I called Conrad Rawlings on his personal cell. “We don’t know what happened to her, whether she left on her own, or if Nabiyev or Bagby had someone here waiting for a chance to get her on her own.”
Conrad took the few details I had, promised to call Bobby to see what resources the department could put into a search. “Don’t beat yourself up, Ms. W.,” he added. “Slows down the investigation. You got a current photo you can text?”
“YouTube. Tonight’s ‘Shoot the Puck.’”
The next hour was a blur of frantic, useless activity. The security crew did a crowd scan with their fan cams, trying to match Bernie’s face to anyone in the stands. I joined two women staffers to search the women’s toilets. I felt dull, empty, while my body moved to staircases, ramps, hidden elevators, dark spaces under the rafters, all against the backdrop of the organ, the screams from fans, the blare of foghorns. My injured eye and nose were aching. The pain forced me to know this was happening now, in the body, not some dream from which I might mercifully awaken.
The woman from security I was working with got a call on her radio: they’d found a gate attendant who was pretty sure he’d seen Bernie leave. We all rushed down to the security office, where the Stadium’s staff had been augmented by members of the Chicago police, including Conrad, who nodded a greeting when he spotted me.
The attendant was flustered, not used to this kind of spotlight. Conrad took the questioning away from the security chief.
“You’re not in any trouble, son, but the girl may be in danger, so we need you to think calmly. How sure are you?”
He was pretty sure, yeah, well, during the game not much happened at the gates, you reminded people that once they left, they couldn’t come back in, and other than that, he and his buddies, they kind of hung out.
“Right,” Conrad said as the security chief started to demand what “hanging out” meant. “What time would you say you saw the girl leave?”
The attendant couldn’t pinpoint it, more than to say around the start of the second period. “Because by the third, with the Hawks on cruise control, you start to get a lot of people leaving, trying to beat the traffic.”
“She seem to be leaving under her own steam, son, or was someone forcing her?” Conrad asked.
The attendant hesitated. “She left alone, for sure, but maybe a minute or two later two guys left, too. I started telling them the policy, you know, no reentry, and they told me to shut the f— up.”
Conrad and the security chief tried a dozen different ways to get the attendant to describe the two men. The attendant became more and more flustered: he saw so many people every night, it was a miracle he even remembered this pair. Conrad finally let it go, his shoulders sagging.
OLYMPIC TRYOUTS
One in the morning, sitting in the cold walkway at the United Center. Conrad and the cops had taken off, Pierre had called Tintrey, one of the biggest of the private security firms, and was out in a car with them, driving the streets around the Stadium.
The security staff were getting ready to shut down the building for the night. The security chief was sympathetic: everyone felt devastated by Bernie’s disappearance, but she wasn’t in the building; I needed to leave.
I got up, my legs so stiff I lost my balance. I clutched the handrail along the wall, my bleary eyes not registering what I was looking at, the shuttered food stands, the garbage that the cleaning crew was shoveling into bags, the aisle numbers going dark as the interior lights were shut off. I was standing near 201, which was blinking at me, the bulb inside getting ready to die.
“Know how you feel,” I muttered.
I had a feverish urge to join the cops and Tintrey Security in driving the city’s streets, the way one does in hunting a missing wallet: it could be here, have you looked there?—even if the police organized a search by quartering the vicinity and fanning out from there they couldn’t cover the buildings, the bridges and tunnels. You need some kind of hint or clue and I had nothing to contribute.
My day had started with Mr. Villard’s shooting. My encounter with the Evanston police seemed part of the dim past, as if it had happened to someone else many decades earlier. I was so worn that I would be more of a hindrance than a creative help in a search. I drove home. Maybe I’d sleep, maybe I’d wake up with an idea.
“Don’t beat yourself up.” I repeated Conrad’s advice as I climbed the back stairs to my place. “Plenty of time for that later. Anyway, Pierre is doing it for you.”