Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (9 page)

When she told him she wanted to join the police, he'd been troubled, and asked her pointed questions about her motives. “Do you imagine yourself as some kind of resistance hero, infiltrating the police so you can read their covert files?”

It was their last serious argument, because she didn't want to admit how close he was to the truth. Grandpapa hadn't believed she could be a happy cop, but she'd actually taken to the work. Seven years on patrol and then she'd passed the exam to become a detective.

“Detective Anarchist!” Grandfather greeted her when she arrived this evening. “Still keeping order in an unorderable world?”

He didn't follow the news; he hadn't heard about Culver's death and she didn't tell him, just asked about his arthritis, about Mrs. Gelinsky and Mrs. Mannheim, who were competing for his attention, and about the cat, Bathsheba, who ruled the house in the absence of a human female.

“You hear from your brother?”

“Every day, Grandpapa. If you would learn to text, you'd hear from him, too.” Her brother Elliot was in Denmark, testing and repairing computer security at his firm's Copenhagen headquarters.

She went into the kitchen to make supper, knowing her grandfather wouldn't have bothered to cook a meal just for himself.

“And what's troubling you, little anarchist,” he asked when she'd put an omelet in front of him.

“Nothing. Why can't I stop by to make you supper just because I love you?”

He smiled. “I'm grateful, even if you're telling only a portion of the truth.”

“Omitting the truth, Grandpapa. How big a sin is that?”

He nodded: she had revealed the real reason for her visit. “The rabbis put a great deal of thought into that, and the answer is, it all depends. If you're protecting someone from harm, versus trying not to embarrass yourself, versus trying not to show off, versus not violating your own privacy—I would need much more information before I could give you an answer. Did you omit the truth in talking to someone? Or did you commit
g'neivat data,
theft of the mind, encourage someone to believe a falsehood?”

His omelet grew cold as he talked. By the end of the evening, Liz thought if she believed in Gd she'd be in even worse trouble than she was already, but she didn't say it out loud. Not that she had to—Grandpapa realized that when he put his hands on her forehead to bless her, before she left him to drive to her own place.

Whether Gd was angry with her, Liz couldn't say, but Lieutenant Finchley definitely was. When she arrived at Area Six the next morning, there was a note taped to the desk she shared with two other detectives:
Marchek, see me ASAP.
Cops usually texted each other; a written note sounded ominous.

The lieutenant sent the desk sergeant away and shut his door. “Why didn't you tell me as soon as you brought Adari into the station yesterday, Marchek?”

Liz stood with her hands clasped behind her, feet apart, as if she were at inspection. The pulse above the lieutenant's left eye was throbbing, a danger sign.

“I'm taking you off this case.”

“But, sir—”

“There is no ‘but, sir,' in this conversation. The victim photographed you going into the suspect's clinic. How did you expect to keep that a secret?”

“I didn't think my medical history was anyone's public business, sir. Not the victim's, and not my co-workers.”

“Your medical history is your business, Marchek, which is why I'm not posting this on the World Wide Web, but when any officer in my command has had prior contact with a suspect or a victim in an investigation, I hear about it first from that officer, not from someone in the Evidence Unit sifting through the victim's papers, unless you think you are V.I. Warshawski, able to operate outside standard systems with impunity. If we don't come up with a better lead in the next forty-eight hours, you and every patient Culver ever photographed will be a person of interest in this crime. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir.” Liz dug her fingernails into her palms to keep her voice from shaking.

“You will assist Sergeant Wrexall at the front desk and catch up on your paperwork backlog until I decide you're ready for the street again. Send Detective Billings in to see me when he arrives. You're dismissed.”

Liz wanted to know what the lieutenant was going to say to Oliver, but his manner was too forbidding for her to ask. She kept her head up, her shoulders back, as she walked to the front desk.
G'neivat daat,
theft of the mind, wasn't in the Illinois Criminal Code, but Lieutenant Finchley knew the punishment for it, anyway.

Fortunately, Sergeant Wrexall acted as though it was an ordinary event, detectives to be put on desk duty.

At nine-thirty, when her partner arrived, Wrexall said, “Billings, the looey wants to see you. Whatever you do, don't complain about hemorrhoids—he decided mine were hurting my job performance so he took your partner to help me out here.”

After five minutes with Finchley, Billings stalked to the front desk, his lips thin. “What did you tell Finchley about our investigation?”

“Nothing. He called me in this morning and told me I was riding a desk for now—what did
you
tell him about me?”

“That you're a useless rookie. He's putting Clevenger and Cormack in charge of Culver and asking me to assist—to be a third wheel! Oliver held out his thumb and forefinger a quarter inch apart, “I was this close to handing in my badge.”

Liz and Wrexall nodded sympathetically. Oliver's father, two uncles and grandfather had all been Chicago cops. He would never resign. Liz felt a flood of gratitude to the lieutenant wash through her. He'd protected her privacy; he hadn't outed her to Oliver Billings.

“Who is V.I. Warshawski, anyway?” she asked Wrexall when they were alone again. “The looey asked if I thought I was like her.”

“She's a PI. Gets on a lot of cops nerves because she takes risks and cuts corners we can't—and also because she has an annoying habit of popping up in high-profile cases and solving them.”

