Страница 75 из 92
A woman from media relations was there with a mike, talking to each of the contestants before they addressed the puck. When it was Bernie’s turn, the woman said, “I see you are wearing Boom-Boom Warshawski’s number, even though your dad is with the Canadiens.”
“Boom-Boom was my godfather,” Bernie a
The remark was so pointed, I figured it explained the tenseness she’d been exhibiting in the stands—she must have been pla
The crowd went wild over Bernie when they caught on to her co
When it was Bernie’s time to shoot, she treated the matter with total seriousness, adjusting her stick as if it were a golf club. The puck sailed through the center slot as if someone were pulling it on a string. Bernie permitted herself a small tight smile, bowed briefly to the cheering audience and scurried off the ice, where Pierre was waiting to hug her. The Blackhawks brass slapped her on the shoulders. I could imagine the threadbare comments: too bad the NHL doesn’t let women try out, we’d put you on one of our affiliate teams right away.
I left the stands to join a line for the women’s toilets. By the time I got back to my seat, the second period had started. Pierre and Bernie apparently had accepted an invitation to sit with the Blackhawks officers: their seats were empty, but I saw Pierre in the row of seats right behind the players’ bench. I picked up the binoculars that he’d left on his seat. No Bernie. Bathroom break, maybe. I sat uneasily for half a minute, then texted her.
About halfway into the second period, when she hadn’t responded to that or to my second text, I headed to the ground floor. The entrance to the floor-level seats was blocked by security staff who demanded a ticket that gave me the right to enter. I opened my mouth to argue, decided that was futile and gave a small scream instead.
“A rat! A rat just ran right over my feet—oh, horrible—look—look, it’s over there!”
I pointed dramatically. The three guards couldn’t help following my arm, which gave me a second to duck around the barrier and run into the stands. I pushed and shoved my way past a
“Pierre! Pierre!” I had to shout his name a half dozen times before someone heard me over the fan noise. The guards had caught up with me and were trying to wrestle me away when he turned and saw me struggling in their arms.
He tried to come to me, couldn’t get by the glass barrier separating the team from the crowd, and shook one of the manager’s arms. By this time, the guards had managed to drag me past the excited spectators to one of the aisles. What a wonderful night of violence, even better than a fight on the rink, guard versus berserk fan right in front of them.
Before the guards could turn me over to the Chicago police, Pierre arrived—he’d had to go through the tu
“Vic, what is it? Bernadine, she is ill?”
“Where is Bernadine?” I demanded.
“But—with you. She is saying my old friends are trop e
“No,” I said flatly. “She’s gone.”
“But—where? Maybe she is in the toilets?”
“She hasn’t been around since the second period started. It’s been a good twenty minutes, maybe more.”
“No,” he whispered. He grabbed his binoculars from me to inspect the section where we’d been sitting, but the three seats remained empty.
I looked around despairingly: twenty-one thousand fans, another thousand or more guards, press, you can’t search a building like this. Not much in the way of security cameras, either.
“Get the head of security,” I said to the guards who’d just been holding me. “Let’s see what we can do. She was on camera for ‘Shoot the Puck,’ and everyone paid attention because she’s Pierre’s daughter. If she left the building, or someone took— Anyway, you can alert everyone in security to look for her, or report whether they saw her, right?”
The man from the Blackhawks management who’d come up with Pierre nodded at the guards. “Get that going now, guys. Pierre, if she’s here, we’ll find her.”
I called Conrad Rawlings on his personal cell. “We don’t know what happened to her, whether she left on her own, or if Nabiyev or Bagby had someone here waiting for a chance to get her on her own.”
Conrad took the few details I had, promised to call Bobby to see what resources the department could put into a search. “Don’t beat yourself up, Ms. W.,” he added. “Slows down the investigation. You got a current photo you can text?”
“YouTube. Tonight’s ‘Shoot the Puck.’”
The next hour was a blur of frantic, useless activity. The security crew did a crowd scan with their fan cams, trying to match Bernie’s face to anyone in the stands. I joined two women staffers to search the women’s toilets. I felt dull, empty, while my body moved to staircases, ramps, hidden elevators, dark spaces under the rafters, all against the backdrop of the organ, the screams from fans, the blare of foghorns. My injured eye and nose were aching. The pain forced me to know this was happening now, in the body, not some dream from which I might mercifully awaken.
The woman from security I was working with got a call on her radio: they’d found a gate attendant who was pretty sure he’d seen Bernie leave. We all rushed down to the security office, where the Stadium’s staff had been augmented by members of the Chicago police, including Conrad, who nodded a greeting when he spotted me.
The attendant was flustered, not used to this kind of spotlight. Conrad took the questioning away from the security chief.
“You’re not in any trouble, son, but the girl may be in danger, so we need you to think calmly. How sure are you?”
He was pretty sure, yeah, well, during the game not much happened at the gates, you reminded people that once they left, they couldn’t come back in, and other than that, he and his buddies, they kind of hung out.
“Right,” Conrad said as the security chief started to demand what “hanging out” meant. “What time would you say you saw the girl leave?”
The attendant couldn’t pinpoint it, more than to say around the start of the second period. “Because by the third, with the Hawks on cruise control, you start to get a lot of people leaving, trying to beat the traffic.”
“She seem to be leaving under her own steam, son, or was someone forcing her?” Conrad asked.
The attendant hesitated. “She left alone, for sure, but maybe a minute or two later two guys left, too. I started telling them the policy, you know, no reentry, and they told me to shut the f— up.”
Conrad and the security chief tried a dozen different ways to get the attendant to describe the two men. The attendant became more and more flustered: he saw so many people every night, it was a miracle he even remembered this pair. Conrad finally let it go, his shoulders sagging.
OLYMPIC TRYOUTS
One in the morning, sitting in the cold walkway at the United Center. Conrad and the cops had taken off, Pierre had called Tintrey, one of the biggest of the private security firms, and was out in a car with them, driving the streets around the Stadium.