He grabbed my briefcase and dumped the contents on the floor. When he didn't see a puppy, he sat on the floor and began to tear up one of my doc.u.ments. Clara bent over and s.n.a.t.c.hed it from him.

I gathered up my laptop, my wallet, and the rest of my possessions. Clara hunted under the couch for a lipstick that had rolled away. By the time I'd put everything away, Ernest had forgotten his outburst and was watching the Three Stooges again. I left without saying another word.

45.

It's Dangerous to Know V.I.

I sat in my car for a time trying to remember why I'd thought it was a good idea to visit the Guamans or why I'd thought I had a right to intrude on the elder Ms. Guaman when she was at the hospital with Ernest, or even why I thought I should be a private eye at all instead of a street cleaner. At least at the end of a day's work, a street cleaner left things better than she found them. sat in my car for a time trying to remember why I'd thought it was a good idea to visit the Guamans or why I'd thought I had a right to intrude on the elder Ms. Guaman when she was at the hospital with Ernest, or even why I thought I should be a private eye at all instead of a street cleaner. At least at the end of a day's work, a street cleaner left things better than she found them.

I finally turned on the engine and drove up to my office, wondering what crises might await me there. Petra, for instance, had not been in touch. I owed Darraugh Graham a report. Terry Finchley still wanted to try Chad Vishneski for Nadia's murder. I didn't know where Rodney Treffer was lurking. Karen Buckley/Frannie Pindero had vanished. Plenty for the dedicated PI to do without tormenting a brain-damaged youth and his family over a nonexistent dog.

When I pulled into my parking lot, I saw Marty Jepson's beat-up truck. I hurried into my office, imagining disasters, but Petra was there with Jepson. She'd dragooned him into helping her sort the mail.

"Vic!" she said. "What a day! So much happened!"

"Too much excitement even to contact me, O Texting Queen?"

"I dropped my phone in the slush when Marty and me were roping my car up to his truck," she explained, "and that seemed to kill it, and don't worry about Marty-about paying him, I mean-because I know you didn't authorize me putting him to work. I'll split my check with him, only, I couldn't have managed the day without him!"

"Staff Sergeant," I said, "if you've spent the day with Petra, you probably deserve some kind of battle pay."

He blushed, and said, "Uh, ma'am, uh, Vic, it was a pleasure to help you out. Uh, I wonder if you can call me 'Marty.' I'm not really a Marine anymore, you know."

"People get to be called by the highest rank they ever achieve," I explained, "even if they've retired. Like, right now, Petra could be called 'pest' by anyone who'd like to know why she couldn't pick up a landline."

"Oh, Vic, don't be such a crab cake! Your phone numbers, they're in my cell-phone memory, which is as dead as my poor old car. You cannot believe how much they're going to charge, although, of course, I have insurance. At least, I'm on my mom's policy." She stopped, sticking her lower lip out as she always did when she was thinking seriously. "Maybe I shouldn't allow her to pay for it. But, gosh, with all my bills, and only this temp job for you-"

"I think your mother would be pleased to know you still rely on her," I interrupted. "But I'm the one who wrecked your car, so I'll take care of the repairs that your insurance doesn't cover."

"Vic, you're an angel. I'm sorry I called you names last night."

She launched back into a high-octane account of her day's adventures: Destroyed cell phone! Towed car! Spilled soup on new jacket! Although the stain on the cuff maybe was the pizza they'd had at Plotzky's last night-what a cool bar!

The avalanche of information was making me reel. I went to my back room, where I keep a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black for emergencies. I don't approve of drinking on the job, but responding to Petra right after my painful meeting with the Guamans felt like a medical emergency to me. I offered the bottle to Petra and Marty, but neither liked whisky.

"It's like drinking gasoline, Vic" was the fetching way my cousin put it. "Don't you have any beer?"

The whisky washed through me, and I felt warm for the first time since I'd left Mexico City at New Year's. I sat at my desk and smiled sweetly at Petra. "You'll have to buy your own beer. You towed the Pathfinder . . . Then what?"

"Oh, well," she said, "then we came here to see if you, like, needed anything done. And there was a message from Cheviot labs. Mr. Rieff, he called to say they'd found something really amazing when he ran his tests for you. Guess what they found?"

"The codes for the U.S. nuclear a.r.s.enal," I suggested.

"Oh, Vic, nothing that amazing. Just-the stuff that was supposed to be in the body armor-the, uh, ceramic or whatever it is-someone took it out and replaced it with ordinary beach sand. Can you believe that?"

I put my whisky down.

