Sara Paretsky - Blacklist

“We can expedite that if necessary,” the U.S. attorney said. “Meanwhile, what about Warshawski here? We never got an account of how she spent those missing hours. Is she capable of hiding a wanted man?”

“You searched my home,” I protested. “I’ll be glad to take you to my office if we’re done here. You can look in the trunk of my car.”

“We had someone at your office this afternoon,” Derek said. “And we’re checking with your friends.”

I tried to control the rising tide of fury in me. “Did you bastards help yourself to my Rolodex? Did you take files? Where the hell do you get off, harassing a citizen without probable cause.”

“We don’t need probable cause,” the U.S. attorney snapped. “We have you and a suspect both missing from the same house on the same night. Like the captain said, no coincidences here. You might have thought he was an innocent kid and given him a boost out the window with you. But now that you know he’s a wanted man, we expect you to cooperate.”

“I am cooperating,” I shouted, leaning across the table. “Vicki, watch yourself,” Bobby warned me.

I shut my eyes and took a breath, counting backward from ten in Italian as I exhaled. “I am cooperating,” I said in a calmer voice. “Now you guys give some back. What’s he done? How do we know he’s a terrorist? Tell me that and I’ll get more excited about your questions.”

Derek and the U.S. attorney exchanged glances; the attorney spoke. “He stayed on in this country without a visa, and without a sponsor, after his uncle died. He goes to an Uptown mosque where they preach some pretty radical rhetoric. And he went underground when we tried to bring him in for questioning.”

I asked him to expand on the radical rhetoric, or what they’d found in the room Benjamin had rented with a Pakistani family after his uncle died, but they refused to provide more detail: they knew what they knew.

“I see,” I said. Really, though, I didn’t see-anything. It didn’t sound like a catalog of evil, but I didn’t know what “radical rhetoric” covered. Death to Israel? Death to America? Death to abortion providers? Radical or patriotic, depending on your viewpoint. If Benji advocated all three, then I’d have to rethink covering up for him. But I’d wait for Father Lou to finish interrogating him before I turned him over to these guys. My own judgment might be at fault, but I sure didn’t trust any of the people at the table more.

Bobby said if I would just explain how I’d spent the afternoon, they’d wrap up the meeting.

“I returned phone calls. I ran errands. I ran my dogs. I ate dinner.” “No one saw you run your dogs,” the Cook County attorney said. “The fact that you staked out my building is sufficiently depressing without you boasting about it. You have a record of my phone calls, too?” The look that Derek and the U.S. attorney exchanged told me all I wanted to know about that. “I was at a TechSurround outlet on Fullerton. You can probably get a record of my transactions by raiding their cash register, or hacking into their computer, or whatever you feel you can do in the name of protecting the country.”

Schorr wanted to bluster more about what I’d really done last night, but everyone else seemed as worn out as I was. Or maybe I’d embarrassed them into silence, just a little.

Bobby broke the silence, turning to look at the woman with the recording equipment. “Sissy, we’re done for the night. You can collect your things and go.”

Sissy? That didn’t seem like a very imposing name for a police officer. Sissy said “Yessir,” switched off the system and labeled her disks.

The DuPage attorney stood up, saying he had a long drive, but he’d call Bobby as soon as he knew the status of Marcus Whitby’s body. That effectively broke up the meeting. Derek and the U.S. attorney left at once, along with the two county attorneys. Schorr threatened me with grievous bodily harm, or a month in prison, or maybe both if I crossed him again-I wasn’t paying a lot of attention by that point.

“Can one of your team give me a ride home?” I said to Bobby when the room had cleared. “As you know, I didn’t drive myself down.”

Bobby nodded. “Finch, go find someone to give Princess Grace here a lift.”

That was what Bobby called me when he thought I was being a nuisance. It wasn’t exactly a term of endearment-but he would never have used it in front of the DuPage and federal officials.

When Terry had left to find me a driver, Bobby told me to join him at the head of the table so he wouldn’t have to shout. `Jack Zeelander is a pain in the behind,” he commented. “All the Feds these days are chasing shadows. They’re so upset at missing the obvious last summer that they grab at every straw the wind blows by ‘em, hoping it’ll lead them someplace. I can understand that-we’ve had murder investigations here where the heat was so high we burned ourselves and never caught the perp. But Zeelander wants to be in Washington so bad you can smell the ambition on him and it doesn’t make him a trustable colleague.”

Bobby’s remarks took me by surprise: he’s never let his hair down in front of me before. “Do you think this is a straw blowing past? The missing kid, I mean?”

He grunted. “That’s not my call, thank God. What is my call is you. I didn’t lean on you in front of all those people, but don’t lie to me now, Vicki. Do you know where that kid is?”

The hair-letting-down, that had been the tactic of a skilled interrogator. I felt the twist of guilt I was supposed to. Tony and Gabriella’s good friend, I couldn’t lie to him. I thought of Catherine Bayard crying out to her grandmother not to ask her anything else because she didn’t want to lie to her. I thought of the vast expanses of St. Remigio’s, the gym, the classrooms, the chapel, the kitchen and bedrooms. I had no idea which room Benjamin Sadawi was in right now.

I slowly shook my head. “I don’t know, Bobby.”

He narrowed his small gray eyes. “You better not be lying to me, Vicki.” I looked at him solemnly. “I know: Gabriella would hate it.”

“Yeah, Tony wouldn’t be crazy about it, either, but the two of them would protect you. Me, if I catch you in a whopper on this one, I’ll hang you out to dry. What were you doing since checking out of that motel? After you went to that Tech-whatever place?”

I drew a circle in the tabletop with my finger. “Morrell has gone underground. I went to see a friend who knows him.”

“For six hours? Don’t try my patience.”

“If I tell you my private business, you’ll use it against me.”

“What the-Oh. Unless you’re about to reveal a criminal act, I’ll keep it to myself.”

I had played games with the truth about Sadawi; I’d level with him on this. “Your guys staked out the front of my building, but not the alley. I thought the Feds or that ape Schorr might be tailing me, so I went in through the back. I needed a decent meal, I wanted to run the dogs, I wanted some time with my neighbor. I did all those things, then changed my clothes, went out through the alley again and came up the street to the front door.”

Bobby stared at me, then let out a hoarse sound somewhere between a laugh and a snarl. “No wonder we can’t find a missing Egyptian boy. It’s a wonder we can find our feet to put our shoes on in the morning, when we don’t have the brains to cover both entrances to a building. Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”

I slept in the squad car going home. It was only ten, but the two hours at Thirtyfifth and Michigan had worn me out almost more than last night’s physical stresses. When the driver shook me awake, I blinked, momentarily disoriented: I had expected to see the little bungalow on Houston Street where I grew up. I had expected, or wanted, to find my mother waiting for me.