“This is what you’ve done to me.” We stood outside MacLennon’s at 12:04. “I’m hanging out in bars at noon.”
“You said you wanted to come.” I was glad, though. She might be able to pick something up from the phone, though she’s better with people than objects most of the time.
Plus, I like having her around.
The barroom was long and dark, with Irish memorabilia all around because every other bar in Chicago has to have some Irish flair no matter who owns it. It’s apparently a city law. Already two customers were seated at the bar, one drinking beer and the other contemplating a shot glass of whiskey in front of him.
An African American woman came out of the back room. “Hi.”
I perched on the edge of a stool. “Tom Jurgen. I called?”
She peered at my ID. “I guess.” She leaned beneath a cash register that looked like something from the old west, and came up a moment later with an iPhone with a Post-It on the cover with my name. “Like I said, this isn’t standard. Tell your friend he can’t do it again.”
“I will.” I hoped. “What was he like last night?”
“I wasn’t here. Jen said he came in looking drunk, but he drank his beer and paid for it like everyone else. Then he just sat at looking at his phone before he left it here.”
“Thanks.”
“You want anything?”
It was a little early for beer, but spending some money seemed only polite. “A Coke? Two?”
Rachel nodded and hopped up on a stool next to me. I opened the case, and a scrap of paper fluttered down.
CHECK PHOTOS AND VIDEO, the note read.
The phone vibrated in my hand. Incoming call—HOME. I let it go, then tapped in the password Chip had given me.
I saw 12 missed calls and two voicemail messages, all from home. But before calling back, I hit the photo gallery icon.
I’d seen most of the images on his Facebook page. Lots of wedding pictures. Chip in a tux and Sherry in a wedding dress, plus bridesmaids and groomsmen, and other brides and grooms from other weddings. Plenty of nature shots. Some “What I had for lunch” photos. A few that looked like they’d been taken by accident. No porn (thank god). I scrolled down, down, down . . .
Then I found it.
At first I couldn’t figure out what I was seeing. I turned the phone, looking at it from other angles, held it close, then pulled it away.
Rachel saw it first. And gasped. She doesn’t gasp easily. “It’s a demon.”
Fiery red eyes, a wide jaw, multiple rows of jagged teeth. Yellow skin pulled tight around a bony skull and shoulders.
Blood dripping from its chin.
“You’re sure?”
Rachel slugged my arm. “I’ve been possessed by demons, remember? I’m sure.”
Our Cokes came. I dropped a twenty on the counter between them. “Thanks.” Then we stood up, Rachel wobbling in her sneakers. “Let’s get out of here.”
The phone vibrated again. I ignored it.
In the car—my new Acura—we looked at the photo again, then at a few more. The same demon, or maybe a different one, it was hard to tell, and then two images of a group, three or more. They looked like they were dancing in a circle around a fire.
Then we went to the videos.
Again, wedding videos, party videos, walking-through-the-woods-holding-hands videos, followed by—
“Ugh.” Rachel turned her face away.
A circle of demons, howling and laughing, danced around the fire. But in the middle of the fire . . . might have been something human. Once.
The figure screamed. I still didn’t have the sound on, and I was glad, but I could see his or her throat contorted as the neck twisted around, eyes searching desperately for help.
My breakfast was in danger of rising again. I shut it off. “You okay?”
“What do you think?” Rachel didn’t even slug me.
I gritted my teeth. “I have to look at the others.”
She nodded and turned her face toward the street.
The second video was just like the first. Dancing, howling, fire—demonic dogs biting the human victim. It was only 20 seconds, but I barely made it through the first five.
The third and last video was somehow worse.
It didn’t have a human victim being tortured. Just a dozen or more demons, fighting each other to run forward toward the phone, laughing and waving hands with claws.
I turned the sound up as low as I could to hear it. Rachel put her hands over her ears.
They were screeching, braying like bloodthirsty wolves. But I could make a few words out:
“—coming! Let us through! We are coming—”
The video ended abruptly, as if someone had closed a door on them.
