When Trina’s eyes widened in amazement, I added casually, “Who did your dad and grandmother send out to stop Leydon’s nonsense at Ruhetal? And what nonsense was it?”
Trina shrugged. She hadn’t paid attention to those battles. She could tell me only that her grandmother had announced at dinner one night that she’d solved that problem, meaning the problem of Aunt Leydon, but not what the solution had been.
I drove back to the city, mulling over the situation at Ruhetal. Leydon had gone into the locked wing. To offer legal services to someone there, because, in Mother Ashford’s charming phrase, she thought she was still a lawyer.
And this had annoyed someone, maybe Vernon Mulliner, the director of security? He’d told the Ashford family and they’d dispatched—of course, they’d dispatched Miles Wuchnik to deal with the situation. I wondered if Wuchnik had threatened Leydon in some way, if that was why she’d been so frightened of revealing her name on the phone to me. He certainly had made it clear he could eavesdrop on people.
Back in my office, I called Tania Metzger at Ruhetal. She was furious when I told her about the Ashford family’s sending someone—probably Wuchnik—out to the hospital to deal with Leydon.
“More than most people, even those with her illness, Leydon creates drama around her, and when she got back from the forensic wing, everyone was stirred up, the guards, the patients! It’s an outrage that the family intervened in some way without consulting the therapeutic staff. How can we possibly look after our patients if we don’t know what’s happening to them? As Leydon became more agitated, I thought she was having paranoid delusions. Now it turns out that an outsider actually was involved. She thought she was being stalked, and maybe she was! I’m taking this up with the head of the hospital, you can be sure of that. I need to find out who allowed a third party to interfere with one of my patients.” She put the receiver down with a bang.
The warehouse where I lease space is hot in summer and cold in winter—I can’t afford the utility bills to cool such a large office properly. I put on a fan, weighting down my papers so they didn’t fly across the room, and used a program designed by one of my old colleagues from the Public Defender’s Office to hack into the Department of Corrections database. I asked it to find me anyone who’d been convicted of arson, anywhere in the prison system.
The computer told me it would take twenty minutes to do the sort. I was too wound up from my meeting with Leydon’s mother to wait patiently. I needed to do something active.
It was Xavier Jurgens who had taken Wuchnik into the locked wing. If Wuchnik had been sent out to clean up after Leydon, he might well have talked to the patient Leydon had promised to represent. In which case, Jurgens would have known the patient’s name. Which meant that Jana Shatka probably knew it as well.
If the police were still treating Jurgens’s death as a suicide, they might not have bothered interviewing Shatka. My track record with her had been unimpressive so far, but perhaps I could frighten her into coughing up the inmate’s name.
38.
HOT ON A TRAIL—OR SOMETHING
“YOU’RE TOO LATE.”
I had pulled up in what was beginning to feel like “my” parking place, across from Shatka’s duplex. One of the women I’d seen on my first trip out saw me and pushed her baby over to talk to me.
“Too late?” I felt my stomach turn over: Shatka had been murdered in the night.
“She left yesterday afternoon. Five suitcases she had with her, and when the taxi came, she told him to take her to O’Hare.”
“You heard her, did you?” I asked.
“Not me, but Anita Conseco happened to be out front when Jana left. She even helped her put her suitcases into the trunk, not that the puta had one word of thanks for her.”
“So when she went out last week—the day I first came here—did Anita happen to hear where she told the cab to take her?”
The woman looked as though she was going to get on her dignity—she pulled herself up and took a breath—so I forestalled her. “No one around here has time to gossip or spy on each other, I know—not with kids and work and laundry—but if you’re like me and my neighbors, you try to keep an eye out so you know if someone’s in trouble.”
“That’s right, and that’s what that bitch Jana never could appreciate. My brother shoveled her walk the first year she was living here, before Xavier moved in, and was there one word of thanks? Just swearing that if he thought he could squeeze a nickel out of her he was mistaken!”
“So did anyone hear where she went last week?”
My non-gossiping, non-spying informant shook her head regretfully. Jana had managed to depart in secrecy.