“I’m lifting sheets. They’ll block the view to the elevator. Then get into the trunk. You’ll be able to breathe, I think. At least enough until we’re in the clear.”

She was in charge, and I meekly followed her instructions. In another moment, the trunk closed. I heard the rattle of the cart as she rolled it a short distance away. And then we moved smoothly out of the garage. Apparently the cop at the inside entrance had called over to the cops guarding the exit, and there was only a brief halt, before we were in motion again.

Between the bass viol’s case and the Corolla trunk, I would choose the Corolla, but only because I was cushioned by the sheets and could put my knees up. Air was in short supply in both. I was thankful when Karen finally decided it was safe to let me out. She had driven up to a side street next to the campus that housed the University of Illinois’s sprawling medical facilities.

I climbed out and scrabbled through the soiled laundry for my gun and Miss Claudia’s Bible. All of the burrowing and dumping had shaken Miss Claudia’s page markers out of it and damaged the spine and creased some pages. I smoothed the pages out that had gotten creased and put in as many of the page markers as I could find.

“What do you want to do now?” Karen asked.

“I’d like to give you a big smooch. And then I’d like to take a shower. You ever get tired of pastoral work, you could open an agency easy.”

The pastor laughed. “I don’t want to go through that again, ever. When I had to get that cart past that cop, I thought my pressure was going to start pushing blood straight out of my head and all over the garage … Where do you want to go from here?”

Morrell’s car was still down near Lionsgate Manor. We agreed it might not be smart for me to show up there again tonight. Everything I wanted to do involved making phone calls, from talking to Murray Ryerson to finding Petra’s college roommate.

“You can make those calls from my house,” Karen offered. “I have an early meeting tomorrow, and it’d be easier on me if you spent the night with me than driving you up to Evanston.”

She rented the second floor of an old workman’s cottage on the Northwest Side. It was on a quiet street, a few blocks from the river, with a little balcony where she sat in the mornings to drink coffee. She showed me to the bathroom and gave me towels and soap. I was a good four inches taller than Karen, but I could wear her T-shirts. She gave me one to sleep in.