The email the commander received contained a gold mine of information. It listed every hospital, clinic, and in-home health care location that the employee worked at, along with the name of the extended-stay apartment or hotel they temporarily resided in, and the type of vehicle they’d requested. The only problem was narrowing down the list of seventy-five to a more manageable number of names that could be relevant. It still didn’t explain the blue Sienna seen entering Washington Park and the fact that an identical vehicle was picked up at Midway by a fifty-seven-year-old woman named Janet St. James.
My confidence was fading, and I felt like we were barking up the wrong tree. Why would she attack, kill, and cart away men in her same age group? I doubted she had the physical endurance to commit the crimes to begin with, and maybe the whole thing was a computer glitch.
Lutz pointed at our laptops as he scooted the guest chair to my side of the desk. “Each of you take twenty-five of those names and plug their addresses into your computer’s map of the area. I want to know who lives the closest to Washington and Bixler Parks. Tony, you take the first twenty-five, Frank, the next, and Jesse, the last batch. Call me as soon as you have the search results for anyone who lives within that ten-block perimeter of Bixler or near Washington Park. Once we have our best selection of people, we’ll station patrol units outside their homes and watch their movements.”
Lutz walked out, and we began the task of searching for addresses that could be in our own backyard. I checked the time before plugging street names and apartment numbers into the search bar. It was now four thirty, and my thoughts of going home, playing with Bandit, and possibly checking for messages on the dating site had gone straight out the window. I would probably be working until after the night crew showed up, especially if we found a promising lead.
“Don’t get tunnel vision, guys, since men can be nurses too. We need to check out every male name and address on our sheet,” I said as I crossed off the second name on my list.
By five fifteen, we had all the addresses that were near both parks. We sat at the back table with our new list of fourteen people, three of them men.
The door to our bull pen opened, and Todd Jacobsen, the lead analyst in our tech department, walked through with a rolled-up paper map of our area.
“Hey, guys, I hope this will work for your needs.” He unrolled it and taped the corners to the table.
“It’s perfect,” I said. “Thanks, buddy.”
With Magic Markers, we spent the next twenty minutes placing red dots at every address where a temporary worker lived. Three of those fourteen lived within seven blocks of Bixler Park, and the rest were spread out between both parks.
I jabbed the map in those three locations. “We should focus on these first. I’ll call Lutz and see if he wants to take a look.”
Sitting next to us moments later, Lutz looked over our results then compared them to the names on the list.
“So, we have one male and two females who live in the general vicinity of Bixler Park— John Merring, Gail Fremont, and Leah Standish. Have you done background checks on them yet?”
“Not yet.” Tony rose from the table and crossed the room to his desk, where he unplugged his laptop. Back at the table, he typed the first name, John Merring, into the DMV database to narrow down the search by state in case there were multiple people with that name.
The results showed John was from Memphis, Tennessee. With that information, we pulled a background check on him, and he came up clean.
“Let’s move on.” I nodded at Tony.
He typed Gail Fremont’s name into the DMV database. “That’s weird. She only has an ID, not a driver’s license.”
“Where’s she from?” I asked.
“Petaluma, California.”
“Maybe she gets a stipend for the city bus unless her job is close enough to walk to work. See if she has a criminal record.”
Tony entered her name, and just like John, she came up clean.
“Okay, one more.”
Tony checked the DMV for Leah Standish and found that her hometown was in North Carolina. “Whoa, what’s this? Our last woman is from Asheville, which is only a few hours from Charlotte.” He plugged her name into our background-check software and told us she had a misdemeanor charge five years earlier for assaulting a patron at a bar.
“She could be the one,” Lutz said. “I’ll get Patrol to sit on her residence and watch her comings and goings.”
“But if it is her, then who’s her partner? A woman who’s five foot two and one hundred ten pounds, according to her driver’s license, can’t overtake, murder, and transport a body all by herself,” Tony said.
I added my two cents. “And a good reason for Patrol to follow her movements for a few days. Maybe she has a partner who lives right here in Chicago or comes on their own once she’s established in the city she’s working at.” I double-checked the car she was given to drive during her stay. “The sheet shows she picked up a cream-colored Forester at Midway, which is a Subaru, and whether the vehicle is cream or tan is open to opinion. That’s like arguing about something being fuchsia or magenta. It’s the same damn thing.”
Lutz grabbed my desk phone, pulled it closer to him, and dialed Abrams. “Mark, it’s Bob Lutz. We have a possible suspect in our recent murders that we need units to sit on for a few days. Yep, I’ll forward all the information to you. Appreciate it, pal.” Lutz hung up and blew out a long breath. “Okay, keep plugging away at the rest. I’ll call Henry and have them come in. There may be other people we need to keep our eyes on too.”