Despite her rough personal history with it, Wicker Park remained one of Annalisa’s favorite areas of the city, thanks partly to its booming restaurant business. Whatever you were hungry for, whether it was fine dining with starched napkins or a grungy bar with greasy burgers, you could find it in Wicker Park. She loved the Middle Eastern food at Sultan’s Market, fresh sushi at Enso, carnitas tacos at Big Star, and a big steaming bowl of ramen at Furious Spoon. When she did venture out on a rare date, she often suggested drinks at the Robey hotel. The art deco–style Coyote Building gave sweeping views of the city that guaranteed that the evening would rate at least a 9/10, even if the guy turned out to be a total zero.
“Chris Colburn has a nicer place than we did,” Nick remarked as they rolled up in front of his building.
“Sewer rats have a nicer place than we did,” she replied.
Colburn lived on the third floor of a six-story redbrick building, erected some decades ago when developers still cared about style. The facade had gray brick inlays that formed an arch over the main door, and gold flourishes flanked the front windows all the way up. They hit the buzzer for Colburn’s apartment and identified themselves as Chicago PD. Moments later, he opened the front door and filled the whole frame with his considerable size. He had the appearance of someone who had not slept in some time, with the brier-like beard, lank hair, and bags under his eyes. “Figured you would get here eventually,” he said. “Come on up.”
They followed him up three flights of steep stairs and into a bare but tidy front room. It held a leather sofa, a giant widescreen TV that was on but muted, a rack of DVDs that went nearly to the ceiling, and most notably to Annalisa, a gun closet in the corner. From her vantage point, she could make out at least two handguns and three long-range semiautomatic rifles. Alarm bells clanged in her brain, and she had to stop herself from reflexively touching her own weapon in reassurance. Colburn caught her looking and deepened his frown. “Hey, those are all legal. I can show you the papers if you want.”
Grace Harper had been strangled, not shot. “Not necessary at this time,” she answered mildly. “As long as you’re not armed for this conversation.”
“Why would I need to be?”
“I guess you know why we’re here.” Nick walked to the window to study the view from above.
“Yeah, I’ve seen the news. What a horror show.” He nodded at the TV. She followed his gaze and drew up short when she saw her own face there, dodging questions from reporters in front of the Harper house. The crawl across the bottom screen said LOVELORN KILLER CLAIMS POSSIBLE NEW VICTIM. “Grace wanted to draw him out,” Colburn continued. “I guess it worked.”
His tone was curiously flat, neither satisfied nor concerned, but he looked like he hadn’t slept in three days. Annalisa glanced into the dining room, which Colburn seemed to use as an office. He had a desk with two separate computer monitors, a printer, a captain’s chair, and, like Grace Harper, a wall full of dead people. She took a couple of steps closer, trying to see if it was the Lovelorn Killer case, but she didn’t recognize any of the victims. “We heard the Grave Diggers group was working on the case,” she said, turning to face Colburn again.
“They were, yeah. I told them it was a bad idea.”
“Why?” Nick asked, a hand on his hip. He wasn’t above advertising his own piece.
Colburn scratched the back of his neck, then rubbed his stomach, stalling for time as he worked out an answer. “The Grave Diggers do the most good on cases where the cops haven’t investigated thoroughly, whether that’s due to lack of interest or lack of resources. The Lovelorn Killer had every LEO in the state focused on him at one point. The FBI still has an open file. There are plenty of amateur groups that have taken a whack at it too. Just seemed to be well-trodden ground.”
“Still,” Nick persisted. “Think of the headlines if you cracked it. You’d be famous. The mayor would name a bridge or a street after you. Hell, they’d probably ask you down to Quantico to give lectures.”
“Grace was the one who chased headlines, not me.”
“Oh yeah? What did you chase?” Annalisa asked.
His jaw tightened. “The truth.”
She had to hold back her laugh, but in that instant, she got him. He fancied himself a rogue, TV-style detective bound by duty to uphold a noble cause. He might have been mucking around with the Grave Diggers, but he didn’t view these amateurs as his peers. He was as big a civilian snob as any of the lifers who sat around Pops’s kitchen, telling war stories. “What was your relationship like with Grace Harper?”
