by Joe Konrath
I switched over from my back to my side, which was a bad thing to do because I immediately took note that Don wasn’t next to me. When I’d arrived at the apartment a little earlier his furniture and things had been removed from the hallway. It had been Don, rather than a thief, because he’d left me a message written on my door in black marker.
“Your an asshole, Jack,” had been the message.
Spelling was never one of Don’s strong points.
But I still missed him. Or maybe not him exactly. I missed having a warm body lying next to me. I suppose we had more of an arrangement than a relationship. I got to hold him at night, and he got a free apartment.
There have been marriages built on less.
I flipped onto my back, staring at the ceiling, trying to let sleep overtake me. Gradually, slowly, eventually, drowsiness set in, pulling me into sleepyland.
Then the phone rang.
I bolted out of bed like a startled fawn and had the phone to my face before I was fully awake.
“Daniels.”
“Hope I didn’t wake you, Jack. We’ve got another one.”
I closed my eyes and gave my head a shake. The clock told me it was a little past noon.
“Where?”
“A 7-Eleven on Addison,” Benedict said. “About a block away from you.”
I blinked and nodded, weighing the news.
“Be there in five.”
“There’s something else. Maybe you should prepare yourself.”
“What do you mean?”
“He left another note. It’s addressed to you.”
“What does it say?”
Herb cleared his throat and read in a monotone.
“”Number Two. Dear Jack, I saw you at Joe’s. Not bad for a bitch. I didn’t get my money’s worth, but it was fun anyway. Too bad that bald guy helped you out. I think you would look beautiful in a wheelchair. But there’s still time for that.“”
I said, “Christ.”
“There’s more. ”I will keep killing these sluts. It’s my mission. I’ve left you another present, but it’s deeply hidden. Run, run, as fast as you can, Jack. You can’t catch me…but I’ll catch you. The Gingerbread Man.“”
“The crowd, Herb. Make sure we get close-ups of everyone. I bet the little weasel is there right now, watching. See you in a bit.”
It only took a few minutes to throw on a suit and get over there. I didn’t even need to drive. The crime scene was practically in my backyard.
Four squad cars had preceded me, parked in front of the entrance to the store, cutting off the lot. Several uniforms were securing the scene, taping it off. Another was keeping the crowd and the growing number of reporters at bay. I hung my badge around my neck and entered the circus.
Herb, who always managed to beat me to crime scenes even if they were only a block away from me, was standing next to the garbage can at the storefront. The lid was off, and something bloody was sticking out into the air. In Herb’s hand was the note, bagged in a large Ziploc.
I found a tissue in my pocket and wiped my runny nose, trying to overtly scan the crowd. If I was obvious about it, I might scare our man away. And I was sure he was nearby, watching.
No one jumped out at me.
“You look like a train wreck,” Herb offered.
“Thanks for caring.”
I turned my attention to the garbage can. It was another woman, her ass rising up out of the refuse like a bloody mountain. Without trying to absorb too much detail, I could see that her buttocks, vagina, and rectum had been mutilated almost beyond recognition.
My stomach began to twist and I looked away, grateful that my nasal congestion masked the death smell.
This was someone’s daughter. She’d suffered, died, and was now rotting away. All for the amusement of some sick son of a bitch.
“Who found her?” I asked Benedict.
“Owner. Guy named Fitzpatrick. He’s the one who called it in. Patrolman recognized the MO, called up our district.”
Which was an indication of how big this case was. Districts in Chicago were incredibly jurisdictional, and only an order from the police superintendent could force them to relinquish cases to one another. The order had been given after last night’s fiasco.
“Witnesses?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“Owner inside?”
A nod.
I left the body and pushed open the glass door, Herb in tow. Fitzpatrick was sitting in a chair behind the counter, a sad expression painted on his face. He was portly, balding, and had several food and beverage stains on his work shirt. Two uniforms flanked him, one of them taking notes.
“Mr. Fitzpatrick,” I announced, “I’m Lieutenant Daniels. This is Detective Benedict.”
“Help yourself to some coffee, Lieutenant. Everyone else has. They say I’ll be closed all day.”
Much as I longed to pity the man and his temporary loss of income, I held firm and didn’t break into tears.
“We should have things taken care of here in an hour or so,” I told him. “Besides, with the news coverage, the whole neighborhood will be by later to see your shop. I’m sure more than one of them will buy something.”
He brightened greatly at the entrepreneurial potentialities. Maybe he was thinking of having T-shirts made up.
“When did you notice the body, Mr. Fitzpatrick?”
“I noticed the lid was off. Sometimes kids, they steal them. God knows what they do with garbage can lids.”
