His stop comes up. He gets off the bus. There are a few people on the sidewalk, but not nearly as many as before. He’s sweating hard now, and can smell himself. It adds to his disguise.
The police station is ahead, and he hesitates. He’d been inside a few months ago, to get a layout of the place. This will work. He just needs to remain calm.
He walks through the front doors, up to the desk sergeant seated behind the bulletproof glass.
“I was robbed,” he says, putting a little alcohol slur into the words. Then he gives a fake name. Brian Pinkerton.
The cop frowns at him. He can guess the sergeant’s thoughts. No one likes the homeless. They’re a blight on the city. Who cares if one got robbed? But a crime is a crime, and they have to take the reports.
He’s told to sit down in the lobby and a police officer will be with him, but it may take a little while.
Which is perfect.
He takes a seat on a cracked vinyl bench the color of cigarette smoke, and places the bag between his feet like he did on the bus. But this time, he unzips the top.
There are half a dozen people in the lobby. An old woman, black and fat, obviously homeless, muttering to herself. A Hispanic lady who keeps dabbing at the tears in her eyes with a wadded-up tissue. Two white guys with various facial cuts and bruises. A man in a reverend’s collar. An angry-looking old man, swinging his cane around like he’s swatting flies.
The first cockroach climbs out of the backpack, hesitates for a millisecond, then climbs down the side and tears across the room.
Two more do the same thing.
Then thousands.
One of the white guys is the first to notice. He stands abruptly, pointing and saying, “Holy shit!”
His companion also stands.
“That is disgusting.”
The angry old man also stands up, uttering a round of expletives, the favorite being, “Goddamn!”
Crying lady leaps to her feet and runs across the room, screaming. The reverend watches, mouth agape, and then also gets up and retreats to a corner of the room.
The Chemist remains still, even as the roaches crawl up his legs. He’s been preparing for this for many months, breeding and feeding the bugs, sticking his hands into the roach pen to overcome his inherent squeamishness. He reaches inside his raincoat, pulling open one of the bags. Roaches erupt from the holes in his clothing like he’s bleeding them out of his veins.
The homeless woman also remains still as the roaches swarm her. He watches as several crawl across her face, and tries to remain just as unaffected as they crawl across his.
Someone is yelling at the desk sergeant, and two plainclothes cops come into the lobby, take one look at the stampede of insects, and join the old man in the “Goddamn” chant.
In a radius of ten feet and growing, the white tile floor has become brown with shifting white specks. Some of the roaches beeline for corners, cracks, hiding places. Others run in straight lines, apparently assured of their safety in numbers.
A female uniformed officer comes in, takes a look, and exits the way she came.
The Chemist stands, hands in his coat, opening more bags. He was hoping to free at least half of the bugs before they kicked him out, but no one is rushing over to grab him. More cops enter the lobby, and they just stand there, looking revolted. No one acts. One of them tiptoes across the room, roaches crackling underfoot like dry leaves, but he heads for the exit rather than trying to secure order.
There is more talking now. The Chemist catches the words filthy and homeless. Freeing the contents of the final bag, he walks toward the exit, pausing at the bulletproof glass to stare at the desk sergeant, ass up on his desk and feet raised from the floor as if the room had suddenly flooded.
“You got a bug problem,” he says.
Then he walks casually out the door and into the humid Chicago night.
Chapter 22
ISPENT THE NIGHT by Latham’s bedside, holding his hand. He had developed pneumonia, his lungs awash with pus and fluid. He was mercifully unconscious for a horrific procedure called a lung tap. The doctors and nurses used big words like empyema and nosocomial and rhonchi and pleural effusion, but none would give me the straight facts on what his chances were.
He looked terrible. His entire face seemed to hang loosely, as if it no longer was attached to the bone. His color was sickly pale, his red hair slicked to his head, his hand clammy and hot.
I played the fate game for a little while, thinking about my telling him to eat without me, realizing that if I hadn’t we would have eaten together and I’d be in the bed next to him. No one wins thinking those thoughts, but I punished myself with them just the same.
I slept a little, on and off, Latham’s mechanical ventilator oddly soothing. But I always awoke with a startle shortly after sleep began, panicked that the man I loved had died without me being there for him.
At a little after seven in the morning, I again startled myself awake, and looked into Latham’s eyes and saw that his droopy eyelids were halfway open.
“Are you awake, honey?”
I pushed a damp lock of hair off of his forehead and noticed his skin was cool. His fever had broken.
“Do you know where you are?”
His eyelids twitched, and I felt him weakly squeeze my hand.
“You’re in a hospital. You have botulism poisoning. It’s paralyzed many of your muscles, including your diaphragm, so you’re on a ventilator.”
Another light squeeze.
“It’s not permanent. You’ll get better, but it will take a few weeks. I was thinking...I was thinking about our honeymoon. I’ve never been to Hawaii. I was thinking maybe we could go there.”
His eyes closed again. I didn’t think he’d heard me.
And I had to go to work.
