Before I Wake

  He looked Bruce’s age, his hair turning prematurely gray, the tan dress slacks hanging loose on him, the blue suit jacket unbuttoned. “Your name?”

  “Gage Collier.”

  Rae vaguely remembered the name from Peggy’s address book. “Why are you here?”

  “We had a date. She didn’t show.”

  “Saturday night?”

  “Monday evening. She had a date the night she died?” he asked sharply.

  “Come down the stairs, Mr. Collier. Slowly. Let me see some identification.”

  He slid out his wallet, using his left hand to reduce the threat of the movement. “I don’t remember Chicago cops carrying Mace and keys when checking out a potential burglary.”

  She smiled, the same hard smile she had given her FBI training officer. “You really don’t want to find out what they teach at the academy. Set it there on the table and step back.”

  Gage set the wallet on the table and stepped into the living room. “A friend of Peggy’s? I don’t remember her mentioning a cop recently, and she would have known I would be interested.”

  Rae ignored his comment and opened the wallet to read the license under the plastic window while she kept enough focus on him to make sure he stayed where he was at, out of reach of anything he could throw at her.

  “I don’t claim its accuracy, only that it’s a bad photo of me.”

  She turned the flap and read his press badge. “What are you doing in Peggy Worth’s home?”

  He opened his suit jacket, his movements still slow, and reached into the inside pocket to tug out a small notepad. “She mailed me a full notebook with a scrawled Post-it note stuck on top saying I was to take her to dinner Monday where she would explain her shorthand.

  “Typical Peg, dangle a story and make me wait. I was hoping she had typed her notes into that BlackBerry she carries everywhere so I could figure out what she was doing down in Justice this last weekend, getting herself killed.”

  Rae’s gaze sharpened. “Killed?”

  “I know what the coroner says. But Peggy attracted trouble every day I knew her, and I can’t imagine her dying in contradiction of how she lived, the coroner report notwithstanding.” He held out his hands. “May I sit down now? I’d rather not stand here debating how my friend died.”

  Rae capped the Mace and slipped the canister into her pocket. “The coroner and the police department are satisfied it’s natural causes.”

  “So I’m in denial; it feels better than accepting Peggy died in her sleep. She was too young.”

  Rae agreed with him on that. “I’m Rae Gabriella: ten years with the FBI, currently private and working for Peggy’s parents to figure out what Peggy was doing this last weekend.” She held up keys. “With keys and permission to be here.”

  “Touché.” Gage sat down on the couch and tossed the notebook on the coffee table. “I can’t read it. And no, her parents don’t know I’m here. I doubt they knew I had keys.”

  “You two were close?”

  “Not in the way you mean. I’m comfortably dating a nice lady who has two adorable boys. Peggy and I were professional colleagues. I liked her, although I’m a cut above her league in who I write for and how I write, and I don’t mean that in a condescending way. She was young, eager, and learning.

  “I brought in her mail, fed her cat, and forwarded e-mail while she was in LA, and in return she shared gossip she heard that might apply to a book I’ve been working on. She’s got a knack for getting ladies to talk more than they would normally do about the guys in their life.”

  Rae thought the story sounded authentic. She chose a seat across from him. “What do you think she was doing in Justice?”

  “Following a story, which is what she lived to do. I’m a Pulitzer prize ahead of her and she wanted to find herself a story that would win herself one.”

  Rae opened the notepad and found it had been filled to the last page with a shorthand she couldn’t read either. “Did you find the notes you were searching for?”

  He lifted one eyebrow. “I was interrupted. There was nothing useful on her laptop, which is where I expected her to have uploaded any files. The password is vanilla-rich; she tends to file by the date she writes notes, that way she can correlate to the date at the top of a notebook page. I scanned the last month and beyond a few Chicago council nuggets didn’t see anything that fit.”

  “She was trying to locate Joe Prescott.”

  Gage whistled. “The Prescott kid’s death?”

  “I’m from out of town, humor me and fill me in.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Washington, D.C.”

  “A place with more than a few stories waiting to be dug up.” Gage rubbed his chin. “Joe Prescott—it starts with a millennium New Year’s Eve rave party. A batch of bad designer drugs kills twelve teenagers, one of them Joe’s grandson.

  “The dealer was determined to be one of the dead. The cops busted the man who was his supplier and he got a few years for an unrelated coke sale. They never found the cook that made the designer drugs, or anyone who would point to where they had originated.”

  “It was a big story around here.”

  “The saga dominated Chicago news for months while the investigation wore on. There weren’t any year 2K calamity stories to write and the media had to report on something. Peggy’s got a thick file on it in her office; I figured it was old reference material since she had done a couple human-interest stories on the topic last year.”

  “Would she have been working on another follow-up story?”

  “Maybe, but Joe Prescott? He’s been dead for months.”

  “And you would have reason to know that because . . . ?”

  “My phone number was in his wallet; they called me when they pulled his body out of the wreck just to double-check when I had last spoken with him and what kind of mood he was in. I published one of his letters on the ravaging attack of reporters running in wolf packs; we got along great for a man that couldn’t stand a reporter.”

  “Peggy didn’t know he was dead?”

