Since Homeland Security didn’t have the news that the drawers had been stolen, that meant two sets of people were looking for Martin. Set One broke into the Mustang while the Feds were waiting to intercept the drawers when I got back to Chicago. So Set One were drug dealers. In that case, the sheriff’s deputies who’d come to the motel at four yesterday morning were right—meth heads thought I’d dug up treasure and they wanted it.
If Cordell Breen was tracking Martin, he could have bribed anyone to let him know whether they found anything at the meth house. My head ached from chasing my ideas in circles. I could see drug dealers murdering Ricky, I could see them thinking that Judy had run from Palfry with a chunk of Ricky Schlafly’s money. And then imagining that I’d found gold in the meth pit when the stories began circulating at the football game.
“DTs,” I printed in block capitals, short for Drug Thugs. “DTs killed Schlafly and Kitty (probably). HSTs—Homeland Security Thugs—are monitoring my e-mail because Cordell Breen has asked FBI to find Martin Binder. Cordell thinks Martin is selling Metargon secrets, but there’s been no whiff of buyer or seller.”
The DTs probably would just trash the bits of paper on the dresser drawers. In fact, they’d trash the drawers, too, when they realized that the only treasure there was fool’s gold.
What did the HSTs imagine I’d found? Not the bank account. The document from the Department of Commerce about Innsbruck? But that was something obtained through the Freedom of Information Act; anyone could read it.
I pulled my laptop out of my briefcase and started to power it up, but stopped. If the HSTs were monitoring my e-mail they could be embedded right in my accounts, looking at every search I made. They’d see the laptop’s ISP and come trundling along looking for me and my machine. I needed a computer where someone wouldn’t be tracking me. I put Il Contesto away, but left the rest of the books on the table.
27
DERRICK, KING OF THE DAMNED
A GOOD FRIEND OF mine had died in a bad fall earlier this summer. I’d put her private documents into my safe while she lay unconscious in the ICU. When she died a few days later, trauma and grief put any thought of her papers out of my mind. I came on them when I was checking my safe, to make sure Homeland Security hadn’t been inside it.
Leydon Ashford had been not just a loving and energetic friend, but a risk-taker who enjoyed thumbing her nose at authority. I figured she would applaud my borrowing her identity for a few days.
I took public transportation down to the South Side so I could use the University of Chicago library. Before I went, I checked in with Mr. Contreras. He started to ask me what had happened to me last night, but I put a finger over his mouth and took him outside with the dogs. While we stood on the beach throwing balls for them, I told him what had happened last night with the federal magistrate. I asked him not to discuss any aspect of this current case when we were at home or in my car.
“Those Homeland Security guys have got me nervous. If they’ve hacked into my e-mail account, they might easily be bugging my phone, or the car or our building.”
The warning made my neighbor angry: this wasn’t what he’d risked his life for at Anzio all those years ago. Far as that went, it wasn’t why he’d worked hard at Diamond Machining for forty years, creating struts for B-52s.
I couldn’t offer him any consolation. It wasn’t what I’d worked all my life for, either. “The trouble is, they seem to think I know something about our nuclear policy, or weapons or something, and until I figure that out, I don’t have a way of getting them to leave me alone.”
Back at home, I took the battery out of my phone so that its GPS signal wouldn’t betray me. I left my iPad and laptop with Mr. Contreras so I wouldn’t be tempted to check my e-mails.
I wasn’t going to drive, in case someone had bugged my car. On my way to the L, I stopped a couple of times, to tie my shoes, to buy a paper, but I didn’t see any obvious signs of tails. Either the HSTs were too subtle for me or I was exaggerating my importance to them. Still, it would reduce my carbon footprint to ride the L: I felt virtuous as the train made its languid afternoon run into the center city.
That was about the one positive in the day. Until I knew for sure why Homeland Security was focusing on me, I wasn’t going to be a very happy detective. A government audit had shown that Homeland Security monitors e-mails and phone calls from Americans without even trying to connect us to terrorism. They don’t have a budget, they just do what they want. The problem is that once the government starts monitoring you, they invade all aspects of your life, not just the little bit they think they need.
I needed to talk to Judy Binder. She surely told her son about the bank account Benjamin Dzornen had set up, but I bet Martin didn’t care about that—it would have been ancient history to him. He’d gone to his mother because he thought Judy had some documents about the significance of Martina’s work, something neither Judy nor Kitty had recognized or cared about.