I showed him the video footage and explained how she’d happened to have my front-door combination. He frowned over the photos, then demanded of the patrol units if they’d done anything to get the footage over to a video-technology team.
Once Bobby showed up, the tempo of the investigation accelerated. Aggressive cops became subdued and helpful, lethargic ones became energetic, and an evidence team magically appeared and began dusting the whole mess for prints, blood, any trace of anything. Bobby called the FBI, in case it was a kidnapping; they sent a special agent over around eleven, and I had to answer useless questions all over again.
In the middle of it all, I started getting calls from reporters, and a television crew parked outside my office. Brian Krumas himself called while I was talking to the FBI’s special agent. The candidate was at a high-end fundraiser in Hollywood, but of course his staff had heard about Petra’s disappearance. Krumas talked to Bobby and then to me.
“You’re Petra’s cousin, right? We met at the Navy Pier event, didn’t we? I’m giving you my private number, Vic, and I want you to call me the instant you have any news of her, okay?”
I copied the number into my PDA and went back to the FBI. No matter how mediagenic you are yourself—and Brian Krumas was being touted as a glamorous new Bobby Kennedy—disappearing blond twenty-somethings are national news, and you need to do damage control.
When I finally got home, I didn’t sleep much. I kept jolting awake, trying not to imagine what could be happening to Petra, trying instead to think of places I should look for her, and wondering who she had invited into my office.
“You shouldn’t be talking to a lowlife like Johnny Merton, anyway,” Mr. Contreras said. “I been telling you that since the first time you drove out there, but no one except you ever knows right from wrong. The rest of us are too ignorant to have opinions. And now you’ve got Petra in trouble.”
“I know just how many counts Merton was charged with. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to know he had my girl kidnapped and forced her to open your office,” Peter roared, swinging around the room to put his nose almost against mine. “If any harm comes to her because of you, whatever it is, I will inflict it on you tenfold. Do you hear me?”
I stood very still, not speaking. If harm came to Petra because of me, I didn’t think I could live with myself anyway, but her father’s wild rage was impossible to respond to. His phone rang, and he finally backed away from me to answer it.
I turned to face Rachel. “You go see Derek Hatfield. He’s a good field agent.”
“What will you do?” she asked.
“I’m putting my own best agent on the case,” I said bleakly.
My best agent had been unable to find Lamont Gadsden. My best agent had left a trail of desolation at the Mighty Waters Freedom Center. I hoped she could do a better job looking for Petra.
3
NO GOOD DEED REMAINS UNPUNISHED
LAMONT GADSDEN AND MY COUSIN PETRA. IT WAS HARD to imagine two people with less in common: an old buddy of Hammer Merton’s from Chicago’s South Side, a Millennium Gen text messager from an upscale Kansas City suburb. If it hadn’t been for me, and some terrible luck, their lives would never have collided.
Petra being my cousin, it wasn’t surprising that she looked for me when she showed up in Chicago at the start of the summer, a fresh-minted college graduate with an internship in her daddy’s hometown.
It was sheer luck, the bad kind, that I agreed to look for Lamont Gadsden. Sometimes when I want someone to blame, someone outside my family, I snarl unfairly at a homeless guy named Elton Grainger.
Elton was the unwitting deus ex machina who led me into the Gadsden morass. Elton had been working my street off and on for several years. I knew him to say “Hey” to. I bought Streetwise from him, bought coffee or sandwiches for him from time to time. Once, during a blizzard, I’d offered him shelter in my office, but he turned me down. Then, one golden June afternoon, he collapsed in front of my office.
If I’d let him lie, maybe Petra would never have vanished, maybe Sister Frankie would still be alive. There’s a lesson in that about the fate that awaits the Good Samaritan.
It happened as I was tapping in the code to my office building.
“Vic, where you been? I haven’t seen you in weeks! You’re looking good.” He flourished a copy of Streetwise. “New issue today.”
“I’ve been in Italy.” I fumbled in my wallet for the U.S. money that still looked weird to me. “My first true vacation in fifteen years. It’s hard to be back.”
“Foreign travel. I got all that out of my system at nineteen when Uncle Sam paid my airfare to Saigon.”