I went home, forced myself through some sit-ups and push-ups and a twenty-minute workout video, showered, searched my cupboards for food and found some instant oatmeal, nuked it, and forced myself to keep it down, even though my stomach didn’t like the idea. Then I threw on a light blue Barrie Pace wing-collar jacket, a matching skirt, and what I called my tough-girl boots—black suede Giuseppe Zanotti knee highs with low heels, rubber soles, and silver and crystal skull details on the ankle buckles. Socks, no nylons. Then makeup.
The sleep had helped reduce the enormous black bags under my eyes to only slightly gigantic, and my concealer made easy work of them. My mom, a cop herself, was never a fashion plate, but she taught me one valuable girlie lesson: The more expensive the cosmetics, the less you have to fuss with them.
It was humid, and my hair frizzed up in a Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio way. Straight-haired women all wanted curls, and I hated my curls and wished someone put out a shampoo that promised less volume instead of more. I checked my purse for mousse or gel or spray. All out. I was stuck with poofy.
An hour later, I tried to pull into the station parking lot, but every slot behind my building was filled, mostly with trucks bearing the names of exterminators. I had to park across the street, next to a hydrant.
“What’s going on?” I asked a uniform named Collins when I came in.
“Roaches. Some homeless guy brought them in this morning. They were living in his clothes.”
I stared as three men with backpack spray canisters and multicolored jumpsuits walked past.
“All this for a few roaches?”
“More than a few. Nasty things are everywhere.”
I took the stairs to my office, eyes alert for roaches. I saw something on the wall that turned out to be a stain, and a wad of gum stuck to the railing, but no insect activity.
There were reports waiting for me on my desk. More victim interviews, witness interviews, a crime lab report from Willoughby’s, and a fax from the Cicero PD—my statement, autopsy reports, and an inventory of the crime scene. My machine had run out of paper, but had eight more pages saved in memory, so I reloaded the tray and let them print. Then I sat down and settled
in to read.
The task force was doing a good job gathering information, but since I was the only one going over everything, there might have been connections that I was missing. I corrected that by calling one of my teams and switching them from interviews to data review. Then I loaded up the fax with reports and read the one that had just printed. It was a background check of the Hothams, and they came up clean, but there was another mention of their daughter Tracey’s death. Except this mention labeled it a homicide.
I called Cooper in Cicero, but he had no more information about the daughter—the crime hadn’t happened on their turf. So I ran Tracey Hotham through the Cook County database, and found the death certificate. She’d died six years ago. GSW to the stomach. I didn’t recall the case, but there had been thousands of murders in Chicago since then.
I located a case number, along with the assigned officer—J. Alger. It also had another case number—an arrest—attached. I looked that up, and found that Tracey Hotham’s assailant, a man named Dirk Welch, had been charged with her murder. A Department of Corrections search informed me that Welch got life, but died in prison after serving two years. Back to the CC database. Welch’s death certificate stated he’d died of a digitalis overdose.
I wanted to read Alger’s case files, but that required a trip to Records on the first floor. So instead I Googled “Tracey Hotham” and found the newspaper articles about the attack. Thirty-one-year-old postal worker Tracey Lynne Hotham had been beaten, raped, and shot in the stomach. She was taken to the hospital, and died en route. Welch had been living across the hall in the same apartment building. Jason Alger arreste. Welch two days after the attack, he confessed, and it was an unusually speedy trial.
So what was the Chemist’s connection? Did he have ties to Tracey or to Welch or to Alger? Or was this just an unhappy coincidence?
I’d have to visit Records and crack open the file for more info.
I leaned back in my chair, ran my hand through my hair...and felt something.
I thought maybe it was a twig, or maybe some plaster from the ceiling had fallen on my head. But the something twitched and crawled right out of my fingers.
I abruptly stood up and shook my hair side to side like a Vidal Sassoon commercial, without the sultry smile. I bent over to give my hair another shake, and glanced at my boots, along with the several dozen roaches climbing up them. Then I felt them inside the boots, between the suede and the naked skin of my calves.
I freaked out, complete with full-blown girlish screams and hopping up and down. This knocked over my garbage can, and the remains of the Chinese feast Rick had delivered last night. Except tha. I didn’t see any garbage, because it was swarming with hundreds of scuttling cockroaches.
I ran out of that office like it was on fire. It took me five steps before I got any control back, and luckily no one saw me. I wound up sitting on a boardroom table, tugging off my boots, dumping about ten live roaches onto the floor. And a few dead ones, that I’d squished underfoot.
Yuck. Yuck yuck yuck yuck.
“At least they weren’t bees,” I said, my voice a wee bit higher than normal.
My white cotton socks, covered with roach guts, went into the garbage.
It took courage I didn’t know I had to put those boots back on, and then I flagged down one of the jumpsuited exterminators—one who looked a lot like Bill Murray in Ghostbusters—and gave him directions to my office.
“Kill them,” I said. “Kill them all.”
“That’s why we’re here, ma’am.”
He walked past, but I grabbed his elbow.
“Do, um, cockroaches carry any kind of disease?”