I dropped the phone in my lap and caught my breath until I was sure my breakfast was safe. But I still needed a few minutes before I could speak.
I risked a look at Rachel. “Did you—get anything out of that?”
She shrugged. “Just what you saw. Demons torturing humans. And they’re coming.” She punched my shoulder. “What the hell was your pal up to?”
“No idea.” Now I knew how the cops felt whenever I reported something crazy.
The phone buzzed. This time I could hear it, but I waited again until the buzzing stopped. Then I took a swig from the water bottle I had in the car, and a deep breath, and searched Chip’s contact list for “Home.”
“Chip? Where the hell have you been?” Sherry sounded feverish. “I’ve been calling and calling—”
I broke in. “This isn’t Chip. My name’s Tom Jurgen. Chip and I used to work together at the Trib.”
“Uhh . . .” I heard her swallow. “What are you doing with his phone? Where is he?”
“Chip left his phone at a bar last night and texted me to come pick it up. I—uh, I don’t know where he is right now.” I could imagine—maybe—how anxious she had to feel.
Her voice tightened. “Who are you again?”
“Tom Jurgen. I’m a private detective. Like I said, we used to be reporters together, but I haven’t heard from him in years until last night. But he apparently had a reason to contact me.”
Sherry took a moment to process that. “What reason?”
“Can we meet?”
“Oh god.” I heard a sob. “I guess. Here’s our address.”
I started the car.
They lived not far from us, in North Lincoln Park. Rachel felt better by the time I found a parking space, but she slammed the door as we got out. “I don’t ever want to look at that again.”
“Me too.” We rang the buzzer on the apartment building.
Sherry looked as if she’d been up for days. She wore sweatpants and a loose tank top, and her hair was frazzled. “Come on—hi.” She blinked at Rachel. “I’m Sherry.”
“Rachel.” They shook hands. “I work with Tom.”
“What’s going on?” She looked ready to cry again.
I wished I knew. “Can we ask you a few questions?”
She stumbled across the carpet into the living room, where a bigscreen TV mounted on the wall ran a silent CNN. A cat on the sofa watched us with suspicion.
Sherry sank down and grabbed a glass of water from a table littered with magazines and crumpled tissues. “What do you want? What’s going on? Where is he?”
We sat down. I tried to start from the beginning. “When did you hear from Chip last?”
“Yesterday morning.” She grabbed a tissue. “We had breakfast. I had to go to work. I’m a, a paralegal.” She blew her nose. “He worked from home. In there.” She pointed at a bedroom door, half-closed. “We kissed, and I left.”
“How did he seem?” Rachel leaned forward.
“Excited. The way he always is when he thinks he’s got a good story. A little nervous, but he’s always like that too.” She gulped her water. “What did he tell you?”
“Not much.” There was no way I was going to share his photos and videos. “Do you know what story he was working on?”
Sherry shook her head. “He writes so many stories, I can’t keep up. Insurance, health care, mom-and-pop stores, drug companies. And I try to listen, but I’ve got too much to handle at work. He did . . . wait a minute . . .”
She sank down. For a moment I was afraid she was going to fall off the sofa. Then her head jerked up. “He said something about a doctor. I think his name was Morley. I don’t know. But he definitely wanted to talk to him about something. I don’t know what.”
The cat jumped on her lap and started purring. Sherry stroked its back, crying softly.
Rachel and I glanced at each other. She shrugged. Which meant that Sherry wasn’t hiding anything. She was genuinely upset. Terrified.
And she hadn’t even seen the videos.
I waited while Sherry pulled herself together. But I had to ask: “Can we take a look at his computer?”
She wiped her eyes. “I don’t know. He doesn’t even let me see what he’s working on.”
“It might help me find him. And figure out what’s going on.”
“Okay.” She waved a hand toward the door. “Go ahead.”
The bedroom/office was packed with boxes and filing cabinets. I took the chair in front of the desk while Rachel leaned behind me.
“A gentleman would let me sit down.” She slugged my shoulder. “Should I start searching?”
