Body Work

18 And the Wheel Goes Round and Round

I printed out the files on Alexandra Guaman and took them with me into the back room to read while I stretched out on my daybed. An hour later when I came to, the pages were strewn across me and the floor like dead leaves.

I struggled upright, washing the sleep out of my eyes under Tessa’s shower, making myself coffee in our kitchenette. I had an hour before I had to meet Murray, and I was feeling so tense about my lack of headway that I wanted to get through as many documents as I could.

What I had on Alexandra Guaman didn’t tell me much. So many people have died in Iraq since we invaded that journalists now dump them all into a journalistic mass grave: fifteen killed in an explosion outside Basra, seven dead in a Baghdad market, thirty obliterated in a bombing run on Fallujah.

Alexandra’s bio was correspondingly slim: the oldest of the Guaman daughters, the first to attend St. Teresa of Avila Prep, followed by college at DePaul here in Chicago, a degree in communications, then a job at Tintrey, the big security contractor. Tintrey’s headquarters were in Chicago, or at least the suburbs, in the corporate corridor along the north leg of the Tri-State.

Alexandra had gone to Iraq for Tintrey four years ago. Tintrey had contracts for everything from over-the-road trucking to providing field first-aid kits. Alexandra’s job title, a level 8 employee in communications, could have meant anything: creating PR, monitoring computer networks, getting real-time information to field personnel.

Chicago’s Latino paper had an obituary, showing the smiling yearbook picture I was getting to know by heart. I squinted at the page, picking my way through the Spanish: the anguish of the parents, the long wait for news, the sad realization when Alexandra’s boss wrote a letter of condolence to the family: an IED had exploded when she was heroically driving a truck as part of a convoy to the Baghdad airport.

Nothing in the story, or in any of my skimpy reports, about her sex life. Or about the Body Artist. Maybe Alexandra had been a lesbian, but she’d been in Iraq at the same time as Chad Vishneski. It was her face on the Body Artist that roused him to fury.

Had she turned Chad down in Baghdad? Had an affair with him that she’d regretted? Or maybe Chad had attacked Alexandra. His service record was clean-certainly no assault charges-but that didn’t mean the two didn’t have a history together. And then when he saw her face pop up out of the blue, he’d gone after Nadia. I knew I was committed to Chad’s innocence, but these connections did not look innocent. Maybe Terry Finchley was right after all. Maybe Chad had doped his own beer out of guilt over murdering Nadia. If that was the case, though, who had broken into her apartment yesterday?

The ideas spun round and round, uselessly, like wheels unable to find traction in a snowbank. Frustrated, I looked up reports on Tintrey.

If I couldn’t find enough about Alexandra, I had the opposite problem with the company that took her to Iraq. I started with their website, which showed heroic warriors defending America from terrorists in the Middle East and Africa but also stressed that “Tintrey is more than just a group of highly skilled fighting men and women. We’re there when you need us… whether it’s at the PX or the RX.”

Tintrey provided base security, they had a division that produced protective gear, they built base housing, they bodyguarded visiting VIPs, and they helped staff the post exchanges.

The website flashed me through the PXs, which looked like giant shopping malls: electronics warehouses, clothes, fast-food restaurants, banks, even car dealerships. You might be twelve thousand miles from home, but you couldn’t escape McDonald’s or multiplexes. I was astonished. Somehow, when people talked about base PXs, I’d thought of small general stores, the kind they show in old Westerns. But if the U.S. needs to get everyone on board our far-flung military operations, of course ordinary vendors need a piece of the pie, too: it can’t all go to Lockheed Martin.

The news reports were more tempered and more mixed. As one of some hundred thirty private security contractors working in tandem with U.S. military bases, Tintrey had made their share of missteps: billing the Department of Defense for phantom supplies, building a bridge that collapsed the first time a tank rolled across it.

Everyone agreed, though, that Tintrey owner Jarvis MacLean had a classic rags-to-riches story. Or, at least, jeans-to-riches. The most enthusiastic report came from Wired Into: The North Shore, a webzine that covered news in the metro area.

GLENBROOK GRAD HITS THE JACKPOT

Jarvis MacLean was flipping burgers while he went to Glenbrook High School, but those days are long behind him. He’s traded his deep-fat fryer for a Ferrari and has a home chef who’s more likely to serve him Burgundy than burgers.

MacLean, home from his eighth trip to Baghdad, talked to us about life in a war zone and the dangerous but rewarding work his nine thousand Iraq-based employees do.

While he was in high school flipping those burgers, MacLean started a firm that provided security at suburban functions. The company grew and branched out, and he made some smart acquisitions, including the purchase of Tri-State Health, which had turned into Tintrey’s medical division, and Achilles, which made protective gear.

“Will Jarvis MacLean’s golden touch change Achilles’ fortunes?” asked an article in Fortune.

Making a fresh start from the ground up and the top down, MacLean has also replaced Achilles’ advertising firm with the high-flying Dashiell-Parker company. Perhaps Dashiell-Parker can improve morale in a firm plagued by cost overruns as it ramps up production of its patented nanoparticles for shielding both Tintrey employees and U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Another story, in the Financial Times, gave a thumbnail sketch of Tintrey’s rise. The company was still relatively small when MacLean tied his fortunes to W’s coattails in 1999. After the invasion of Iraq, MacLean was rewarded with one of the many lucrative security and rebuilding contracts the U.S. handed out to private companies. Between 2001 and 2005, Jarvis MacLean’s annual revenues bloomed from under a hundred million to over a billion.

Mazel tov, I snarled under my breath. You got rich while Alexandra Guaman got dead and barely merited a line of type.

