“The judge waived the requirement to live in a halfway house due to his notoriety. He inherited a cabin near Starved Rock in the nineties from an uncle. My father put it in a trust and handed it off to a management company. The property has been a vacation rental for all these years. He’s going to live there, so the judge ordered me to tag along with the social worker and the parole officer to have a look at the place ahead of the release. Make sure it meets all the requirements.”
“I’m going with you,” Lane said.
Rory hadn’t told Lane about her meeting with Catherine Blackwell. She allowed him to believe her nervousness had started with her visit to Stateville Correctional Center. It was a logical conclusion, as compared to the real source of Rory’s distress—that her father had been trying to find Angela Mitchell before he died. And more troubling than the discovery itself was what it was doing to Rory. That walled-off place in her mind had been disturbed, the once-calm waters clouded now with muck and filth. The only way to restore clarity was to figure out what her father had found. The only way to tame those waters back to peace, and to quiet that place in her mind, was to look for Angela herself. To ignore this urge was to stoke the flames of a sickness she had managed to control for many years. She knew the best way to extinguish the impulse was to nurture it, like Aunt Greta had taught her as a child when Rory de-fused her fanatical impulses by mastering the detailed craft of restoring china dolls. The burning question now, though, was if Rory would be reconstructing the woman’s death, or following the footsteps of a woman who was still very much alive.
“Fine,” Rory said. “Come with me.” She looked up from her laptop and offered a rare glimpse of emotion. “Thanks. I didn’t want to go alone.”
A pang of guilt prickled her neck for keeping her secret from Lane. The man had done nothing more than love her—and all of her flaws—for the better part of a decade. Didn’t he deserve to hear this part of her life? Perhaps so, but she couldn’t bring herself to tell him. Rory pointed to Lane’s computer, then looked back to her own.
“Let’s go, we’re way behind. What have you got?”
Lane continued to stare for a moment, as if he sensed something more she wasn’t saying. Rory felt his stare, but kept her attention on the laptop.
“Okay,” Lane said, giving in and looking at his own computer monitor. He scrolled through the pages. “I’ve been watching an area outside of Detroit, southeast portion of the city and into the adjoining counties. It’s been coming up on the algorithm. Several hits in just the last four months. There have been twelve homicides in the last two years where the victims have been homeless women or prostitutes, all African-American. Little or no family support, a few who were only identified at the morgue through fingerprinting and matching to the Michigan fingerprint identification program of convicted criminals. Basically, no one knew they had been killed. No family, no friends.”
Rory was typing on her computer. “Easy targets with little risk.”
“Correct,” Lane said.
“How did the algorithm pick them up?”
“Manner of death.”
Each week, Lane and Rory ran through trends picked up by the algorithm Lane had created. It took into account several different factors about crimes reported from across the country, looking for trends and similarities. Doing so allowed them to recognize commonalities between homicides in a particular geographic region. When enough markers and tags showed up in the same location, Lane and Rory were alerted. Then they jumped in and started digging. To date, the Murder Accountability Project had identified twelve serial killers—defined as a single person having committed at least three homicides—across America in which arrests were made. Many more hot spots were trending, where local police were following up on leads. Tonight’s meeting was a weekly occurrence where Rory and Lane pointed out marks that were trending on the software. Sometimes it was a cluster of homicides in a tightly focused location, or a group of homicides carried out with the same suspected weapon, or on the same type of victim. It might be how a body was disposed of. It could be the occupation of the victim. The algorithm tracked over five thousand indicators looking for similarities.
When they could make a strong enough case, Rory and Lane took their findings to the authorities in that area. With Lane’s reputation as a forensic psychologist and criminal profiler for the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, and Rory’s credentials as a reconstructionist who pieced together the very findings the algorithm looked for, they made the perfect team. Police departments listened to their conclusions, and many had started using Lane’s software to track homicides on their own.
