Morrell shook his head. “Vish can’t figure it out. It’s true they were beaten, but he doesn’t think with something conventional, like clubs or whips. He says oil was embedded in Czernin’s skin. He was hit hard on the head, hard enough to break his spine, but it didn’t kill him, at least not right away. He died from asphyxiation, not from spinal injuries. But what has Vish really baffled is that the injuries are uniform across both their bodies. Except for Czernin’s broken neck, obviously. Whatever brutal hit he took, Marcena managed to avoid, which is hopeful for her ultimate recovery.”
The two men tried to think of things that would cause that kind of injury. Morrell wondered about rollers from a steel mill, but Mr. Contreras objected that those would have crushed the bodies. In his turn, the old man suggested that they’d been dragged along the road from the back of a truck. Morrell thought that sounded plausible and phoned Vishnikov to propose it, but apparently dragging would have left burn marks and distended tendons in the arms or legs.
The images were too graphic for me: I’d seen the bodies, I couldn’t deal with them right now as an academic exercise. I abruptly announced I was going upstairs. When I got to my own place, I decided to wash my hair, which the hospital had left alone when they hosed me off. I figured my back had healed enough that I could stand under a shower.
When I was clean, and had my own jeans on, I checked my messages. It was getting hard to remember that I run a business, that life wasn’t all coaching basketball and hiking across swamps.
I had the predictable queries from Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star and Beth Blacksin, a television reporter with Global Entertainment. I told them what I knew, which wasn’t much, and checked in with clients who were waiting for reports—with ever-decreasing patience.
I had a message from Sanford Rieff, the forensic engineer I’d sent the frog dish to. He had a preliminary report for me that he was faxing to my office. I tried to call him, but got only his voice mail; I’d have to wait until I got to my office and my fax machine to see what he’d found.
Rose Dorrado had phoned, twice, to see if Josie had been in the pit with Bron and Marcena. Julia answered the phone when I called: her ma was out job hunting. No, they hadn’t heard anything from Josie.
“I heard how April’s dad got killed. You don’t think they’ll kill Josie, do you?”
“Who, Julia?” I asked gently. “Do you know anything about how Bron got killed?”
“Someone told Ma they found Billy’s car all wrecked, and I thought, since him and Josie disappeared the same night Mr. Czernin got killed, some gangbanger could be out there just knocking people off and the police, like they ever care about us, they’ll never find them.”
Her voice held genuine terror. I did my best to reassure her without offering her cold comfort—I couldn’t promise Josie wasn’t dead, but it seemed hopeful to me that no one had seen her. If she had been assaulted, and by the same people who went after Marcena and Bron, all their bodies would have been found together.
“I’m going to see you tomorrow at practice, right, Julia?”
“Uh, I guess so, Coach.”
“And tell your ma I’m coming over after practice to talk to her. I’ll give you and María Inés a lift home, just this once.”
When I’d hung up, I sat down with a large pad of newsprint and a Magic Marker to write down everything I knew, or thought I knew, about what had been happening in South Chicago.
A lot of lines ran through Rose Dorrado and Billy the Kid. Rose had taken a second job, which upset Josie; the night the plant blew up, the Kid had come to stay at the Dorrados’, running away from his family. Because they objected to Josie? Because of something they were doing themselves? Then there was Billy’s car, but it had Morrell’s flask in it. Somehow, Billy had gotten involved with Bron or Marcena, or both. And Bron had had Billy’s phone in his pocket.
I remembered Josie telling me that Billy had given his phone to someone. To Bron? But why? And then had he given the Miata to Bron so that detectives couldn’t find him through his car? Had Bron been killed by someone who mistook him for Billy? Had Billy really been running away from danger, danger whose seriousness he was too naive to recognize?
The cell phone. What had I done with it. I had a vague memory of the clean-shaven man from Scarface demanding it from me, but I couldn’t remember whether he’d gotten it.
I’d dropped my dirty clothes just inside my door. Billy’s cell phone was still in the jacket pocket. As was Morrell’s thermos, or the thermos that looked like his. I’d handled it so much by now that I doubted it had much forensic value, but I still put it in a plastic bag, and went back down the stairs on slow, stiff legs. It used to be that I could have gone running after twenty-four hours of rest, but these legs were not going running anytime soon that I could imagine.
30
Comrades in Arms
When I returned to Mr. Contreras’s kitchen, I found Conrad had arrived. He was sitting next to Morrell at the chipped enamel table while Mr. Contreras finished flipping a stack of fresh flapjacks for him.
“How good and pleasant it is when brothers dwell together in unity,” I said.