33
A New Recruit
Petra’s voice floated down the hall toward me when I opened my office door.
“And then, she shot one of them in the shoulder and another in the stomach. Meanwhile, I was swimming across the river—I totally needed antibiotics after swallowing that water—have you ever looked at it? It’s, like, completely brown and green, with weird stuff floating on it, but, anyway—oh, hi, Vic!”
Petra was beaming. She’d been a hostess at a country club during her summer vacations from college, she’d helped run a U.S. Senate campaign last year, she’d been Olympia’s star server at Club Gouge. She knew how to smother clients in youthful charm. Tim Radke, sitting upright in an office chair, was blinking uneasily.
I held out a hand. “Mr. Radke, good of you to come out at the end of a long workday. Do you need coffee? Beer? Whisky?”
“I offered him drinks, Vic,” Petra assured me. “He only wanted tea. But we were, like, not a hundred percent sure what you wanted him to do. He logged onto [http://embodiedart.com] embodiedart.com, and we got the message that the site was shut down—”
“I want to know if you can find out where the blocking originates,” I said, “but, before we do that, look at this and tell me if you know what it means.”
I pulled the plastic bag out from under my sweater and held it out so that the black mitt with the logo was visible. Radke frowned at it.
“It looks kind of familiar,” he said, “but—”
“I know!” Petra had ducked down to stick her head over my shoulder. “That’s the design that Nadia was painting, isn’t it? It’s got the same kind of curlicue at the ends.”
I was impressed that Petra spotted it so quickly but said to Radke, “I found this in Chad’s kit. Is it something he could have brought back from Iraq?”
Radke turned over the plastic bag. More granules trickled out of the mitt. “You know, this thing, this looks like the shields they give gunners for their body armor. We all wore armor if we went outside the Green Zone, but infantry, gunners, high-risk guys, they had these extra things that supposedly stopped most bullets. I never saw an empty one before. That’s why I couldn’t tell what it was at first.”
He went over to my desk and typed a few lines into the computer. When I went to look, he had pulled up a page about body armor, with a photograph of something that looked like a life jacket.
“See this?” He pointed at a dark line armpit-high in the picture. “It’s a slit in the armor—that’s where you stick these slabs in. They’re heavy, which is why we don’t like to wear ’em—really, you can keep these vests on only a couple of hours before you’ve sweated so much you could pass out.”
“They fill the mitts with what? Sand? Gravel?”
“It looks kind of like sand, but really it’s some kind of fancy-pants stuff they invented for body armor. Tiny particles, but superstrong when they’re packed together. The Israelis thought of them first, I think that’s what they told us.”
Radke started to open the plastic bag, but I pulled it away. “I want to get it analyzed, and there’s already a fair number of other contaminants in it from lying in the bottom of Chad’s duffel. Why would he have cut holes into it?”
Radke shrugged. “Guys do weird things when they’re bored or stressed. I saw this one guy, he got burned. And he started picking at his skin. And the next thing you know, he’s pulled all the skin off his forearm.”
“Oh, gross!” Petra’s mouth cocked open in disgust. “Why didn’t you stop him?”
“He was out of his head in pain, kept holding his rifle on us when we tried to get near him. The chaplain finally talked him down, but it was bad, man. So if Chad was coming unstuck, he could’ve started cutting up his own armor. Could’ve been testing the odds after he lost his squad.”
Survivor guilt. It made a certain sense. Better that than pulling all the skin off your own forearm.
“I just learned that a couple of older guys in suits were with Chad on Friday night, the night Nadia died. Who could they have been?”
Tim shrugged again. “Like I told you, I don’t know Vishneski that well. He grew up here. He could know a ton of guys I never met. Maybe they were friends of his mom’s. He was crashing at her place, after all.”
“True enough. But one of them had on an Army medal, a service medal, something like that. Do you know all of Chad’s Army friends?”
Radke gave a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. The five of us who were in counseling together at the VA, we’re the ones who hung out, went to bars or Hawks games or whatever. But maybe they were from that college he went to over in Michigan. You know, if they stopped in Chicago to see him he wouldn’t necessarily mention it to us.”
The difference between cats and dogs—if two women had spent two or three nights a week together for four months, they’d know each other’s family histories for four generations back, not to mention their taste in everything from linebackers to lingerie.
“How about the computer problem you actually came over to solve?” I asked. “Think you can find out what computer the command to shut down the site came from?”
“I can try,” Radke said, “but I’m no computer genius, just a guy who fiddles around with them some. Do you have the password for the site?”
“Uh, no. I have nothing for the site.”
Radke made a face. “I can’t climb Mount Rushmore without a rope, you know.”
My stomach sank. Everything was just too damned hard right now.
“Does that mean you can’t do it?” I said.
“I can download some software, but it’s pricey. Or let me talk to the person who owns the site.”
