Bobby glared at me and let Schorr take over the questions. We rehashed Geraldine Graham’s interest in her old home. We rehashed the fact that the kitchen door was open.
“You say,” Derek Hatfield put in. “I’ve worked with Warshawski before. She skirts the law; I’ve never proved it, but she’s not above breaking and entering.”
“This DuPage gorilla here-excuse me, this lieutenant-searched me. Thoroughly enough for a sexual misconduct claim. Ask him if he found any tools on me.”
“You were there alone for God knows how long,” Schorr shouted. “You had plenty of time to hide any picklocks.”
I raised my brows in exaggerated disbelief. “You didn’t search that mansion from top to bottom? And all the time thinking you had a terrorist cell hanging out there? On less evidence than an Arab-English dictionary, the government just took apart my home without a warrant.”
“This isn’t Comedy Central,” the U.S. attorney said. “Those of us at this table are trying to protect our country.”
“Well, I’ll sleep easier at night knowing you’ve inspected my bras,” I said bitterly. “What did Renee Bayard say about the books in the attic?”
“The Bayards and the Grahams are old friends. Ms. Bayard thinks her husband might have lent them to Mr. Darraugh Graham when Mr. Graham was a boy,” the DuPage attorney said. “Of course, with her
granddaughter in the hospital she was too distracted to give the matter serious attention.”
“So the Bill of Rights still operates for wealthy voters,” I said. “That’s reassuring. You do know why her granddaughter is in the hospital, right?” “Because of an unfortunate accident.” The DuPage attorney clipped off the words. “Why didn’t you wait in the house to answer Lieutenant Schorr’s questions last night? Jumping out the bathroom window-it makes us think you had some reason to run away to take such a risky exit.” “I would have preferred a door myself, but the lieutenant made the estate’s lawyer lock me in.”
“You could have waited until Schorr talked to you,” Jack or Orville persisted.
“I was tired-I’d been dragging the pond-it was freezing in the house. I wanted to get some sleep. When Schorr’s deputies shot Catherine Bayard, he was too busy to remember me. So I left.”
“But you didn’t go home.” The Cook County attorney spoke up. “No,” I agreed. “I believe a safe driver is one who knows when she’s too tired to control a vehicle. I checked into a motel.”
The lanky woman nodded: they’d cared enough to find the place I’d stayed. They clearly didn’t know I’d left my Mustang behind the shrubbery, or someone would have been all over me for that. The Cook County attorney pressed the attack. “You weren’t in the motel when the maid went in to clean at noon. What were you doing today between noon and eight o’clock?”
“Is there reason you need to know that?” I asked. “If there is, I’ll be happy to tell you, but I can’t imagine why my movements are of interest to Cook County or DuPage, or, most especially, the Department of Justice.”
“America is at war,” the U.S. attorney reiterated. “If you aided a terrorist in escaping, you can be charged with aiding our enemies.”
I suddenly felt very tired. I spread my hands on the table and studied my fingers while the silence grew.
“Well,” the U.S. attorney prodded.
“It’s not well,” I said. “None of it is well. We’re not at war, for one thing. Only Congress can declare war, which they haven’t done-unless it happened while we’ve been sitting here.”
“You know damn well what he means,” Derek said. “Do you think it’s a joke, what happened in New York, what our troops are doing in Afghanistan or the Persian Gulf?”
I looked up at him. “I think this is the most serious thing that has happened in my lifetime. Not just the Trade Center, but the fear we’ve unleashed on ourselves since, so we can say that the Bill of Rights doesn’t matter any more. My lover is in Afghanistan. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive, I haven’t heard from him in almost a week. If he’s dead, my heart will break, but if the Bill of Rights is dead my life, my faith in America, will break. If I had found a terrorist in the Larchmont mansion, I would have done my best to deliver him to you, Derek-and hoped you’d pay more attention to me than your colleagues in Minnesota or Arizona did to similar warnings. But I didn’t see any signs of a violent criminal. Did you? Were those Arabic books manuals on bombs, or did they contain diagrams of important U.S. targets? I assume you’re finding that out.”
I turned to the DuPage attorney. “Meanwhile, the net gain for the night was that Schorr’s Arab-hunting tigers shot a local teenager. I had nothing to do with that, and I don’t think my hanging around Larchmont while Schorr figured out what spin to put on that catastrophe would have been at all helpful.”
No one said anything for a minute or two. I shifted in my chair, stretching my neck and shoulders.
“We need to reopen the investigation into Whitby’s death. I don’t believe in coincidences, a suspect hiding in a house, a man dead outside the house, those two have to be connected.” Bobby spoke with the authority of his forty years on the force. He looked at the DuPage attorney. “Orville, can you get your pathologist to do a full autopsy, including a tox screen on Marcus Whitby?”
“We released the body to the family yesterday,” Orville said. “I’ll see if they’ve taken it back to Atlanta.”
Bobby rubbed his balding temples. “I hope to Christ they haven’t: I don’t want to deal with an exhumation. Or with one more jurisdiction than the three already involved.”
I didn’t reveal that Bryant Vishnikov had already started a private
autopsy: I was hoping Bryant could finish and give me the results before the law found out he had the body.
“We can expedite that if necessary,” the U.S. attorney said. “Meanwhile, what about Warshawski here? We never got an account of how she spent those missing hours. Is she capable of hiding a wanted man?”
“You searched my home,” I protested. “I’ll be glad to take you to my office if we’re done here. You can look in the trunk of my car.”
“We had someone at your office this afternoon,” Derek said. “And we’re checking with your friends.”
I tried to control the rising tide of fury in me. “Did you bastards help yourself to my Rolodex? Did you take files? Where the hell do you get off, harassing a citizen without probable cause.”
“We don’t need probable cause,” the U.S. attorney snapped. “We have you and a suspect both missing from the same house on the same night. Like the captain said, no coincidences here. You might have thought he was an innocent kid and given him a boost out the window with you. But now that you know he’s a wanted man, we expect you to cooperate.”
“I am cooperating,” I shouted, leaning across the table. “Vicki, watch yourself,” Bobby warned me.
I shut my eyes and took a breath, counting backward from ten in Italian as I exhaled. “I am cooperating,” I said in a calmer voice. “Now you guys give some back. What’s he done? How do we know he’s a terrorist? Tell me that and I’ll get more excited about your questions.”
Derek and the U.S. attorney exchanged glances; the attorney spoke. “He stayed on in this country without a visa, and without a sponsor, after his uncle died. He goes to an Uptown mosque where they preach some pretty radical rhetoric. And he went underground when we tried to bring him in for questioning.”
I asked him to expand on the radical rhetoric, or what they’d found in the room Benjamin had rented with a Pakistani family after his uncle died, but they refused to provide more detaiclass="underline" they knew what they knew.
“I see,” I said. Really, though, I didn’t see-anything. It didn’t sound like a catalog of evil, but I didn’t know what “radical rhetoric” covered. Death to Israel? Death to America? Death to abortion providers? Radical or patriotic, depending on your viewpoint. If Benji advocated all three, then I’d have to rethink covering up for him. But I’d wait for Father Lou to finish interrogating him before I turned him over to these guys. My own judgment might be at fault, but I sure didn’t trust any of the people at the table more.