By Hook or By Crook Page 7

  Those lawns were brown. Winter hadn’t arrived yet, despite the chill.

  In the early fall, when Linda Krag had seen this place, it had probably looked inviting. Now, with the naked trees stark against the gray skyline, the leaves piled in the street, the battered cars parked haphazardly against the curb, the block looked impoverished and just a little bit dangerous.

  Or maybe I was projecting. Linda Krag, white and young, might have felt comfortable here, but I felt out of place, despite the University neighborhood’s known color-blindness and vaunted liberalism.

  I had the skeleton keys from Helping Hands. Linda’s stuff had not been removed from the apartment — she had until the end of the month before her belongings would become part of the charity’s donation pile. I doubted anyone had visited this place once everyone realized she was gone.

  The apartment was on the second floor. More bikes littered the hallway, and so did several more beer cans. The hall smelled of beer.

  Linda’s door was closed tightly. There were scrapes near the lock and the wood had been splintered about fist-high. I had no idea of that damage predated Linda’s arrival. With student housing, it was almost impossible to tell.

  I unlocked the deadbolt and had to shove hard to get the door to open. It had been stuck closed. As I stepped inside, I inspected the side of the door and noted that the wood was warped.

  I pushed the door closed, but it bounced back open. The warped wood made it as hard to close as it was to open.

  I had seen the apartment she had been given on the South Side. That had been a two bedroom with a full kitchen and stunning living room. I had put up another family there a year or so ago. They had worked their way through the Helping Hands program and had bought their own house last summer.

  I couldn’t believe she would have left that place for this one.

  But people’s prejudices made them do all kinds of crazy things.

  The apartment smelled sour. A blanket was crumpled at the end of the couch, and a sweater hung off the back of a kitchen chair someone had moved near the window. The kitchen was to my right. The table, with two chairs pushed against it, was beneath a small window with a good view of the house next door.

  A full ashtray sat on the tabletop, along with a coloring book and an open — and scattered — box of crayons. Dishes cluttered the sink, which gave off a rotted smell.

  More cigarettes floated in the water filling the bowls at the bottom of the sink. A hand towel rested on one of the burners. It was the only thing I moved, using the skeleton keys so that I wouldn’t have to touch it.

  Then I went through the kitchen into a narrow hallway. The second bedroom was back here. A bed was pushed against the wall. Clothing — pink and small — was scattered all over the floor. More clothes hung on the make-shift clothing rod by the door.

  The clutter was every day clutter, not slob-clutter. It looked like the kind of mess a person made when she left in a hurry, meaning to clean up later. It disturbed me that a woman who cared so much about her daughter — a poor woman — would leave most of her daughter’s wardrobe behind.

  The hair rose on the back of my neck. I didn’t want Valentina to be right. If she were right, then we had lost more than a week in searching for this woman.

  And a week, in a missing person’s case, was a long, long time.

  I made myself walk back through the kitchen and down another narrow hallway to the full bedroom. It wasn’t much larger than the daughter’s room. The full-sized bed left barely enough space between the wall and the side of the bed for me to walk around it.

  The bed was unmade. Pillows sideways, blankets thrown back. But the bottom of the blankets — along with the sheets — was tucked in. The tucks were perfect military tucks, something that wouldn’t last during weeks of restless sleep.

  Linda Krag usually made her bed. She usually made it with great precision.

  Her clothing hung in the small closet, separated by color. A pair of shoes was lined neatly against the wall.

  The sour smell was stronger here. It didn’t smell like dirty dishes, but something else, something that I should have recognized, but couldn’t.

  I pushed open the bathroom door, and the smell hit me, making my eyes water. Vomit. Old vomit. It lined the edge of the bathtub, the floor beneath the sink, and the toilet itself. It had crusted against the wall.

  I made myself go into the room. Another cigarette butt floated in the sloppy toilet water. The bathroom mirror was cracked, and a small handprint — child-sized — marred a white towel still hanging on the rack.

  I looked at the handprint, wondering if that delicate little girl had been the source of all this vomit.

  But as I pushed against the towel, I realized the handprint was a different color.

  The handprint was made of dried blood.

  • • •

  I couldn’t find any more answers in Linda Krag’s apartment, so I drove home.

  I’m sure my neighbors wondered why I hurried out of my car that afternoon, and took the steps to my apartment two at a time.

  Jimmy had a half an hour of school left before Franklin picked him and the Grimshaw children up and took them to an after-school program we had started three years ago. If I called Franklin now, I could probably arrange for Jimmy to stay the night.

  I wasn’t sure I would need all that time, but I figured I had best plan for it.

  Linda Krag and her little daughter Annie had been missing for several days. Some would have argued that a few more hours would make no difference, but to me, they would have.

  If the woman was in trouble, then every second wasted would be a second closer to her death. Because, if Valentina was right, and Linda Krag had been taken by her husband, that man wouldn’t be interested in rebuilding their relationship.

  He would punish her.

