Death on the Edge Read online

  Dedication

  For Marcie Love, on the occasion of her 80th birthday.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: God of Mirth or God of Mercy

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  A Note to Readers

  About the Author

  Also by Sara Paretsky

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  God of Mirth or God of Mercy

  I grew up knowing gunshots before I even understood the words, “Get down. Shield Baby!” But the bullet that killed Tyrone Elgar was louder, sharper than any I’d heard before.

  I was six. I was by no means the youngest child on my street to lose a family member to a bullet: cross fire, gang war, police shooting. It doesn’t matter whether a cop or a gangbanger is firing the weapon. The bullet doesn’t care as it finds the artery, the brain, the liver.

  Uncle Ty was driving me home from Pee Wee soccer. I was a skinny little thing, and he used to tease me.

  “You got legs like matchsticks, Keisha. How can those bitty legs kick a soccer ball?”

  He had a big laugh, almost as big as he was himself, and when he teased us kids—me and my cousins and our friends—his big laugh would rumble in our chests and we couldn’t help laughing along with him.

  The bullets hit as we were stopped at a stop sign on the corner of my grandma’s street. I heard the sound; I knew to crouch down in my seat, and then I heard the screaming and, above it all, the keening of my grandmother. Someone opened my door and unbuckled my seat belt. I shut my eyes tighter and clutched the seat belt, scared someone was going to kidnap me.

  “It’s okay, sweetheart. I’m a fireman.”

  I opened my eyes and saw the black rubber sleeve with a giant white stripe. The zebras, we used to call firefighters.

  Uncle Ty’s head was plopped over on his right shoulder, as if he’d suddenly gone to sleep at the wheel.

  I shook his shoulder and my hand came away covered in blood. I started to scream but my fireman lifted me from the seat and carried me across the street, away from the shattered glass and my uncle’s blood. Over his shoulder I saw my grandma kneeling by the car, pulling Uncle Ty’s head toward her own breast.

  I never played soccer or any other sport after that day. My matchstick legs grew wide and heavy until all that was left of that six-year-old child was a nickname whose origin no one understands: “Sticky.”

  Chapter 2

  “Tell me again why you wanted me down here today?” I demanded.

  Marcena Love’s brows were raised in hauteur. “It is exactly what I said to you yesterday: this is your patch; I hoped you could get me past the suspicion one encounters as an outsider.”

  When she’d said this to me the day before, I’d replied it hadn’t been my turf for at least thirty years. “I don’t know anyone down here now,” I’d added.

  “You went to school with Hana Milcek,” Marcena said.

  “Hana Milcek? She’s still down there?”

  “Teaching high school English at”—Marcena consulted her notes—“yes, Mirabal.”

  Hana and I had taken AP English and history together. A dreamy girl with a love of poetry, she’d impressed the rest of us with the dozens of poems she knew by heart. She could recite whole passages from Shakespeare.

  Even though we’d been among a handful of college-bound kids at our school, Hana and I had never been close. I’d lost track of her when we graduated. She took off for Normal, Illinois, to do a teaching degree the same fall I left for the University of Chicago. I hadn’t even known Hana had returned to South Chicago to teach until Marcena came to see me yesterday.

  Knowing Marcena Love was back in Chicago had not made my heart flutter with joy. The last time I’d seen her had been about five years ago. She’d been shrouded in gauze to shield her face while skin grafts healed. She’d looked fragile and very nearly contrite—she’d lost skin on a third of her face and arms in an assault she’d endured after she crossed the line between reporting on crime and participating in it.

  Contrition had vanished along with the gauze. Her auburn hair had grown in again; she’d swept the curls from her face with a clip. She was dressed in her usual skintight black, with a velveteen fuchsia bomber jacket and puffy faux combat boots that announced she belonged in the front of the fashion line along with any other line she might stand in.

  “I’m working for The Edge,” Marcena announced when I buzzed her inside.

