102: Kloz had been right, the little shit knocker.
So far, he’d tied eight more obituaries belonging to employees at John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital, employees who were very much alive.
Once he matched the employee names, Clair worked with the hospital’s HR department to reach out to each one and communicate what was happening, dispatching cars to fetch them.
She spent most of the night gathering them all here, at the hospital. Each person had been told to not to bring anything at all—no food, no toiletries, no books, no cell phones, not one single personal possession other than the clothing on their backs. All would be provided once they arrived. Those with families were told to bring their families. Nobody was permitted to make a phone call, not before leaving or after arriving.
She gathered them here, in the hospital’s cafeteria.
They were pissed.
Stir-craziness set in quickly, and most staffers were just longing for their shift to start so they could leave the room. It was worse for the children and spouses, but this made the most sense. The cafeteria was at the center of the hospital, easily guarded. They had plenty of food and shelter. She couldn’t accommodate this many people at a safe house, not even in multiple safe houses. The department didn’t have the resources.
She saw Nash enter from the far end of the room, spot her, and cross the cafeteria, taking in what was beginning to look like a refugee camp.
“We’ve got an ID on the boy in the truck,” he told her. “His name was Wesley Hartzler. He’s a Jehovah’s Witness. Went missing sometime yesterday. He attended services first thing in the morning, then they spread out around town to try and recruit.”
“Do they know where he went?”
Nash shook his head. “They don’t file a flight plan or anything. Sounds like it was completely unorganized. Everyone goes out the door and heads off in different directions.”
“Was he alone?”
“He paired off with a girl named Kati Quigley. I just hung up with her mother. She’s missing too. We put out an Amber Alert. I told both sets of parents to meet us here so we can get statements. Figured that would be faster. There’s more,” he said. “Eisley said cause of death on the boy was blunt-force trauma to the head. No water in the lungs.”
“So he wasn’t tortured?”
“I’m thinking he just got in the way and our unsub kept the girl.”
Clair opened the notes app on her phone and ran through the names Kloz gave her. “We don’t have obituaries for Quigley or Hartzler.”
Nash shrugged. “Maybe they both got in the way. Jehovah’s Witnesses show up on our unsub’s doorstep, probably out of the blue, they see something they shouldn’t . . .” His voice trailed off, but Clair knew where he was going. She glanced around the room. Of the eight potential victims Kloz identified, four had children. All the children were accounted for. They were all here.
Nash followed her eyes. “If he took her, it was because she was convenient, not because we kept him from one of these kids. The fact that we found the boy and not her tells me she’s still alive.”
“He could be torturing her right now.”
“We’re getting close.”
“Were they on foot? Get uniforms to their starting point, have them branch out on a house-to-house. Make sure they go in pairs—we don’t want someone stumbling into Bishop or the unsub alone.”
“Already happening. I spoke to Dispatch right after I hung up with Eisley. I’m heading out there now.”
Clair nodded, then dialed Agent Poole.
Seven hundred and eight miles away, Special Agent Poole answered on the second ring. Clair told him about Wesley Hartzler, and that they’d located all Bishop’s potential victims and gotten them safely to the hospital.
“When we hang up, I want you to call SAIC Hurless. He’s my commanding officer. Fill him in on the house-to-house. He can get you more bodies,” Poole told her.
Clair felt people watching her in the cafeteria, her every movement telegraphed and documented by the eyes of the people she brought here. She walked past the two officers stationed at the cafeteria entrance out into the hallway. “We interrupted Bishop’s endgame. He’s going to retaliate.”
“You can’t think about that. You need to focus on keeping those people safe. We’ll find him.” Poole sounded like he was shuffling papers. His voice dropped lower. “I’ve got five more bodies down here in that lake, Detective. Possibly a sixth body. Dismembered. The pieces sunk in plastic bags and weighed down with rocks, just rotting away in the water.”
“Jesus.”
“I’ve got the diary too. Porter left it for me.” More rustling of papers, and then he went on. “The mailbox on the adjoining house said ‘Bishop.’ I’m down at the county property appraiser’s office, going through records.”
Clair said, “We ran searches on that a few months ago but hit a wall. There’s no national database, so we threw darts at possible counties. The municipalities with records only go back so far electronically, and there are a lot of Bishops out there. Our search was limited to Illinois and the surrounding states. We never considered South Carolina.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes you have to dig the old fash . . .” he trailed off.
“Find something?”
No reply.
“Agent Poole?”
“Does Sam have any kind of connection to South Carolina?”
“He . . . he did his time as a rookie in Charleston I think, before coming to Chicago. Why?”
“What year did he come to Chicago?”
“Why?”
Poole let out a breath, the weight of his words heavy. “The property with the lake and the two surrounding houses, all of it is in his name.”