Twenty-Five
Evie munched on cinnamon toast and held her cell at an angle so David didn’t have to listen to her eating a very late breakfast. He was still working out the press statement with Sharon, Evie listening in, mostly to enjoy the fact she didn’t have to write it.
She picked up the large coffee she’d brought into the office with her and headed inside. Shifting the cellphone to her shoulder, she pushed open the door. “I’m fine, David,” she said, “stay with Maggie. I’m just boxing things up today. John’s going to take Maggie’s fan mail, and the case boxes are returning to the archives. I need to finish up my final report, hand it off to the evidence clerk. Maggie needs you more than I do.”
She figured if David stayed at the Bishops with Maggie, the man might get some sleep. He’d spent most of yesterday shuttling between there and Maggie’s house to oversee shoring up the wall and getting the glass replaced in the patio door. The entrance was now blocked by vehicles intentionally obstructing the driveway, along with a group of men there to provide security.
“She’s talking about wanting to go back to New York. Give me a day, Evie, and I’ll be on the job again.”
“If you hurry back right now, you’ve misjudged the women in your life. I’ll keep you in the loop,” she promised. “We’re two weeks into the task force and we’re both already due about four vacation days. I’ll put aside anything you might want to see for when you come in.” She said goodbye and tucked the phone into her pocket.
The flowers from Rob were showing their age, though they were still beautiful. She stopped to admire them, touched a few. She loved the guy who had sent them. It feels good to admit that, she thought. As mismatched as they might be in careers and even personalities, she loved him. He’d asked for an answer by Valentine’s Day. She still had several weeks to sort out her personal life. That she was leaning toward yes and was getting comfortable with the idea suited her fine.
She dumped her backpack on a spare chair. She pulled out her now-ragged master list of facts and theories. Under Facts was a new entry:
21. Andrew Timmets killed Jenna Greenhill.
Under Theories she waffled between two competing ones:
27. He wanted something he saw in Jenna, to have her forever as only his.
28. Jenna annoyed him, and he wanted to have her gone.
She favored the second, given everything she suspected. Jenna had annoyed Andrew at the concert, said something snarky about Maggie or the band, gotten on his bad side, and he’d simply been in a position to react to someone who irritated him. He’d handled the problem by shutting her up for good. Lifted her wallet, and the rest was easy.
His dad being a locksmith, Andrew had learned those skills over a very long time. Get inside Jenna’s apartment ahead of her, wait for her to go to bed, smother her once she was asleep, haul her body down the stairs and out at three or four a.m. when even a college neighborhood gets quiet. Use some common sense on where to hide the body and drive out of town.
Evie wouldn’t tell that to Jenna’s family. What she did want to do if possible was finish up the case completely. She took her coffee and walked over to the aerial maps of Brighton College and the surrounding area. She really had only one piece left: Jenna’s remains, and one fairly decent clue.
Five rough sketches had been found in an envelope in Andrew’s desk, along with his Last Will and Testament. They were obviously something he considered important. That they were maps seemed certain. Given there were five of them, it became a puzzle of geography. But with no method of orientation for the sketched lines, nothing as simple as a location marked with an X, the pages were a mystery.
A detective in Ohio had found the first answer early this morning, matching one of the pages to the Emily Close site by referencing the lines as gradients, not roads, turning the page into a topological sketch, the darkest line being a ditch and the only dashed line a bridge. With those marks providing units of distance, the sketch turned out to be accurate to within a few feet of where Emily’s body was recovered.
Indiana quickly followed that format and picked out two of the remaining pages as directions to the remains of Virginia Fawn and Laura Ship. That left two pages and the question of which one was the map pointing to the remains of Jenna Greenhill and which to Tammy Preston.
Evie could live without the closure, but still she wanted it—for herself and for the families. She’d told herself she first would get the report finished, the case files stored, before making any educated guesses as to the geography. That plan lasted only as long as it took her to finish drinking her coffee while staring at the two sketches. She made half a dozen copies of both, modifying the scale with reductions and enlargements.
She took the aerial shots she had for the Brighton College area off the board, laid them out on the conference room table, and tried to get something—anything—to line up.
Two hours later, she separated the two versions of the sketch into neat stacks and considered again the problem. Part of it was fatigue. Even with the extra sleep, her eyes were tired and this was detail work. And she was working in the abstract with what were tangible facts. These were topology sketches reflecting how landscapes changed heights, nearly impossible to assess against an aerial map.
She grabbed folders, separated the two different sketches, stacked the aerial maps and carefully rolled them up. She put everything into a map tube and left the building. She needed a neighborhood expert’s instincts to interpret the features on these pages. If there was anyone who knew the Brighton College area like the back of his hand, it would be the guy who’d grown up in the neighborhood.
