The Shining Girls

Dan ^{13 JUNE 1993}

Dan loses sight of her somewhere on Randolph. His mind a knot of panic, he made it through the traffic, setting off another round of enraged hooting, but he just couldn’t keep up. He leans on one of the green trash cans, from the Chicago of yesteryear, like the streetlights with their gaslamp bulbs that look like inflated condoms. He’s panting. He has a stitch clawing into his ribs and it feels like Dolph fucking Lundgren has delivered a round-house kick to his chest. A train goes rattling overhead, the vibration practically shaking his fillings loose.

If Kirby was here, she isn’t now.

He takes a wild guess and walks over to Michigan, holding his side, breathing between his teeth. Pathetic. He is sick with panic and rage. He thinks about her lying dead in an alleyway somewhere behind a pile of trash. Probably passed right by her. They’ll never catch the guy. What this city needs is cameras on every corner like a gas station.

Please God, he’ll get in shape. He’ll eat vegetables. He’ll go to Mass and confession and visit his mother’s grave. No more cigarettes on the sly. Just let Kirby be okay. Is that so much to ask, really, in the scheme of things?

Back at the Sun-Times, the cops have still not arrived. Chetty is in a fit of pique, trying to explain what’s going on to Harrison. Richie comes in, pale and freaked out, to tell them that a girl was murdered this morning. Stabbed in a pharmaceutical lab on the West Side. Looks like the same MO. Worse. The details are even more gruesome. And a woman from the dead junkie girl’s support meetings has come forward to identify a man with a limp who was asking about her.

No one quite knows how to take it, Dan realizes. That maybe she was fucking right about the guy all along. He can’t believe that pendejo’s balls, walking in here and asking for her.

He goes to the electronics shop down the road and buys a beeper pager. Pink, because it’s the window-display model and it’s ready to go. He heads back to Chet and gives him the number and strict instructions to page him on it if they hear anything. Particularly from Kirby. He clamps down on the worry. As long as he keeps doing things, he won’t feel it.

He goes to fetch his car and get something from his house. Then he drives to Wicker Park and breaks into her flat.

It’s even messier than it was before. Her entire wardrobe seems to have migrated into the living room, draped across the furniture. He averts his eyes from a pair of red briefs, inside out on the back of a chair.

She’s been playing at being a proper detective, he sees. The contents of the evidence boxes are scattered all over the place. There’s a map of the city blu-tacked to the broom closet. Every stabbing femicide for the last twenty years is marked on it with a red dot.

There are a lot of dots.

He flips open the file on the jerry-rigged trestle table. It’s full of typed transcripts, neatly numbered and dated and clipped to the original news articles. Murder victims’ families, he realizes. Scores of people she’s tracked down and interviewed. I’ve been doing this all year, she’d said. No kidding.

He sinks heavily onto the painted stool, flipping through the testimonies.