“Have you read the whole report?” Rieff asked. “One of the oddities Winne found was scorching around the holes in the mitt. That fabric is too tough to cut without a special blade, so he must have burned it to get into it. That’s the one thing a defense lawyer could jump on in claiming the contents had been tampered with.”
He hung up, but I held on to the receiver, staring at the desktop. If Chad knew that his buddies had died because their armor didn’t protect them, no wonder he’d freaked out when he saw Nadia paint the Achilles logo on the Body Artist. He’d accused Nadia of spying on him. He must have thought she worked for Tintrey.
I looked up to see Petra watching me anxiously.
“Vic,” she said, “is there some kind of problem?”
“Not a problem,” I said slowly. “Just—I think I understand what happened, but not how to prove it. Not who pulled the trigger on the gun that shot Nadia Guaman but why they did, and why they framed Chad. Marty, how much did Chad say about the body armor?”
Jepson frowned. “He never stopped talking about it, ma’am—Vic. We knew he was angry. But he was always angry about the way him and his men had been treated generally.”
“But did he talk about the armor malfunctioning?”
“He said his men should be alive, that their armor didn’t protect them. But, ma’am, no disrespect, you get these IEDs, and nothing can protect you.”
“So he didn’t say the shields were full of sand instead of the nanoparticles they were supposed to contain?”
He shook his head, trying to remember. “I know he said he was going to tell the whole world how his squad got butchered, but, you know, that was just talk. It was his way of letting off steam. Least, that’s how Tim and me and the other guys took it. I don’t remember him ever saying he did like you did, sent the armor to a lab to get it analyzed.”
“No: I think he tested it by shooting at it.” That explained the burn marks around the holes in the mitt as well as the holes in Mona’s bedroom wall that had bothered her so much. Chad had attached the shield to the wall and shot at it. The bullet went through the armor and destroyed the drywall behind it. That was his proof. But how had the men at Tintrey known what he was doing?
“His blog,” I said. “The sections that got erased, I bet those were where he described the mitt. We need Tim. We need to see if he can resurrect Chad’s blog.”
I got up. “Jake’s leaving for Europe this evening. I want to see him before he takes off. Can you two track down Tim and see if he’ll come up to my place when he gets off work? In the meantime, make two copies of this report, will you? Send one to Murray Ryerson at the Star. The other goes to Freeman Carter.”
I’d offered to drive Jake to O’Hare, but the packing of his basses for international travel was a painstaking, if not heart-stopping, business. With a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of instruments, he bought tickets so that they could ride in the plane with him, but they required extra scrutiny and careful repacking once he’d been through security. The manager of his chamber group was bringing a roadie just to oversee the luggage.
Jake greeted me on the landing when he heard me on the stairs. “Vic, you made it. I was afraid you were shooting somebody or being shot at.”
He took me in his arms and danced me into his apartment, where the living room was filled with the luggage, including his two basses—the modern one for the chamber group, the period double bass for his early-music group. In their fiberglass cases, the instruments looked like stiff elderly people at a concert. I bowed to them and sang a few bars from “Non mi dir, bell’idol mio,” my mother’s signature aria.
Jake took me into the bedroom, where he’d touchingly set up a little table with champagne and a vase of flowers. “Three coach seats. I can’t afford to take my children first-class, so we’ll drink my champagne now.”
He slid my heavy winter layers over my head and unhooked my bra. He winced a little when he saw the bruises on my stomach, but he didn’t back away from me as I’d feared. By the time he