Breakdown (31 page)

I stopped, thinking about Vernon Mulliner’s finances. “Mulliner’s brokerage account appeared out of nowhere seven years ago, when he started at Ruhetal,” I told Mr. Contreras. “I suppose he could be ordering large quantities of hallucinogens; Xavier could be selling them and getting a cut. If Miles found out, he’d have put the bite on Mulliner.

“But that’s not what took Wuchnik out to Ruhetal in the first place. If there were allegations of drug fraud, the state attorney general would know about it. She has a team of investigators on her payroll; she wouldn’t pick a bottom feeder like Wuchnik to investigate.”

Mr. Contreras picked up the mileage log the boys had found next to Wuchnik’s car. “What’s this here?”

“It’s Wuchnik’s mileage log for his visits to his clients. You can see how many miles he logged for different trips, so that pretty well tells when he went out to Ruhetal, or down to Danville. What I don’t have is a way to crack his client code system. All his electronics are missing—computer, phone, the works. I’d had high hopes for this log when the kids handed it to me, but it’s just one more frustrating dead end!”

I slapped the book back on the table. “And even if Wuchnik found out about a drug deal once he got out to Ruhetal, who sent him there to begin with? If it was Ormond or Napier, at my ex’s firm, who was their client? And come to that, why would attorneys from Crawford, Mead hook up with a two-bit guy like Wuchnik, when they can afford the cream of the investigative universe?”

“Meaning you, doll? Not that you’d take a job for your ex.”

I kissed his cheek. “Crawford, Mead usually go for the big-name firms, Baladine, Tintrey, one of them. How did they find Miles?”

“Maybe they figured a big company would have too many ears listening in on their private business,” my neighbor suggested shrewdly. “They wanted a solo op, and if you’re right that he was putting the bite on them, they picked the wrong guy.”

I whisked my coffee pot off the stove seconds before it exploded again. I really needed one of those fancy electric espresso makers, where you didn’t have to mop off your stove every time you forgot you’d started to make coffee. Maybe for my birthday, next week, if I solved Wuchnik’s murder by then. And if anyone paid me for doing so. The good machines cost more than a thousand dollars.

My cell phone rang as I was divvying the fresh coffee between Mr. Contreras’s and my cups. I didn’t recognize the number, but a strange male voice said, “Ms. Warshawski? This is Gabriel Eycks. Julia Salanter needs to see you. Please come to Schiller Street at once.”

Gabriel Eycks—Gabe, the Salanters’ houseman.

“I’m tied up right now, Mr. Eycks. If Ms. Salanter wants to make an appointment, I’ll be glad to see her at my office.”

“We have an emergency here, Ms. Warshawski. Arielle has disappeared, and Julia hopes you or your cousin know where she is.”

31.

WHERE, OH, WHERE DID THE DAUGHTER GO?

A
S
I
DROVE,
G
ABE DIRECTED ME TO THE MANSION’S GARAGE
entrance. This was behind the house, via an alley that could be entered only through a locked gate. The garage was underground; Gabe was standing inside it between a Land Rover and a Mercedes sedan. He told me to leave the car where it was, not to bother parking properly, and led me up a back stairwell to the side room where I’d first met Julia Salanter last week.

Julia was walking back and forth in a short circuit, clutching her hands. Her face seemed to be all eyes and mouth, two dark pools over a skull-like rictus. She started talking as soon as she saw us, without preamble.

“Chaim is flying home, but he won’t get here before five. She isn’t with Petra, is she? I tried reaching Petra, but she wasn’t answering her phone. Sonia Appelzeller—your cousin’s supervisor at Malina—Sonia says Petra doesn’t come in on Wednesdays until afternoon. I need to reach her now!”

“I stopped at my cousin’s apartment on my way here. She was sleeping and hadn’t heard her phone ring, but she hasn’t seen or heard from your daughter since the attack on the Malina Building last week.”

Petra had been cross when I leaned on the doorbell hard enough to wake her, but as soon as she heard about Arielle, she came fully awake in a hurry. “But, gosh, Vic, if she isn’t with Nia I don’t know what to suggest. Unless she ran off to join her father? I don’t know where he is or what their story is.”

I thought Petra’s suggestion was a good one, so I asked Julia whether she’d talked to Arielle’s father.

“He’s dead,” Julia said. “He died of leukemia when Arielle was four. It’s how Sophy and I became friends, on the cancer ward, husbands with the same illness, daughters the same age. Are you sure Petra isn’t hiding something?”

