It felt queer to be alone in an apartment and to know I couldn’t use the phone. It was like being in an isolation tank. I quickly wrote a note to Max, telling him where I was, how to reach me in this age of the Internet, and asking him to get word to Lotty and Mr. Contreras.
I picked Morrell’s car keys from the top dresser drawer in his bedroom. Morrell’s extreme tidiness, which had been a source of friction between us—or maybe it was my extreme messiness that bothered him—was useful when it came to finding anything in a hurry. In my apartment, a team of skilled searchers had torn the place apart without finding what they wanted.
As soon as I pulled out of Morrell’s garage, I felt nervous and exposed. Morrell had been out of my life all summer. I didn’t think anyone hunting me would know about him, but I could be wrong. When all this was over and I had found Petra safe and sound, I would have to invest in a GPS jammer. That would force anyone tracking me to follow me physically instead of doing it the lazy electronic way.
Situations like this usually key me up. I get just nervous enough to be sharp while remaining confident about my ability to deal with whatever comes along. It was Petra’s disappearance, coupled with Sister Frankie’s death, that made me so skittish.
Deep breaths, V.I., I admonished myself, deep yoga/singer breaths. You and the breath are one. After a near miss with a Herald-Star delivery van, I decided meditation and driving weren’t an ideal mix and returned to skittishness. I forced myself to believe I was in the clear, got off the side streets and took the main ones to Beth Israel. When I got there, I circled until I found street parking. At the emergency-room entrance, I went in, head up, a confident walk; security didn’t try to stop me even though I didn’t have a badge on.
I’ve known Max’s secretary, Cynthia Dowling, for years. She had stopped by my room when I’d been laid up the previous week. Today, she congratulated me on my quick recovery. Max was in a meeting, she said. Naturally. Executive directors are always in meetings.
I gave her the note I’d written. “You haven’t seen me since I was released from the hospital, have you, Cynthia?”
She smiled, but her eyes were worried. “I don’t even know your name, so I can’t say that I’ve seen you today. I’ll see that Max gets this when he’s alone. Do you know anything about your cousin?”
I shook my head. “Not enough of a whisper to even have a direction to follow. But I’m talking to people who can talk to people, and maybe one of them will finally start giving me real news.”
I left by a side door and jogged back to Morrell’s car. I drove down Damen Avenue as the closest route to the expressway. The light at Addison turned yellow just as I got to the intersection. Without a driver’s license, without an insurance card for the Honda—Morrell kept his in his wallet—I was being very law-abiding. I came to a virtuous halt. The car behind me honked in annoyance.
“Roscoe, Belmont, Wellington.” I counted off the streets out loud, nervous about needing to get to the South Side ahead of Dornick. “Roscoe!” I shouted.
The car behind me honked again, this time because the light was green, and then zoomed around me, almost colliding with the northbound traffic. Roscoe. Brian Krumas had told Peter he could stay in the Roscoe Street apartment. The contractors who had shown up at the Freedom Center were owned by a guy with offices on West Roscoe. I made a U-turn just as the light was turning yellow again, forgetting my need to be utterly obedient to traffic signals and having my own near miss with an oncoming bus. Stupid, stupid. What had been his name? The exact address? The nuns at the Freedom Center could tell me.
I’d almost reached Irving Park Road when I realized that if I drove to the Freedom Center, I’d show up on Homeland Security cameras. I needed a phone or a computer. Therefore, I needed to find an Internet café. I drove along Addison toward the lake. Just before Wrigley Field, I found what I needed.
I paid cash for a card that I could stick into one of their machines. Compared to my Mac Pro, the Windows machine they had was painfully cumbersome to use, but I logged on to one of my search engines and hunted contractors on Roscoe Street. Rodenko, that was it, 300 West Roscoe. Harvey Krumas had an unlisted phone number, but I found him, too, through my best search engine, Lifestory. The house in Barrington Hills, a place in Palm Springs, a flat in London. And the pied-à-terre in Chicago. At 300 West Roscoe.