“Pretty good, at first. She was smart, observant.”
“Were you close?” Annalisa moved nearer to him, trying to study his hands without being too obvious about it. The ME hadn’t reported yet whether Grace had struggled with her attacker, but either way, it was a physically involved murder, and the killer could well have abrasions or cuts from the effort. Colburn’s hands looked clean, although he’d bitten his nails down to the quick.
“We chatted a lot online. She was an insomniac like me, so we’d be up in the middle of the night together. We’d watch the same true-crime show and try to guess the outcome.”
Nick tilted his head. “Kind of like a date.”
“What? No. No, it wasn’t like that.” The strength of his denial told Annalisa he had wanted to start something with Grace, but it hadn’t worked out. Maybe she’d rebuffed his overtures.
“Why not?” she asked. “You were single, right? She was single. Both of you were professionals around the same age, and obviously you had a lot in common.” Grace was forty-three, and his driver’s license listed Colburn at thirty-five. Their quick computer check on his background told them that he drove a van for the Tech Squad, doing ad hoc computer repair and consulting in Chicagoland.
Colburn looked to Nick. “Look, I don’t want to speak ill of the dead. I just didn’t see her like that.”
“Hey, I feel you,” Nick replied. “If the chemistry isn’t there, you can’t force it.”
“Exactly.” Colburn extended his hands in relief at Nick’s understanding. “She was nice and all. Just not my type.”
“You ever been to her house?” Annalisa asked, and Colburn dropped his arms in defeat.
“If you came all the way over here, you know I have.”
“Suppose you tell us about it.”
He looked at the TV, which was replaying footage of the night before, showing the coroner’s van taking away Grace’s body. “A couple of months ago, there was going to be this TV special on famous unsolved crimes throughout history—Jack the Ripper, the D. B. Cooper case, the Gardner Museum heist. I asked Grace if maybe she wanted to come over and watch it.”
Nick’s eyebrows lifted. “In person?”
“Sure, why not. Sometimes I get sick of looking at the computer screen so long. Eye strain, you know?” He tried to play it cool, like this invitation to Grace was no big deal, but Annalisa saw his ears had turned red. He cleared his throat. “So, she came over, we had some pizza, and watched the show. I showed her my collection.” He jerked a nod to the rack of folders he had sitting on a table next to his desk in the would-be dining room.
“Your collection?”
“I have some rare items related to unsolved crimes. Original photographs from the scene. Memorabilia from the families. You never know what might turn out to be useful in the investigation. You can check it out if you want—I’ve got it all catalogued and preserved.” He seemed eager to show it off, so they followed him to his stash. “Like, look here.” He took a folder and opened it to reveal a handwritten letter on yellow legal paper, carefully smoothed out and sealed in a plastic bag. “This is a letter written by Henry Lee Lucas to his cousin during the years he was killing people. You can see the crazy right there on the page.”
“Do you have anything pertaining to the Lovelorn Killer?” Annalisa asked, and Colburn’s lips thinned in menace.
“I did,” he said as he replaced the Lucas letter. “Until she stole them from me.”
“She? You mean Grace Harper?”
“I bought her dinner, opened up my home to her, and while I’m in the can, she takes my Lovelorn Killer file and stuffs it in her bag. I didn’t even know she wanted to work on the case.”
“What did she take?” Nick asked, making notes.
“I had copies of the original police reports from three of the victims. Copies of the autopsy photos of Denise Marklund, and a bunch of candids from the Halloween party Katherine Duffy was at the night she died. Not to mention my notes from the case when I looked into it six years ago. I’d have given her copies of this stuff if she asked, but she just stole it.”
“So, you went to get it back?” This explained what he’d been doing at Grace’s house, pounding on her door.
