Deadly Blessings (23 page)

Bass tried to shrug the sheepish look off
his face. “Nothing. Just something I need to remember when things
get tense.”

I repeated the phrase to
myself in my head.
Remain faithful to your
regulation.
Sounded like an ad for a
laxative. “And that helps you?” I asked.

“
Just drop it.”
William knocked, then came in, easing into the unoccupied seat
across from me.

Bass’s lips moved, though no words came out.
It occurred to me that he performed some sort of daily affirmation,
or repetition of a mantra to help calm himself. Interesting. He
didn’t strike me as a new-age touchy-feely sort of fellow.

I glanced over at William, who seemed to be
catching the same vibes from Bass that I was, based on the guarded
look on his face. “All right,” I said to Bass, “remember that story
I mentioned to you the other day?”

He nodded, fractionally. Tension emanated
from him like heat. Sitting at the edge of his seat, his feet were
firmly planted on the ground, but his one leg kept bouncing, and
his eyes shot back and forth between me and William, like a wary
animal’s, waiting for a strike.

I took a deep breath. “The hair care
story—”

“
This is about the friggin’
hair story? For crying out loud, Alex, you knew we agreed to that
to shut Gabriela up. It’s filler, for crissake.”

Both my hands shot up, index fingers pointed
skyward. “Didn’t I tell you to have patience?” Bass nodded. He was
angry, I could tell, but at least he was silent.

In periphery I saw William’s eyebrows shoot
up.

“
Here’s where we are,” I
began.

I told him about my ulterior motive in
visiting Hair to Dye For, about Matthew’s disappearance and
subsequent murder. I cautioned him that I was basing much on
speculation and conjecture, but that things were beginning to add
up and that I had a gut level feel that I was following the Milla
story, after all. That I’d bring a whole new angle to the exposé
and I told him, in detail, about my undercover antics with Lisa and
the alleged prostitution ring. And I told them about Sophie, safe,
at least for now.

He sat back when I was finished, his face
and body relaxing for the first time since he’d come in. “How
soon?”

“
Bass …”

William cut in. “There’s a lot here, and
Alex and I haven’t even had a chance to work through the next
steps.”

Just then my cell phone rang out from the
depths of my purse. I pulled it out, and glanced at the Caller ID.
Lisa Knowles. “Quiet,” I said in a terse enough voice that they
both silenced at once.

When I answered, Lisa’s voice was all
business. “Is this Alexandrine Szatjemski?”

“
Yeah.” I lapsed in to what
I hoped would pass for a standard down-on-her-luck, yet eager,
woman.

“
Lisa Knowles calling. I’m
so sorry,” she said, though her voice sounded anything but.
“There’s been a mixup. I somehow hired two of you for the same
position. And since there’s only one opening, currently …” She
didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t have to.

“
You mean I’m out?” I was
stunned—”Why?”

Lisa heaved a sigh. Total affectation. I
could tell that even through the phone lines. “I’m very sorry.”

At this point, I realized my acting talents
weren’t going to make much difference. My undercover plans had been
shot sky-high. Politeness took control over my disappointment. I
thanked her and hung up.

“
Shit!” I said.

Bass held his hands out; they might have
been trembling. “What? What happened?”

As I related the conversation, I felt an
enormous rush of disappointment. Even though I had no plan to get
“promoted” past the level of shampoo girl, I had intended to gather
information for as long as I could. Something changed that killed
that chance for me. The timing was lousy and I could only wonder
what had triggered Lisa’s move. Because I didn’t for a moment
believe her story about accidentally hiring two girls for one
job.

Bass was quick to point out that it left us
with a hole in our investigation. Except he didn’t use the word
“us.” He’d stood up to pace, gesticulating as he walked. Coming to
my side of the desk, he looked ready to spit as he warned me that
this was a serious problem. He pointed in the general vicinity of
my chest. With anyone else, I would have taken it to have sexual
overtones. With Bass, he was just too agitated to notice how close
he was. He told me that I was going to have to come up with another
idea. And I better be pretty damn quick about it.