"Did he say . . . Could he prove that it was inside the shield to begin with? I mean, Chad had poked a bunch of holes in the shield. How do we know what was in it first?"

Petra hunched a shoulder. "I don't know."

"Uh, ma'am . . . Uh, Vic . . . We did get the report. Since we didn't know where you were or what you needed, we drove up to Northbrook and picked it up from Mr. Rieff."

Marty handed me a sealed envelope with the familiar crest of the Cheviot rams in the corner. I slit it open and scanned the pages, which bristled with "moieties," "van der Waals forces," "carbon 60," and other arcane phrases that I should have paid more attention to in Professor Turkevich's chemistry lectures when I was an undergraduate, but it was too late to fret about that now.

I called up Cheviot labs. Sandy Rieff was working late. That was one good thing.

"This ratio you have in the report," I asked, "seventy-five percent sand mixed with twenty-five percent fullerene, how is that different from what it should be?"

"It should be a hundred percent gallium a.r.s.enide fullerenes," said Rieff.

"And how sure are you that this diluted mix was in Chad's shield from the get-go?"

"My best materials engineer, Genny Winne, did the a.n.a.lysis. Winne says that she's prepared to testify on both those points. And she doesn't say that unless she thinks her results are unimpeachable."

I thought back to the Fortune Fortune article, to Tintrey's rush to get their Achilles body shield to market, to take advantage of all those juicy Iraqi war contracts. "So Tintrey basically put out a shield that wouldn't stop a bullet. I wonder if that was a temporary thing to grab market share or an ongoing policy. Can you order some Achilles armor from several different production runs and get your Ms. Winne to a.n.a.lyze the content?" article, to Tintrey's rush to get their Achilles body shield to market, to take advantage of all those juicy Iraqi war contracts. "So Tintrey basically put out a shield that wouldn't stop a bullet. I wonder if that was a temporary thing to grab market share or an ongoing policy. Can you order some Achilles armor from several different production runs and get your Ms. Winne to a.n.a.lyze the content?"

"Will do," Rieff said. "What kind of priority?"

"Priority service, but not premium."

"Have you read the whole report?" Rieff asked. "One of the oddities Winne found was scorching around the holes in the mitt. That fabric is too tough to cut without a special blade, so he must have burned it to get into it. That's the one thing a defense lawyer could jump on in claiming the contents had been tampered with."

He hung up, but I held on to the receiver, staring at the desktop. If Chad knew that his buddies had died because their armor didn't protect them, no wonder he'd freaked out when he saw Nadia paint the Achilles logo on the Body Artist. He'd accused Nadia of spying on him. He must have thought she worked for Tintrey.

I looked up to see Petra watching me anxiously.

"Vic," she said, "is there some kind of problem?"

"Not a problem," I said slowly. "Just-I think I understand what happened, but not how to prove it. Not who pulled the trigger on the gun that shot Nadia Guaman but why they did, and why they framed Chad. Marty, how much did Chad say about the body armor?"

Jepson frowned. "He never stopped talking about it, ma'am-Vic. We knew he was angry. But he was always angry about the way him and his men had been treated generally."

"But did he talk about the armor malfunctioning?"

"He said his men should be alive, that their armor didn't protect them. But, ma'am, no disrespect, you get these IEDs, and nothing can protect you."

"So he didn't say the shields were full of sand instead of the nanoparticles they were supposed to contain?"

He shook his head, trying to remember. "I know he said he was going to tell the whole world how his squad got butchered, but, you know, that was just talk. It was his way of letting off steam. Least, that's how Tim and me and the other guys took it. I don't remember him ever saying he did like you did, sent the armor to a lab to get it a.n.a.lyzed."

"No: I think he tested it by shooting at it." That explained the burn marks around the holes in the mitt as well as the holes in Mona's bedroom wall that had bothered her so much. Chad had attached the shield to the wall and shot at it. The bullet went through the armor and destroyed the drywall behind it. That was his proof. But how had the men at Tintrey known what he was doing?

"His blog," I said. "The sections that got erased, I bet those were where he described the mitt. We need Tim. We need to see if he can resurrect Chad's blog."

I got up. "Jake's leaving for Europe this evening. I want to see him before he takes off. Can you two track down Tim and see if he'll come up to my place when he gets off work? In the meantime, make two copies of this report, will you? Send one to Murray Ryerson at the Star. Star. The other goes to Freeman Carter." The other goes to Freeman Carter."

