autopsy: I was hoping Bryant could finish and give me the results before the law found out he had the body.
“We can expedite that if necessary,” the U.S. attorney said. “Meanwhile, what about Warshawski here? We never got an account of how she spent those missing hours. Is she capable of hiding a wanted man?”
“You searched my home,” I protested. “I’ll be glad to take you to my office if we’re done here. You can look in the trunk of my car.”
“We had someone at your office this afternoon,” Derek said. “And we’re checking with your friends.”
I tried to control the rising tide of fury in me. “Did you bastards help yourself to my Rolodex? Did you take files? Where the hell do you get off, harassing a citizen without probable cause.”
“We don’t need probable cause,” the U.S. attorney snapped. “We have you and a suspect both missing from the same house on the same night. Like the captain said, no coincidences here. You might have thought he was an innocent kid and given him a boost out the window with you. But now that you know he’s a wanted man, we expect you to cooperate.”
“I am cooperating,” I shouted, leaning across the table. “Vicki, watch yourself,” Bobby warned me.
I shut my eyes and took a breath, counting backward from ten in Italian as I exhaled. “I am cooperating,” I said in a calmer voice. “Now you guys give some back. What’s he done? How do we know he’s a terrorist? Tell me that and I’ll get more excited about your questions.”
Derek and the U.S. attorney exchanged glances; the attorney spoke. “He stayed on in this country without a visa, and without a sponsor, after his uncle died. He goes to an Uptown mosque where they preach some pretty radical rhetoric. And he went underground when we tried to bring him in for questioning.”
I asked him to expand on the radical rhetoric, or what they’d found in the room Benjamin had rented with a Pakistani family after his uncle died, but they refused to provide more detail: they knew what they knew.
“I see,” I said. Really, though, I didn’t see-anything. It didn’t sound like a catalog of evil, but I didn’t know what “radical rhetoric” covered. Death to Israel? Death to America? Death to abortion providers? Radical or patriotic, depending on your viewpoint. If Benji advocated all three, then I’d have to rethink covering up for him. But I’d wait for Father Lou to finish interrogating him before I turned him over to these guys. My own judgment might be at fault, but I sure didn’t trust any of the people at the table more.
Bobby said if I would just explain how I’d spent the afternoon, they’d wrap up the meeting.
“I returned phone calls. I ran errands. I ran my dogs. I ate dinner.” “No one saw you run your dogs,” the Cook County attorney said. “The fact that you staked out my building is sufficiently depressing without you boasting about it. You have a record of my phone calls, too?” The look that Derek and the U.S. attorney exchanged told me all I wanted to know about that. “I was at a TechSurround outlet on Fullerton. You can probably get a record of my transactions by raiding their cash register, or hacking into their computer, or whatever you feel you can do in the name of protecting the country.”
Schorr wanted to bluster more about what I’d really done last night, but everyone else seemed as worn out as I was. Or maybe I’d embarrassed them into silence, just a little.
Bobby broke the silence, turning to look at the woman with the recording equipment. “Sissy, we’re done for the night. You can collect your things and go.”
Sissy? That didn’t seem like a very imposing name for a police officer. Sissy said “Yessir,” switched off the system and labeled her disks.
The DuPage attorney stood up, saying he had a long drive, but he’d call Bobby as soon as he knew the status of Marcus Whitby’s body. That effectively broke up the meeting. Derek and the U.S. attorney left at once, along with the two county attorneys. Schorr threatened me with grievous bodily harm, or a month in prison, or maybe both if I crossed him again-I wasn’t paying a lot of attention by that point.
“Can one of your team give me a ride home?” I said to Bobby when the room had cleared. “As you know, I didn’t drive myself down.”
Bobby nodded. “Finch, go find someone to give Princess Grace here a lift.”