Death on the Edge
Author: Sara Paretsky
Date: 2018-09-18 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Mystery; Fiction; Short Stories; Crime; Mystery Thriller
Description: In this short story from New York Times bestselling author Sara Paretsky, acclaimed detective V.I. Warshawski must confront gun violence in her own Chicago hometown Legendary sleuth V.I. Warshawski is no stranger to the sound of bullets. Growing up in the Windy City, it was a way of life: loved ones taken too early, gangs patrolling the streets by night, police too quick to touch a trigger. Now, in the wake of a string of high school shootings across the United States, V.I.’s hometown has become impassioned by the growing movement to tackle gun violence. News reaches her old high school on Chi
Publisher: Witness Impulse

Dedication

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

Contents

1. Cover
2. Title Page
3. Dedication
4. Contents
5. Chapter 1: God of Mirth or God of Mercy
6. Chapter 2
7. Chapter 3
8. Chapter 4
9. Chapter 5
10. Chapter 6
11. Chapter 7
12. Chapter 8
13. Chapter 9
14. A Note to Readers
15. About the Author
16. Also by Sara Paretsky
17. Copyright
18. 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 5

“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.

“It is true, Dex,” the principal said, “and the police are here, wanting us not to contaminate their crime scene, so please don’t come farther into the room.”

Dex ignored her. “Marcena. If I’d known you were in the building I’d have come at once. What’s going on?”

I stared as he hurried to Marcena’s side.

“This is Dexter Vamor,” she said quickly. “He was one of my—our—The Edge’s local judges. We only met in person yesterday.”

Vamor held a hand out to me. “Chair of the English and Journalism Department here at Mirabal, for my sins. Are you with The Edge, as well?”

“I’m a detective,” I said.

“Private,” Conrad snapped. “She’s not with the police, she’s not going to ask any questions, and she’s not going to touch evidence to prove that she’s sharper than we are.”

I prudently didn’t say anything.

The next hour was a jumble of questions about who had seen what, and who was doing what in the lounge. All of us, from Keisha and Jasmine to me, and not excluding the principal or Marcena, were tested for gunshot residue and searched for weapons.

Conrad talked to the principal and Vamor about students or colleagues who might have been angry with Hana, but both were adamant that she didn’t have that kind of history.

Vamor added, “Of course, there’s always a student who thinks their work is undervalued, but frankly, our kids aren’t looking for that extra decimal on their GPA to get them into Harvard. As for her colleagues, sure, some people liked her more than others, but she’s been here twenty years without making enemies among the teachers. This must have been a random shooting. Maybe she interrupted someone selling or using.”

“Dex,” the principal said. “We’re not in the business of pointing the cops at our students or our faculty and staff. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t start speculating without any facts to back up your statements.”

Vamor gave her a mock salute. From the expression on the principal’s face, she wished it was his body on the book cart, but she only turned to Conrad to say that Hana worked hard with students who wanted to excel, but didn’t neglect anyone in her classes.

“If she had discipline problems, she usually sorted them out herself.”

When Conrad finally decided to dismiss us, I said diffidently, “If the lieutenant would permit me one question first?”

Rawlings looked at me sourly. “Meekness isn’t your best act, Warshawski. Ask away.”

“Mr. Vamor, I’m here because Ms. Milcek apparently had questions about Keisha Dunne’s essay. Since you were one of the judges, you probably have a sense of what she wanted to know.”

“What questions?” Jasmine Dunne demanded, hands on hips. “I am tired of you insinuating—”

“Please, Ms. Dunne,” Marcena said. “Keisha’s work is brilliant. But I still needed to speak to Ms. Milcek. Did she know your daughter?”

“Of course not. Keisha doesn’t go to Mirabal. Milcek might have been my niece’s teacher.” Jasmine looked a question at her daughter, who nodded and muttered that “Fannie Lou adored Ms. Milcek.”

“Fannie Lou surely wouldn’t bad-mouth you to her English teacher,” Jasmine said to Keisha.

“No, mama,” Keisha muttered, staring at her feet.

Vamor meanwhile was upset that Marcena had talked to Hana without telling him.

“Milcek—Ms. Milcek—found what hotel I was in and called me there,” Marcena said. “She didn’t want to talk on the phone. Vic’s question is a good one: Did she share her concerns with you?”

