The rain was beating the ground, digging up little pebbles and bits of glass, and it was impossible to tell if anyone had walked through here—or dragged an unconscious girl through here—recently. Lightning kept crackling, so close that the hairs rose on my arms several times. I knew that it was dangerous to stay here among the stones and the trees, but I was too frightened about Arielle’s fate to worry about my own safety.
By the time I finished exploring the area, my T-shirt was clinging to my wet torso. Not only was I having trouble thinking clearly, I was blinded by the rain dripping from my hair into my eyes. I couldn’t bring myself to leave the cemetery, though, until I had retraced the path the girls and I had taken after their Raven ritual.
The thunder had died to a faint growl and the rain had lightened to a mist by the time I reached the cemetery’s east wall. I found the place where I thought I’d sent the girls over and scrambled to the top, my running shoes slipping on the wet bricks.
I jumped down to Hamilton Street and continued my blind search of the grass and the gutter. And found myself looking at some Sportmax wire wheels, picked out in red trim. They were attached to a red Camaro, its paint shiny in the wet. The tinted windows were hard to see through in the rain, but I thought there was a body inside.
I had my picks with me, but it was no time for finesse. I pried two loose bricks from the wall. Used one as a hammer and the other as the nail and smashed the window. When I opened the door, I saw Xavier Jurgens in the driver’s seat, his head flopped against the steering wheel.
Jurgens had thrown up violently. The vomit had already begun to rot in the thick July air. The stench was so horrible that it was all I could do to make myself feel for a pulse. I didn’t find one, but the vomit was well mixed with alcohol; he might be alive at some minimal level.
The keys were still in the ignition. I’ll never know what impulse made me do it, but I pulled them out and opened the trunk. Wedged against the spare wheel, her head near the backseat pass-through, was Arielle Zitter.
33.
SUICIDE OR MURDER: TAKE YOUR PICK
ARIELLE WAS GOING TO MAKE IT, ALTHOUGH I DIDN’T GET THAT reassuring news from anyone on Schiller Street. When I realized the Salanter ménage, including Gabe Eycks, was on lockdown, not answering calls, I had tried the FBI’s Christa Velpel.
“How is Arielle?”
“Her condition isn’t something I can discuss with you.”
My eyebrows and temper went up at the same time. “Ms. Velpel, you and I both know you’re a truly skilled investigator because you told me that about a dozen times this morning. I’m just the bumbling private eye who found Arielle Zitter. Now I want to know if she’s going to make it—she wasn’t in good shape when I bumbled my way to her location this morning.”
Somehow that approach didn’t make the fed feel more cooperative. It was Lotty who finally got me some news; she worked her network and found someone at the hospital where the EMTs had rushed Arielle.
“She was given a strong antipsychotic, in fact, some of the Abilify that you say was at the scene. She would have suffocated if she’d been in that car much longer. What kept her alive until you found her was that she’d vomited up a lot of the drug and miraculously hadn’t sucked it back into her lungs. They’re flooding her, trying to wash the rest of the Abilify out of her system.”
“Abilify?” I said. “Isn’t that some kind of antidepressant?”
“Oh, it’s one of those drugs that TV is begging doctors to prescribe,” Lotty said. “It does a lot of things, but it’s a powerful antipsychotic. It shouldn’t be handed out as if it were candy. Arielle had much too much of it for safety; it’s left her very confused. The neuropsychiatrist I spoke to says she can’t remember anything of the past twenty-four hours and is hazy on other matters, but he hopes that will clear up in another few days. You are a true heroine in this story, Victoria.”
“Not a heroine, Lotty, just incredibly lucky—I don’t even know what made me climb over that cemetery wall to find the car.”
The other piece of luck for Arielle had been that Xavier Jurgens started the night with a full tank of gas. The evidence techs who came to the Camaro told me Xavier had kept the car on, with the air-conditioning at full bore, until it ran out of gas on its own. Arielle had been lying in the stifling heat for only an hour or so before I found her.
Xavier Jurgens hadn’t been as lucky. He’d drunk too much vodka with his Abilify, and had been dead himself before his car died.
Evidence techs aren’t usually very chatty, especially not with private eyes like me, but one of the team had done his rookie partnership with my dad at the old Twelfth District. When Cosimo Draco connected my name to my father’s, he told me he was the luckiest graduate in his academy class, getting assigned to Tony Warshawski.