Breakdown (37 page)

Salanter’s expression didn’t give anything away this time, but the glance he exchanged with Gabe told its own story. He opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off—I didn’t want to hear another evasion.

“So he had,” I said. “What had he found out? And was it something Arielle had hired him to look for?”

“How would she even know to look for a detective?”

“Oh, please, Mr. Salanter. Whatever went on in your life in Vilna all those years ago, you were no older than Arielle when it happened. She has your brains, your wits; even if PI’s weren’t all over TV, she’d find an investigator if she wanted one. The bigger questions are: What did Wuchnik find out about you? Who hired him to look? Why was he murdered near your granddaughter? And was it Mr. Eycks here who hoisted him up on that tomb and murdered him?”

“The implication being that I’d do anything Mr. Salanter commanded?” Gabe said. “I’m not a vassal; I get to say yes or no to anything asked of me, and I would certainly say no to murder.”

“What does this have to do with the attack on Arielle?” Wren Balfour demanded. “That’s what Mr. Salanter needs to know.”

“Oh, that. There’s a connection between the dead orderly, Xavier Jurgens, and the dead PI. There’s a connection between Jurgens’s partner, Jana Shatka, and Vilna. She knows something about Mr. Salanter’s past. So there’s a connection between Arielle’s kidnapping, Mr. Salanter’s past, the dead orderly, and the dead PI. You can fill in the blanks.” A yawn cracked my face in two as exhaustion swept over me.

“How do you know all this?” Salanter demanded.

“Sheer dogged work. Anyone who cares enough can follow the same paths I did. If Jana Shatka knew something about your past in Vilna, anyone can find it out.” I yawned again. “How is Arielle, by the way? Or is that information still classified?”

“It is not classified, merely so distressing that it’s hard to discuss,” Salanter said. “She will live, they are sure of that, but when she will become her bright quicksilver self again, that they cannot say. Her brain waves are returning to normal, but she still is confused and can’t speak coherently, let alone remember what happened. That’s why I’m here, hoping that you can tell me why she did what she did, going out in the middle of the night, presumably to that cemetery.”

“That part’s easy—she had a text message from a phone number in her database. What the message said we don’t know, but she thought it was from a friend. She sent Nia an e-mail about it, because their mothers had shut down texting between the two girls, but Nia didn’t look at her e-mail until this morning. The FBI was going to track down that text, come to think of it, find out who used the phone, what the phone message said.” I sat up, my fatigue dissipating as the implication of what I’d said struck me.

“Anything I can tell you about why Arielle went back to Mount Moriah cemetery you can learn from the FBI,” I said. “They might not tell me, if it was my granddaughter, but billionaires get caviar treatment from law enforcement. So you didn’t come on Arielle’s account: you’re here because you want to find out how much of Miles Wuchnik’s discoveries I’ve learned. That answer is easy, too: not much, but if Jana Shatka is the next person who turns up dead, I don’t think even being the world’s twenty-first wealthiest man will protect you from some serious police scrutiny.”

37.

PARANOID DELUSION?

A
FTER MY VISITORS LEFT,
I
WAS SO EXHAUSTED
I
COULD BARELY
stay upright. I was going to go straight to bed, then remembered the Dudek sisters. I staggered back down the stairs to Mr. Contreras’s place, too tired to bother putting my clothes in the dryer. I softly undid the bolts to my neighbor’s front door and tiptoed across the living room.

I could hear the old man’s snores through the closed door to his bedroom. Kira and Lucy were asleep, spoonlike, in the top of the bunk beds my neighbor had put in his dining room for his grandsons. Mitch was on duty at the bottom of the ladder; he thumped his tail in greeting but wouldn’t leave his post. That was reassuring.

Back upstairs in my own place, I collapsed into bed, just taking time to drop my gold dress on a chair. I fell instantly asleep, but it was into another night of tormenting dreams, where I was tracking Chaim Salanter through a maze. When I tried to peer through the hedges, the leaves and twigs turned into barbed wire. A death camp lay on the far side. I tried to run back to the entrance but found myself instead inside Ruhetal, where I wandered around the lobby, studying the photographs of the hospital’s founders. In their midst, I discovered Leydon, hanging crucified next to the social worker’s great-grandmother. Fire was bursting from her hands and feet.

