J. Konrath - Dirty Martini

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.

I ran out of that office like it was on fire. It took me five steps before I got any control back, and luckily no one saw me. I wound up sitting on a boardroom table, tugging off my boots, dumping about ten live roaches onto the floor. And a few dead ones, that I’d squished underfoot.

Yuck. Yuck yuck yuck yuck.

“At least they weren’t bees,” I said, my voice a wee bit higher than normal.

My white cotton socks, covered with roach guts, went into the garbage.

It took courage I didn’t know I had to put those boots back on, and then I flagged down one of the jumpsuited exterminators-one who looked a lot like Bill Murray in Ghostbusters -and gave him directions to my office.

“Kill them,” I said. “Kill them all.”

“That’s why we’re here, ma’am.”

He walked past, but I grabbed his elbow.

“Do, um, cockroaches carry any kind of disease?”

He scratched at his stubble. “They aren’t the cleanest. Like to eat spoiled food, and excrement. Tough little buggers too. A roach can survive a few weeks with his head cut off. Eventually starves to death. Can live if you flush them down the toilet. Can even survive radiation equivalent to a thermonuclear explosion. But they don’t carry any germs harmful to humans.”

“Thanks.”

“No problem. And hold still, you got one in your hair.”

I clenched my teeth as he reached up to my scalp and pinched a roach between his bare fingers.

“Thanks again,” I said, forcing on a smile.

“Ah, there’s another one. Hold on.”

I forced myself to stay still.

“Just a sec… little fella crawled around the other side.”

Bill Murray walked behind me, rooting through my hair like he was giving me a hot oil treatment.

“Looks like you got a few in here. Maybe they’re having a party.”

And that was the straw that broke me. I ran squealing to the bathroom, leaned over the sink, and gave my scalp to the tepid spray. I got water up my nose, started to choke, but kept my head under, running my fingers through my hair over and over until I was sure every last bug was out.

Then I squeezed out the excess water, tried not to stare at the five bugs trying to crawl out of the slippery porcelain sink, and positioned myself awkwardly under the push-button hand dryer.

The air was hot and strong, but it took twelve button presses before I’d dried my head and jacket.

I checked the mirror. My expensive makeup hadn’t washed off, and my hair had lost the poofiness and actually looked pretty good.

I wasn’t going to go back into my office until I was sure it had been fumigated, sterilized, and hermetically sealed, so I took the stairs down to Records.

Chicago had twenty-six Police Districts, divided into four Areas. Each District housed their duplicate reports at a single Records facility in their Area. My District had that honor for my Area. Alger had worked the two-four, making him part of my Area, which meant copies of his files would be kept in my building.

Every year, we griped about digitizing the files and putting them in a database. And every year, we were told that there was no money for it. So even in this enlightened technological age, the CPD was still killing trees.

Records was an expansive, open room with floor-to-ceiling shelves. The shelves held document boxes labeled according to case numbers, which were divided by District and in semi-chronological order.

The cop running Records was a portly woman named Martel Sardina who’d worked here for six years and didn’t know where a damn thing was. It took a special talent to learn absolutely nothing about your job in that amount of time. I asked Sardina about it once, and her reply was jovial.

“I like it here. It’s quiet. I can read magazines. Records is considered scut-work, a stepping-stone to other positions. If I did a good job, I’d be promoted out of here. So I don’t do a damn thing.”