The Shining Girls

Kirby ^{2 AUGUST 1992}

Dan and Kirby walk up the driveway past the neatly clipped lawn, which sports a yard sign: ‘Vote Bill Clinton’. Rachel used to put up signs for all of the political parties, just to be difficult. She also used to tell campaigners that she was voting for the lunatic fringe. But when she busted Kirby making prank calls to an old lady, convincing her to wrap all her appliances in tinfoil to stop the radiation from the satellites penetrating the house, she told her to stop being childish.

There is the muffled sound of kids shouting inside the house. It could do with a fresh lick of paint, but there are orange geraniums in flowerpots on the porch. Detective Michael Williams’s widow opens the door, smiling but harried.

‘Hi, sorry, the boys…’ There is a scream behind her.

‘Moo-ooom! He’s using hot water.’

‘Excuse me one second.’ She disappears into the house and comes back, hauling two kids with water pistols by the arms. Six or seven, Kirby’s not great at judging children’s ages. ‘Say hello, boys.’

‘’Lo,’ they mutter, staring at their feet, although the younger one sneaks a look up at her through crazily long lashes, which makes Kirby glad she wore a neck scarf today.

‘Good enough. Outside, please, thank you. And use the garden hose.’ Their mother thrusts them into the yard. They gain momentum like loosed missiles, whooping and hollering.

‘Come in. I just made ice tea. You must be Kirby? I’m Charmaine Williams.’ They shake hands.

‘Thanks for this,’ Kirby starts, as Charmaine leads them into a house as neatly kept up as the garden. It’s an act of defiance, Kirby thinks. Because this is the problem with death, be it murder or heart attacks or car accidents: life continues.

‘Oh, I don’t know if it will be any use, but it’s lying around taking up space, and the guys at the station don’t want it. You’re doing me a favor, honestly. The boys will be glad to have their own rooms.’

She opens the door onto a small study with a window overlooking the alley behind the house. It’s been colonized by cardboard boxes that creep across the floor and pile up against the walls. Opposite the window is a felt bulletin board pinned with family photos and a Bulls pennant and a blue ribbon for Chicago PD Bowling League Championships 1988 and a collection of old lottery tickets framing the edge; a bad-luck border.

‘Played his badge number?’ Dan says, examining the board. He does not comment on the photograph of the dead man lying sprawled in a flowerbed with his arms thrown out like Christ, or the Polaroid of a bag of housebreaking tools, or the Tribune article ‘Prostitute Found Dead’ that are pinned up, disturbingly, among the happy domestic memorabilia.

‘You know it,’ Charmaine says, frowning at the desk, a K-Mart kit job, which is barely visible underneath the spread of papers, and specifically at the striped coffee mug that’s grown a fine fuzz of mould in the bottom.

‘I’ll just get you that iced tea,’ she says, sweeping up the mug.

‘This is weird,’ Kirby says, looking around the room at the painfully exposed detritus of investigations past. ‘It feels haunted.’ She picks up a glass paperweight with a hologram of a soaring eagle and puts it down again. ‘I guess it is.’

‘You said you wanted access. This is access. Mike investigated a lot of femicides and he kept all his old case notes.’

‘Don’t they normally go into evidence?’

‘The critical investigative stuff does: the bloody knife, witness testimony. It’s like math, you have to show all your workings, but there’s a lot of messing around before you get there; interviews that don’t seem to go anywhere, evidence that seems irrelevant at the time.’

‘You’re killing whatever remaining faith I had left in the justice system, Dan.’

‘Mike was one of the cops campaigning to get the system changed. To force detectives to file absolutely everything. There was a lot he thought needed revamping in the police department.’

‘Harrison told me about your torture investigation.’

‘Big mouth. Yeah, this guy Mike was the whistleblower on that until they started threatening Charmaine and the boys. I don’t blame him for backing down. He took a transfer to Niles, stayed out of their way. But in the meantime he kept every piece of paper that crossed his desk from every murder he worked, and any others he could lay his hands on. There was a damp problem at one of the precincts. He rescued a lot of files, brought them here. Some of the stuff is impossible to identify. I think he had this idea that he was going to retire and sort through it and solve cold cases. Maybe write a book. Then the car crash.’

‘No foul play?’

‘It was a drunk driver. Hit him head-on, killed them both pretty much instantly. Sometimes bad shit happens. Anyway, he was a bit of a homicide hoarder, Mike. There’ll be stuff in here that you won’t find in the Sun-Times archives or at the library. Probably nothing. But you know, like you said. Wide net.’

‘Just call me Pandora,’ Kirby says, trying not to be daunted by the sheer number of boxes, every single one packed tight with grief. This would be the moment to call it quits.

Like hell.