I hesitated, then said, “Did you know Arielle had written to the Holocaust Museum, looking for information about your family’s history in Vilna?”
He looked up, his poker player’s mask slipping briefly—I couldn’t tell if he was angry or astonished, or even, perhaps, afraid. “How do you know that?”
I told him about looking at Arielle’s e-mails. “I assume the FBI is doing the same thing, and that they’re reporting back to you. What is it you don’t want her to find out?”
“Why would she seek that information when I told her I never wanted to revisit that past?” His voice was soft but charged with bitterness.
“Children need rootedness,” I suggested. “Beyond that, though, Arielle is deeply troubled by Wade Lawlor’s attacks on you. She wanted to know what lies behind them.”
“I’ve told her time and again that nothing lies behind them, that he’s attacking me because it’s a way of reaching his paranoid audience, and it’s a way of attacking Sophy Durango. Arielle knows that!” He smacked the piano and the keys crashed discordantly.
I rubbed the middle of my forehead, trying to ease an eyestrain headache. “The last thing a bright child believes is something she knows her parents are lying about. And frankly, I don’t believe you, either. I am ninety-five percent certain that Miles Wuchnik was murdered because he was blackmailing someone. He thought he’d uncovered a big secret about you. Had he put the bite on you?”
Salanter’s expression didn’t give anything away this time, but the glance he exchanged with Gabe told its own story. He opened his mouth to say something, but I cut him off—I didn’t want to hear another evasion.
“So he had,” I said. “What had he found out? And was it something Arielle had hired him to look for?”
“How would she even know to look for a detective?”
“Oh, please, Mr. Salanter. Whatever went on in your life in Vilna all those years ago, you were no older than Arielle when it happened. She has your brains, your wits; even if PI’s weren’t all over TV, she’d find an investigator if she wanted one. The bigger questions are: What did Wuchnik find out about you? Who hired him to look? Why was he murdered near your granddaughter? And was it Mr. Eycks here who hoisted him up on that tomb and murdered him?”
“The implication being that I’d do anything Mr. Salanter commanded?” Gabe said. “I’m not a vassal; I get to say yes or no to anything asked of me, and I would certainly say no to murder.”
“What does this have to do with the attack on Arielle?” Wren Balfour demanded. “That’s what Mr. Salanter needs to know.”
“Oh, that. There’s a connection between the dead orderly, Xavier Jurgens, and the dead PI. There’s a connection between Jurgens’s partner, Jana Shatka, and Vilna. She knows something about Mr. Salanter’s past. So there’s a connection between Arielle’s kidnapping, Mr. Salanter’s past, the dead orderly, and the dead PI. You can fill in the blanks.” A yawn cracked my face in two as exhaustion swept over me.
“How do you know all this?” Salanter demanded.
“Sheer dogged work. Anyone who cares enough can follow the same paths I did. If Jana Shatka knew something about your past in Vilna, anyone can find it out.” I yawned again. “How is Arielle, by the way? Or is that information still classified?”
“It is not classified, merely so distressing that it’s hard to discuss,” Salanter said. “She will live, they are sure of that, but when she will become her bright quicksilver self again, that they cannot say. Her brain waves are returning to normal, but she still is confused and can’t speak coherently, let alone remember what happened. That’s why I’m here, hoping that you can tell me why she did what she did, going out in the middle of the night, presumably to that cemetery.”
“That part’s easy—she had a text message from a phone number in her database. What the message said we don’t know, but she thought it was from a friend. She sent Nia an e-mail about it, because their mothers had shut down texting between the two girls, but Nia didn’t look at her e-mail until this morning. The FBI was going to track down that text, come to think of it, find out who used the phone, what the phone message said.” I sat up, my fatigue dissipating as the implication of what I’d said struck me.
“Anything I can tell you about why Arielle went back to Mount Moriah cemetery you can learn from the FBI,” I said. “They might not tell me, if it was my granddaughter, but billionaires get caviar treatment from law enforcement. So you didn’t come on Arielle’s account: you’re here because you want to find out how much of Miles Wuchnik’s discoveries I’ve learned. That answer is easy, too: not much, but if Jana Shatka is the next person who turns up dead, I don’t think even being the world’s twenty-first wealthiest man will protect you from some serious police scrutiny.”
37.
PARANOID DELUSION?