  “You mean you’re working on an edge and you’re hoping I’ll keep you from falling off.”

  “Oh, please, Vic: The Edge. Brand-new. It’s a Salanter venture—he’s put up the seed money. We’re the future of journalism; we’re out on the edge. Streaming, online, audio, everything but print.”

  Like the Guardian newspaper, The Edge was based in London. After the Parkland massacre, the Guardian newspaper had turned over editorial decisions about writing and covering the aftermath to the Parkland students who were organizing the March for Our Lives. The Edge decided they needed to go one better. Or at least one different.

  Marcena explained that The Edge had put together an essay competition, asking teens to write about gun violence. “My idea, but Chaim loved it and put up the money for the prizes and transport and so on.”

  Meaning Chaim Salanter, octogenarian billionaire and Holocaust survivor, who hoped to save everyone before he died, from journalists to children whose lives were damaged by violence.

  Marcena and her team had culled a dozen winners from among seven thousand entries. They planned to fly the kids to DC, where they would be filmed reading their essays in the rotunda of the Library of Congress.

  “Most of the entries were filled with predictable bromides and calls to action,” Marcena added. “Others were harrowing accounts by survivors of school or mall shootings, but too many of those didn’t read well. And then we got one from a girl named Keisha Dunne here in Chicago that was flat-out amazing. It was about growing up with routine gun violence and how it affected the girl and her family—she was with her uncle when he was shot in some gang cross fire. Her story was also a reminder that we media types care more about affluent white kids than we do people of color in the cities. She’s my number one choice, but I have to vet the story, of course, make sure she didn’t make it up and that the girl wrote it herself, make sure she’s mediagenic—”

  “If it’s the best story and she wrote it herself, why does it matter how good she looks on TV?” I demanded.

  Marcena smiled puckishly. “Vic, darling, you are so charmingly Victorian. Of course it matters. We’re doing this for the kids, of course, but we’re also doing it to put The Edge on the map. We asked our hundred potential finalists for video clips, but now we need to meet and vet the writers and the stories.

  “Anyway, I’d like you to come down to South Chicago with me and help me figure out if there are any issues with the story. The family—mother, I should say, father isn’t in the picture—were eager, but then I got a call from this Hana Milcek, with some questions that she wouldn’t discuss over the phone.”

  “She’s Keisha Dunne’s English teacher?” I was trying to follow the story.

  “No. Keisha goes to a private school, South Side Preparatory Academy. But the head of the English and Journalism Department at Mirabal High was one of our local judges. I’m guessing he must have shown Keisha’s essay to your friend Hana. She called me this morning and said she had questions before I met with the Dunne girl. She was pretty stiff on
the phone, but I remembered that you’d grown up down there. When I asked Milcek if she knew you, she thawed and admitted she follows your cases. She’ll talk more frankly if you’re with me.”

  “The last time I let you romp around that high school with me, you drove a pretty big truck through a lot of people’s lives.”

  “It won’t be like that this time.” Marcena looked at me so earnestly that I almost believed her.

  Chapter 3

  I tried calling Hana as soon as Marcena left, but she wasn’t answering her phone. I had plenty of other work to do, but nothing involving Marcena is ever straightforward; I decided I’d best find out whether there was any information that would bolster or contradict Keisha Dunne’s essay. I should have demanded a copy of the essay but Marcena left before that occurred to me. At any rate, Marcena had given me the murdered uncle’s name: Tyrone Elgar.

  Elgar’s murder had merited a scant line in a paragraph summarizing all the violent deaths that same week. He’d been killed in 2009, apparently caught in gang cross fire at a stop sign on Escanaba and Ninety-sixth. I’d wondered if he might have been a banger himself instead of an innocent bystander, but it wasn’t possible to tell from the single sentence.

