I zipped the cushions back into their covers. Even if I disturbed some vital piece of evidence, I needed to sit down. I wanted water too, but that meant going to the hall, to the refrigerator, and I didn’t want to open my door until I felt safe inside my building.
What did I have that someone might want? Besides my computer, of course. My Isabel Bishop painting was the only valuable in the office. I got up and looked at the partition facing my desk. The painting had been tossed to the floor. I didn’t touch it. The glass would show prints if any had been left.
Even Tessa absorbed in work would have responded to the racket made by this wantonness. Would the intruders have hurt Tessa? Again I wanted to run to the hall, run to look in her studio, but fear kept me locked inside.
I finally pulled my cell phone from my handbag and phoned Tessa’s home. She lived with her parents in their Gold Coast duplex. Her mother answered, the rich contralto that worked magic in courtrooms around the country vibrating the airwaves.
“Victoria. How are you? I didn’t recognize your voice.”
“No, ma’am. I’ve had a bit of a shock. I just got in from out of town and found my office vandalized. I wanted to make sure Tessa was all right.”
Mrs. Reynolds made the proper statements of alarm and concern but reassured me about Tessa. She had picked her daughter up at the studio for a cup of coffee around noon. Tessa was off for a weekend’s sailing with friends, and Mrs. Reynolds, back from a busy week in Washington, had wanted to see her alone for a few minutes.
“When the police come, have them examine her studio to make sure nothing’s wrong in there. I’ve never liked her being that close to Humboldt Park. I don’t care how big her lats are, as she keeps telling me, or how good you are in a fight, you two young women need to be in a safer part of town.”
“You’re probably right, ma’am,” I agreed, as the easiest way to end the conversation.
I leaned back on the couch and shut my eyes. Imagined lying in Lake Michigan with the sun overhead until my breath was calm enough for me to think about my situation. If this were Baladine’s work it could be an attempt to terrorize me, but if he were also looking for something what would it be? I thought through my conversations during the last week, with Frenada, with Alex. With Murray. The last name came most reluctantly to mind.
I’d told Murray about my LifeStory report on Frenada, that I had proof he was clean. But this was not Murray Ryerson’s work. It could not be. Murray was a journalist. The story and the chase, wherever the road led you, that was what mattered to him. Global couldn’t have destroyed that in him in a few weeks, he was better than that. Really, he was.
I was saying the same thing over and over in my mind, as if standing in front of the bench pleading his case. I needed to find the hard copy, if it was still there, although with the leisure to search my absence had guaranteed them, the intruders could have turned over every piece of paper in the room.
I shut my eyes and tried to remember what I’d done with the LifeStory printout. I’d stuffed everything into a desk drawer, because I knew Mary Louise was going to be in using the desk, and unorganized stacks of files drove her mad. I opened the drawer. Many of the papers had been pulled out, exposing a box of tampons I kept there. They were rolling around in the drawer, and I automatically stuffed them back into the box. They wouldn’t go in, so I picked up the carton, forgetting for the moment about evidence.
Inside was a plastic freezer bag filled with white powder. I stared at it, my numbed mind moving like a dog in quicksand. Cocaine. Maybe heroin—I wouldn’t know one from the other. Someone wrecked my office and planted drugs in it. I didn’t want to send it to a lab for testing, and I didn’t want to explain it to the cops. I didn’t want to explain it to anyone.
I leapt to my feet in a sudden frenzy and searched every drawer in the room, every light fixture, every crevice. I found two more bags—one taped inside the printer and the other tucked into a rip in the fabric underneath the couch.