The Sleep Police

by Jay Bonansinga

  Deets nodded. “Next few days, we’ll be canvassing local titty bars and brothels, working the IR files, reaching out to the boys in the crime lab—”

  Krim raised a hand to cut him off. “You think the perp is an organized type?”

  Deets nodded. “Yessir, I do. The condition of the body—I mean, assuming all that posing crap is post mortem—this guy needed a lot of time and privacy.”

  “You think he was making some kind of point?”

  “Yeah, I do. It’s the same kinda deal back in the Nineteenth ten years ago, same kinda signature.”

  Armanetti sighed. “This is starting to sound like a ‘G’ type of thing to me.”

  “Boss, we don’t have to hand this thing over to the Feds.”

  “Sully, I’m sorry, really, I am, but we just don’t have the resources—”

  “Look, Boss. I know what you’re thinkin. But all due respect, Frank and I got everything we need to interface with VICAP. We got the COMPSTAT software, and we can link up with the National Latent Print Index. I think we ought to at least be the primaries on this thing while we’re still red line.”

  There was another pause.

  Deets waited as Armanetti and Krimm exchanged a glance.

  At last Krimm looked at and Deets and said, “Where the hell is Janus, anyway?”

  Deets took a deep breath before answering.

  It was a good question, on many different levels.

  Where was Frank Janus?

  The air inside Casa de la Buen Provecho was so ripe with the odors of cumin and smoke, it seemed to cling to Frank’s skin as he entered. The nominal light was coming from the flickering table candles and small spots shining through multi-colored fabric. And there was a Flamenco guitarist way in the back, but the room was so narrow, nobody but the closest couple of booths could hear him.

  Frank saw a skinny young man in a denim shirt standing up in back, waving Frank over.

  Frank fought his way over to Kyle’s table. “How you doing, Boomer?” Frank said.

  “Famished, what does it look like?”

  The two men embraced. Kyle was the first to let go, an awkward little moment because Frank wasn’t ready yet. He kept hugging the younger man tightly, desperately, eyes closed, soaking in the familiar warmth and patchouli smell of his baby brother. Finally Frank let go and slid into the tattered booth across from his brother.

  “What a day,” Frank said, signaling for a waiter.

  “I’m on my third bowl of tortilla chips,” Kyle said, feigning exasperation. “The waiter’s getting suspicious I might have a tapeworm.”

  “Sorry I’m late,” Frank said.

  “You okay, Francis?”

  “Never better, don’t worry about me,” Frank said unconvincingly. The waiter came, and Frank ordered a non-alcoholic beer.

  When the waiter was gone, Kyle said, “NA beer? Aren’t you homicide detectives supposed to be heavy drinkers?”

  “I’m partial to the hard drugs myself,” Frank said, then pointed at his brother’s left ear. “The extra earring’s are a nice touch.”

  “You like ‘em?” Kyle brushed his fingertip across the row of delicate little silver rings pierced through the outer edge of his ear. A slender, pale, bookish young man in his early thirties with a mousey beard, Kyle Janus had Frank’s dark, curly hair, and he wore it long, tied back in a ponytail. Behind his wire-rimmed glasses were the eyes of a brilliant, wounded soul. “Multiple earrings are de rigueur with the teaching assistants nowadays,” he added with a little grin.

  Frank grinned back at him. “You’re gonna need more than that to get laid on an assistant professor’s salary.”

  “My brother, the Philistine,” Kyle muttered under his breath.

  “What happens if I pull on them?” Frank said, pretending to grab at the earrings. “Does your nose fall off?”

  Kyle shoved him away, and they wrestled for a moment. They were laughing all of a sudden like they were in grade school again, and people were watching them, then the waiter came and the Janus boys quieted down. Frank ordered a taco salad. Kyle ordered a combination plate. Both men paid close attention to the prices. Finally the waiter left, and Kyle got serious.

  “So what kind of abomination-of-nature have you guys been cleaning up lately?”

  “Oh, you know, the usual,” Frank said. “Society’s flotsam and jetsam, you know.”

