Most investigations, Annalisa knew, started small. They might have a single detective working the scene, looking for a lone detail that would break the case open. If the victim was dead in the living room, why was there a broken coffee cup in the bathroom? The lifers, the ones who thrived in this role, had a particular combination of patience and tenacity. They were nosy nudges, the kind who would see a loose thread and pull on it till the whole thing unraveled. They would go back to the scene to crawl around on the floor, comb through high school yearbooks and cell phone records, and ask you the same question two dozen times, just to check that your answers matched. After a year or two or ten, the perp might think he’d gotten away with it, until one day, he’d be enjoying a drink at the bar or loading his kids into the minivan, when a detective would come walking out of the past, having DNA tested a single human hair—a mere two-thousandths of an inch wide, but strong enough to send a guy to prison for life. The Lovelorn case had a thousand dangling threads, but so far, the cops hadn’t yanked on the right one.
As she took her paper coffee cup into the windowless briefing room, Annalisa faced a crush of humanity. The room held double its usual capacity, men and women squeezed shoulder to shoulder, the whole place buzzing like a hive. Nick waved her over to where he stood with the rest of his usual crew from day shift. “Saved you a chunk of wall,” he said as she wedged herself into the narrow opening between his body and the cream-colored paint. They hadn’t been this close since they had shared a bed together.
“I guess no one is complaining about being called in on a Saturday,” she observed as she looked around at the animated discussion. At the front of the room, she saw Zimmer, the police commissioner, head of state troopers, and a man and woman in matching dark gray suits that had to be FBI. “I see we even have the mayor here,” she remarked behind her coffee cup.
“The governor’s on via conference call. I’m expecting them to whip out a crystal ball and loop in J. Edgar Hoover at any moment now.”
She giggled, laughter escaping her like air from a pressure valve. Unfortunately, the sound attracted Ike Johansson’s attention, and he turned around to look at them and their two inches of personal space. “Well now, isn’t this cozy? The ball and chain, together again. I hear you’re working nights together now—hope it’s not too long and hard for you.”
“Funny, that’s just what I said to your mom last night,” Nick replied.
Ike gave a dark laugh and poked Nick in the belly. “My mom’s been dead since ’94. I guess that makes you a necrophiliac.”
He turned around again, chuckling over his victory, and Nick muttered a bunch of choice curse words under his breath. Annalisa arched an eyebrow at him. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. If you’re into dead people, then I’m the corpse in that little scenario.”
“He’s a troglodyte.”
“Go with that as an insult next time,” she advised. “Ike can’t spell it so he won’t be able to look it up.”
Eventually, the meeting got underway with the police chief serving as the emcee even if he didn’t have much to contribute directly to the conversation. What he did admit out loud for the first time was that it appeared as though the Lovelorn Killer had resurfaced. A hush fell over the whole room as he said the words. Annalisa noticed a broad-shouldered man in his fifties with a buzz cut and wire-rimmed glasses standing off to the side. She stared hard at his angular face, sifting through her memory banks until his identity clicked into place. He was Don Harrigan, the detective who had worked Katherine Duffy’s murder. He rocked up and down on the balls of his feet as though eager to be called off the bench. Let him wait, Annalisa thought. This was the guy who’d sidelined Pops, given him scraps of the case he’d hungered to solve. And for what? Don Harrigan had moved on from Chicago PD years ago with Katie’s death still unsolved.
They sat through a recap of the current status of the case from Reynolds and Brown. Annalisa noted that they withheld the bleach detail again, stating only that Grace Harper’s murder had the unique signature of the Lovelorn Killer. They had alerted the media to be on the lookout for a letter.
“Maybe he’s given that up,” called out a voice from across the room. Annalisa couldn’t see his face. “They never found one for the last victim, right?”
Don Harrigan came to attention and they passed him the mic. “That’s correct as far as we know,” he said. “We have not found a letter connected with Katherine Duffy’s murder. The folks at both the Tribune and the Sun-Times turned their mailrooms upside down looking for it, but it’s always possible it went missing before ever reaching them. Mail gets lost all the time.”
Annalisa thought of Chris Colburn and his gruesome collection of murder memorabilia. Maybe someone in the mail delivery chain had spotted the last letter, guessed what it was, and taken it as a souvenir. Harrigan had some souvenirs of his own to display. Annalisa flinched as he put up a slide showing Katie bound and dead on the floor of her home. Annalisa, Colin, and her brothers had built forts in that den, roasted marshmallows at the fireplace, and chased each other around the green sofa that was just visible in the corner of the photo. She had to force herself to pay attention to Harrigan’s highlights of the case.
“We know this guy stalked his victims for days, maybe even weeks, so you can bet Katherine Duffy was not a random choice. Her husband, Owen Duffy, did ten years on the job. The neighborhood had four other officers living on those two blocks alone, squad cars often parked right on the street. Katie fit the profile of the other victims, as much as there was one. Female aged twenty-five to forty-five, dark hair, living in a nice neighborhood. But we’d been after this guy for years without any success, so I’m sure he got a special charge out of tiptoeing past a bunch of cops to commit his heinous crimes right in their own backyard. It was the ultimate ef-you. What he may or may not have known, depending on how closely he watched her, was a tidbit we kept private at the time: Katie was eight weeks pregnant.”