“Since Saturday night, Lynne has been glued to the news. It was all I could do to keep her from going outside Maggie’s house, stand there and cry. A puzzle like this will do her good,” Jim insisted, “and no one knows this neighborhood like Lynne.” Evie reluctantly followed him up the steps to the Benoit home. She wanted Jim’s help, not to get pulled into a thousand and one questions about Maggie. She didn’t know precisely those answers anyway, as she hadn’t seen Maggie since early Sunday morning.
Lynne was the one who opened the door. “Oh. Hi.”
“Lynne, this is one of those no-question times,” Jim said firmly. He looked past her into the living room. “Nancy, can we use the kitchen table? The lieutenant here needs some help.”
“Of course, Jim. Come in, both of you.”
Evie knew immediately that Lynne was dying to ask at least a few questions, felt sorry for her when the girl promptly sealed her lips at Jim’s remark. Evie followed them into the kitchen and said mostly for Lynne’s benefit, “Maggie is fine. She’s staying with friends. She didn’t see what happened that night. Her home has one of those safe rooms where the door shuts and no one can open it. When her security sounded the alarm, she went inside the room and waited until David came to get her.”
“She wasn’t scared?” Lynne asked, her tone one of worry.
Evie gave her a reassuring smile. “It was quiet, she had music, some pillows to get comfortable. She was playing cards to keep herself occupied when David opened the door. I was there. I promise, she’s okay.”
“But she can’t go back home, can she?”
“I imagine not, but Maggie’s resilient. She’ll find another great home to call her own.”
“I made her a card. It’s not much, just a sympathy card. Would one of you give it to her for me?”
“I can do that, Lynne,” Evie said, thinking it might do Maggie good.
“I’ll go get it and be right back.” Lynne darted away.
Evie pulled out the materials she’d brought along. Nancy promptly put a plate of cookies on the table. “One good deed deserves another.”
Evie picked one up with a smile. Jim pulled out a chair beside her, took a cookie, and began to arrange the aerial photos in order. Nancy came around to watch what he was doing. She put a finger on a house. “This is us.”
“Yep.”
“It’s a very different view of the neighborhood looking at it from above,” Nancy said. “You can see how large the yards really are compared to the houses.”
Lynne returned with a light-blue envelope. “Thanks.”
“Sure.” Evie stored it in her backpack. “I’ll see Maggie gets it as soon as I see her.”
“You’ve brought a puzzle?” Lynne asked, looking curiously at the tabletop.
“I don’t mean to be morbid, Lynne, but we might be able to find Jenna’s remains if we can figure out these sketches,” Evie explained. “These are topography sketches—the lines mark the way the land gets flatter or steeper. The lines aren’t necessarily roads, trails, or landmarks. The man who drew these used other sketches like them to show where he put a body. We’re assuming one of these two sketches might tell us where he buried Jenna. There might be a clue in the sketches, some feature in the landscape like a bridge, a culvert, a railroad crossing.”
Lynne picked up one of the sketches, turned it several directions. “Okay, it’s a land graph, like when you play a golf green and want to know how the land slopes and rises, it shows where to putt to reach the flag.”
“Exactly,” Jim replied, choosing a copy of the other sketch. “But it doesn’t have a scale marked, so we can’t put it beside the map and find the location. We have to think about the locations, see if we can see that land graph fitting the place we remember.” He put his finger down near the first open area behind Jenna’s apartment building. “Think about that tree behind Jacob’s shed. Does this area match your sketch?”
“Too flat,” Lynne said. “When it rains, that whole area is a puddle. This sketch looks like a round bowl.” She glanced over his shoulder at the one he held. “That’s closer, but you need long and narrow and steep at one end.”
“Okay.” Jim moved his finger south on the aerial map to the next open area. “The bike trail by the drinking fountain. If you were to go toward the stream, that land falls off quickly.”
Lynne shook her head. “It’s too . . .” She made a gesture with her hand. “You slide on your butt to the bottom, but then it goes flat again. There’s no curve. Yours needs a curve too.”
Jim moved farther on the aerial map, and he and Lynne slowly took the neighborhood apart piece by piece, sharing memories and landmarks. They finished the first column of photos and moved closer to the college with the next column.
“Lynne, show me your sketch again,” Jim said. She laid it on the table, and he nodded and put his finger on a spot. “The way these two lines intersect, they’ve got a defined corner. That can’t be a natural feature; it has to be something man-made. You need a square corner and a big bowl.”
“I know where this is!” Lynne said, excited, picking up the sketch. She grabbed Jim’s hand and tugged. “Come on.”
He laughed and resisted. “Where, Lynne?”
“Four squares twister—it’s the spinner.”
Jim pulled over another copy of the sketch Lynne had, put his finger on the intersecting lines, studied the sketch around his finger. “She’s right.”
Evie heard it in his voice, saw it in his face. He was seeing a place and its geography was matching up with the sketch.
