Dirty Martini

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 co

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 Ly

So what was the Chemist’s co

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.