  And he would do it one of several ways. If he was just a man filled with uncontrollable rage, he would beat her until he felt better. But if he was a sadist — and if what Valentina said was true, that Linda Krag’s daughter was the most important thing in her life — then he would hurt the daughter to punish the mother.

  People who got punched in the stomach hard or repeatedly often vomited, sometimes uncontrollably. I hoped that the amount of vomit in that small bathroom had come from an adult, but there was no way to tell.

  I clenched my fists. Then I released the fingers slowly, making myself breathe. I picked up the phone, called Franklin, explained the case — since he was part of Helping Hands too — and asked him to take care of my son for at least the next twenty-four hours.

  Then I hung up and set about finding Linda Krag.

  • • •

  Unlike the stuff you see on Mannix or Hawaii Five-0, detective work is seldom fisticuffs and confessions. Usually it’s long and repetitive legwork. I was going to try to cram a week’s worth of legwork into a single day.

  So I went into my office and made calls.

  My office was in the bedroom between mine and Jim’s. I decorated it with used office furniture (bought at a bargain when I first moved here), filing cabinets that were nearly full, and a new-fangled answering machine that Laura had bought me. I hadn’t taken the thing out of the box yet.

  I pushed the box aside, picked up the phone, and called Valentina. She wasn’t there, so I left a message, asking if she had found that information for me. I hoped she would call me back while I was still at home.

  Then I started a series of calls to area hospitals and doctors’ offices. I had found, over the years, that if I put on a slight East Coast accent and spoke a little quicker than I usually did, people gave me information without many questions.

  Hospitals, trained to keep some information confidential, were a tougher nut to crack. But my years as an insurance company investigator helped there. If I called Billing and told them I had an unpaid bill from the hospital itself, I usually got full cooperation.

  I did this now, saying that I had a bill for my client Linda K
rag, without dates of her hospital stay or any listing of her procedure. I couldn’t pay the bill unless I had that information.

  Billing departments all over the city scrambled to help me. They hand-searched their records. I told them that we had received the bill today, which made us (or more accurately, them) believe that the procedure happened within the past month.

  Each call took about fifteen minutes, because the billing person I spoke to did a thorough search. Each call also ended with the same discouraging phrase: We don’t seem to have treated your client. Are you sure it was our hospital?

  It seemed that Linda Krag had not shown up at any doctor’s office or hospital in the Greater Chicago area in the past month. At least, not under that name.

  The next thing I did was check the morgues and funeral homes. That was a little easier — with funeral homes, I asked when the Linda Krag funeral was scheduled, and with morgues, I just asked my question in a straightforward manner.

  No one had heard of her.

  When I finished, I realized I should have asked after her daughter as well — Annie Krag. But the very idea of searching for death records for a child made my stomach twist.

  I thumbed through the phone book, wondering if I could run the same hospital scam for the daughter on the same day, when my phone rang.

  It was Valentina.

  She gave me an address on the east side of Madison, the husband’s full name — Duane G. Krag, age thirty-five, and the make and model of his car, a white 1968 Olds with Missouri plates. Up until three weeks ago, he had worked at the Oscar Mayer plant not far from his home.

  I didn’t like that last detail at all. “Did he give notice or did he just disappear?”

  “He finished his shift on Friday and failed to show up on Monday,” she said.

  “You got this information how?” I asked.

  “A few well-placed phone calls,” she said. “I know some people here now.”

  I didn’t quite trust her tone. “You didn’t go there, right?”

  “No,” she said. “I have no reason to. Do I?”

  “None,” I said.

  “Besides,” she said. “He’s been using his phone.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “How do you know that?”

  “One of my volunteers at the hotline also works for the phone company. It’s amazing what they can find out about you.”

  I bet it was.

  “Do you have information for me?” she asked.

  “I’ve been to the apartment,” I said. “So if she did leave on her own, she left a lot behind.”

  I wasn’t going to tell her about the vomit or the blood. I had no idea what had happened, so I wasn’t going to scare Valentina unnecessarily.

  “She wouldn’t do that, Smokey.” That edge of worry had returned to Valentina’s voice.

  “I tend to agree with you. I’m about to go back to see if her neighbors saw anything unusual.”

  She was silent on the other end. I wondered if she could tell that I was withholding information from her.

  “I hope you find her,” she finally said.

  “Me, too,” I said. “Me, too.”

  • • •

  I hadn’t lied to Valentina about one thing: My next step was to return to the neighborhood and ask if anyone saw anything unusual. I didn’t relish going back to this neighborhood, but I saw no other choice.

  It was already dark when I drove back into the neighborhood, which made me even more uncomfortable. As I approached Linda’s block, I debated whether or not I wanted to park there or on a nearby street.

  I ended up with no choice. Every parking spot for blocks was taken. I finally found a parking place near a bookstore on 57th, and I walked to the apartment building.

  I didn’t have a date or an exact incident, but I did my best. I stopped student after student, asking if they had seen the woman with the little blond girl who lived just down the block. Most remembered her — there weren’t a lot of children on this street — but none had talked to her.

  And no one had seen her for at least a week.

