I punched at the darkness, my heart thudding in my eardrums. My feet felt like lead ingots were chained to my ankles as I tried to run. Then I tripped, cursing, and kicked out at the shadows, but didn’t connect with anything.
I rolled over and hugged my chest, my arms digging into my ribs. Protecting myself. I didn’t know what was after me. Or who. I just knew it was danger. Terror gripped my body, my brain. I fought to breathe.
Suddenly I was paralyzed. Nothing moved. I tried to kick, tried to roll, tried to untighten my arms around my body. Tried to open my fingers. Nothing worked. I was trapped.
Was I dead? I closed my eyes, then opened them, trying to pierce the gray shadows around me.
“Tom. Tom!”
Rachel kicked me. Gently, in her bare feet, but it was enough to force my eyes open. For real this time.
I looked up. Rachelk stood over me, in a T-shirt and panties, scowling. “It happened again.”
“Damn it.” I really was hugging my chest, lying on the living room floor, breathing hard. I unwrapped my arms and Rachel grabbed my hand, helping me sit up.
“What was it?” She crouched and put a hand on my chest as I caught my breath.
I shrugged. “The same. Something chasing me. Everything was dark. Then I couldn’t move. Or breathe. Then something was kicking me.” I nudged her foot with my toes.
“You wake me up at three in the morning and you’re lucky I didn’t put my boots on first.” She punched my shoulder. Lightly. It still ached from the knife wound I’d gotten two weeks ago.
“Thanks.” I squeezed her hand, and she helped me stand up. An arm around my shoulders, she led me to the bedroom.
“This is the third time this week.” Rachel sat on the edge of the bed, a three-quarter moon shining through the window behind her. “I can’t keep this up. I need my beauty sleep.” She stretched her arms.
“At least I didn’t climb on the kitchen table this time.” I sat next to her.
“Or try to unlock the door and run out into the hall in your boxers.”
“Good thing I had my boxers on.” But Rachel was right. We both needed our beauty sleep. Not that she needed anything to look hot and sexy, but lack of sleep made her irritated during the day. Which she took out on me.
I nodded. “I’ll call Dr. Neral in the morning. After my new client.”
“Good.” She kissed me. “Now bed. Sleep.”
“Right.” I stretched out and pulled the blankets up as Rachel slid in next to me. “Uh, if I can’t get to sleep right away . . .”
She groaned. “We tried that last night. Watch TV or something. No whiskey.”
“Yeah.” I closed my eyes and tried not to see a serial killer in the darkness.
“It’s my mom.” Ginny May was in her mid-thirties, with long dark hair in a ponytail, a short nose and large blue eyes slanted downward with worry. We were at a diner near my apartment the next morning.
“She, uh, disappeared. About a month ago.” She sipped her tea. “They found her purse and coat burning in a dumpster, and traces of her clothes. But they never found her. I’m sure she’s not dead.”
I nodded and sipped my coffee. “What makes you think that?”
She looked away. “I don’t—it’s just a feeling. I know it sounds crazy. But—they never figured out where she was, what happened to her. She just vanished. The last place she was at was a shopping mall. The police said it was maybe a serial killer?”
I flinched at the words “serial killer.” She didn’t notice. She went on: “I just want to know more about it, you know? Even if you can’t find her, I just want to know what happened. Can you do that?”
“I can try.” Chances were I wouldn’t find anything more than the cops had, but sometimes looking more closely than a busy suburban detective could turn up something new. I took some information from her, she wrote me a check, and we parted. She worked in real estate downtown, and had meetings to get to.
I had an appointment of my own.
“So here’s the thing.” I sat on the couch, facing Dr. Neral. “A couple of weeks ago I was involved in a case where there was this, uh serial killer. Meyer Williams. He could change his face to look like anyone the victims trusted to let him in. He killed four people before I caught up with him, and then the last girl and me—he tried to kill both of us, and we—we managed to kill him. So it was, uh, pretty intense.”
Dr. Francis Neral was a psychiatrist. A Black man with a balding scalp and a thin black necktie. I’d seen him several years ago, after the time I took too many sleeping pills—on purpose—and ended up in the hospital.
“That does sound . . . extreme.” He shifted on his chair. “You saved this girl’s life?”
“We saved each other’s lives.” Every night I saw Stacy Durbin slamming the hatchet down into Meyer’s skull in my nightmares. “There were some I couldn’t save.” I saw them every night too.
“And how are you physically?”
“I got stabbed a few times. It still hurts.” I rubbed my shoulder. “The thing is, I’m having—night terrors.”
He nodded. “What about them?”
“I’m running. Trying to get away from—something. Someone. And I can’t get away. And it’s getting closer. It’s like one of those nightmares where if you die in your sleep, you die for real? That kind of thing.”
“Nightmare on Elm Street.” He smiled. “I’ve never seen it, but I know the, uh, the concept.”
“Rachel has to wake me up. Then I can’t get back to sleep. I don’t even want to go to sleep in the first place.” I rubbed my eyes. “And Rachel is—trying not to get mad at me. For waking her up, and for almost getting myself killed in the first place. I can’t blame her.”
“Are you drinking more?” He peered at me.
I nodded, embarrassed. “Whiskey. It helps me get to sleep, but it doesn’t do much for the terrors. And I’m trying not to turn into an alcoholic.”
“I’m asking because I can prescribe some medications to help you sleep better, but you can’t drink if you take them.”
I nodded. “Like before.” He’d given me antidepressants when I tried to kill myself, and I’d gone without beer for months. Lots of soda took its place.