  There was a pause, as Kyle Janus regarded his older brother. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine—why?—I’m doing great.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, Boomer, I’m sure, you can stop worrying about me,” Frank said with a stiff smile. The image flickered suddenly in his midbrain: a marble-fleshed corpse curled in the fetal position. His stomach clenched.

  Kyle plucked a chip from the basket and chewed it gloomily, gazing off toward the smoky end of the restaurant.

  Frank watched his brother. “What’s the matter, Boomer?”

  Kyle looked at Frank. “I got a call from Dr. Hemphill today.”

  Frank bristled at the name.

  Dr. Gloria Hemphill was the administrator at the Clarendon Psychiatric Hospital where Helen Janus was currently being warehoused. Since 1989, Helen had been a patient at Clarendon after serving out her time for voluntary manslaughter at Cook County. For a while, Clarendon had seemed a humane answer to Helen’s needs. She was allowed to work in the gardens, and she was allowed contact with other patients, and she was treated with dignity. But then Hemphill had taken over the directorship, and the woman had proven to be a fascist disciplinarian. The doctor had not taken kindly to Helen Janus’s quirks. Social hours were cut, medication was increased, and Helen started to decline.

  “What’s the problem this time?” Frank said. “Mom’s pilfering toilet paper again?”

  “She’s deteriorating, Francis,” Kyle said flatly, staring at the chips as though they were dead rats.

  “What do you mean—deteriorating?”

  “She’s psychotic again, and this time they think it’s complicated by Alzheimer’s.”

  Frank swallowed hard. “The combination platter.”

  “She’s in a bad way, Francis.”

  “What did Nurse Wretched say?”

  “Hemphill wants to move her.”

  “Move her where?”

  Kyle stared at the chips. “God only knows—some kind of nursing home for vegetables.”

  There was a long pause, as Frank thought about it, the delicate sound of Flamenco guitar warbling out over the din of voices and steaming skillets of shrimp fajitas. The smell of death on Frank’s linen jacket.

  “Okay, well, we’re not gonna do that,” Frank said, nodding to no one in particular.

  “Francis, we don’t have a—”

  “No, no, no... we’re not gonna do that,” Frank said again. “We’re not.”

  “Francis, do we have a choice—?”

  “We’re not going to put her in some hellhole,” Frank said. His voice was raw. His eyes burning.

  Kyle stared at him.

  The Flamenco guitarist strummed.

  “We’re not,” Frank murmured, then picked up a plastic straw from the water glass and started chewing on it.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  2:30 am.

  Another sleepless night.

  A single library lamp on a cheap desk, thin ghosts of cigarette smoke curling upward, a tumbler of tepid milk nearby. Frank in his boxer shorts, hunched at his computer.

  The apartment was a typical shotgun bungalow on Chicago’s north side—the best Frank could do on his 50K salary after his divorce from Chloe. And right now Frank was in his cluttered living room, his dark-rimmed eyes locked on the home page of the VICAP website. VICAP stands for Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, and it’s operated by the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime just outside of Washington DC. VICAP is the largest single source for tracking unsolved homicides.

  An FBI insignia flashed at the top of the scre
en.

  Frank clicked through the police message boards, entered a brief description of the thumb sucker signature, and told the index to search for matches in the Great Lakes area. A moment later, a window appeared informing Frank there were only two Special Circumstances files available with similar signatures. One was dated 8-12-00—today—and the other was 2-16-90.

  Both files were CPD.

  Frank sighed and lit another cigarette. It looked as though Deets had been busy today, filing the latest thumb sucker on all the databases. Frank opened the SC file dated 1990, and all the pertinent forensics from that first thumb sucker case blinked on screen. Frank scanned the luminous blue lines of text, and for an instant he was cast back to that desolate, litter-strewn alley off Wacker Drive. It had been midwinter, and the pavement had been black ice, and the girl’s body had been tucked behind the Dumpster. Her porcelain face was serene and empty.

  Dead, cold lips closed around a slender thumb.

