“He s—s-said—he wanted the rec-c-c-cording,” she burst out. “L-l-like I was—was—a radio st-st-station. Give me the rec-c-cording, he k-kept saying.”
“The recording?” I echoed. “What recording?”
She was shaking and miserable; she didn’t want to answer stupid questions from me. I got her to the couch, put on water for tea, and went out to my car. To my relief, when I unlocked the door April was still breathing. I was just explaining the situation to her when the blue-and-whites finally came screaming around the corner.
42
The Hiding Place
Total confusion followed the arrival of the squad cars.
Men ran through the alley and took up positions around the house, all the time squawking importantly through their walkie-talkies. I kept April in my car—it would be a tragic irony if she survived her heart failure and Freddy’s assault only to get shot by one of these Lone Rangers. It took forever to get the men (and the one woman in the group) to understand that there had been a home invasion, that the perp had fled, and that April and her mother needed medical help.
They finally got an ambulance to come. Even though April was breathing on her own, her pallor was bad, and I was relieved to have professionals take over her care. Sandra was still shaking too badly to make it down the walk on her own, but the crew carried her to the ambulance with a kind of impersonal briskness that seemed to brace her and make her function better.
“Can I call someone to go wait with you and bring you home?” I asked Sandra as they helped her into the back of the ambulance.
“Just leave me alone, Tori Warshawski. Every time you come near me, someone in my family gets hurt.” She spat this out reflexively, because, a second later, she told me to call her folks, who lived over in Pullman. “They only have a pullout bed in the front room, but April and me, we can stay with them for a few days. My dad’s old local, they’ll send someone around to fix the house up for me.”
It was a relief to know she wasn’t completely on her own, but her departure left me to try to explain to the police what had been going on. I decided a bare-bones story would work best: I was the interim basketball coach; April was sick, her father had just died, I was dropping something off for her when a scumbag broke in through the back. He’d grabbed Sandra and threatened her; I took the kid out to my car to try to keep her out of danger. We waited for the posse—which, by the way, only arrived some thirty minutes after Sandra’s first call.
The bare-bones story got bogged down when they saw my Smith & Wesson. I had a gun, yes, I had a license, yes, I was a private investigator, yes, but I wasn’t here as a detective. I told them my history, my connection to the Czernins because April was on the Bertha Palmer basketball team and I was subbing for the coach, blah, blah. They didn’t like it: I was here with a gun, the house was a wreck, they only had my word that Freddy had ever been on the premises.
I was trying hard not to lose my temper—that was a sure recipe for spending the night in a holding cell at the division—when Conrad called me on my cell phone: he’d gotten home, he’d gotten my message, and what the hell was I doing interrogating suspects?
“It took your damned squad twenty minutes by the clock to respond to a 911 call about a home invasion,” I snarled. “Don’t give me word one about staying out of your turf, leaving police business to the Fourth District, giving tea parties, or whatever it was you said last week.”
“Home invasion? What are you talking about, Warshawski? You didn’t say anything about that in the message you left.”
“It hadn’t happened then,” I snapped, “but Freddy Pacheco, the guy I called you about, was breaking into the Czernin house less than an hour later. I did report my encounter with him to one of your detectives, but he wouldn’t work up a sweat over it. Now your boys want to arrest me for saving Sandra and April Czernin.”
“You’re so wound up, I can’t make head nor tail of what you’re saying,” Conrad complained. “Let me talk to the officer in charge.”
I grinned savagely and handed the phone to my chief interrogator. “It’s Conrad Rawlings, your Fourth District commander.”
The officer frowned, thinking I was yanking his chain, but when he heard Conrad on the other end of the line he changed comically, sitting up at attention, giving an abbreviated account of their arrival. Judging from the officer’s broken sentences, Conrad kept interrupting with demands to know why it had taken them so long to get to the Czernins’, and what they had found when they searched the house. The officer got up to confer with another man, and reported that the house was empty.
I heard Conrad’s voice scratchily through the mouthpiece; the officer said to me, “He wants to know what you know about the perp.”