“Did she tell you more?” Conrad turned to me. “You spend a lot of time in that apartment, right?”
I smiled. “That’s right, Commander, but Marcena didn’t confide in me. She did say that Bron let her drive his semi the first night they met, and that she almost took out a shed or something in the school parking lot, but I can’t remember her talking about him more specifically.”
“Ms. Czernin said the Love woman was screwing her husband,” Conrad said.
Mr. Contreras made a noise at the vulgarity, which wasn’t typical of Conrad—I figured he was trying to get Morrell off balance, to see what indiscretion he might blurt out.
Morrell gave a tight smile. “Marcena didn’t confide her private business to me.”
“Or to you, Warshawski?” Conrad said. “No? One of the girls on your team said that everyone in the school knew about it.”
My face grew hot. “Why are you harassing my team, Conrad? Do you imagine one of them killed Bron Czernin? Do I need to make sure my girls have a lawyer?”
“We’re talking to everyone who knew the guy down there. He had a way about him around that neighborhood—a lot of men might have had a reason to kill him over the years.”
“Why would the men of South Chicago go for him now if he and Marcena were an item? I’d think they’d be glad he was finding more distant pastures to roam in—except maybe Sandra, and I don’t see how she could have beaten up both her husband and Marcena and dragged them to that pit.”
“She could have had help.” Conrad tipped his head toward Morrell, who looked at him in bewilderment.
“Am I supposed to have been jealous of Czernin?” Morrell said. “Marcena and I are old friends, which is why I’m putting her up, but we’re not lovers. She has wide-ranging and eclectic tastes. When we were in Afghanistan last winter, she got involved with one of the orderlies at Humane Medicine, a Pakistani army major, and someone from the Slovenian wire services, and those were the three I knew about. Believe me, if I were a jealous lover who wanted her dead I would have done it up in the Pathan hills where no one would have cared.”
Conrad grunted: maybe he believed it, maybe he didn’t. “What about her work? What was she writing?”
Morrell shook his head. “The series was on the America Europe doesn’t know. After she met Czernin, she decided to focus on South Chicago. She spent time out at By-Smart headquarters—old Mr. Bysen seemed to like her, and she had a couple of private meetings with him. That’s all I can tell you: she played her cards close to her chest.”
“Not that close, if you knew about her Pakistani major and the orderly and so on,” Conrad said. “I want to see her notes.”
“You think the attack had to do with the story she was working on? Not someone who was out to get Bron and hit her because she was there?”
“I don’t have a theory,” Conrad grumbled. “I only have a woman whose daddy is in the British Foreign Office, so the consul has called the super five times and he’s called me ten times. Czernin gave horns to any number of guys in South Chicago, and we’re looking at that. I don’t think it was a routine gangbanging, because whatever happened to them took a lot of work, and even though my punks in South Chicago have way too much time on their hands they don’t go in for elaborate murder. So I’m looking at people Czernin pissed off, and I’m looking at what Love was working on. I can get a warrant to search your place, Morrell, easy, because the mayor is yanking the super’s chain and the super is yanking mine—any judge will be happy to oblige. But it would be real, real nice if you’d save me the trouble.”
Morrell studied him thoughtfully. “Police departments are walking off with people’s files these days under cover of the Patriot Act. I don’t want to invite police into my home so that they can take my machine or someone else’s.”
“So you want me to waste time on a warrant.”
“I don’t think legal protections are a waste of time, Rawlings. But I won’t ask you to go to a judge if you’ll come with me yourself, and go through Marcena’s computer with me file by file. If she has personal material on it, we’ll leave it lay. If she has notes that may suggest a perpetrator, you’ll copy them and take them with you.”
Conrad didn’t like it. He is a cop, after all, and cops don’t like civilian oversight of their work. But he’s a fundamentally decent guy who doesn’t want to harass citizens for the pleasure of it.
“I’m a watch commander. I can’t take that kind of time, but I can give you a good detective and a uniformed officer. With orders not to take anything you haven’t seen.”
“With orders to take copies, not originals,” Morrell said.
“With orders to take anything that looks relevant to the work the Love woman was doing in South Chicago.”