When he’d seen Mitch lead me into the swamp, Mr. Contreras had tried to follow us in the car, but the road went too far to the west of where we were walking, and, anyway, after a couple of minutes he couldn’t see us at all through the marsh grasses. He’d gone back to the place where Mitch started into the swamp, but after half an hour a state trooper came along and ordered him to leave.
“I tried to tell the guy you was lost in there, and he says, tell the local cops, not him, it’s Chicago’s responsibility, so I beg him to call the Chicago cops, and he won’t, only tells me he’ll impound the car if I don’t move it, so I had to go home.” The old man’s voice was still thick with grievance. “When I got home, I called 911, and they told me to wait until morning, and, if I hadn’t heard from you, to file a missing persons. I should have called Captain Mallory, I guess, didn’t think of that, but, anyway, by and by I heard from Morrell here, he told me about Mitch leading you all the way to that Miss Love.”
“I don’t understand that part,” I said. “Not that I understand anything right now, but—whoever attacked Marcena and Romeo must have done it around 100th and the river, because that’s where Mitch disappeared. He was following the two thugs who attacked Billy’s car, and then, all I can figure is, he somehow caught Marcena’s scent and went after her. Has Conrad been looking by the river?”
Morrell shook his head. “I haven’t talked to him since we parted company at the hospital yesterday.”
“How did you and Conrad hook up, anyway?” I demanded.
“I called him after you phoned me from your pit—do you know where you were, by the way? The edge of the Harborside Golf Course, where it peters out into a no-man’s-land leading down to the garbage dump. Anyway, South Chicago is Rawlings’s turf; I thought he was the fastest route to finding you and getting Marcena to a hospital.”
I hesitated over the question, but finally asked how Marcena was doing.
“Not good, but still on planet Earth.” He must have seen the tiny sigh of relief I gave, because he added, “Yes, you’re a jealous street-fighting pit dog, but you’re not mean-spirited. She wasn’t conscious when she got to the hospital, but they put her into a medical coma, anyway, to make sure she didn’t wake up. She lost skin over about a quarter of her body, and is going to need massive grafts. If she were alert enough to answer questions, she’d be in so much pain the shock would probably kill her.”
We sat in silence for a time. To Mr. Contreras’s consternation, I could only manage one pancake after my fast, but I ate it with about a quart of honey and started to feel better.
After a bit, Morrell picked up his part of the story again. “When Rawlings called to tell me they’d found you, I phoned Contreras, here, and got a cab to pick him up on the way to the hospital—which was a mercy, let me tell you, Queen of the Amazons, because your guard dog wasn’t going to leave your side.”
“Really?” I brightened. “Yesterday, he attached himself so thoroughly to Marcena I thought he didn’t love me anymore.”
“Maybe he just figured you were his last tie to her.” Morrell wiggled his eyebrows provocatively. “Be that as it may, if Contreras hadn’t shown up you’d probably be in County Jail right now, not County Hospital, and the dog would be dead. But it all worked out. Contreras here persuaded the Hound of the Baskervilles to let go of the security guard’s leg, I saw you into the emergency room, we waited until the charge nurse said you just needed rest and rehydration, and then Rawlings arrived, wondering if he could get a statement from you about Marcena. When he saw that was no go, we found a cabbie who’d take Mitch; Contreras set off with him. Rawlings left to do police stuff, but I went across the street to the morgue and talked to Vish; he was doing the autopsy on Bron Czernin.”
Nick Vishnikov was the deputy chief medical examiner at the Cook County Morgue, and an old friend of Morrell’s—he did a fair amount of forensic pathology for Humane Medicine, the group that had sent Morrell to Afghanistan. Because of that, he’d given Morrell a number of details he would probably have kept from me if I’d asked.
“They were beaten so badly.” I shivered at the memory of that flayed and mottled flesh. “What happened to them?”