“I’m ready to answer questions but not to make a formal statement, not until I can see well enough to read any document you ask me to sign.”
One of the group, I think the man from OEM, was wearing a kind of musky aftershave that made me feel sick to my stomach. The CPD’s Bomb and Arson team was leading the inquiry. It was one of them who had me state my name for the record.
“V. I. Warshawski.” As I spelled Warshawski, I remembered Petra’s a warrior in a rick shaw on a ski and had that horrible impulse to laugh that seizes us at moments of grief and fear.
“What were you doing at Sister Frances’s apartment?” a member of the Bomb team asked.
“We were meeting to discuss a forty-year-old murder.”
A murmur went through the room, and the woman from OEM asked whose murder.
“Harmony Newsome. Sister Frankie—Sister Frances—had been with Ms. Newsome when she died.”
“Why are you interested in this old murder . . . Vicki, is it?”
“Vicki, it isn’t,” I said. “You may call me Ms. Warshawski.”
There was a shifting and more muttering, and the temperature in the room went up a few degrees. Good. Why should I be the only one feeling burned?
“Why are you interested in this old murder?” the FBI’s Lyle Torgeson asked.
“I’m not . . . very.” I started to explain my search for Lamont Gadsden and suddenly felt so tired that I thought I might go to sleep midsentence. It seemed to me that I had been looking for Lamont Gadsden and Steve Sawyer my whole life.
“Why did you go to Sister Frances’s apartment?” Torgeson again.
“That was where she asked to meet me,” I said. “She wanted to talk to me. She said she’d been troubled for forty years by the verdict against Steve Sawyer.”
“And why was that?” said one of the detectives, truculent: We in the Chicago Police Department do not bring innocent people into court.
“I don’t know. We got three sentences out before the bombs fell.”
“What did she say?” Torgeson asked.
“She said Iowa was depressing.”
“We were warned that you think you’re funny,” the man from OEM said, “but this isn’t the time or place.”
“Do I look to you like someone in the throes of merriment?” I said. “I’m in pain, I’m in shock, and I would love to think you’ve got a really active crime scene unit going over every square inch of the Freedom Center and the sisters’ building. I’m also mildly curious about why the OEM and the FBI are here. Do you think a terrorist was after Sister Frankie?”
A sucking in of breath and another buzz around the interrogation circle. “Anytime someone starts throwing bombs around, we’re curious,” Torgeson finally said. “As a citizen, you have an obligation to help us in our investigation.”
“As a human being, I am deeply grieved that Sister Frankie died and that I couldn’t do anything to keep that from happening.”
“So tell us, as a human being, what Sister Frankie said.” Torgeson’s voice was heavy with sarcasm.
“Sister Frankie said Iowa was depressing. She’d just come back from trying to help the families of the people your buddies in INS scooped up and arrested for the crime of working in a meat-packing plant. She said it was . . . Oh, I get it.” I leaned back against the egg-carton hospital mattress. “Sister Frankie was helping people who were in this country illegally. That’s why you’re all here, panting like badly trained bloodhounds.”
Lotty’s fingers gripped my shoulder: Steady there, Vic. Keep your temper under control.
“Do you think her death is connected to her work in Iowa?” I said.
“We’re asking the questions this afternoon, Warshawski.” That was the woman from OEM, determined to be as tough as the men around her.
I smiled tightly. “So you do think her death is connected to her work in Iowa.”
“We don’t know,” Torgeson said. “We don’t know if Sister Frances was the target or another member of the Freedom Center. It might even have been you. You’ve made yourself plenty unpopular with some people in this town.”
The accusation was so ruthless, so unsettling, that I almost missed the woman from OEM saying, “We thought the target could also be one of the families who live in the building. Some are illegals. Some are dealing drugs.”
“You know a lot about them,” I said. “Fast work.”
It’s an amazing thing about lack of sight: you feel people’s emotions more than when you can see them. I could feel Torgeson withdraw into himself, as if a glass wall had slipped between him and the room.
“You know about them because you’ve had the Freedom Center women under surveillance,” I said. “You’ve been watching them, tapping their phones. America is facing international terror threats, and you’re following a bunch of nuns.”
“We are not at liberty to discuss our actions, nor are we required to do so,” the OEM woman snapped.