Gabrielle Grey sat in her office, the blinds down, the door locked. This was not her usual style – she liked to encourage an informal, sharing dynamic within the department. But, right now, she needed to be alone.
Her meeting with Hoskins was still fresh in her memory. Following his departure, she had immediately checked in with Suarez in the incident room, then with Detective Richards, who was her point man on their surveillance team. The news was not encouraging – Kassie Wojcek continued to stalk West Town, but seemingly to no purpose. Her behaviour was becoming ever more unpredictable – she had just been thrown out of the local library for disturbing the readers – and Gabrielle could tell that her team were beginning to doubt that their surveillance would prove fruitful.
Feeling beleaguered, frustrated, Gabrielle had retreated to her office. The expected breakthrough with Kassie Wojcek continued to elude them. The teenager maintained her lonely hunt, but hadn’t actually done anything interesting or incriminating. Nor had she contacted anyone. This latter detail was particularly unnerving, their working theory being that Kassie had an accomplice, selecting and stalking her prey before handing them over to a more experienced killer. Yet over five days of surveillance, her officers had not seen her contact anyone. She hadn’t used her phone, nor had she attempted to meet with anyone, so how exactly was this partnership working?
Gabrielle racked her brains, turning over the possibilities, but she could make no headway. It was maddening: Kassie had to be involved somehow – she knew the identities of the victims before anyone else and had inserted herself into the narrative at every opportunity. Also, she had reason to dislike them. And yet … there were aspects of her behaviour, aspects Adam Brandt had been keen to point out, that ran counter to the idea of Kassie being a threat to these people. She had insisted she was trying to warn Jacob Jones, something he had confirmed in his brief statement to the uniformed officers who dragged her away from him on North Michigan Avenue. Furthermore, her actions at Rochelle Stevens’ house and Lake Calumet could be read as suggesting she was trying to help the victims. The latter was particularly confusing – it was Kassie who had started the chain of events that led to their presence at Lake Calumet. If she was in league with their killer, why would she lead Adam Brandt to the kill site, disturb the attack on Baines, injure herself in the process?
Still Gabrielle pushed these doubts away. If Kassie wasn’t involved in these killings, if she was trying to help them, then she had to be telling the truth. But that was impossible. Gabrielle had never believed in the supernatural and she wasn’t about to start now.
However, she wasn’t stupid, nor had she spent years working cases to ignore the possibility that there was more than one potential explanation, that there was something she had not yet alighted on that would illuminate everything. Say the girl was mad, that somehow she knew or thought she knew who these victims would be, and was trying to help them, then that suggested that she had no connection to the killer and would never lead them to him …
Unnerved by this thought, Gabrielle pulled open her files once more. She knew it was pointless – staring at the photos of the victims was hardly going to inspire a flash of inspiration – but riven with doubt, she felt there was nothing to do but go back to basics, in the hope – the fear – that they had missed something.
She placed the photos of Jones, Stevens and Baines next to each other in a row. These were not the grim post-mortem images, but rather the photos provided by the families for use in their appeals for witnesses. They were happy, smiling photos and Gabrielle shuddered as she looked at them now. All these people had loved ones – partners, mothers, fathers, husbands, children – and yet they had been abducted and murdered without hindrance.
Their attacker had timed his actions to perfection. Jacob Jones’s fiancée had been away at a conference, Madelaine Baines’s family had been at work and school, and Rochelle Stevens had been targeted when she was home alone, watching her favourite TV programme. Unless their killer was extremely lucky, he had done his homework. This suggested that he was a stalker first and a killer second, yet there was little actual evidence to support this theory. Security footage feeds had not revealed any of the victims being tailed in the lead-up to their disappearance, nor had their neighbours spotted any suspicious figures or unusual activity in the run-up to their deaths. This killer was obviously scrupulously careful, but still you would expect something to show up, some evidence of his craft. How else would he know that Madelaine’s twins always played a softball match on a Thursday, that Rochelle was regularly home alone on Tuesday nights, watching her favourite show?
And now a thought landed. A thought so simple, but so insistent, that Gabrielle found herself rising to her feet. There was one way he would know all their movements without ever going near them. Rounding her desk, she hurried out into the incident room.
‘Montgomery …’
The young officer looked up, as Gabrielle approached.
‘Rochelle Stevens’ phone. Where is it?’
‘Right here,’ she replied, crossing to the evidence store and removing a plastic bag in which the young woman’s phone lay.
Slipping on latex gloves, Gabrielle took the bag from her. Turning the phone on, she opened the dead woman’s calendar. All her appointments, right down to casual coffee meets, grocery deliveries and television viewing, were scheduled there. This was a woman who liked to plan.
‘And Baines’s phone?’
Montgomery handed her a battered Samsung.
‘Recovered from her house, just like the others. We’re assuming the killer left them there so his movements couldn’t be tracked.’
Nodding, Gabrielle opened up Madelaine’s calendar. It too was rammed full of appointments, charity events, school pickups and softball matches. Gabrielle stared at the long list of engagements, her mind turning.
‘Was Baines’s phone synced to anyone else’s?’
‘Sure,’ Montgomery replied, looking momentarily wrong-footed. ‘To her husband’s, I think. They shared a diary.’
‘And do we know where Baines bought the phone?’
Montgomery stared at her for a moment, then started leafing through a mound of paperwork.
‘I think she got it from Phone Shack. She went there quite regularly, I think.’
‘Which one?’
‘West Town,’ Montgomery replied a little hesitantly, as if fearing she had overlooked something important.
Gabrielle digested this, before continuing.
‘What about Rochelle Stevens?’
Montgomery was already rifling through her files. Gabrielle watched her, hungry for answers.
‘I know she was with Verizon, had been for a while … She set her contract up over two years ago at a Talk Warehouse in the Loop. It’s near where she works, I think.’
Gabrielle stared at her. Was she barking up the wrong tree after all?
‘But I’m sure there was a payment from her account to a Phone Shack,’ Detective Suarez interrupted, crossing to join them. ‘A couple of months ago. It stood out to me, because she hadn’t used them before and it was only a one-off payment.’
‘Yeah, there it is,’ Montgomery confirmed, pointing to a line on Rochelle’s bank statement. ‘A one-off payment to the Phone Shack in West Town …’
She petered out even as she said it.
‘You’re thinking the Phone Shack is the connection?’ Suarez asked, handing the statement to Gabrielle.
Gabrielle paused before answering, trying to gather her thoughts.
‘All three victims were targeted when they were home alone. Now, Rochelle Stevens was out a lot. She had therapy sessions or social events most nights, except Tuesday, when she religiously watched Scandal. Baines was also very busy, but her girls always played a softball match on Thursdays, so stayed late at school. Neither woman was a regular tweeter or poster – you couldn’t monitor their movements that way – but they were both scrupulous users of their calendars, so if you had access to them, it would be easy to work out when they’d be alone. Jones was more of a home body than the others, but his fiancée was away at a conference on the night he was abducted –’
‘Which had been in his diary for weeks,’ Suarez added pointedly.
‘So we’re saying Jones visited Phone Shack too?’
‘Possibly,’ Gabrielle replied carefully. ‘Maybe someone there encountered them all, took the opportunity to clone their accounts or sync phones …’
‘If he did … then he could see all of their apps, their diaries … everything,’ Montgomery overlapped. ‘He could even pinpoint their whereabouts in real time, by switching on location services.’
‘Exactly. He’d know where they were, where they were going to be, when they were likely to be alone …’ Gabrielle’s voice dropped to a whisper as she concluded: ‘… he’d know everything about them.’