“I wish I knew what had happened to the kid’s phone,” I said to the techs. “It has the evidence of who sent her the text message that brought her here last night. And then—I don’t know. I can’t imagine Jurgens being that subtle.”
“For the third time, Warshawski, we don’t do theories,” Draco said. “Anything could have happened to the girl’s phone—kids lose them all the time. I know mine do—it’s like the phone is the beating heart that keeps them alive, only they leave it at the mall or at a friend’s or drop it when they get out of the car.”
“You’re imagining this like some kind of TV show, but criminals don’t act like that most of the time.” The youngest tech stopped in the middle of repacking his equipment bag to look at me. “The detectives will decide, of course, but your guy Xavier was just flailing around. He drugs the girl, gets her into his car, starts to write a ransom note, and then realizes how high the odds against him are. So he mixes the drug into his booze, knocks it back, and drifts off to Jesus.”
“Or whoever,” Draco said. “I’ve got everything photographed. Lunchtime, boys.”
What do you eat after spending a couple of hours inhaling vodka-laced vomit? For me, a tall cold one. Water, not beer. I took the long way back to my car, and was lucky to find a street vendor hawking bottles of water at Augusta and Leavitt. I bought two and sat on the curb drinking, trying to make sense of the things I’d seen and heard since leaving my own home a century or so ago.
The evidence techs were willing to label this a kidnapping gone wrong. And who was I to say they weren’t right? You could interpret Jurgens’s farewell message to his true love as a confession that he’d killed Miles Wuchnik, and then killed himself. End of story, sort of.
It still didn’t explain where Jurgens got the money to buy the Camaro, or where Wuchnik had gotten the money he was sending his sister, or who had sent Arielle Zitter whatever message had brought her onto the mean streets.
I got up and walked back to my car. I needed to change clothes. And probably, despite the dull nausea I felt in the wake of Jurgens’s death, I needed to eat something—I’d gotten the SOS from Gabe Eycks in the middle of breakfast, and that had been six hours ago. Maybe if I ate, I’d be able to think of what I needed to do next.
By the time I reached home, I found that Mr. Contreras was running out of steam. He’d been on his own for an hour, since Petra had to go in to work, and little Lucy not only had the energy of an atomic pile but a certain ruthlessness that made her realize she could get pretty much what she wanted from “Dziadzio Sal” by opening her blue eyes as wide as possible and looking like an orphan about one second away from death.
The girls had been playing with the dogs: red ribbons festooned Peppy’s neck and tail, but Mitch was wearing a pink babydoll pajama top and a baby bonnet. When I laughed at the sight, he gave me a look of burning indignation and slunk behind Mr. Contreras’s couch.
“Did you find Arielle?” Kira asked.
“Yep. She’d gone back to the cemetery where you had your initiation ceremony.”
“Why’d she do that?” Mr. Contreras said. “And the middle of the night, too, like she hadn’t already caused her ma and her grandpa a carload of grief!”
“You know her better than we do, Kira,” I said. “Why do you think she did it?”
Kira hunched a thin shoulder. “I don’t know. Arielle does what she wants and the rest of us are supposed to clap.”
“Everybody clap your hands,” Lucy started to sing, but her sister told her to shut up.
“You know, girls, your Dziadzio needs a little time alone if he’s going to stay up to watch a movie with you tonight. You’ll be sleeping in my apartment, so I need you to come upstairs and help me put clean sheets on the bed.”
Despite his humiliating wardrobe, Mitch bounded up the stairs after Lucy and Kira. I set them to changing the bed while I took a shower and found some clean clothes. When I was dressed, I logged on to my laptop as a guest, to keep the girls out of my confidential files, and downloaded a Nancy Drew puzzle for Kira to solve. Lucy was happy enough in front of the television, so I went back to my neighbor, to tell him the full story on what had happened to Arielle.
“The techs are slanting their findings toward suicide, but I’m not convinced,” I said. “We don’t know why or how Xavier got Arielle into that car. Teens and their phones are glued to each other; Arielle’s is missing. The techs say she probably dropped it struggling with Xavier, but if that’s the case, where is it? And then there’s Kira’s phone, which I’m pretty sure the killer used to send Arielle that bogus text.”