“Let’s go,” Lynne said, tugging again.
Jim grabbed his coat with one hand, pointed Lynne toward hers. “We’re coming.”
“Is it far?” Evie asked, wondering if it made sense to drive.
“Blocks rather than miles, south of the quad past the arts building,” Jim replied. “We can walk it.”
“I’ll have coffee ready when you get back,” Nancy said, wrapping a scarf around Lynne’s neck, then kissing her cheek. “You did good, my girl.”
Evie made a call as they headed out. “David, Lynne and Jim think they have figured out one of the maps. Come join us at the college if you like.”
Evie answered David’s call sixteen minutes later.
“I’m in the parking lot, south side of the quad. Where are you?” David asked.
Evie looked around for the tallest object she could describe. “Look north. See a tall, white marble column, kind of like a steeple?”
“Got it.”
“I’m in its shadow.”
“Be with you in a minute.”
It was a rather serene place, still on campus and part of an outdoor art display of sculptures, memorial walls, plaques commemorating various events and graduating classes. It began where the quad ended and stretched about twenty feet wide along two blocks until it came to the cemetery behind one of the oldest churches in the neighborhood.
Lynne had stopped at a place midpoint, at an earthen sculpture meant to be experienced in a tangible way rather than just looked at. As kids, they had made up a game of twister in the bowl of earth, the four marble slabs of the monument providing reasonable distances to attempt to reach, while the sloped earth created a natural gravity well that made it impossible to play more than a move or two without falling over. The record, according to Lynne, was six moves, and she still held it.
The wind had cleared snow from the top of the sculpture, and Jim pushed the small drift inside away with the side of his boot. Evie saw with fascination that the four marble slabs had been etched with short music riffs, country and jazz, classic and rock.
Jim began sorting out the finer details of the sketch now that the reference point was set. Lynne paced off steps at his direction, carefully moved up the slope and back down, confirming the way the sketch had been drawn.
Jim nodded and made a final mark on the copy he held. “The unit of distance in this sketch is right at twenty inches. It holds no matter which direction you move away from the corner of that oblique.”
“So where does that say Jenna should be found?” Lynne asked, spinning around in a circle while studying the ground.
David joined them as Jim reached out and quietly took Lynne’s hand to stop her from getting dizzy.
“She’s in the monument.”
“What?” Lynne jumped sideways, away from the marble stones.
“There’s no X to mark where the body is, just a bunch of contour lines to confirm you have the location, with the one man-made feature and a unit of distance you can use to calculate the rest. I don’t think he buried her; I think he hid her.” Jim pointed. “In there.”
Evie looked at the solid bench sitting adjacent to the four marble slabs set in the bowl of earth. The bench sat on a solid base. Jim walked over to the bench and put his weight against it, tipped it.
A bone tumbled out.
“Oh, put it back!” Lynne spun away with an anxious step as Jim eased the bench back down. A solid bench, hollow inside, keeping watch over an earthen bowl with four flat marble slabs marking the four directions. The plaque on the bench read, Sit and overlook an eternal sea of music.
Evie carefully rolled up the hand-drawn street maps of the area around Jenna’s apartment building and returned them to the map tube. She took down the photos from the whiteboard, restored them to their original pages in Jenna’s albums and scrapbooks, and stacked them all in a box to be returned to the family. She put the reports she had read back into order and stored them in another box, added the data sets of names she’d sourced and printed out while working the case. Her desk cleared rather swiftly when the decision was simply which folder to store the material in. She reluctantly dropped the last of her flowers, now wilted, into the trash.
Michael’s byline had been on the front-page story today, the most complete of the reporting to date on what had happened with the missing women, at Maggie’s home, and the search that had put the case together. She needed to call him, if only to say thanks for the fact he hadn’t called her. He had quotes from Sharon, Paul, a nicely done insert on Jim and Lynne, comments from cops at the various scenes, and information on the recovery of Jenna’s remains, including a statement from Jenna’s family. He was an honorable man, who meant it when he’d said she was his friend, not a source.
Michael would have been under enormous pressure from his boss to make that call to her, and through her to reach out to David and Maggie. That he hadn’t made the call impressed her. She’d debated calling him early on to share her own perspective, but the hierarchy of Sharon being the one to speak with the press protected the task force, and she wouldn’t impose on her working relationship with David or use her knowledge of his relationship with Maggie for a news story. Michael had put together a great story without her help, just as she’d expected he would. He’d always been excellent at his job.
“Need some help?”
Evie smiled at Ann as her friend came in. “I’m about done. Jenna is a small case compared to some others we’ve worked.”
She archived the electronic copies of the reports onto a flash drive and added it to the reference box. The Jenna Greenhill case would go back onto a shelf, only this time marked closed, once the medical examiner finished the final report on the remains.
