The Sleep Police

by Jay Bonansinga

  Walk away from the thumb sucker case—shut it down—forget about it.

  Frank closed the M.E. report.

  There was a manila envelope sitting in his in-basket marked A/V DEPT., full of forensic photographs and Polaroids from the crime scene. Frank opened it and spread the photographs across his desk. He arranged the black-and-white shots of blood patterns into a mosaic. He stared at it, and he smoked, and he imagined the sequence of events. He extrapolated from the blood drop trajectories, and the drag marks, and the blossoms of arterial spray on brick walls. He used the profiling techniques that the FBI had taught the unit years ago, after the first thumb sucker had stymied them.

  You get the drugs into her early. Don’t you? Then you get her inside the doorway. Where it’s dark. Right there. And you give her the same speech you gave the last one.

  “Bambi!”

  The voice nudged Frank out of his reverie. He glanced up and saw Big Sully Deets ambling toward him. “Top of the morning, Mr. Investigator,” Frank said with nod, gathering up the photos and stuffing them back into the envelope.

  “Lookin’ chipper this morning,” Deets said, shrugging off his rayon sport coat and taking a seat at his cluttered desk, which was adjacent to Frank’s. He already had damp spots under his banlon armpits. “You see the man yesterday?”

  Frank nodded. “Had a good talk, yeah, thanks.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Thanks, D.”

  Deets shrugged. “Hey, shit happens to everybody. You see the M.E. report?”

  “We got a pharmacist on our hands,” Frank said.

  “Yeah, I already checked on the drug. It’s strictly over-the-counter.”

  Frank nodded, then pulled a Marlboro out of his pocket and sparked it. “You talk to Armanetti?”

  “Yeah, he’s got us primary on this. For the time being at least. Krimm was in his office at the time.”

  Frank nodded, then took a nervous drag off the cigarette. “SC file says there was no mention of the sedative on the first thumb sucker.”

  “Maybe the guy’s getting more careful. I talked to Birnbaum on the way in this morning,” Deets said.

  Frank let out a sigh. “When’s he taking over?”

  “We got a couple of days. Birnbaum’s gonna send his lab guys out there this afternoon, whatever good it’ll do ‘em.”

  “No prints whatsoever, huh?” Frank said.

  “No prints, not even a partial,” Deets said with a silent belch, snapping his gum distastefully. “Pathologist tried the girl’s fingernails, teeth, even her eyeballs.”

  “Gloves?”

  “Definitely.”

  All at once, Frank noticed someone coming down the hallway with a lunchbox.

  “Excuse me, D, one second,” Frank said, pushing himself away from his desk.

  Frank got up and chased after the kid in the T-shirt and laminated security pass. “Johnny! Hold up!”

  Johnny Trout paused outside the property room door. “Morning, Frank.”

  “Hey, Johnny, how ya doing?”

  “Not bad, Frank. What’s going on?” Prematurely bald, his smooth pate sunburned as red as a lobster, Johnny Trout was the resident tech-head around the squad house. He was in charge of the property room, the dispatch equipment, the wireless beat radios, the video gear, the computers, everything around the Twenty-fourth that might require more than a Reader’s Digest knowledge of electronics. He also knew more about Bruce Lee movies than a healthy person really should.

  “Got a question for ya,” Frank said. “It’s a little convoluted. I’m just wondering, is it possible—I got an iMac, okay—is it possible for somebody to hack into my computer through the Internet, and then make a message come on my screen that looks like it came from my own keyboard?”

  The bald kid licked his lips for a moment, thinking. “Um... you mean simple text?”

  “Actually, I’m talking about a message window.”

  “A message window?”

  “Yeah. You know. A box with edges, and background, and text inside it.”

  “Over e-mail?”

  “No, actually, I’m talking about while I’m online, looking at a web site.”

  Trout took a long, deep breath, then said, “I guess it’s possible, but it’s highly unlikely.”

  “Yeah?”

  The kid shrugged. “You can’t control a rig’s internal default parameters from outside that rig.”

