Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

At seven, I got up to run to the lake with the dogs while Mr. Contreras followed us in my Mustang. The idea that I might be in danger worried him powerfully; I could see he was going to stick close at hand until the Edelweiss business was resolved.

The lake was still warm, even though the September days were drawing short; I went into the water with the dogs. While Mr. Contreras threw sticks for them I swam to the next rock outcropping and back. When I rejoined the three of them I was tired but refreshed, the misery of the previous night eased from my mind.

As we drove home I turned on the radio to catch the news at the top of the hour. Presidential election blah-blah, violence on the West Bank and Gaza blah-blah.

In our top local story, police have released the identity of a woman whose body was found early this morning in the Sundown Meadow Forest Preserve. A Countryside couple came on the body when they were running their dogs in the woods a little before six this morning. Countryside police now tell us that her name was Connie Ingram, thirty-three, of LaGrange. She lived with her mother, who became worried when her daughter did not return from work last night.

“She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Mrs. Ingram said. “She often stayed late on Fridays to go for a drink with her girlfriends at work, but she always caught the 7:03.”

When her daughter failed to come home by the last train, Mrs. Ingram called local police, who told her they didn’t take a missing person’s report until someone had been gone for seventy-two hours. Still, by the time Mrs. Ingram talked to LaGrange police, her daughter was already dead: the Cook County Medical Examiner estimates that she was strangled around eight P.M.

Ingram had worked at Ajax Insurance in the Loop since graduating from high school. Coworkers say she had recently been troubled by accusations from Chicago police that she was involved in the murder of longtime Ajax insurance agent Howard Fepple earlier this week. Countryside and LaGrange authorities are cooperating fully with the Chicago police in the investigation.

In other local news, a South Side man was shot and killed in an apparent drive-by shooting as he was walking home from the L last night. Colby Sommers had been involved in Alderman Louis Durham’s Empower Youth Energy program as a boy; the alderman said he is sending condolences to the family.

Is the end of summer getting you down? Turn to-

I turned off the radio and pulled over to the curb.

Mr. Contreras looked at me in alarm. “What’s up, doll? She a friend of yours? You’re white as my hair right now.”

“Not a friend-the young woman in the claims department I’ve been telling you about. Yesterday morning when I went down to Ajax, Ralph Devereux taxed her with knowing something about these wretched old journals that Lotty’s wandered off with.”

Connie Ingram disappeared for a few minutes on her way to the elevator. I thought she was hiding from me, but maybe she was in Bertrand Rossy’s office, seeking advice.

Fepple must have sent a sample of his goods to the company: how else had they known he really could blackmail them? He’d sent them to poor little Connie Ingram, because she was in touch with him. She went directly to Bertrand Rossy because Rossy was taking a personal interest in the work she was doing on the Sommers file. It must have been almost unbearably exciting for a claims handler to be pulled out of the pit by the glamorous young executive from the new owners in Zurich. He swore her to secrecy; he knew she wouldn’t betray his interest in the case to Ralph, to her boss Karen Bigelow, to anyone, because he could gauge her excitement pretty clearly.

But she was a company woman; she was worried when she left Ralph’s office. She wanted to be loyal to the claims department, but she needed to consult Rossy first. So what did Rossy do? Arranged a secret meeting with her at the end of the day. (“We can’t talk now, my schedule is full; I’ll pick you up at the bar across the street after work. But don’t tell anyone. We don’t know who in this company we can trust.”) Something like that. Taken her to the forest preserve, where she might have imagined sex with the boss, and strangled her when she turned to smile at him.

The scenario made me shudder in disgust. If I was right. Peppy leaned her head across the backseat and nuzzled me, whimpering. My neighbor wrapped a towel around me.

“You get into the passenger seat, doll, I’m driving you home. Tea, honey, milk, you need that and a hot bath right now.”

I didn’t fight him, even though I knew I couldn’t afford to sit around for very long. While he boiled water for tea and fussed around with bread and eggs I went upstairs to shower.

Standing under the hot water, drifting, my mind turned up what Ralph had said yesterday to Connie. Something like, I didn’t think we ever deep-sixed papers in an insurance company. If Fepple had sent her samples of his wares, so to speak, she’d have kept them.

I turned off the water abruptly and dried myself quickly. Say Rossy took care of the claims master file, cleaning out anything in Ulrich’s handwriting. He’d found the microfiche copy-nothing simpler than for him to roam the floors of the building after hours: just checking on local operations. Hunt for the right drawer, abstract the fiche, and destroy it.

But I’d guess Connie had a desk file-the documents she needed to consult every day on a case while she was actively working on it. It probably hadn’t occurred to Rossy-he’d never done a day’s clerical work in his life. And I bet Fepple’s stuff was in it.

I scrambled into my clothes: jeans, running shoes, and the softly cut blazer to conceal my gun. I ran down the stairs to Mr. Contreras’s place, where I took the time to drink the hot, sweet tea he’d made and eat scrambled eggs. I was impatient to be going-but I owed him the courtesy to sit at the table for fifteen minutes.

While I ate I explained what I wanted to do, muting his protest at my taking off again. The clinching argument in his eyes was that the sooner I got going on Rossy and Ajax, the sooner I’d be able to start looking for Lotty.

I ran back up to my apartment to collect my bag-and to call Ralph, so I’d know where he was instead of bouncing around town hunting for him. My phone was ringing when I got upstairs. It stopped before I got my door opened but started again as I rummaged in my briefcase for my Palm Pilot.

“Vic!” It was Don Strzepek. “Don’t you ever check your messages? I’ve left four in the last hour.”

“Don, knock it off. Two people connected with my investigation were murdered last night, which is way bigger in my mind than returning your phone calls.”

“Well, Rhea was lucky she wasn’t murdered last night. A masked gunman broke into her place, looking for those damned books of Ulrich Hoffman’s. So if you can clean the snot off your nose and be responsive, go get them back from Dr. Herschel before someone else is hurt.”

“Broke into her home?” I was horrified. “How do you know they were after Ulrich’s books?”

“The attacker demanded them. Rhea was terrified: the bastard tied her up, held a gun on her, started tossing stuff out of her bookshelves, going through her personal things. She had to say that Lotty had them.”

I felt the air drain from me, as if I’d been kicked in the solar plexus. “Yes, I can see that.”

My voice was as dry as the dust under my dresser, but Don was full of his own alarms and didn’t notice. At four this morning, Rhea woke to find someone standing over her with a gun. The person was completely covered in a ski mask, gloves, a bulky jacket. Rhea couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, a black person or a white, but the attacker’s size and ferocity made her think it was a man. He pulled a gun on her, forced her downstairs, taped her hands and feet to a dining-room chair.