“What time was this?”
“At five to twelve, maybe a little after. There was no one in the store, so I went outside to look for the lid and I saw…” He made a gesture with his hands at the garbage can through the storefront window. “Then I came in and called 911.”
The patrolman on his left, with a name tag proclaiming he was Officer Meadows, glanced at his notebook.
“Call came at eleven fifty-seven. Jefferson and I arrived on the scene at twelve oh three.”
“Did you notice anything unusual beforehand?” I asked Fitzpatrick.
“No, nothing really.”
“How about earlier today? Did any garbage trucks come into your lot? Vans? Anything out of the ordinary?”
“Nothing, except some guy who almost died in my store about an hour ago.”
Benedict did his eyebrow thing, prompting an explanation.
“Some kid. Teenager. Had some kind of fit or seizure or something. Threw himself down on the floor by the pop machine, started shaking and foaming at the mouth. I thought he was gonna die right there.”
“Did you call for an ambulance?”
“I was gonna. But the kid told me not to. Had these attacks all the time. After a minute or two he just got up and left, no problem.”
I nodded at Herb, who went off to phone Mr. Raheem at the first 7-Eleven to check for a similar happenstance. Some guy foaming at the mouth would easily draw attention away from the parking lot.
“Can I have the surveillance tapes?” I pressed. “The ones for the last two hours?”
“Sure. But that kid didn’t dump no body. I watched him leave.”
“How much later did you notice the lid off the garbage can?”
“Few minutes, I guess.”
I turned to Meadows. “Print him after he gives the deposition.”
“I didn’t do nothing!” Fitzpatrick thrust his jaw at me.
“We’re doing that to rule out your prints if we find any on the garbage can.”
He nodded, as if he knew that all along. I went back out into the fray, my headache pulsing with every heartbeat, my eyes feeling as if they’d been rubbed in sand. Maxwell Hughes was peering at the body in the can with professional detachment that can only come from constantly being around corpses. On his nod, two gloved assistants tipped the garbage can over.
The girl plopped onto the sidewalk, cocooned in a shell of bloody garbage. Two uniforms moved in, bagging and tagging, while Hughes knelt down and searched for a puls
e that he knew wasn’t there.
I walked over, staring down at the body, trying to imagine it walking and talking and being a person. I couldn’t do it. Death robs people of their personalities. It turns them into, for lack of a more sympathetic word, an object rather than a human being.
This girl had hobbies and dreams and hopes and friends. But none of that meant a thing anymore. All that was left was the further indignity of an autopsy, in the hopes that her corpse would somehow lead to her killer.
From dreamer to evidence. And it was no easy trip.
I’d seen a thing or two. Shotgun deaths. Gangland murders. A guy who killed his kid with a hot iron. But as the garbage was peeled away, I had to turn away for fear of losing my stomach.
It was obscene, the traumas inflicted on this poor girl.
“We’re missing some parts,” Hughes said to his men. “I’m looking for two ears, four fingers, and all ten toes. Check inside cans and wrappers.”
“Tell me this was done after death,” I said to Max.
“I don’t think I can appease you there, Jack.” He spoke sadly. “See these cuts on her palms? From her own fingernails digging in while she clenched her fists. Consistent with most torture deaths. I don’t see any ligature mark around her neck like the first one either. My guess would be she died of shock as a result of massive blood loss.”
I blinked away the image of organs oozing up through the slits in her belly.
“Lieutenant,” someone said.
Happy to focus on something else, I gave attention to one of the patrolmen sifting through the trash. He was holding, in his gloved hand, a gingerbread man cookie.
I wiped my nose and rubbed my temples and stared a challenge into the crowd of onlookers, daring one of them to meet my gaze. None did.
“I talked to Mr. Raheem.” Herb was putting away his cell phone. “He also had a kid in the store who had some kind of attack, about two hours before Donovan found the body.”
I gave myself a mental kick in the ass for missing that.
“The surveillance tape?”
“We’ve got it in Evidence. We checked it up until an hour before the body was found. Maybe we should check the whole thing.”
“We know this guy hires outside help. He proved that with me last night. He might have hired the same kid to do both distractions…”
“Then maybe he has a partner.”
“And maybe we have a lead.”
It was still iffy at best. The kid might not have a record, and we might never find him. Even if we did, there was a chance that he was hired the same way Floyd was, with little or no information about our perp.
But at least now we had something to do other than wait for new victims.
Herb eyed me sympathetically. “You want to meet me later, get some rest first?”
“Naw. Wouldn’t be able to sleep anyway. I could use something to eat, though. Hungry?”
