“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.
I went through the maze of underground corridors and found my hat where I’d left it, stuffed behind the potted palm: not a good mark for the cleaning staff but easier for me. I put the Cubs hat and CHICAGO sweatshirt in my briefcase. I kept forgetting the Nellie Fox baseball. It was in there, too. My case now bulged so much with discarded clothes that I couldn’t zip it shut.
I checked in with the lobby guard, who phoned up to the campaign. She did a creditable job with my name, Petra having probably accustomed her to it. The guard looked at my passport, printed out a pass, and directed me to the elevators that would carry me to 41.
When I got off the elevator, I barely had time to admire the giant red-white-and-blue posters with Brian’s bright smile and keen eyes. A thirty-something woman, with a mass of reddish curls, hurried through the double glass doors to greet me. She was carelessly dressed in a yellow shirt whose tails partly hung out over a floral-print skirt, and she started speaking almost before she was through the doors.
“Where have… Oh! Who are you?” Her hands, which she’d been brandishing in annoyance, fell loosely at her sides.
“V. I. Warshawski… Who are you?”
“Oh! Petra’s cousin, the detective. Petra forgets her ID about once a week, and the front desk has to call for permission to let her in. I was hoping this meant she’d shown up. Where is she?”
“I wish I knew. I want to find out what she’s been working on to see if it’ll give me any hint about where she might have gone.”
The woman glanced uncertainly at the double glass doors. “Maybe I’d better ask Mr. Strangwell. She’s been doing more for him lately than for me.”
“You’re…” I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to remember if Petra had ever called her boss by name.
“Tania Crandon. I run the NetSquad, which is where Petra started. Before she got so important that she only takes orders from Mr. Strangwell.” When she realized how resentful she sounded, the skin at her throat and chest flushed in the blotchy way that afflicts very fair people.
She was wearing an ID around her neck, which she swiped against a pad on the doors. When they clicked open, I followed her into the campaign hive. Her cellphone tweeted to let her know she had messages coming in. She glanced at these and thumbed responses as we walked past campaign workers. They were gathered in knots over computer screens, arguing in corners, answering cellphones and landlines, shrieking news at each other across the tops of cubicles.
Ms. Crandon looked like a senior citizen in here. Most of the staff was Petra’s age. Regardless of race or sex, they all seemed to share my cousin’s exuberant energy. Maybe Krumas really did signal a change in politics as usual in Illinois.
Various youths scurried up to Tania with questions. One asked for Petra. They couldn’t respond to some rumor on drilling for oil in the Shawnee National Forest without her input, she’d been doing the research.
“See me after lunch,” Tania said. “I’ll have something for you by then.”
Our destination was the southwest corner of the floor. This part of the operation was quieter, with a row of offices banked along the south wall. The corner suite included a secretary, who was handling a phone console with the panache of Solti on the podium. Tania bent to murmur in the secretary’s ear. The woman looked at me in surprise, made a call of her own, hit a key on the computer on the desk, and unlocked the inner-office door.
Tania followed close behind her. They shut the door too fast for me to see inside, but not too fast for me to hear my uncle’s voice raised in a hoarse shout. So Peter, too, wanted to know what Strangwell had his daughter doing. That was a help. The politico might share more with her father than with her PI cousin.
A few armchairs were arranged to give visitors a view of the Bean, the big sculpture in Millennium Park in which you can see sky, city, and self reflected in its stainless steel curves. I stood for a few moments at the window, watching tourists photograph themselves, but the light was so bright that I had to put my dark glasses on, and then I couldn’t see much.
As the minutes stretched on, I left the window. I tried the office door, but it was locked. I scowled at it, then left the area looking for the NetSquad. I had a feeling that if I didn’t find Petra’s coworkers now, I’d be hustled off the floor before I could talk to them.
The campaigners were deep in conferences or text messages and cellphones. A youth who finally responded to me told me the NetSquad was in Sector 8.
“Sector 8 is which way?”
“We’re in pods. Communications is Pod 1, nearest the elevators. Pod 2 is R and D. Sector 8, the NetSquad, straddles the two.” He went back to his computer, finished with me.
Pods, sectors: they’d clearly grown up playing too many sci-fi games on their handhelds. The energy and self-absorption of the campaigners, which had seemed entertaining at first, began to grate on me.
When I finally found Sector 8, I saw the young woman who’d wanted Petra’s input on oil drilling in the Shawnee Forest. About five kids were at their computers. It was hard to get a real count because they never sat still for long. Someone would type furiously for a bit, yell, “I’m sending you this, read it before it goes live,” and then take off, while another two or three staffers would emerge from other pods, look at what was on-screen, sit down to type a comment, then drift away again.