Too Dark To Sleep

by Dianne Gallagher

  “I’m gonna need some extra phone time, Joe,” Old Man Quinn said softly as the guard unlocked his cell. John Tierney did his own magic, now the old man had to perform his. “It’s for Maggie.”

  “Not a problem, Mr. Quinn.” Joe smiled as he led him down the hall. “Dinner time. Got a free office just waiting.”

  The old man didn’t waste time. All he needed was a few phone calls to stop things before they started. It was what he was good at. Anticipating problems and resolving them before they snowballed.

  “The press is going to be ready with their story,” Paddy Quinn said into the receiver. He looked at the door. Joe was keeping watch outside. “I’m betting they’ll have some conveniently leaked facts. Walker may have okayed the deal, but I don’t think he’s good with it.”

  “We understand, Paddy,” said Tony Ciccone. The man worked for Quinn’s boss. He was the public face of the Outfit and made sure things looked clean and shiny.

  “It’s gonna read like a movie of the week. My girl doesn’t need the publicity and neither does Tierney.”

  “Like I said, Paddy, we know. Trust us, it’ll be taken care of.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “My sincere thanks. Please let them know…”

  “Not a problem, Paddy,” Tony said.

  “I hear the Trib has got some new hot shot.”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. “Yeah, real ace. He’s been digging on some union stuff. Pissed a lot of people off,” Tony said. “But I hear he’s getting an offer from a bigger paper. In New York.”

  The old man smiled. “Funny how that works.”

  “Isn’t it? Like I said, it’s just not a problem. Talk to you later, Paddy.”

  One call and things were rolling. It was difficult keeping the media off Maggie, but not impossible. Paddy’s employers managed to get stories buried before and they could do it again. Not a big price for a loyal servant who sat in jail and kept quiet… while turning a handy profit.

  Paddy looked up at the door again. Joe smiled and nodded. The old man returned the nod and dialed again. This new detective. The one Tierney told him about. Checking him out took a few more calls. Luckily, Paddy Quinn had Joe and the Outfit. In less time than it would take a PI, he had everything he needed on Nick Dublowski.

  “So how does it look?”

  “Where are you calling from?” Maggie was immediately suspicious. There wasn’t the familiar metallic echo in the background.

  “I got promoted. They gave me my own office.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “You didn’t answer. How does it look?”

  “Thin,” Maggie said.

  “Piece by piece,” her father said.

  “I know.” Maggie held back a sigh. “It won’t be easy.”

  Good, thought Paddy Quinn. “So what is this detective like, the one Tierney’s assigned you. What’s his name.”

  “Dublowski?” she answered. “I suppose I’ll meet him when I have something.”

  “His wife’s got an uncle, Harry Kuebler, over in the Garment District.”

  “Yeah,” Maggie smiled. “Kind of hard to find something like that out if you didn’t know the guy’s name.”

  Silence.

  “Okay, so why is that important?”

  “Walker likes to dress well. That’s how this Dublowski got in.”

  “A rabbi downtown,” Maggie mumbled. That’s what Art called it.

  “Looks like it,” the old man replied.

  “So I should watch my back.”

  “You should watch your ass,” her father corrected.

  “I will.”

  “You haven’t been sleeping. Why?”

  Maggie snapped her gum. “Just can’t.”

  “I got the name of someone. Lorenzo’s cousin says he’s good.”

  Lorenzo was a business associate. As far as Maggie knew, he had no last name. But he did have a cousin who cut himself. Slashed his arms, his chest, his face.

  “I’m okay, Dad.” The last thing Maggie needed was a psychiatrist recommended by Lorenzo’s crazy cousin.

  “I’m out of time,” the old man sighed. “Sleep. That’s an order and…”

  “I know. Watch my ass.” She hung up the phone just as Rayney stepped into the library.

  “Breakfast,” he said.

  Maggie was deadly silent, staring at the phone on the desk.

  “Now what?” Rayney asked. He could smell her simmering.

  “Do you tell my father everything?” Maggie asked softly, looking up at the young man.

  Antoine Rayney tried to hold the stare. It was tough, so he decided to make it a short conversation. “Yeah.”

  Maggie nodded to herself, then walked past him. “You need to drive me someplace after we eat.”

  “So where we going?” Rayney asked as he pulled the sedan out of the driveway.

  “Over near Pershing and Halsted. You know the area?”

  “Yeah,” the young man said. “What’s there?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why we’re going.”

  They made a stop at Osco. Inside Rayney pushed the cart as Maggie tossed in surgical gloves, Ziploc bags, envelopes of various sizes. Clear packing tape. A ruler. Brushes, tweezers and a Dust Buster. He watched as she tossed item after item into the cart.

  Shit, what were they going to do?

  “Just a little detective work,” Maggie said.

  “Would you stop answering before I ask,” Rayney said. “It is fucking rude.”

  “Sorry.”

  The Boys swore Maggie was psychic. It was a lazy man’s way of explaining logic. She simply paid attention. To everything. Every movement, every detail, every bead of sweat and drop of blood. If you watched people, got to know them, saw how their minds worked and had a clean scene, there wasn’t a crime that couldn’t be solved. It wasn’t about being psychic. It was about paying attention.