“When am I not hungry?”
I looked at his stitches. “Doesn’t it hurt to eat?”
“Hurts like hell. But a man doesn’t give up breathing just because he has a cold. I know a place that serves great falafel.”
“Falafel?”
“No, I don’t feel awful.” Herb grinned. “I feel pretty good.”
I gave him deadpan. Herb pouted.
“Come on, Jack. I’ve been waiting two weeks to use that joke.”
“Should have kept waiting.”
We took Herb’s car, buying some White Castle cheeseburgers at a drive-thru and eating them back at my office. I called up Evidence, and Bill was only too happy to bring up the surveillance tape from the first 7-Eleven.
“I hear you’re a free woman again, sugar buns.” Bill grinned at me, showing off his unnaturally white dentures.
“I’m not free, but my rates are reasonable.”
“How much for, say — three and a half minutes?”
“I don’t talk money. You’ll have to settle it with my business manager.”
“You can have her for two bucks,” Herb said. “That includes my cut.”
Bill grinned wickedly, and I watched in amazement as the sixty-eight-year-old rolled his hips. They made a cracking sound.
“Unfortunately,” I cut in before he pounced, “the taxpayers require my time first.”
“You’re a tease, Jack, getting an old man all hot and bothered and then turning him away.”
He pinched my cheek and walked out.
I turned to Herb. “Thanks for informing Bill of my recent availability.”
“Payback for siccing the Feds on me. You want the last burger?”
I shook my head and popped the tape in the VCR. As expected, the quality was poor. It was black and white, grainy from having been reused several hundred times, and speeded up so one six-hour tape could accommodate an entire day.
There was a time code in the lower left-hand corner, in military time, and I rewound to 1800 hours and let it play.
Lo and behold, at 18:42 a young man entered the store, made a beeline for the magazine rack, and then fell over and started shaking like a leaf. The two other patrons who were in the store, along with the clerk, went over to take a closer look.
The seizure lasted almost two minutes, or about twenty seconds on the speeded-up copy we had, and then the kid got up and left the store, keeping his head down, avoiding the overhead camera with obvious experience.
“If that was a real seizure, I’m trying out for the ballet,” Benedict said.
I pushed the image of Herb in tights out of my mind and rewound the tape, letting it run in slow motion so it was closer to real time. As evidence, the tape was practically inadmissible. The picture quality was that bad. I took it out and plunked in the tape from the 7-Eleven earlier today, hoping for a better quality.
Sometimes wishes come true.
This time the tape was in color, crystal clear. Rather than the annoying pan back and forth of the previous tape, this tape used four different cameras to record four different parts of the store, which broke the screen up into quarters.
“This is more like it,” Herb said.
I rewound to the part where the kid walked in, and he gave us a perfect full frontal face shot. Then he went from one screen to the next, and we watched as he popped something into his mouth and went into the familiar convulsions.
“Looks like he’s spitting something up.”
“Alka-Seltzer. It’s an old trick, makes you look like you’re foaming at the mouth.”
“Let’s get some uniforms up here to look at this.”
Benedict got on the horn and rounded up half a dozen or so officers on duty. They piled into my office and watched the tape. No one recognized the kid.
“This has got to be an MO he’s used before,” I told them. “Probably shoplifting, maybe causing a distraction while his partner made off with some goods. Ask around, see if anyone’s heard of a petty thief who fakes seizures.”
After they’d left, the desk sergeant called and informed me that we now had a composite sketch of our suspect, drawn from descriptions given by Steve the pharmacist and Floyd the leg-breaker broker. Herb went down to get it, because the vending machines were en route. I put in the video of the first crime scene and scanned it for gawkers with cameras. Nothing.
Benedict came back a few minutes later, sans foodstuffs but with telltale chocolate smears in his mustache. He handed me the sketch, which was vague enough to look a little like every average middle-aged white man in the world. The eyes were closer together than most, and the head was more triangular, giving the perp a ratlike appearance. But under low lighting conditions, after a couple of drinks, the picture might have been of Don, or Phin, or half my squad. We could rule out Herb because the face was lean.
The phone rang, and Benedict graciously picked it up for me.
“It’s Bains.” He hung up the receiver only seconds after putting it to his ear. “He requests the company of your presence in his office as soon as you have a moment.�
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I got up and stretched, wincing as all of my aches and pains came to life. Perhaps the captain wanted to discuss the fight last night, or our progress on the case, or my brush-off of the Feds, or my unauthorized overtime, or to tell me he liked my outfit.
I was right on four of the five.
“Jack, have a seat.”