Annalisa audibly gasped, but she wasn’t the only one. Colin had been an only child and, at sixteen, had seemed likely to stay that way. She had shared her brothers with him, the pack of them running in and out of each other’s houses. Bike races down the big hill. Packing sandwiches to bring to the community pool in the summer, where they took turns dunking each other in the chlorine until suppertime. Only her brothers grew up one by one, escaping childhood into their own lives, leaving just Annalisa and Colin alone together at the end. By the time he took her hand and led her behind the soaring oak in his backyard, it felt like she’d been preparing her whole life to kiss him. She wondered if he had known that his mother was pregnant; if so, he had never breathed a word.
Harrigan walked through the parts of the case they all knew by now. Katie had been at the neighborhood Halloween party but then suddenly felt ill, so she had gone home early. With the news of the pregnancy, this development made more sense. Her husband, Owen, and son, Colin, stayed behind. A couple of hours later, around eleven thirty, Owen went to check on his wife and found her dead on the living room floor. Her costume was laid out beside her, except for the scarves, several of which the killer had incorporated into his bindings. The red one encircled Katie’s neck, and this festive party prop, in the end, was what killed her—choking her until she could not breathe.
Annalisa discreetly averted her gaze from the gruesome photos. Katie had taken her to buy her first bra because Ma refused to do it. She’d given her makeup tips and shown her how to change a tire. You don’t want to be caught out waiting for some guy to do it, she’d said. Then they’ll think you owe them.
She swallowed back the lump in her throat as Harrigan gave way to the FBI profilers. They, too, had little information to impart that hadn’t been covered by the voracious news stories back in the day. The offender was probably a white male, aged twenty to thirty-five at the time of the initial attacks, so add twenty-odd years to that estimate now. He’s educated; the letters he sent reveal an erudite vocabulary. He picked confident women in residential neighborhoods and studied their habits, which meant he was comfortable in the environs. He blended in. His familiarity with diverse areas in and around Chicago suggested that he was from the area and also that he might travel for his job. A regional salesman, perhaps. Someone who could be charming when he chose to be. The complex knots in the bindings might mean he was a sailor or military man, or just someone really into Boy Scouts.
Annalisa thought of Grace Harper and her weather reports. None of the briefings had mentioned anything related to this angle, so Annalisa raised her hand at question time. “Has there been any link to the weather?”
Brown fielded the response with a slight frown. “What type of link?”
“I don’t know,” Annalisa replied honestly. “Some of the deaths were preceded by large storms. I wondered if that could be triggering him somehow.”
The men looked at each other and then back at her. “He hates the women,” Brown said finally. “Not the rain.”
When the meeting broke up, Zimmer called Annalisa and Nick over for a private consultation. “What was that issue about the weather?” she asked, curious.
“Grace Harper was tracking the weather reports around the time of each murder. I don’t know why.”
“Well, stay on it.”
Annalisa glanced at Nick, and his face showed he shared her surprise. “We’re keeping the case?”
Zimmer looked over to where Harrigan, Brown, and the chief were deep in conversation with the Fibbies. She jerked her head to the side, indicating that Annalisa and Nick follow her out into the corridor. Once there, she trained her intense brown eyes right on Annalisa. “I remember how bad your father wanted the Duffy case,” she began, and Annalisa opened her mouth to defend Pops. Zimmer held up her hands to ward off the protest. “Harrigan was right—he was too close to it. He and Duffy rode together, and he had a long-standing social relationship with the victim. I’m sure you must’ve known her pretty well yourself.”
Annalisa looked away. “I was just a kid.”
“A cop’s kid,” Zimmer replied.
Annalisa wasn’t sure how much this mattered. Adults were interchangeable in her world back then. Now she could view Katie with an adult lens, with a cop’s view, as Zimmer would put it. Katie had taken such pleasure in putting together an outfit, coordinating with playful accessories and funky shoes. The killer had left her naked, her clothes laid out where she could watch them while she died. Like Grace Harper had been forced to listen to her music boxes as he’d choked her. It wasn’t enough to take the women’s lives. He wanted to humiliate them in the most personal way while doing it. “The neighborhood back then subscribed to the whole ‘it takes a village’ theory. We all knew Katie Duffy. I knew if I got out of line, Katie or some other parent would report it back to Pops.” With Katie gone, the chain broke down. People retreated inside their homes and kept their doors locked and curtains closed.
“A neighborhood with eyes like that made her a high-risk victim,” Zimmer said. “An ef-you to the cops, like Harrigan was saying.”
“If Katie was picked to highlight the cops’ incompetence, then Grace Harper had to be a statement victim as well,” Nick replied. “He knew she was working his case.”