I bit back a snappy retort. Your kid goes missing, you get a free pass on the things you blurt out.

“Let’s start from the beginning,” I suggested. “When did you last see or talk to Arielle? When did you decide she was missing?”

Julia blinked—the recent past, the past where she didn’t know something was wrong, seemed incredibly remote. “At seven-fifteen. I was getting ready to leave—I had an early meeting, and I didn’t want Arielle sleeping all day. She has chores, and her community service. I think everyone needs a schedule—none of that matters!” She wrung her hands. “When I saw her bed was tidily made I thought perhaps she’d gone for a bike ride—really, I thought she’d sneaked out early to see Nia Durango, and I was starting to lose my temper, when Gabe said she left through the garage at two!”

I turned to the houseman. “Why didn’t you tell Julia sooner?”

“I didn’t know at the time.” His voice was calm, but his brown eyes were watchful. “Julia came into the kitchen asking if I’d seen Arielle. When I realized she was gone, I looked at all the security camera footage. That’s when I saw her letting herself out through the garage.”

“No one was with her?”

“Not that I could see. You can look at the footage yourself, if you want.”

“I guess, in a minute. It’s the police you should be showing it to. When are they arriving?”

“The police?” Julia said. “What can they do? It’s not as if she was snatched; she walked out of here on her own. Are you a hundred percent sure she’s not with Petra?”

“Julia—Ms. Salanter—you’re not thinking. You have to call the police and the FBI. You and your father must have discussed this terrifying eventuality.”

“I’ve called Thor Janssen. He’s on his way, but what can the police do? No one snatched my daughter, but why did she leave? Where did she go?”

“Thor Janssen?” I interrupted.

“The family lawyer,” Gabe answered for Julia.

“If someone phoned Arielle, the police can discover that instantly,” I said. “Trying to pretend that this is a normal event, it’s costing you precious time.”

Gabe nodded. “She’s right, Julia. Thor will tell you the same thing when he gets here.”

“And the one person who might know why Arielle left is Nia Durango. Maybe they’re off at some shape-shifter ritual together. Have you talked to Nia, or to Dr. Durango?”

“It was Sophy’s and my punishment to the girls that they couldn’t text or see each other for two weeks. They haven’t spoken since we did our TV show last week!”

“And you know this because?”

“Because Sophy and I ordered them not to! We blocked their respective numbers on their cell phones just to make sure!”

“Give me Nia’s or Sophy’s number,” I said. “If you think two girls as tight as your daughters paid any attention to a command not to talk for two weeks, you must have led the life of a cloistered nun when you were a kid!”

Gabe was typing onto a cell phone while I was speaking. “Gabe Eycks here, Diane. We have a high-alert situation here; do you know where Nia and Sophy are?”

After a pause, he spoke to Sophy Durango, explained the situation, asked that she send Nia to the Schiller Street house immediately. It was another instance of how central Gabe’s role in the household was. Doorman, crisis manager, what else did this houseman do? Arrange bodies on catafalques?

Julia took the phone from Gabe and began a longer conversation with Sophy, a distraught, detailed version of her crisis. I started to get agitated myself. The longer we waited to talk to Nia, the longer it would take to follow any trails she could lead us to.

“Dr. Durango’s housekeeper is on her way with Nia,” Gabe assured me. “It’s good for Julia to talk to Sophy. While we’re waiting for Janssen, let me show you the footage of Arielle.”

Gabe took me to the control room. The house had security cameras at every door, as well as in the security fence and on the corners of the roof and garage. They were expertly mounted, not readily visible, and the footage streamed to a backup system that ran frequent checks to see whether the same faces were peering through the fence on successive days. If anyone tried to climb the fence, a buzzer sounded on Gabe’s cell phone.

“You’re the only staff member?”

“The only one who lives in. Two women come to help with the cleaning and the laundry; they’re in the kitchen now. Julia already spoke to them; they don’t know anything. They’ve been with her for over a decade, both of them, and they’re completely reliable. There’s Livia Barradas, who used to be Arielle’s nanny—she still comes to stay when Julia and Chaim are both out of town. Chaim’s PA Wren has a key, but she works out of his office on LaSalle Street.”

He showed me the footage of Arielle’s departure. There were no cameras in the bedrooms, but there were two in the halls. We saw Arielle in cutoffs and a T-shirt, carrying her shoes; the time stamp was 2:03.33. At 2:05.17, she ran down two flights of stairs, stopped in the kitchen, where she put on her shoes and picked up an apple, and went down to the basement. At 2:11.08, she pushed the button that opened the garage door.