  When they got to the warehouse, Maggie stared at the building through the windshield. She flipped open a notebook and wrote. After about five minutes, she was out of the car.

  “Are you sure we can do this?” Rayney followed as she circled the building.

  “Why not?”

  “Shouldn’t the cops just send their guys?”

  “They did.” Maggie looked at the building.

  She scribbled words every couple of steps as they walked. Three times she stopped completely and made sketches of the area. Rayney watched with more interest than he expected. Not so much what she was doing, but how. Maggie’s whole body changed as she walked. She didn’t apologize for every step. She moved like she owned the place and no one could fuck with her.

  A small digital camera came out and she started snapping pictures before moving on to the building itself. It was a large warehouse. Not old, but certainly not well-maintained. Windows lined the building on three sides, but Maggie only focused on the ones in the narrow alley between a bank of abandoned storage containers and the warehouse, itself. All of those windows were broken. She stopped at the one tucked furthest back and stared at it for several minutes, turned and looked toward the parking lot, turned again and looked toward the street. She bent down and searched the ground.

  “What is it?” Rayney said.

  “Look.” Maggie was pointing to a broken window.

  “It’s a window.”

  “And…”

  “It’s broken. They’re all broken.”

  “They’re all broken with glass on the inside. Someone smashed them.”

  “To get in?”

  Maggie shook her head. “For fun. If they wanted to get in, they could’ve just crawled in through this window.” She pointed to the one furthest back. “It was the first one broken.”

/>   She snapped more photos then dug in the plastic bag for the surgical gloves. “This kind of glass takes two, three hits to knock out. Whoever did all these didn’t care if they cleared the windows, they just wanted to beat the shit out of them. This one. The glass was broken and pulled out. Tossed aside.” Grabbing a strainer from one of the plastic bags, she carefully scooped the shards, shook out the dirt and poured what was left into a paper bag.

  “They say the guy came in through the back door. I’ll lay money it was locked and he came in through this window.”

  “How the fuck do you know that?”

  “I don’t. Nobody does. That’s the problem.” Maggie made some notes as she snapped her gum. “They didn’t say anything about windows in the report.”

  “Maybe they thought it wasn’t important.”

  “They didn’t think the case was important.” This part of town, she was betting Halverson called it as a “death by pimp.” Wrote it off. Who’d care? Just another working girl dead.

  Maggie bent down. A small piece of glass was still lodged in the frame. “If these doors were locked, no way the average guy is going to bust in. This place is built like a brick shithouse. Probably good doors and better locks. Which means he’d need tools. And time. I don’t think he had either. That leaves the windows. They look like they were replaced. Not original...cheap. So if our man did break a window to get in, it’d be this window. You can’t see it from the street or the parking lot. He would’ve hid the car right in this alley. Went to this window.” Maggie stood back and checked her sight lines again. “If he crawled through… unless he was a very, very small man, which he couldn’t be and still move the victim upstairs, he might’ve left something.” She pointed to the remaining piece of glass. “If he wasn’t careful.”

  “That’s a shitload of ifs.”

  “Yeah.” She tapped the sill gently, pulled the piece of glass out and bagged it. Rayney watched as she scribbled some words on the envelope. Maggie reached in the Osco bag, took out the flashlight and shined it through the broken sill. She almost poked her head in, but stopped.

  “Let’s go in,” Maggie said.

  “Think you’ll find anything?”

  “If they worked the scene inside as poorly as they did outside,” Maggie grinned, “we just might find the body.”

  Rayney wasn’t amused.

  The locks on the back door were broken. Maggie snapped a few shots of the lock and the hinges, then handed Rayney the camera. Carefully, Maggie turned the knob, opened the door and examined it. “Solid metal, reinforced doors. Respectable lock system.” She paused. “Cops did this.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The marks. The damage to the frame. They used a Rambar.” Maggie shook her head. “Halverson. He loves using the toys. Makes him feel like a cop.” Maggie plotted her path in. “Keep your hands to yourself, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  Maggie took a large flashlight from the bag, handed it to Rayney, then took one for herself. They stepped into the warehouse.

  “Jesus Christ.” Rayney covered his nose with his arm. For a brief moment, he actually thought they might’ve left the body.

  “The stink hangs for a while. It’s not that bad. Just breathe it,” Maggie said. “Your nose’ll shut down after a few minutes.”

  Her old man taught her the trick. He spent his share of time around dead bodies in various stages of decay. “Just keep breathing,” he told her when she was a uniform. “It’s like hell for the first few minutes, then your brain just stops processing the information.”

  “Second floor,” she said, trotting up the stairs.

  Rayney followed. At the top of the steps, Maggie stopped. She stared at the huge, empty room, at the windows, the blood spatter, the place the body laid. Hands behind her back, eyes methodically sweeping the area.

  Out came the notebook. She sketched a floor plan in black pen, drawing a grid over the top in pencil with each sector numbered. Grids stunk. They took too much time. Maggie liked the spiral. It was practical and time efficient. But this scene was contaminated. Who knew how many feet trampled through and what they carried where? Best to play it safe. Especially considering the team that worked it.

