Hardball

2

“WHAT DID YOU DO TO HER?” PETER GRABBED MY shoulders and shook me.

“Let go!” I snapped. “This isn’t the way-”

“Answer me, damn you!” He was hoarse, his face swollen with fury.

I tried twisting from his grasp-I didn’t want to fight him-but he dug his hands deeper into my back. I kicked him on the shin, hard. He yelped, more from surprise than pain. His hold on me loosened, and I backed away. He lunged for me, but I ducked and moved farther back, rubbing my shoulders. My uncle was almost seventy, but his fingers still held the strength he’d gotten on the slaughterhouse floor in his teens.

The two dogs were making ominous noises in the back of their throats. Still gasping for breath, I put a hand on their shoulders: Easy, Mitch. Easy, Peppy. Sit. They had caught my anxiety and were yawning and mewling in worry.

“There’s no call for you to carry on like that.” Mr. Contreras had risen to his feet when Peter attacked me. He was an old man himself, close to ninety, but he was ready to fling himself into battle. “Vic here would never put your gal in harm’s way. You can take it from me.”

Considering that Mr. Contreras had flung accusations of his own at me when I reported Petra’s disappearance, I was grateful that he was willing to support me in front of her parents.

“You, whoever you are, mind your own damned business.” My uncle was happy to have a fresh target to attack.

“Peter, yelling, this anger, it isn’t going to help.”

Rachel spoke from the shadows behind the piano. Peter and Mr. Contreras and I were all startled. In the rage of the moment, we’d forgotten my aunt was there.

When I finally tracked her and Peter down the previous night, they were at a campsite in the Laurentian Mountains with their four younger daughters. It was Peter’s secretary in Kansas City who got me the relevant phone numbers and arranged for the corporate jet to fly into Quebec City to pick up the family. Peter and Rachel drove all night to get to the airport. Ashland Meat’s jet dropped Rachel and Peter at O’Hare and went on to Kansas City with the other daughters, where they would stay with Rachel’s mother.

“Petra was pretty nervous the last few days,” I said to Rachel. “She said nothing was bothering her, but I’m thinking now maybe this was weighing on her, this plan to let these thugs into my office.”

“Damn you,” Peter roared. “Petra does not know thugs. You do. You’re the one fucking around with the Anacondas, going out to Stateville to see Johnny Merton behind bars.”

“How do you know about Merton?” I was startled.

Rachel gave a strained, apologetic smile. “Petra and I talk every day, sometimes three times a day. She told us about your meetings with this man in prison. It was interesting news to her.”

“And I heard about it from Harvey, too,” Peter snapped. “He says Vic here disobeyed a direct order from a local judge to stop looking into the affairs of these old gangbangers.”

If I hadn’t been so distraught myself, I would have laughed. “Disobeyed a direct order? I’m not in the Army, Peter. That judge used to be my boss at the PD. He’s afraid I’m going to make him look bad because he did a terrible job on an old case involving one of Johnny Merton’s street soldiers.”

“So what if he did? One less gang member on the street for any reason is all to the good.”

“But, Vic, how can you be sure it was Petra in your office last night?” Rachel said.

She’d asked the question before, but she was so worried she kept forgetting the answer. I explained again about finding her daughter’s bracelet outside the back door.

“And, yes, it could have belonged to someone else, but I don’t think so.”

“Even if it was hers, what makes you think she opened the door?” Peter demanded. “Maybe it was that sculptor who shares the building. How do you know she isn’t connected to some mob operation?”

I opened and shut my mouth several times but didn’t speak. Tessa Reynolds is African-American, and I didn’t want to find out that her race was driving my uncle’s wild suggestion. She’s also African-American aristocracy, her mother a famous lawyer, her father a highly successful engineer. They worry that I’m dragging Tessa down into the mud, the cases I get and the people who show up at the building. I’d already had an anxious call from Tessa’s mother after last night’s break-in made the late news.

I was too tired, and too confused, to pursue that line of thinking. Instead, I booted up my laptop. I’d e-mailed myself the camera footage that showed the trio who’d come into my office yesterday afternoon. Now I showed the images to Rachel and Peter.

“Does any of them look like Petra to you?”

“Of course not!” Peter stomped away from the machine and pulled out his cellphone. “This is a fucking waste of time. Why are we even sitting here for, letting Vic spin us around in circles? She’s just trying to get off the hook for putting Petey in harm’s way.”

Rachel shook her head; tears were slowly welling and falling along her nose. “That’s Petra in the middle.”

“How can you be sure? Of all the-”

“Peter, it’s the Crocodile Dundee hat and outback oilcloth coat she got in Melbourne. She was so proud of them. Even in this picture, I can tell.” She looked at me through her wet lashes. “Vic, someone must have forced her to do this. We’re meeting with Special Agent Hatfield at the FBI in an hour. Give me some names, some people the FBI can talk to.”