“All of them were killed by some sort of blunt-force trauma—blows to the side of the head—and then the bodies were disposed of in Dumpsters.”
They were in the process of logging the names of the twelve Detroit victims, and cataloguing their findings, when the doorbell rang. Rory looked at her watch. It was almost ten o’clock. She walked to the front door and peered through the peephole. Ron Davidson stood on her porch.
“Shit,” she said before pulling the door open. “Hey, Ron.”
“Gray,” he said in a measured tone. “You’re not returning my calls again.”
Rory exhaled loudly. “Sorry. I’ve been busy with this … thing. For my dad.”
“I’ve heard all about it since you asked me for those old records.” He leaned closer to the screen door. “Christ, Gray. Your dad repped this guy?”
Rory nodded. “Looks like it, yeah.”
“Did the boxes from 1979 have what you needed?”
“Yes. Or … I’m not sure. I haven’t been through them all yet.” Her hand habitually moved to her face to adjust her glasses, but she realized she wasn’t wearing them. She never did when she was alone with Lane. “Thanks for coming through on those.”
“No problem. I owed you for taking Camille Byrd’s case.”
The two stood without speaking for a moment, Detective Davidson on the front porch and Rory inside behind the screen door.
“Can I come in?” Ron asked.
“Yeah, sorry. Of course,” Rory said, opening the door.
She led her boss into the living room, where Lane was still tapping away on his computer across from the roaring fire.
“Lane,” Rory said. “Ron’s here, we’ve got to talk.”
Lane looked up. “Ron, how are you?”
“Doing good, Doc.”
The two shook hands.
“Sorry to interrupt,” Ron said. “I’ll just be a minute.”
“No worries,” Lane said.
“In here,” Rory said, walking Detective Davidson past the darkened den, where all her dolls stood on the shadowed shelves, and into her office. In addition to the three boxes from 1979 that rested by her desk, the contents of which were spread across the surface, Camille Byrd’s photograph also hung from the corkboard with the few scant notes Rory had made nearly two weeks ago about the autopsy findings.
“Walter Byrd contacted me,” Ron said. “He says he hasn’t heard from you. He said he called a few times, but never got a call back. Sounds familiar.”
“I don’t have anything to tell him yet.”
“Then tell him that, Rory. But tell him something.”
“I feel like crap, Ron. I agreed to take the reconstruction, then my father died, and I’ve been tied up in dissolving his law firm and … everything else I ran into. I haven’t put many hours on the case.”
“I’m sorry for the timing, Rory. I know you’ve got a lot on your plate.”
Rory looked over at her desk and saw the remnants of her research from the 1979 case strewn across the surface. She remembered sitting at the desk a few nights before, stumbling across her father’s notes and wondering what he had been doing for Thomas Mitchell throughout all the years he represented the man. Now she knew.
“I’ll get back to Camille Byrd. I promise.”
“Have you looked into it at all?”
“Just a glance,�
�� Rory said, remembering the night she’d paged through the medical examiner’s report, the image of Camille’s bruised and damaged throat sparking in her mind. Rory glanced over at the picture of Camille Byrd on the corkboard. She felt the spidery tentacles of guilt crawl up her back. She had dreamt of Camille Byrd two nights earlier, coming across her body as it lay in Grant Park. Rory had tried to apologize for ignoring the case, but the girl was dead and cold in her dream when Rory shook her. As she stared now at the photo and into the dead girl’s eyes, Rory felt the urge to hide behind her thick-rimmed glasses, turn up the collar of her coat, and look away.
“I’ll put some hours on it.”
“When?”
“Soon, I promise.”
Her phone rang from her back pocket. Rory held up a finger.
“Sorry.” She retrieved her phone and checked the number. Although not in her list of contacts, Rory immediately recognized the number. It had been burned into her memory the way everything else was, but this particular phone number held a greater significance than simply her remarkable memory. The last time she received a call from this extension, she had learned that her father was dead. Was it irony, Rory wondered, that she had also been with Ron Davidson when she had accepted the last call?
