Sara Paretsky - V.I. Warshawski 08 (46 page)

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.

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 finger 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. “Iam 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.”