Dead Land (V.I. Warshawski Novels) by Sara Paretsky

Author:Sara Paretsky [Paretsky, Sara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2020-04-21T05:00:00+00:00

31

Everyone Joins the Chase

Over dinner, I told Peter about finding Simon Lensky’s body, talking some of the horror of the murder out of my system. I told him, too, about the photo Elisa Palurdo had taken from Lydia’s apartment.

“And then there’s this bizarre business of Donna Lutas—you know, my downstairs neighbor—being ordered to help me look for Lydia Zamir.”

Peter listened empathically, but couldn’t make more sense of it than I did. “I can only offer you the archaeologist’s mantra: keep digging, because you don’t know how deep some bones are buried.”

Peter and I said our goodbyes in the morning: he was leaving for Ankara tonight and we both hate airport farewells.

“Don’t let anyone near you with a gavel,” he murmured into my hair. “I like your head the way it is. I sometimes think you would be safer working in Sudan or Syria than in Chicago.”

I tried to say something insouciant, but it sounded flat even to my ears. I hoped I wasn’t getting old, fearing risk, needing comfort in a lover’s arms, but it was hard to let go and say goodbye.

When he’d gone, I took the dogs for a long walk, all three of them, trying to dispel the sinking in the stomach that Peter’s departure left behind. Bear was also suffering from melancholy. He plodded along but refused to engage with Mitch, who was nipping at his ankles.

When we got home, I called a dog-walking service to organize care for Mitch and Peppy. Fitting their exercise and Bear’s into my schedule had me at my tipping point—namely, the point at which I tip over and can’t get back on my feet.

With the dog walkers in place, I drove to my office, taking Bear with me, not just to spare Mr. Contreras the struggle of keeping Mitch from bullying him, but if I found a trail to Coop, I wanted to offload his dog as soon as possible.

When we’d settled in, one with a cortado, the other under a desk with a bully stick, I called SLICK’s Mona Borsa. I didn’t recognize her voice when she answered, it was so changed by the shock of her coworker’s death.

She and Simon Lensky had known each other for thirty years, she said, in her tremulous new voice. They’d met over shared community issues, gone to the same church, and then had run SLICK, along with Curtis Murchison, for the last eleven years.

I listened to her memories and her grief for some time. When she seemed ready to talk about Lensky’s death, I asked if she knew why he’d gone to Coop’s apartment.

“The police don’t know,” I explained.

“I can’t understand it.” She wept. “Coop—we all were tired of Coop. He was always disrupting our meetings. We have regular cleanup days in the parks, as you saw. We plant trees, we try to keep glass and used diapers off the beaches, but whatever we did, Coop knew it was wrong.

“He attacked one of our volunteers for using Roundup on the running paths. I mean attacked with his fists.

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