Sara Paretsky - Body Work

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.

GLENBROOK GRAD HITS THE JACKPOT

Jarvis MacLean was flipping burgers while he went to Glenbrook High School, but those days are long behind him. He’s traded his deep-fat fryer for a Ferrari and has a home chef who’s more likely to serve him Burgundy than burgers.

MacLean, home from his eighth trip to Baghdad, talked to us about life in a war zone and the dangerous but rewarding work his nine thousand Iraq-based employees do.

While he was in high school flipping those burgers, MacLean started a firm that provided security at suburban functions. The company grew and branched out, and he made some smart acquisitions, including the purchase of Tri-State Health, which had turned into Tintrey’s medical division, and Achilles, which made protective gear.

“Will Jarvis MacLean’s golden touch change Achilles’ fortunes?” asked an article in Fortune.

Making a fresh start from the ground up and the top down, MacLean has also replaced Achilles’ advertising firm with the high-flying Dashiell-Parker company. Perhaps Dashiell-Parker can improve morale in a firm plagued by cost overruns as it ramps up production of its patented nanoparticles for shielding both Tintrey employees and U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Another story, in the Financial Times, gave a thumbnail sketch of Tintrey’s rise. The company was still relatively small when MacLean tied his fortunes to W’s coattails in 1999. After the invasion of Iraq, MacLean was rewarded with one of the many lucrative security and rebuilding contracts the U.S. handed out to private companies. Between 2001 and 2005, Jarvis MacLean’s annual revenues bloomed from under a hundred million to over a billion.

Mazel tov, I snarled under my breath . You got rich while Alexandra Guaman got dead and barely merited a line of type.

My phone dinged to let me know I needed to leave to meet Murray. I’d been so wrapped up in my reading I hadn’t even noticed my feet getting cold. I was just logging off when I did a double take on Jarvis MacLean’s name. Mac. The happy boys at Rainier Cowles’s table last night had called one of their party Mac.

I went back to Tintrey’s corporate site and looked for photos of MacLean. Sure enough, he was the guy who’d said he wanted to look at Karen’s breasts-tits, he’d called them-from time to time. The report showed him accepting an award from President Bush in one picture; solemn-faced in battle fatigues in another and flanked by Rainier Cowles. What was Cowles to them? Their outside counsel?

Another person in the photo had also been with Cowles at Club Gouge last night. According to the caption, this was Gilbert Scalia, head of Tintrey’s Enduring Freedom Division, which oversaw their Iraqi operations. How cute to call the division after the official name for the invasion. I logged off in disgust.

While I laced up my work boots, I looked up the phone number for Tim Radke, the only one of Chad’s friends whose name John and Mona Vishneski remembered. Radke responded to the news I was investigating Chad’s death unenthusiastically, but he did agree to see me.

“I haven’t known Chad all that long,” Radke warned me. “But he’s not a bad guy. I’d like to help him out.”

That was not exactly a ringing character endorsement, but we set a date at a Division Street bar for the next evening. Radke repaired computer setups for a local cable company; he’d be finishing around six and reckoned he could meet me by seven.