“The feds really have kept you in the dark.” I told him about the text message Arielle had received. “Arielle wants to uncover Chaim Salanter’s history, which somehow plays a role in this story. For all I know, the kid hired Wuchnik to investigate her grandfather, and Salanter killed him for his pains.”
“Yeah, I can see my watch commander’s face when I tell him that cute theory. We don’t interrogate people in Salanter’s income bracket, let alone their granddaughter or her friends. Not unless we’ve found their DNA smeared an inch thick on a piece of rebar. Which, before you ask, was free of any evidence except Wuchnik’s blood. And skin tissue and so on.”
“Terry, the kids saw something, or the killer thinks they saw something. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have targeted Arielle, using a cell phone from one of the girls in her group. I heard that Sophy Durango’s daughter is leaving the country today or tomorrow, but—”
“How did you hear that?” Finchley demanded.
“By listening to what people tell me,” I snapped. “I am an investigator, Terry, and every now and then I stumble on a fact. I can’t track down every girl who was in that cemetery two weeks ago, or make their parents talk to me, but you can. And you can get a warrant allowing you to look at the pix on their cell phones, to see if one of them got a good shot of the killer. And you can warn the parents to keep their kids close to home until we get this maniac. We owe it to these children.”
“I don’t need you to tell me how to do my job,” Finchley said.
“You know you would’ve done this two weeks ago if you hadn’t gotten that directive to minimize your investigation into Wuchnik’s murder. I’ve been spinning in circles, trying to follow up on Wuchnik’s sister, his missing electronics, and these girls. I don’t think they were involved in killing him, but I do believe someone went to a lot of trouble to get Wuchnik and them to the same place at the same time. You have the resources to find what was on their phones—including any spyware Wuchnik might have uploaded.”
Finchley glared at me, but he was a good cop, and he knew I was right. “Liz, make a note. Make it a priority when we’re back in the car.”
Officer Milkova nodded stiffly and pulled a pad from a pocket beneath her vest. Finchley got to his feet; Milkova rose as if on remote-controlled marionette strings.
“If you think of anything, or if you find another corpse, you call me, Warshawski,” Finchley said. “I don’t care if it’s two in the morning and the body is on Mars. If you find it I want to know about it.”
“Copy that, Lieutenant. Officer Milkova, a glass of water before you leave? It’s a miserable hot day out there.”
She flushed but spoke her first words of the afternoon. “No, thank you, Ms. Warshawski. We’ve got water in the car.”
I followed them down the stairs to make sure they really left the building. As I climbed back to the third floor, I felt a grudging respect for Jana Shatka. Maybe Terry would have gotten something from her if he’d been able to interrogate her with the might of the law behind him, but I didn’t think so. Instead, she’d be dead, because whoever killed Jurgens and Wuchnik would think she’d ratted him—her?—out to the cops.
I went back into my apartment. “Prosper in Kiev, Ms. Shatka. Stay away from Ukrainian mobsters; they’re easily as ruthless, or more so, than their American counterparts.”
I parodied a toast with my coffee cup, but saying the words aloud made me think again that the case might revolve around drugs. I should have suggested that to Finchley. Perhaps Shatka had a connection to a Ukrainian mob, or perhaps she was tied to a South American cartel.
That flight of fancy didn’t take into account a possible connection to Salanter, though. Nor had Shatka seemed much like a mobster in our two encounters. She had seemed like what she was: a two-bit con artist milking Social Security for a disability check, but smart enough to run from murder.
It was hard to believe Chaim Salanter had ever given in to blackmail. I could see those remote eyes looking unflinchingly on murder if he thought Wuchnik and Jurgens were big enough threats. But these had been strenuous murders, or at least Wuchnik’s had been. Salanter would have required help to get Wuchnik’s body onto a slab, and I couldn’t picture him leaving himself vulnerable to further blackmail by letting Gabe Eycks in on his secrets. And would he have put his own granddaughter in the trunk of a car? Despite what Dean Knaub had said earlier, about the impenetrability of the human heart, I didn’t believe it.