GRACE NOTES
Journal Entry #423
For book purposes, I’ve started carrying a digital recorder to our Grave Digger meetings. I didn’t tell the others because I want the conversation to seem natural, but really, the recordings are for them. I want to make sure I give them credit in the book for any contributions they make to the Lovelorn case. Tonight, we mostly stuck to Janeesa’s disappearance. We met at the pub near Barnes’s place, which meant that Chris was in rare form because we were accommodating someone other than him. He ordered a beer and made the server bring it unopened, cracking the top himself, like he was some feudal king whose food might be poisoned. After he sent back his burger not once but twice, he might’ve been right to check the food for toxins or nails and at least a gob of spit. We were supposed to be talking about Janeesa’s case, but Chris just replayed his glory days from when he founded Grave Diggers. He yammered on about how the cops dragged a dead guy out of the Harbor wearing a Reilley family reunion T-shirt. “It had been almost ten years since they found him, and no one had ID’ed this guy,” he told us, like we hadn’t already heard this story a hundred times. “But I looked at that shirt and knew it had to be the key to cracking the case. A Day-Glo shamrock? The family name right on it? How many Reilleys could there be? Turns out, a motherfuckin’ ton, but I used the genealogy sites and tracked them one by one.”
I give Chris all due kudos for the big “get.” He’s right that the cops probably weren’t ever going to identify this guy on their own, and when it turned out the dead guy wasn’t even a Reilley, but a boyfriend who just happened to get a leftover shirt, Chris gets even more credit. He emailed and called every member of that family who attended the reunion and asked them the whereabouts of their shirts. After ten years, the accidental drowning victim got a name, thanks to Chris. Yahoo. Can we move on now, please? I think we have a chance to do more than put a name on a dead guy. I think we could unmask a serial killer. I just need a way to get the group on board, and they’re still preoccupied with Janeesa’s case.
Molly talked to her uncle, the one who is a retired sergeant from the Chicago PD, about Janeesa’s disappearance. She said he’s pretty convinced Hector the boyfriend did it and just no one can prove it. We’ve all seen these cases, and as much as we like to rag on the cops sometimes for not following up, usually when they like a guy, they’re not wrong. What are we always saying when a woman disappears? It’s got to be the boyfriend, right? It’s always the boyfriend.
Molly’s boyfriend, Travis, harrumphed at this, and we had a good laugh. #NotAllBoyfriends, right? Molly says Travis hates coming to our meetings because of the gory talk, but I think he secretly hangs on every word. Anyway, Molly’s idea is to track down Jimmy Gomez, the buddy who was Hector’s alibi the night Janeesa went missing. “Maybe they’re not so tight anymore,” she said. “He might be singing a different tune.”
I disagreed and said it was Bomber Jacket Guy from the video. That creeper set off every one of my alarm bells.
“That’s great, but we have no way to tell who he is,” Chris told me. He had sorted the container of sugar packets so every color was together and all the edges lined up. I swear, he’s wound so tight you could bounce a quarter off him.
I said I wanted to go down to the mini-mart to check it out for myself. Watching true-crime shows has taught me the value of walking the scene. Chris made fun of me. “What do you think you’re going to find after six years? Do you think Bomber Jacket Guy is just hanging around the parking lot, maybe with a chunk of her hair?”
But Barnes backed me up, and he actually is an ex-MP so he knows what he’s talking about. Chris likes to brag that he got the highest score possible on the police entrance exam, but he figured his intelligence would be wasted just walking the beat so he didn’t take the job. He went into IT instead, because it takes a genius to drive around suburbia and show housewives how to plug in their PCs. “The bomber guy may not be waiting right at the mini-mart,” Barnes said. “But he might be in the immediate area. One thing I noticed in watching the videos is that he doesn’t show up in the shots of the parking lot where Janeesa’s car was. It’s possible he left his car at the pump while he went inside, but it’s also possible he came on foot, meaning he could live nearby.”
Oliver was quiet most of the night, and I saw he hadn’t eaten much of his fish and chips. I asked if he was okay, and he said he was hanging in there. “All this talk about who took her, it’s important. But I can’t stop thinking about that poor girl, out there somewhere, with no way to get home. We know she’s certainly dead, but without proof, everyone’s still got that little bit of doubt. How cruel is that for her mama, having to wake up every morning wondering where her baby’s at?”
