The Sleep Police Read online

  The uniforms barely noticed him leaving.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Stress Management is in the lower level of Area Six headquarters at the corner of Belmont and Western.

  Frank arrived a few minutes before 4:00 and took the main elevator down, his stomach cramping from too many cups of coffee and too little food. He had tried to eat lunch before his appointment, but he had no appetite. He was a bundle of nerves.

  The basement level was a recent addition to the headquarters building. A maze of newly carpeted cubicles and private offices, the area was used mostly for administrative purposes, the archiving of crime data and old police business. Inverted lighting gave the corridor a corporate feel, and contemporary Muzak—what the wags nowadays are calling Lite Adult Rock—hummed through speakers embedded in the ceiling. The cool air smelled of new fabric and copy machine toner. Neighborhood Relations had an office down here, as well as Internal Affairs.

  At the end of the corridor, a glass door was marked STRESS MANAGEMENT COORDINATOR. Frank entered the modest waiting room and gave his name to a sober looking woman sitting behind a desk. The woman told Frank that the doctor would be with him in a moment. Frank thanked her, took a seat and started chewing compulsively on his drinking straw, tearing it to shreds.

  Five minutes later, Frank was sitting in Dr. Henry Pope’s tiny office, trying to articulate his feelings.

  “Tell you the truth, Doc, it’s just like last time.”

  “Dizziness? Shaking?”

  “Yep.”

  “Tightness in the chest, shortness of breath?”

  “You got it.”

  “Thoughts racing? Worried that you’re losing your grip, losing your mind?”

  “That’s about it,” Frank said, fidgeting in the Steelcase armchair. The shrink’s office was three hundred square feet of folksy clutter. From the bulletin boards plastered with positive-messages, family snapshots, and grandchildren’s artwork, to the bookshelves crammed with new age tomes and little figurines urging onlookers to ‘Hang in there!’ and ‘Keep your chin up!’

  Ten years ago, Frank had sat in this same office, agonizing over the same kinds of horrors, the same feelings. The shame, the depression, the dread. Ten years. And now Frank was back looking at the same fingerpaint portraits of Barney the Dinosaur, going over the same awful territory.

  The doctor looked up at Frank. “And you’re convinced these feelings were triggered by the scene itself?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What I mean is, you’re thinking it was because of the MO? The link to the last one?”

  Frank shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose—I don’t know—probably.”

  “Any possibility it was because of the memories, the way you felt back in District Nineteen?”

  Frank looked at the old man. “What do you mean?”

  “What I mean is, in most cases of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, there are triggers, and these triggers bring back all these bad feelings—we call it re-experiencing—”

  “Look, Doc, I understand what you’re saying.” Frank was sitting forward in his chair. “But when I was back in the Nineteenth, and I saw that first vic—the one with the thumb in her mouth—we never established that I had PTSD afterward. I mean, there was never an official diagnosis.”

  “You’re right, Frank, I’m sorry.” The doctor wrote something in a manila file folder on his desk. A lanky man in his late sixties with thinning salt-and-pepper hair, Henry Pope wore tortoiseshell reading glasses low on his nose, glancing over them once in a while when something caught his interest. He had a bushy gray goatee and everything about him was stooped: his shoulders, the way he shuffled when he walked, even his kindly hound-dog face. He looked like an Old World artisan worn down by life—like an old European toy maker nearing retirement.

  On the wall behind his desk were framed diplomas and certificates, and even a patrolman’s star mounted on a plaque. Back in the seventies, before he got his Ph.D., Henry Pope had been a beat cop for a year and a half in Sacramento. Which was probably why the cops liked him so much. He had been one of them. He had ridden alongside them in patrol cars, he had shared their Code-7s, he had covered their backs.

  Finally Frank spoke up: “I’m not saying you’re wrong—about the feelings—I’m just saying, it’s not like I went to Vietnam.”

  The psychiatrist sighed. “I don’t know, Frank. You guys in the Violent Crimes Division—you see things. The rest of us would curl up and die.”

