At first he put up a spirited defense of her youth and impulsiveness, but by the time I got to her late-night trip to the Freedom Center even Mr. Contreras was uneasy. “But, doll, if she was doing something she shouldn’ta been, it was because she was pushed into it. You listen to me. She’s as good as gold, little Peewee, and don’t you go thinking otherwise. When you get to the end of this story, you’re going to find Johnny Merton was behind it. Mark my words.”
“Let’s find her first and argue over who got her in over her head later, right?”
He agreed gruffly, and watched while I printed out a couple of shots I’d taken of Petra on my cellphone. I also printed random pictures off the Web of young blond women: some celebrities, some pictures that people had posted on their blogs, finishing with a few shots of myself.
I uploaded the photo I’d snapped of Alito and Strangwell at the Prudential Plaza the other day. It wasn’t a very clear shot, but it was the only one I could find of Alito. Strangwell was highly visible. His website showed him with various Illinois politicos, with U.S. presidents and a Supreme Court justice, and with entertainers like Michael Jordan. I guess if you were coming to Strangwell for help, the portraits showed you what kind of access a thousand dollars an hour bought you. I printed a couple of those images, and pulled one of Dornick from the Mountain Hawk Security website as well.
The old man finally left when I went into the bathroom to get ready for my day outside. As I covered my face and arms with protective creams, it seemed somehow wrong to be tending to my body when my cousin’s life might be in danger. I put on my hat, my gloves, checked the clip in my gun and put it in its tuck holster, and went out the back door.
Jake Thibaut was on his little porch with a cup of coffee. “That’s a fetching costume. You going undercover on a Civil War plantation?”
I tried to smile but found my voice cracking instead. “It’s because of the fire. Because of… Sorry, my cousin has vanished in a way that has me pretty freaked. I’ve got to go, see what I can find out.”
He walked down the five steps to our common landing. “You need any kind of help from me? You know, anything that doesn’t involve a handgun or some kind of physical heroism?”
I started to say no, then remembered that Thibaut had seen the people who broke into my apartment as they left early Tuesday morning. I pulled my folder of photographs from my briefcase and showed them to him.
“I know it was dark, and these aren’t great shots, but could any of these guys be the ones you saw?”
“It’s impossible to say.” He tapped the picture of Alito and Strangwell. “They’re sitting, so I can’t tell how tall they are. This one”-he was touching Alito-“he’s broad enough, but… I’d have to see them walking. I measure people’s height against Bessie. My bass,” he added when he saw my puzzled look.
I put the pictures back in the folder. As I started down the stairs, Thibaut said, “They looked menacing. Remember that.”
I nodded soberly. Menacing didn’t even begin to cover the way these people had acted.
I went out the back gate and picked up my car in the alley. In the frenzy we’d all been in since last night, no one had talked about seeing if Petra were at home, doped or… or not dead. I was going to make her apartment my first port of call, then head to South Chicago.
I hadn’t had time to replace the lump of melted plastic in my wallet with a new driver’s license, and I didn’t want to waste an hour explaining that to a traffic cop, so for the few miles that lay between me and Petra’s loft I stayed within the thirty-mile-per-hour limit, stopped at all stop signs, and even braked when the light turned yellow.
My picklocks were still in my glove compartment. I rang Petra’s bell, but there was no answer, even though I leaned on it for a good thirty seconds. I didn’t want to be seen using my picks in broad daylight, so I got inside on the tried-and-true method of ringing every bell in the building. There is usually someone careless enough to buzz you in, and I was lucky with the third bell I pushed.
I took the stairs up to the fourth floor two at a time. By the time I reached Petra’s door, I had a stitch in my side where my gun was poking me. The woman who’d buzzed me in was shouting up the stairwell. I tried to steady my voice when I called down an apology, I’d rung the wrong door. The voice of an educated white woman was reassuring to her, and she called back an acknowledgment. I heard her door close, and I knelt to work Petra’s lock.
My hands were shaking. I was slow, exhaustingly slow, and my cotton gloves kept slipping on the picks. I took off the stupid gloves but still felt like I was stirring molasses with my fingers.
When I finally got inside, the apartment had a churchlike quiet. A tap was dripping somewhere. That ping of water on enamel was all I could hear. I found myself tiptoeing through the big room that made up the bulk of the loft, looking for any signs of my cousin or anything that would give me a hint about where she’d gone.
Petra hadn’t bothered much with furnishing the place. She had an overstuffed sofa, one of those big, sacklike things, covered in a kind of taupe denim. An outsize teddy bear was sitting in the middle of it, staring at the windows, with a sad smile on its face. Its wide plastic eyes unnerved me. I finally turned it facedown.
She had a television on a rolling stand, a rolling computer table, and an armchair that matched the sofa. She had no curtains for the long row of windows, just the blinds that came with the apartment.
I hadn’t been here, except the night I unlocked the door for her, so I had no idea what might be missing if she’d left under her own steam. No drugs in the bathroom, but her electric toothbrush and Waterpik were still in their stands. Her tube of Tom’s Toothpaste was carefully rolled from the bottom up.
In the area where she slept, she had a futon and a dresser. A change of clothes was tossed carelessly across the futon, trailing onto the floor, and more clothes were half on hangers or had been allowed to fall to the closet floor.
A stack of wicker baskets by the bed held books, magazines, and a box of condoms. I wished I knew who she was dating or whether the box was simply there for insurance. I flipped through The Lost Diary of Don Juan, hoping that the lost diary of Petra Warshawski might fall out, but I didn’t see anything in her handwriting, not even a checkbook. With someone in the Millennium Gen, you couldn’t tell if that meant she had run away, taking her checkbook with her, or that she did all her banking online.
The one thing I had hoped to find was her laptop, so I could see who she’d been e-mailing what to. Although she seemed to do most of her communicating by texting, a computer might have longer documents, more of a key to what she was doing. At a minimum, I could have seen what websites she’d been visiting lately.
The big room flowed into a kitchen with a tiled work island and a big cooktop, with a grill and a restaurant-sized exhaust fan. The fancy appliances seemed wasted on my cousin. Her refrigerator held wine and blueberry yogurt and not much else. In the morning, she’d grab a carton and eat it on the bus. At lunch, she’d pick up a sandwich and eat it at her desk. And at night, the group of friends she’d made would all go out for Thai or Mexican. Or so I pictured it.
A door by the refrigerator led to a small deck and back stairs. When I pulled the door open, it swung crazily on its hinges and then fell off. I jumped out of the way just in time to avoid a smash on the head.
The noise, the shock of the door collapsing under my hand… I leaned against the work island, shaking. When my heart was more or less normal, I saw my gun was in my right hand. I hadn’t noticed drawing it.