Ann leaned in the conference room doorway. “Hey, David.”
“Hey back.”
Evie was glad Ann had come over. David had the fan mail Andrew Timmets sent to Maggie spread out on the conference room table, brooding a bit over it, trying to see if they could have picked out clues to what was going on before it had escalated so far. He needed to be interrupted, diverted to something else for a while. Evie had read the forty-two letters and emails. With hindsight she could see more than if she’d just read them as mail that came in over a stretch of years. She knew there was nothing that could have been done real-time just based on these letters, and David needed to get to that same conclusion.
“Maggie get away okay?” Ann asked.
David looked over to nod. “She’s safely on a flight back to New York and away from the immediate press attention. She wants to finish up the songs for the next album and plans to use that as a distraction while I figure out where she’s going to live in Chicago.”
“Double house hunting,” Evie called, and got the laugh she hoped for in reply.
David came out to join them. “I’m to find something equally as beautiful, and she still doesn’t want a gated community.” He leaned back against one of the empty desks. “While you’re here, Ann, I thought I’d mention to you both—I had an interesting call from Detective Jenkins this morning. A letter arrived at the DA’s office, written by Terrance L. Whitney—the real name of our Philip Granger—a man who entered WITSEC in 2014 and who died on the eighteenth of this month. The letter gives details regarding a body buried behind a wall in an Englewood building. The letter further stated he saw Blake Grayson shoot the man.”
Evie grinned. The WITSEC death letter had shown up. She looked at Ann and found her friend was apparently fascinated by the pattern in the carpet.
“They can’t prove murder with what they have,” David continued. “The ballistics don’t tie the gun to Blake, but to his bodyguard. And no one else so far is talking about what happened with Saul that night.”
“It’s not the first cold case solved where nothing could be done to bring justice,” Evie mentioned.
“Been here before, will be here again,” David agreed. “It just leaves a bad aftertaste.”
Evie understood the sentiment. “You should tell Lori thanks for us, Ann,” she teased, “and ask how she likes retirement. She must be living with a few hundred secrets like that of a guy being buried in a wall.”
“She’s not nearly as colorful as you’re trying to paint her, Evie,” Ann replied, amused.
“Uh-huh. That’s like saying you don’t have interesting friends. It doesn’t hold given I’ve met a few of them.” Evie slid a lid on the last box. “Sharon and the guys are coming this way for dinner. You want to join us? Taylor and Theo are now wrapped too. We’re going to choose a new county and move on as a group.”
“Sharon found her family?”
“A mother and two daughters, alive and well, with the case being closed simply as resolved. They don’t need the press attention, and the only one who could be arrested over what happened to cause them to run is already doing jail time, enough he shouldn’t get out even with early parole until after the girls have graduated college.”
“A good ending.”
“Five for five with one group alive is a nice opening set.” Evie looked around the office space. “I already miss this place. The next county is likely going to find us working in some basement with florescent lights with a need for lots of air fresheners.”
David laughed. “Isn’t that the truth? You have a preference for where we go next, Evie?”
“Let’s stay somewhere north—I’m getting resigned to all the snow. I wonder if there’s something like a missing magician in those county summaries? That would be neat. Or maybe a missing chef? We’d enjoy working a foodie crowd of suspects.”
Her phone rang in her pocket. She dug it out, noted the caller ID. “And this day was going so smoothly.” She answered the state dispatcher, “Lieutenant Blackwell,” then reached for a pen and wrote down an address. “Tell him an hour. I’m on my way.” She slid the phone back in her pocket. “Huge favor, Ann—can you pack up my hotel room?”
“Sure.”
She took out her hotel room key and handed it over. “Cole thinks my arsonist just got caught by one of his own fires. I’m on my way to Hoffman Estates.” She stuffed the address in her pocket and picked up her backpack, grabbed her coat and gloves. “Choose somewhere interesting for us, David. I can handle anything but a missing schoolteacher. I’ve had my fill of classrooms for a lifetime. I’ll meet up with you in the next county.”
“Done. I’ll see you there, Evie.”
She headed out. She liked working with him. They were wrapped with both cases before the end of January. That had a good feeling to it too. She’d landed on a successful team and planned to make the most of it. She was even optimistic she would sort out how to answer Rob and get her life in order in the coming month.
She was pulling keys from her coat pocket, hurrying to her car when her feet went out from under her. She stared up at the sky, stunned, then shifted to see if anything was injured but found her coat had padded the worst of the impact and started to laugh. Life had a way of tumbling her occasionally. She got carefully back to her feet, rescued her backpack. Still laughing a bit, she unlocked her car. She’d hurt her pride more than anything else. She could always count on life to throw her some surprises. She started the car, hoped the heat would kick in quickly. Then she drove to meet Cole at the fire scene, wondering what she would find waiting for her there.