  “Yeah? Okay, thanks a lot, Johnny, I appreciate it.” Frank started to turn away.

  “You want me to show you what I’m talking about?” Trout said, gesturing with his thumb back toward his office.

  “No thanks, Johnny, I’m swamped today, I appreciate it.” Frank turned and hurried back to his desk.

  Deets was already putting on his sport coat, preparing to go back out into the heat. “You ready to go ID this vic?”

  “Lead the way, D,” Frank said, grabbing his jacket and notebook, then following the big man toward the exit.

  Frank and Deets were in the showroom of the Little Red Rooster Lounge when the beeper went off.

  “Son of a bitch,” Deets grumbled, digging under his coat, grabbing the beeper off his belt.

  “Sorry,” Frank murmured to the dancer, his stomach twisting in the smoky, blue gloom. Frank was trying to keep the interview light and breezy, trying to keep the girl relaxed. It wasn’t easy.

  “Am I in some kind of trouble, Detective?” the dancer asked nervously, her silk robe tented by massive artificial breasts. Her peroxide blonde hair gleamed in the low light. Her lips were outlined in thin, black eyeliner. Somewhere nearby, in some other room, the bass-line from Steve Miller’s “Abracadabra” thumped through a wall.

  The room smelled deodorized, like the inside of a cab.

  “No, Miss Jamison, not at all,” Frank said with a contrite smile. He was nauseous and exhausted. “We’re just trying to locate a girl. If you could just tell us exactly what your friend told you, that would be fabulous.”

  Deets was growling to himself, “Piece of shit is impossible to read in this dump.” He was trying to read his beeper in the dim light, fishing in his pocket for his reading glasses.

  Something was bugging Deets. Frank had noticed it from the very first interview. He was all cranky, and he was being nasty to the girls, and he was acting like a bully, which wasn’t like Deets at all. It was making Frank uncomfortable. Frank liked to treat people with respect.

  “All I can tell you is what I heard Tiffany say last night,” the dancer said. She was frightened. Frank could tell by the way she was blinking, like she had something in her eye. “Tiffany said there was talk among the other dancers that we should be careful, that we should have the bouncers walk us to our cars.”

  “Okay, no problem,” Frank said, writing in his notebook. “You think Tiffany would mind chatting with us for a second?”

  “Son of a bitch!” Deets barked, reading the tiny liquid crystal numbers.

  “What is it, D?” Frank said, looking at his partner.

  “One-eighty-seven over in Albany Park,” Deets said, starting toward the door. “Come on, Frank.”

  “Thanks a lot, Miss Jamison,” Frank said, handing the stripper his business card. “Like I said, my name’s Detective Janus, and if you hear anything else, if you have any problems, don’t hesitate to call me.”

  Deets was pausing near the door, turning and pointing a finger at the stripper. “I want statements from you and your girlfriend on the record! You can put them on video down at the Twenty-fourth District Headquarters!”

  The stripper chewed on her fingernail, said nothing.

  “You hear what I said?!” Deets yelled.

  “Yeah, sure, I can hardly wait,” she muttered, staring at the floor in exasperation.

  “You got a problem with that?!” Deets barked at her.

  “No sir,” the dancer replied.

  Deets stormed out of the club.

  Frank followed him into the humid sunlight,
eyes blinking at the glare. “What’s wrong, D? What’s going on?”

  Deets marched across the gravel lot to the unmarked Crown Victoria, which was parked near a chain-link fence. He opened the driver’s door and got in. Frank followed, got in the passenger side and shut the door. The car was hot enough to bake bread. Deets started it up and got the A/C blasting.

  “Talk to me, D—what’s the matter?” Frank asked again, as Deets pulled out of the lot.

  “I hate these flesh pits with a passion,” Deets said over the rush of the air conditioning.

  “What’s the deal with the one-eighty-seven?” Frank asked.

  “It’s gotta be a match-up, and they’re calling us in to consult.”

  “Another thumb sucker?” Frank could feel a shiver of ice on his neck.

  Deets nodded, then called in to the house to get the low down on the Albany Park scene.