Vamor shook his head. “As I said, I saw her at lunch today. We talked about the competition—like a lot of teachers, she had kids whose lives were hit by gun violence and she’d encouraged them to enter—and she knew I was a judge, so she wondered when she could find out about her students. I told her that was up to the people in London, and I couldn’t release names until Marcena told us they were ready to go public.”

“But you’d already spoken to Keisha and her mother,” I said to Marcena.

“Of course,” she said. “Under oath of secrecy, since no winners can be announced until we’re dead sure of our finalists.”

“How did you come to pick Vamor as a judge?” Conrad asked. “A Rust Belt school isn’t exactly on international radar.”

“But Dex is,” Marcena said. “He writes a regular column for one of the best journalism school blogs and he’s on the faculty for a summer journalism program that works with teens. We knew about him even before we were sure we were going forward with the contest.”

The principal raised her brows. “Dex, that’s news to me. I’m surprised it’s not in your CV.”

He looked a little embarrassed. “Doing it on my own time, Albertine.”

“Usually we know when you’re up to something high-profile. But if there are questions about an essay submitted by one of my students—”

“She doesn’t go to school here, Albertine,” Vamor interrupted. “She’s at South Side Prep in Chatham.”

“The essay dealt with the murder of one of your students’ fathers,” I said. “Fannie Lou Elgar.”

“But Fannie didn’t write the essay,” Vamor said sharply.

“Fannie Lou, Dexter,” the principal said. “Her father named her for Fannie Lou Hamer. If her cousin’s work deals with Tyrone Elgar’s death, I’d like to read it; it might give me insight into Fannie Lou. She’s one of our most gifted students, but painfully shy inside her shell.”

“The essays are not being made public yet,” Marcena said. “And they’re the property of The Edge.”

“It’s mine,” Keisha said. “I wrote it.”

Marcena smiled at her. “The contest rules state that The Edge owns all the submissions, I’m afraid. Even the ones that don’t win awards we may want to use in some other way.”

“But you could print it out for us to take a look at,” I said.

“So you can start questioning it and tearing it apart?” Jasmine said. “I don’t think so.”

“In that case, I’ll get the state’s attorney to give me a warrant,” Conrad said. “Gun deaths on the South Side are usually about gangs, and if the lady had been shot on her way out of the building I might believe it was an initiation murder. As it is, I’m open to all ideas. Which means all of you can wait here until the state’s attorney gives me a warrant for the essay.”

Chapter 6

Marcena was magnanimous in defeat. The principal took her to the school office, where Marcena printed out a half dozen copies of Keisha’s essay, including one for me.

Conrad pulled me aside for a short talk before he left: he trusted if I knew anything that would shed light on the murder that I would not be a glory hog but would turn it over to him.

“Talk to Love over there,” I said, pointing to where Marcena was conferring with Dexter Vamor. “She’s the one who pulled me down here and I’m still not sure I know why.”

Conrad looked at her, but suddenly smiled at me. “I don’t know her, Ms. W., but I know you. You may have come down here for the reasons you state, but you’re obsessed now with Milcek’s death.”

“Of course I am. Violent death is always a shock, and then, you know, we went to school together. I’m not a glory hog—you must surely know that after all these years—but I want to know why Hana died and who killed her.”

I shivered; Hana had gotten out of bed thinking about her class schedule, or what she wanted to ask Marcena, or whether she could make her insurance payments on time—the quotidian, not the thought that she would die before supper time.

“Are the school’s surveillance cameras working?” I asked.

Conrad nodded. “Tech teams will look at them to see if any strangers came into the school in the last twenty-four hours. Guards sure didn’t sign anyone in, but a school hall can be chaotic; someone could have blended in during a class change. Keep me on speed dial, Warshawski.”

When he’d left, I went back to the principal’s office to talk to Albertine Diaz about Hana Milcek’s next of kin. Hana had never married; she’d lived with her mother until the older woman’s death three years ago. If she’d been close to anyone with whom she might have confided her concerns about Keisha’s essay, Diaz didn’t know who that might be.

As for enemies among students or staff, Diaz shook her head. “Despite what Dex Vamor was saying in the group, he and Hana didn’t get along. She was a serious type and he’s flamboyant. No one ever put together better lesson plans than Hana, but the students gravitate to Dex. Being a teacher is half dedication, half knowledge, and all showman. Sad to say. I often thought Hana would fit in better at a university; I tried to get her to go for the doctorate but she loved being in the classroom. And every now and then, she’d find a student who responded.

