“Oh, Chrissake, Troy, show her your badge.”
The first guy scowled but pulled out his ID. Troy Murano was with the Secret Service, not the FBI after all. In a spirit of generous reciprocity, I showed them my PI license.
Besides guarding the President, the Secret Service investigates large-scale fraud, but when I tried to ask Troy and his partner what they thought Kystarnik was up to, they told me to mind my own business.
“So why is a Chicago PI sniffing around him?” the partner asked.
“Just minding my own business,” I said in the spirit of reciprocity. I tucked my cell phone into my pocket before getting back into my car.
The utility truck didn’t follow me when I turned onto the main road. I pulled into another strip mall and shared my sandwich with the dogs, who were getting restless after spending several hours in the car.
If the Secret Service was tagging around after Kystarnik, they weren’t being too secretive about it-those security cameras dotting Kystarnik’s fence would have spotted the utility truck long ago. Maybe the feds were hoping to pressure him into a misstep. If he was laundering money, maybe they thought he’d reveal his bank accounts to their electronic scanners. Maybe I should have suggested they look at Club Gouge, but, for all I knew, they already had a lead on Rodney and the club. More than ever, I wanted to get my cousin out of the place.
I guess it had been instructive to drive up here, although it was hard to say what I’d gained besides seeing my tax dollars at work.
I turned to my voice mail, which had been beeping at me in some indignation. “You have eleven new messages,” it cried in my ear.
One of the calls was from Sanford Rieff at the Cheviot labs, saying he’d found something interesting. Since I was in their neck of the woods, I drove on west to Cheviot’s complex.
Rieff came out to the lobby to see me. “Vic! I don’t have anything so dramatic or definite that you needed to make a trip out here.”
“I was in the area,” I explained. “What’s up?”
“We’re still waiting for a report back from a national ballistics clearing center to see if the two guns are involved in any other shootings, but we’ve done an analysis of the beer cans. Mass spectrometry shows a high concentration of Rohypnol. Roofie, you probably call it. In beer like that-whoever drank it is probably very sick.”
Roofie. The date rape drug.
“He’s in a coma,” I said slowly. “Is there any way to tell if he put it in the beer himself?”
Rieff smiled. “That’s the interesting piece of your little puzzle. If this comes to court, it’s going to be tricky, very tricky. Lawyers and expert witnesses will battle for days, and defendants will watch their bank accounts vanish before their startled eyes.”
“Thanks, Sandy, but why?”
He led me back to his office and brought my report up on his computer screen so I could see the graphics.
“The fingerprints on the cans are odd, at least to Louis Arata, who’s our expert. If you pick up a can or a glass yourself, you press only one finger, usually the middle, full against it. Besides your thumb, of course. You touch the can with the tips of the other fingers. Here, face on, we have prints for all five fingers.”
He tapped the screen with a soft pointer to show me what he meant. “The can is clean except for those five fingers. Usually, you pick a can up, put it down, pick it up. Your prints soon overlay one another. I’m betting-or Louis Arata is betting-that a third party held the drinker’s fingers on the can. I’ll put it all in writing for you.”
I stared at the screen while Rieff rotated the image for me. Who would have gone to so much trouble to frame Chad Vishneski? Rodney and Olympia? Karen Buckley? Anton Kystarnik? And why? That was the even more urgent question.
I got up to go.
“I’d say this is pretty darn dramatic, Sandy. Guard those beer cans and so on in your deepest vault.”
Back in my car, I talked with Lotty’s clinic nurse, Jewel Kim, and told her about the Rohypnol. “Can you make sure that Lotty and her pet neurosurgeon know ASAP? I don’t know if it can help with Chad’s treatment this many days out, but that’s probably what put him in the coma.”
Jewel looked at Lotty’s notes on Chad. “She’s ordered a broad-spectrum search for drugs, but I will let her know that she can narrow it down to Rohypnol. Thanks, Vic.”
I stared out the windshield for a long time, thinking over Rieff’s report. I e-mailed the gist of it to Freeman Carter, and then, even though I knew Freeman would advise against it, I called Terry Finchley. He answered the line himself, but when I announced myself his voice grew cold. He was still angry, which prompted me to become super-perky.
“Guess where I am right now.”
“If you said sunning yourself on a Florida beach, now that would cheer me up.”
“Almost. I’m on the banks of the Skokie Lagoon. At the Cheviot labs, where they did some nifty forensic work on the beer cans that had been in Chad Vishneski’s bed. Guess what they found?”
“I’m not in the mood, V.I. Just tell me.”
“Roofies.”
“So the perp tried to off himself. Make my day.”
“The fingerprint analysis suggests a third party was present.”
The dogs had been cooped up in the car too long. They were whining at me, making it hard to hear Finchley. Cheviot’s building sat in a culde-sac that backed into one of the lagoons that dot the area. I let Mitch and Peppy out.
“Why are you doing this?” Finchley demanded.
“Doing what?”
“Trying to show me up over the Guaman homicide. I know you and I have had our differences, but-”
“Terry, I’ve always liked you, and I respect you as a cop. I’m not trying to show you up. If I were, I’d be giving my news to Murray Ryerson to broadcast wholesale instead of telling you.”
Mitch had found something to roll in. Peppy was barking at him, demanding her turn. I pretended I didn’t know them.
“I told you yesterday that Nadia Guaman’s and Chad Vishneski’s computers were both missing. This makes me think that one or both of them knew something a third party wants to keep hidden. I just learned there’s a story about Vishneski’s beer cans: not only did someone mix Rohypnol in his beer, they wiped the cans clean and then placed his fingers on them to make prints once he’d passed out.”
“You’d be hard-pressed to argue fingerprint pressure in court,” Finchley said.
“That may be true, although Freeman Carter has persuaded juries of more implausible things. But I don’t think we’ll get to a courtroom. I started this investigation prejudiced against my client’s son, but the more I learn, the more I think he was framed, poor stressed-out vet. Someone’s covering their tracks exceptionally well, but somewhere, somehow, they’re sure to have slipped up. When I find whatever mistake the real perp made, I’m counting on you to release Chad Vishneski. Assuming he’s still alive.”
“Oh, damn you, anyway, Warshawski.”
He cut the connection. The dogs had moved down to the lagoon. I trailed after them, stopping where they’d been rolling. A dead raccoon. When I’d persuaded them to get back in the car, I was annoyed with myself for my stupidity in letting them run free. They stank, and it was too cold to ride the Tollway with the windows open.
I drove along Dundee Road until I came to a groomer’s. I had to wait almost an hour until they could fit in Mitch and Peppy, but the wait allowed me to catch up on the rest of my calls. Even the expense of two shampoos beat wrestling the dogs into my own bathtub at home.
22 The Road to Kufah
I stopped at my apartment just long enough to leave the dogs with Mr. Contreras. At my office, I found a little pot of tulips heavily wrapped in newspaper on the doorstep and a note from the client.
We got Chad moved to Beth Israel, and now Mona’s sitting with him. I like your doc. She said to bring along some of his music to play when we can’t be there, so Mona’s got his iPod running and I’ll play my clarinet for him tonight. I guess you know what you’re doing.