He scratched at his stubble. “They aren’t the cleanest. Like to eat spoiled food, and excrement. Tough little buggers too. A roach can survive a few weeks with his head cut off. Eventually starves to death. Can live if you flush them down the toilet. Can even survive radiation equivalent to a thermonuclear explosion. But they don’t carry any germs harmful to humans.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem. And hold still, you got one in your hair.”
I clenched my teeth as he reached up to my scalp and pinched a roach between his bare fingers.
“Thanks again,” I said, forcing on a smile.
“Ah, there’s another one. Hold on.”
I forced myself to stay still.
“Just a sec...little fella crawled around the other side.”
Bill Murray walked behind me, rooting through my hair like he was giving me a hot oil treatment.
“Looks like you got a few in here. Maybe they’re having a party.”
And that was the straw that broke me. I ran squealing to the bathroom, leaned over the sink, and gave my scalp to the tepid spray. I got water up my nose, started to choke, but kept my head under, running my fingers through my hair over and over until I was sure every last bug was out.
Then I squeezed out the excess water, tried not to stare at the five bugs trying to crawl out of the slippery porcelain sink, and positioned myself awkwardly under the push-button hand dryer.
The air was hot and strong, but it took twelve button presses before I’d dried my head and jacket.
I checked the mirror. My expensive makeup hadn’t washed off, and my hair had lost the poofiness and actually looked pretty good.
I wasn’t going to go back into my office until I was sure it had been fumigated, sterilized, and hermetically sealed, so I took the stairs down to Rec ords.
Chicago had twenty-six Police Districts, divided into four Areas. Each District housed their duplicate reports at a single Records facility in their Area. My District had that honor for my Area. Alger had worked the two-four, making him part of my Area, which meant copies of his files would be kept in my building.
Every year, we griped about digitizing the files and putting them in a database. And every year, we were told that there was no money for it. So even in this enlightened technological age, the CPD was still killing trees.
Records was an expansive, open room with floor-to-ceiling shelves. The shelves held document boxes labeled according to case numbers, which were divided by District and in semi-chronological order.
The cop running Records was a portly woman named Martel Sardina who’d worked here for six years and didn’t know where a damn thing was. It took a special talent to learn absolutely nothing about your job in that amount of time. I asked Sardina about it once, and her reply was jovial.
“I like it here. It’s quiet. I can read magazines. Records is considered scut-work, a stepping-stone to other positions. If I did a good job, I’d be promoted out of here. So I don’t do a damn thing.”
It made a warped kind of sense.
Sardina offered a friendly smile and wave when I walked in. Instead of reading magazines today, it appeared that she was working on crayon drawings. I asked where the two-four files were, and she shrugged.
“Come on, Officer Sardina. Just point me in the right direction.”
“I have no idea. Do we even have records from the two-four?”
“Yes. And I’m sure a thousand people have asked you where they are, over the years.”
“If they found them, they never shared their location with me.”
“If you had to guess, where would they be?”
“I couldn’t even guess.”
“Come on. I won’t tell. I’ll even put in a bad word to your superior.”
“I can’t help you, Lieutenant. And in all honesty, I don’t wish that I could.”
She smiled pleasantly.
“What if I told Captain Bains you’re doing a great job, and that I wanted you transferred to Homicide?”
“Threats won’t work,” she said. “He just threatened to suspend me, because of my art.”
She held up a poorly done stick figure crayon drawing of a man with a very large mouth yelling, “I’m a big stupid poop head!” The title at the top read Captain Bains.
“You got the eyes wrong. The
y’re brown dots, not blue dots. And I don’t think he has a pig snout.”
“Artistic expression. Want to see the one where he’s rolling around in the mud?”
“Maybe later.”
“Ask Mr. Creepy Exterminator Guy if he wants to see it. He’s around here somewhere, spraying for bugs.” She squinted at her drawing. “Think the captain would look good as a cockroach?”
“Just make sure you get the eyes right.”
While she hunted for a brown crayon, I walked down the ranks and files of shelves, trying to remember where I should begin. I had the case numbers, but where were the two-four files?
I checked the nearest box as a reference point. But the boxes on either side didn’t seem to be in order. Was that also part of Sardina’s plan to appear incompetent? Putting the files back out of order? If so, I was impressed. She deserved to be in management.
I moved an aisle over, and here the numbering system seemed to work. I opened a box to confirm. This was, indeed, the two-five section. I skipped the next aisle, turned, and almost bumped into a guy in a bright red jumpsuit, digging through one of the boxes.
“Are they eating our files?” I asked.
The exterminator looked up and smiled. He had a port-wine birthmark covering most of his right cheek, just above a thick goatee. Aviator glasses that reflected like mirrors. And a dark smudge on his forehead, grease or dirt.
“Little fellas like it dark. Gotta check everywhere.”
He set the box back on the shelf and picked up his chemical pack, slinging it over his shoulder. Then he held out the sprayer wand and squirted along the bottom of the shelf he’d been searching, coating the carpeting with white powder.
“Is that stuff dangerous?”
He winked. “Only to vermin.”
Sardina was right. Creepy guy. We passed each other, and I followed the numbers until I got to Alger’s case files. My internal alarm sounded—they were in the same box that the exterminator had been looking through.
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