“The Elgar girl, Fannie Lou, she was one of the ones who responded to Hana Milcek’s style. She’s a studious type, too. Shy, serious, super-bright. I don’t know what Hana’s death will do to her. Her mother died in childbirth when Fannie Lou was two, then her father was shot and killed. I hope the cousin told Fannie Lou she was writing about her father’s murder. It would be a nasty shock to find out about it from your English friend’s online performance.”

“Yes,” I agreed, thinking about it. “I wonder if that’s what Hana wanted to talk about with Marcena. If Fannie Lou was one of her own protégées, she’d have wanted to protect her . . . You said she solved her own disciplinary problems. Did she have many? Did students gang up on her because of her scholarly style?”

Diaz smiled wryly. “The teenage mind remains a mystery to me, even though I’ve been teaching and administrating in their world for close to thirty years. Kids treated her almost like a pet. I think it was because she was one of the world’s true innocents. She behaved the same to everyone, to me and her peers and the janitors and the students. She thought everyone shared her interest in poetry and literature and she’d listen to anyone’s opinion. She added writers like Audre Lorde to her curriculum, she’d let kids write on rap. She didn’t try to be hip, not the way Dex Vamor does, but she listened.”

“What’s Vamor doing here, anyway?” I asked. “Seems like a guy who wants a bigger stage.”

Diaz’s lips tightened. “Yes, indeed. He’s been here three years, came when we added a media department. He’s only thirty-two but he had the credentials to be a department head. I’m sure he’s already planning his next move.”

Marcena came into the office at that moment, looking for me, hoping it wouldn’t be an inconvenience but she needed to get back to her hotel so she could communicate with her London colleagues on Hana’s death and how that might affect The Edge’s essay competition. I’d noticed her taking pictures of Hana’s body—those would probably be on The Edge’s website within the hour. What a scoop—journalist right there when her subject’s dead body was found. I wondered again if Marcena had known anything about Hana’s death before I found her.

At home, I curled up with a glass of Amarone and read Keisha’s essay. She wrote with a high degree of sophistication, both in language and in structure. She covered seven funerals she’d attended for people dead from bullets.

Every story is different, but every story is the same: the same grief, the same incomprehension, the same anger, whether over Baby Nikwa Jonas, hit by a bullet that went through her father’s kitchen window, or for Alan Wicherly, star forward on my school’s basketball team, shot by a cop when he was putting a hand inside his pocket for his driver’s license.

These deaths create a mountain of grief that presses down on me. There are days when it scarcely seems possible to rise from my bed, because the grief mountain grew another hundred feet higher in the night.

Family and neighbors call on Jesus for help or faith, but I always remember my grandmother, kneeling next to my Uncle Ty. She called him “my baby.” It had never occurred to me that my big laughing uncle had ever been my grandma’s baby, but when he died, he was, in her eyes, no bigger than Baby Nikwa.

“Why, Jesus?” she cried. “Why did you bring him safe home from Iraq only to let him die in front of me? Are you the God of mercy or God of mirth, laughing at the contortions of the human heart?”

I sat for a long time when I’d finished reading, staring at nothing. The pain of lives like Keisha Dunne’s seemed almost beyond bearing. And now her cousin’s high mountain of grief had just doubled with the loss of a beloved teacher.

I finally stirred enough to pour myself another glass of wine. Keisha had been six when her uncle was shot. I wondered if her grandmother had really uttered those words—God of mercy or God of mirth. The fireman was carrying Keisha across the street, away from the murder scene. She was in shock. What would she really remember from the moment? Perhaps a poetically inclined teenager had added the words on her own.

How would Fannie Lou, the shy, studious cousin, feel if her father’s murder catapulted Keisha into international recognition? Betrayed and violated? Or would she be glad that the story reached a wide audience? Those could easily have been the questions on Hana Milcek’s mind when she spoke to Marcena about the competition.

I went to my laptop and looked up Alan Wicherly, the murdered basketball star. He’d died two years earlier, but she had the details right: shot by a cop, community fury, no action by the city or the department. He’d been a senior forward on the Mirabal High basketball team, with a full ride to the University of Kansas fabled basketball program, when he was killed outside a gas station at Eighty-third and Exchange.

Mirabal High. Keisha didn’t go to school there, but Fannie Lou did. I shook my head. Fannie Lou’s murdered father, her high school’s murdered basketball star. To an outsider, it looked as though Keisha needed to take her cousin’s experiences and make them her own. Of course, Keisha lived on the South Side. If Wicherly was a star at her cousin’s school, she might have known him.