  “Prescott died a few months ago, and I never had reason to mention it. I had no idea she was working on a story that touched on the deaths.”

  Rae got up and paced over to the window. Peggy went down to Justice to get answers to some questions and she thought Joe Prescott was the person to ask. The source of the designer drug that had killed his grandson? It remained the one intriguing unanswered question in the story she had just heard. “Has Peggy ever shared a story with you in the midst of researching it?”

  “No. Which is why I cleared my schedule Monday night, and when she didn’t show, went looking for her. I learned about her death from her boss Tuesday morning. I’ve seen the paperwork: the coroner has a good reputation, but just because something doesn’t show up on a medical test doesn’t mean nothing happened.”

  “You’re a skeptic.”

  “She was a friend. It’s hard to accept she just went to sleep and never woke.” Gage got to his feet and walked over to join her. “I would like to pick up the story she was writing and finish it if only as a tribute to her, but I haven’t found what she was after yet.”

  “She had a late-night date Saturday; she mentioned she was going to see the movie Holiday Park. No one seems to know who she was going out with or if she went on that date.”

  “Stan Bartlett would be my best guess. He’d been asking her out with regularity. She probably finally said yes. He’s a sportswriter, and not someone you’d need to worry about.”

  Rae wrote down the name to track down.

  “I don’t mean to cut this off, Miss Gabriella, but Mr. and Mrs. Worth are having a memorial at 2 p.m. I need to stop and get flowers on the way, and I need a few minutes with Mr. Worth before the others arrive. Could we talk again another day?”

  She held out an agency card. “Yes.”

  Gage pocketed the card with a smile. “I’m glad they hired you; I think you’ll stick until you g
et answers.”

  “So far I was the last one to see her alive.”

  “That would be motivation. I’ll let myself out.”

  Rae locked the door behind him and stood for a moment absorbing the last half hour. She walked over to the couch and took a seat. She started writing verbatim notes as fast as she could scrawl the words of her conversation with Gage Collier.

  She had to talk to Nathan about that carry permit, so that next time she wouldn’t be holding off a guy with a can of Mace. And knowing her luck, she’d find herself appearing in Gage’s story when he wrote that tribute to his friend.

  She retrieved her phone and dialed. “Bruce, I need some information as fast as you can retrieve it. Address and basic bio for a Stan Bartlett, all I’ve got is the fact he’s a sportswriter. And I need a read on a reporter, a Gage Collier.”

  “You found yourself a story.”

  “Maybe. Call me back.”

  “Give me a few minutes.”

  Rae closed the phone and began her own search of Peggy’s home. So where are the rest of your notes, Peggy? Where’s that BlackBerry? If no one was with you that night when you died, then they have to be where you left them. The hotel room, the rental car . . . I need a thread to pull. She took what seemed to be the most current or useful from the office, looked around the rest of the house, didn’t find a diary or second address book, and decided she’d come back again if necessary. She headed to her car with what she had collected.

  18

  Rae shuffled papers on the passenger seat, wishing she had these pages spread across a big work desk. She drank more of the milk shake and glanced at her watch. She was halfway back to Justice and Bruce had told her to stop, find a restaurant, and wait for him.

  Peggy was beginning to feel three-dimensional to her. The lady had a snappy sense of humor, wrote mostly people pieces on the movers and shakers in business and entertainment, and had begun in the last year doing more breaking-news articles.

  Rae shifted files in the box; she’d tried to take anything at Peggy’s that seemed likely to explain a trip to Justice.

  The rave deaths were a thick file of press clippings, the tragedy, the trial, even recent clippings on the release of the supplier who had served enough of his sentence to be released on parole. The file was chronological and looked to be what Gage had assumed: background reference material. It was more information than Rae could absorb in a day.

  Bruce pulled in beside her in the parking lot.

  Rae touched a button to lower the window. “You have an address for Bartlett?”

  “I do. Pack the essential stuff; you can ride with me.”

  She picked up the most critical files and locked up her car to join him. She handed over a milk shake she had bought for him.

  “Thanks.”

  “My pleasure.” She relaxed in the front seat of his car, glad to have someone else handling the driving. She’d been fighting the maps while watching for exit signs.

  Bruce headed east on the highway. “You missed some excitement back in Justice this morning.”

  “I’ve only been gone a few hours.”

  “Word got out the tile plant is planning to bring in strikebreakers. Someone responded by lobbing a Molotov cocktail into the plant manager’s home. By the time the fire department got it suppressed, the living room had taken a lot of smoke damage and fire had pierced the ceiling.”

  “Is everyone okay?”

  “A few smoke-inhalation injuries and some bruises from the fistfight that broke out at the scene. Nathan ended up arresting two union guys.”

  “A small police department with a volatile strike entering its third week— I don’t know how Nathan handles it, Bruce.”

  “Nathan’s looking very tired. I don’t know how he keeps his patience in the midst of all of this.”

  “What are the odds my game of pool with Nathan later tonight is going to happen?”

  “Slim to none, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s what I thought. Tell me about Bartlett.”

  “He’s twenty-six, a sportswriter for the Daily Herald. He just got back in town this morning from covering a game in Milwaukee.”

