“You’re right.” Gabriella used to beg me the same as Mr. Contreras when my cousin Boom-Boom and I ran into danger.
I bit my lip. But I still wanted to look at those magazines. The old man nodded, grimly pleased that his words had hit home. He started the slow process of pulling on his boots and his coat while I set the oven timer for the chicken. We took the dogs for company-the walker wasn’t coming for another couple of hours.
At my office, Tessa was working on some immense steel thing. While I went into my files, Mr. Contreras pulled up a stool to watch her. Tessa doesn’t usually tolerate an audience, but Mr. Contreras was a machinist in his working life, and she respects his advice on tools.
Chad had stuffed his girlie pix inside a copy of
I had removed the girlie magazines and was thumbing through them looking for Alexandra Guaman’s face, wondering if I would recognize it floating airbrushed above improbable breasts, when I did a double take on the Achilles headline. I had read it online when I was looking up background on Tintrey.
I went back to
Achilles had been losing money; R & D doesn’t come cheap.
Jarvis MacLean’s first order of business was a campaign to sell Achilles shields to the Department of Defense. Some Achilles staffers, who spoke on condition of anonymity, expressed concern that Tintrey was marketing a product that wasn’t ready for full-scale production. Yet the new owners had spent almost ten million dollars on building a PR campaign.
“When you’re making a new product, why worry about graphic design? Why not put the money into hiring a good science team?” asked one former member of the R & D staff.
Indeed, Tintrey has been downsizing the R & D division since acquiring Achilles. “They have a great product in place. We need to focus now on getting it into the hands of our troops, not on endlessly refining it,” said Gilbert Scalia.
As head of Tintrey’s Enduring Freedom Division, it’s Scalia’s job to outfit the nine thousand Tintrey employees in Iraq and to provide materiel to the U.S. Armed Forces deployed around the world.
A year after acquiring Achilles, Tintrey has already changed the profit picture at the division. Maybe the new publicity did the trick.
The magazine showed some of the PR materials, including the Achilles logo: a pink-and-gray fleur-de-lis. This was the design on the black mitt I’d found in Chad Vishneski’s duffel. And it was the design Nadia Guaman had been painting on the Body Artist.
I read the article through carefully twice, curled up on the couch in my client corner with the dogs at my feet. I learned a bit about the structure of fullerene nanoparticles, at least, I learned they were named for Buckminster Fuller, but not much else.
The article had been important to Chad Vishneski, important enough that he kept it alongside his girlie magazines. And he’d cut holes in one of the armor mitts. But why he’d done it would have to wait until he regained consciousness-or Sanford Rieff at Cheviot labs found out a dramatic secret about the shield.
Neither John Vishneski nor Tim Radke had ever heard Chad talk about the armor. But Chad’s squad had been killed around him: that was when he lost the equilibrium that carried him through his first deployments. Maybe he blamed Tintrey for the failure of their armor in protecting his men and was savaging their equipment as a way to vent his feelings of helplessness.
I called Vishneski. He’d had to go to a jobsite, a building far enough along that they were working on the interior, but he said Chad’s status continued to improve.
“The docs are all pretty optimistic. He hasn’t been speaking anymore, at least, he hadn’t before I left this morning, but he’s restless in a good way, they say. The police have been around some, wanting to know if he’s well enough to go back to prison, but that Dr. Herschel, she’s a pistol, isn’t she? She told them where to get off.”
I silently blew Lotty a kiss. “No strangers have come around to try to see him?”
“Not that I know of. But I’ll talk to Mona. Of course, we don’t know who his friends are, so they’d all be strangers to us. But, like I said, some of my buddies are hanging around. They’ll let me know if anyone comes calling.”
That was one less worry, at least for now. When he’d hung up, I started looking for Rodney Treffer. He wasn’t in the morgue, so I called around to the hospitals on the near North Side. I hadn’t heard back from Finchley or Milkova. And I wanted to find out how much time I had before Rodney was fit enough to come after me. I said I was Sunny Treffer, searching for my brother. He was supposed to meet me for breakfast this morning and never showed, and given his history of psychosis, I was worried whether he’d had some breakdown and been brought in.
I was lucky with the third place I called. The ER charge nurse told me Rodney had injured himself in a fall but didn’t seem to be having a psychotic episode when he was with them. They’d kept him overnight for observation and discharged him an hour ago. He’d had a concussion and some brain swelling, but they’d done a second CT scan before they released him; the swelling had gone down.
“You’re his sister? Make sure he rests for the next several days. He shouldn’t be out on this ice where he could slip and fall again.”
“I’ll do my best to keep him off the streets,” I promised. “Did Mr. Kystarnik pay his bill?”
The charge nurse transferred me to the billing department, where a service rep said someone had stopped by with Rodney and paid cash, all twenty-three thousand dollars that were owed for his emergency care.
I gave an embarrassed titter. “I need to know who paid for my brother. He… Well, he’s not good with bills, and I’m kind of responsible…”
The rep misunderstood me. “Don’t worry about that, honey. Our cashier looked at the money, it wasn’t counterfeit.”
“But who paid for him?”
I heard her clicking at her keyboard. “His friend said the receipt should be made out to your brother.”
“Did he give his own address?” I asked. “On Bobolink Road in Highland Park?”
She clicked her teeth. “No, he said he was at 1005 North Inscape Drive in Deerfield.”
“Oh, dear,” I said. “That’s his ex-wife’s address. Well, it can’t be helped. Thanks for looking after him. He probably didn’t tell the doctors about his risperidone, either. You should add that to his chart.”
The helpful rep said she’d pass a note on to the doctor who’d treated my brother.
The address Rodney had given, on Inscape Drive, belonged to Anton Kystarnik and/or Owen Widermayer at Rest EZ. As his worried sister, I hoped Rodney would stay there, firmly put, for a month, but I was more afraid he might be looking for me and for Karen Buckley’s computer.
40 Karen, Revealed
Mr. Contreras and I were climbing into my Mustang when a strange truck pulled into the parking lot. I reached reflexively for my gun, but Petra bounded from the passenger seat, as lively as a new puppy. Mitch broke from me to rush to her side, while Staff Sergeant Jepson climbed down from the driver’s seat, followed by Tim Radke, who’d been squeezed into the back.