“Damn right I did, once I realized it was missing. Molly let it slip that the rest of them were looking into the case even though I’d marked it inactive on our site. When I went to confront Grace about the stolen files, she had the balls to call the cops on me, when she’s the one who’s the thief!” A thought occurred to him. “Hey, can I get it back now? Did you find the stuff in her house?”
“You never got it back?” Nick asked him.
He shook his head. “The officer who showed up told me I could file an official complaint against her, and they’d investigate if I wanted. I didn’t get the feeling it would be a real priority for him, though. Plus…”
“What?” Annalisa asked when he didn’t continue.
He shrugged, seeming almost embarrassed. “The Grave Diggers was my group first. My idea. But the guys, they were all following what she said, looking into the Lovelorn case. If I went after her with the cops…”
“You could lose everyone for good,” Annalisa continued.
He looked at the floor. “She should’ve listened to me,” he murmured, shuffling his feet. “She should’ve left it alone.” He went to the couch and sank down on it, turning his puffy eyes to the television. “It’s got to be him, right? Grace got too close and he decided to shut her up permanently.”
“We heard she had a new theory about the case,” Annalisa said. “Any idea what it was?”
He shook his head vaguely, still watching the news footage. “We weren’t exactly on speaking terms these past few weeks.”
“Any idea who she might have told?”
“The others, maybe.” He glanced up. “If anyone, probably Barnes. She’s always trying to impress him.”
Nick’s cell phone rang, and he took it out onto the tiny metal balcony that overlooked the alleyway. Annalisa tried not to think about the fact that she was now alone in the room with a brick wall–sized man and his army of guns. She shifted so that she was between Colburn and the door. “When you did look into the Lovelorn Killer investigation,” she said, one eye on Nick and one eye on her suspect, “what was your read on the guy?”
“Huh?” He didn’t seem to register the question, as fixated as he was on the TV. She found this curious, that he would have actual cops in his house who were working the Lovelorn Killer case, especially with a victim Colburn knew personally, and yet he seemed to prefer the canned version on the screen to the live action in his living room. Nick beckoned her out to the balcony, so she excused herself to join him.
“Zimmer’s calling us back in. The all-hands meeting has been moved up now that the press has gone bananas.” He nodded inside toward Colburn, who hadn’t moved from his sofa. “What do you make of him?”
“There’s something he’s not telling us.”
“What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know. If she stole his stuff, that explains why he went after her. The part I’m having trouble with is where he didn’t want the Grave Diggers investigating the Lovelorn Killer case. It’s a major unsolved investigation right in his backyard. Seems like he should want to be all over it.”
“He says the cops had it covered.”
She snorted a laugh. “This guy thinks he’s as good as a cop. He’s not ceding ground to the men and women in blue out of any kind of respect.”
“So then what?”
She tapped her pen against her notebook and considered. “When you used to come home late with some bullshit story about working an extra shift, and I’d catch you with your undershirt inside out, you’d just spin your story harder. You said you had to change unis because some drunk puked on you.”
“Hey, that actually happened.”
“Once, maybe.” She sighed. “I’m not pissed at you, Nick. It’s way too late for that. I’m just saying, if anyone understands a liar…”
He grimaced and clutched at his ribs. “Ouch, you’re shooting to kill today, aren’t you?”
“Are we done with this guy, or what?”
Nick put his phone away and leaned out over the balcony. “I always liked these old buildings. Look at that scrollwork in the trim over the window. You don’t see that kind of stuff in Jacksonville.”
“Nick…”
“I was ashamed,” he said, without turning around.
She froze, wondering if she’d imagined the admission.
“I knew it was shitty, what I was doing to you.” He gave her a rueful shrug. “I wanted you to like me anyway.”
She folded her arms. “At least you’re honest about it now.”
“Maybe I’m a changed man.”
She no longer traded on maybes. “So, Colburn in there, what’s he ashamed of?” It was a rhetorical question for the moment since neither of them had an answer. She pondered the possibilities as they walked back inside. He could be ashamed that Grace got the best of him, that she walked in past his heavy artillery and waltzed out with part of his prized collection. He might also be ashamed that she was leaching the group from him. He clearly wanted to project strength, authority, and superior intelligence. A man like that, he would most fear … weakness. She decided to try to riff on that idea before they let him go. He was dazed, sleepless. Maybe he’d give up something useful.
