“Go attend to that.”
Benedict about-faced and waddled to the door, knees pressed together.
After Herb left, I locked eyes with my boss.
“What’s going on, Captain? I usually enjoy some leeway when it comes to picking cases.”
Chicago had five Detective Areas, and I worked as a floater. My reputation allowed it.
Bains didn’t seem swayed by my reputation. He pursed his lips. Not a good sign.
“What aren’t you telling me, Captain?”
“The superintendent has been getting some flack lately about that TV show.”
“TV show?”
“That series with the PI and that fat woman who plays you.”
I mentally groaned. The show, called Fatal Autonomy, featured a supporting character based on me. I never watched it, but from what I heard, the series didn’t display the CPD in a good light. Or me either.
“I explained this before, I let them use my name because one of the show’s producers helped out with the Kork case.”
Which had been a mistake. Anything to do with Harry McGlade wound up being a mistake.
“The super doesn’t care. Chicago is buried in crime, and that show makes us look like a bunch of idiots.”
“So what are you saying? The super is pissed at me, so he’s gunning for my job?”
“I’m saying I don’t want you on anything that might make you look foolish, or anything high-profile. This will all go away, but laying low won’t hurt.”
I leaned closer to Bains and dropped my voice an octave.
“How angry is he?”
“If you see him on the street, turn around and run.”
Ouch.
“You have two days to come up with something solid, Jack. And keep the media out of it.”
Bains dismissed me, dispersing the wind I’d had in my sails. Having to worry about job security at my age was a stressor I just didn’t need.
I looked for Herb, heard scary sounds coming from the bathroom, and chose to leave him alone for a while.
Evidence was located on the first floor. I took the elevator. The day guy, Bill, greeted me with a grin. He was old enough to have milked Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. Bill rescued a previous mayor’s family member decades ago, and was allowed to stay on without being forced into retirement. It was a good thing too, because he was the only person who could find anything in the cluttered, unorganized Evidence Room.
“You’re like a shot of Viagra, Miss Jack Daniels. I love the boots. Can I lick your heel?”
“No. I thought men lost interest in sex after turning a hundred.”
Bill winked. “I’m only ninety-eight. But I make love like a man of seventy-five. What are your plans for later?”
“I’m visiting my mother.”
“How is she doing?”
I thought of Mom, the tube in her throat.
“No change.”
“How about afterward? Maybe a little midnight rendezvous? You look like you could use a little TLC.”
Bill hit the nail on the head with that one. It had been months since I’d been with a man. But even though I’d passed my prime, I wasn’t desperate enough to date someone so old he farted dust. Not yet, anyway. Give me another few months and I might consider it.
“I appreciate the offer, Bill, but right now I’m interested in a closed case—333871-5.”
Bill nodded, tapping his pointy chin. “The Gingerbread Man. Eleven boxes. Anything in particular?”
“I need everything. Sorry. You want some help?”
“Nope. I keep in shape.”
Bill held up his right arm and pulled back the short sleeve, flexing his biceps. There was enough extra skin hanging from that arm to upholster a couch. In a liver spot pattern. I kept that to myself.
Bill scuttled off and lugged the boxes out of storage one at a time. I signed the tags and dug in.
The first two boxes were mostly paperwork, much of it mine. I glanced at a few reports, the memories of the case returning full force. Charles Kork had been a very bad man, torturing women in his basement in Evanston, prolonging their deaths for hours and lovingly capturing it all on videotape.
The third, fourth, and fifth boxes contained personal belongings from his last three victims.
In the sixth box, wrapped in tin foil and sealed in a plastic evidence bag, was the first gingerbread man cookie we’d found. Parts of it were stained black with blood. It had candy hearts for eyes and mouth, three gum drop buttons on the front, and had been lacquered. The one we’d recently found was almost an inch larger, had peppermint swirl buttons and raisin eyes, no mouth. Not the same source.
