Sara Paretsky - Hardball

Petra hadn’t bothered much with furnishing the place. She had an overstuffed sofa, one of those big, sacklike things, covered in a kind of taupe denim. An outsize teddy bear was sitting in the middle of it, staring at the windows, with a sad smile on its face. Its wide plastic eyes unnerved me. I finally turned it facedown.

She had a television on a rolling stand, a rolling computer table, and an armchair that matched the sofa. She had no curtains for the long row of windows, just the blinds that came with the apartment.

I hadn’t been here, except the night I unlocked the door for her, so I had no idea what might be missing if she’d left under her own steam. No drugs in the bathroom, but her electric toothbrush and Waterpik were still in their stands. Her tube of Tom’s Toothpaste was carefully rolled from the bottom up.

In the area where she slept, she had a futon and a dresser. A change of clothes was tossed carelessly across the futon, trailing onto the floor, and more clothes were half on hangers or had been allowed to fall to the closet floor.

A stack of wicker baskets by the bed held books, magazines, and a box of condoms. I wished I knew who she was dating or whether the box was simply there for insurance. I flipped through The Lost Diary of Don Juan, hoping that the lost diary of Petra Warshawski might fall out, but I didn’t see anything in her handwriting, not even a checkbook. With someone in the Millennium Gen, you couldn’t tell if that meant she had run away, taking her checkbook with her, or that she did all her banking online.

The one thing I had hoped to find was her laptop, so I could see who she’d been e-mailing what to. Although she seemed to do most of her communicating by texting, a computer might have longer documents, more of a key to what she was doing. At a minimum, I could have seen what websites she’d been visiting lately.

The big room flowed into a kitchen with a tiled work island and a big cooktop, with a grill and a restaurant-sized exhaust fan. The fancy appliances seemed wasted on my cousin. Her refrigerator held wine and blueberry yogurt and not much else. In the morning, she’d grab a carton and eat it on the bus. At lunch, she’d pick up a sandwich and eat it at her desk. And at night, the group of friends she’d made would all go out for Thai or Mexican. Or so I pictured it.

A door by the refrigerator led to a small deck and back stairs. When I pulled the door open, it swung crazily on its hinges and then fell off. I jumped out of the way just in time to avoid a smash on the head.

The noise, the shock of the door collapsing under my hand… I leaned against the work island, shaking. When my heart was more or less normal, I saw my gun was in my right hand. I hadn’t noticed drawing it.

Whoever had come in through the back hadn’t bothered with the finesse of picklocks; they’d simply crowbarred the hinges out of the doorjamb and then propped the door up when they left.

What had they taken? The computer? My cousin at gunpoint? I moved the door and went down the back stairs. There were cigarette butts on one landing, but they looked old, the residue of a smoker sent outside to indulge, not a recent watcher. The stairs ended in an asphalt areaway that was separated from the alley by a high fence and a gate. I opened the gate. Its lock was still in place. But a row of parking spaces lay behind the gate, and the intruder could have waited out there for someone to park and simply followed that person in.

I propped the gate open and walked the length of the alley. My cousin’s shiny Pathfinder was sitting there, all locked up. I opened it and looked through the receipts and empty drink containers. I got down on my knees and looked under the seats, in the glove compartment, in the spare-tire compartment, under the hood, under the fenders. I detected that Petra drank a lot of smoothies and bottled water, didn’t go in for soft drinks, ate at El Gato Loco, and wasn’t careful with her credit-card chits. After searching the alley, the only other clue I found was that a lot of people drink at night and can’t be bothered to find a trash can for their empties.

I returned to Petra’s place through the back. I needed to do something about the broken kitchen door. On my way out through the front, I saw the building-management company name on a plaque. I called them to report the broken door. And called Bobby Mallory to tell him that someone had broken into Petra’s apartment.

“That ‘someone’ wasn’t you, was it, Vicki?”

“They broke the back door getting in. I was there just now, trying to see what was missing, and I’m wondering if they stole her computer. Or maybe forced her at gunpoint to go into my office.”

Bobby catechized me on what my aunt and uncle were up to. When I told them they were meeting with the FBI this morning, he was skep tical. The Bureau was stretched too thin with terror watching, he claimed. He didn’t think they could find Petra even if she’d been kidnapped.

Bobby’s comments only increased my own high level of terror. I wished I knew whether my next step was a waste of time or not. Fear paralyzes you, makes it hard to act creatively.

It wasn’t until I’d driven three blocks that I realized I had company. After the fire bombs, after the trashing of my home and office, after Petra’s disappearance, I should be taking triple precautions, making sure no one had planted bugs or bombs in my car before climbing into it, riding around the block two or three times to make sure I was clean before I went anywhere. It was only this sixth sense I’d gotten from all my years in the business that made me note that the bike messenger, the same one who’d been riding behind me on my way over to Petra’s, was in my side mirror again.

A bike was a great way to do a tail within the city. Any maneuver I made, he could react faster to than a car. Of course, he couldn’t follow me onto Lake Shore Drive. But anyone smart enough to use a messenger as a tail had a car or two as backup.

I pretended I hadn’t noticed him and got onto the drive. I didn’t bother to check for tails. If they wanted me to know, they’d reveal themselves. If they didn’t, my best strategy was not to try to flush them out now.

I pulled off at the first downtown exit, and stopped at the second hotel I came to. I turned my car over to the valet, explained I was going to a meeting and that I wasn’t a guest, and went inside.

There’s a network of underground passages that connect the hotels and high-rises on the east side of the Loop. I took the lobby escalator down, slipped behind a pillar, and knelt down. I didn’t see anyone behind me, but I still took off my Scarlett O’Hara hat and left it behind a potted palm. It just made me too damned easy to track.

I waited until a group of women all came down together, laughing and talking, and moved just in front of them so that we all seemed to be walking along the underground corridor together. They peeled off at one of the subterranean take-out joints.

I darted into a neighboring gift shop, where I bought a Cubs cap. Going up and down escalators, buying a frozen yogurt, I didn’t see the same face twice. I bought a red CHICAGO sweatshirt at another gift shop and pulled it on over my linen jacket. Although the weight of the sweatshirt on a hot day made me feel as though I were encased in a burka, I wasn’t instantly recognizable.

Still underground, I finally headed to my original destination: the Illinois Central station. There was a twenty-minute wait for the next train to South Chicago. I bought a ticket and stood near the door leading to the tracks. When they called my train, I waited until the last possible moment before sliding through the doors and down the stairs. I thought I was clean, but you never know.