I drove home. Even though Cicero was closer to Bensenville, it still took an hour.
A call to the nurse’s station told me Latham had awoken briefly, but was now sleeping again. I asked them to call me if there was any change. Then I fished my notebook out of my purse, and found the number of Wilbur Martin Streng that Dispatch had given to me earlier. He lived in Elmwood Park. No priors, other than some minor traffic violations.
My dad.
I stared at the number, wondering how I should feel. I didn’t remember much about my father. All I had were impressions of him. The old leather slippers he always wore around the house. The dark-framed Clark Kent glasses. The smell of Old Spice and cigars.
One memory stood out, so clear that I had no idea if it was a real memory or a fabrication. We were in Grant Park for some kind of summer festival, and I was on his shoulders, and there was an ice cream vendor on the street. Dad bought me an ice cream, and I dropped it. So we went back to the vendor, and he bought me another one. I accidentally dropped that one too. He didn’t get mad. No lecture. No yelling. Not a single word. We just went back to the ice cream man, and Dad bought me a third.
This was the man who left me and Mom. The man who destroyed our family.
I wanted to drum up some hate, but couldn’t seem to find it. All I had was curiosity. I wanted to hear, in his words, why he left. Why he never tried to get in touch. How he could completely absolve responsibility for the lives of two people he was supposed to have loved.
I put the number away. Now wasn’t the time.
I came home to a package outside my door. Shoes I’d ordered from some TV shopping club. Normally that would perk me up. This time, it was a chore to even pick them up.
Upon opening my door, I was greeted by the pleasant surprise of a living room coated in kitty litter. This was impressive, considering the cat box was in the kitchen. Mr. Friskers had also asserted his dominance over the sofa, having shredded one of the armrests.
He missed my mother, I guessed.
I’d once gone so far as to battle Mr. Friskers into his cat carrier, in preparation to get him declawed, and if possible, detoothed. Mom, in her mother tone, reminded me that the cat had saved both of our lives, and removing his claws would be like taking away Wyatt Earp’s Colt Peacemaker.
I told her, “Wyatt Earp didn’t terrorize the West, maiming innocents and destroying property.”
“Let the kitty out of the carrier, dear, and help yourself to my Valium.”
The cat was the one who needed the Valium. But Mom won, and the weapons of mass destruction weren’t removed. Mr. Friskers celebrated his victory by tearing apart a section of carpeting in my bedroom.
He never seemed to destroy any of Mom’s things.
I went into the kitchen, litter crunching underfoot, and saw Mr. Friskers on the countertop, playing with something small and dark.
That poor mariachi’s mustache.
“You’re the Antichrist,” I told him.
He ignored me.
I checked his food dish, saw that it was filled with kitty litter (how did he do that?), and rinsed it out. I dumped in some dry food, refreshed his water, and plodded into the bedroom.
As I undressed, I thought about Latham and got pretty choked up. Not only because he was sick, but because I should have said yes when he proposed. I looked at my left hand and felt an itch where the ring should be.
Where was the ring?
Latham had appropriated a few drawers in my dresser, and I opened up the top one. The ring box was resting on top of his jeans. I took it out and opened it up.
It was gorgeous. Bigger than I remembered. And I wanted it so badly.
I considered putting it on, so he could see it when I visited him. But I wanted him to put it on me. I wanted the mariachi players again, and the kneeling, and the sweet speech, but this time I’d say yes, and no one would lose any facial hair, and then we’d have a romantic dinner and wild sex and I’d soon be Jacqueline Conger. Jacqueline Conger-Daniels. Jacqueline Daniels-Conger.
Well, we’d figure out the name stuff later.
I closed the box and put it back in the drawer.
A hot shower burned away some of the stress, but not much. I threw on one of Latham’s undershirts, rubbed some Oil of Olay into my wrinkles, and plopped into bed as exhausted as I’d ever been.
Sleep refused to come.
After twenty minutes of tossing and turning, I flipped on the Home Shopping Network. I had their 800 number on speed dial, my customer number committed to memory, and I bought a portable steamer, a hair-coloring system guaranteed to get out the gray in five easy minutes, and an assortment of fake eyelashes because I’d never owned fake eyelashes and because they looked like fun and because I was seriously overtired.
“Would you like to put this on your Visa, Ms. Daniels?”
“That sounds perfect.”
Some people had cocaine. I had HSN. It was still up in the air as to which was the more expensive addiction.
The phone rang, and I wondered if it was Stacey from HSN, telling me their computer burst into flames when they tried to authorize my credit card.
But it wasn’t HSN. It was the hospital.
“Are you the next of kin for Latham Conger?”
I tried to swallow, but couldn’t. I managed to say, “Yes.”
“You’d better get here are soon as possible.”
“What’s going on?”
“His condition has deteriorated. He may not last the night.”
I glanced at the drawer, the one with the engagement ring in it. Then I threw on some clothes and headed for the hospital.
CHAPTER 21
HIS GREEN SWEATPANTS have holes in the knees, and have been rubbed with grease and grime from his gas grill. He wears a blue hoodie, equally stained, and over that a black rain slicker. His shoes are an old pair of white Nikes that have been scribbled on with black permanent marker. Grease also coats his forehead and both cheeks. The glued-on goatee has bits of crackers in it.
Taped to the insides of his jacket are eight large-sized ziplock bags. They’re full, and when he cinches his jacket closed, he can feel their contents wiggling.
He carries a stuffed backpack, also dirtied up. If he puts his ear to it, he hears a soft rustling sound.
He checks the mirror, rubs more grease onto his face and over the backs of his hands, and then pulls on a wool cap, covering his hair.
Then he walks to the corner and waits for the bus.
Even at three in the morning, it’s unbearably hot. It’s only June, but Chicago already has that oily humidity so common during summer nights; part garbage smell, part sewage smell, with just a hint of Lake Michigan. It’s bright out—traffic, shops, streetlights—and the bus stop is especially well lit. To discourage criminal behavior, he assumes. He’s not discouraged in the least.
The movement inside his jacket is creepy, repulsive. He forces himself not to fidget, to keep the coat on and relax. When the bus arrives, green and white and almost as dirty as he is, he puts his quarters in the money box and the driver makes a show of not looking at him.
The bus has a few occupants. A single black man. Some college kids talking loud. A woman who might be a hooker. He sits in an empty seat and places his backpack between his feet. He stares at it, and tries not to think about what he’s got under his coat, tries not to think about what he’s going to do.
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 c
op 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
I SPENT 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 arrested 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 that I didn’t see any garbage, because it was swarming with hundreds of scuttling cockroaches.
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