by Thomas Laird
I’ve effectively muffled her screams. I’ve got her down on the ground, it’s cold and there’s always a risk, however remote, that someone might walk right on up to us at any second, but I’ve got to see her. As she lies on the wet, cold grass before me, I slit open her blouse and brassiere. I was right about her.
Then she moans. I haven’t dosed her sufficiently. It happens occasionally. I go back into the bag for the T-shirt.
But I find the moaning more arousing, so I stop and replace the T-shirt in the satchel.
Then I tear her skirt and panties off with my hands. Before she can fully come to I’m on top of her and then in her. I’m lifting her off the soggy, chilled grass and I’m pounding at her, and all the while I can see her eyes coming more alive and alert. My own eyes have adjusted to the dim lighting that the surrounding streetlamps have provided, and I can see her waking gradually. And she knows that someone is inside her, that someone is taking her, and she tries to scream, but she’s still too foggy, and she quiets herself as if she’s in the middle of some dream, as if she’s enjoying what’s happening to her. And then I hear footsteps. They are still some distance away from us, but they are approaching.
I cannot stop, as dangerous as I know it is. She’s moaning, either in pleasure or in stupor, and I cannot stop myself. I am lunging and crashing against her, and suddenly she’s coming to consciousness.
It is then that she cries out. I punch her once, then twice, and then she is asleep again. The footsteps I just heard have become louder. They’re closer. So I pull up my zipper, gather my tools, and I get the hell out of here.
*
‘You came home empty-handed?’ she demands.
‘Yes. Someone came up on us and I —’
‘I can smell the sex on you. I can smell her. You had to fuck her before you —’
‘What I do when I do my work does not concern you. You know how it has always been, and it will always be that way. Why are you so suddenly concerned about what I do to them, as long as I come home with —’
‘But you’ve come home with nothing! It took two days to plan this, we’ve got a buyer waiting, and you come here to me with nothing! ... You’re wrong. This is not jealousy. This is purely business, and you have fucked up, and I’ll be the one who has to explain why there’ll be a delay while you find someone with whom you can keep your zipper pulled up ... I don’t care what you do to them. Just make sure you don’t leave me vulnerable. Do you understand? Do you?’
I slap her and she falls to the floor.
‘This is not a time for —’
I undo my pants.
Then I reach down to the floor and open my bag.
‘What the hell are you doing?’
Just as she’s about to scream, I choke the sound off. It isn’t as if someone’s going to hear her, out here.
I hold her down and I quiet her while I squeeze her throat. Then I enter her. She struggles at first, but her lack of air prevents her from fighting me as strongly as she would normally. She’s fading as I finish.
Then I kneel next to her, and I show her the knife. She’s coming to and her eyes are widening, but she’s still weak from the near-throttling.
I sweep the flat of the blade across her stomach and down onto her pubic patch. I place the tip of the blade just at the edge of her labia.
‘You ever talk to me that way again, and I’ll use you the way I use them. Do you understand me?’
She’s hushed quite nicely, and she nods her head very slowly and very gently.
Chapter Eighteen
She called it a conflict of interest. I called it using my weight. I got to oversee her stakeout for The Farmer because it was my case. She knew that I was the primary investigator on this deal, but she was hoping Wendkos would take over, seeing that she knew Doc and me on a personal level. I explained to Natalie that it didn’t work that way this time. The Captain was aware that she and I were engaged to be married, but he also understood about manpower, and manpower was something we didn’t have an overabundance of since U2, the rock-and-roll group, had come to town. And this Irish band got a lot of security help from us, and that led to shortages elsewhere, and hence Natalie couldn’t get our red-headed Captain to get somebody other than me to head this detail.
‘I don’t want any special attention,’ she said as we left to go to our area of operations.
‘You won’t get any,’ I told her as she rode in the back of the Taurus. She was riding with Doc and me to the site.