“Celia,” Rory said to her father’s administrative assistant. “Is something wrong?”
“Oh, hello,” Celia said, caught off guard. “No, nothing’s wrong. Well, I’m not sure. I have to see you. I have something of your father’s that I’m not sure what to do with. Can we meet this week?”
Rory spun through her schedule. She had to make the trip out to Thomas Mitchell’s cabin, meet with Judge Boyle and the parole board for the final hearing, finish the legal paperwork to get her newest and only client out of jail—which was scheduled to happen in one week, get his finances in order, and now dedicate some time to Camille Byrd’s reconstruction. All of this while putting off the burning desire to start her own search for Angela Mitchell and figure out what had happened to her.
“I’m swamped at the moment, Celia,” Rory said, knowing that her father’s law firm was all but shut down and wrapped up besides the Thomas Mitchell affair. “Can we put it off for a couple of weeks?”
There was a pause before the soft voice answered: “I really need to see you, Rory.”
She thought she heard quiet weeping. Rory remembered Celia’s tears dripping onto her neck when the woman had embraced her at her father’s law office.
“Yes,” Rory said. “Then we’ll meet this week. I’ll call you tomorrow to find the best time.”
She heard more sniffling and ended the call without waiting for confirmation. She placed the phone in her back pocket and looked at her boss.
“Give me another week, Ron. In the meantime, I’ll call Mr. Byrd and give him an update.”
The detective nodded. “Okay. But I need something soon, Rory. Something new. Anything.”
“I’ll have something to you by next week,” she said.
CHICAGO
November 1981
FRANK MOORE HAD TRACKED HER GENEALOGY, THE BEST HE COULD figure. If Angela Mitchell were alive, she would likely rely on friends or family. This was his hope, anyway. Because the other possibility—that she had disappeared on her own—presented an insurmountable obstacle he’d never be able to scale. How would he find her if she had simply vanished? What if she had left the state to hide in a corner of the country where no one would look? Based on what Frank knew about the woman, this was a very conceivable possibility.
Angela Mitchell had been a loner her whole life, moving from her parents’ custody as a child, to an extended stint at a juvenile psychiatric hospital in downstate Illinois that lasted until she was released at age eighteen. From there, Frank’s research got murky. Her parents had been out of the picture since she became a legal adult, and Frank’s trip down to St. Louis to visit them had been fruitless. Angela Mitchell’s parents hadn’t seen or heard from her in years prior to her disappearance. They hadn’t even known she married. The next time she showed up on Frank’s sketchy timeline was when she met Thomas Mitchell in Chicago, had a short courtship, and then married. She had no close friends besides a woman named Catherine Blackwell, who was the wife of Thomas’s former business partner. Frank’s journey to the Blackwell residence had been unsuccessful, a little strange, and ultimately a waste of time and energy.
Through archival information he found at the library and some names given to him by Angela’s parents, Frank had made a list of distant relatives to call on. These were cousins, and siblings of her parents, and cousins of her parents, and other further removed folks that had at one time or another been part of Angela’s life before she met Thomas Mitchell.
For the past three months, Frank had been looking for any hint that his client’s wife was still alive, as Thomas Mitchell swore she was. A twenty-eight-year-old associate, Frank was anxious to prove himself at Garrison Ford. He filled his days by slogging through research and briefs, and occasionally making an appearance in court to assist the partner to whom he was assigned. He spent his nights hunting down a woman who was likely dead and buried. Newly married, with a nurse for a wife who worked the afternoon shift at the hospital, he had the time to look. He was happy being paid to chase a ghost. But God almighty, he could only imagine what would happen if he actually found her. His client would be free, the conviction overturned, and Frank’s stock at Garrison Ford would rise quickly. Perhaps he’d make partner before forty.