  Fifteen minutes later they were pulling up in front of a boarded-up bodega cooking in the sun at the corner of Lawrence and Seimens. An ancient, cracked hard-shell sign over the door said FOOD & LIQU R, and a profusion of weeds fringed the foundation and sidewalk. Yellow crime-scene tape was drawn across the front, and a clutch of CPD vehicles was parked at haphazard angles across the litter-strewn parkway: a patrol car, a couple of unmarked squads, and a crime lab wagon.

  Deets parked near the side lot and got out of the car.

  Frank joined him.

  “You gonna be okay?” Deets asked.

  “Yeah, D, absolutely, thanks. This one a popper?”

  “No, actually, it’s a fresh one. You sure you’re okay?”

  Frank managed a smile and patted his coat pocket. “Better living through chemistry.”

  Deets tossed him the baby powder. They put on their rubber gloves. Put their shields on their pockets. Got out their notebooks.

  Then they stepped under the tape and slipped inside the half-ajar plywood door.

  Thin shafts of daylight sliced through the dust motes, barely illuminating a narrow abandoned store full of empty shelves. Air ripe with animal droppings. A motor drive buzzing, a strobe light flashing. Six dark suits in the back, huddled near a forlorn little bundle of flesh on the floor.

  A blood pool as dark as black strap molasses.

  “Thumb sucker,” Deets said under his breath as they approached the scene.

  Frank felt lightheaded. He fought it. He gripped his notebook white-knuckle tight.

  “Sully Deets?” One of the Albany Park detectives, a beefy black gentleman in wrinkled polyester, was glancing up at the newcomers.

  “Look who’s here,” Deets said, approaching the group, extending his hand.

  The black man grinned and the two men shook hands, their rubberized palms squeaking faintly. “They still let you play detective up there in the Twenty-fourth?”

  “Last time I checked, we had better closure rates than the Seventeenth.”

  “But we can still beat your asses in softball,” the black man said with a twinkle in his eye.

  “You remember Frank Janus?” Deets gestured at Frank.

  Frank said hello to Detective Roy “Smokey” Harris, and the black detective introduced the other men, the detectives, the lab people.

  “Whattya got, Smokey?” Deets said at last.

  The black man shrugged. “You tell me. Saw your SC file and figured this might match up.”

  Frank stood his distance, staring at the dead woman on the floor. She was nude, as pale and thin as a greyhound, with old needle tracks on her arms. She was lying on her side, her legs pulled up against her ravaged abdomen. Entrails glistened beneath her. Her right arm was tucked inward, her thumb inserted into her mouth.

  “—local bangers found her,” Harris was saying. “Found her wallet tucked neatly into that bundle of clothes over there. Name’s Irene Jeeter. Street walker, worked down on Cicero.”

  Frank took a deep breath and tried to focus on his job. He opened his notebook.

  “—We got some great stuff off the scene. No prints yet, but we got a heel mark, and the lab guys say we got a hair that doesn’t belong to the lady—”

  The strobe light flashed.

  Something fell out of Frank’s notebook.

  He glanced down and saw a piece of paper had fallen from his spiral-bound. He knelt down and picked it up. It was a piece of white typing paper, carefully folded to a quarter of its size. Frank had no idea where it had come from, and evidently nobody else had seen it hit the ground, because the others, including Deets, were still concentrating on the scene.

  Frank stood back up.

  He unfolded the paper, and he saw the message hastily scrawled in ballpoint.

  His own ballpoint.

  Stop investigating the thumb sucker case! It’s a dead end!! It cannot be solved! Give up!

  Frank started backing toward the boarded door, his head swimming, his pulse racing.

  “Frank?” Deets was looking at him now.

  “I gotta—I need to—I gotta go check on something,” Frank was stammering.

  Frank turned and hurried out the narrow channel between the worm-eaten plywood and the doorjamb.