  I didn’t see anything about Elgar’s niece, Keisha Dunne. A Fannie Lou Elgar had been one of the winners of the mayor’s summer reading challenge three years in a row and had also been on the Mirabal chess team when they beat Whitney Young for the city championship—an upset on the David-Goliath metric. Mirabal is a poor, underperforming neighborhood school; Whitney Young, a magnet school, is one of the top five high schools in Illinois. The Mirabal website celebrated the team hoisting the trophy, a stylized queen about a foot high. Seven guys and Fannie Lou, the lone female on the team, a heavyset girl who stared at the camera with a kind of defiant seriousness.

  I dug a little and found Elgar’s paid death announcement in the Sun-Times: survived by beloved mother, Verena, cherished daughter, Fannie Lou, sister, Jasmine, niece, Keisha.

  I wondered why the niece, not the daughter, had written about Elgar’s death, but maybe she could be more detached. Although if it was the niece who’d been with him when he died . . . maybe it wasn’t detachment but a decade of pent-up fears that made Keisha write. I imagined an uneasy rivalry of grief and fear between the two girls.

  They were both only children; Jasmine Dunne, older than her brother Tyrone by two years, had divorced Albert Dunne when Keisha was three. She’d never remarried. Her PR firm, Jasmine Speaks Success, with offices on Seventy-first Street, had a small but important client list. She lived in one of the historic condominiums on Sixty-seventh Street that overlooked Lake Michigan to the east and one of Olmsted’s parks to the north.

  Fannie Lou Elgar lived with her grandmother at Ninety-second and Brandon, only a few streets from where I’d grown up. Looking at the addresses, I thought Elgar must have been taking his niece to the grandmother’s house when he was killed.

  I called Lt. Conrad Rawlings, the watch commander at the Fourth District. Conrad and I have a Byzantine relationship, meaning I never fully understand the rules that dictate whether we are at odds or BFFs. Today we seemed on a cordial footing: after a few minutes of me explaining why I cared, he looked up the file on Tyrone Elgar. The cops made an arrest about eight months after his murder, when the same gun was used in another gang shooting. Dirtbag was doing twenty-five-to-life in Pontiac.

  “Is there any suggestion that Elgar was involved with the shooters? Rival gang, anything?”

  “I know you wouldn’t assume a black man who got shot had it coming,” Conrad said stiffly.

  “Thank you; I don’t. Merely I don’t want to get blindsided tomorrow when I meet with the niece and her mother down at Mirabal. There’s some issue around the essay that’s making the English teacher uneasy.”

  I heard Conrad typing and then he assured me that Elgar had led a blameless existence—bachelor’s in environmental studies at Illinois-Chicago, a stint with the Navy in the Persian Gulf, and then home to a job with the South Chicago Redevelopment Foundation.

  Conrad’s friendly manner disappeared in flames the next afternoon when he saw me backstage at the Mirabal school auditorium: I was standing near Hana Milcek’s dead body, giving a statement to the sergeant who’d answered my 911 call.

  Chapter 4

  When Marcena and I pulled into the visitor’s section of the parking lot, I’d been depressed by how shabby Mirabal High looked. It had been old when I went there, but at least the asphalt had been in good shape. Now it had buckled and cracked; several windows were boarded up, and—true for all Chicago schools, at least in minority neighborhoods—all the entrances were padlocked except for one side door.

  The teachers’ lounge was still in a small room adjacent to the auditorium. The space had been a green room when the school was new—decades before my time—and kids put on elaborate musicals. The lounge’s main entrance was via the auditorium’s backstage—there was a second door through a janitor’s closet that no one ever used. Fire hazard, I thought as I sidestepped instrument cables and music stands to get to the lounge.

  Marcena had arranged to meet Hana there at the end of the school day, along with Keisha Dunne and her mother. I’d suggested we bring in the cousin and the grandmother, in case there were questions about what happened the day Tyrone Elgar died, but Marcena vetoed the idea.

  “The more people involved, the longer it will all take; you know that, Vic. Of course, I’ll check with the grandmother once I know your friend’s concerns, but let’s get those cleared up first.”