  “It’s not as bad as you think.”

  “But it’s pretty bad sometimes—right?”

  Frank shrugged again. “The honest truth is, it’s part of the job. I don’t have to tell you that.”

  “You’re right about that, Frank,” said the doctor, then wrote something else in the folder. While he was writing, he said, “How about your insomnia? How’s the quality of your sleep lately?”

  Frank had to smile despite his frayed nerves. “Sleep? That’s where people lie on soft things and close their eyes and have pleasant dreams, right?”

  Pope looked up. “Still pretty bad?”

  “Bad isn’t the word.”

  “You still taking the Restorill?”

  “Sometimes,” Frank said. “When the going’s especially rough.”

  “How often is that?”

  “I don’t know—every other night or so.”

  “And the blackouts? Have you had any recently?”

  Frank swallowed hard. “Not for a while. It happens usually when I’m running on no sleep whatsoever. Last year, I went through a fairly rough stretch where I was blacking out every few weeks, but never at work, thank God.”

  The doctor scribbled in his folder. “What about the nightmares?”

  “Once in a while, you know,” Frank said.

  “Crime scene stuff?”

  “Yeah, you know.”

  The doctor looked at the file for a moment. “How about the noctambulation?”

  “The what?”

  “Sleepwalking. Night dazes. There was the episode with your wife—?”

  “Ex-wife.”

  The doctor raised his hands apologetically. “Sorry. Your ex-wife. How are you doing with that?”

  Frank looked at the doctor. “You mean the divorce?”

  “Sure... and the whole sleepwalking incident. I remember you were devastated by the whole experience.”

  Frank sighed. “It’s all ancient history, really.” He paused and thought about it for a second.

  Even after all this time, it was still incomprehensible to him that he would physically assault his wife—even if it was during a sort of middle-of-the-night fugue state, as she had claimed in the divorce proceedings. Throughout his adult life, Frank had occasionally had problems with sleepwalking. Every few months he would wake up in an unexpected room, or be startled awake, drenched in sweat, wearing an inexplicable article of clothing that he couldn’t remember putting on. But he would never strike his wife. Never.

  “I guess I’ve put it behind me,” Frank said at last. “Chloe and I rarely talk.”

  The doctor nodded, then glanced back down at the file. “It’s been a few years, Frank, but I remember some stuff about your mother.”

  “My mom?”

  The doctor looked up at him. “There were dreams that disturbed you, haunted you?”

  Frank shrugged. “Yeah, you know. Once in a while I dream about my mom. I’m like most people, I guess.”

  “We never really got into that last time.”

  Frank looked at his shoes and managed a wan smile. “I guess we didn’t.”

  The psychiatrist looked over the top of his bifocals. “What’s funny? Something about your mother?”

  Frank grinned. “I’m sorry, Doc, it’s just, every time you start talking about my mom I get worried we’re gonna start discussing Greek mythology.”

  Henry Pope took off his glasses and laughed heartily, rubbing his pouchy eyes. “Don’t worry, Frank. Oedipus went out of style around here a l
ong time ago.”

  “That’s a relief,” Frank said, his smile fading. He glanced down at his jacket sleeve and saw a smudge of fresh ash from the cigarette he had smoked before the session. He rubbed at the stubborn spot. Frank hated stains on his expensive work clothes, and he hated loose ends on the job. And most of all, he hated talking about his mother. As long as Frank could remember, his mother had been one big loose end. Morbidly obese, diagnosed as a mild schizophrenic, Helen Janus had been institutionalized at the Cook County Psychiatric Facility since Frank was a boy, and Frank had never really figured out how to talk about her. Even when Frank was having his initial troubles with the thumb sucker case back when he was a young, green detective in the Nineteenth—and Dr. Pope had tried to explore Frank’s relationship with his mom—Frank had refused to go there.

  “Mind if I have a cigarette?” Frank said finally, reaching for his pack of Marlboros and rooting one out.

  The doctor said it was no problem, reached into his top drawer, pulled out an ashtray, and shoved it across the cluttered desk.

