It was an appealing thought, but I didn’t have enough information to put any questions to him. Fly the Flag was connected to By-Smart because they were manufacturing for the behemoth, first flags and now sheets. I wondered if Buffalo Bill paid enough attention to small details to look at sheets or if that was something that Jacqui handled. I could talk to Jacqui, anyway.
Billy the Kid was connected to Bron and Marcena because he had given Bron his cell phone, and Morrell’s flask, which Marcena was using, had been in Billy’s car. Billy was connected to Fly the Flag because he was dating Josie. Had run away with Josie. I hoped. I hoped she was with him and not-I shut my mind: I didn’t want to imagine the horrible alternatives.
Where were those two kids? Maybe Josie had confided in April. I picked up my phone to call Sandra Czernin and then decided it would be easier to talk to her in person, especially if I wanted to speak to her daughter. I owed her a courtesy visit, anyway, since I’d been the person who found her dead husband. And I wanted to talk to Pastor Andrés. It was time for him to answer a few direct questions. Like, was that chavo connected to the fire? And where did he hang out? I’d round out my afternoon in South Chicago with a visit to Patrick Grobian-Billy had had a meeting with the warehouse manager sometime just before he disappeared.
I put my labeled files into a drawer and collected what I needed for an afternoon in the cold. I was wearing a parka, bulkier and much less chic than my navy coat, but maybe better for standing on a street corner on a cold day. This time, I remembered gloves, or, rather, mittens: my fingers were still so sore and swollen from Tuesday night’s escapade that I couldn’t work my gloves over them. If I needed to use my gun, I’d be in trouble. I took it with me, though: whoever had attacked Bron and Marcena had a scary imagination. Binoculars, phone book, peanut butter sandwiches, a flask of coffee. What else did I need? A new battery for my flashlight, which Mr. Contreras had left in my car, and my picklocks.
I’d told Morrell I’d be doing desk work today; I thought about calling to say I’d changed my mind, but I didn’t want to go into a long discussion of what I felt fit enough to do. If I were truthful, I’d have to admit that twenty-four hours in the hospital hadn’t been enough for me to feel fully recuperated. And if I were smart, I’d go home and rest until I did feel fit enough again. I hoped this didn’t mean I was dishonest and stupid.
“It’s a long and dusty road. / It’s a hard and heavy load,” I sang to myself as I picked up the southbound expressway. I was getting very tired of this route, the leaden sky, the dirty buildings, the endless traffic, and then, after the eastbound cutoff from the Ryan, the ruined neighborhood that used to be my home.
The exit at 103rd goes right by the golf course where Mitch had found Marcena and Bron. I stopped briefly to look at it, wondering why their attackers had chosen this spot. I took a side road south and looked at the entrance to the course. Enormous gates were padlocked for the winter. The gates were pretty solid, attached to a razor-wire fence that wouldn’t be easy to scale, or even climb under.
I slowly drove back to 103rd, inspecting the fence for access, but the razor wire had been rolled out with a lavish hand. The side road wound past a police pound, the graveyard for a thousand cars. Many were wrecks, twisted hunks of metal that had been scraped off the Dan Ryan Expressway, although some seemed to be whole cars that had been parked in tow zones. While I watched, a little fleet of the city’s blue tow trucks trundled in, pulling cars behind them, like a team of ants carrying food to their queen. Empty trucks were leaving, going off to forage in the countryside. I wondered if Billy’s little Miata was in there now or if the family had collected it.
On beyond the pound, razor wire continued to divide road from the marsh. I parked on the verge at the spot where Mitch had left the road for the swamp. The fence was still down there, and you could still see a faint wheel track through the gray-brown grasses.
I didn’t understand why their assailants had taken Bron and Marcena through the marsh and then dumped them at the edge of the golf course. If you were going to break down the fence, why not just leave the bodies in the marsh itself, where rats and mud would obliterate the flesh fast enough. Why take them to a pit on the edge of a tony golf course, where someone might stumble on them at any moment? Even at this time of year, there were groundskeepers wandering around. And why go into the marsh at all-it took so much work. Why not just come up Stony Island from the south and drop them in the garbage dump?
I got back in my car, unsatisfied with the whole setup. As I put the car in gear, my cell phone rang. I looked at the readout: Morrell. I felt guilty, being caught out far from my office, and almost let his call go through to voice mail.
“Vic, are you on your way home? I just tried your office.”
“I’m in South Chicago,” I confessed.
“I thought you were staying close to home today.”
He sounded resentful, which is so out of character for him that my own visceral anger at being monitored didn’t kick in. I asked what the problem was.
“The most outrageous thing-someone broke into my place and stole Marcena’s computer.”
“What-when?” A By-Smart eighteen-wheeler honked furiously as I stepped on the brakes and pulled onto the verge.
“Sometime between five this morning, when I left to go down to the hospital, and now, I mean ninety minutes ago, when I got home. I lay down on the couch to rest for half an hour, then went into the back to get things organized for Rawlings’s detective. That’s when I found someone had been through my papers like a wind machine.”
“How do you know they took Marcena’s computer? Wouldn’t she have had it with her?”
“She’d left it on the kitchen counter. I put it by her bed when I was straightening up Sunday night. It’s gone now, along with my jump drives. As far as I can tell, nothing else is missing.”
His jump drives, the little key-sized gizmos he uses to back up his data, which he does every night, storing the neatly labeled drives in a box on his desktop.
“They didn’t take your computer?”
“I had it with me when I went to the hospital-I thought I might write a little while I was sitting with you-not that I did, but it turned out to be a good thing, since it saved my machine.”
I asked about his other electronics. His fancy sound system was intact, along with the TV and DVD player.
He’d called the Evanston police as soon as he discovered the loss, but, from the sound of it, they’d only gone through the motions, figuring drug addicts were responsible. “But my place hadn’t been broken into. I mean, whoever did this came in through the front door with a key, and those are very good locks. Which doesn’t sound like an addict, and, anyway, an addict would have taken the portables, like the DVD.”
“So someone with sophisticated skills wanted Marcena’s files, and those only, and doesn’t care that you know it,” I said slowly.
Morrell said, “I called Rawlings, and he swears it wasn’t the Chicago police. Should I believe him?”
“This isn’t like him,” I said, “and if he swears he didn’t do it-I don’t know. He’s a cop, and we live in such a screwed-up world these days that it’s hard to know who to trust. But he’s a fundamentally good person; I want to believe he wouldn’t do it, or wouldn’t lie if he had. Do you want me to come up to canvass the neighbors?”
“I hadn’t even thought of doing that, which just shows this has knocked me off balance. No, you go on doing what you’re doing; I’ll feel less impotent if I talk to my neighbors myself. And then I’m going to buy some new jump drives and work in the university library where no one can mug me for my machine. What did you say you were doing?”