There were other cookies in other bags, but I didn’t bother opening them. In the seventh box I found what I’d been looking for.
Twelve videotapes.
The chain of evidence tags noted how often they’d been viewed and duplicated, which was often. Each tape had a label, done in Kork’s distinctive handwriting.
Tape #1, “Jerry Dies Slowly.” Tape #6, “Kids Say the Funniest Things When They’re Bleeding.” Tape #11, “T. Metcalf Gets a Surprise.” Tape #12, “Slipping the Knife to the Wife.”
The videos contained graphic footage of Kork murdering his victims. There had been ten of them in all, six women and four children. The task force had identified all but one of the kids.
Seeing the tapes filled me with a dread I normally felt in life or death situations. Herb and I had watched part of #4, “Making Little Belinda Cry.” We could only stand it for two minutes, even with the sound turned off.
I hadn’t been able to forget it, much as I had tried.
After only a small hesitation, I sucked up my courage and pulled out the tapes.
“Would you like a bag?”
I nodded, and Bill produced a plastic Jewel Foods bag from under the counter. I poked through the remaining boxes, taking a handwriting analysis report and some autopsy reports.
In the last box, all by itself, was the murder weapon. A large hunting knife with a jagged edge on the back of the blade. Through the plastic evidence bag, I could see some of Diane Kork’s blood dried on the edge.
I put the knife in the bag with the other things. Then I signed everything out, parried another seduction attempt from Bill, and walked up a few flights of stairs to my office.
Benedict was leaning on my desk, looking deflated.
I patted his shoulder. “Everything come out okay?”
He grimaced. “They should put a warning label on the GoLYTELY, something about violent explosions. I think I just lost ten pounds.”
I gestured at the jug on my desk, still half full of liquid.
“Looks like you have a little bit more to finish.”
Benedict glared at the bottle. “I can’t do it. If I finish that, I’ll have to attach a seat belt to the toilet.”
“Maybe an airbag too.”
I sat down and reached for the door-to-door reports on the top of my in-box. A quick scan gave me the gist.
“Neighbors didn’t see anything.” I tossed the reports onto my desk, annoyed. “Why doesn’t someone ever commit a homicide next to a nosy busybody with some binoculars who spies on people all the time?”
Benedict didn’t answer. He was staring at the bottle of GoLYTELY.
I left him to face his nemesis, and dove into the Realtor’s statement. She’d shown the house to over a hundred people since it went on the market last year. Apparently, the stigma of the previous owner had prevented any sales. No one wanted to dwell where a serial killer once had.
There had been talk of bulldozing it, but Diane Kork had insisted on selling. She inherited it from her ex-husband, shortly after he’d tried to murder her.
Herb’s stomach made a noise. He said, “Gotta go,” and ran for the door.
“You forgot your jug!” I called after him.
I checked my watch, saw it was creeping up on five, and I decided to call it a day. The reports went into my Jewel bag, which I lugged down to my car.
>
The engine coughed twice, then turned over. The lion’s share of my paycheck went to supporting my aging mother. When Mom had lived in Florida, her condo had cost slightly more than the gross national product of New Zealand.
She’d sold the condo last year, to move in with me. That should have freed up some of my financial obligations, but Mom’s current condition cost even more than her condo had.
Mary Streng was in a coma, and her insurance only covered partial treatment. The condo money was almost gone, and soon the debt monster would come a-calling.
It was a burden I gladly accepted. My father died when I was a kid, but Mom had showered me with enough love to make up for the loss. A former Chicago cop herself, she was more than a mother to me; she was a hero.
And now my hero lay in a coma.
And it was all my fault.
CHAPTER 3
MOM RESIDED IN a long-term acute-care facility called Henderson House, on Chicago’s north side, not too far from my apartment. She was classified PVS—permanent vegetative state, and received artificial hydration and nutrition, though she could breathe without assistance.
I stopped by on the way home.
