“She’s from Lithuania,” I said. “Is she moving to Ukraine?”
“I don’t care where she goes in Foreignland, but for what it’s worth, the consulate told me Shatka’s mother moved to Kiev last month. They said anti-Russian feeling is running high in the Baltic states.”
“Can you extradite her?”
Finchley’s mouth was a thin bitter line. “No treaty with Ukraine. That’s why the Ukrainian mob sits over there, happily hacking into our bank accounts. Why in God’s name couldn’t you call me yesterday when you found Jurgens?”
I felt my eyes turn hot. “I am thoroughly sick of every cop in the six-county area blaming me for their problems. I found Jurgens, I saved Arielle Zitter’s life, I got Leydon Ashford to the hospital after she was pushed off the Rockefeller Chapel balcony. I did all this even though I’m a one-woman shop and you have a team of thirteen thousand. Go yell at the evidence techs who went over Jurgens’s Camaro. Scream at the patrol team that responded to my 911 call, but get off my back!”
Finchley frowned at me for a moment, then gave a reluctant nod. “Point taken. Tell me everything you learned from Shatka. I know you talked to her—Burbank let me interview the neighbors.”
I told him everything I knew, everything except the aerograms I’d dropped off at the university. I couldn’t see the point of adding to Terry’s workload by sending him after the translator—for all I knew, those were letters from Shatka’s mother, telling her the cabbage crop had failed and she’d better stay on in Chicago, collecting disability checks. I also didn’t tell him about finding the Crawford, Mead phone number on Shatka’s landline—he could discover that for himself, after all.
“How’d you get involved with Shatka, anyway?” Finchley said.
“My friend Leydon Ashford. She was a patient at Ruhetal, where Xavier Jurgens worked. Jurgens took Miles Wuchnik into the locked ward, and Leydon was convinced Wuchnik was there, spying on her. Which may not have been a paranoid delusion. Someone at Ruhetal called the family to report that Leydon was stirring up the inmates.
“Sewall Ashford and his mother sent a minion out to the hospital to stop Leydon. They didn’t tell the therapists they were intervening, or interfering, whichever it looks like to you, so the therapists don’t know who the family sent. You could talk to Vernon Mulliner, the head of security at the hospital. Or maybe Leydon’s mom, or her brother, Sewall, will be more forthcoming with you than they are with me.”
“Sewall Ashford? Oh, great, Warshawski. You couldn’t have a connection to someone a little more accessible, could you?”
Meaning someone who would respond to police threats. “I wish! I’ve been banging my head against inaccessible people all week. Dick Yarborough, Eloise Napier and Louis Ormond at Crawford, Mead. Harold Weekes and Wade Lawlor at Global. Chaim Salanter. Maybe you can come up with a more subtle approach.”
Finchley gave a sharkish grin. “Anything I do would be more subtle than you, Warshawski. What else about Shatka?”
“If you look at Jana Shatka and Xavier Jurgens, she was the strong-minded member of the couple. Whatever Jurgens knew, if Shatka thought it was valuable, she bullied it out of him. Someone paid Jurgens a bundle, and I’m betting Shatka knew who that was. If you pull her phone records, you should be able to find who she talked to without needing to extradite her or anything.”
“Pull her phone records!” Terry snarled. “You’re like all the juries in Cook County, you think we have the time and resources to gather evidence on every case the way they do in CSI. We searched the premises, but there wasn’t a piece of paper in the place. She was smart.”
“She was scared: her lover had been murdered. And she was pretty sure she knew who did it, pretty sure it was the same person who killed Miles Wuchnik two weeks ago.”
“You can’t know that,” Finchley objected.
“Please, Finch—both of them at the same cemetery? Have you interviewed Jurgens’s coworkers at Ruhetal? Do they know where he got the money for the car?”
Finchley shook his head. “He just showed up with it one day, bragging about it. Perhaps what his girlfriend told you is right. Maybe the Camaro has nothing to do with his death—maybe he bought it with money he saved skipping lunch. It was how my grandfather bought his first Continental, after all.”
I bowed my head briefly, acknowledging his grandfather’s frugality. “Have you talked to the kids in Arielle Zitter’s book club?”
Finchley stared at me. “Why should I do that?”