Before calling the hospital I looked inside my phone to see if the folks who broke in had planted a bug in it. When I didn’t find anything unusual in the mess of wires, I went out behind the warehouse to inspect the phone junction box. There I found that the wires had been stripped and clipped to a secondary set of cables, presumably leading to a listening station. I tapped on them thoughtfully. Probably best that I left them in place. It wasn’t a sophisticated system, but if I dismantled it, Baladine would get something less primitive, harder to find, and harder to circumvent.
Back inside, I let Andras Schiff play Bach on my office CD. I don’t know if those old spy movies are right, that radios block listening devices, but the Goldberg Variations might at a minimum educate the thugs—who knows? I sat next to the speaker with my cell phone and called the hospital. The woman from the agency stared at me curiously, then turned a huffy shoulder: she thought I was trying to keep her from listening to me.
Max Loewenthal’s secretary, Cynthia Dowling, came on the line with her usual efficient friendliness.
“I can’t remember the ER surgeon’s name,” I said. “I should, since it’s Polish, but all I remember is that it had a hundred zees and cees in it.”
“Dr. Szymczyk,” she supplied.
When I explained what I wanted, she put me on hold and tracked down the report. Of course Dr. Szymczyk hadn’t done an autopsy, but he had dictated information while he was working on Aguinaldo. He had described necrotic skin on the abdomen but hadn’t mentioned any serious burn wounds. He had noted a couple of raw spots above the breasts that didn’t seem connected to the blow that killed her.
Raw spots. Those could conceivably have been caused by a stun gun, so maybe Veronica Fassler hadn’t been spinning a complete lie. I would bring fifty dollars for her with me to the prison in the morning.
I worked desultorily with the woman from the agency, but it was hard for me to focus on files. For some people, putting papers in order is a wonderfully soothing act, but I could make so little sense of the world around me that I couldn’t make sense of my scattered papers either.
Late in the afternoon, as I was trying to remember what year and what file records about Humboldt Chemical belonged to, my office buzzer rang. I stiffened and had my gun in hand when I went to the front door. I was astounded to see Abigail Trant, her honey–colored hair and softly tinted face as perfect as when I’d met her two weeks ago. Her Mercedes Gelaendewagen was double–parked on the street outside. When I invited her in, she asked if I’d talk to her in her vehicle instead. I wondered briefly if she had been dragooned into acting as a decoy but followed her to her trucklet.
“Do you know that Robbie Baladine has disappeared? If you know where he is, can you send him home?”
I blinked in surprise but assured her I hadn’t heard from him for several days. “Did Eleanor or BB send you to talk to me?”
She looked straight ahead, ignoring an angrily honking line of cars behind her. “I came on my own initiative, and I am hoping you will honor my speaking confidentially to you. We are flying to France with the Baladines on Saturday, along with the Poilevys, so Eleanor discussed Robbie’s disappearance with me in a frank way, as it is affecting their travel plans. They both feel that you have encouraged Robbie to be disobedient. I don’t know if that is the reason, but BB has been talking furiously about wanting to put you out of business or thoroughly discredit you in some way. Knowing something about his methods, I didn’t want to call you—he might well be monitoring your phone calls. I think I told you when we met that he doesn’t like to feel anyone is getting the upper hand with him: for some reason he thinks you are taunting him or undermining him in some way.”
I gave a snort of mirthless laughter. “He’s been making it almost impossible for me to run my business.”
A car shot around her from behind, giving her the finger and a loud epithet. She paid no attention.
“I had suggested to Teddy that Global try to make use of your agency, that it would be a good thing to support local talent. But he said you refused to take the assignment.”
My jaw dropped so suddenly that my ears popped. “You were behind that? Mrs. Trant—that was extremely gracious of you. The trouble is, the assignment as it came to me from Alex Fisher was to frame someone, a man named Lucian Frenada who was drowned over the weekend. I couldn’t take it on.”
She sighed. “That’s so typical of Alex. I wish Teddy didn’t rely on her advice so much—I think she often leads him astray.”
What a good wife, letting herself believe her husband was the innocent victim of bad advisers. But I wasn’t going to ride her: she had gone out on a long limb for me with no reason for doing so. I asked her what made her put in a word for me with her husband.
She looked at me for the first time. “Do you know that the only money I’ve ever worked for was exercising horses for people when I was a teenager? I love my life and I love my husband, but I’ve often wondered what I would do if he—and my own family—lost everything. Would I be able to cut my own path, the way you have? Helping you out is like—like—”