  Frank picked up his milk and spilled a little bit on the keyboard. Was he shaking again? Re-experiencing? He wiped the keyboard with his shirttail, set the milk down and took a nervous drag off his cigarette.

  The warm milk was one of the countless insomnia remedies he had tried over the years. He had also tried ripe bananas, cold turkey, melatonin, valerian root, white noise generators, and even bizarre folk remedies like putting an onion in a jar and sniffing it at bedtime. Nothing worked. Even the heavy tranquilizers were a wash—Frank would simply wake up in the middle of the night with a raging headache. Over the years, Frank had seen a slew of specialists, and had been diagnosed with a mouthful of maladies, including parasomnia (sever insomnia), mild episodes of somnambulation (sleepwalking), frequent pavor nocturnus (night terrors) and daytime transitory syncopal attacks (brief fainting spells or blackouts). But nobody seemed to be able to help him get a good night’s sleep.

  Frank reached over and flipped his printer on.

  Then he printed the links that had come in over the last few months.

  He closed the VICAP site and went on to other sites. He checked the National Crime Information Center, then punched into the Illinois Bureau of Investigation website, then took a look at the Violent Crimes Linkage Analysis System. He didn’t find much. He went into the search engine—a phrase that Frank had always relished, feeling like a search engine himself from time to time—and the screen flickered for a moment. Then an unusual window came on his screen.

  Frank blinked.

  At first, Frank thought the computer must have crashed. iMacs were notorious for crashing and freezing, and Frank’s computer had certainly experienced its share of glitches. But this was no warning window. This was different. A two-by-three inch square box in the center of the screen with yellow borders and black-on-white type inside it.

  The type style was simple Geneva, a common font for most Macs:

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

  Staring at the screen, his eyes watering, his brain fuzzy and his mouth dry from the medication, Frank was frozen in his chair for a moment.

  The announcement had come out of nowhere, like an annoying pop-up advertisement or “buddy” message... but that was impossible. Frank had customized his e-mail and search engine to block all unsolicited incoming ads and junk mail. Besides, this thing was meant specifically for Frank.

  “Okay, Deets, hardy-har-har, you can stop goofing around,” Frank grumbled at the computer, his body relaxing slightly as he realized it must be a gag. A bad joke. Deets must have been trying to cheer him up.

  He pressed the escape button and nothing happened. All at once, Frank remembered how inept Sully Deets was with computers. The big man would never be able to engineer a surprise message over the Web. In fact, Frank wasn’t even sure it was possible to send a message window through the Internet to a single terminal. He pressed the delete button.

  The message stayed on his screen, the words trumpeting in his brain:

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

  Suddenly Frank was shaking again, his heart starting to pump a little faster. What if this was some kind of message from the perp himself? What if this guy was a player, a smart ass, a goof like Son of Sam or the Zodiac killer? What if the perp were initiating some kind of communication with Frank, making the first move in a bizarre game of chess?

  Frank’s skin tingled on the back of his arms as he stared at the luminous message.

  Out in the kitchen, a sudden noise.

  Frank jumped.

  He spun around and glanced over his shoulder at the swinging saloon doors leading out into his little kitchenette. It was dark in there. Once in a while, on hot nights, when the AC was running hard, the old linoleum would crackle. But Frank wasn’t sure if that’s what he had heard. It had been a faint creaking noise, as though something had shifted its weight out there.

  And that’s when the panic and the realization washed over Frank all at once. The noise in the kitchen... the unexpected message on his computer... the luminous window that could have only been generated from his own keyboard! Somebody was inside his apartment, fucking with his iMac.

  Somebody familiar with the thumb sucker files.

  Frank snapped off the light and dropped to the floor immediately.

  He crawled as silently and quickly as possible across the dark living room. His head was throbbing, full of cotton from the Dalmane, but the panic was piercing the fuzz like a sharpened knife. His heart was racing. The rug burned his knees, but he didn’t feel it.

  He was focused on getting to his bedroom.