“Not yet.” I powered the computer up. “I may need you to hack his password.”
But Chip’s iPhone password was the same as the one he used for this computer, a Dell that looked several years old. It was slow, but eventually his desktop came up, and I started looking around.
Chip’s desktop was more organized that mine. I found folders on most of the big Chicago-based businesses—Sears, McDonald’s, Walgreens, and others. Small businesses too. I clicked on a few at random and found files of research and stories he’d written.
No folder named “Demons,” though.
So I started methodically searching each one, in case he’d hidden demon-related information where it wouldn’t be obvious.
Bored, Rachel started searching the boxes, starting with the ones dated most recently. “Any porn?”
“Not so far.” Everyone has porn on their computers—I’m a private detective, I know these things—but I wasn’t looking for it and hoped I didn’t stumble on any. After checking every file dated this year, I went to his web browser and checked out his bookmarks.
Most of them were related to his work. I looked at his Facebook and LinkedIn pages, found nothing, and then started running down the list. Again, bookmarks for Chicago companies he reported on, along with professional associations he belonged to, plus the usual assortment of personal-interest sites—TV shows, antique dealers, birdwatching, comedy, and the like. I started checking out every single one. The exciting life of a private detective. Even when you’re hunting for demons.
Rachel crossed her legs on the floor, sorting through paper files. “It’s mostly just printed copies of his stories and his research. Like he wanted to have physical copies in case his computer died. Hey, here’s one—”
“Wait.” I got to “Antiques,” which seemed odd, considering the only antique in the apartment seemed to be Chip’s computer. I clicked the link—
—and found a webcam of what looked like a throng of reptiles sleeping on top of one another like snakes. What the hell?
Then one of them lurched up. Not a snake.
A demon.
I leaned back. I knew the demon couldn’t see me—I hoped—but my cowardly impulses took over. The demon snarled, revealing rows of long, jagged teeth, then attacked the demon sleeping next to it.
In two seconds, they were all awake, battling each other. Just like in the video on Chip’s phone. I didn’t have the headphones on, and I was glad, because I was pretty sure I didn’t hear the howling and biting and gnawing of demon flesh that must have filled the air—wherever it was.
“Yuck.” Rachel stood behind me. “What the hell is that?”
“Exactly. Hell.” I checked the URL at the top of the screen. No site name, just a string of numbers and symbols. I opened a Word document and did a copy-paste. “Can you find out where this is from?”
“Maybe.” Rachel’s a graphic designer, but she knows more than she should about the dark side of the internet. “Right now?”
I clicked off, then found Chip’s email server. Maybe I should have started there. I sent the document to my email, then started skimming his subject lines. “What did you find?”
“This.” She held out a folder. The handwriting on the tab said, “Moreland Research,” with a date just a week ago.
At first I didn’t see the connection. It was a collection of internet articles on someone named Charles Moreland, a tech consultant specializing in quantum computing. I know less about quantum computing than I know about brain surgery, but it was pretty easy to tell that Moreland was a quack—his quotes in the articles were full of technobabble that would have gotte a Star Trek script writer fired.
But Chip had circled one quote in red: “With these opportunities, we may be able to peer into other universes, other dimensions—where humans don’t exist, but maybe angels or demons thrive.”
“Huh.” Moreland might be a crackpot. But if there was any connection between his research and the “Antiques” bookmark . . .
“Keep looking.” I turned back to the computer.
“Aye-aye, captain.” Rachel’s been helping me with my cases long enough to know that you can’t give up just because you find one lead.
A half-hour later we were finished. Only the Moreland lead looked worthy of checking out.
“Did you find anything?” Sherry was drinking coffee and working on a laptop, apparently trying to work even though her eyes were red and she had a pile of used tissues on the couch next to her.
“Maybe.” I didn’t want to make any promises. “We’ll be in touch if we learn anything.” I handed her my card. “Call me if you hear anything.”
She grabbed a tissue and blew her nose. “Thank you.”
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