The site this time was Watertower. We had picked that mall thing because the time of year was near to the holidays. It was also the time of year when the sun set early. So we let Natalie wander the Watertower shops. We let her amble toward the other stores and outlets on Michigan Avenue, and we let her walk solo toward her parking lot.
She fit his bill. She was near thirty (twenty-seven), she was attractive, and she would be alone. At least, it would appear that way.
We dropped her off on Michigan Avenue where she picked up her own vehicle. She got in the Camry and headed north to the nearest private parking lot. We stayed discreetly behind her. Three other cars were on surveillance with us.
We knew it was a very long shot. This guy had been throwing darts at a board as if he was blind or as if he didn’t care where he landed. But he’d hit the Loop area twice, and I still agreed that most of these serial slayers liked to stay in a comfort zone. When it got down to it, he’d come back home. And if The Farmer was Repzac, Preggio, or Karrios, Chicago was home.
She arrived at a lot just three blocks from where she had originally parked. She drove the Camry into the lower level, and then we had to wait until she emerged. She was gone for a few minutes, so I began to worry that something might have happened in those few seconds when we’d left her unattended. There was a blind spot in every plan, and walking out of the parking lot was that blind spot.
Finally she walked out into the waning daylight. It was just after 3.00 p.m. It was almost Thanksgiving, but the holiday crowds hadn’t formed yet. Not until the parade and thereafter. When I saw her come out, my heart literally swelled. I could feel it expand inside my chest. This was my wife-to-be, I told myself, and she was staking herself out like a sacrificial she-goat. But she was also a police officer who had asked for this detail, too.
‘She’s one hellaciously pretty girl.’ Doc smiled. ‘If the asshole is in the neighborhood, he’s got to notice her.’
‘How many women are walking Michigan Avenue alone this afternoon?’ I countered.
‘We all know the odds on hitting on this thing, Jimmy,’ he told me. Then he slapped my forearm where it rested on the steering wheel.
‘The odds are too long. Way the hell too long. I’ve never liked these things. Too risky. I wonder how many times we’ve actually been lucky on —’
‘Hey, guinea. It’s what we do when we have nothing else going our way. You know how it works.’
We pulled into a parking lot only one block away from Watertower. We’d passed Natalie on Michigan Avenue, but she knew to slow down and started looking into shop windows in order to make it very obvious that she was out there and she was on her own. We had Natalie’s parking spot covered with eight coppers, so when she returned there were police all around her. This was another blind spot, while we were parking our car. The other detectives were cruising around and past my fiancee, but there were a few moments when she was out there all alone.
I could understand why she had asked the Captain to put Jack Wendkos in charge of this detail. Even I was aware of what a pain in the ass I’d become. Jack was one of the coppers on scene at Natalie’s parking area.
Doc got us a spot. We got out quickly and hustled down toward street level.
We walked the block and a half to where we were supposed to catch up to the redhead, and there she was, looking into the picture window at the entrance, right next to the swiveling glass entry door. Natalie entered, and we were walking in after her. There were already four pairs of
plainclothes inside, waiting for her. Each pair consisted of one male and one female police officer, so that they appeared to be couples doing Christmas shopping. I knew who the eight officers were. They were all Homicide.
As soon as we walked in, Doc and I saw Natalie board the upward escalator. This building was a house of glass and escalators. Everything seemed to point upward. There were numerous levels, and she rode skyward, seemingly bound toward the top. Anybody who suffered from fear of heights would not much like Watertower. You leaned over the railing, you felt like Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo when he kept on peering down, inside that bell tower. Even I tried to avoid looking at what we were leaving behind.
The redhead got off at the seventh level. We hadn’t seen anyone squirrelly following her to this point. Just the group of Homicide people looking for a killer who might qualify as that kind of small bushy-tailed rodent.
She walked into a yuppie version of a clothes store. It had overpriced blue jeans that teenagers ‘die for’. Forty-buck pants that you could buy in a place that ended in ‘mart’ for twenty-five percent less. It was the tag the kids wanted on their asses, anyway. I knew because my daughter Kelly loved to come here and drain my bank account.