  His service weapon was hanging on the hat stand next to his closet, still tucked in its braided black leather holster. Frank sprang to his feet and raced over to the gun, yanking it out of the sheath and quickly checking the cylinder. Then he swallowed the fear and slid back out the door.

  He gripped the revolver in classic police “tripod” stance, and scanned the living room.

  Nothing there.

  He listened for the cracking sound out in the kitchenette, trying not to make a sound as he backed along the wall toward the swinging doors. His heart was beating so loudly he wondered if the intruder could hear it. His hands were white-knuckle tight around the handgun. It was a Charter Arms Bulldog, a .44 Special designed for maximum punch. Six-inch barrel. Five rounds of modified hollowpoints.

  Some cops call the Bulldog the Paranoid Special, because it’s the maximum-sized side arm that a city policeman is allowed to carry. But Frank didn’t care what they called it. He just needed the peace of mind.

  He shoved the swinging doors open and pointed the Bulldog at the empty kitchen.

  Even in the gloom it was clear that there was nobody lurking in there.

  Frank let out a pained sigh of relief.

  He spent the next ten minutes searching the rest of the apartment with his gun raised and ready. He looked in the bathroom, behind the shower curtain and in the linen closet. He looked under his bed, in his closet, and behind the bookshelves. He looked in the pantry and in the living room behind the video cabinet.

  He even looked in the main corridor.

  There was nobody there.

  Finally Frank went back to his computer, printed the message window and saved it on a disk. He shut the computer off and sat down on the sofa.

  He stared at the printout for a long time. He lit a cigarette and stared at it some more. He found a plastic straw in his pencil holder, and he started chewing on it, but no matter how hard he tried, he could not tear his gaze from that unexpected message:

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

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dawn came to Rogers Park on a whisper of hot lake breezes. The threads of brilliant sunlight spindled down through the high tension wires and elm trees, and the smell of garbage promised another blast furnace of a day. Early morning traffic mingled with the ubiquitous buzz of cicadas.

  Frank arrive
d at the 24th well before the third shift had knocked off. He was greeted in the coffee room by the night crew—Detectives Bozelli and Jeffers—and the three men stood around for a while, chatting idly about the thumb sucker, commiserating over the new union steward and the lousy HMO plan. Frank did his best to hide his trembling. Freshly showered and shaved, dressed in his crisp new Armani jacket, he felt a little better now that he was at work, and even though he was running on zero sleep—and was still rattled by the mysterious message on his iMac—he was anxious to get back on the case.

  The medical examiner’s report was sitting on Frank’s desk blotter when he sat down.

  He opened the report and scanned the findings.

  No ID yet on the second thumb sucker. Time of death was estimated at sixty to sixty five hours, which meant the girl had been killed on Sunday morning, sometime between 2:00 AM and 5:00 AM. There were bits of undigested tortilla in her stomach. Lividity in the upper body cavity indicated that she had been moved post mortem. Elevated serotonin levels suggested that she had died from blood loss. Official cause of death: massive hemorrhaging due to a sharp force trauma to the abdomen.

  Frank lit a cigarette and thought about the nut job who did this.

  You need time. Don’t you? You need privacy. You need a cozy place to be alone with your toys. Don’t you? Everything has to be just right...

  Frank looked back at the report.

  High histamine levels indicated that the victim was conscious when she died. Usually an indication of struggle or torture. Tests confirmed that she had high levels of the sedative pentobarbital in her bloodstream. Probably to keep her manageable. There were defensive wounds across the palms of her hands, and there were minor, unexplained lesions across the platysma muscle of her neck, although there were no signs of strangulation. A cadaveric spasm at the time of death explained the retention of the “pose.”

  Frank looked across the squad room. The morning shift was starting to filter in. A couple of secretaries, a tactical officer picking up his radio gear. Frank took a drag off his cigarette and thought of the strange message flickering on his iMac. He knew he should report the message right away, put it in his GPR and tell Deets about, maybe get the tech guys to look at his computer. But something told him to wait, keep it to himself for the time being. Was it hubris? Did he think that the message was going to help him solve the case?