When I woke at six-thirty, I was still tired, but it felt like a release to leave my bed. Peppy had stayed the night with me. She followed me down the stairs while I put my laundry into the dryer. We went back into Mr. Contreras’s place, where everyone was still asleep, including Petra, who’d crashed on the sagging sofa bed in the front room some time after I’d looked in last night. I dragged a reluctant Mitch to the lake with us.

When we got back, everyone was still sacked out. I looked resentfully at my cousin: she turned over when Mitch raced to lick her face but didn’t really wake up. I wished the gods had given me the gift of untroubled sleep but I refrained from taking out my resentment by shaking her awake. Instead, I scribbled a note, asking her to call me with updates during the day. I left the dogs on patrol and drove south to the University of Chicago, my clothes clean if unpressed, my gun in an ankle holster under my jeans.

My dream of Leydon’s crucifixion had been so vivid, I’d been scared she’d died in the night, but the ICU nurse assured me her condition was unchanged. That was the less-bad news; the bad news was that Leydon would have to be moved soon to a nursing home.

“Your brother says the family won’t pay for private care, so it will have to be a public-aid home,” the nurse said, as she helped drape me in protective gear. “But I thought your family had a lot of money.”

I’d forgotten saying that I was Leydon’s sister. “The Ashfords do, but I’m not a legitimate part of the family. Sewall has never liked Leydon, and he’s always been annoyed with her for staying close to me. I’ll talk to him and his wife, but I’m sure he won’t pay attention to anything I say.”

The nurse’s eyes widened. “I’m sorry—I wouldn’t have said anything—I didn’t mean—”

“How could you know?” I smiled and patted her shoulder with my latex-covered hand.

As I sat with Leydon, stroking her face where it showed through its protective bandaging, I told her what I’d just said. “Can’t you picture Sewall exploding if he finds out I let that nurse think I’m your illegitimate sister? But I will talk to him, or at least to Faith, darling, I’ll try to swallow my bile and be persuasive, because you sure don’t need to be warehoused in some rat-infested hellhole. Ruhetal has a staff that cared about your welfare, even if they’re underfunded, but a public-aid nursing home—not even Sewall can condemn you to that.”

Leydon’s blue eyes rolled sightlessly in her gaunt face. Her breath came in short, harsh pants. I blinked back my tears and brushed a strand of red-gold hair from her cheek.

“Oh, why can’t you wake up? Why couldn’t you just tell me on the phone why you wanted to talk to me? If you’d said two weeks ago what you saw in the locked wing, you wouldn’t be here now.”

I pressed my lips together: if the brain-damaged can hear what we say, Leydon would suffer from listening to my recriminations. “Sorry, girl, sorry. We do what we’re strong enough to do, I know that. But what did you see? Does Chaim Salanter have an illegitimate child who’s been warehoused there for unspeakable crimes? Talk to me, babe, talk to me straight, none of those riddles about huntresses and fires!”

The nurse came in to tell me my time was up. I walked slowly from the hospital across the quadrangles, to Rockefeller Chapel. A yoga class was happening in the chancel, but no one paid attention to me as I climbed to the balcony.

I sat for a long time, staring at the spot where Leydon had landed. I ignored incoming texts and calls from clients, just looking at the phone long enough to make sure they weren’t distress signals from Mr. Contreras or Petra.

If I was ever going to find out what had happened, I needed to get inside the locked wing at Ruhetal. I could go in as a lawyer but not without a client. It might be easier to climb the fence in the middle of the night.

“Are you all right?”

I jumped. I’d been so lost in thought I hadn’t heard the chapel dean come up the stairs. Maybe this was how Miles Wuchnik had been killed, by someone sidling up next to him. He’d been lost in thought, imagining his next blackmail target, when Gabe Eycks hit him over the head and hefted him onto the slab. Was that how Wuchnik had come to be at the site where the Carmilla club was meeting? Had Chaim, or Arielle, promised a payoff if he’d go to the cemetery, only to have the payoff be a spike through the chest?

The dean repeated his question.

“My mind is slipping; it keeps withdrawing from the present and sliding off to other places,” I said. “Not good. Detectives need to be aware of what’s around them.”

“That sounds like a very advanced spiritual practice.”