Even so, I found the card for the Mirabal principal, Albertine Diaz, and called her cell.

“Ms. Warshawski! Have you learned something about Hana’s murder?”

“I’m wondering if I’ve learned what questions she wanted to ask about Keisha Dunne’s essay,” I said. “Have you read it?”

Diaz apologized. “I just got home ten minutes ago. I wanted to break the news of Hana’s death to Fannie Lou Elgar myself, and she was every bit as distraught as I anticipated. I got her home and sat with her and her grandmother for an hour. I just hope this doesn’t derail her academics. We have high hopes for her, but losing Hana to a bullet, after a childhood that started with watching her father die—”

“She was there when Tyrone Elgar died?” I interrupted. “Keisha’s essay doesn’t mention that.”

Diaz said, “It’s my understanding she was in the car with him when he got shot.”

“She was? Both girls were there? That sure doesn’t come across in Keisha’s writing.” I asked Diaz about Alan Wicherly.

“It was a big story in South Chicago. All the kids were affected. Basketball star gets shot, no one is safe: that was how every parent and every child felt. I don’t think it means anything particular that Keisha Dunne wasn’t in the same school as Alan.” Diaz’s tone was sharp.

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said soothingly. “I was trying to understand what in the essay troubled Hana. If Fannie Lou felt close to her, she might have discussed relations with her cousin. A lot of the events Keisha describe seem to come from Fannie Lou’s direct experience, and I can’t help wondering about rivalry and jealousy between the two girls.”

“I’ll read the essay and get back to you,” Diaz said grudgingly.

I wasn’t expecting to hear from her, especially after more than an hour had gone by. I was on my way down the stairs to give my dogs their final outing of the day when Diaz phoned.

“We have a situation here. Is there any chance you could drive down to Fannie Lou’s grandmother’s place tonight?”

She started to give me directions, but I cut her off. “It’s my briar patch, too, Ms. Diaz: I grew up three blocks away.”

Chapter 7

Once I passed the Loop I had the roads almost to myself—few people go to Chicago’s South Side late at night. I was passing the park that covered the old U.S. Steel South Works twenty minutes after I left home.

Lights were on in all the rooms of Verena Elgar’s bungalow on Brandon. The situation, as Diaz had called it, was so loud that I could hear the shouts as I got out of my car. The noise and lights had drawn neighbors to the street outside. They watched me curiously as I jogged up the walk, but no one spoke to me until I rang the doorbell.

“They can’t hear you inside but the door’s open,” a woman called helpfully.

She was right; I pulled on the handle and walked inside to fury. I recognized Fannie Lou Elgar from her chess club photo, a heavy young woman with a wild halo of natural hair, her face swollen from crying. Next to her was an older version of Jasmine Dunne. The grandmother, I presumed. The pair were facing off against Jasmine and Keisha, the girls yelling so loudly I could only make out a handful of individual words, but those were charged: Thief! Liar! Loser! Murderer!

Albertine Diaz was on the perimeter of the battle zone, watching the combatants, her shoulders hunched with tension. When she saw me, she relaxed noticeably and took me into the narrow hallway.

“I’ve unleashed a firestorm here. When I read the essay I felt—”

“I want no more secrets or secret conversations about my granddaughters.” Verena Elgar had left her daughter and was facing us in the doorway, arms akimbo. “Whatever you have to say or think you know, I want it right here in my living room. And you can start by telling me who you are.”

I obediently introduced myself.

“I see—you’re the woman Albertine says made her start asking questions about Keisha’s essay.”

“It’s my essay,” Fannie Lou muttered. “She stole my essay.”

“You can’t prove that!” Keisha said. “You think you’ve got the only brain in the family. I’m tired of, ‘Fannie Lou won the reading competition,’ ‘Fannie Lou is doing summer math camp,’ ‘Fannie Lou this,’ ‘Fannie Lou that.’”

“I’m tired of, ‘Keisha is such a gifted singer and dancer. Must be hard to have a cousin like her when you’re so fat yourself,’” Fannie Lou blurted, on the verge of tears.

“You didn’t even know about the competition until I told you.”

“Liar!” Fannie Lou said. “Ms. Milcek told me about it. I wrote about my daddy and she said it was brilliant and I should make it into a whole essay for the competition.”