I'd offered to drive Jake to O'Hare, but the packing of his ba.s.ses for international travel was a painstaking, if not heart-stopping, business. With a hundred thousand dollars' worth of instruments, he bought tickets so that they could ride in the plane with him, but they required extra scrutiny and careful repacking once he'd been through security. The manager of his chamber group was bringing a roadie just to oversee the luggage.

Jake greeted me on the landing when he heard me on the stairs. "Vic, you made it. I was afraid you were shooting somebody or being shot at."

He took me in his arms and danced me into his apartment, where the living room was filled with the luggage, including his two ba.s.ses-the modern one for the chamber group, the period double ba.s.s for his early-music group. In their fibergla.s.s cases, the instruments looked like stiff elderly people at a concert. I bowed to them and sang a few bars from "Non mi dir, bell'idol mio," "Non mi dir, bell'idol mio," my mother's signature aria. my mother's signature aria.

Jake took me into the bedroom, where he'd touchingly set up a little table with champagne and a vase of flowers. "Three coach seats. I can't afford to take my children first-cla.s.s, so we'll drink my champagne now."

He slid my heavy winter layers over my head and unhooked my bra. He winced a little when he saw the bruises on my stomach, but he didn't back away from me as I'd feared. By the time he had to get up to shower and dress for his flight, some of my earlier anguish over my visit with the Guamans had eased. I lingered in bed until the bell rang, when I pulled on my jeans and one of my sweaters while Jake went out to greet his roadie.

I stood on the landing with my champagne as the two men carted out luggage and instruments. "It will be almost April when you come home. I'll miss you. But I'll follow your concerts online when they're being broadcast."

"I hope you'll be olive-colored again by the time I'm home," he said. "This green and purple doesn't look so good on you, V.I. Try to look after yourself, okay?"

A quick kiss, and then he was gone. I lingered on the landing, but there wasn't time for me to feel sorry for myself. About half an hour after Jake left, Petra and Marty Jepson arrived with a couple of pizzas. Mr. Contreras and the dogs helped us eat while we waited for Tim Radke. When Tim showed up, around nine, he set straight to work, but even though he managed to crack Chad's log-in and pa.s.sword, he couldn't re-create the blog. The entries had been deleted, and that was that.

"Or he never wrote them," Tim said. "I can't tell. It's not like the Artist's website where we could see someone was issuing a command to shut down the site. Here, there's just no trace that anything was ever there."

"If we found his computer?" I asked.

He shook his head. "You'd have to hack into the blog server to see what was deleted. And even if I wanted to go to prison for Chad, which I don't, I'm not good enough to do that kind of search. The only thing we might find if we had his machine is if he sent an e-mail or wrote a letter or something about the armor."

I had to be satisfied with that, although it wasn't the news I'd hoped to receive. The young people took off to go to a club. They invited me to join them in a way that made me feel like an elderly aunt. And like an elderly aunt, I stayed home and went to bed. Oh, those days of having so much energy that I could work all day and go dancing at night . . . I wanted that time back.

It was after one when the doorbell woke me. Someone was leaning on the buzzer so hard they'd roused the dogs. I could hear the barking as I made my way to the door on sleep-thickened legs. I pulled on my coat, put my gun in the pocket, and tried to run down the stairs so I could get to the door ahead of Mr. Contreras. Petra, I was betting. Petra had locked herself out of her apartment. I rehea.r.s.ed a stern speech on how she could check into a motel or sleep on the living-room floor.

The ugly words died in my throat. Clara Guaman stood outside, her right eye swollen shut, her nose bleeding. When I pulled open the door, she collapsed in my arms.

46.

Our Lady, Protector of Doc.u.ments.

You will be well, little one. Just uncomfortable for a few days, with this packing in your nose. Now, who did this? Did Victoria involve you in some desperate scheme?"

"Lotty!" I started to protest, but the words died in my throat. If I hadn't nosed my way into the Guaman home, tonight's a.s.sault probably wouldn't have happened.

We were in Lotty's clinic on Damen Avenue, along with Mr. Contreras, who had surged out of his apartment moments after Clara's arrival.

"My G.o.d, is it Peewee?" he cried. When he saw that the face of the young woman, a stranger, was covered in blood, he'd ordered me to bring her into his place.

We laid her on his couch, and he made an ice pack for her face. "You stay with her, doll. Make her lie still. I'm getting dressed, and then we'll get her to the doc."

Clara was clutching her French textbook, and she wouldn't relinquish it. I wrapped her in a blanket and concentrated on cleaning the blood from her face. While Mr. Contreras changed out of his magenta-striped pajamas, I called Lotty from the phone in his living room to ask if she could cut through the red tape at Beth Israel's emergency room for us.

