Body Work by Sara Paretsky Page B

Nadia’s death.”
    I hung up on her demand to know “Just what do you mean by that?”

7
    No-Smoking Zone
    O lympia’s call effectually ended my brief sense of well-being. When we returned from dinner, while Jake practiced I looked up the news of Nadia’s killer. Web news sites can be as obnoxious as any tabloid—maybe more so, since it’s so easy to play with images.
    “From War Hero to Club Killer” screamed the Herald-Star ’s blog.
An anonymous tip led police to an apartment on a quiet street in Lakeview, where the troubled vet who allegedly murdered Nadia Guaman was living. Chad Vishneski, awarded the Bronze Star for valor in Iraq, couldn’t take civilian life. He returned with a ferocious anger that moved him from random acts of vandalism to the sinister, when he began stalking and finally murdered a young graphic artist at Club Gouge on Friday.
The Chicago native was a Lane Tech football star, who went to Grand Valley State on a scholarship, but dropped out to join the Army, where he served four tours before his discharge last summer.
    I clicked on a link to a video report and saw footage of a woman, her face swollen with fury.
“The police broke down the door,” she said.
    The video showed a door with the wood splintered behind a yellow crime scene banner.
“When I heard the noise, I thought it was Chad. He was so angry all the time since he got home, so I went in the hall to look. Only it was the police come to arrest him. Mona, that’s his mother, she’s out of town. She let him sleep there, even though everyone knows how unstable he is. The condo board is going to have to take action, maybe evict her—we could all have been murdered.”
    The video footage shifted to Terry Finchley, standing solemn-faced in the lobby of the police headquarters building, holding a gun in the approved fashion—suspended from a stick passed through the trigger guard.
“We found the perpetrator passed out in bed with this Baby Glock next to him on the floor. Our forensics tests prove that this was the weapon that was used to kill Nadia Guaman.”
    Someone asked if it was true that Chad had been brought in drunk. Terry said Chad had apparently taken a drug overdose. He was in the intensive care ward at Cermak Hospital, on the grounds of the Cook County Jail complex, over at Twenty-sixth and California.
    I skimmed the rest of the story. Childhood friends recalled Chad as a lighthearted, fun-loving guy. He hadn’t been a football standout, but he’d been big enough to get a Division II scholarship. Back then, “his life was, like, girls, beer, games. The war, it gave him a reason to quit school and serve his country,” one high school buddy said. “When he got home, he was so different, just angry all the time. The war really messed with his head. You couldn’t be in the same room with him.”
    The county had assigned him a public defender, although right now it was an open question as to whether Chad would regain consciousness, let alone have enough brain function to stand trial. Still, the PD gallantly told the press that his client was innocent, that this was all a terrible mistake. He didn’t add that the county public defender’s office didn’t have the resources to sort out mistakes, even if Chad’s arrest turned out to be one.
    Poor Nadia, crossing paths with a distraught veteran. Poor Chad, another casualty of the endless Iraq war. Poor public defender, and poor Mona Vishneski, Chad’s mother. She’d been spending the winter in Arizona, looking after her own mother, but was flying back to Chicago to be with her son.
    Mona Vishneski responded to the Herald-Star ’s invasive questions with the age-old litany of mothers: “Chad is innocent. He’s a good boy. He never would have killed a girl at a nightclub.”
    Of course, the maniacs in the blogosphere were out in full force, some braying that Nadia Guaman “had been asking for it,” since only an evil woman would frequent a place like Club Gouge.