“Watch yourself on I-80. Goddamn state troopers got eagle eyes.”
Rory smiled and took the ice-cold bottle. “Thanks, Kip. I’ll see you in May.”
“Here,” he said, handing her the Swiss Army knife as well. “I know that doll’s worth more than a couple cases of beer.”
Rory nodded her thanks, then pulled out of the brewery’s parking lot and onto Indiana Parkway. A few minutes later, she was on the highway with her cruise control set at one mile per hour slower than the posted speed limit. She sipped her Dark Lord and enjoyed the ride back to the city.
Rory found herself parked in front of her father’s house. It was close to one in the morning. She was becoming unhealthily fixated on the woman from 1979. Angela Mitchell had somehow reached back across the years to grab hold of some part of Rory’s consciousness. Like a tuning fork that has been tapped, the vibration from the mystery surrounding the woman was at once barely audible but yet impossible to ignore.
At first, she failed to understand why Angela Mitchell had such a hold on her. Or, at least, Rory wouldn’t admit it. To do so required self-reflection, and the acknowledgment of her own flaws and idiosyncrasies. Baring her soul had always been difficult, even if she were doing so only to herself. The connection had started when Rory learned that Angela was autistic. The link had strengthened when Rory read the descriptions that painted Angela as an introverted woman on the outskirts of society, someone who never truly fit in and who had few, if any, close relationships in her life. A woman who had been too scared to go to the authorities even when she suspected her husband was a killer. Since she had learned that Catherine Blackwell believed Angela Mitchell could still be alive, Rory’s mind was in overdrive. That her father had once searched for her, and perhaps had spent much of his life looking, had produced an unhealthy obsession with Angela Mitchell. From the low vibration in her mind, a single question formed: What did her father find? It was too much for Rory to neatly pack away, compartmentalize, and forget about. Rory knew she would use all her skills and talent to reconstruct Angela’s whereabouts.
She climbed from her car and strapped her backpack over her shoulder. Opening the trunk, she grabbed a second Dark Lord from one of the cases and then used her key to enter her childhood home. A wave of emotions suddenly washed over her. Rory couldn’t remember the last time she cried. In fact, she was unsure if she had ever experienced the emotion during her adult life. She didn’t think so, and wasn’t about to start now just from walking across the threshold to her childhood. Her father was gone. He had carried with him a great secret. It was enough for her to be curious. Crying would produce nothing useful.
She closed the door behind her, walked into her father’s office, and sat behind his desk. She used Kip’s Swiss Army knife to pop the top on her stout, and looked around the darkened room. Rory’s greatest gift was her ability to piece together cold cases, to pore over the facts and discover things other investigators missed until a picture of the crime—and sometimes the perpetrator—became clear in her mind. Her understanding of a killer’s thinking and motive came from examining the carnage he left behind. The frustration with attempting to reconstruct anything about Angela Mitchell lay in the fact that there had been nothing left behind. Thomas Mitchell left no carnage, and this made Rory wonder about the man’s guilt. Was it possible, she asked herself, that he had spent forty years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit? The more puzzling dilemma was whether he had spent decades in jail for a crime that had never happened.
She clicked on the desk lamp in her father’s office and pulled Lane Phillips’s thesis from her backpack. He had written it for his dissertation more than a decade ago. It was a dark and ominous look into the minds of convicted killers. A tour de force that came from Lane’s two-year crusade, during which he personally interviewed more than one hundred convicted serial killers around the world. The thesis still echoed in the hallways of the FBI, even though Lane had long ago moved on from his time as a profiler there. It was also Rory’s go-to reference material when she needed to remind herself how to think like a killer, a useful technique when trying to piece together a crime. Rory took a sip of Dark Lord and turned to the cover page: Some Choose Darkness By Lane Phillips.
She’d read the thesis many times, and was always drawn to the same section. She turned to it now. The heading always put a flutter in her chest: “Why Killers Kill.”
She read Lane’s discernments on what made a person choose to end another’s life: the rationalizing that occurred, the blocking of emotion, the pouring of societal norms and moral obligations into a black hole of the mind. This concept got back to the core of his thesis: At some point in every killer’s existence, a choice is made. Some choose darkness, others are chosen by it.
Rory finished her beer while she sat in her dead father’s darkened office. She looked around her childhood home, the quiet of the empty rooms allowing her mind to form the questions that gnawed at her. She thought about Angela Mitchell. She wondered if the mysterious woman had chosen darkness all those years ago, or if darkness had chosen her.
CHICAGO
November 1981
FRANK MOORE CONTINUED TO KEEP HIS HUNT FOR THE GHOST OF Angela Mitchell to himself, sharing none of his investigation with his bosses at Garrison Ford. And he hadn’t yet mentioned anything to his wife. He had been named lead counsel for Thomas Mitchell’s appeals, a task he was handling with efficiency and skill. Frank had kept private the fact that the man had hired him to look for his dead wife. He had received the request with confusion and suspicion, but since his bizarre encounter at the farmhouse in Peoria, and perhaps for the first time, Frank considered that Angela Mitchell might actually be alive.
