It wasn’t until I’d driven three blocks that I realized I had company. After the fire bombs, after the trashing of my home and office, after Petra’s disappearance, I should be taking triple precautions, making sure no one had planted bugs or bombs in my car before climbing into it, riding around the block two or three times to make sure I was clean before I went anywhere. It was only this sixth sense I’d gotten from all my years in the business that made me note that the bike messenger, the same one who’d been riding behind me on my way over to Petra’s, was in my side mirror again.

A bike was a great way to do a tail within the city. Any maneuver I made, he could react faster to than a car. Of course, he couldn’t follow me onto Lake Shore Drive. But anyone smart enough to use a messenger as a tail had a car or two as backup.

I pretended I hadn’t noticed him and got onto the drive. I didn’t bother to check for tails. If they wanted me to know, they’d reveal themselves. If they didn’t, my best strategy was not to try to flush them out now.

I pulled off at the first downtown exit, and stopped at the second hotel I came to. I turned my car over to the valet, explained I was going to a meeting and that I wasn’t a guest, and went inside.

There’s a network of underground passages that connect the hotels and high-rises on the east side of the Loop. I took the lobby escalator down, slipped behind a pillar, and knelt down. I didn’t see anyone behind me, but I still took off my Scarlett O’Hara hat and left it behind a potted palm. It just made me too damned easy to track.

I waited until a group of women all came down together, laughing and talking, and moved just in front of them so that we all seemed to be walking along the underground corridor together. They peeled off at one of the subterranean take-out joints.

I darted into a neighboring gift shop, where I bought a Cubs cap. Going up and down escalators, buying a frozen yogurt, I didn’t see the same face twice. I bought a red CHICAGO sweatshirt at another gift shop and pulled it on over my linen jacket. Although the weight of the sweatshirt on a hot day made me feel as though I were encased in a burka, I wasn’t instantly recognizable.

Still underground, I finally headed to my original destination: the Illinois Central station. There was a twenty-minute wait for the next train to South Chicago. I bought a ticket and stood near the door leading to the tracks. When they called my train, I waited until the last possible moment before sliding through the doors and down the stairs. I thought I was clean, but you never know.

The slow ride to South Chicago was like a backward journey through my life, the ride I’d taken with my mother so many times as a child, past the University of Chicago, where my mother had wanted me to study. “The best, Victoria. You need to have the best,” she would say when the train stopped there to let off students.

Ninety-first Street. End of the line. A certain desolation attached to the conductor’s announcement. Life ends here. I walked the four blocks from the station to my old home.

At least Señora Andarra’s grandson and his friends weren’t visible this morning, but a couple of helpless-looking men were sitting on a curb with a bottle in a brown paper bag. Somewhere, a car stereo was pouring out a bass so loudly that the air was vibrating from it.

At my old home, I saw the boarded-over window that had been broken to throw in the smoke bomb. The prisms across the top were splintered, too. I concentrated instead on the decorative-glass fanlight over the front door, which was still intact.

I rang the bell. After a few minutes, when I wondered if she’d gone out, Señora Andarra opened it the length of its stubby chain. “Esta ventana,” I stumbled in my bad Spanish, pointing at the fan. “Mi madre amó esta ventana también.”

The fact that my mother also loved that window didn’t make Señora Andarra smile, but it did keep her from slamming the door in my face. Using painful pidgin Spanish interlaced with English and Italian, I tried to explain that I was a detective, that I had photographs. Could she look at them, let me know if any of the people in them had been at her house when the bomb came through the window?

The whole time I spoke, she stared at me through the crack in the door, her dark eyes frowning in her nut-colored face. When I finally stumbled to an end of my story, she took the folder from me. As I’d feared, she singled Petra out with no trouble.

“¿Su hija?” she asked.

I was tired of everyone thinking Petra was my daughter, so I dutifully explained she was my cousin. “Mi prima. ¿Y los hombres?”

I thought she lingered on the shot of Alito with Strangwell, but I couldn’t be sure. She finally shook her head, and said she didn’t know any of them, hadn’t seen any of them. I walked back to the station and waited for the northbound train to whisk me back to civilization, or whatever it was.

34

ON THE TRAIN NORTH, I CALLED CONRAD RAWLINGS AT the Fourth District. Of course, I should have gone to see him before visiting Señora Andarra, but I didn’t feel I had spare time for getting police permission to talk to people in my cousin’s orbit.

Conrad was predictably annoyed, but he’d seen the news about Petra; he was more interested in finding out why she’d been at a crime scene in his bailiwick than yainching at me for not calling him first.

“Is there anyone else you can place at the crime scene that you might care to mention? Not that we cops can compel testimony. The laws keep us from getting answers to questions that might help solve crimes. But if you’re in the mood…”

I ignored the savagery in his tone. “I showed Ms. Andarra a shot of Larry Alito with Les Strangwell, but they didn’t look familiar to her.”

“Spell the names.”

I could hear him tapping at his computer.

“Any special reason you think a cop and a politico-a big Gorgon zola politico, from what Google is telling me-would be involved in a two-bit home invasion?”

“Alito’s an ex-cop, and he’s sniffing around this story somewhere, somehow. Strangwell is my cousin’s boss at the Krumas campaign.”

“And that’s reason enough to suspect he’s a villain, because anyone who tries to boss the Warshawski women around must be a criminal?”

“I can’t talk about this now. Not with you hostile and me out of my head with worry.” I pressed the OFF button.

A detective who’s out of her head with worry is useless. I slipped off my shoes and pulled my feet up to sit cross-legged on the seat. Took deep, low breaths, tried to empty my mind of fear, to fill it with a useful to-do list.

The police and FBI had both canvassed the street where I have my office, to see if anyone could describe the men who’d been with Petra, or at least the car they’d driven-if they’d come by car. Naturally, they wouldn’t share the results with me. I didn’t want to retrace all those steps, not on my own: there must be several hundred people in that section of Milwaukee, between the businesses and the apartments. But I could talk to Elton Grainger. I couldn’t remember whether I’d seen him yesterday or not. He was usually at the coffee bar across the street during the day. If he hadn’t been too drunk, he might remember seeing Petra with her entourage.

Petra’s college roommate, Kelsey Ingalls. My aunt wouldn’t give me her phone number, but Kelsey was the person Petra might have confided in. I could surely find her in one of my subscription databases.

Those two tasks meant I should go to my office, but when the train pulled into the Randolph Street station I realized I was underneath the building where the Krumas campaign had its headquarters. Maybe Petra had confided in one of her coworkers. Maybe Les Strangwell would tell me what she’d been working on. What was it Johnny’s daughter had said? Enough “maybes” make a hive.