“Good evening, Ms. Daniels. Would you like to visit your mother?”
The secretary, Julie something or other, already had the phone in her hand to call the nurse station. Normal procedure meant for me to schedule my visits, or to phone ahead of time. That gave the staff time to clean my mother up before I saw her. For what this place cost, relatives tended to get angry if the loved ones they were visiting had a dirty diaper.
“Any change?” I asked when she hung up the phone.
Julie flipped through a chart. “Still Level One on RLA Cognitive functioning. But her Glasgow went up two points. She spontaneously opened her eyes today.”
That got my attention.
“When?”
“Chart says this morning. There’s a notation that we called you at home.”
“Why didn’t you call my cell phone?”
“I’m sorry, Ms. Daniels. Would you like me to put down your cell phone as your primary contact number?”
“My cell phone should already be the primary contact number.” My voice got louder. “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t have tried it since you couldn’t reach me at home. Or you could have tried work. I do work for a living.”
I set my jaw and felt my ears burn.
“I understand, Ms. Daniels. I’ll make sure we use the cell next time. Did you want a glass of water? It will be a few minutes before your mother is ready.”
I declined, and sat in a relentlessly cheery waiting room, walls painted bright yellow and adorned with framed prints of rainbows and sunrises. I thought about the Glasgow Coma Score. Mom’s Glasgow scores fluctuated all the time. While she hadn’t spoken since her injuries, her response to stimulus and her eye-opening were on-again off-again. Her doctors told me that a PVS patient might have a low score one day, and then the next day she could suddenly be awake and aware. So much for Glasgow.
I spent a few minutes sitting and staring at a dusty silk flower arrangement on the magazine table and a man I recognized walked in.
“Hi, Tony.”
He brightened when he saw me. Tony Coglioso was tall, in his forties, and had classic Italian good looks. His father had been in a coma for three years.
“Hello, Lieutenant. Any change?”
“Up two points. How about yours?”
“Down a point.” He smiled, but it seemed forced. “It sounds like we’re talking about the stock market, and not our parents.”
Tony and I had seen each other many times over the past few months, exchanging little snatches of conversation in hallways and waiting rooms. Like me, he was divorced, but unlike me he had two adult children. I enjoyed his company, and he wasn’t hard to look at. I wondered why he never asked me out. I still fit comfortably into a size eight, and just last week, on the street in front of my apartment, a homeless man told me I had a nice ass.
“How are the kids?”
“Too busy to visit Papa. My oldest says it doesn’t matter, that Papa doesn’t hear anything anyway.”
“He hears,” I promised him. “He hears every word.”
“Yeah. Well. You on your way up?”
I glanced at Julie, who’d been watching our conversation. Julie nodded.
“Go ahead, Ms. Daniels.”
I smiled at Tony. “I guess I am.”
“Would you like to share an elevator with an old paisan?”
“I’d be honored.”
We didn’t talk during the elevator ride. Though some of the cops in my district would label me as aggressive, I wasn’t that way with men. It didn’t make sense. I could bust down a door and handcuff a murderer, but I’ve never asked a guy on a date. Not once. In all of my romantic encounters, I’d been a follower rather than a leader.
Even worse, I was crummy at dropping hints. Perhaps if I said something like, “Gosh, it’s been a really long time since I got laid.” Would a guy pick up on that?
I didn’t have a chance to find out. The elevator stopped, and Tony went left, without a word or a wave.
Of course, he was off to visit his PVS parent, so I couldn’t really fault his manners.
My own PVS parent was lying peacefully on her bed. A cotton bandage covered the hole in her neck, where the feeding tube went in. Her eyes remained closed, even when I shut the door extra loudly, as I always did.
“Hi, Mom. Still napping, I see.”
I sat in the rocking chair next to her, held her withered hand, and told her about my day.
We talked for an hour or so. I tried to remain cheery and upbeat. Regardless of what I’d told Tony, I had doubts that Mom even knew I was there. But on the slight chance she did know, I didn’t want to depress her.