He sat at his desk at Garrison Ford, the phone to his ear. Next to him was the thick folder of research. It held all the information he had collected thus far on Angela Mitchell, her troubled adolescence, her stint at Bayer Group Juvenile Psychiatric Facility when she was seventeen years old, and Frank’s conversation with Dr. Jefferson. The file ended with the address of the farmhouse in Peoria and the name of the woman who had driven Angela from Bayer Group the day she discharged herself on her eighteenth birthday—Margaret Schreiber.
He spent a week researching the woman. His phone calls to the county and the literature he had managed to obtain from public records told him that she had owned the home for eleven years. She held a mortgage and was current on her taxes. She was a certified nurse-midwife at the local hospital in Peoria. Over the past few days, Frank had pulled permits from public county records and nursing licenses from the Illinois Department of Professional Regulation. He made phony phone calls to inquire about the hospital’s services, and had pieced together an impressive biography of Margaret Schreiber.
“She left Bayer Group on her eighteenth birthday,” Frank said into the phone. “I found the woman who picked her up.”
“It wasn’t her parents?” Thomas Mitchell asked in a static-filled voice from prison.
“No. She signed herself out, but a woman named Margaret Schreiber helped her. It’s my only lead so far. The only non-family member whom I can link to her before she met you. I’m running with it for now.”
“Have you talked with her?”
“Briefly,” Frank said.
“Did you ask about Angela?”
“I mentioned her.”
“And? You think she knows something?”
Frank remembered Margaret Schreiber as she backpedaled through the front door of her farmhouse. He remembered the fear in her eyes. He remembered the curtains as they shifted slightly when the woman peeked through the window as he drove away. She was hiding something, and Frank had a good idea what it was.
“I’m not sure,” he finally said. “But when I know more, I’ll be in touch.”
Frank hung up the phone and logged the fifteen-minute call to the Thomas Mitchell file and tacked it onto the appeals billing. His secretary walked into his office.
“I’m heading to lunch,�
�� she said. “Here are your messages from the morning.” She held yellow slips of paper in her hand. “Your wife called. She’s going to work early and won’t see you tonight. Howard Garrison stopped by, wants you to come see him. And a strange message from someone who wouldn’t give her name. She said, hold on … it was a bit strange.”
Frank felt a numbness run through him as the secretary shuffled the paper slips.
“Here it is. She said …” Frank’s secretary looked up from the message to stare at him with raised eyebrows. “‘Sorry about the dogs’? And she’d like to talk with you as soon as possible.” The secretary handed him the message. “You know what that’s all about?”
“Long story,” Frank said, standing quickly and hurrying around his desk. “I’ll call my wife later. Tell Mr. Garrison I got hung up with something. I’ll see him tomorrow.”
“She wouldn’t leave a phone number,” the secretary said as Frank hurried out of the office.
“That’s okay. I don’t need one.”
He jogged out of his office, chasing the ghost of a woman who disappeared two years ago.
CHAPTER 24
Chicago, October 30, 2019
AFTER RORY’S MOTHER, MARLA, DIED SIX YEARS EARLIER, HER FATHER had threatened to downsize to a condo, but could never bring himself to do it. Instead, he kept the three-bedroom house, where Rory was raised, and lived in the too-large space in order to keep the memory of his wife alive. It dawned on Rory the night before that with her father gone, she’d have to empty the place like she had done the law office, box everything up, and stick a FOR SALE sign in the front lawn. After too many Dark Lords, she had lain on the sofa with a strong beer buzz. She contemplated the sad and unenviable task of clearing out her childhood home of all its memories to allow a different family to start the process of painting a new story over the ones that were here now. She had contemplated it all while using the alcohol to numb her senses. Eventually she dozed off and was gone to the world.
Rory woke now in her father’s office. Sunlight skewed through the window and across her face, causing her to shield her eyes as she woke. A dull headache greeted her as she sat up on the couch and rubbed her temples. Her father had died in this room. It was where Celia had found him, and Rory felt some cathartic sense of peace for having stayed here through the night. Maybe she offered her father’s spirit a night of company. Maybe she was still drunk on Dark Lord.
The empty bottles of stout sat on her father’s desk, and the computer exposed the last of her voyeuristic attempt to discover what her father had learned about Angela Mitchell before his death. If he had found anything at all, he didn’t put it onto his computer. She cleared the bottles from the desk, sat again in the chair where her father had died, and used her phone to find the websites of three moving companies, the numbers of which she jotted on a sticky note. There were a number of storage facilities in the area, and she picked a few at random. She spent thirty minutes making calls and arranging times. When she was finished, she shut down the computer and looked around the room. Her father’s office appeared different in the morning light than it had in the dark hours of the previous night. She noticed the cabinet door at the bottom of the desk was opened a crack, and saw the knob to a safe peeking from the crevice between the edge of the door and the frame of the desk. Rory pulled the door open.
