I didn’t waste time arguing with her or trying to persuade the kids to move; my most urgent task was to find Marcena’s recorder before William’s Dobermans did. Since she seemed to carry it everywhere, she must have had it on Monday. Maybe she’d only read from a transcript because she was recording the meeting, or she was wary enough not to let them see her device.
Her big Prada bag, which she also took everywhere, hadn’t materialized after the assault, so William must have gotten that. He’d searched the remains of the Miata. If the pen wasn’t there, or at Morrell’s, or the Czernin house, then I was betting she’d lost it either at Fly the Flag or in the truck that took them to the landfill. Or at the landfill itself, I suppose. Since I didn’t know where the truck was and couldn’t look at the landfill until morning, I’d swing by the plant now, before William had the same idea.
I hoped Billy and Josie would continue to be safe if I left them behind. It was hard to live with so much uncertainty. I’d been trailed yesterday, but not today-as far as I knew. But I’d been using my phone this past hour, and Billy had been using Mary Ann’s computer. I went to the living room and peered through a slit in the drapes. I didn’t think anyone was watching, but you never know.
Josie had gotten them this far. She was four years younger than Billy, but a harder-headed urban survivor. It was she I coached to put the chain bolts on both doors and not to open them for anyone but me; if I didn’t come back tonight, then tomorrow they had to tell a reliable adult what was going on.
“You two have been smart about not speaking on Coach McFarlane’s phone, and you need to keep doing that, but you have to promise me that you will call Commander Rawlings in the Fourth District if you don’t hear from me by morning. Don’t talk to anyone but him.”
“We can’t go to the police,” Billy objected. “Too many of them owe favors to my family, they do what my father or-or grandfather tells them.”
I was about to say they could trust Conrad the way they trusted me, but how could I be sure of that? It might be true, but Conrad had superiors, he even had patrol officers who could be bribed or threatened. I gave them Morrell’s number instead.
“When I do come back, I’m going to take you home with me. I don’t like leaving you here with Coach McFarlane-you’re too exposed, and it puts her in danger.”
“Oh, Victoria, my life is too close to the end to worry about danger,” Mary Ann protested. “I like having young people in the place. It keeps me from brooding over my body. They’re looking after Scurry, and I’m teaching them Latin-we’re having a grand old time.”
I smiled weakly and said we could figure that part out later. I showed Josie the place in the curtains where she could see the street, and told her if she saw someone follow me she should call me. Otherwise, I’d see her in the morning.
I zipped up my parka, kissed Mary Ann on both cheeks, and let myself out the door. Billy came behind me and pulled briefly on my arm.
“I just wanted to say thank you for helping me out when I fell apart just now,” he muttered.
“Oh, honey, you’ve been carrying way too big a load. You didn’t fall apart-you just felt safe enough to let me know how hard it’s been.”
“Do you mean that?” His wide eyes studied me for mockery. “In my family, not even my grandma thinks it’s all right to cry.”
“In my family, we think you shouldn’t wallow in your tears, we think you should act-but we believe that sometimes you can’t act until you’ve cried your heart out.” I put an arm around him and gave him a brief hug. “Look after Josie and Coach McFarlane. And yourself. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
The skies had cleared. When I got to my car I could see the Big Dipper low in the northern sky; the moon was almost full. This was both good and bad; I wouldn’t have to use a light to find the factory, but I’d be visible if anyone was watching Fly the Flag.
I checked my flashlight. The batteries were good, and I had a spare pair in the glove compartment. I put them in my pocket. Checked for my extra clip to the Smith & Wesson. I left my phone on until I was a couple of blocks from Mary Ann’s, heading north, toward Lake Shore Drive and my home. At Seventy-first Street, I switched off my phone, then turned west and looped around the neighborhood until I was sure I was clean. I turned south again and made my way to Fly the Flag.
Once again, I parked on Yates and walked down to the factory. The Skyway embankment loomed in front of me, its sodium lights forming a halo above the street but not shedding much light below. Most of the streetlamps were out down here at ground level, but the cold silver moon lit the streets, turning the old factories along South Chicago Avenue into chiseled marble. The moonlight cast long narrow shadows; my own figure bobbed along the roadway, like a piece of stretched bubble gum, all skinny lines with little blobs where my joints were.
The avenue was empty. Not the quiet emptiness of the countryside, but one where urban scavengers moved under cover of the dark: rats, druggies, thugs, all looking for a fix. A South Chicago bus labored up the street. From a distance, it looked like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood-its windows were filled with light, and the headlights looked like a grin underneath the big front window. Get on board, ride home in warmth and comfort.
I crossed the road and went into the factory yard. It had been over a week since the fire, but a whiff of smoke still hovered faintly in the air, like an elusive perfume.
Even though the traffic on the Skyway was loud enough to muffle my sounds here, I walked along the edge of the gravel drive so that my running shoes wouldn’t crunch in the loose stones. I went around to the side, to the loading bay.
I saw at once what had happened to Bron. Just as he had the heavy front load of the forklift suspended beyond the lip of the dock, ready to drop his load in the truck, Grobian had pulled away. The forklift had pitched headfirst off the dock, burying its forks in the ground. The cartons Bron had loaded on the front end were scattered in a wide circle around it. The fall itself must have broken Bron’s neck; the wonder was that Marcena had survived it.
I shone my flashlight around the ground. Sherlock Holmes would have seen the telltale broken weed, or displaced piece of stone, to say whether Marcena had been in the truck when it went over. I could only guess that her war zone training had given her a sixth sense of the danger, so that she jumped clear of the forklift as it fell.
I climbed around the machine. I looked underneath it as best I could, but I couldn’t see Marcena’s red pen. Maybe it was buried under the front end, but I’d save that possibility for last-it would mean hiring a tow truck to raise the forklift.
I moved in a circle around through the weeds and the gravel. This side of the building faced away from the fire, so I didn’t have to contend with the broken glass and charred remnants of fabric I’d found when I searched here last week, but there was still a tiresome amount of debris, jetsam from the Skyway, flotsam from the street. I’d read recently that Chicago ’s landfills were just about at capacity and we were starting to ship our garbage downstate. If all the bags and cans I’d seen on the streets today had been put into the garbage, maybe we’d have filled our landfills even sooner. Maybe litterers were saving taxpayers money.
After an hour, I was as sure as I could be in the dark that the pen wasn’t out here. I put a foot onto the forklift and climbed up onto the loading dock. I sat on the lip and stared into the tangle of brush, trying to imagine Marcena.
Now that I wasn’t moving around myself, the night noises started to sound loud. I strained to listen under the whoosh of the cars and grinding gears of the semis overhead. Were those rats and raccoons rustling in the brush, or humans?
Marcena wanted Grobian and William on tape, or chip. She saw she was onto a much bigger story than she’d thought; she knew the power the Bysens had-if she tried to publish the story, they could squash it, sue the paper, sue her. She needed their voices, saying what they were doing.