It was humiliating to be mistaken for an INS officer. Or an agent of a foreign secret–police force. I didn’t know which would be worse.
There might have been something more profitable I could have done with the rest of the afternoon, but I went home and worked on personal projects, matting some prints I’d picked up at a flea market. One of the pictures showed a young woman about Aguinaldo’s age. She was partly dressed, in a kind of camisole, and was staring at a window; what I liked about the picture was the reflection of her face in the glass.
I started wondering about the shirtdress Aguinaldo had been wearing. The lab’s report had explained only how they’d tested the outside of the fabric for automobile traces. Maybe the inside of the shirt could tell me something about how Nicola Aguinaldo had died.
I was actually feeling edgy enough to try the lab. Of course no one was answering on a Saturday afternoon. I worked my way through the voice menu and left a message in the mailbox of the guy who had signed the report on the Trans Am.
Sunday morning I went out with the dogs for another early swim, keeping an eye open for Lemour. Back home I told Mr. Contreras I would take Peppy to the office with me for company. I assured him I’d be back by four: he and the dogs and I were joining Mary Louise and her foster sons for a picnic. Mary Louise and I get together once a week to go over work; this week we’d decided to combine it with a family outing.
“Okay, doll, okay. You got a water dish down there? It’s too hot for the princess to go all day without drinking.”
I bit back a sharp retort. “Her comfort is my main object in life. And my office is air–conditioned. I hope no animal–rights people are out throwing yellow paint on her today, because she just won’t give up that big old fur coat, not even in June, will you, girl?”
Peppy grinned in happy agreement and clattered down the stairs with me, her tail waving a pointed put–down at Mitch, left at home with my neighbor. At my office she ran first to Tessa Reynolds’s studio. Tessa is a sculptor. These days she was working with marble; the dust made her short dreadlocks glitter under her bright lights. She waved a muscular forearm at me, gave the dog a quick scratch, but was too deep in her work to take a break.
If Tessa wouldn’t stop to talk I had no choice but to go to work myself. While my computer came up I pulled out my phone books and started calling everyone in the metropolitan area named Morrell. I didn’t try anything smart—just the unvarnished truth: V. I. Warshawski, private investigator, looking for the man asking questions of immigrants in Uptown. Of course half the people weren’t home, but those who were either didn’t know what I was talking about or affected not to.
“Enough, Warshawski, get to the stuff you know you need to do,” I muttered, inserting a CD–ROM with a cross–directory for Georgia phones and addresses. Checking phone numbers was mindless work; my thoughts kept creeping back to Aguinaldo. Baladine said she’d faked an illness to get sent to the hospital. Mary Louise said the prison had reported an ovarian cyst. Did Baladine know that was faked? Or that the report was a fake?
When I was with the public defender, my clients found it impossible to get medical care. One man with lymphoma had a tumor constricting his diaphragm and died in solitary for causing a disturbance when he tried to summon help. It was hard to believe that Coolis was so tender of their charges that Aguinaldo could have faked an illness. And once she’d fled the hospital, how had she gotten to Chicago so fast?
I put down my notes on Georgia and went to the cupboard to pull my Illinois county maps. Peppy, lying under a table, half–sat up to see whether I was leaving. She lay down again when I returned to my desk.
The hospital in Coolis sat on the northwest end of the town, the prison side, where growth was fastest. If Aguinaldo had left in a supply or laundry truck, they would have gone out the service road, which followed Smallpox Creek. I squinted through my magnifying glass to bring up the details. Assuming she’d hopped off the truck before it reached the town center, she had limited choices—she could follow Smallpox Creek on foot north to Lake Galena or try to hitch a ride on Route 113, which led from the hospital past the prison as well as northeast away from the town.
There was only one crossroads between the hospital and the prison, Hollow Glen Road, which intersected again with 113 a mile north and another state road a mile south. It might be worthwhile to see if someone picked her up—assuming Robert Baladine hadn’t been waiting at Hollow Glen Road in his Porsche. Those queries were ones that only the police or state marshals had the resources to undertake. I put the map down in frustration.