I made a face. “I think it’s the opposite—a quintessential animal wariness. Do you think Chaim Salanter could be cold enough to engineer a murder that he knew his granddaughter had a good chance of witnessing?”

“Chaim Salanter? Oh, the options magnate. The human heart is incalculable in its heights and depths. Even if I knew Mr. Salanter, I wouldn’t pretend to know what he could be capable of.” The dean spoke with a seriousness that robbed his words of pomposity. “By the way, did any of my suggestions about that verse from Second Samuel help?”

“The George Eliot link took me to the dead man’s sister down in Danville, where I learned he’d been an enterprising blackmailer, but she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me who her brother had been targeting.”

Brother and sister, in death they were not divided. Maybe it was husband and wife, maybe Jana Shatka and Xavier Jurgens—could Leydon have seen it that way? She would have met Xavier at Ruhetal; Jana might have shown up there, too.

I’d slipped away from the present again. The dean brought me back with a question about Leydon.

“The prognosis is very poor but not impossible. I need to know what she saw in the forensic wing at Ruhetal and no one will tell me.”

“Didn’t you used to be a criminal defense lawyer?”

“A million years ago. I couldn’t mount an effective courtroom defense today—I’m far too rusty.”

“I’m not suggesting that,” the dean said. “Look at the patient roster. Maybe one of your former clients is in there. It would give you a reason to talk to someone on the inside.”

I slapped my forehead with my palm. “You’re right—I’m an idiot. I should have thought of this yesterday. It’s been twenty years since I left the PD’s office, but I can still go into the DOC—Department of Corrections—database and see who at Ruhetal is there on an arson charge!”

I pushed myself to my feet. “Of course, Leydon was pretty hypergraphic her last week; maybe she left a note in her apartment. I didn’t really sort through the papers when I went there the first time.”

As I jogged back to my car, I thought of the landfill in Leydon’s condo. The idea of returning to it was so depressing that I decided to confront Leydon’s sister-in-law about her care instead.

Before driving north, I remembered Tyler. I’d been on the run all day yesterday and hadn’t taken the time to call her mother, but I couldn’t afford to let any more time go by. I was about to make the call from my cell phone but decided I’d better be prudent, in case anyone was listening to my calls. I drove around the area until I found one of the few remaining pay phones in the city.

Rhonda Shankman proved to be a breathless, skittish woman who giggled when she was nervous—as she was throughout our conversation. I explained who I was: Petra’s cousin, and a private investigator. Ms. Shankman giggled so hard at the thought of talking to a private eye that it was hard to get the conversation on track.

“How much did Tyler tell you about the night she spent away from home twelve days ago?”

“Why, why, just that she was with girls from Vina Fields who share her love of the
Carmilla
series. Is there something else? Something her father should know?”

“She didn’t tell you that the girls went to the cemetery where the vampire murder took place?”

“Oooh,” Rhonda shrieked, and then gave another nervous staccato of laughter. “Oh, do I have to tell Perry? He’ll be so angry!”

“This isn’t about whether your husband will lose his temper, Ms. Shankman, it’s about your daughter’s safety. It’s possible that she caught a glimpse of the person who murdered Miles Wuchnik. If the killer knows that, he may try to silence Tyler—he took a good shot yesterday at Arielle Zitter, the girl who organized the escapade in the cemetery.”

We went round in circles for several frustrating minutes, during which I kept feeding quarters into the phone. Finally, in exchange for my promise not to say anything to Perry Shankman, Rhonda agreed to call the Texas camp and tell them to deny Tyler’s presence there if anyone called asking for her. “Lots of famous people send their kids there; it’s why Perry chose it, so they’re used to having kids be there under fake names and stuff.”

I had to be satisfied with that arrangement, although I wished I had the time and the resources to fly to Texas myself. Not just to reassure myself about Tyler’s well-being but also to try to get a description from her of the vampire she’d seen.

I’d been so troubled by my nightmares that I hadn’t been able to eat this morning. For someone whose family motto is “Never skip a meal,” this seemed like part of a disturbing trend, two mornings in a row without breakfast. When I reached the far northern suburbs, I found a kind of a diner, a clinically clean space painted in perky pinks and golds, where I ordered a BLT and a bitter espresso. At least, I ordered an espresso—it just turned out to be poorly made.