I ended up telling him about Nancy’s death and my trek to Dead Stick Pond. He’d never been below the Field Museum and had no inkling of life on the South Side. I got out my city map and showed him Houston Street, where I’d grown up, and then the route down to the Cal Industrial District and the wetlands, where Nancy had been found.

He shook his head. “Dead Stick Pond, huh? Guess the name says it all. It’s rough losing a friend that way, one you played basketball with and all. I never even knew you was on a team, but I mighta guessed it, the way you run. But you want to be careful, doll. If this Dresburg guy is the one behind all this, he’s an awful lot bigger than you. You know me, I’ve never backed away from a fight, but I know better than to go in single-handed against a tank division too.”

He was going into an elaborate illustration based on his experiences at Anzio when Jonathan Michaels phoned. I excused myself and took the call on the bedroom extension.

“I wanted to get you before I leave town in the morning.” Jonathan spoke without preamble. “I had one of my staff people look up your two guys—Pankowski and Ferraro. They did sue Humboldt. Apparently not over wrongful dismissal, but whether they could get workers’ comp. It looks as though they quit due to illness and were trying to prove it was job related. They didn’t get anywhere with the suit—the thing came to trial here and Humboldt didn’t have any trouble winning, and then the two died and the lawyer didn’t seem to want to follow up on appeal. I don’t know how far you want to follow this, but the lawyer who handled it was a Frederick Manheim.”

He cut short my thanks with a crisp “Gotta run.”

I was hanging up when he came back on the line. “You still there? Good. I almost forgot—we didn’t see anything about sabotage, but Humboldt could have kept that quiet—not wanting the idea to get popular, you know.”

After he hung up I sat on the bed looking at the phone. I felt so overloaded with unconnected information that I couldn’t think at all. My professional curiosity had been piqued by the reaction I’d gotten first from the Xerxes personnel manager and then the doctor. I’d wanted to find out what lay behind their jumpy behavior. Then Humboldt seemed to have a glib explanation and Nancy’s death had made me shift my priorities anyway; I couldn’t untangle the whole universe, and finding her killers seemed more urgent than scratching the Xerxes itch.

Now the wheel seemed to turn the other way up again. Why had Humboldt gone out of his way to lie to me? Or had he? Maybe they’d sued for workers’ comp but had lost because they’d been fired for sabotage. Nancy. Humboldt. Caroline. Louisa. Chigwell. The images spun uselessly through my mind.