When I was all talked out, I stood up, stretched, and then did my poking and prodding. I checked her diaper. Examined her for bed sores. Tickled her feet and pinched her arm, hoping to provoke some kind of response.
“You know, Mom, you’re only supposed to sleep for one-third of your life. You’re using up your allotment here.”
After a pillow fluff and a kiss on the cheek, my attention drifted and I wondered if Tony was still here. A kind, good-looking, single man my age was a rarity.
How hard could it be to ask a guy out for a cup of coffee? What’s the worst that can happen? He tells me no? On several different occasions, men have tried to kill me. Getting rejected had to be easier than that.
“See you tomorrow, Mom.” I leaned down, whispered in her ear. “I think I’m gonna ask him out.”
I closed the door behind me, gently this time, and wandered down the hallway.
Tony had left his door open, and when I poked my head in I saw him holding his father close, his face buried in the older man’s chest.
He was sobbing. Great heaving sobs that shook his whole body.
Before I could back away, he noticed me, his face a mask of rage and tears.
“Leave me alone, for crissakes!”
“I . . . uh . . . sorry.”
I backpedaled, not able to get to the elevator quick enough.
In the car ride home I second, third, and fourth-guessed myself. My conclusion: A coma clinic isn’t a smart place to pick up men.
I lived in an apartment in Wrigleyville, a stone’s throw from where the Cubs played. The rent was outrageous and the neighborhood younger than me by two decades. I parked next to a hydrant on the street and lugged the evidence bag up the stairs and to my door.
After disarming the alarm, I went into my kitchen and discovered the cat had been playing his favorite game—toss the kitty litter out of the litter box.
I hated that game, but preferred it to his second-favorite, crap on Jack’s bed.
I decided to leave the mess until tomorrow. There was a lump of solidifying cat food in the bowl, and I couldn’t remember if it was from this morning or yesterday. I scraped it into the garbage a
nd opened a fresh can.
Mr. Friskers leaped onto the counter upon hearing the can opener.
“You don’t greet me when I come home, but you come running when I give you food.”
He didn’t reply. I dumped the food into his dish and he sauntered over and sniffed it. Then he looked at me, his face the picture of utter disappointment.
“How about a thank-you?”
The cat ate without thanking me.
I plodded into the bedroom, took off my outfit and judged it unsmelly enough to hang up, and washed off my makeup in the bathroom sink. I followed that up with a careful mirror examination of my face, studying the wrinkles and deciding I needed nothing short of spackle to fill them in. My roots were showing too. No wonder Tony wanted me to get away from him.
After dunking my head into a bucket of Oil of Olay, I put on one of Latham’s old T-shirts and crawled into bed.
Latham was my ex-boyfriend. I loved him, but messed up the relationship by being me.
I reached across my blanket for the remote, and made an unpleasant discovery: Mr. Friskers had indulged in his second-favorite game after all.
“Dammit, cat!”
I curbed a desire to toss him out the window, a desire I often had but never seriously considered because Mom loved the damn cat. Ten minutes later I’d cleaned up Mr. Friskers’s gift, microwaved a chicken parm Lean Cuisine for myself, and got under the covers to watch TV.
The videotapes from the Kork case called to me from their bag.
I ignored them, sticking with sitcom reruns and zany late-night talk show antics. But the jokes weren’t funny, and my mind wouldn’t let me relax. I brought those tapes home to watch them. And I only had forty-eight hours to find some kind of lead.
But I didn’t want to watch videos of people being tortured to death.
But this was my job.
But they might not even help the case.
But they might.
But, but, but.
Finally, when the only thing on was infomercials and pay-per-view porn, I crawled out of bed and went for the Jewel bag.
I told myself I could handle it. I told myself that the people on those tapes had been dead a long time. They were beyond my control. They weren’t in pain anymore. I was strong. I could handle it.
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