“And then you’d send in your video clip and Ms. Love would swoon over your fat ass and put you on national television. I don’t think so,” Keisha sneered.

“Fannie Lou, are you sure Ms. Milcek submitted your essay?” Diaz asked. “Even the most dedicated teacher can drop the ball now and again.”

“Not Ms. Milcek,” Fannie Lou said. “When she said she’d do a thing, she’d do that thing.”

“Fannie Lou—Ms. Elgar,” I said. “Did you watch Ms. Milcek submit your essay?”

She nodded, choking back a sob. “I sat with her as she filled out the form, because some of the information was about me. My birthdate and things like that that Ms. Milcek wouldn’t know off the top of her head. Two other kids in my class wrote essays and she sent them all in on the same day. So it wasn’t that she was treating me special,” she added fiercely to her cousin. “Everyone mattered to her if we did the work.”

“And you, Ms. Dunne,” I said quickly, before Keisha could fire back. “How did you submit your essay?”

“Mom helped me, but we took it to my high school counselor.”

I asked the girls for the dates they’d made their submissions, but they couldn’t remember—it had been back in the spring, before the end of the school year, and it was late September now.

I felt a bit like King Solomon with the baby—who was really the mother of the essay? I called Marcena.

“Your winning student has a rival for the same essay. Can you check your files at The Edge for a submission by Fannie Lou Elgar?”

“I’m in the middle of something right now, Vic. Can’t it wait?”

“I’m not sure how you’d handle a public outcry if your winner was found to be guilty either of theft or plagiarism. That’s where this is heading, though.”

“What are you talking about?” Marcena demanded.

“Your winning essay, your mediagenic kid. It’s possible she stole her cousin’s work. I’m trying to figure that out.”

Marcena wanted to know where I was, how I knew this, damn it, I should have called her as soon as I heard about the problem—did I think I was God Almighty on a throne dispensing justice to the rest of the human race?

“We can sort out later who I think I am and who I think you are, but in the meantime, can you get that information from your paper’s database?” I said.

I heard a man’s voice in the background, a smothered noise of annoyance, and then Marcena said she’d call me back in ten. It was actually a bit under that when she phoned to say she’d gotten The Edge’s nightshift tech department to do a search. Nothing from Fannie Lou, nothing from Mirabal High, sorry, Vic.

“But that can’t be,” Fannie Lou protested. “I watched her, and so did Jordan and Artiya.”

“You just can’t admit you or your precious teacher made a mistake,” Keisha said. “Did you even do your video? Maybe your teacher didn’t know how to upload that.”

“Just because I don’t go to a fancy school doesn’t mean we all crawl around in the dirt down here,” Fanny Lou said.

“Girls!” Verena’s voice was a whip. “I will not have you turn yourselves into a public spectacle. That’s enough of this for tonight. You, Ms. Detective, do you have any advice on how to find out what happened to Fannie Lou’s essay?”

“Did Ms. Milcek do this at a school computer or on your laptop?” I asked Fannie Lou.

“At the school, in the computer lab, but I have my essay on my machine and it has the date stamp on it. That will prove I wrote mine before Keisha wrote hers!”

“Only if Keisha’s date stamp is later than yours, Missy,” Jasmine said. “Why can’t you let Keisha have a little glory for once in your life, Fannie Lou? You get your name in the paper every five minutes for some competition or other.”

Fannie Lou said, “She’s in the choir, she got a solo at the Youth Orchestra, she was an extra in The Chi. Why can’t she let me be best at this one thing?”

“Go get your computer, Fannie Lou,” her grandmother said. “At least we can find out what date you put your essay in your machine.”

Fannie Lou turned to go to the hall and up the narrow stairs to the second floor. Keisha was watching her, hands on hips, biting her lips.

“Sticky!” I called.

Fannie Lou stopped with her foot on the first step. She turned to look at me, but Keisha didn’t move.

“I’m pretty sure that answers the authorship question,” I said dryly. “We can get the computers and find Hana’s and check all the dates, but I think we’ll find that Fannie Lou wrote the original essay.”

Principal Diaz and the grandmother both looked bewildered. “Why? What does ‘Sticky’ have to do with it?” the principal said.