She crossed to where he sat and got right in his personal space, standing over him. “Level with us, Mr. Colburn,” she said. “You didn’t want the Grave Diggers taking on the Lovelorn Killer case because you’d tried to solve it once and failed. You didn’t want to admit you’d come up empty.”
The gambit got his attention. He snapped his head away from the TV. “Okay, I didn’t solve it,” he said. “Last I checked, neither had you.” He pointed, and sure enough, there she was again on the screen, looking lost in front of a sea of microphones. He took in the news footage hungrily, as though he hadn’t seen it on a constant loop. “You realize he’s probably watching you right now. He followed all the media attention.”
His words made the hair on her arms stand up. She stood her ground and kept pushing him. “Maybe he is. Maybe he’ll make a move, and we’ll be the ones to take him down.”
“If you find those notes that Grace took from me, you’ll see I did contribute to the case. I found a woman in Skokie who’d been getting hang-up calls during the night. This was before the first murder, before everyone had caller ID. She thought it was her ex-husband trying to scare her into giving up the house. Then one night, she came home from work and found a noose hanging in her kitchen.”
He swung his head up to look her right in the eyes. She held his gaze. “What happened?”
“She called the cops, which is how I found the report. They discovered a footprint in the garden by the back door. The woman still thought it was her ex because there was no sign of a break-in and he knew where she hid the spare key. But the footprint was a size twelve, and her ex-husband took a ten.”
“You think it was the Lovelorn Killer, is that it?”
“I don’t know who it was for sure, but fourteen months later, Josephine Harvey came home to find a guy waiting in her bedroom with a handful of ropes.”
“We’ll look into it,” she said, preparing to leave. “Thanks for your time.”
“There’s more,” he called out. “If you care to hear it.”
She turned around again. Nick paused at the door. Colburn stood up from the couch, demonstrating once more his considerable height. “I tracked the woman down and asked her about the incident. She’s still blaming her ex-husband. Seems he eventually got arrested for slashing her tires and spray painting the C-word on the side of her car. But I walked around that neighborhood, and all the other neighborhoods where the women got killed. There’s a sameness to them. They’re quiet but not so quiet that a stranger stands out right away. They have lots of trees and bushes—good for cover. Kids ride their bikes, people barbecue on the weekends. See, the profilers who detailed this guy always went on about how much he hates women, but I think he hates the whole package. People move to these areas because they think they’re safe, yeah? Well, he’s going to take all that away.”
Annalisa risked a glance at Nick to see how he was taking this, and he looked as intrigued as she felt. Colburn had obviously given this some thought. “It sounds like you had good insight into the case,” she said. “That makes it even more surprising that you shut it down for the Grave Diggers.”
He balled one hand into a fist and looked away. Whatever the problem was, she’d hit on it. Nick could feel it too because he stepped back into the room. “Look, man, if you can help get this guy…”
“I can’t,” he snapped. “There, I said it. Are you happy now?”
“Mr. Colburn,” Annalisa began, trying to soothe him. “I—”
“I’d been working the case about a month, talking to different people. The Grave Diggers had kicked around some ideas before, but I thought this noose-in-the-kitchen story was a new angle. If he’d broken into one home like this, maybe there were more. But before I could assemble a full report, we got busy at work. I came home late one night and found a noose hanging over my door.”
“What did it look like? Do you still have it?” Annalisa asked quickly.
“I don’t think you’re hearing me. This guy, whoever he is, he never went away. He’s been watching the whole time.” There it was: His shame. His fear. “Grace should’ve listened to me when I told her to leave this case. Maybe the others will have the sense to give up now, too.”
“Mr. Colburn, if we could bring you down to the station for a formal interview—”
“I can’t help you,” he said, waving them to the door. “I’m not sure anybody can.”