Again without looking over his shoulder, Thibaut asked for my office address. I told him he could drop me on Belmont, where I’d flag a cab.
“V. I. Warshawski, I didn’t seriously risk the life of this twenty-two-hundred-dollar case to drive you four blocks. Tell me where you’re going.”
I didn’t put up a serious fight. I was glad of the offer. I sent him on a route up past Wrigley Field, turning onto side streets until he was sure no one was following him. Finally we drove to an intersection a block north and east of my office. If the office was under surveillance, I didn’t want anyone registering Thibaut’s car in a database.
I flexed my spine and did a few neck stretches before leaning into the driver’s window to thank him. “Who’s Lily?”
“The fox terrier we had when I was a kid. When all this is over, I’ll play a concert for you. The Schulhoff concertino, to commemorate my most exciting performance since my Marlborough Festival debut.”
He squeezed my fingers where they rested on his open window. The warmth of his hand stayed with me as I slipped into the shadow of the buildings on Oakley.
38
I DIDN’T KNOW ANY UNOBTRUSIVE WAY TO GET INTO MY office. The alley exit opens only from the inside, and the windows are twelve feet from the ground. It would have to be through the front door.
At this hour of the morning, all the trendy bars and cafés in the area are closed. The coffee shop across the street would open in a few hours, but right now its glass front gleamed black under the streetlamps like a pond.
I moved cautiously down the street, gun in hand. No one was out that I could see. But if pros were conducting surveillance, it could be done by remote camera. They wouldn’t have to be on the street.
A rat leaped from a garbage can at my approach, and I came close to screaming. I had to stop and gulp down the wave of panic that swept over me, as it ran out onto the sidewalk. Still, I couldn’t hold back a little cry. A car drove up the street and turned left onto Cortlandt. It was missing a taillight. Dornick looked like the buttoned-down type who wouldn’t let you work for him if your car was missing a light. Or would he use a car like this to make me think he wasn’t watching me?
Or he could be… Enough! The Age of Fear makes you crazy. I took a breath, crossed the street, and tapped in the new door code to my building. The lock wheezed as it always did, a loud sound in the still night, but I was tired of fear. I boldly opened the door, stopping long enough to tap each of the numbers on the pad so that anyone using a UV spray wouldn’t be able to tell which ones unlocked the door. I flicked on the lights, not caring that they would spill out onto the street and advertise my presence.
My office suite still had a crime scene seal across the door, but I broke it and went into the chaos. For a moment, my spirits flagged again on seeing the mess. I made a feeble stab at straightening things out, putting drawers back in the desk, returning ordnance maps to their shelves, but the chaos was overwhelming. I wondered who I could hire to help since the temporary agency had backed away from me at warp speed.
I tried to remember the date that Petra had been in my office to use my computer, but I could only guess. It had been around two weeks before the Navy Pier fundraiser. I set up a program to find all the Internet sites visited during those weeks.
While the program ran, I knelt to collect papers from the floor, gathering them in a big bundle and laying them on the couch. One of the documents was the transcript of the Steve Sawyer trial. I flipped through the pages, looking again for my father’s name, but instead “Lumumba” jumped out at me.
“Lumumba has my picture,” Steve Sawyer had said on the stand.
Lumumba: Lamont, in the Anaconda’s secret code. Lamont had Sawyer’s picture. What did that mean? Was it some cryptic way of saying that Lamont had fingered him? Or did it mean he was expecting Lamont to testify for him. As in, Lamont has my picture, Lamont has my back.
I wondered if Curtis Rivers would interpret… Curtis Rivers! I smacked my forehead. African names. Kimathi, that was what Rivers called the man who swept the sidewalk in front of his store. While my Internet-search program was running, I pulled up a separate browser window and looked up Kimathi.
Dedan Kimathi, a rebel leader in Kenya in the 1950s. Feeling a sort of nervous dread, I put the name into the Illinois Department of Corrections database. There he was: January 1967, convicted of murdering Harmony Newsome, served forty years, released a year ago January. No time off for good behavior, often in isolation for unspecified, violent outbreaks. Living since his release on Seventieth Place, at the same address as Fit for Your Hoof.
I stared at the screen for a long time, remembering Rivers’s fury when I’d asked where to find Steve Sawyers, of Hammer Merton’s scorn when I asked him the same question.
My brain was frozen. I couldn’t concentrate on those old Anacondas or Miss Claudia’s dying needs. If Petra hadn’t gone missing, I’d have driven straight to Curtis Rivers’s shop and camped out until he and Kimathi-Sawyers emerged. And then I’d have energetically convinced them to tell me what had happened to Lamont-Lumumba. But Petra was fragmenting my mind and sapping my energy.
I closed the browser window. The search program had finished, turning up over a thousand URLs for the ten days I’d bracketed. I started scrolling through them, startled to see the amount of time I spent on the Internet. It took about twenty minutes for me to find where Petra had been, but, once I got there, it was dead easy to follow her in. She’d been updating her MySpace pages. She hadn’t logged in as Petra Warshawski. Instead, her page was called “Campaign Girl.”
I had to create my own MySpace page to look at Petra’s. I signed up under Peppy’s full name, Princess Scheherazade of DuPage, and even created an e-mail address for her. I began to see why people liked using the site. The process of making up Peppy’s biography and interests, the music she listened to-currently, “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog”-took me away from my dark, disaster-filled office and my fears for my cousin’s safety. For twenty minutes, I was in a fantasyland of my own creation.
Campaign Girl loved Natalie Walker’s Urban Angel. She had five hundred friends. To read the messages they sent her, I needed Petra’s password. Trying to figure that out would require either better computer tracking skills or more inside knowledge of Petra than I had. I concentrated on the posts she’d made on her profile page.
She started by explaining that she had to post anonymously because she was working on an important Senate campaign and if she said anything under her own name, or her candidate’s name, she could get both of them in trouble.
“So I’m just Campaign Girl for now. And all of you homeys out there, PLEASE don’t screw up and call me by my real name. Not unless you want me to lose my job. And that goes quintuple for you, Hank Albrecht, wanting stuffy old Janowic to win. My boy is going to beat yours with one hand behind his back. And I have a bottle of beer riding on it.”
I looked up Hank Albrecht, one of Petra’s “friends.” He had gone to college with my cousin and was in Chicago working for the incumbent.
A few days later, Petra was writing about the work she was doing for Brian, whom she scrupulously only called “My Candidate.”