“The start of the essay,” I said. “The writer says the only remaining piece of the girl with ‘matchstick legs’ who was with Tyrone Elgar when he died is the nickname. Keisha went through the essay and found every reference to Mr. Elgar as ‘Daddy’ or ‘my father’ and changed them to ‘Uncle Ty’ or ‘my uncle.’ But she forgot the rest of the context. Why, though?”

When Keisha didn’t say anything, Verena Elgar demanded that she answer the question.

“Fannie Lou was, like, preening herself. ‘My essay’s so good, I’m going to win the big prize.’ I couldn’t take her boasting on herself.”

“What big prize?” I asked.

“The scholarship money,” Keisha whispered. “The winners all get scholarships to the college of their choice. I want to go to a real conservatory, and it seemed like—I read Fannie Lou’s essay and I thought, she’ll win this competition just like she wins everything. But even without this, she’ll get a scholarship to Stanford or Harvard or someplace, why can’t I have this one chance?”

“But why, baby?” Verena went to Keisha and took her in her arms. “You know I would help you; you know I’ve saved my pennies and dimes so that you and Fannie Lou could both go to college.”

“We don’t know that, Mama.” Jasmine’s voice was like a whip. “The whole time I was growing up, everything was ‘Ty, Ty, Ty.’ He was so special, it was like I didn’t even exist. And then after he died, you were the same with Fannie Lou. Keisha’s accomplishments never mattered to you the way Fannie Lou’s do. I work hard but the money isn’t there for the New England Conservatory or Cincinnati.”

Albertine Diaz’s jaw dropped in horror. “But, Ms. Dunne—surely you didn’t encourage your daughter to steal her cousin’s work!”

“No. But when she told me what she’d done, I thought, okay, why not? After all, Ty was my brother, but my grief never counted for anything. And he was like a second father to Keisha—her daddy left us when she was a baby. But it was always Fannie Lou’s grief, Mama’s grief, never what happened to us.”

“You must have known this would come out if Keisha won,” I said. “Didn’t you have a plan?”

“If she won, I figured she’d be in Washington and on TV before anyone at Mirabal High knew about it.”

“Oh, Jasmine.” Her mother’s voice crackled with misery. “I always said God was a god of mirth more than mercy. He and his angels laugh at the way we contort ourselves. Albertine, and you, Ms. Detective, I need to be alone with my family. You leave now.”

I nodded and said to the principal, “Can you get me into the school? I know it’s almost midnight, but I’d like to get to the computers before some clever jerk decides to wipe the server.”

Chapter 8

Mirabal High was built like a giant E, but missing the middle prong. The computer lab was on the second floor of the wing farthest from the entrance. When we reached the end of the long hall and turned left, we saw the light from the lab at once.

The lab door was locked, but Albertine had a master key. The room was filled with rows of monitor-covered countertops; it took a moment before we saw Dexter Vamor at a machine by the windows. Marcena was standing behind him.

I raced across the room to him, shoving Marcena out of the way. I leapt onto Dexter, knocking his hand from the keyboard. He rolled back in his chair, pushing me off balance, and reached for an ankle holster.

I lunged forward, hands around his neck, fingers digging into his larynx. He still managed to fire twice before he lost consciousness.

Black hands covered mine, pulling me away from Vamor. “Ms. W, didn’t I specifically order you to keep me in the loop and not to hotdog?”

Chapter 9

Marcena and I sat with Albertine Diaz in the principal’s office. We both tried to pretend we could handle the bitter institutional coffee—neither of us wanted to look like overprivileged white women condescending to the Black and Hispanic South Side.

“Thank you for alerting the police,” Diaz said formally to Marcena. “It was a big help to have Lt. Rawlings see Dex actually trying to shoot us. And thank you, Vic, for figuring things out quickly enough to stop him before he erased Hana’s files.”

It was two days after the shoot-out in the lab. I’d spent most of the previous afternoon with the Elgar family. Verena was mourning her granddaughter Keisha’s theft of Fannie Lou’s work, but more than that, she was upset with herself for not seeing how she was hurting Jasmine.

“After Ty died, I wanted to weave this cocoon around Fannie Lou, and I didn’t see how I was cutting Jasmine and Keisha out. They were always here, Sunday dinner, girls playing together, going to swim lessons together, but I read the story wrong. Jasmine put Keisha in a private school and I thought she was cutting herself away from me, from us and the neighborhood. I didn’t see the world of hurt she was living in.”