  By the time I got to her apartment building, I was feeling discouraged. I took the steps up the porch just as a young man came out of the front door wheeling his bicycle.

  His red hair brushed the collar of his coat. He smelled faintly of incense and marijuana. His eyes were clear, however.

  He started when he saw me.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I’m here to see Linda,” I said. “I’m a friend of hers from Madison.”

  He studied me for a minute, then he said, “Linda didn’t have any friends in Madison.”

  Finally, someone who knew her.

  “Who told you that?” I asked.

  “She did,” he said.

  “Well, that’s a little awkward,” I said, trying to seem humble. “She lived next door to me and my wife and we talked all the time. We’re in Chicago to see family and I was wondering if she and Annie could join everyone for lunch tomorrow. I guess I thought we were better friends than we were.”

  The boy shrugged. “Maybe I misunderstood her. We only talked a few times. My roommate knew her better.”

  “Knew her?” I asked, then realized the question sounded sharp, so I did my best to cover. “Did your roommate move?”

  “No,” the boy said. “Linda and her husband reconciled. He said he was taking them back to Madison. I would’ve thought you knew that, since you lived next door.”

  I shook my head. “They haven’t been back all month,” I lied. “He moved out. I thought they were getting a divorce.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” the boy said. “But my roommate — he’s Duane’s brother — he said it was a love match and all it would take was some persuading.”

  I shivered, and it wasn’t from the growing chill. Someone had clearly been persuaded, and not in a good way.

  “I never thought it was a love match,” I said, looking at the door, but deliberately not looking at the upstairs window, as if I didn’t know which apartment she had lived in.

  “I think the whole thing’s kinda weird, myself,” the boy said. “I was studying for my econ exam when he came to get her. It didn’t sound like a love match to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The boy shrugged again. “It’s none of my business, really.”

  And he said it in a way that also meant it was none of mine.

  “They fought?”

  “Nothing like that. But that little girl sure cried hard. I’d never heard a peep from her before that.”

  “Was she all right?” I couldn’t help the question.

  The boy looked at me. He was frowning. “You know, I wondered. So I looked out the window. They all got into his car. He put suitcases into the back and Linda, she was holding her daughter. She saw me looking, and she waved at me. So I knew everything was all right.”

  I started in surprise. I hadn’t expected Linda Krag to think of anyone except herself and her daughter. But she had protected her neighbor. By pretending everything was okay, she made sure he didn’t intervene.

  “When was this?” I asked.

  “A week ago Wednesday. I know because the exam was on Thursday.” He grinned. “And of course, I aced it.”

  “Good for you,” I said, and hoped it didn’t sound patronizing. Then I thanked him, and went back down the stairs.

  There was no point in asking anyone else questions.

  Duane’s brother had clearly alerted him to Linda’s presence, probably on the weekend between the time Duane last punched in for work and the Monday when he hadn’t shown up. Duane had come here, tried to talk to her, hit her so hard she threw up or hurt the little girl somehow.

  Then, when he realized Linda actually knew people here, he took her and Annie out of the apartment. He drove them somewhere.

  But the question was where.

  I didn’t have the capability to track someone like him, even with his white car and Missouri l
icense plates. Ten days was a long time.

  And he could have taken her anywhere.

  Except, Valentina told me that he had been using his telephone.

  He was in Madison, in his old stomping grounds, and if we were lucky, Linda and Annie were still alive.

  • • •

  I didn’t break any speed limits heading to Madison, but I wanted to. I wanted to get there as quickly as I could.

  Had he kept her in Chicago, I would have had options. I knew people in the police department, I had friends who worked alongside me and could act as backup. I even knew people who could have discretely checked on the apartment and let me know he was inside.

  The only person I knew in Madison was Valentina. And I didn’t want to involve her. But I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to have a choice.

  Because I couldn’t see any good way for this to play out.

  Madison was a white town. I couldn’t just barge into a white man’s apartment and demand that he hand over his wife. I couldn’t call the police with my suspicions — and they couldn’t do anything anyway. A man was entitled to treat his family anyway he liked. Only when things got “out of hand,” and the definition of that phrase varied from police department to police department, could the police step in at all.

  So as I drove, I tried to formulate a plan, but I couldn’t come up with a good one.

  I only hoped that Valentina’s friends included someone other than the lady who worked for the phone company.

  Because otherwise, I was about to make a difficult situation worse.

  • • •

  Valentina’s hotline was housed in an old church near Lake Mendota, not far from either the state capitol building or the University of Wisconsin.

  I knew better than to show up unannounced at a hotline run primarily by women who dealt daily with rape. The last thing they needed to see was a muscular, scarred black man pounding on the church door. So I called ahead, leaving Valentina worried, but willing to open the hotline’s doors for me.

  Three cars were in the parking lot when I showed up around ten. The church looked like it had once been a monstrosity of the Protestant type — some stained windows, but not a lot of iconography. A tasteful cross carved into the brick chimney, but little else besides the building’s shape to even suggest it had once been a church.