Story Excerpts

The Girl in the Pit
by Floyd Sullivan

Detective Paul Wilson called early one morning. He wanted me to meet him later at a coffee shop on Lincoln Avenue.

“Am I in trouble?” I asked.

“If you were in trouble,” he said, “I’d be outside your door with handcuffs. No. I need your help. I understand you worked the Caldwell concert last Saturday.”

“Yeah, I did. Tough gig. That poor girl.”

“That’s what I need to talk to you about.”

I found a table near the coffee shop entrance and claimed it with the book I brought to read on the train. The list of caffeinated beverages on the blackboard behind the counter included a dozen coffee creations and half that many tea choices. A young woman in a gray DePaul sweatshirt and magenta hair waited patiently for me to decide.

“What’s Joe’s Fine Tea?” I asked. “Something from Trader Joe’s?”

She laughed. “No. We get that question a lot. It’s named after our owner. He picked out the blend personally. It’s—”

“No need to give me the details. I won’t know what you’re talking about. Give me a mug of Joe’s, as opposed to a mug of joe.”

She smiled. “We get that a lot too.”

As I waited for my drink I stepped to the side and watched the front door. Detective Wilson arrived before my tea. He looked out of place, a tall, middle-aged African American man wearing an expensive gray suit among young white people in torn jeans and T-shirts, sipping at mugs and studying laptops. A few glanced up from their screens and followed him with their eyes as he made his way to the counter. He had put on a little weight since I last saw him, and his close-cropped hair had turned almost entirely gray.

“Peters,” he said as a greeting when he arrived at the counter. He held out his right hand. We shook, a single, loose pump. “What do we have here?” He glanced up at the blackboard.

“Anything you want. I’ll buy.”

He ordered a large regular coffee and a blueberry scone. I gave my debit card to the woman behind the counter, who said, “Sorry. Cash only.”

“Uh, I didn’t bring any cash.”

Detective Wilson shook his head. “You’re pitiful, Peters.” He reached in his pocket, took out a silver money clip with an embedded dark blue Chicago Police Department shield, and peeled off a twenty.

At the table, as I took my first sip, he said, “So. The Caldwell concert.”

“Yes.”

“I thought you were strictly a studio photographer.”

“I did a photo study of them for a magazine before they were famous. One of the shots was picked for the cover. It helped get their name out there. They were grateful. They hire me to cover their Chicago concerts as a kind of ‘thank you.’ And it’s fun. I get in free.”

He bit into his scone. “Mmm. Not bad.” He used his napkin. “Where exactly were you? I mean, what was your vantage point when the young woman died?”

“I was on the stage, shooting wide angle. I wanted to get both the band and the crowd in the same shots.”

“When the concert started?”

“During ‘Let’s Get On It,’ their opening number. When the audience surged forward.”

“The crowd in the, what do you call it? The mosh pit. I understand that the room was completely dark as the band started up. How could you take pictures?”

“After the first couple of chords they turned on overhead strobes. You know, flashing lights that make everything look jerky like a silent movie?”

“I’ve heard of such a thing. Does that mean you were able to shoot during that audience surge under the flashing lights?”

“I brought a tripod and kept the lens open to capture the band and the crowd using the strobe lights as my flash.”

“Whatever. So you have images of the opening number.”

“Yes.” I stared at him as he lifted his coffee. “What’s going on? I read in the papers that she was crushed to death. Why are you involved?”

“Coroner report came through late last night. She was stabbed. Already dead when she hit the floor, which wasn’t until the end of the song. The crush of the crowd kept her body up straight until then.”

I thought back to the night of the concert. I had set up my camera to the right of the band, behind the keyboards. The crowd had politely suffered through a particularly awful warm-up group, heavy on organ chords. As soon as intermission began they started working their way to the front. When the lights went out, I couldn’t see a thing except the red exit signs at the back of the hall, and the little red power indicator lights on the guitar amplifiers. Caldwell came on stage from the wings opposite me, dark silhouettes walking briskly and pulling their guitar straps over their shoulders. Roadies crouched behind the drums and the amps. The crowd buzz intensified with scattered hoots and cheers and loud, shrieking whistles.

The boys in the band milled around each other, shouting last minute instructions. Brendan Younger strummed the first chords as he approached the edge of the stage. The crowd screamed. The noise was deafening. The strobe lights began flashing. I set the shutter and began to shoot. The flashes were synced to the beat of the song and so triggered two or three times every second. I could only capture images on about every tenth flash, but I knew that would be plenty of shots to cover the first song. I would get close-ups of the band, and fans in the mosh pit, during the rest of the set. But the set never went beyond that first song. At the end of “Let’s Get On It” cheers turned to horrific screams as the houselights went up revealing a knot of panicked fans a few feet from Brendan. A small circle had been created by frightened young people pushing back and away from something. A teenage girl looked down, hands on her cheeks, mouth agape and eyes wide with terror. Several young men spread their arms in an effort to keep the crowd back from whatever was on the floor.

“Stabbed?”

“Whoever did it knew how to reach her heart through her back, or got lucky. Very surgical. Almost no blood, except internal bleeding. Her heart stopped pumping almost immediately.”

“Jesus.”

“I want to go through your shots. Whoever killed her might be visible in one of them.”

“Certainly.”

“I need to see the highest resolution possible. We will no doubt be zeroing in on very small areas of the pictures. How do we do that?”

“We should look at the raw files on a high-res screen. Do you have that kind of monitor at the police station?”

“Probably not the most up-to-date hardware. Where else can we go?”

“Connie’s studio.”

“Connie Brennan? She’s still in business?”

“Yep. North Branch Digital Imaging. It’s on Elston near Goose Island.”

“Where are the pictures?”

“In my pocket.” He raised his eyebrows. “You asked me if I worked the show when you called. I assumed it had something to do with my shots.”

 

I called Connie from Wilson’s car as we drove southeast on Elston. She had a workstation ready for us when we arrived at the studio. She and Detective Wilson kept the formalities to a minimum, and we got right to work.

After plugging my USB memory stick into the studio computer, I opened the folder containing the concert images and quickly reviewed the icons. I selected one I knew had a good view of the surging mosh pit crowd and double-clicked. Hundreds of happy, animated faces, fists pumping and cell phones raised high, filled about two thirds of the twenty-seven inch screen, with the heads and backs of the band members in the foreground to the left.

Wilson pointed to an area of the mosh pit just in front of Brendan. “Can you zoom in? We found her on the floor about there.” I worked the mouse to launch the zoom tool. The image seemed to explode in size as a small section of the pit came into view, tack sharp from edge to edge. “There. That’s her.” His index finger landed on the only face not screaming, eyes fixed on Brendan. Her dark hair had been pulled back in a ponytail. She smiled slightly, knowingly, as if she had already seen the show a dozen times. I took my hand from the mouse and leaned back in my chair.

“Marcie Rae,” I whispered. . . .

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Copyright © 2024. The Girl in the Pit by Floyd Sullivan