Back in my office, I stared blankly at the database giving me the list of inmates in Ruhetal’s forensic wing.
The Umbrian hills hadn’t really kept my mother’s father safe—there are always neighbors like the women on Jana Shatka’s street who know what you’re doing, and inevitably, one of them will betray you, in exchange for safety, or money, or, in wartime, for a little extra food. Perhaps that was Chaim Salanter’s wartime secret—not the grand plots that Wade Lawlor wove around him but something he was too ashamed to admit now.
Salanter had encased himself in a vast fortune here in the New World, but it hadn’t been enough to protect his granddaughter. I sat up abruptly. Whoever had doped her and put her in the trunk of the Camaro to suffocate would have no qualms about going into her hospital room and putting something nasty into her IV.
I called Lotty’s clinic to see if her staff could work their hospital networks to get me an update on Arielle Zitter, explaining my fears about her security. “I don’t need to know what hospital she’s in, but the Salanters should have security professionals in place to inspect any meds or food she gets and any visitors who come.”
Jewel Kim phoned back twenty minutes later to tell me that Arielle’s mother was moving her to a private rehabilitation clinic in Israel, where the family felt her security could be guaranteed until she recovered. She’d flown out on the Salanters’ private plane this morning. That was reassuring. If Arielle was fit enough for a ten-hour flight, she must be recovering fairly quickly.
Everyone was leaving Chicago. Maybe Lucy and Kira Dudek should, too—go to their tata in Poland. They didn’t have the Salanters’ private jet to whisk them behind Mossad’s protective radar. If it was Kira’s phone that had been used to summon Arielle to Mount Moriah two nights ago, the assailant might well think Kira knew something about him—or her, I added, conscientiously.
I called my cousin to make sure she and the girls were still all right. She’d left them with “Uncle Sal” while she went in to work.
“I just talked to him ten minutes ago, and he’s getting kind of worn out. Anyway, the girls want to go home, and their mom doesn’t like them being away, either, especially since you and Uncle Sal are strangers.”
“I don’t want them to go home if I can’t guarantee their safety,” I fretted. “Things are looking ugly and scary from where I’m sitting. If I could hire—” I broke off; the words gave me an idea. “Hold that thought: I’ll get back to you in a minute.”
I called Chaim Salanter’s PA. “Ms. Balfour, I understand that Arielle is out of the country, in a safe place.”
“How did you know that?” she said. “Only the family—”
“Don’t worry about it; I’m not passing the word along. But there are two girls from Arielle’s book group at the Malina Foundation whose safety has been compromised by Arielle’s shenanigans. Their mother scrapes out a living cleaning hotel bathrooms. It would be an act of charity if Mr. Salanter would spring for a private guard for them so their mother can stop worrying about them while she’s at work.”
She dithered, she dickered, but I told her she had nothing to bargain with, since it was her boss’s mania for secrecy that had put the Dudek girls at risk. Finally, she put me on hold while she conferred with Chaim. He came on the line himself, asked a few questions, such as how I knew where Arielle had gone: had I been spying on her?
“No, sir. I don’t even know what hospital she was taken to. But nothing involving more than one human being can be kept secret forever.”
“The Dudeks—is that their name?—have no claim on my generosity.”
“Your granddaughter was the ringleader of the group that sucked them into her cemetery adventure. Arielle took advantage of Kira’s mother working all night to use the Dudek apartment for her private meetings. If not for Arielle, Kira Dudek wouldn’t have been in Mount Moriah cemetery two weeks ago. The loss of her cell phone was a financial blow to Kira and her mother, but if it had incriminating photos or texts on it, whoever attacked Arielle may well try to find Kira to silence her. I’d say that was a pretty large moral claim on your generosity.”
I did my best to keep the bitterness out of my voice, but he wanted to know next whether I was threatening to disclose Arielle’s location if he didn’t help the Dudek girls.
“No, sir,” I said. “Even if I wanted to dicker over their safety, which I don’t, you could keep moving Arielle and I don’t have the energy to follow her.”
“How long will it be before the police discover who was behind the assault on my granddaughter?”
“I can’t speak for the police, Mr. Salanter, but I am hard at it. With more information, of course, it would be easier.”