  * * *

  Rae watched Stan Bartlett walk around the island in his kitchen, shutting down the heat under skillets and pausing his dinner preparations. He was fixing a seafood stir-fry.

  “Peggy’s the one who cancelled the date. She said she had someone to go see, that it was important to her story, and that she was sorry, but she had to go.”

  “Did she say who she was meeting?” Bruce asked.

  “No. You’re telling me she passed away in her sleep Saturday night?”

  “Yes,” Rae replied.

  “Man, that’s unexpected. I’ve been so out of the loop; I haven’t even checked messages yet. My brother met me at the Milwaukee game and we headed out to his place for a couple days.”

  “When did you make arrangements to take Peggy out, to go to the movie?” Bruce asked.

  “Tuesday night. I caught her at home about six and she said yes, as long as we could go see Holiday Park; she’d been wanting to see it. We arranged to meet at the steak house near the Brighton Theater Complex. I would have picked her up but she wanted to have her own transportation.”

  “When did she call it off?”

  “Saturday about eight, I was just getting ready to walk out the door. She was driving; I could tell that from the background sounds.”

  “What did you do after that?” Rae asked.

  “Besides get annoyed? I was hungry. I went to Kregel’s down the street and had myself a steak, then watched the basketball game on the big screen at the sports emporium.

  “My boss paged me about eleven to ask if I wanted to fill in at the Milwaukee game for a reporter stuck out at Denver’s airport, and I said sure. I packed and left about eight the next morning, so I could get there and interview the new coach.”

  “Who could verify that?”

  “The waitress at the restaurant will remember me; I talked her into joining me for a drink when she got off work. My boss probably remembers the page, for he put through expense traveling money for me shortly after we spoke.

  “Between then and when I left here and got to Milwaukee—I was online for a good couple hours pulling current rosters and stats, you can check the computer file times if you like, I was saving most of the pages to print after I got off-line.”

  “Do you know what story Peggy was working on?” Rae asked.

  “No. Last month she was working on a personal profile, some guy who got out of prison that committed suicide. She’d interviewed him last fall for a story and she found his actions—inconsistent—was the word she used. At least that was the story she was using as her excuse to say no when I asked her to join me at a game down at the center.”

  “Why did she say yes this time?”

  He smiled. “She appreciated persistence. Listen, I’ve got guests coming at six. Is there anything else I can help you with later by phone? I really need to get back to this.”

  “We’re done,” Bruce said. “Thanks for your time.”

  Rae waited until they were outside before drawing her conclusion. “He wasn’t involved.”

  “Probably not. Is it worth tracking down that profile she was working on last month?”

  Rae opened the passenger door. “Let’s look first at the calls she received and made Saturday night. Sometime around 8 p.m. she got the lead she was pursuing. Peggy was back at the hotel by 1 a.m. We find out where she went, we’ll know the story that brought her to Justice, and this case will be done. I’ll have what I need to present to her parents.”

  “You’re comfortable Peggy’s death was natural causes?”

  “I’ve read the coroner’s report. I’m comfortable with it. Drop me at my car, and I’ll follow you back to Justice.”

  * * *

  Rae didn’t have a desk yet, and the office still smelled of drying paint, but the bookshelves were in if not yet pa
inted, and the open floor space worked fine for the work surface. She spread all the documents she had collected that day around her on the floor and looked for the final thread of what Peggy Worth had been doing the weekend she died.

  “It’s not here. Peggy received a local call at the hotel and left to meet someone. There’s not going to be a record of it,” Bruce concluded.

  Rae retrieved another Chinese pot sticker. “She was new to the town of Justice. If she were going to meet someone, she had to write down the directions or else she was going somewhere so obvious she couldn’t miss it.”

  She looked through the box of things she had picked up from Peggy’s parents and found the map Peggy had stored in her rental car glove box. The map had been folded back on itself in the past. Rae studied the folds and tried to figure out how Peggy had last held it. “Maybe the lake pavilion? This looks like she was looking east of town.”

  Bruce took the map and handed her a slip of paper. “What do you think of this? It was in the book she was reading, marking her page.”

  “Jason? She doodled over the name.” Rae reached over for Peggy’s address book. “Bruce, we’re missing something simple.”

  “I hate puzzles, Rae.”

  “You can go on home; there’s no need to stay and watch me read papers.”

  He looked at his watch. “Hand me that research folder you brought from her home. I’ll stick around awhile longer.”

  Rae handed it over. “The boring work is a bit more fun when it’s my case.”

  Bruce smiled. “The next case we’ll have to make ours.”

  * * *

  He was hunting a ghost. Nathan turned his powerful torchlight to the steep banks of the ditch beside the road, looking for footprints in the snow or dropped debris, something to show what had been through here was human. He’d heard the screech this time, and Jack was right. It sounded like something dying. It didn’t fit any animal he had heard before.

  Nathan walked farther down the road toward his squad car. The two-lane road was empty of traffic, the only signs of life the occasional bright eyes of a possum or a stray cat looking back at him. Whatever was in these woods, it would take a group of guys doing a sweep to have a chance of spotting it.