Some bearded, bald young guy came right up to Natalie. He was wearing an ID, so he must have been an employee. She shed him in about thirty seconds, but she did it with a smile.
Doc nudged me as I pretended to peruse a pair of those high-priced denims.
I looked up and I saw a blond-haired man watching the redhead. He was about thirty-five, I guessed, about six feet one. He fit the general billing that we got from Stephanie Manske, The Farmer’s one miss. It gnawed at me, of course, that we didn’t know for sure that the guy who came up to her in that rainy parking lot was our guy, but you got to place your bet on one horse eventually or there was no chance at winning any cash.
Stephanie beat the hangman. She saw The Farmer and survived him. She was the only one we know who had, to this point. Was it Repzac or Preggio or Karrios that she saw? With his hair plastered to his head, lurking outside her ride in that thunderstorm? Yeah, I thought it was.
But this wasn’t one of that terrible trio. I saw that as Doc and I wandered closer to the redhead. He was definitely eyeballing her.
I stopped with Doc and we looked through a pile of denim shirts.
Natalie walked around for a few more minutes. She had made this guy. The sign was a quick flick to the side of her nostril. It was subtle, but I saw it. She knew the blond man was on her trail.
She left the clothing store and began to walk toward the Warner Brothers outlet. The place with all the Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny stuff. The blond guy was right behind her, and Doc and I were right behind him.
Another pair of plainclothes picked up the trail just outside the Warner store. It was Tracy Jascow and Billy Whiteside. Tracy was very noticeable because she was the best-looking homicide detective we had. She also had one of the highest clear-up rates in the department. Billy was a twelve-year veteran and a very successful copper, too.
All of us were inside the home of Looney Tunes. About three beats after we were in, Blondie approached Natalie. She was about thirty feet away from my partner and me, so we couldn’t hear what he was saying. Natalie was not wired. It was difficult to do audio inside these kinds of places. There was a lot of interference in a high-rise mall like this, so we decided simply to maintain visual.
Natalie seemed to shake him off. He smiled, walked off — but he didn’t disappear. He kept her in his sights and was pretending to shop at the glass cases that cluttered the floor.
When the redhead walked out, we watched the man. He waited a few seconds, then he went after Natalie. Doc and I and the other pair of detectives followed, a brief interval between us.
She rode the escalator upward, once more. I was starting to get dizzy even though I didn’t chance a glance back down over the railing.
‘You okay?’ Doc asked. ‘You look a little green.’
‘I don’t relish heights.’
Doc nodded. He remembered the case with the murderous ex-nun who stabbed an ex-cop on top of a high-rise. The ex-cop flew down at us from the height of all those stories, and then Doc and I had to run up all those flights after her. She damn’ near jumped over the edge. I was the guy who had to grab her. As I said, I didn’t like heights.
Natalie hit a few other galleries. I saw a second swipe at her lovely nose as she turned sideways on the escalator down, now, and I knew she was aware she still had this guy behind her. It was time she made her move toward the parking lot in order to see if this man’s intentions were sincere.
Down we went, but I kept my eyes straight ahead. Doc reached over and gripped my upper left arm, but I grinned to tell him I was all right, and finally we arrived at ground level. Tracy and Billy were still coming down after us.
Once we got outside, I was using the hand-held, and I told the detectives in the parking lot that we were headed their way. I got an affirmative response from Marty Marion, one of the Homicide guys waiting at the parking deck.
‘These things never work out, Jimmy. He’s just trying to hit on her and he can’t understand “no”.’
I shot a glance toward him, but we kept on walking back down Michigan Avenue. The six-foot blond man was between us and my fiancee. I was wearing the Nine in the shoulder holster and the .44 Bulldog against my lower left leg, just like the last time we came looking for trouble.
One more city block and we were back where Natalie began. It had gone quickly. Only forty-eight minutes had elapsed since the redhead got out of that lot. She hadn’t even accumulated a decent bill for the parking yet. It was not supposed to work like this on stakeout. You were supposed to be prepared for an all-night-all-day marathon. I was not used to this kind of fast pace.
