Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

I nodded reluctantly. Like Bobby, I hate giving information across police barricades. “Cerise Ramsay.”

“How’d she get that license?”

“She stole it from me yesterday morning.” I crossed my arms in front of me.

“Did you report it? Report the theft?”

I shook my head without answering.

Bobby slammed his hand against the side of the cart hard enough that the metal rattled. “Why the hell not?”

He really was pissed. I looked at him squarely. “I thought Elena might have taken it.”

“Oh.” The fire went out of his face. He jerked his head at Furey and McGonnigal. “Why don’t you boys wait for me in the car?”

When they’d left he said in quiet, fatherly tones, “Okay, Vicki, let’s have the whole story. And not just the sections you think I’ll find out anyway. You know Tony would say the same thing if he was here.”

Indeed I did. It’s just that I was too old to do things because my daddy told me to. I didn’t have a client to protect, though. There wasn’t any reason not to tell him the pathetic little I knew about Cerise, just as long as we didn’t do it surrounded by cold bodies.

Bobby got the attendant to show us to a tiny cubicle where the ME’s drink coffee or whiskey or something in between dissections. And I told him everything I knew about Cerise, including Katterina and Zerlina. “I can sign the papers if you want. Her mother’s got a bad heart- I don’t think it would do her any good to come down here.”

Bobby nodded. “We’ll see about that. What were you doing at Eleventh Street that rattled Roland Montgomery’s cage so bad?”

The shift in topic was casual and expert, but it didn’t make me jump. “Nothing,” I said earnestly. “I don’t understand it myself.”

“He came to see me with a full head of steam and demanded I run you in if you showed up anywhere near the Indiana Arms.”

Bobby’s tone was neutral-he wasn’t criticizing, just offering me information, telling me he couldn’t protect me if I got powerful people mad at me. At the same time he’d make a stab at it if I gave him the inside track on why the Indiana Arms was a hot topic. Unfortunately I couldn’t help, and in the end he got angry-he couldn’t see that I wasn’t being obstructive, that I was well and truly ignorant. He thinks I take on clients and cases just to thumb my nose at him, that I’m having a late-life adolescent fit. He’s waiting for me to grow out of it the way his six children all did.

It was two when Furey, driving recklessly and wordlessly, dropped me at my apartment. I didn’t make any attempt to be conciliating-I could understand why he was pissed, but at the same time it was just the luck of the draw that he’d seen me with Robin. It was farce, not tragedy-I wasn’t about to pretend to be Desdemona.

I waited inside the front door until his car had screeched its way up Racine to Belmont. My Chevy was parked across the street. I climbed in, made a U, and headed south through the empty streets toward Navy Pier.

The Rapelec complex was a monster. It wasn’t actually on Navy Pier of course-no development has been approved there because the aldermen can’t figure out how to divide up the zoning payoff pie. The site was on the west side of Lake Shore Drive facing the pier, a strip of decaying warehouses and office buildings that has suddenly become development heaven.

The construction site took up the whole section between the river and Illinois Street. The foundations had been poured last May. They were up about twenty stories now in the towers, but the office/retail complex was going more slowly. The sketches in the papers had made it look like a giant high school auditorium. They were taking their time with the support structure.

Bare light bulbs slung around the top of the skeleton outlined its iron bones. I shuddered. I’m not exactly afraid of heights, but the thought of perching up there without walls around-not so much the height, but the nakedness of the building-frightened me. Even at ground level it seemed menacing, with black holes where windows should be and wooden ramps that led only to fathomless pits.

By now my skin was crawling. I had to fight an impulse to run back to the Chevy and head for home. Concentrate on putting one step in front of you, Vic, and curse yourself for a fool for leaving your party clothes on, instead of changing to sneaks and jeans.

I circled the site from the outside. The blue-and-whites had long gone, leaving behind a crime-scene barricade but no guard. There were at least a dozen ways into the grounds in the dark. Looking nervously above me, I selected an entrance lined with lights that didn’t seem to have any steel beams poised to drop on it. My pumps made a soft thwick on the plank.

The boards ended at the third story. I stepped off onto a cement slab. Ahead of me and to the right shadows engulfed the floor and the beams, but the lights continued on the left where more wood had been dropped to make a crude floor cover. My palms were sweating and my toes felt ticklish when I forced myself down the corridor.

The lower floors were enclosed at this point, but no inner walls had been built. The only light came from the naked bulbs strung along the structural beams. I could see dimly into the recesses of the building. Steel beams stuck shadowy fingers upward to support the deck above. Inky splotches might be holes in the floor or maybe just some piece of machinery. I thought of Cerise coming here alone to die and the skin at the base of my neck prickled uncontrollably.

“Hello!” I cupped my hands and yelled.

My voice echoed faintly, bouncing from the steel beams. No one answered. Sweat now dropped from my neck inside my cotton sweater. A faint night breeze dried it, leaving me shivering.

The rough flooring suddenly ended in a nest of plywood cubicles. The door to the one on my right stood open. I went in. The room was dimly lit by the bulbs from the hall outside. I hunted around for a switch, finally finding a likely candidate in a thick cable. I touched it nervously, afraid I might be electrocuting myself, but the room lights came on.

Two large drafting tables were set up against one wall. Cradles holding books that looked like giant wallpaper samples covered the other three. I pulled one out. It was very heavy and didn’t handle easily. Straining, I laid it across the cradle and flipped it open. It held blueprints. They were hard to follow, but it seemed to me I was looking at a corner of the twenty-third floor. In fact, this whole volume seemed to be devoted to the twenty-third floor. I shut it and slid it back into its nest.

A couple of hard hats stood on one of the drafting tables. Underneath them lay a stack of work logs. These documents were much easier to interpret-the leftmost column listed subcontractors. Next to them were slots to fill in billable hours for every day of the week. I studied the log idly, wondering if I’d see any familiar names.

Wunsch and Grasso figured prominently as the lead contractor in the joint venture that was building the complex, Hurlihey and Frain, architects, also had put in a bunch of hours. I didn’t realize architects kept working on a project after construction started.

One name struck me as rather humorous-Farmworks, Inc. I wondered what agricultural needs a building like this had. Farmworks put in a lot of time too-they were submitting over five hundred hours for the week just ending.

A heavy step sounded on the wood flooring outside. I dropped the papers, my heart jumping wildly.

“Hello?” My voice came out in a quaver. Furious with myself for being so nervous, I took a deep breath and went out into the corridor.

A thickset black man in coveralls and a hard hat scowled at me. He held a flashlight. The other hand rested on the butt of a gun strapped to his waist.