Jasmine and her mother agreed that Keisha needed a meaningful penalty for stealing Fannie Lou’s work, but no one wanted to see her publicly shamed. She was sixteen, and sixteen-year-olds act without thinking about consequences ten times a day. We didn’t want a mark on her record that would add another barrier to any education or jobs she would try for in a few years. When I left, they were deciding on a combination of community service—Keisha coaching neighborhood kids one afternoon a week—and the curtailing of Keisha’s own social life.

“And Fannie Lou is going to join Keisha in coaching,” Verena said. “I’m distressed if she was boasting on herself and making Keisha feel like a lesser girl.”

What I didn’t understand was Dexter Vamor’s role in the story, but Marcena explained that.

“He saw the video clips the girls sent in. He knew the essays were identical, but he knew Keisha had the winning presence and he wanted a win. He wanted a job on cable and he figured if he ingratiated himself with ‘the lady from London,’ and had a beautiful poised girl like Keisha to be the face of Chicago’s South Side, he’d have a chance to make himself known nationally. So he deleted Fannie Lou’s submission.”

“And then Hana read Keisha’s essay,” I said. “She instantly recognized the language from Fannie Lou’s work; she called Marcena to say she had questions about the essay, but she wanted to talk to Vamor first, I guess.”

Marcena nodded. “That’s how I reconstruct it, too. She confronted him and he shot her. And then he tried to romance me. I suppose he thought he could dazzle me into not questioning his role in the essays, but I’m forty-five; when good-looking thirty-year-olds try to dazzle me, I always wonder what’s really going on with them.”

She looked at me with a smile half guilty, half mischievous; she would never apologize for the havoc she’d wreaked five years ago, but she wanted me to know she’d learned from it.

“And the prizes?” the principal asked. “I hope you’re going to readmit Fannie Lou’s essay. She may not be the most mediagenic girl in your database, but she did write the essay, and she is a gifted student in a community without very many of them.”

“Oh, yes.” Marcena produced her brilliant public smile, five hundred watts of dazzle. “The Edge is going to profile the whole family. We’ll fly the grandmother and the cousin out along with Fannie Lou. And I’m twisting some arms at the London Conservatory of Music; we think we’ll come up with a nice package for the cousin.”

I drove Marcena to the airport a few days later. I still wondered why she was in the computer lab with Vamor when Albertine Diaz and I arrived there.

“Vic, you’re such a Victorian.” She repeated the label in a voice light with scorn. “Just because an apple has a worm in it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy tasting the apple. You take everything in life too hard. You want everyone to be moral and well behaved, but all you get is bruises when you try to make that happen. Relax; learn to take the pleasures that come your way. Life is too short; the time for rosebuds is here for an instant. Gather them while you can.”

I pulled up to the international terminal. “Maybe you’re right, Marcena. I guess I’m the person following after you, trying to get the worms out of the apples so they don’t choke an innocent bystander.”

She leaned across the gearshift and kissed my cheek. “None of us is innocent, darling. We all carry a shadow of guilt for something. I just let the world see mine.”

She grabbed her bag from the back seat and strode into the terminal without a backward glance.

A Note to Readers

Marcena Love first appeared in Fire Sale, where she crossed a line between reporting on a major crime centered on V.I.’s old South Chicago high school, and participating in it.

About the Author

Hailed by P.D. James as “the most remarkable” of modern crime writers, SARA PARETSKY is the New York Times bestselling author of nineteen previous novels, including the renowned V.I. Warshawski series. She is one of only four living writers—alongside John Le Carré, Peter Lovesey, and Lawrence Block—to have received both the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. She lives in Chicago with her husband.

Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

Also by Sara Paretsky

- Shell Game
- Fallout
- Brush Back
- Critical Mass
- Breakdown
- Body Work
- Hardball
- Bleeding Kansas
- Fire Sale
- Blacklist
- Total Recall
- Hard Time
- Ghost Country
- Windy City Blues
- Tunnel Vision
- Guardian Angel
- Burn Marks
- Blood Shot
- Bitter Medicine
- Killing Orders
- Deadlock
- Indemnity Only

Copyright

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

death on the edge. Copyright © 2018 by Sara Paretsky. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.

Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-289584-4

Cover design by Patricia Barrow

Cover photograph © Erhard Nerger/imageBROKER/Shutterstock

WITNESS logo and WITNESS IMPULSE are trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers in the United States of America.

HarperCollins is a registered trademark of HarperCollins Publishers in the United States of America and other countries.

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Table of Contents

- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- 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