“Is there a reason she didn’t use the front door?”

Gabe nodded. “Once the family is at home for the night, I turn on the interior cameras and set the alarms on the doors and windows. If any of them are opened, my phone buzzes me. The garage alarm only rings if it’s opened from the outside. That’s a security lapse which we didn’t think about, but apparently, Arielle did. And it may be that someone else did as well.”

“It’s why you need the police,” I reiterated wearily. “They can interrogate the security company, and the lovers of the women who clean, and the children of Livia Barradas, and so on and on.” I looked at him squarely. “Not to mention your own connections. You’re at the heart of this household; you know all its secrets.”

Gabe’s lips tightened in anger, but he said levelly, “You’re right: you don’t know me, or my history with the family. I’ve been with Chaim since I was a junior in college. I don’t expect a stranger to take my word that I’ve never given a lover access to any security codes or family secrets, but by all means—investigate my past, my friends, my family.”

I nodded, not agreement, just acknowledgment that I would do all of that if it became necessary. “In the meantime, call the cops. Don’t wait for Julia’s okay, just do it!”

The front door rang in the middle of my plea. We both looked at the monitor. It was a tall man, dressed in a suit, despite the heat.

“That’s Thor Janssen.” Gabe released the front-door lock. A moment later, Nia Durango appeared on the monitor at the front gate, accompanied by a middle-aged white woman. Gabe released the lock again, but I sprinted down the hall to the front door, beating the staff from the kitchen as well as Julia.

There was a flurry of confused greetings, the lawyer suspicious, Nia scared, Sophy’s housekeeper unflappable. Gabe arrived a moment later; he and Sophy’s housekeeper sorted us into our component parts. Gabe took the lawyer off to see Julia in the library. Diane Ovech, the housekeeper, accompanied Nia and me to the family room.

“Nia, how were you and Arielle communicating this past week?” I said as soon as we were sitting on the wicker chairs.

Nia looked from Diane to me.

“This has gone way beyond whether you violated your mothers’ orders to separate for two weeks,” I said. “This is about Arielle’s safety. Did you use Facebook?”

When Nia still didn’t answer, Diane Ovech said, “You need to speak.” Her voice was calm but implacable.

“Our moms look at our Facebook pages,” Nia whispered. “We used old-fashioned stuff, like the landlines if our moms weren’t home, but mostly e-mail.”

At any other time I might have laughed to hear e-mail characterized as old-fashioned. “Did Arielle e-mail you that she would be going out last night?”

“No. If she decided at the last second, she couldn’t tell me because we couldn’t text. That’s the trouble with e-mail, you don’t know you’ve got it, not unless you’ve got, like, an iPhone or something, and we just have ordinary phones, they don’t have e-mail, so we have to use our computers.”

“Do you know how to get into Arielle’s computer?” I asked. “Let’s see if someone else was reaching out to her the old-fashioned way.”

Nia admitted that she and Arielle used the same passwords. She led her minder and me up two flights of stairs and down a short hall to her friend’s room. The computer was sitting on a small desk. While Nia turned it on and logged on, I had a quick look around.

It was the typical bedroom of a modern affluent teen, with the requisite sound and video systems, the laptop with its webcam, a wardrobe with a minimalist collection of clothes.

Arielle’s bookshelves included books on the Holocaust—
How Dark the Heavens; From That Time and Place; How to Document Victims and Locate Survivors of the Holocaust—
sprinkled among the novels of her childhood. The seven books in Boadicea Jones’s
Carmilla
series held pride of place, but she’d branched into other vampire novels, like the original
Dracula.
A collection of stuffed animals, including a large bright-eyed raven, looked down on her bed from a shelf at the foot.

“Okay, Nia. Let’s see what you two girls have been talking about this week,” Diane said.

I took Nia’s place at the desk and scrolled through the correspondence. They e-mailed each other four or five times a day, nothing compared to the texts they would have sent, but they still managed to fill each other in on the minutiae of their lives. Arielle’s included volunteer work at the Malina Foundation, a day’s sailing with an aunt and uncle, a trip to Ravinia, where a famed singer who knew her mother had entertained them with a late supper. Nia had gone to campaign events in Kankakee and Edwardsville with her mother, had done data entry at the campaign office, and gone for a long bike ride with Nolan Spaulding and Jessie Morgenstern—
Loser crybabies!