The Woman in Darkness

by Charlie Donlea

  Angela’s skin was burning as she waited for Thomas in the kitchen. When the door opened, Angela immediately recognized the concern on her husband’s face.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked, rushing to her.

  “I saw him again,” Angela said, but Thomas was paying no attention to her words.

  He grasped her wrists gently and examined her hands, lifting them to his face to get a better look. For the first time, Angela noticed her bloody fingertips. Thomas moved his hands to her upper arms, pulling her sleeves away. Angela had unknowingly removed the long-sleeved, button-down shirt she had worn to the library, which Catherine had questioned. She stood now in a white T-shirt, the sleeves of which were soaked with bloodstains from where she had dug at her shoulders and opened the scabs that were hidden there.

  “What’s going on?” Thomas said. “You’re covered in blood, Angela.”

  She felt him wipe her forehead and eyebrows, where her bloody fingertips had left crimson streaks from pulling at her lashes.

  “He was at Catherine’s. Bill hired him.”

  “Slow down,” Thomas said, looking into her eyes. “Slow down and breathe.”

  Angela swallowed hard and tried to control her frantic respiration. She was like a child who had cried ferociously and was now trying to speak. She exhaled a few times and allowed Thomas’s grip on her shoulders to right her mind.

  “I was at Catherine’s house today.”

  “Okay?”

  “And Bill came home.”

  “Okay?”

  “And he was with the man from the alley. From when I tried to get rid of the couch.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Bill said he works for you. He runs the warehouse up north.”

  Thomas furrowed his brow, and then cocked his head. “The Kenosha warehouse? That’s Leonard.”

  “He was in Catherine’s house. He looked right at me.”

  “Leonard Williams? Are you talking about Leonard?”

  “Yes!” Angela screamed. “He was the man from the alley.”

  “Angela, it’s okay.”

  Thomas tried to pull her into his chest, but she resisted like a child working to prevent a parent from lifting them.

  “But … I saw him in the alley.”

  “Leonard lives in the area. He was probably out walking that morning. This is good news, Angela. You see? Leonard is harmless. He runs one of our warehouses. That’s all.”

  Angela felt Thomas pull her close again, this time allowing it. She rested her head on his shoulder, her chest still heaving, but no comfort came from her husband’s embrace. Worry was all she could do and all she could feel. It was all her mind would allow. It filled her chest, her head, her soul.

  Thomas whispered into her ear. “I think it’s time you start seeing your doctor again.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Chicago, October 22, 2019

  IT WAS MIDMORNING ON THE DAY AFTER HER MEETING WITH JUDGE Boyle, court was in session, and the hallways were vacant when Rory walked through the Dirksen Federal Courthouse in The Loop. Her combat boots rattled with her gait and echoed off the walls. Rory found the courtroom, pulled her gray coat tight to her neck, opened the heavy door, and slid silently into the back row. The pews were mostly empty, but for the first three, which were lined with young men and women Rory guessed were students of the distinguished Lane Phillips. Groupies, she thought, who followed the good doctor everywhere he went. Lane’s court appearances brought high fervor for the young lads who hoped to see their mentor in rare form on the stand. Rory admitted that a Dr. Lane Phillips court appearance could rival any other type of entertainment.

  Lane was testifying as an expert witness for the prosecution in the case of a double murder that took place the year before—a man was accused of killing his wife and mother in a fit of rage. Rory hadn’t seen much of him in the last week because he had been preparing for his time on the stand.

  “Dr. Phillips,” the attorney asked from behind the podium. “You mentioned earlier that your specialty is in forensic psychology. Is that correct?”

  “Correct,” Dr. Phillips said from the witness chair.

  Lane Phillips was approaching fifty, but looked like he was in his thirties, with mismanaged hair and the remnants of a once-prominent dimple on his right cheek, which flashed when he smiled. His casual attitude toward anything that came his way made him popular with the students, who looked up to him like a deity. His laissez-faire style—messy hair, black jeans, worn sport coat, and no tie—surely spoke to the young audience that filled the front pews. Whenever Lane spent the night at Rory’s place, he never took more than ten minutes to shower and dress in the morning. His efficiency made Rory Moore, who was far from girlish, look like a beauty queen.

  Lane’s appearance stiffly contrasted with the sharp-suited attorney cross-examining him, whose hair was perfect and whose cuff links shined brightly as they peeked from under the sleeves of his tailored suit. Even before Rory took into consideration the discussion between the two men, it was obvious they were rivals.

  “Is it also true, Doctor, that you serve often as an expert witness in high-profile cases?”

  “The profile of a case is not a variable in my decision to serve as a witness.”

  “Very well,” the attorney said, walking from behind the podium. “But it is true that you often testify as an expert witness in cases of homicide, is it not?”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “Usually, your expertise is sought to help the jury understand the mind-set of the one who stands accused of murder. Is that correct?”

  “Oftentimes, yes,” Dr. Phillips said. Lane sat upright with his hands folded in his lap, oozing a calm confidence against the attorney’s aggression.

  “In this case today, you’ve offered the jury quite a detailed look, so to say, into the mind of my client. Is that fair to say?”