My phone dinged to let me know I needed to leave to meet Murray. I’d been so wrapped up in my reading I hadn’t even noticed my feet getting cold. I was just logging off when I did a double take on Jarvis MacLean’s name. Mac. The happy boys at Rainier Cowles’s table last night had called one of their party Mac.

I went back to Tintrey’s corporate site and looked for photos of MacLean. Sure enough, he was the guy who’d said he wanted to look at Karen’s breasts-tits, he’d called them-from time to time. The report showed him accepting an award from President Bush in one picture; solemn-faced in battle fatigues in another and flanked by Rainier Cowles. What was Cowles to them? Their outside counsel?

Another person in the photo had also been with Cowles at Club Gouge last night. According to the caption, this was Gilbert Scalia, head of Tintrey’s Enduring Freedom Division, which oversaw their Iraqi operations. How cute to call the division after the official name for the invasion. I logged off in disgust.

While I laced up my work boots, I looked up the phone number for Tim Radke, the only one of Chad’s friends whose name John and Mona Vishneski remembered. Radke responded to the news I was investigating Chad’s death unenthusiastically, but he did agree to see me.

“I haven’t known Chad all that long,” Radke warned me. “But he’s not a bad guy. I’d like to help him out.”

That was not exactly a ringing character endorsement, but we set a date at a Division Street bar for the next evening. Radke repaired computer setups for a local cable company; he’d be finishing around six and reckoned he could meet me by seven.

Before finally packing up for the night, I called Terry Finchley over at CPD headquarters. A detective at his level, being groomed for a major promotion, didn’t keep regular hours any more than I did. He was still at his desk.

“Warshawski. You were next on my list to call.”

I’d known Finchley long enough to hear the tightly reined fury in his thickened voice. I could picture the pulses throbbing at his temples, turning his ebony skin a deeper black.

“I take it you got the message I left last night?”

“Just what were you doing moving a murder suspect out of county custody? I just got the report. You had this guy lawyered up so fast, we didn’t have a chance-”

“‘Lawyered up’?” I repeated coldly. “That is a disgusting phrase. By which you mean, I saw Chad Vishneski had access to some basic, constitutionally protected rights. Aside from the fact that he’s in a coma, so it’s hard to believe he’s a flight risk. And aside from the fact that you arrested him based on no more than a phone tip, which came from where exactly?”

“I do not have to reveal anything to you, Warshawski, crime hotlines least of all. But I will remind you that the gun used to murder Nadia Guaman was found in bed next to Vishneski-”

“Who was unconscious and unable to answer any questions. When your crew picked up the murder weapon, what did they do with Vishneski’s cell phone and his laptop? A Lenovo ThinkPad, it was.”

“That, again, is none of your damned business unless you are representing the perp, in which case you can present the usual subpoenas for evidence.”

“His parents hired me, John and Mona Vishneski. When I saw that Chad’s computer and his cell phone were missing, I assumed you had booked them in. But, if not, it supports our hypothesis that someone was in the apartment with Chad the night Guaman was murdered. And that whoever was there thought it prudent not to leave his electronics lying around where someone like you, or even me, could read his files.”

Finchley was silent for a minute. I heard the clicking of his fingers on his keyboard, and then a swearword, under his breath but unmistakable.

“If the electronics are missing-and I’m not relying on your word for that or anything in this case, Warshawski-it doesn’t prove squat about Vishneski’s innocence.”

“Not in and of itself,” I said. “But I went over to Nadia Guaman’s apartment this morning, which the CPD didn’t seem to think was worth searching. Here’s something strange: Her place had been tossed. Her computer was gone. Some of her artwork.”

He tapped more keys. “She lived in Humboldt Park. Plenty of drug-happy housebreakers there.”

“If it was just Guaman, or just Vishneski, whose computer was gone, I’d agree. But both? Come on, Terry.”

He let out a sigh, deliberately loud to signal that I was annoying him. “We have a solid case against Vishneski. He assaulted the dead woman twice in the weeks before he shot her. He’s a textbook stalker. And the murder weapon was in bed with him.”

“You’ve tested the weapon?”

“I know you think we’re too inept to tie our shoes without you holding the laces for us, but, yes, it did occur to me to get the weapon tested. The Glock on the pillow next to Chad Vishneski fired the bullet that killed Nadia Guaman.”

“And residue? You did an atomic absorption test on Chad’s hands?” I persisted despite his annoyance.

“Of co-” He broke off mid-word. “I’ll get back to you on that as well.”

I was aching to know what Finchley was reading on the computer. Had someone screwed up and forgotten to test Chad? Or was there some anomaly in the result itself that gave him pause?

“By the way,” I said, “it would help Chad’s treatment if the doctors knew what drugs they found in his system. Did they test him over at Cermak?”

“Freeman Carter can get a court order, if you need to know.”

That raised my hackles. I hadn’t planned on riding him about sloppy work at the crime scene, but I added, “You might like to know that Chad vomited on his pillowcase. I sent that, and the empty beer cans by the bed, out to a private forensic lab for analysis.”

“Damn you, Warshawski, couldn’t you have called me first?”

“It was four days after Guaman’s murder. I figured if your team had wanted to collect evidence, they had plenty of time.”

I thought I could hear Finchley gnash his teeth, but all he said was, “If someone jumps you tonight, or breaks into your place, don’t call 911, Vic. Even if we caught the perp red-handed, you wouldn’t think we knew what we were doing.”

I opened my mouth to apologize, then stopped. I would not apologize for letting Terry Finchley know his team had missed evidence. And I would not apologize for getting Chad Vishneski good medical care-assuming it wasn’t too late.