  Stumbling out into the furious sunlight, blinking fitfully, head full of cotton, he tried to breathe, but he couldn’t, he couldn’t get a decent breath. He still had the note in one rubber-gloved hand and the spiral-bound in the other. He staggered across the parkway, then down a narrow alley running between the building and a deserted loading dock.

  Dark spots obscured his vision.

  He managed to make it over to a large, moldering peach crate, and he flopped down on it. His heart was hammering against his sternum, and his eyesight was wavering, like a dark storm cloud was moving across his field of vision. He tried to read the message, but a sudden shockwave was bolting through him.

  Then everything went black.

  Frank woke up somewhere else.

  He was still in the alley, but he wasn’t slumped on the peach crate anymore.

  Sharp pain stabbed up his lower back, so profound it wrenched a groan out of him. He felt a cold, wet sensation on his ass. He tried to open his eyes and look around, but his vision was still clouded. The sound of Deet’s voice was coming from somewhere to his left, and he saw the ground, the grease marks and the scabrous pavement of the alley.

  “Bambi—?!”

  All at once Frank realized he was on the opposite side of the alley, on the ground, his back pressed against the wall. He couldn’t feel his legs. The folded paper was gone. His notebook was gone. His rubber gloves were gone, and his hands—as well as his sleeves—were soaking wet, saturated with some unidentified fluid. His feet were asleep. A terrible ammonia smell hung in the air around him.

  “Bambi!—you okay?!” Deet’s voice, a little panicky now. Footsteps coming fast.

  Frank tried to straighten up, but he quickly realized his lower extremities were asleep. Needles of numbness tingled in his joints. Cold panic suddenly trickled down his spine, the realization shrieking in his mind.

  “I’m—I’m alright—” Frank managed, pulling himself up into a sitting position against the alley wall.

  Deets was approaching with a couple of plastic Ziploc bags under his arm. “What the hell happened?”

  “Nothing—I got a little dizzy.”

  Deets gave him a hand, helping him up. “Been looking all over for ya.”

  “Sorry, D, I’m okay,” Frank said, trying to get his bearings. He was drenched in sweat. His mouth tasted of bitter almonds. He was terrified: the realization.

  “Lab guys are done,” Deets said. “I was getting worried—you sure you’re okay?—what happened to your gloves?”

  “I’m fine, D, really.” Frank rubbed his wet hands on his damp jacket. “Little dizzy spell, you know.”

  “Friggin’ heat probably,” Deets said, unconvinced, then raised the plastic bag. “Got some goddamn physical evidence for once.”

  Frank could barely focus on the bag. “What is it?”

 
“Fresh cigarette butt,” Deets said. “Found it near a heel mark, behind the door. Perp is getting careless.”

  “That’s fabulous, D,” Frank said, trying to stand on his prickling, numb joints.

  “Come on, Bambi, let’s get you outta this heat,” Deets said, putting an arm around Frank, ushering him toward the street.

  Frank hobbled along as best he could...

  ...but he could not stop thinking about the fact that—before awakening—he had been curled into a fetal position on the dirty cement.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Henry Pope was not even close to being finished when the sound of chirring came from across the room. It was coming from inside Frank Janus’s sport coat, which was currently slung over a chair near the door. A cellular phone: one of life’s little modern conveniences that always made Henry long for the days of rotary dials and the Fibber McGee and Molly Show.

  “Okay, Frank, let’s bring you back up now,” the psychiatrist said very evenly, adopting the gentle, mellifluous tones he had perfected for therapeutic hypnosis.

  Frank was lying back on a divan adjacent to Henry’s chair. Eyes closed, body relaxed, shirt buttons loosened around his neck, left arm elevated in midair, Frank was in a deep trance. “Yes,” he said softly.

  “Can you hear me, Frank?” Henry said.

  “Yes.”

  “We’re going to get back on that imaginary elevator now. Can you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  The cellular kept chirping.

  “That’s good, Frank, and now I want you to get back on that elevator, and we’re going to start rising back up to consciousness now... okay, Frank?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, now we’re rising up one level to the basement, and you’re still feeling good, and you’re not afraid. Do you understand? Can you hear me, Frank?”