  “I offered my opinion on your client’s mind-set when he killed his wife and mother, yes.”

  The attorney let out a subtle laugh. “Objection, Your Honor.”

  “Dr. Phillips,” the judge said. “Please limit your comments to the questions being asked and offer no more conjecture on guilt or innocence.”

  “Excuse me, Your Honor,” Dr. Phillips said, looking back to the attorney. “I offered my opinion on what someone might be thinking if they had shot and killed their wife and mother.”

  This got a subtle reaction from the students.

  The attorney nodded his head and offered a small smile as he ran his tongue against the inside of his cheek.

  “So, as in today’s earlier testimony, and in the many other cases in which you’ve served as an expert into the criminal mind, one might guess that you are employed by a government agency. Say, the FBI?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “No? Wouldn’t a distinguished mind such as yours be put to good use in the Criminal Investigative Division or the Behavioral Science Unit within the Federal Bureau of Investigation?”

  Dr. Phillips opened his palms. “Perhaps.”

  The attorney took a few steps forward. “You must, instead, be in private practice, then? Counseling such individuals on a regular basis. Surely, that is how you came to be such an expert on the criminal mind.”

  “No,” Lane said calmly. “I’m not in private practice.”

  “No?” The attorney shook his head. “Then please tell us, Dr. Phillips, with all of your advanced degrees and your many publications in forensic psychology, where exactly do you work?”

  “The Murder Accountability Project.”

  “Yes,” the attorney said, gathering papers and reading from them. “The Murder Accountability Project. That’s your pet project that has supposedly developed an algorithm to detect serial killers. Do I have that right?”

  “Not really, no,” Lane said.

  “Please enlighten us, then.”

  “First, it’s not a pet project. It’s a legitimate LLC corporation that pays my employe
es and me a salary. And I didn’t supposedly develop anything. I actually developed an algorithm that tracks similarities between homicides across the country to look for trends. These trends can then lead to patterns, which can help law enforcement solve homicides.”

  “And all these homicides you help to solve, how many of the accused perpetrators do you deal with personally as a psychologist?”

  “My program identifies trends to help law enforcement track potential killers. Once we see a pattern, the authorities take over the case.”

  “So the answer to how many of these alleged murderers you end up counseling as a psychologist would be zero. Is that correct?”

  “I’m not directly involved with any of the accused that my program has helped identify.”

  “So calling yourself an expert in psychology when you no longer practice the profession is a bit misleading, is it not?”

  “No, sir. Misleading is dressing in a shiny suit and calling yourself an attorney, when really you’re just a hack throwing insults to distract the jury.”

  Lane’s students tried unsuccessfully to mute their laughter.

  “Dr. Phillips,” the judge said.

  Lane nodded. “Excuse me, Your Honor.”

  The attorney, unfazed, went back at his papers. “You are also a professor at the University of Chicago. Is that correct?”

  Lane looked back at his rival. “Yes.”

  “A professor of what, exactly?”

  “Criminal and forensic psychology.”

  “I see,” the attorney said again, walking back to the podium with a trying-too-hard confused look on his face and scratching his sideburn. “So you run a business that claims to identify killers, but you don’t work in any capacity of psychology with those killers. And you teach the psychology of the criminal mind to young college students. I’m struggling to understand where your practical experience comes from, Dr. Phillips? I mean, you’ve offered so much information about my client’s mind-set, and what he must have been thinking in the days leading up to the night his wife and mother were killed. Insights such as the ones you offered have to come from practical, clinical experience working with men and women convicted of violent crimes. But it looks to me like the prosecution has put on the stand a so-called expert witness who runs a business that sells algorithms and data to the police, and who teaches psychology to college kids. Doctor, have you heard of the axiom ‘those who cannot do, teach’?”

  “Objection!” the prosecutor said as she stood from behind the table.

  “Withdrawn, Your Honor. I have no more questions for Dr. Phillips.”

  The DA was heading to the witness-box. “Dr. Phillips, prior to taking a university faculty position and starting the Murder Accountability Project, where were you employed?”

  “At the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  “For how long?”

  “Ten years.”

  “And what was your role within the Bureau?”

  “I was hired as a forensic psychologist.”

  “And your job was to analyze crimes to determine the type of person who may have committed them. Is that accurate?”

  “Yes, I was a profiler.”

  “During your tenure at the Bureau, you worked on over one hundred fifty cases. What was your clearance rate in those cases, where your expertise in profiling the perpetrator led to an arrest?”

  “I had a close rate of ninety-two percent.”

  “The national average for clearance rate of homicides is sixty-four percent. Your success rate was thirty points higher than that. Before your tenure with the Bureau, Dr. Phillips, you wrote a thesis on the criminal mind titled Some Choose Darkness. That thesis is still widely heralded as a comprehensive look into the minds of killers and why they kill. Please tell us, Dr. Phillips, how you gained such insight.”

  “I spent two years during my PhD studies on sabbatical, during which I traveled the world interviewing convicted killers, understanding motive, mind-set, empathy, and patterns of how a human being decides to take another’s life. The dissertation is a well-received and peer-reviewed document.”