  “Not that I have anything against Freud,” Frank said, fishing in his pocket for his Zippo. He brought the lighter up to his mouth and realized that his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t hold the lighter steady enough to spark the cigarette. The doctor saw this, and without a word he reached over and held it steady for Frank. Frank nodded a thank you, lit the cigarette and blew smoke up at the ceiling. At last Frank said, “The problem is—all due respect to the field of psychology—I just don’t believe you can trace a person’s behavior back to the time they fell off their tricycle.”

  The psychiatrist was looking at his file. “Let me ask you something, Frank, and if you don’t want to get into this, just say so.”

  “You’re the doctor, go ahead.”

  “How old were you when your mother—well—when she took the Pollock gentleman’s life?”

  Frank took a drag and blew smoke. “I was—what?—I was ten.”

  “And how old was your mom?”

  Frank swallowed a nervous lump. “She was thirty-seven.”

  “And what are you now, Frank?—thirty-six?”

  There was an anguished stretch of silence.

  “I’m thirty-seven.”

  Another beat of silence. Frank felt something turning inside him.

  He looked at the tiles on the floor and murmured, “I never even thought about that.”

  “Can you tell me something else, Frank?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Do you remember when your insomnia started?”

  Frank smoked his cigarette for a moment. “I don’t know—college, maybe?—no, probably high school.”

  “High school?”

  “Or maybe earlier, I don’t remember for sure.”

  “Could it have been around the time they took your mom away?”

  A long pause, as Frank smoked and thought about it. His eyes were burning. He could barely feel the tears welling. “My mom had a thing about sleep,” he said in a hushed tone.

  “You feel like talking about it, Frank?” the doctor said very softly, very gently.

  There was a long pause.

  “Frank?”

  The pause stretched. Frank was staring at his shoes, thinking about something his mother used to do.

  Pope took his glasses off. “Frank? Would you rather not talk about it?”

  Finally, Frank looked up at the doctor. “I guess I never told you about the sleep police... did I?”

  “The sleep police?”

  “It was something that my mom used to say to us.”

  “In what context?”

  Frank sighed painfully. “When my brother and I refused to go to sleep.”

  “Go on.”

  Frank cleared his throat. “My brother and I were inseparable when we were kids. We’d have these ongoing battles. Try to make each other crack up at mass, fart sounds under the sheets at night. You know how it is with kids. Always trying to make each other laugh.”

  “Sounds pretty normal to me,” Pope commented. “Especially under the circumstances.”

  “I’m sure it drove my mom even loonier than she already was, but for the most part she put up with it. Except at night. That’s when she couldn’t handle it. So she came up with this idea of the sleep police.”

  “Go on.”

  Frank took another drag off his cigarette. He was exhausted. Drained. Still shaking slightly. He exhaled a lungful of smoke and said, “She’d come into our room at the end of her rope. God bless her, she was never cross with us, never raised her voice—but she would very softly let us know that it was high time all good boys were asleep because the sleep police would be making their rounds soon.”

  “That’s all she said?”

  “No, see, at first, it was just kinda playful. She’d come in and tickle us, and we’d giggle, and she’d say, ‘Eeef you boys dohn’t be still, the sleep poleeese gonna come and meck you go to sleep forever and ever, jes like Snow White.’”

  “I see.”

  “But as we grew older, the sleep police got scarier somehow, meaner. I guess it was my mom getting sicker. I used to imagine what they looked like. The sleep police. Big broad shoulders, stone faces. They carried flashlights. But you couldn’t see their eyes under the bills of their hats. Something about it really got to me.”

  The doctor nodded. “I can imagine.”

  There was another long pause as the doctor consulted his notes, and Frank smoked. Finally Pope looked up and asked Frank about the way the bodies were posed, and whether there might be a significance to the fetal position and Frank’s childhood, and the two men talked about this for quite a while.

  Before long, it was time to call the emergency meeting to a close.