“But I think we should also see each other. At least for a while. I suspect you have some issues to talk out.” He crossed his arms, waiting for my reaction.
I looked around the room. Photos on the walls showed birds flying, butterflies, clouds,. Very peaceful. “Like what? I mean, I’m not fighting the idea of therapy, but—”
“Guilt, for one thing. You said you couldn’t save the others.”
I sighed. “Yeah.” Four dead. “I—I didn’t know what was going on at first. I did save one person. But the guy—he used my face to get into someone’s house. And he murdered two people there.”
He nodded. “And then there’s everything else you deal with. Vampires, demons. Killer plants. Giant killer chickens?”
I chuckled. That was when I’d first started seeing him. “Yeah. My business seems to take me to some dark places.”
“And it’s only natural that some of those stresses would come out in your dreams. I mean, this killer is certainly one factor, but things like these usually have multiple causes in the subconscious.”
“Yeah.” I sat forward. “So—same time next week?”
“It’s a date.” He leaned over to write out some prescriptions.
Three Roads Mall in Skokie reminded me of a ghost town in an old western movie. There weren’t actual tumbleweeds blowing past the shop doors, but it felt haunted, even though most of its stores were still open for business and enough shoppers roamed the vast central area to keep it going even in an age of Amazon and online shopping.
Veronica May had last been seen here. Mall security cameras caught her going in and out of several stores—dresses, cosmetics, a Barnes & Noble—but there was nothing suggesting she’d been attacked or abducted, or even approached by anyone. The footage I saw—sent by my client after the police had released it to her—showed only a middle-aged woman wandering from one store to another, minding her own business, carrying more and more bags with each stop.
The mall was quiet in the middle of the weekday. A group of senior citizens power walking, mothers shopping with infants in strollers, a few teenagers skipping school to hang out at the food court—do teenagers still do that?—along with people my age (40ish) or younger gazing at window displays while talking on their phones.
I followed Mrs. May’s path through the mall, stopping at each store she’d been recorded going into. No one remembered her specifically, but most of them had been questioned by the suburban police, and everyone knew about the dumpster fire out back.
“Gross,” said an older woman working in a Dress Barn. “You could smell the smoke all day.”
“Yeah, I remember that,” said a young woman wearing a “Mimi” name tag in a store that sold macrobiotics and vitamin supplements. “I think I rang her up for some gingko biloba. For memory. She was nice. I wonder what happened to her? Hey, you look like you could use some St. John’s Wort.”
Ginny May had found an unopened bottle of ginkgo biloba in her mother’s purse. I turned down the St. John’s Wort and went to the Barnes & Noble next, where I couldn’t resist browsing before questioning the booksellers there.
I bought a book about the battle of Stalingrad and asked the cashier about Mrs. May. Like the rest, she didn’t remember the woman, but a friend of hers had mentioned giving her directions to the restroom.
I checked out the mall’s anchor store, a Target, but found no one who could offer me any new information. Annoyed and frustrated, I walked down the wide central aisle on my way to the parking lot. Then I spotted a hallway with an arrow underneath the universal symbols for men’s and women’s restrooms.
I didn’t expect anything, but I had to check it out. I found both restrooms, a locked storage closet, and an emergency exit. I couldn’t open it without tripping an alarm, which meant that probably Mrs. May hadn’t used it either.
Another locked door was signed “Mall Employee ACCESS ONLY.” I watched a custodian in a brown uniform punch a keypad for entrance, but didn’t try to follow him in. A few minutes later the door opened again and a woman came out, wearing a blue blazer and tan slacks. “Can I help you?”
She was Black, in her 30s, and husky, with a name tag that read J. BEVERS, THREE RIVERS SECURITY. She’d probably spotted me loitering here on the surveillance cameras. I gave her my card and explained what I was doing at the mall.
“Oh yeah,” she groaned. “That sucked. We spent hours looking at the recordings. I mean, yeah, it sucked for the lady, and her daughter too. Everyone was upset. We really wanted to find her, but there was nothing.”
“What about the dumpster? Could anyone just get back there?”
Bevers shrugged. “Store owners have access. Their employees. The dumpsters are supposed to stay locked, but people always forget. That particular dumpster, the one they found her stuff in? It belonged to one store but it’s closed now. Business is tough.”
“What store?”
“Silk’s Jewelry. Rings, necklaces, gold and silver and diamonds. Some crystals for the new-age folks. It’s right next door.” She pointed. “Went out of business a month, six weeks ago. The cops talked to them—they took over my office while they worked, but I couldn’t be there. I guess they didn’t find anything.”
I thanked her and headed back out to the shopping area.
The sign still hung over the glass doors—Silk’s Jewelry. Metal bars behind the glass didn’t let me see much, just an empty counter with bare shelves behind.
Out in my car I called my client. “Yeah, I remember something about the jewelry store,” Ginny May said. “They questioned the owners, but they didn’t say anything. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just wasting my time. And yours.”
“Did she take any herbal supplements? Someone at that store remembers her.”
“Yeah, she’d order stuff online, and she could spend an hour at the vitamin shelf in Walgreens.” She laughed. “What would that have to do with what happened?”
“I don’t know. The wrong mixture might have made her disoriented, and more vulnerable. But that doesn’t tell us much about who did this.”
“Yeah.” Ginny sounded sad. “Maybe that’s it. Thanks for your time—”
“Wait—let me keep on this for another day. I don’t feel like I’m done yet.”
She hesitated, as if afraid I was milking her for a little extra money. “Okay. Let me know if you find anything, otherwise I’ll try to let it go.”
“Great. Thanks.”
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