  “In fact,” the DA said, “more than ten years after your thesis was published, it is still popular in the forensic community. Am I correct?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “In fact, your thesis is used as the main training tool around which the FBI teaches new hires who join the Bureau as profilers. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “In addition to your dissertation, you also compiled your findings on serial killers of the last one hundred years into a true-crime book. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “As of the latest printing, how many copies of that book are in print?”

  “About six million.”

  “No more questions, Your Honor.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Chicago, October 22, 2019

  RORY ENTERED THE TAVERN ON THE AFTERNOON AFTER LANE’S courtroom appearance. She and Lane sat at the corner of the bar and ordered drinks. Rory took off her beanie hat and removed her glasses. There were few people in this world Rory Moore felt comfortable around, Lane Phillips was one of them. The bartender placed a Surly Darkness stout in front of her, and a light beer in front of Lane. Rory made an ugly face when she looked at Lane’s beer.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Your beer is the same color as urine.”

  “That dark stuff hurts my stomach.”

  “You hurt my stomach,” Rory said. “Why do you put yourself through that crap?”

  “On the stand? Every expert witness has his credentials questioned. It’s part of the gig. Gotta have thick skin to deal with it, and you have to see it for what it is. The defense is attacking me to distract the jury from the fact that his client killed his wife. If my credentials need to get shredded in order for my opinions to be heard, that’s okay with me, as long as the son of a bitch is found guilty.”

  “I hate bullies.”

  “He’s just doing his job.”

  “Lawyers are the scum of the earth,” Rory said, taking a sip of stout.

  “Says the lawyer next to me. And he’s right, by the way. I haven’t practiced psychology for years. And I haven’t dealt directly with the criminally insane for more than a decade.”

  “That might be about to change. I need a little help.”

  “With the Camille Byrd reconstruction?”

  Rory thought briefly of Camille Byrd, whose photo she had pinned to her corkboard days before. Her father had died of a heart attack just after she agreed to take the case, and tying up his affairs had been an all-encompassing task. A pang of heartache struck as Camille’s face popped into her thoughts. Rory had all but abandoned the case, and the guilt of leaving a cold case unattended suddenly felt heavy on her shoulders. She made a mental note to put in some hours on the reconstruction, once she had this last file of her father’s settled.

  “No, something else,” she finally said.

  Rory reached into her purse and pulled out the file Judge Boyle had given her.

  “I’ve got my father’s firm pretty well settled, besides this one case.”

  She pushed the folder across the bar, and saw Lane’s posture straighten. Paging through a criminal’s file gave him a thrill. And despite any stiff-suited attorney trying to convince people otherwise, Lane Phillips was one of the best at dissecting the mind of a killer. He’d resigned from the FBI not because his profiling skills were suspect, but because he was too proficient at it. Diving into criminal minds left him shaky and tormented by what he found there. He understood their minds so well that it left a haunting impression he had difficulty shaking off. So when his true-crime book, which chronicled the minds of the most notorious serial killers of the last one hundred years, including personal interviews with many of them, sold more than two million copies during its first year in print, he quit the Bureau and started the Murder Accountability Project with Rory. The MAP was an effort to track unsolved ho
micides and identify patterns that might highlight similarities between crimes, often pointing to serial killings. Rory and Lane’s skills complemented each other. She was able to reconstruct homicides better than anyone in the country, and Lane Phillips was one of the world’s foremost authorities on serial killings.

  “Ever hear of this guy?” Rory asked as Lane paged through the file.

  “Yeah. They called him The Thief. But, Christ, that was forty years ago. Your father represented this guy?”

  “Apparently. I’m still sorting the details. Garrison Ford, the big criminal defense firm, originally handled the case. My father worked at Garrison Ford after leaving the public defender’s office, but his tenure was short. Just a couple of years. When my father left to start his own firm, he took this case with him.”

  Lane turned a few pages in the file. “When was the last time your father worked at Garrison Ford?”

  “Nineteen eighty-two,” Rory said. “And he’s had this guy as a client ever since.”

  “Doing what?” Lane asked.

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out. After Garrison Ford mounted an unsuccessful defense at trial, my father worked on appeals and represented him at parole hearings. The guy also has a small fortune from before he was put away, and it looks like my dad oversaw the money. Set up a trust and protected it for three decades. Settled some debts, looked after some property, and paid himself out of the trust for legal services rendered.”

  Lane turned the page. “And visited this guy a lot. Look at all these visitor log entries.”

  “Yes, my father had quite a relationship with this man.”

  “So what’s the issue? Pawn this case off like you’ve done with all the others.”

  “I can’t. This guy’s been granted parole. My father was working with the judge on the details when he died, and His Honor is under some pressure to get it off his docket, so he’s not letting me delay it.”

  Lane took a sip of beer as he continued to page through the file.

  Rory picked up her stout. “Tell me about this guy. I looked him up. He was convicted on a single count of Murder Two. Doesn’t seem like it would be so spectacular that he made parole after forty years. But when I talked with the judge, he said the guy killed a whole bunch of people.”