of the metro-area casinos, then opened a nightclub of her own in west suburban Aurora. The Aurora Borealis proved so successful that she’d apparently decided she was ready for the big city. Three years ago, she’d sold her Aurora place and opened Club Gouge.
Olympia’s first two years at Club Gouge, even during the boom economy, had been disastrous. She’d run through almost a million dollars, maxed out her credit cards, and overdrawn her line of credit. And then, as the bottom fell out of the economy, just as everyone else in the country was losing their jobs and their homes, Olympia’s bills were wiped clean. There was no way of seeing who her godfather had been, but someone had put a million dollars in cash into her account.
Santa Claus. Rodney Claus. He was the person Olympia was trying to keep happy. He was the one she’d called her “insecurity.” But he wasn’t Olympia’s savior; he was the foot soldier sent to keep an eye on the investment.
Nadia had sought out the Body Artist because Buckley had known Allie. I couldn’t get away from that. But how had Nadia found out that her sister had known the Artist? If murder happened because of the Guaman family’s sensitivity over Allie’s sexuality, why was Nadia dead and not Karen Buckley?
I was making myself crazy with all these unprovable scenarios. It was close to five p.m. now. I’d planned on going home to walk the dogs and eat a bowl of pasta before meeting Murray, but I was too exhausted from my day in the snow. I called Mr. Contreras and asked him to let the dogs out. I was heading to the daybed in my back room, when my computer pinged to tell me one of my requested reports had arrived.
Alexandra Guaman. The file on her wasn’t very big, but when I opened it the first thing I saw was her high school yearbook picture. Her face, framed by curly dark hair, didn’t have a knife slash across the middle. Other than that, she looked like the portrait Nadia had drawn on the Body Artist’s back. That didn’t particularly startle me; I’d been expecting it. What jumped out at me was where she died. Alexandra Guaman had been working for a private security firm in Iraq. She’d been driving a truck on a supposedly safe route when an IED exploded and killed her.
18
And the Wheel Goes Round and Round
I printed out the files on Alexandra Guaman and took them with me into the back room to read while I stretched out on my daybed. An hour later when I came to, the pages were strewn across me and the floor like dead leaves.
I struggled upright, washing the sleep out of my eyes under Tessa’s shower, making myself coffee in our kitchenette. I had an hour before I had to meet Murray, and I was feeling so tense about my lack of headway that I wanted to get through as many documents as I could.
What I had on Alexandra Guaman didn’t tell me much. So many people have died in Iraq since we invaded that journalists now dump them all into a journalistic mass grave: fifteen killed in an explosion outside Basra, seven dead in a Baghdad market, thirty obliterated in a bombing run on Fallujah.
Alexandra’s bio was correspondingly slim: the oldest of the Guaman daughters, the first to attend St. Teresa of Avila Prep, followed by college at DePaul here in Chicago, a degree in communications, then a job at Tintrey, the big security contractor. Tintrey’s headquarters were in Chicago, or at least the suburbs, in the corporate corridor along the north leg of the Tri-State.
Alexandra had gone to Iraq for Tintrey four years ago. Tintrey had contracts for everything from over-the-road trucking to providing field first-aid kits. Alexandra’s job title, a level 8 employee in communications, could have meant anything: creating PR, monitoring computer networks, getting real-time information to field personnel.
Chicago’s Latino paper had an obituary, showing the smiling yearbook picture I was getting to know by heart. I squinted at the page, picking my way through the Spanish: the anguish of the parents, the long wait for news, the sad realization when Alexandra’s boss wrote a letter of condolence to the family: an IED had exploded when she was heroically driving a truck as part of a convoy to the Baghdad airport.
Nothing in the story, or in any of my skimpy reports, about her sex life. Or about the Body Artist.