Instead of the slide show I’d found on my previous visit to the site, the screen was blank except for the message “Out of respect for the dead, we have temporarily taken the site off-line.” I somehow had not expected so much sensitivity on Karen Buckley’s part. It forced me to think of her as less completely self-centered than she’d seemed.
I made myself a coffee and opened the report I’d ordered on Olympia, which had been sitting in my computer’s pending folder since the previous afternoon. The details of Olympia’s life were sketchy, as were her financials. She owned a loft apartment on the near North Side, in the stretch made newly hot by the destruction of the old Cabrini Green high-rises. She didn’t actually own it; she was paying a mortgage on it, as she was on a summer place near Michigan City. The debt on the two properties was around half a million.
Olympia didn’t own the building where she ran the club; that was held by a blind consortium managed through the Fort Dearborn Trust. I whistled through my teeth, trying to pick apart what I could of the club’s finances.
Olympia had been running Club Gouge for almost three years. Her background had been in restaurants and entertainment; she’d managed a restaurant at one of the metro-area casinos, then opened a nightclub of her own in west suburban Aurora. The Aurora Borealis proved so successful that she’d apparently decided she was ready for the big city. Three years ago, she’d sold her Aurora place and opened Club Gouge.
Olympia’s first two years at Club Gouge, even during the boom economy, had been disastrous. She’d run through almost a million dollars, maxed out her credit cards, and overdrawn her line of credit. And then, as the bottom fell out of the economy, just as everyone else in the country was losing their jobs and their homes, Olympia’s bills were wiped clean. There was no way of seeing who her godfather had been, but someone had put a million dollars in cash into her account.
Santa Claus. Rodney Claus. He was the person Olympia was trying to keep happy. He was the one she’d called her “insecurity.” But he wasn’t Olympia’s savior; he was the foot soldier sent to keep an eye on the investment.
Nadia had sought out the Body Artist because Buckley had known Allie. I couldn’t get away from that. But how had Nadia found out that her sister had known the Artist? If murder happened because of the Guaman family’s sensitivity over Allie’s sexuality, why was Nadia dead and not Karen Buckley?
I was making myself crazy with all these unprovable scenarios. It was close to five p.m. now. I’d planned on going home to walk the dogs and eat a bowl of pasta before meeting Murray, but I was too exhausted from my day in the snow. I called Mr. Contreras and asked him to let the dogs out. I was heading to the daybed in my back room, when my computer pinged to tell me one of my requested reports had arrived.
Alexandra Guaman. The file on her wasn’t very big, but when I opened it the first thing I saw was her high school yearbook picture. Her face, framed by curly dark hair, didn’t have a knife slash across the middle. Other than that, she looked like the portrait Nadia had drawn on the Body Artist’s back. That didn’t particularly startle me; I’d been expecting it. What jumped out at me was where she died. Alexandra Guaman had been working for a private security firm in Iraq. She’d been driving a truck on a supposedly safe route when an IED exploded and killed her.
18 And the Wheel Goes Round and Round
I printed out the files on Alexandra Guaman and took them with me into the back room to read while I stretched out on my daybed. An hour later when I came to, the pages were strewn across me and the floor like dead leaves.
I struggled upright, washing the sleep out of my eyes under Tessa’s shower, making myself coffee in our kitchenette. I had an hour before I had to meet Murray, and I was feeling so tense about my lack of headway that I wanted to get through as many documents as I could.
What I had on Alexandra Guaman didn’t tell me much. So many people have died in Iraq since we invaded that journalists now dump them all into a journalistic mass grave: fifteen killed in an explosion outside Basra, seven dead in a Baghdad market, thirty obliterated in a bombing run on Fallujah.
Alexandra’s bio was correspondingly slim: the oldest of the Guaman daughters, the first to attend St. Teresa of Avila Prep, followed by college at DePaul here in Chicago, a degree in communications, then a job at Tintrey, the big security contractor. Tintrey’s headquarters were in Chicago, or at least the suburbs, in the corporate corridor along the north leg of the Tri-State.
Alexandra had gone to Iraq for Tintrey four years ago. Tintrey had contracts for everything from over-the-road trucking to providing field first-aid kits. Alexandra’s job title, a level 8 employee in communications, could have meant anything: creating PR, monitoring computer networks, getting real-time information to field personnel.
Chicago’s Latino paper had an obituary, showing the smiling yearbook picture I was getting to know by heart. I squinted at the page, picking my way through the Spanish: the anguish of the parents, the long wait for news, the sad realization when Alexandra’s boss wrote a letter of condolence to the family: an IED had exploded when she was heroically driving a truck as part of a convoy to the Baghdad airport.
Nothing in the story, or in any of my skimpy reports, about her sex life. Or about the Body Artist. Maybe Alexandra had been a lesbian, but she’d been in Iraq at the same time as Chad Vishneski. It was her face on the Body Artist that roused him to fury.
Had she turned Chad down in Baghdad? Had an affair with him that she’d regretted? Or maybe Chad had attacked Alexandra. His service record was clean-certainly no assault charges-but that didn’t mean the two didn’t have a history together. And then when he saw her face pop up out of the blue, he’d gone after Nadia. I knew I was committed to Chad’s innocence, but these connections did not look innocent. Maybe Terry Finchley was right after all. Maybe Chad had doped his own beer out of guilt over murdering Nadia. If that was the case, though, who had broken into her apartment yesterday?
The ideas spun round and round, uselessly, like wheels unable to find traction in a snowbank. Frustrated, I looked up reports on Tintrey.
If I couldn’t find enough about Alexandra, I had the opposite problem with the company that took her to Iraq. I started with their website, which showed heroic warriors defending America from terrorists in the Middle East and Africa but also stressed that “Tintrey is more than just a group of highly skilled fighting men and women. We’re there when you need us… whether it’s at the PX or the RX.”
Tintrey provided base security, they had a division that produced protective gear, they built base housing, they bodyguarded visiting VIPs, and they helped staff the post exchanges.
The website flashed me through the PXs, which looked like giant shopping malls: electronics warehouses, clothes, fast-food restaurants, banks, even car dealerships. You might be twelve thousand miles from home, but you couldn’t escape McDonald’s or multiplexes. I was astonished. Somehow, when people talked about base PXs, I’d thought of small general stores, the kind they show in old Westerns. But if the U.S. needs to get everyone on board our far-flung military operations, of course ordinary vendors need a piece of the pie, too: it can’t all go to Lockheed Martin.
The news reports were more tempered and more mixed. As one of some hundred thirty private security contractors working in tandem with U.S. military bases, Tintrey had made their share of missteps: billing the Department of Defense for phantom supplies, building a bridge that collapsed the first time a tank rolled across it.
Everyone agreed, though, that Tintrey owner Jarvis MacLean had a classic rags-to-riches story. Or, at least, jeans-to-riches. The most enthusiastic report came from Wired Into: The North Shore, a webzine that covered news in the metro area.