His eyes got wet. Oliver always feels the victims deeply, sometimes shaming the rest of us who maybe look at these cases more like a puzzle. These days, Oliver’s grief is right up near the surface. He’d sounded upbeat at our last meeting, saying his wife, Sandra, is getting this great new experimental drug. But I got to thinking later, if she’s got a new drug, that means the last drug failed. Sandra’s been fighting her cancer more than two years at this point, so I don’t know how many more drugs there are left to try.
“What would you like us to do to find her?” Chris asked him. “Go beat the bushes with sticks? The cops searched Hector’s and Jimmy’s homes. They looked in the nearest fields and parks.”
“I realize that,” Oliver said with authority, like he was reprimanding an uppity student. He’d taught history for forty years, and he could still take us to school any time he wanted with just a pointed look. “But it was twenty-four hours before the cops even started to look for Janeesa, and longer than that before they located Hector and Jimmy for questioning. They said they’d been out driving, no place in particular. I’m wondering if they might have crossed state lines with her.”
“So, we should check for Jane Does in surrounding areas,” Barnes said with admiration. “Excellent idea.”
When the meeting broke up, I walked to the L with Barnes as usual. We live at opposite ends of the city, but our journey begins from the same subway stop. I always like this opportunity to talk to him alone, away from Chris especially. Tonight, I told him about my plan for the Grave Diggers to resurrect the Lovelorn Killer investigation. Chris took a whack at it years ago and came up empty, so he’d moved it into the “graveyard” section of our caseload before I even came on board. But I’ve been poking around in there lately, and I see a few possibilities we could explore. I don’t think this guy is dead like the cops say. I think he went underground like BTK in Kansas. I’ve been studying that case too, and I see some parallels with the ropes and suffocation of the victims. Barnes didn’t try to shout me down like Chris would have. He seemed intrigued—interested enough to wait around in the freezing cold air while I explained it to him.
“BTK reported his own murders,” I said. “He wrote letters to the media like the Lovelorn Killer. His main thing was killing, yeah, but he also wanted to be famous for it. That’s what ultimately got him to crawl back out of his hole—people had stopped talking about him. But the cops used his enormous ego against him and got him to send them chapters of his autobiography, which they then traced back to Dennis Rader at his church computer. I think the Lovelorn Killer must be feeling that same urge. He could’ve written those letters to the victim’s address, or to their families—you know, to rub salt in the wound. Instead, he wrote them to the Sun-Times for maximal attention.”
Barnes pushed his glasses up his nose, the way he does when he’s thinking hard about something, so I know he was taking me seriously. “You think the mass hysteria and the giant headlines were just as exciting for him as the murders,” he said. Barnes can always take my ideas and say them in way less words than I use.
I’m sure there are still cops assigned to this case, but they aren’t looking for him. No one writes articles about this guy anymore. He’s probably sitting in his mommy’s basement, stewing about how she’s still the boss of him, getting by on his memories of the good old days when he held the whole city at attention. Only the thing is, those days are really old now.
I want to make some headlines of my own. Give him a taste, only make the story about the Grave Diggers and how we’re going to find him. He’s not the lead. We are. I’ll bet he gets furious when he sees the news, and maybe that’s enough for him to send up a flare.
Barnes listened to me the whole time without interrupting to shout his own opinions over mine, unlike some people. He has these pretty eyes that are hard to describe, green with flecks of yellow that make him look like he’s lit from the inside. I forget sometimes that he’s the only one of us who’s actually seen a dead body, over in Iraq. He doesn’t lord it over us the way Chris would if he were the decorated Army vet. “It could work,” he said. “Maybe. You’d have to find an angle that would interest the news enough to do a story.”
There’s one part Barnes warned me about. He shook his head at me. I couldn’t tell whether he was pissed or impressed. “You know Chris isn’t going to like this,” he said. “He marked the case as closed.”
My boss works at the Foodsmart, and his name is David, not Chris. On the Grave Diggers, we’re supposed to be equals. “Except it’s not closed,” I told Barnes. This guy tortured seven women to death and never had to answer for it. He’s out there, breathing the same air as you and me, eating nice food, and walking all over this city, wherever he pleases. Meanwhile, the women are underground, right where he wanted them all along. I wonder if the cops have ever thought to stake out the cemeteries where the victims were buried. This guy is just the type to come around and admire his handiwork. Hell, he probably brings flowers. So sorry I had to kill you.
I don’t want to make trouble for Barnes, so I told him he doesn’t have to help me work the case. If he doesn’t want to risk Chris coming down on him for going behind his back, I totally understand. I can work alone for now.
Barnes didn’t need to think about it. “No,” he said immediately. “I’m in.”