  “I’m starting in that corner.” She handed Rayney a second flashlight from the bag. “Just keep them on me, okay?”

  Maggie examined the first sector, noting everything. She tucked small bits into bags and envelopes. Scraped blood off walls. Dustbusting and bagging what remained. It was an exercise more than anything. She knew the lab already took samples. She knew they had photos of the spatter. Still, going through the act as though she was first on the scene was useful. Useful in the same way real dictionaries were more productive than on-line versions. Real maps, instead of an image on a screen. CDs instead of a music list floating on a cloud. There was substance, a reality that flipped Maggie on. So she continued the exercise, hoping to leave with more than a bunch of baggies filled with dust and blood.

  Blood. There was a lot of it. Rayney couldn’t keep himself from looking. He remembered seeing the photos of the women laid out on the library desk. He’d never seen anything like it. How could someone do that to another person? How could someone spend hours staring at those kind of images?

  “Light.” Maggie tried not to sound desperate.

  Rayney forgot about the flashlights. “Sorry.” He moved both beams back to her. “How long is this going to take?”

  “As long as it takes.” She snapped some shots of the building across the street, the pavement and sidewalk below.

  “Thanks for the update.” Rayney saw something shining between the cracks of floorboard. He reached down to pick it up.

  “Don’t!” Maggie snapped. “Don’t touch anything.”

  “Sorry, Mother.”

  “Hands in your pockets,” she said. “First rule at the location. You move something and the story’s been changed. The scene’s different and you can’t fix it.” Maggie laid the ruler against the small shard and photographed it in the original position. With the Maybelline tweezers, she picked the small sliver of glass from between the boards and dropped it into a Ziploc. Rayney shook his head and watched as she wrote the sector, location and short description on the edge of the plastic.

  “So what do you think it is?”

  “Probably nothing,” Maggie said. “But you never know.”

  Three hours of notes and sketches, photos and Ziploc bags, and now Rayney was staring at the windows. He didn’t need to say anything. Maggie could feel it. It was getting dark. She was almost done. Only one sector left. The shadows were building in the corners. Between the floorboards. Maggie’s underarms were slick and her shirt stuck to her back. She took out the Dustbuster and cleaned the final sector.

  Rayney made sure the lights stayed on Maggie. They had to leave soon. When the sun went down, three flashlights wouldn’t be enough to hold the dark back. Not in a room this size. Not in a place with blood-drenched walls and only one way out.

  “Time to go,” he finally said.

  Maggie looked up from her work and nodded. Clumps of wet hair were pasted to her forehead and temples. There was a wildness in her eyes as she struggled to hold the dark back, fighting to stay calm until she finished.

  “Think,” she whispered herself. “Is there anything else? Anything. Anything. Anything.”

  The word took on a calming rhythm as she repeated it. She had to focus. Push out the dark. Maggie stood back and looked at the scene, the pool of dried black, the marks on the walls. She replayed the action, where he would come in, where he would walk, what he would do. She snapped her gum as the pieces slid together in her mind.

  The window. Someone was watching. A blue nylon jacket. He was… No, she told herself. No one was there. No one could be outside the window. They were two stories up
. There was no man in the window. Maggie focused on the last sector as a wave of nausea hit her. She fumbled with the Dustbuster, then reached for another stick of gum as the dark rolled around her.

  Air.

  She couldn’t breathe.

  Something grabbed at her shoe.

  Through the floorboards.

  Something.

  She reached for the camera to get a shot. Maggie stopped. There was no one there. Nothing. Nothing the camera would capture, at least. Her head felt light, like it was rising to the ceiling, to the dark there. No, she had to keep herself on the ground. Jesus Christ, of course she’d stay on the ground. She wasn’t floating. Her head wouldn’t touch the fifteen-foot ceilings.

  What was that? Maggie spun as she felt a hand on her shoulder. She was ready to strike out, then saw Rayney. He looked almost as bad as she felt.

  “Okay, that’s it,” he said firmly.

  Maggie nodded and turned her flashlight like a beacon, guiding her to safety. Rayney tried to do the same, but it was too hard. He couldn’t hold the lights, carry the bags and help her down the steps at the same time. And Maggie needed help. She was having trouble breathing. She couldn’t keep her feet under her. Out the door, Rayney picked Maggie up and carried her the last ten feet to the car. He threw her and everything else inside and ran around to the wheel.

  Maggie swept the beams of the flashlights around the car. Rayney hit the overhead and the headlights as Maggie punched the lock down, then pushed herself deeper into the seat.

  It was all around her now.

  Pushing.

  Clawing.

  A writhing mass of dark.

  She couldn’t lose control now or she’d never get it back. Maggie forced herself to suck in air as the dark filled the car.

  “Come here,” Rayney said urgently, pulling her against him. “It’s okay. We’ll make it home.” He listened to see if she was breathing. “Relax and breathe. Come on. Breathe or you’re going to be passing out on me. Come on. We’re going to make it.”