“Maybe she'll pop up and solve Culver's death,” Liz suggested.

Thirty-six hours passed with no viable leads, and no sign that V.I. Warshawski was going to pop up. In twelve hours, Lieutenant Finchley would turn the photographs from the Evidence Unit over to the investigating detectives. Liz would become a person of interest—one among however many thousand Culver had photographed at abortion clinics, but the one whose private history would become part of her partner's arsenal when he wanted to tear her down. Maybe even end her police career just as it was getting going.

If Liz had known Culver was taking her picture when she went into Adari's clinic, she might have killed him on the spot. If the looey hadn't threatened to make her private business public, Liz would have been happy to see Culver's murderer walk free, even if the Sixth Commandment didn't give you the option to choose who you did or didn't murder.

When Wrexall's shift ended, Finchley was still in the station. Liz went to her own desk, pretending to busy herself with cold-case files. Liz kept on working through the shift change. Finchley finally left for the day, with a grunt at Liz to let her know she was still on probation, but holding up well. Liz waited until she was sure the lieutenant had pulled out of the parking lot before going over to Oliver's desk and logging on to his computer. She could have accessed the Culver case from her own machine but she didn't want a trail following behind her.

Culver's password was easy—his star number plus the jersey numbers of his two favorite athletes. Liz loaded the case notes onto a flash drive, logged off, and was in her car before third shift roll call started.

She drove to an Internet café in one of the busy student neighborhoods. She even paid to park—no point in some meter maid reading her plates and noting that a cop had parked here. I'm a thief, she imagined herself telling Grandpapa, a thief of information who knows my guilt so thoroughly I'm trying to hide my tracks in someone else's computer. Even as she squirmed, she paid cash for time on a machine.

The Culver murder was important enough that plenty of people had written notes into the case file. The report from the crime lab: Culver had been killed by one of the sticks used in the posters the protestors had carried along Lake Shore Drive. Someone searching the crime scene had found the shattered pieces of wood covered with Culver's brains and blood, but they hadn't found usable prints or any DNA besides the victim's.

Oliver had entered his notes on the investigation Dr. Adari had started into Culver's life and finances. Adari hadn't discovered anything criminal, although Culver had been taking home close to a million dollars a year from his organization. Oliver had written, “Major motive here,” in the margin. Liz shook her head—that was a motive for Culver to kill Adari, not the other way around.

She trolled through blogs and social networks for a bit—sometimes killers made coy comments on websites, eager for recognition of how clever they'd been. The anti-abortion vitriol was so extreme across the Net—directed at Dr. Adari, who deserved to be in everyone's gun sights, according to many posts—that Liz stopped reading it.

She did find a number of photos of Culver, taken at the protest by his adoring supporters, and now posted as precious icons of his martyrdom. Some of the shots showed him with the four children who'd accompanied him to the march. The two boys were dressed in identical pale-blue blazers and ties, the girls in frilly white dresses with blue ribbons, despite the chilly weather.

When Liz had gone to the house two days ago, before Finchley took her off the case, the girls still had on the frilly dresses they'd worn to the march and the younger boy, Jimmy, was wearing his pale-blue blazer and a tie. Only the oldest boy had shed his formal clothes for a sweatshirt and jeans. Maybe that was the one place where he could vent a rebellious adolescent spirit. Liz thought of all her teenaged fights with Grandpapa—maybe it would have been better if her only rebellion had been to wear a sweatshirt to Temple.

The house had been spilling over with children—Arnie's eight, augmented by a dozen more belonging to the neighbors and in-laws who'd gathered to console the widow.

Liz had mouthed the conventional phrases to Culver's widow: sorry to disturb you, but if I could talk to the children who were with your husband this morning? She tried not to flinch from the crucifixes on the walls.

“I thought you'd made an arrest” one of the neighbors said. “One of the baby killers.”

Liz shook her head. “We're just gathering information. That's why anything the kids saw or heard could help.”

The women reluctantly brought forward the four who'd been with Arnie. Lucy, the oldest of the Culver children, sixteen, followed by Paul, fifteen, and Veronica and Jimmy, seven and eight.

“We take turns going with Dad,” Lucy said, when Liz asked why they'd been at the fundraiser with Arnie. “It was Paul's and my turn, and we're training the little ones, how to talk to ladies when they're about to go into death chambers, how to tell them not to kill their unborn babies.” Her voice was soft, matter-of-fact.

“Your teachers are okay with you missing school?” Liz asked.

“We're home-schooled, so the atheists can't force us to deny Christ crucified the way they do in school.”

The words seemed to be spoken by rote, auto-pilot. Liz wondered why the parents didn't send the children to Catholic school—there were more than enough to choose from—but she knew she shouldn't get into an argument with the children, or the mother.

“So two of you stayed at the harbor to hand out literature, and two of you went with your dad?”

“Jimmy and I, we were at the harbor. Paul and Nicki, Veronica, they went on down the path with Daddy. Daddy was checking on the pickets—our people get discouraged sometimes standing all alone. You can't believe the horrid things Christ haters shout out of their cars. One of our ladies was even crying. Nicki cheered her up, didn't you?”