CHAPTER 47

It was two more hours before I got my first look at Daniel Pollard. He poked his head out the front door at just past nine-thirty. Under the flicker of a Chicago streetlamp, Pollard looked smaller than I expected. He winced at the wind as he turned the corner on his house and shrank into the night. A moment later, I heard a garage door creak open. The Pontiac pulled out and cruised past me.

I gave him a half block’s worth of room and followed. He stopped at a Jack in the Box, went through the drive-in, and ate alone in the parking lot. An hour after that we were cruising Main Line Road, a nasty stretch of pavement in a town on the edge of Chicago called Calumet City. As a cop, I had worked the area for prostitutes. Not to arrest them. Just for information.

On the street hookers represented the bottom of the food chain, usually desperate for cash and willing to sell whatever they knew. Three out of five girls on the corner were HIV-positive, the majority dead, one way or another, within a year or two of hitting the stroll. You might think that would deter prospective johns. You would be wrong. I asked a customer once, a doctor and father of five, if he was concerned about HIV.

“Oral sex only,” he said. “Besides, I have these.”

He smiled and pulled a bunch of condoms out of his pocket. I made sure they called the doc’s wife when they booked him.

Pollard stopped at a convenience store. I pulled over and waited. A woman walked out in front of my car and opened up her coat. She was naked underneath. Subtlety was never a major selling point in Cal City. She was still standing there when Pollard exited the store. I pulled around her and followed the Pontiac. He was driving slow enough to get a look at the action, but Pollard wasn’t shopping for a woman. At least not yet.

He moved out of the strip and cruised into a darker, more industrial neighborhood. The cars were less frequent here, and I slipped farther back. After a couple of miles Pollard pulled into what looked like a mostly empty trucking yard. I switched off my lights and followed. Two hundred yards in, I could still see his headlights bouncing along the road in front of me. Then the lights seemed to slow and steady. I stopped my car and slipped out.

Two minutes later I was creeping along the side of an abandoned flatbed, and snuck a look around the corner. Pollard’s car sat in the middle of a dirt path, still running, doors open, lights illuminating a large blue dumpster. Best I could tell, the car was empty. I was about to move forward for a closer look when a head poked out of the dumpster. It was Pollard, clutching a pillowcase stuffed full of what I suspected was someone else’s garbage. He climbed to the lip of the dumpster and, after some hesitation, jumped to the ground. Then he scuttled back to his car, unloaded whatever was in the bag into his backseat, and returned to the dumpster. Climbing up the side looked difficult, but Pollard managed and dove headfirst into the depths. I sat back for a moment, thought about going home, then thought better of it. Instead I lit a cigarette and waited.

Pollard dove the dumpster and then three more like it. At one point I snuck close and took a quick look inside his car. I saw what I expected to see. Three plastic bags, one burst at the seams and spilling out old clothes; a spool of gray wire; a rusted-out car battery; broken pieces of old toys; a bent street sign that read KEDZIE AVENUE. And that was just half of the backseat.

It was pushing two-thirty before my friend had gotten his fill of other people’s garbage. Pollard cruised the stroll one more time before calling it a night. The Pontiac seemed to linger over the girls a bit longer this time around but ultimately moved on. Pollard was back at the house on Warner by a little after three in the morning.