“You know her—it’s the Body Artist from Club Gouge. And she’s skipped.” I explained what had happened the previous night. “So is it worth going down to the club on the chance her machine is still there? Anyone could have walked off with it, including the Body Artist herself. But the point is, she says someone took over the system from her and changed the password. I don’t know why she would lie about that. But even if she did, would we be able to get the password from her machine?”
Radke fiddled with a pencil, thinking it over.
“Do you know what her ISP is?” he asked.
“The website is run through WordPress,” I said, “but I don’t know who the service provider is.”
“That’s what we could get from her computer easier than by me trying to hack, and if I had the ISP, then I could maybe start figuring out who’s controlling the site right now.”
“So. Once more into the breach, and all that.” I tried to sound jaunty about going back into the biting air. My earlier nap had given me a brief second wind, but it was rapidly dying down. “Petra, you want to call it a day?”
“Are you kidding?” My cousin let out a gust of laughter. “This is the fun part, where you show me how you pick locks and everything.”
“Youthful high spirits,” I murmured to Radke.
We were putting on parkas and lacing up boots when John Vishneski called from the hospital to see if I’d found Chad’s vest.
“I didn’t see any vests, just a pile of—” I broke off mid-sentence. His body armor. Chad thought of it as a vest.
“Mr. Vishneski, I think Chad may have meant his body armor. It looks as though someone took that, along with his computer and his cell phone, the night Nadia Guaman was killed. The guys who left him to die in Mona’s bed dumped something in the garbage behind her building. I can’t prove it was the armor, but that’s my best guess right now. Chad apparently cut into one of the supplemental shields; I found the pouch and some of the special filler in the bottom of his duffel bag.”
“Why would anyone throw out his vest?” Vishneski demanded.
“No idea. Chad might have cut into the shield out of anger or frustration at losing his unit. But I’m wondering if he sewed something valuable into it when he was overseas and cut it open when he—”
“Like what?” Vishneski asked, again demanding.
“I don’t know. Something small—a microchip, a diamond. In case it’s still in the armor cover, maybe stuck inside to the fabric or lost in the sand or nanochips or whatever this filler is, I’m going to take it up to the forensic lab I use and get them to go over it with one of their scanners. In the meantime, if Chad wakes up and asks again for his vest, tell him it’s in a vault, that it will be safe until he gets home. If it’s weighing on his mind, we don’t want him worrying about it.”
I paused, then added, “It would be best not to spread the word that Chad seems to be improving. Whoever framed Chad for Nadia Guaman’s murder, we don’t want them getting another shot at him.”
Vishneski gave a bark of laughter. “I don’t know why I’m acting so surprised. We hired you, Mona and me, because we didn’t believe our boy could’ve shot that gal. It’s just—you’re making it sound like he’s in the middle of some big-ass conspiracy, and Chad, he doesn’t know any secrets. Are you sure about all this?”
“It’s guesswork,” I said. “But if, well, if someone came after him again while we were trying to prove my guesses, that would be a very bad way to prove me right. Just to be on the safe side, I’d like to get some bodyguards in place at the ICU. It’ll require cooperation from the medical staff, and I’m not sure how willing they’ll be, but there are a couple of guys I use when I need muscle. Very reliable.”
“I’ve got friends,” Vishneski interrupted. “Construction’s slow, and I know plenty of guys who’d be glad to look after my boy.”
“You should clear it with the head of the ICU. She’ll be more sympathetic if it comes from you than from me. But I’d suggest instead of saying you’re bringing in a bodyguard that you tell her you want a friend with Chad at all hours in case he wakes up when you’re not around.”
“I’ll talk to her, but, man, I wish you knew what was going on. This is so frustrating, you not knowing if my boy’s in danger or not, or who from. How could he survive Iraq and get caught in some conspiracy here at home? Do you think it’s al-Qaeda, stalking an American soldier out of revenge?”
“I don’t think Arabs were with your son the night he was drugged.” Mona Vishneski’s nosy neighbor would have noticed Arabs. “And if al-Qaeda was at work here, the Justice Department or Homeland Security would be tripping over me in this investigation. Does Chad know any older guys who served in Desert Storm, maybe, or even Vietnam?”
“God, I don’t know. Maybe he met some guys at the VA, but he never said anything about them to me.”
I looked across the room at Tim Radke and Petra and remembered that chunks of Chad’s blog had been blocked or deleted.
“I’ve got to go, Mr. Vishneski. But if you were going to guess at a password your son might have used on his blog, what would it be?”
“Password? What are you talking about now?”
“Some way to try to get at his missing posts. Do you have a hunch about a password for him?”
Vishneski thought a moment, then said, “Probably he’d have the number 54 in it, on account of he’s a big Brian Urlacher fan. Maybe something about the Black Hawks. I’d try those.”