“This isn’t Comedy Central,” the U.S. attorney said. “Those of us at this table are trying to protect our country.”
“Well, I’ll sleep easier at night knowing you’ve inspected my bras,” I said bitterly. “What did Renee Bayard say about the books in the attic?”
“The Bayards and the Grahams are old friends. Ms. Bayard thinks her husband might have lent them to Mr. Darraugh Graham when Mr. Graham was a boy,” the DuPage attorney said. “Of course, with her
granddaughter in the hospital she was too distracted to give the matter serious attention.”
“So the Bill of Rights still operates for wealthy voters,” I said. “That’s reassuring. You do know why her granddaughter is in the hospital, right?” “Because of an unfortunate accident.” The DuPage attorney clipped off the words. “Why didn’t you wait in the house to answer Lieutenant Schorr’s questions last night? Jumping out the bathroom window-it makes us think you had some reason to run away to take such a risky exit.” “I would have preferred a door myself, but the lieutenant made the estate’s lawyer lock me in.”
“You could have waited until Schorr talked to you,” Jack or Orville persisted.
“I was tired-I’d been dragging the pond-it was freezing in the house. I wanted to get some sleep. When Schorr’s deputies shot Catherine Bayard, he was too busy to remember me. So I left.”
“But you didn’t go home.” The Cook County attorney spoke up. “No,” I agreed. “I believe a safe driver is one who knows when she’s too tired to control a vehicle. I checked into a motel.”
The lanky woman nodded: they’d cared enough to find the place I’d stayed. They clearly didn’t know I’d left my Mustang behind the shrubbery, or someone would have been all over me for that. The Cook County attorney pressed the attack. “You weren’t in the motel when the maid went in to clean at noon. What were you doing today between noon and eight o’clock?”
“Is there reason you need to know that?” I asked. “If there is, I’ll be happy to tell you, but I can’t imagine why my movements are of interest to Cook County or DuPage, or, most especially, the Department of Justice.”
“America is at war,” the U.S. attorney reiterated. “If you aided a terrorist in escaping, you can be charged with aiding our enemies.”
I suddenly felt very tired. I spread my hands on the table and studied my fingers while the silence grew.
“Well,” the U.S. attorney prodded.
“It’s not well,” I said. “None of it is well. We’re not at war, for one thing. Only Congress can declare war, which they haven’t done-unless it happened while we’ve been sitting here.”
“You know damn well what he means,” Derek said. “Do you think it’s a joke, what happened in New York, what our troops are doing in Afghanistan or the Persian Gulf?”
I looked up at him. “I think this is the most serious thing that has happened in my lifetime. Not just the Trade Center, but the fear we’ve unleashed on ourselves since, so we can say that the Bill of Rights doesn’t matter any more. My lover is in Afghanistan. I don’t know if he’s dead or alive, I haven’t heard from him in almost a week. If he’s dead, my heart will break, but if the Bill of Rights is dead my life, my faith in America, will break. If I had found a terrorist in the Larchmont mansion, I would have done my best to deliver him to you, Derek-and hoped you’d pay more attention to me than your colleagues in Minnesota or Arizona did to similar warnings. But I didn’t see any signs of a violent criminal. Did you? Were those Arabic books manuals on bombs, or did they contain diagrams of important U.S. targets? I assume you’re finding that out.”
I turned to the DuPage attorney. “Meanwhile, the net gain for the night was that Schorr’s Arab-hunting tigers shot a local teenager. I had nothing to do with that, and I don’t think my hanging around Larchmont while Schorr figured out what spin to put on that catastrophe would have been at all helpful.”
No one said anything for a minute or two. I shifted in my chair, stretching my neck and shoulders.
“We need to reopen the investigation into Whitby’s death. I don’t believe in coincidences, a suspect hiding in a house, a man dead outside the house, those two have to be connected.” Bobby spoke with the authority of his forty years on the force. He looked at the DuPage attorney. “Orville, can you get your pathologist to do a full autopsy, including a tox screen on Marcus Whitby?”
“We released the body to the family yesterday,” Orville said. “I’ll see if they’ve taken it back to Atlanta.”
Bobby rubbed his balding temples. “I hope to Christ they haven’t: I don’t want to deal with an exhumation. Or with one more jurisdiction than the three already involved.”
I didn’t reveal that Bryant Vishnikov had already started a private