She walked inside the parking high-rise. Our guy was right behind her, and the four of us were right behind him.
Natalie was parked on the third level up. She took the stairs. We backed off from the blond a bit, because it was becoming a little cramped for space. So we gave him a bigger interval. The level where she was parked was loaded with coppers anyhow.
When we caught back up with the two of them, Marty Marion whispered to me over the hand-held.
‘He’s going to a vehicle of his own, Jimmy. Red Dodge. New model, left-hand side of the lot.’
Marty got off quietly and quickly because he knew I was not far away from Natalie and the man behind her.
We saw the redhead opening the door of the Camry, her back to all of us. The blond man was off to our left, and he was unlocking his trunk. He pulled out a gym bag.
‘He’s been behind her from the beginning. How the hell did we miss him?’ Doc whispered.
Natalie jiggled the keys in the lock of her car to give the blond time to approach her. The other cops on surveillance would come rushing to her when I gave them the signal over the hand-held.
The six-footer had the bag gripped in his right hand. He walked steadily toward Natalie, and now Doc and I were moving at a trot, coming at him.
‘Go!’ I said into the hand-held.
I heard a number of car doors being opened, and then I saw the crowd of us descending on the man and Natalie.
‘Stop!’ I yelled.
The Nine was pointed at the back of his towheaded noggin.
‘Drop the bag!’ Doc commanded.
He dropped the gym bag.
Then he put his hands high in the air, turned toward me and my partner, and began to beg.
‘Take my wallet, but don’t hurt me!’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ one of the other four police told him.
His expression was genuinely confused. He was surprised and frightened. He was either a very good actor or he was about ready to fill his jockey shorts.
*
‘Why were you following her?’ I asked again.
‘I told you. She was very ... pretty. She turned me down, but I wanted to try again.’
&n
bsp; It was a dead end and Doc and I both knew it. There was nothing in the gym bag but a couple of towels, a clean pair of undershorts and a T-shirt. No knife, no ether. Nothing.
His name was Patrick McGaherty and he worked in a health club. Apparently he was not used to being turned down by women. And, yes, he was behind her after she left that third deck in the parking lot. He must have been following Doc and me, and that was why we didn’t make him until later on in the surveillance.
So we cut him loose after we checked to see if he had a record. And he was clean. Not even traffic violations.
Natalie was waiting for us outside the interrogation box.
‘Nothing?’ she asked.
I shook my head, waved goodnight to Doc, and steered my fiancee by the arm toward the elevators.
*
‘We’re losing credibility with my Captain, Red.’
‘I know. Manpower minus results. I’m sorry, Jimmy.’
‘Hell, it’s not your fault, Natalie. I’m just disappointed this wasn’t the guy. He sure fit the bill physically. Right age. Right look. Everything that the profile calls for.’
I was driving her home. We were working the same afternoon-to-midnight shift, so we’d be able to have dinner and spend the night together. My mother was still living at my house — which was an issue we’d have to address after I married the redhead.
‘These things are always very shaky when it comes to odds, Natalie. You know that.’
‘You don’t think we’re going to catch this man in the act, do you, Jimmy?’
‘No. We rarely ever do. Stakeouts work occasionally, but they’re really just action for the sake of action. You feel a little desperate, you want to do something, get out on the street. Somebody keeps killing people and you can’t stop him. You want to be active, get out there and make a play. These guys like The Farmer are control freaks. They hardly ever allow you to turn the tables on them. This guy might kill again, and he might do it right under our noses. He might chop somebody up on the Gold Coast or in the Loop. Or he might move to the burbs, the way he tried to with Stephanie Manske. He was telling us that he wasn’t committed to one area of the city. It’s the women who are linked. It’s their ages, their general appearances. Once we find out why he prefers his particular kind of victim, maybe then we can set him up ... No, little shots in the dark like tonight aren’t going to bring down the big dog, here. He’s too goddamned cute, Red.’
