The Enemy Inside (3 page)

She shoved the thought back down as she removed her clothing. Catching sight of her reflection in the large wall mirror perched over the sink, she stared at the bruises running across her naked abdomen and upper thighs before touching them in a detached way. Their purple, green, and yellow shades were livid against her pale skin. She probed them with her strong fingers, relishing the sudden, blunt ache for a moment. She frowned, unable to remember how they happened—or was it that she didn’t want to?
 

Berg glanced in the mirror. She could appreciate that she had a certain aesthetic charm to others, even if she couldn’t see it. Fortunately, the façade was all people wanted to see, so they never bothered to look any deeper.
 

She examined her face: brown eyes, high cheekbones, and heavy, arched brows. Running her fingers over the bump in her nose, she remembered the beating that had caused it. One of her stepfathers had been quite willing to use his fists against a small, defenseless little girl. She wore the bump like a badge.
 

She glared at the mask in the mirror, the mask that drew the men to her, the mask responsible for the pain. Loathing for both the men and herself rose like bile in the back of her throat as she stared. She wanted to claw the tissue from her bones with her fingernails, then crush the flesh in her bare hands, and watch it drip red into the pure, white sink.
 

Berg looked away from the impassive reflection before her. The walk would have to be a quick one. She had plans for the rest of the night. She dragged on her sweats as her mind wandered.

Having made a few halfhearted efforts at relationships in her twenties, all ending in disaster, she had given up. She tended to pick emotionally unavailable men who had seen her as a prize to wear on their arm and nothing else. She had stumbled across a few genuine men—by luck, not design—but had pushed them away until they had no choice but to leave her. As a result, she had been single for many years and preferred it that way.

Ten minutes later, she was ready, if somewhat unglamorous, having pulled on her oldest and rattiest gray sweats. She covered them with a large pink cotton sweater and scraped her long hair back with a simple band. Jesse never minded how she looked, another thing he had over men.

“Ready?” she called, grabbing the leash.
 

Jesse skidded across the sleek white tile in his haste, tripped over his large paws, and fell in a furry ball of quivering anticipation at her feet.
 

“I’ll take that landing as a yes, then.” She laughed at the dog’s delight, barely recognizing the sound of her own happiness.

After clipping on the leash to Jesse’s collar, she grabbed her keys and shut her door. She walked to her neighbor’s and knocked loudly at her door. After several moments of the sound of locks being manipulated, the door opened a few inches and was stopped by a sturdy chain bolt.

A grey-haired black woman peeked through the door. “You’re home early tonight, Alicia,” she said, looking surprised.

“No need to take Jess out later, Vi, I’m taking him,” Berg said, not bothering to inform her cautious neighbor that a chain bolt could be overcome with a simple, hard kick by anyone older than the age of twelve.

“He’s greedy. He’s been out
twice
today already.” Vi gazed at Jesse with a fond smile. “Not including when you took him out this morning.”

Berg chuckled. “Thanks, Vi, I appreciate it. I wouldn’t have been able to get him if you didn’t help out.” She had found Jesse in an abandoned-dog shelter the previous year and fallen in love. “I’m sure he’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Of course. I have my keys. He’s the highlight of my day.”
 

Berg waved good-bye and began walking.

Vi called after them. “Why don’t you both come over later, and I’ll make you dinner? You need to fatten up.”

“Can’t, sorry. Working.”
 

Berg heard Vi shut the door. She knew Vi hadn’t expected her answer to be any different, so she wasn’t worried about offending her. It was an invitation Vi extended at least twice a week, and Berg always declined.

Berg and Jesse trotted down the five flights of stairs and into the darkening street. They set off at a fast walk down the block, heading to Jesse’s favorite dog park a couple of streets away. This was another reason she loved the city so much. Chicago was the city of parks, and she and Jesse were spoiled for choice when it came to walk time.
 

Sometimes, particularly during the summer, she would load Jesse into her car and run him along the lakefront. Unlike most golden retrievers, Jesse showed no inclination for the frigid lake water. He preferred to harass innocent sunbathers lying on the golden sands of the man-made beach. But the evening’s foray needed to be closer to home if she was going to go out later.
 

After a few minutes of walking on the asphalt to get the blood moving, Berg upped the pace to a slow jog, enjoying the sensation as her muscles stretched and relaxed. Her lungs filled with chilly night air while she worked off the tension of the day.

She counted her long strides to keep the voice quiet.

Early the next morning, Berg entered her dark, quiet apartment, letting the heavy fire door close behind her. It was so early Jesse didn’t even leave his bed to greet her, preferring instead to remain curled up on Berg’s untouched bedspread.
 

In the dark, she stripped off her clothes, leaving them in an uncharacteristically messy pile on the floor. After sliding off her flimsy underwear, she threw it straight into the trash, slamming the lid shut, as if it could contain the rusty smell of blood and shame. The bra and panties joined several other old pairs of used cotton, taking up more space in the steel container than regular household refuse.
 

She turned on the shower as hot as it would go and waited until the water was scalding before she stepped under the jets in the dark and let the cleansing water run over her battered body.
 

Although she couldn’t see it in the pitch-dark room, she knew the water pooled crimson around her feet before draining away.