The latest lead was written on a scrap of paper—a name and address—and stuck with Scotch Tape to his dashboard. The rural road, an hour and a half west of the city, was empty. Frank couldn’t imagine there ever being much traffic this far out in the sticks, and he drove freely as the sun set in front of him. Cornfields stretched out on either side of the road, as far as he could see. The once-tall stalks were now cropped down to nothing. Large bales of hay, spun in tight spirals, studded the field in random patterns.
He came to a T in the road, checked his map, and turned left. After another three miles, he eventually saw the top of the two-story building rising above the otherwise-flat terrain. The campus sprawled out over many acres. In the middle of nowhere, the white structure looked like a prison. Frank was sure it felt that way to many of its patients. He turned into the parking lot and pulled past the sign indicating that he had arrived at BAYER GROUP JUVENILE PSYCHIATRIC FACILITY. He found a spot and parked. Inside, he signed in.
“Which resident are you visiting?” the receptionist asked.
“No resident,” Frank said, standing in his wrinkled suit after making the long drive from the Garrison Ford offices. “I’m here to see Dr. Jefferson.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“Yes. I called earlier in the week.”
“Let me find him,” the receptionist said.
Frank paced the waiting room for five minutes until the door opened.
“Mr. Moore?”
Frank turned around to see a thin man with tiny glasses and a long white coat.
“Dale Jefferson, we spoke on the phone.”
“Yes,” Frank said, walking over and shaking hands. “Thanks for taking a meeting.”
“Sorry it’s not under better circumstances,” Dr. Jefferson said. “Come back to my office.”
Frank followed the doctor into the psychiatric facility, through a long white corridor, and into his office. The space was decorated like a living room—a couch, coffee table, and two end chairs. A wall of built-in shelving held volumes of textbooks. Dr. Jefferson sat in one of the chairs and motioned for Frank to take a spot on the couch. A file was resting on the coffee table and Dr. Jefferson picked it up as he sat.
“It’s a terrible shame about Angela. I was unaware of the situation at first because the news media never used her maiden name. And, sadly, Thomas Mitchell has gotten more attention than any of his victims. Society is more interested in The Thief than the lives he stole.”
Frank was no
t here to debate the psychology of society, and wasn’t about to mention that his client was convicted of killing only one woman, not a slew of women. In fact, Frank hadn’t mentioned his association with Thomas Mitchell to anyone he had encountered during his months-long search for Angela. The court of public opinion had pinned all the missing women from the summer of 1979 on Thomas Mitchell, and Frank knew he needed to hide his motives for why he was asking about a woman who had supposedly been killed more than two years ago.
“Yes,” Frank finally said. “It’s a shame.”
“You said Angela’s family is looking into a civil lawsuit?”
“Yes,” Frank said, crossing his legs. A poker player might see this as a nervous reaction to hide his lie. “I’m looking into matters myself to see if a civil suit is possible, given the circumstances.”
“You’ll excuse me,” Dr. Jefferson said. “The man must be very troubled, but if they’re not going to put him to death for what he did, then I say lock him up for life and drain him of all his resources.”
“Well,” Frank said, clearing his throat, “I’m going to see what I can do.”
“Do you represent Angela’s parents?”
Frank paused briefly. “Yes.”
“From what I remember, they didn’t have a wonderful relationship with Angela. Always terrible to see fractured relations between parents and child. And now, never to be repaired.”
“Yes. It’s a shame,” Frank said again.
“Do you have children, Mr. Moore?”
“I’m just married. Maybe in a year or two my wife and I will try.”
Dr. Jefferson held up the file. “What can I help you with?”
“Civil suits can be nasty, so I want to find out as much about Angela as possible. I know she spent time here during her teen years, and I’m wondering if I could ask a few questions.”
“Of course.”
Frank removed a piece of paper from his breast pocket. “Angela came here in 1967 when she was seventeen years old.”
“That’s correct.”
The Woman in Darkness Page 16