“Yeah, cookie,” Mr. Contreras put in. “This ain’t the time to hold your cards close to your chest, the way you like to do.”

“Have you talked to her college roommate, to Kelsey?” I asked. “I don’t know her last name, but she’s the person Petra talks about most.”

“Kelsey Ingalls. She called me when she saw the news online this morning. She said she’d tried calling Petra-we all have, and we keep getting rolled over to her voice mail.” Rachel’s voice quavered. “Vic, there must be someone you’ve talked to who can lead the FBI or the police to Petra. Please, please tell me their names.”

I shook my head helplessly. “My apartment was trashed a few nights ago, and I did wonder if a cop, ex-cop, named Alito had been involved, but I don’t have any real reason to suspect him. Other than that, Johnny Merton, the head of the Anacondas, if he was mad enough at me he might do anything, but I was talking to him when this was going on. He didn’t lose his cool with me until the end of the meeting.”

Peter seized on Johnny and the Anacondas. If Peter had known I was working with violent criminals, he’d never have let Petra come within twenty miles of me.

“I understand,” I said, when he’d shouted himself hoarse. “But look at the times recorded on my door monitor. It looks as though Petra was waiting for Tessa-my lease-mate, the sculptor, you know-for her to leave. There’s a ten-minute gap. Tessa leaves, Petra types in the code and goes in with those two punks.”

“Vic, coincidences happen,” Rachel said, trying to stay calm. “How would Petra know people like that? She just graduated from college in May, she’s never lived in Chicago, she’s been working in an office downtown with a bunch of other twenty-somethings. She’s just a suburban Midwest girl who’s never seen a criminal in her life and wouldn’t recognize one if she did. I’m not saying it’s your fault, but you’re the one who knows gangsters and people like that. Not Petra. Please, please turn your files over to the FBI or to Bobby Mallory. They can look into everyone you’ve been talking to.”

“Bobby came to my office last night,” I said.

He had pushed his way past the cops filling the entryway and found me underneath my desk, trying to see if anything else of my cousin had been discarded there along with her bracelet. Despite the many good women who have worked for him in the last fifteen years, my presence at a crime scene still gives him heartburn.

“There you are, Vicki. One of the boys who’s smarter than he looks saw your last name on a sheet and brought it to me. Who’s Petra, Peter’s kid? What insane business did you involve her in? Does Peter know? He’ll turn your guts into sausage casing if you hurt his kid.”

“Not guilty, Bobby,” I said wearily, crawling out. “She’s working on the Krumas campaign. I don’t know why she came here or who she let in.”

I showed him the video footage and explained how she’d happened to have my front-door combination. He frowned over the photos, then demanded of the patrol units if they’d done anything to get the footage over to a video-technology team.

Once Bobby showed up, the tempo of the investigation accelerated. Aggressive cops became subdued and helpful, lethargic ones became energetic, and an evidence team magically appeared and began dusting the whole mess for prints, blood, any trace of anything. Bobby called the FBI, in case it was a kidnapping; they sent a special agent over around eleven, and I had to answer useless questions all over again.

In the middle of it all, I started getting calls from reporters, and a television crew parked outside my office. Brian Krumas himself called while I was talking to the FBI’s special agent. The candidate was at a high-end fundraiser in Hollywood, but of course his staff had heard about Petra’s disappearance. Krumas talked to Bobby and then to me.

“You’re Petra’s cousin, right? We met at the Navy Pier event, didn’t we? I’m giving you my private number, Vic, and I want you to call me the instant you have any news of her, okay?”

I copied the number into my PDA and went back to the FBI. No matter how mediagenic you are yourself-and Brian Krumas was being touted as a glamorous new Bobby Kennedy-disappearing blond twenty-somethings are national news, and you need to do damage control.

When I finally got home, I didn’t sleep much. I kept jolting awake, trying not to imagine what could be happening to Petra, trying instead to think of places I should look for her, and wondering who she had invited into my office.

“You shouldn’t be talking to a lowlife like Johnny Merton, anyway,” Mr. Contreras said. “I been telling you that since the first time you drove out there, but no one except you ever knows right from wrong. The rest of us are too ignorant to have opinions. And now you’ve got Petra in trouble.”

“I know just how many counts Merton was charged with. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to know he had my girl kidnapped and forced her to open your office,” Peter roared, swinging around the room to put his nose almost against mine. “If any harm comes to her because of you, whatever it is, I will inflict it on you tenfold. Do you hear me?”

I stood very still, not speaking. If harm came to Petra because of me, I didn’t think I could live with myself anyway, but her father’s wild rage was impossible to respond to. His phone rang, and he finally backed away from me to answer it.

I turned to face Rachel. “You go see Derek Hatfield. He’s a good field agent.”

“What will you do?” she asked.

“I’m putting my own best agent on the case,” I said bleakly.

My best agent had been unable to find Lamont Gadsden. My best agent had left a trail of desolation at the Mighty Waters Freedom Center. I hoped she could do a better job looking for Petra.