Zimmer nodded. “We don’t know where this asshole is, but we have a good idea of where he has been lately—close to Grace Harper. I want you two to keep working the victim. Somehow, she crossed paths with this guy, and we need to find out where. I want to know everything about her and this Grave Diggers group she was in. You turn that neighborhood upside down. If there was a refrigerator repairman out recently, I want to know about it.” She glanced down the hall to where the men in suits stalked off together, making plans of their own. “The Washington contingent brings fresh eyes and more resources, which we sorely need. But they don’t live here like we do. Go shake all the trees you can, and just be careful with what falls out. If this guy was watching Grace Harper, he’s damn sure going to be watching us. Report anything you find first to me.”
Zimmer’s words stayed with Annalisa through the rest of the day spent logging witness statements and drafting a list of new people to interview. It was dark by the time she drove Nick back to his car, which sat two doors down from Grace Harper’s house. The media vans had vanished; the crowds had dissipated. The street was draped in shadow and silence. She cut the engine but Nick seemed in no hurry to leave her car. He sat with his head back against the seat, his eyes closed, but she felt a tense energy radiating off of him.
“Have you told him yet?” he asked without opening his eyes.
“Told who?”
“Him. The son. Colin, I think you said his name was.” He finally looked at her, his eyes dark in the low light. “You never mentioned his name to me before.”
Silence stretched between them, and her tongue grew thick in her mouth. “It was a long time ago,” she said finally.
He gave a dark chuckle. “You were twenty when I met you, Vega. Your entire life was modern history back then. I know we weren’t together long, but you might have brought it up somewhere in there that your boyfriend’s mom got murdered by the Lovelorn Killer.”
“I never said he was my boyfriend.”
He looked her over. “Please. Have some respect for my professional capabilities, at least.”
She felt her face grow hot. They were trained to listen for all the things that people didn’t say. “Okay, so we dated.” Lame words, in which he could probably hear the lie. Or maybe he was like her family who’d smiled condescendingly and tut-tutted about the cuteness of puppy love. Notes exchanged on lined school paper. Phone calls under the covers at night, when Colin’s was the only voice she heard. They’d had plans, so many plans. They would both apply to the University of Chicago. He would go for English, or maybe journalism, and she would be prelaw. They would marry after graduation and take a year off to explore the world. He could write from anywhere. Annalisa still had the notes he’d given her, funny stories he made up to amuse them during endless boring classes in hot June schoolrooms. Her favorite was one about how Mrs. Hill the geometry teacher had been a poodle in another life, which explained her odd sniffing habit and the jar of dry biscuits on her desk.
She kept the notes in a shoebox along with other mementos—a ticket stub from the first movie they’d seen together, a plastic spider ring he’d given her at Halloween. Included in the set was a color picture taken at a Fourth of July barbecue, back when people printed out pictures to hold in their hands rather than confining them forever to a tiny screen. Annalisa had held this particular photo a lot. It showed her and Colin at a picnic table with juicy slices of watermelon in front of them. They were young and dewy from the summer heat, her ponytail a mess, Colin’s strong, tanned arm across her shoulders. Ten minutes before the photo was taken, they’d been having frantic sex up in his twin bed on top of the rocket ship comforter. Ma had sent them in to chop the watermelon, but instead they’d crept upstairs to fool around. She could still recall the feel of her shorts sliding down her bare legs, of Colin’s naked weight on her body. They’d been intimate before, but this was the first time he’d actually made her come. Her head was hard against the board, the window open so she couldn’t make any noise as the pleasure coiled tighter, tighter, until the fireworks went off behind her eyes.
“We loved each other,” she said to Nick. The grownups thought they had been playing around, rehearsing for some greater love in the future, but Annalisa knew it was impossible even then. Her heart couldn’t hold any more.
Nick let his head fall back, his gaze drifting to the shard of moon just visible through the car’s sunroof. “I think I saw that,” he said eventually, his voice wondering. “Back then. I think maybe I fooled myself into thinking it was for me.”
Annalisa clenched her hands in her lap. He broke up their marriage, not her. “Why do you think Zimmer wants us to report only to her?” she asked, pointedly changing the subject.
He sat up. “You and me, we’re new to this story. Our hands are clean.”
“What do you mean, our hands are clean?” She rested hers on the steering wheel.
“There’s one theory about the Lovelorn case that didn’t get mentioned today. Another kind of person besides a sales guy or deliveryman, someone who patrols the neighborhoods. Someone who could access lots of information on the victims without any trouble at all.”
She gripped the wheel. “You mean a cop.”
He pointed a finger at her. Bingo. “I don’t know about you, but I am dead on my feet. I gotta get some rest if we’re doing this all again tomorrow. Let’s say eight o’clock?”
“Eight it is.”
He got out but leaned in through the open door. Grace Harper’s house loomed completely deserted in the background, the front yard cordoned off with yellow tape. He patted the roof of her car. “Drive home safe, okay?”
She watched him get into his vehicle and then pointed her car west, toward home. She reached over and turned the radio on for company, for a human voice in the dark. As she idled at a red light, Tom Petty sang plaintively how waiting is the hardest part. The song finished and the female host came on, full of cheer. “For you sports fans out there, the Cubs clobbered the Cardinals tonight, ten to one. They’ll go for the sweep tomorrow, but we’d better hope they get the game in early. There’s a storm rolling in.”