  “Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Pope said, writing something on a small ‘script pad on the edge of his desk blotter. “First, I’m going to give you a prescription for a sedative to help you avoid those sleep police, maybe get on a better sleep schedule.” He finished writing, tore off the page and handed it to Frank. “Then, we’re gonna meet on a regular basis for the next few weeks, and we’re gonna deal with these feelings. See if we can’t find you some tools to deal with the stress. Does that sound alright?”

  Frank sighed and snubbed out his cigarette. “That’s sounds fine, Doc.”

  “Valerie will work out the scheduling with you,” Dr. Pope said. Then he rose to his feet and extended a hand, making it obvious their emergency meeting was drawing to a close. Frank stood up and shook the old man’s grizzled hand.

  Psychiatrists are like talk show hosts. They can segue out of the most serious discussion, ushering one patient out and another in as though breaking for a commercial.

  Frank walked out of the office in a daze.

  Somewhere inside him, a seam was beginning to tear.

  CHAPTER THREE

  It was long past quitting time when Sully Deets finally went down to the sergeant’s office and knocked on the door.

  Armanetti’s voice: “It’s open.”

  Deets walked into a sterile little office dominated by a bay window view of Warren Park.

  “Whattya got, Sully?” Detective-Sergeant Stan Armanetti said from behind his huge walnut desk. A fiftyish man with graying temples, broad shoulders and a bushy mustache, Armanetti was Deets’s immediate supervisor.

  Deets tossed the two manila envelopes on the desk. “Jane Doe over in Little Pakistan.”

  “It’s late, Sully,” Armanetti said with a sigh, glancing across the office at Krimm, who was standing near the window, gazing out at the dying light. “Jerry’s got to get home to his garden.”

  “Possible serial case,” Deets said.

  This got Lieutenant Gerald Krimm’s attention. He turned and looked at Deets. “The ‘S’ word,” the lieutenant uttered softly, almost to himself.

  Deets nodded at the files. “MO looks a lot like an old cold case. It’s all in the GPR.”

  “How about giving us the
Cliffs notes—huh, Sully?” Armanetti said with a smile. The sergeant was a buddy-buddy type, a back-slapper who avoided controversy at all costs. Most of the cops in the 24th liked him well enough—as long as he stayed out of their faces.

  Deets ran down the facts for them: The Jane Doe had been murdered some time early in the morning on the 10th. Judging from her appearance—a tattoo above her left breast, cosmetic surgery scars, trimmed pubic hair and multiple piercings—she was involved in the sex business. In the parlance of lawyers, she was “high risk.” No husband, no boyfriend, no known next of kin. Not the type to be missed by anyone. But the most interesting part of the case was the similarity to the “thumb sucker” from District Nineteen ten years ago. That time, it had been a stripper from the Admiral Men’s Club who had been gutted like a Thanksgiving turkey and posed post mortem with her thumb stuck in her mouth.

  That case was still open, still as cold as the February turf at Soldier’s Field.

  “You contact media relations yet?” Krimm asked Deets.

  “We kept the scene closed until the M.E. was done, then we gave neighborhood media some bullshit story about a homeless woman croaking.”

  “How about the Feds?”

  “I sent the Special Circumstances file to VICAP and out to Great Lakes. There’s one in each of your folders. We’ll be contacting Birnbaum for the autopsy.”

  Armanetti spoke up. “Second and third shifts should get rundowns, Sully. They should get copies of everything.”

  “Sergeant, I’m wondering—”

  “What is it, Sully?”

  Deets chewed the inside of his cheek. Something was bothering him about this Pakistani Jane Doe. Maybe it was Frank’s reaction at the scene, or maybe it was something else. But for the moment, Deets was going by the numbers. At last he said, “In terms of the other shifts, I’m wondering if Janus and I could be primaries on this thing.”

  There was a pause. Lieutenant Krimm blinked. A thin and humorless man in his fifties, Krimm wore delicate little round glasses that had earned him the nickname “Egghead” from the patrol cops. He was hated by the rank and file. Right now he was studying Deets. “You’ve got a plan, I take it?”