Sara Paretsky - Hardball

“Odd places?” Dornick said. “Like what?”

“Like the Mighty Waters Freedom Center a few nights after it was fire-bombed.” I touched my face inadvertently. “Like my childhood home the night someone threw a smoke bomb through the window.”

“Petra wouldn’t go to South Chicago, not unless you took her there. Damn it, Vic, if you put her in front of a crew of gangbangers-” My uncle’s outburst lacked conviction, apparently even to himself, since he let Dornick cut him off midsentence.

“Les says Petra was playing at detective for you, Vicki.”

“Vic,” I corrected.

Strangwell ignored me. “I had to read Petra the riot act when I found she was looking up information for Vicki here on campaign time. I’m sorry, Peter. Now I can’t help wondering if I wounded her pride, and she ran away.”

“It’s not like Petra to be hypersensitive,” my uncle said, “but you’re such a ruthless SOB, Strangwell, maybe you were crueler than you realized at the moment.”

“This is a very strange chorus.” I was trying not to lose my temper because that would cost me judgment. “Is that what you did while I was waiting? Agree on the song and the harmony? Petra ran away because big, mean Les was too tough for her? I chewed her out good and hard for rummaging through my private possessions, and she bounced back like the proverbial Pillsbury Doughboy. But now you want me to think she might have run off because Les hurt her feelings?”

“George is putting a team together for us,” Harvey Krumas said. “We know you love your cousin. But someone like you will hurt us more than help us.”

“Someone like me being what?”

“A pretty ineffectual solo op,” Strangwell said crisply. “You haven’t found a person you’ve been hunting for over a month. But you did get a wonderful nun killed.”

I felt it where he intended it, right below the diaphragm, that place where your insides collapse in on you when you think of all the terrible mistakes you’ve made.

“I’m impressed that you’ve gone to so much trouble to uncover my workload.” I tried to keep my voice steady. “Still, I don’t think you should discount what I can do.”

“I don’t want you to do anything.” My uncle was close to tears. “Rachel has left town to be with the girls, and I’m turning everything over to George. He’s in charge.”

“What did Derek Hatfield tell you when you met with the FBI?” I asked. “Is he comfortable, too, with letting George’s team run the search?”

“They’re overworked, Vicki,” Dornick said. “Of course they’ll put some agents in play. But Hatfield knows what I can do, and he knows he can trust my operatives to behave sensibly if it turns out we have a ransom or hostage situation on our hands.”

I looked at my uncle. “Petra usually calls Rachel at least once a day. Hasn’t she been in touch at all?”

My uncle made a rough, meaningless gesture. “We kept calling and getting her voice mail. Why she can’t answer-”

“Her battery seems to be dead,” Dornick said.

I raised my eyebrows. “You’ve been using your GPS monitors to track her, then. Where did you last pick up a trace?”

Dornick pressed his lips together. He hadn’t meant to tell me he was tracking Petra, but he didn’t compound the blunder by trying to deny it. “We didn’t get on it until early this morning, so we don’t know where she went after she ran out your back door.”

“Now that you have Hatfield’s acquiescence in letting the private sector handle the search, what are your plans?”

Dornick smiled thinly. “The first thing we’ll do, of course, is to sweat Merton.”

I was astonished. “You really think the Anacondas are involved in this, Georgie?”

He flushed at the nickname. “Don’t be naïve, Vicki… Vic. You know that even doing life at Stateville, Merton runs a big chunk of the South and West sides of this city. Drugs, whores, ID theft. We can squeeze him where it hurts.”

“And that would be where?” I asked politely. “He can’t do more time than he’s already doing.”

“He’s proud of his daughter. We can put pressure on her.”

“I didn’t think they were close,” I objected.

“That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be upset as hell if her law firm decided she was a security risk,” Dornick said.

“And if it turns out Merton had nothing to do with Petra’s disappearance, will you restore Dayo Merton’s reputation and make sure she gets another job as good as the one she has now?” I asked, adding to my uncle, “Is that how you’d want Petra treated?”

“If he’s behind her disappearance, he’s already treating her-”

“Okay. So you’ll start by sitting on the Hammer. And, at the same time, just in case…”

“We’ll pull in some of the Anacondas who hold a grudge against… well, let’s say, against your dad. People like this Steve Sawyer you’ve been looking for.”

“You know where he is?”

A little smile played around Dornick’s mouth, condescension mostly. “I feel pretty confident I can track him down.”

“And we’ll talk to you, Vic,” Strangwell said. “We need to know what Petra was doing for you.”

Peter was looking at Harvey Krumas with an odd, almost pleading expression. It seemed to me that the two men were holding their breath, waiting for my answer.

“Nothing, really.” I spoke slowly, studying their faces, trying to guess what they were hoping to hear. “When I was injured in the fire that killed Sister Frances, my eyes were damaged. They told me not to look at a computer for a few days, and Petra offered to look up an address in one of my databases. Then she told me Les here had sat on her and that she couldn’t do the search.”

“Are you telling the truth?” Harvey Krumas demanded.

“That’s a useless question, Mr. Krumas. If I say yes, would you believe me? And why on earth would I say no? Besides, why do you care? It’s data that’s readily available to the public at large. What difference does it make if Petra saw it or not?”

Before any of the men could speak, we heard a muffled shout outside the door, a scrabbling sound as the lock was pushed back. The door opened, and the candidate himself walked in.

HARVEY KRUMAS GAPED AT HIS SON. DORNICK GOT TO HIS feet, but, for once, he seemed at a loss, looking from Peter to Harvey and then to Les Strangwell, who picked up the cue and spoke first.

“Brian, you have a full schedule with donors in L.A. today. Why did you cancel that? We’re going to have to do some serious damage control out there now.”

“Chrissake, Les, the damage control isn’t about me and some B-movie starlets but about finding Petra Warshawski. I need to be here.” Brian’s tie was unknotted, and his dark hair hadn’t seen a comb for some time.

“We have the situation under control,” Les said. “George is putting his best people into finding Petra.”

“How about just once, Les, Dad, George-and whoever you two are”-Brian looked at my uncle and me without recognition-“just once, we pretend this is my campaign, my life, my staffers, that we aren’t all pawns in your big power game. I want to know what the cops have said about Petra and what we know about her disappearance. And why is George here, at damage-control central, instead of meeting with his best people to get them moving?”

“We want to minimize media attention on Petra’s disappearance,” Strangwell said. “You coming back here like this sends a message that we think it’s more serious than it is.”

Brian’s face turned white. “Are you saying it isn’t serious when a young woman on my staff vanishes into thin air? The Web is saying the FBI suspects kidnapping. And you’re nuts if you don’t think the media isn’t already on it like flies on a dead cow. When I got to LAX this morning, I had a dozen mikes under my nose wanting to know where I was when the kid disappeared and what did I think about it, and on and on and on. Tell me what’s happened. Not the sound bite you think I should chew on but what the cops and the FBI have said and done.”