Chapter Four

Jay and Berg arrived at the station the next morning at eight fifteen sharp. Berg had a double espresso and Jay arrived with some milky concoction, eager to start the day and see what else the deceased trucker yielded in the way of evidence.

“So, what did you get up to last night?” Jay asked.

“The usual—walked Jess, dinner, bed. You?”

“Watched the game, drank some beer, and ate some junk. Did you watch? We were robbed!”

Berg had no idea if he was talking about football, baseball, or some other team sport, and didn’t care. She snorted. “Are we going to do some police work or chitchat?”

He scowled. “Fucking excuse me for trying to make polite conversation. You get some last night? You look tired.”

Berg shot him a look as she walked to the half cubicle they shared, wondering for an instant if he could tell what she’d been doing. But one glance at his amused face, and the knot in her stomach relaxed. Judging by the grin, he thought he was making a huge joke. “Very funny,” she said.
 

Sitting down at her desk, she took a large swig of the first of many caffeine hits to come that day. The insomnia had returned, and she needed the caffeine to clear the constant fuzz in her head. She couldn’t understand how she could be dead on her feet all day, but as soon as night fell she would wake up, as if all the caffeine had been stored in her veins to be released in one heart-pounding rush.

As the warm coffee worked its way through her, she looked around the office absentmindedly. The 12
^th
District’s police headquarters was a five-level concrete building, built in the early seventies. Street level held the duty cops and the public desk, while the detectives of the Special Crimes Unit were housed on level two. The upper three levels were split between admin, vice, the fugitive apprehension unit, private offices, and the cyber crimes unit. The basement housed the Cook County morgue, a few holding cells, interview rooms, and one of the country’s most advanced forensics labs.
 

Detectives, forensic pathologists, administrators, and visitors crowded into the building seven days a week. Berg and Jay’s level had seen better days, housing some fifteen detectives and one captain, all crammed together in one hot area behind outdated wooden desks and partitions. The peeling walls, sweaty bodies, and almost nonexistent windows compounded the constant scent of coffee and deep-fried food lingering in the air.
 

It sometimes felt to Berg as if every one of the CPD’s thirteen thousand officers walked through their level and past her desk at least once a day, even though she knew that wasn’t the case. But the place would have seemed crowded even with half the staff. The only semiprivate area was a glass-walled office off to one side that belonged to their captain.
 

The cramped cubicle situation Berg endured was not helped by Jay’s desk, which was piled high with so much paper, old take-out cartons, and coffee containers that she wanted to douse it in gas and set it on fire. She looked at her immaculate desk and sighed at the contrast.
 

“You sure you don’t want to date men like a normal human woman?” Jay asked, a grin lighting his features as he took a swig of his coffee. “Thirty-five seems a little early for sexual retirement to me. I think a solid fuck would do you some good, you know? I hear orgasms release endorphins.”

Berg snorted. “Well, fuck, you’re the resident expert on that. I’m surprised you’re not dehydrated from constant loss of bodily fluids.”

“Gatorade.”
 

Berg gave him a grudging half smile. “Can we get on with it, please?”

“Okay.” He somehow managed to find space on his desk to put his feet up in one long, languid movement. “We’d better get to it, or Consiglio’s going to crawl up our asses so fast we’ll need his and hers enemas to dislodge him.”
 

“A nice mental picture for first thing in the morning, thanks.” Berg opened her laptop and booted it up.

Jay sighed. “I wonder how Chief Consiglio will tell us to solve our cases today?”

“I’m sure it will be inventive and designed to further his dream of being alderman of Monroe, as per usual. Remember when our only directive was to solve crimes and we reported to Captain Leigh?”

Jay sighed wistfully. “You gotta feel sorry for Captain Leigh, really.”

“She holds her own.”

Jay raised an eyebrow. “Barely.”

A drowning female cop in a men’s only pool, Captain Louise Leigh was desperately trying to keep control over her domain in the face of blatant chauvinism and ongoing budget cuts.

Having no faith in the leadership of a mere woman, Chief Antonio Consiglio used Leigh’s precinct as his personal election campaign headquarters under the tagline Consiglio: Chicago’s in safe hands
.
He dedicated himself to the task, posturing at crime scenes, offering
helpful
advice to his subordinates within political earshot, and playing the media like an idiot savant with a fiddle.

To her credit, the captain did her best to shield her most productive detectives from the ire of the chief, and for that, Berg was grateful.
 

Berg glanced over at the captain’s office. Leigh looked even more tired than she did. A short, squat, middle-aged blonde woman, whose scrawny upper half looked out of place on her heavy lower body, the captain stared at the paperwork on her desk, seemingly without seeing it.

Despite what she said to Jay, Berg did feel sorry for her. Leigh had worked hard to get where she was, and there were precious few women in the upper ranks of the Chicago police. Despite the loud public claims of equal opportunity and affirmative action, a mere twenty-one percent of the CPD were women, and a minuscule number of those were in the upper ranks.
 

Leigh had been a fair boss over the last two years, despite arriving out of nowhere after working her way through the ranks of out-of-state stations.
 

“Speak of the devil . . .” Jay muttered, interrupting Berg’s musings as Consiglio, an average-looking man with a thin build, tanned skin and thick, graying hair, burst into the station with the usual heavy air of arrogance and disdain following him.