“
Listen,” William said, “we
don’t know who killed Matthew Breczyk or Milla Voight. That’s true.
But there is a story here that we can explore. Sophie isn’t going
to go on camera for us. We know that. And we wouldn’t want her to.
But we can tout this as an ongoing investigation. Alex has contacts
with the Chicago Police Department. I do, too. What if we throw out
a net?”

Bass’s skeptical look was gentle, compared
to the tone of his voice. “Net?”

“
We’re not the authorities,
we don’t have to play by the same set of rules. We can talk about
the alleged prostitution ring, we can talk about the exploitation
of immigrant girls who’ve come to the United States for a better
life, and we can write a kick-ass show, without using a single name
or identifiable reference.”

“
This is a net?” Bass asked
again.

“
Sure. Because what do you
think will happen when the show airs? Some of the girls are going
to start to worry about getting caught. They’re going to wonder if
they’ll go to jail when the full story gets out. And that’s when
some of them might step forward. And they’re more likely to step
forward to a television station than they would to a police
department. Especially if we guarantee anonymity.”

We’d never done anything quite along those
lines. It was a bit chancy. Bass, seated again, was making that
very argument, and since I had no doubt about what he would say, I
let my mind wander a bit. While I’d been skittish about what to do
if they’d ever try to set me up on a “date,” I also knew that there
would have been no better way for me to gather information. I
wondered again about Lisa’s reneging on the job she’d promised me.
I still wished there was some way to exploit the undercover
angle.

“
Hey,” I said, half to
myself.

They both looked my direction, Bass’s mouth
half open, mid-sentence. He wiped at the tiny beads of spit around
his mouth.

“
What? You think William’s
idea will work?”

I sat up, excited, buying myself a moment to
allow the thoughts that had jumbled in my mind to find some order.
“Okay, what if …” I realized I was thinking out loud, which
sometimes gets me into trouble when I don’t take the time to edit
myself ahead of time. But the ideas needed to be spilled. The two
of them could help me sort through and massage the plan into place.
“What if we went undercover after all?”

William cocked an eyebrow at me, but said
nothing. Bass frowned. “How are you going to do that? You can’t be
a hooker anymore, they just fired you.”

“
Yes, but,” I had my hands
up, gesturing, working out the energy I felt so that my brain could
remain calm enough to explain. “The problem with my plan, even if
it had worked perfectly, was that I depended on overhearing
conversations to build our story.”

They both nodded. Good.

“
To actually prove that a
prostitution ring existed, to actually prove that Lisa exploited
young girls, I would have had to cooperate, and whenever she would
have set me up with my first ‘date,’ I would have fled. End of our
stream of information, right? Because it would have been too
dangerous for me to actually follow through on that.”

Again, the double nod, though Bass seemed
less certain than William.

“
We could still prove the
prostitution ring. Without Sophie’s cooperation. Keep her
completely safe.”

I felt my own eyes widen as
I spoke and my words came out fast, like they always do when I’m
excited. “What if we sent in an undercover
john
. We have him contact Lisa to
set up a date for himself. Then capture the whole exchange on
videotape.”

William’s quizzical look forced me to add,
“I don’t mean that he’d actually go through with any …” I struggled
for polite phrasing, “… physical contact. But if we could set up
the hotel room ahead of time, and our guy could get her talking
…”

“
Yeah,” Bass said. The word
came out with a slow, thoughtful bob of his head.

William leaned forward in his chair, waving
the pen in his hand to interrupt the flow of conversation. “What
about the girl? We air any of it and she’s toast.”

“
No, no,” I said, jumping
back in. “We can do this, I think, without them ever realizing what
went down. We get enough information and we hand it over to the
police. They take it from there. We’ve worked with them before in
some of our investigations. They get the arrests, we get the
exclusive story.”

“
Okay,” he said, “but,
remember that the reason you started to follow this story in the
first place was because a young woman was murdered. And now Matthew
Breczyk, who purportedly tried to bring the organization down, is
dead too. If your suppositions are correct, we’re dealing with some
dangerous people here.”