  I eyed her thoughtfully. “You have a second tape running in your head. I’d love to listen to that along with the foreground sound.”

  “Tape?” Marcena said derisively. “It’s all digital now, Vic.”

  She moved away from me to greet a newcomer entering through the auditorium door, calling her “Ms. Dunne,” exclaiming how delighted she was to meet in person.

  “This walkway is a lawsuit waiting to happen,” Jasmine Dunne announced. “I tripped on a music stand, and those cables are lethal.”

  She was dressed in a dramatic turquoise suit, the jacket featuring a half cape over the left shoulder. Keisha arrived a minute or two later. With her high cheekbones and her own stylish outfit—a horizontal-striped cropped top over high-waisted leggings—I could see why Marcena wanted to film her.

  “Miss Milcek said there were questions about Keisha’s essay.” Jasmine Dunne impatiently waved aside introductions. “If someone is accusing my girl of something, I’m here to fight for our rights. I own a public relations firm, and I know what happens when journalists start making accusations—”

  “No one’s making accusations, Ms. Dunne,” Marcena cut her off smoothly. “I’m going to every school in North America that our winning writers attend. I’m asking the same questions of each student and their teachers. It’s excellent that you came today; it saves me time in trying to make an appointment with you for permissions and all those things we do with underage performers.”

  The posh British accent worked its usual magic on the Americans. Keisha, who’d been staring at the floor, looked up and smiled at the word “performer,” while her mother nodded warily but calmed down—an English journalist might not bring an American’s racial prejudice to the meeting.

  A half hour passed with no sign of Hana. Marcena tried her cell phone, the school secretary paged her. I don’t know what made me go back to the auditorium, except some obscure thought she might have tripped on the backstage cables on her way to join us.

  Lights were kept on during the school day, but I still almost missed her: she was sprawled across a book cart that had been wheeled behind the school orchestra’s drum set. As nearly as I could tell, she’d been shot twice at close range.

  My first, illogical thought was that Marcena had shot her to protect her precious Edge competition. My next thought was that Hana Milcek looked young and innocent in death.

  Chapter 5r />
  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Conrad stormed over to me. “That call to me yesterday, that was a fucking setup, wasn’t it?”

  The watch commander’s arrival at a crime scene makes the rank and file nervous: they know it’s a high-profile case and they can’t afford a mistake. The commander’s arrival spitting nails makes everyone from first responder to senior detective fade as far into the scenery as possible.

  “You remember Marcena Love, don’t you, Lieutenant?” I said formally. “Her employer is holding an essay competition on kids affected by gun violence; Keisha Dunne wrote about the murder of her uncle, Tyrone Elgar. Ms. Love asked me to be part of a conversation about the essay with her mother and with Ms. Milcek, since something in it troubled Ms. Milcek. I called you yesterday as a routine fact-check; I wanted to make sure the CPD thought Mr. Elgar had been murdered.”

  “My brother was most certainly murdered,” Jasmine Dunne snapped. “Are you trying to say he wasn’t?”

  “We’re fact-checking all the essays,” Marcena said soothingly. “A whiff of ‘fake news’ will destroy the credibility of this important program.”

  Jasmine was starting to say she wanted to go with Marcena when she checked facts at white suburban schools, but she was cut short by a man with a deep voice loudly demanding to know if “it was true.”

  “Someone told me Hana is dead. What happened to her? We had lunch together a few hours ago. I thought she seemed perfectly healthy.”

  If Marcena wanted mediagenic, she didn’t need to look farther than the new arrival, a tall, square-jawed white man with a shock of dark hair. Like most contemporary teachers he wore jeans, but he also had on a blazer over an open-necked shirt. If the principal hadn’t already been in the room—an African-American woman in her fifties—I would have pegged this man for the job. He had that authoritative energy that men in power, or aspiring to power, project like a force field.