The safe was built into the desk, and she immediately spun the dial, trying common combinations of numbers. They all failed. She spun through her birth date, then her mother’s and father’s. When she finally tried her parents’ wedding anniversary, the door swung open. Crouching down below the desk, Rory peered into the vault of the small safe. A thick folder sat on the shelf. She retrieved it and placed it on the desk. She opened the cover and found Thomas Mitchell’s parole letters dating back two decades, all marked Denied. Her father’s appeal letters were attached to each denial. When Rory made it to the bottom of the stack, she found a letter from the parole board that suggested great progress by Frank Moore’s client, and a changing in the board members’ thinking. Two more letters praised the evolution and rehabilitation of Thomas Mitchell, and then, at the bottom of the stack, the parole letter marked Approved.
Rory paged back through the stack, glancing at the dates on top of each letter, her mind registering and cataloguing each month, day, and year. Her father had been part of all of the hearings and appeals dating back to the 1980s. She stacked the appeal letters and parole board correspondence to the side. The next stack of papers was handwritten letters from Thomas Mitchell. The penmanship was perfect block, all-caps letters that looked as though they were traced from the print of an old-fashioned typewriter. Rory recalled the detectives’ chicken scratch from the many reports she had read throughout her career. Thomas Mitchell’s writing was in stark contrast, evidence of a man with nothing but time in front of him. There was no urgency to his work. There was no reason to rush. His writing was deliberate, each letter a perfect match to the one preceding it. As Rory skimmed the page, she noticed the repetitive way the man composed his A’s. He used no crosshatch, and the letter looked simply like an inverted V. The character jumped from the page in every word where it was present:
I, THOMΛS MITCHELL, ELECT MY ΛTTORNEY, FRΛNK MOORE, TO BE PRESENT ΛND TO SPEΛK ON MY BEHΛLF ON THE MΛTTER OF MY LΛTEST PΛROLE HEΛRING.
The unique symbol gave Rory a nauseous feeling, as if the missing crosshatch represented a sinister deletion of something more significant in the man’s soul. She pushed the letters to the side and pulled the last pile of papers in front of her. The stack was a rubber-banded collection on top of which was her father’s writing: Angela Mitchell.
Rory’s breath caught in her throat. Chronicled in the pages was what appeared to be her father’s research into the life of Angela Mitchell, her family, friends, and acquaintances. A long list of names, with check marks and notes next to each one. She recognized Catherine Blackwell’s name. She moved her finger down the page, reading each name.
“Your friend said I might find you here.”
The voice startled her, and the breath Rory held in her throat came out with a yelp. She looked up to see Celia standing in the doorway.
Rory put her hand over her chest. “Christ, Celia. You scared the hell out of me.”
“Sorry. I knocked, no one answered. But I saw your car outside.”
Rory stacked the papers together. “What are you doing here, Celia?”
“You never called me back. I went to your house this morning. Your friend said to look for you here.”
Rory vaguely remembered a drunken call to Lane the night before while she snooped through her father’s computer.
“Sorry,” Rory said. “I’ve just had so much going on.”
Rory recognized something in Celia’s expression.
“Is something the matter?”
“I’m afraid your father has left me with a burden I can’t handle,” Celia said, holding a small object in her hand. “He gave me this a long time ago. Told me to keep it to myself.”
Rory squinted her eyes; her contact lenses were dry from having slept in them and she couldn’t make out the object in Celia’s hand.
“What is it?”
“It’s the key to his safe-deposit box.”
CHICAGO
November 1981
FRANK STOPPED HIS CAR AT THE EDGE OF THE LONG DRIVEWAY. THE farmhouse stood in the distance. It was late afternoon and the shadows of maple trees stretched across the property. He turned the wheel and advanced up the extended drive. The dogs appeared from behind the house to chase his car, hopping at the excitement of a visitor. Frank worried that they would sense his fear from the last time he was here, when he had barely made it to the safety of his car as they tried to rip him to shreds.
He wasn’t about to open the door, but he shut off the engine and waited while the dogs barked and announced his presence. After a minute, the woman appeared on the front porch and shouted at the dogs, and they promptly ran to the bac
k of the house. Frank stood slowly from his car.
“C’mon inside,” the woman said.
Frank walked up the steps and onto the creaky front porch. The woman opened the screen door and Frank followed her inside. They entered the sitting room off the foyer. A large bay window looked out over the fields behind the property. The woman appeared older, now that Frank had a good look at her, perhaps a bit haggard, as if life had treated her badly. She ran a hand through her coarse gray hair as she sat on the sofa.
Frank was prepared for small talk, but didn’t need to be. He had his story prepared, but wouldn’t use it.
“Why are you asking about Angela?”
The directness of the question caught Frank by surprise, and he felt the sudden need to tell the truth. For months, he’d lied about what he was doing. For months, he’d been deceptive as he tried to find any useful thread that might lead to the whereabouts of a woman he was rapidly believing might be alive. But for some unexplained reason, the woman in front of him now seemed as though she’d be impervious to his stories. “I’ve been hired to see if Angela is …”
Frank struggled with his words for a moment.
“Is what?”
“Is still alive.”
The woman shook her head. “She warned me that he’d come looking for her.”
A tremble went through him. A buzzing deep in his soul. “Who warned you?”
The woman looked at him. A dead stare that was unrelenting.
“Angela.”
The Woman in Darkness Page 18