“
Which is why we’ll be
extra careful,” I said.

“
Right,” Bass chimed in. He
looked back and forth between us and licked his lips.

I tapped at my teeth with a fingernail.
“Let’s say for a minute that we do this. Who do we send in?”

Bass shook his head in a move that
communicated that the answer was obvious. He pointed. “Billy here,
ought to do it.”

I heard William’s sharp intake of air.

Billy? I thought. Since when was he “Billy”?
I shook my head. “I was thinking we’d hire someone. Like an actor
or something—”

“
Why?” Bass asked. “This
isn’t the kind of story we want leaked, is it? Of course not. Other
than the three of us here, I don’t think anybody else should know
about it. We keep it safe that way.”

The story. He was always thinking about the
story.

“
What about William? What
if they find out he works here? Then what?”

William cleared his throat. “This situation
is no different than the one you put yourself in when you applied
for that job with Lisa. You were taking a risk.”

“
Yeah,” I said, “But
…”

I caught myself. I’d been about to say that
the difference was that this was my story, not his. But then I
remembered his offer to help out. I’d been on my own so long in
this job that I wasn’t used to dragging anyone else through the
quagmires I inevitably created.

In an effort to cover up the near-blurt, I
said, “But … are you willing to go through with something like
this?”

Something akin to pain crossed William’s
features, and he gave an abrupt nod. “What I need to know is, what
then? Where do we take it from there? Once we get our feature?”

Bass’s eyes flickered with nervousness.
“What do you mean? Once we get the story we’re done, right?”

William turned to him and I felt a chill in
his gaze. “These people are preying on vulnerable young women.
Women who’ve come here for a better life and who made a bad
decision. Look at what happened to Sophie. She tried to get out.
Are we in this for a story? Or are we in this to make a difference
in these peoples’ lives?”

William’s voice had grown quieter even as it
intensified. I had to admit it—the little shiver that ran down my
spine as he spoke had nothing to do with the ambient air
temperature. Wow. I liked this guy. Couldn’t have said it better
myself. We both waited for Bass’s reaction.

With trapped-animal jumpy looks toward both
of us, he nodded, a bit too enthusiastically. “We want to make a
difference in their lives,” he said. Then added, “Of course.”

Chapter Sixteen

“
Father Trip,” I called,
stopping him mid-stride.

He was crossing the parking lot adjacent to
the church, likely on his way to the school for his daily check-in.
I knew that Mass was celebrated every weekday morning at
nine-fifteen, so my appearance here just before ten was no
accident.

I caught up with him, encouraged by the fact
that he was smiling. Chances are nothing was wrong. And I was
over-reacting.

“
Alex! Good. I was going to
call you later.”

He resumed his brisk walk toward the school.
Wearing black pants, black gloves and a black polyester jacket with
the furry collar turned up against the chill, he could have been a
cat burglar.

“
Everything’s
okay?”

He wiped at his red nose. “Yes, of course.
Sophie had an uneventful night.” One hand snugged the collar a
little tighter as he pointed toward the convent with his chin. “The
sisters took care of her. Made sure she felt at home.”

“
Where is she
now?”

He stopped walking. While his expression
remained calm, his eyes flickered with a touch of alarm. “At the
convent. I checked on her early this morning. She was up at dawn,
helping the nuns with their chores.”

“
She’s not there
now.”

“
Are you sure?”

“
Sister Mary Mildred told
me she ‘went to go see Father.’” I looked at him. “I assumed she
meant you.”

Dead center of the asphalt lot, we were a
perfect target for the biting wind. I could hear it whistle as it
streaked past my ears, leaving the tops of them feeling that first
numb of the season. My nose ran a little, and as I wiped at it, I
was glad I’d worn a pair of knitted gloves. My hair felt as though
it was being twisted by a cyclone and my eyes watered. Even though
Father Trip’s hair was short, the tiny silver ends lifted up as we
stood there. He looked away, his jaw set, his eyes inscrutable.