Cardozo was still stiff. “Word’s been rattling around the firm that you’ve been asking questions—you called last week, right? We all looked at the case files to see if there were any loose ends.”
“What did you find?”
“There are always loose ends,” Cardozo said. “But we dotted every i in the trial proceedings. There’s no reason for you or anyone else to raise questions about Devlin’s conduct of the case.”
“I wasn’t.” I tried to make my face look as innocent as a golden retriever’s. “My only questions were about Lydia Zamir’s history with the firm. Why you needed an order of protection, or at least, felt you needed one. And whether she’d appeared on your doorstep after she vanished.”
“She’s only been missing, what, less than a week?”
“Ms. Cardozo, we both know you’re a savvy woman, smart as well. Law firms like Devlin are brutal places for women, and you’ve thrived. So please don’t spin me lines about studying the Morton file to make sure the firm didn’t leave loose ends. Tell me instead about the loose end that you’re afraid this current crisis in Zamir’s life will expose.”
She squeezed the paper cup so hard that coffee sloshed on the table and onto her clothes. She dabbed her blazer with the paper napkins on the table, but they left pilling on her lapels.
“That’s my exit cue—get this to the cleaners before the coffee stains set.” She got up briskly, the transcription center chief in charge, but as she scuttled to the door, the look she gave me bordered on alarm.
When I got home, I looked up the partners at Devlin. Their photos were on the firm’s website. I found the man Cardozo had been talking to as she left work, a Clarence Gorbeck, one of the senior partners. I studied his face, narrow, with dark eyes; a wide, thin mouth that looked ready to snap off heads of opposing witnesses.
When I got home from running the dogs, I called Murray, to tell him the police had found a gavel that might be the weapon that killed Leo Prinz. He had a barrage of questions, which I told him should be directed at Sergeant Pizzello; all I could say was what she’d told me—that the gavel had been found somewhere near the Forty-seventh Street Metra platform.
It was at four the next morning that Coop dropped Bear off, rousing the whole building.
26
A Vampire in a Cave
The doorbell rang around nine. It didn’t rouse me, but the noise troubled Bear, who pawed at me, whining anxiously.
As I forced myself from sleep to semiconsciousness, I heard the bell, held down with an insistent finger. “You think it’s your boy come back for you? I hope and pray.”
I stumbled to my front door and called down through the speaker. It was Sergeant Pizzello, a sharp disappointment to both me and Bear.
“With you in a few,” I growled through the speaker.
I took my time about it, turning on the espresso machine, brushing my teeth, showering. When I got out of the shower, Pizzello was leaning on the doorbell right outside my apartment: someone had let her into the building. The sergeant was also calling my cell phone. A glance through my spyhole showed she’d brought a uniformed man: a formal visit. Or perhaps backup in case I turned on my superpowers.
“I don’t know how much law you know,” I said to Bear, “but it’s prudent not to let the cops into your place. They can search, you see, even if they don’t have a warrant, if you’ve invited them in.”
I took him out through the kitchen, let him relieve himself in the yard, and then circled around to the front of my building. Before climbing the three flights to my home, I pushed the buzzer at Donna Lutas’s apartment.
She came to the door, an eager look replaced by dismay when she saw it was me, not the police.
“It’s getting on for ten a.m., Lutas,” I said. “Don’t Devlin & Wickham expect junior staff to show up at seven and stay until midnight? I’d hate to think you were oversleeping and missing your chance for promotion.”
“Thanks to you I hardly got any sleep last night and neither did anyone else in the building. I’m working from home this morning. One of the partners is helping me prepare a formal complaint against you to take to the condo board.” She slammed the door. Just when I was trying to be neighborly, too, and look after her career.
Behind Mr. Contreras’s door, Mitch and Peppy were raising furious demands to join me. My neighbor let them out and they pelted up the stairs. Bear, scared and abandoned, stayed close to me, whining, while my duo kept trying to nose him out of the way, barking fierce commands. (She’s our property. Go back to your own person.) I clung to the stairwell railing to keep them from knocking me down.
Sergeant Pizzello met us at the top landing.
“You knew I was waiting to talk to you, and you left me out here for twenty—” She looked at her watch. “Make that thirty-one minutes. I don’t know how you make a living working these kind of hours, but I’d have you on probation after two days.”
“Sergeant, if I’d had any idea you couldn’t let a day pass without seeing me, I’d have set my alarm. I was roused in the middle of the night by the arrival of this fellow.” I scratched Bear behind the ears. His skin was tight and his mouth was pulled into a rictus of anxiety.
“People tell me you’re a cop’s daughter. You should know better than to play games with me. If this wasn’t urgent, I’d have sent you a text.”
“Is it Lydia Zamir?” I demanded, belatedly alarmed: visions of Lydia’s emaciated body under a bush in the Wildlife Corridor danced in my head.
“It’s the man Coop,” Pizzello said through thin lips. “I understand he showed up here last night. Early this morning.”
“Right. What I just said—he dropped off his dog. How could you know? I didn’t report it.”
Pizzello bared her teeth in a parody of a smile. “Information received in our morning reports. The police may not be as clever as a PI, but gathering evidence piece by piece usually gets us where we need to be.”
I thought it over. “Oh. My neighbor Donna Lutas did her civic duty and phoned the Town Hall District, who are sick of her reports on my dogs, and didn’t send anyone over. However, when you read the city-wide reports, something in the wording made you think of Coop and Zamir.”
Pizzello nodded slowly. “We put word out through some of our confidential informants that we had a lead on the gavel and would be following up today. My patrol units all know Coop or at least the dog Bear, and so we staked out the hole with the gavel in it, figuring when Coop got the word he’d hustle over to collect it. He never showed, but when I saw the report of a dog arriving in the middle of the night and rousing the residents at what I knew to be your address, I figured it had to be Coop. And now, I want to go inside to talk to him.”
“He’s not there, Sergeant.” I eyed her steadily. “However, if you have a warrant?”
She scowled. “How about you doing your civic duty for five minutes, Warshawski? Why are you protecting him?”
“I’m not. I don’t know where he is. He rang my bell. I came down to find his dog tied up out front with a note asking me to look after him. By the time I’d read it, Coop had vanished.”