it were candy. Arielle had much too much of it for safety; it’s left her very confused. The neuropsychiatrist I spoke to says she can’t remember anything of the past twenty-four hours and is hazy on other matters, but he hopes that will clear up in another few days. You are a true heroine in this story, Victoria.”

“Not a heroine, Lotty, just incredibly lucky—I don’t even know what made me climb over that cemetery wall to find the car.”

The other piece of luck for Arielle had been that Xavier Jurgens started the night with a full tank of gas. The evidence techs who came to the Camaro told me Xavier had kept the car on, with the air-conditioning at full bore, until it ran out of gas on its own. Arielle had been lying in the stifling heat for only an hour or so before I found her.

Xavier Jurgens hadn’t been as lucky. He’d drunk too much vodka with his Abilify, and had been dead himself before his car died.

Evidence techs aren’t usually very chatty, especially not with private eyes like me, but one of the team had done his rookie partnership with my dad at the old Twelfth District. When Cosimo Draco connected my name to my father’s, he told me he was the luckiest graduate in his academy class, getting assigned to Tony Warshawski.

“He was a real teacher, and the steadiest guy in the district. If he’d been watch commander, the Twelfth would have been a different place. It was Tony who encouraged me to get the training to work crime scenes.”

In the wake of the morning thunderstorm, the sun had come out with a humidity-laden ferocity. My wet T-shirt and jeans dried to an unpleasant clamminess, and the stench from the car became unbearable. Draco kept talking, though, sharing his team’s findings, so I fought back my nausea and stayed close to the scene.

Jurgens’s cell phone was on the floor at his feet, splattered with vomit but still usable. Draco held it delicately by the corners, put it into an evidence bag, then showed me the text message that he was able to bring up on the screen.

I shouldn’t have done it, Jannie, any of it, Wuchnik or the kid. Sorry to screw up your life. I’ll always love you, xxx Xavier.

My brows went up. “When I saw Jurgens, he was swinging a butcher knife at me. And Jana, his ‘Jannie,’ was screaming the street down, calling her neighbors ‘whores’ and spitting nails. It’s hard to imagine them exchanging love notes.”

Draco shrugged. “People behave differently behind closed doors. And he was probably panicking, feeling the drug and not being able to do anything. Who was Wuchnik?”

“The vampire killing, Drake,” one of the other techs said.

“Oh. Guy was found here, wasn’t he? I didn’t work the scene, but Lurie here did, right, Lure?”

The youngest of the three-man crew nodded. “Yeah, and it turned out a bunch of girls were in here dancing in the rain while the guy was having a spike pounded through him. This sounds like a confession, don’t it—‘I shouldn’t have done Wuchnik.’ Why’d he snatch the girl, though?”

“She was one of the crew dancing in the rain,” I said, “but if he was planning on killing himself, why would he bother with her?”

“Maybe he wanted to blame her for his troubles,” Draco said. “Her grandpa is the rich guy, right? If he blamed the rich for his troubles, he wouldn’t be the first, but that’s for the detectives to sort out.”

I wasn’t convinced, but there was no point in arguing with the tech team. “Arielle left home because of a text message she got, we know that much. Can you see what other texts he sent?”

Draco pulled the phone back out of the evidence locker and scrolled up through the plastic. “He didn’t write to the kid, at least not last night. In fact, he doesn’t look like much of a texter. There’s not a lot else on here for yesterday.”

“Did you find another cell phone on him?”

The youngest tech said they only found Jurgens’s personal phone. “We went through his pockets; we found the bottle he’d taken away from the Ruhetal pharmacy—it’s labeled ‘Abilify’—and his house keys, a wallet, but we didn’t find a second phone. You think there should be another one?”

“One of the girls had lost her phone here at the cemetery ten days ago; I was sure the killer found it and used it to lure Arielle here.”

“Theories are for the detectives,” Draco repeated. “We, thank God, get to deal in facts. But bear in mind, kids lie all the time if they think they’re in trouble. I’d wait to see what they say to a skilled interrogator.”

Ah, these mythical interrogators with their highly honed skills. If the detectives talked to the Ravens—the loser crybabies, as Nia had called two Vina Fields girls in one of her e-mails—the police might learn what codes or language the Carmilla club members used with one another. But what could the girls tell even the most skilled interrogator about Xavier Jurgens or Miles Wuchnik?

If the two men’s connection was simply a drug ring operating out of Ruhetal, the Ravens wouldn’t know anything about it. Not that tween girls can’t be users or dealers, but none of the Ravens had shown signs of that: the only needles they used were the ones they pricked their palms with to become shape-shifters.

But if my little brain flash about Wuchnik being a “genie” in Nia and Arielle’s minds because he was connected to Arielle’s genealogy search was on target, then Nia might well know more than she’d told me this morning. And if the feds or the local cops talked to Nia, the story would be all over the broadband waves in a trice. Leaks sprouted from the Wuchnik interrogation faster than holes in the sides of the
Titanic.

I could imagine Wade Lawlor and Helen Kendrick’s innuendo-laden scripts.
I don’t know about you, but my kids are home after curfew. What is it about the billionaire Salanter family and “we’re all apes” Durango that lets them think their kids are special and don’t have to play by the same rules as ours?
Or words to that effect.

“I wish I knew what had happened to the kid’s phone,” I said to the techs. “It has the evidence of who sent her the text message that brought her here last night. And then—I don’t know. I can’t imagine Jurgens being that subtle.”

“For the third time, Warshawski, we don’t do theories,” Draco said. “Anything could have happened to the girl’s phone—kids lose them all the time. I know mine do—it’s like the phone is the beating heart that keeps them alive, only they leave it at the mall or at a friend’s or drop it when they get out of the car.”

“You’re imagining this like some kind of TV show, but criminals don’t act like that most of the time.” The youngest tech stopped in the middle of repacking his equipment bag to look at me. “The detectives will decide, of course, but your guy Xavier was just flailing around. He drugs the girl, gets her into his car, starts to write a ransom note, and then realizes how high the odds against him are. So he mixes the drug into his booze, knocks it back, and drifts off to Jesus.”

“Or whoever,” Draco said. “I’ve got everything photographed. Lunchtime, boys.”

What do you eat after spending a couple of hours inhaling vodka-laced vomit? For me, a tall cold one. Water, not beer. I took the long way back to my car, and was lucky to find a street vendor hawking bottles of water at Augusta and Leavitt. I bought two and sat on the curb drinking, trying to make sense of the things I’d seen and heard since leaving my own home a century or so ago.

The evidence techs were willing to label this a kidnapping gone wrong. And who was I to say they weren’t right? You could interpret Jurgens’s farewell message to his true love as a confession that he’d killed Miles Wuchnik, and then killed himself. End of story, sort of.