She'd been sound asleep, but years of practicing medicine made her alert at once. She told me to bring Clara to her clinic. "If nothing is broken, we'll put her together there more comfortably. And without worrying all those social workers and insurance companies about reports on injuries to a minor child."

As soon as Mr. Contreras was dressed, I ran upstairs for jeans, a sweater, and a spare coat for Clara, who'd arrived wearing nothing over her jeans and St. Teresa sweatshirt. I drove the two miles from our place to the clinic with a Lotty-like disregard for traffic laws.

Once Lotty a.s.sured herself that Clara's injuries were superficial-no broken jaw, no damaged eye sockets-she inserted codeine-laced swabs into Clara's nose and then packed it with what looked like a mile of gauze. Lotty applauded Mr. Contreras for knowing to ice the swollen eye and broken nose, then turned a stern gaze on me, wanting to know what kind of scheme I was running that endangered children.

"It wasn't Vic," Clara said. She was sitting in a big reclining chair in the examination room, knees up, head back, another ice pack pressed to her face. Her voice was a little slurred from the drugs Lotty had given her, but she seemed anxious to tell us what had happened.

"I guess they had someone watching our house, Vic," she said. "Like, you know, I told you how Prince Rainier thought we were talking to you. I guess someone told him you still were."

I felt sick to my stomach, as if Rodney were standing over me, kicking me again. Maybe I should find him and let him do it a few more times. Lotty was right-I had had been running a scheme that endangered children. I couldn't wallow in guilt now-I needed to get Clara to tell me how bad the damage was before Lotty's drugs put her to sleep. I prodded her to continue. been running a scheme that endangered children. I couldn't wallow in guilt now-I needed to get Clara to tell me how bad the damage was before Lotty's drugs put her to sleep. I prodded her to continue.

"They must have waited until Papi got home from work. He was on the three-to-eleven shift today, so it was almost midnight before he got back. He was eating supper in the kitchen, and they just battered down the back door and came in. It-the noise, the shouting, these men all in black-it was so terrifying I don't even know how my abuelita abuelita didn't have a heart attack. didn't have a heart attack.

"I was doing homework, and I ran to the kitchen. Mama and Ernie and my grandma were all asleep, but the noise woke them up. The men, they made us all come into the living room. One of them had me, he was holding me. I tried kicking him, and that's when he hit me the first time."

She was trembling at the memory, but I spoke sharply, forcing her to focus on details. How many men? Four. How were they dressed? Like Ernest used to dress when he rode his motorcycle, all black leather and studs.

"That was almost the most awful part, because Ernie started shrieking, 'We're getting our bikes out! We're going for a ride!' So these men, they yelled at him to shut up, and when he wouldn't, first one man punched him, and when he still kept yelling, this other man, he hit me. Papi and Mama, they stood there like frozen statues."

She let out a bark of laughter that turned into a sob. Lotty wrapped her in a blanket, and forced some hot sweet tea into her. After a few moments, when she seemed calmer, I asked why she had come to me.

"Vic, she's had enough!" Lotty's voice was a whip. "She needs to sleep, and in a safe place."

"Clara's been playing with fire for too long," I said. "If she's ready to tell me what she knows, I need to hear it now, before anyone else gets hurt or killed."

"That's why I came to you, Vic," Clara said. "Because they said if we didn't give them the report, they'd burn the house down."

My stomach became a lump of ice. "What report?"

"The Army sent it to my parents after Alexandra died."

Clara's hands were shaking so badly that the tea slopped onto the blanket she was holding.

I took the cup from her and held it to her mouth. I waited while she gulped the tea down before pushing her to tell me more about the report.

"It's what started all the trouble, only I didn't know back then. I was a kid still, no one told me anything. But it's why Nadia and my mom were fighting all the time.

"My mom tonight, first she told the g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers she didn't know what they were talking about, only when they punched me again and my nose started to bleed, she went to get it. See, she'd hidden it inside the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe over Allie's bed. She-I should have told her, but I thought-I don't know what I thought. I was just praying and praying that the g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers would leave.

"When they couldn't find it, they said we had twenty-four hours to give it to them or the house would be burned down, or blown up, I don't remember which. They left, out the front door. I just grabbed my French book and went out the back door, down the alley. I ran all the way to Ashland with Papi chasing after me, begging me to stop. But I found a cab right away and came to Vic's place."

"Your French book?" Mr. Contreras said. "Why the heck would you even be thinking about your studies at a time like that? And what about-"

"Vic gave me a twenty for an emergency."