Annalisa waited out the remaining hours of the night on her couch with her gun and her cell phone in easy reach. She kept hearing Chris Colburn say how he’d come home to find a noose over his door and his warnings about how the killer still tracked the case. By dawn, her nerves were so frayed that it was just as well her phone hadn’t rung again—she’d probably have shot it. She held her breath leaving her house, half expecting to see a dangling rope, but she found nothing but the birds chirping down at her from the trees.
Sunday morning in Chicago meant church traffic, cars streaming out of the various parking lots, pedestrians dressed in their worship-service finery. Annalisa remembered with a shudder how Ma had forced her into some frilly frock and spit shined her face as she’d hustled her into St. Thecla’s for morning mass along with her brothers. Tony usually dozed off, Vincent doodled cartoons in the edge of the bulletin, while Annalisa and Alex had elbowed each other for space in the hard wooden pew. Today, the bright colors on the women’s spring dresses clashed with the stormy sky overhead. The rain had stopped in the early morning, but the thick clouds churned, gathering strength for another round.
At the station, she found Nick unshaven and already into his second cup of coffee. “Couldn’t sleep, so I figured I’d be more useful here than watching infomercials on my couch,” he said.
She nodded at the paper printouts on the desk in front of him. “Find anything?”
“I ran Jared Barnes through the computer. He’s forty-six and a local lad, born and raised in Cicero, now makes his home on the Near South Side. He signed up with the army out of high school and worked as an MP before being honorably discharged eight years later. Clean record. The only other mention is a traffic accident fifteen years ago. I don’t know the details. I figure he can fill us in when we talk to him.”
“Ex-military, huh?”
“Yeah, I noticed that too. Bet he knows his way around a knot.” He got up and snaked his suit jacket from the back of his chair. “You ready to roll?”
Annalisa glanced at Zimmer’s office and saw her on the phone in deep conversation. She’d run her hands through her short dark hair so often it now stood on end, and Annalisa spotted a bottle of antacid medication sitting on the desk. The last thing she wanted was to make more problems for her boss. “Something weird happened last night,” she said to Nick. “I don’t know whether to tell the commander or not.” Her late-night call seemed strange but less frightening in the cold light of day.
Nick sat on the edge of the desk and gave her his full attention. “You can start by telling me.”
She recapped the brief conversation with her anonymous caller, and it sounded outlandish when she said it out loud. Men didn’t call her pretty, for one thing. She had strong, angular features and didn’t bother with fancy hair or makeup. She dressed like the guys around her, in suits and shoes meant for walking the pavement all day. She’d deliberately adopted body language that said don’t mess with me, and so the men who got past this barrier, the men who desired her, wanted her because of her steel core. Nick had shucked her jeans and yanked her T-shirt off that first night like he was a man dying of thirst, his open mouth hungry on her skin.
Her caller, whoever he was, didn’t know her at all. “Then he hung up,” she said to Nick as she finished the story.
“He,” Nick repeated. “You’re sure it was a male?”
“I’d say ninety-five percent sure.” She made her voice low and raspy. “He was talking like this, so it was hard to tell.”
“Did you trace the number?”
“This morning. It’s a burner phone.”
Nick looked troubled and Annalisa’s anxiety bubbled up again. She’d been hoping he would say it was a stupid prank, nothing to worry about. “We tell her,” he said, turning around to look at Zimmer. “We tell her right now.”
Zimmer also did nothing to reassure Annalisa’s fears when she heard the story. “You say he called your work number?” she asked, taking careful notes.
Annalisa and Nick stood next to each other in front of her desk, like kids called to the principal’s office. Annalisa made sure to get her story straight. “Yes, but I gave out at least three dozen copies of my card yesterday alone when we canvassed Grace Harper’s neighborhood. I’ve given out hundreds of them since I got the phone last year.”
“Did the voice seem familiar, like it might’ve been somebody you talked to yesterday?”
Annalisa searched her memory and shook her head. “No, but like I said, he was trying to disguise it. I was on television … anyone could’ve seen me.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of. Give me the number. I’ll see if we can find out anything about the phone and where it might’ve been purchased.”
Annalisa had it memorized by now, but she hesitated before reciting the numbers. “You really think it could be him?”
Zimmer regarded her with serious eyes. “It’s a long shot at best. Probably he’s just your garden-variety creeper, but either way, he’s messing with one of my people, and I plan to put a stop to it. I’ve been on the job twenty-nine years now, and I haven’t lost anyone yet. If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to keep that record going. So if this guy calls back, try to record it. Then call me immediately. I don’t care what time of day or night it is.”
“Call me too,” Nick was quick to add.
Both women looked at him. He spread his hands in self-defense.
“What? I can’t be concerned about my partner?”
“I can handle myself,” Annalisa told him. “I’ve had the exact same training as you, remember?”
Nick ducked his head in acknowledgment of this, but then he touched the photo of Grace Harper that lay on Zimmer’s desk. “Yeah, but I don’t look like the victims.”
If the Near South Side were a person, it’d be a squinty old gentleman in a suit and bow tie, sitting on the porch in a creaky rocking chair, saying, “Boy, I’ve seen some things.” Over the past century, the neighborhood by Museum Campus had been a blue-collar residential zone, a slum, a warehouse district, and a hotbed of railway action. It had re-gentrified throughout the 1990s thanks to a housing boom that included Jared Barnes’s nondescript but well-kept brick apartment building. There was an intercom system outside the glass front doors, and Nick and Annalisa used it to let him know they’d arrived. “Come on up,” he said, buzzing them inside. Annalisa saw signs for both a gym room and a pool, and she felt a pang of longing for the easy access to these amenities. They reached the third floor and knocked on the door marked 323, which opened right away to reveal a man sitting in a wheelchair.
“Detectives,” he said, rolling back to admit them. “Jared Barnes. Please come in.”
Annalisa looked at Nick to see if he’d previously picked up on Barnes’s disability, but his slight shake of the head told her he had not. “Mr. Barnes,” she said, “thanks for seeing us.”
“Please just call me Barnes. Everyone does.” He looked like ex-military, with his close-cropped hair, toned arms, and collared polo-style shirt. “I have coffee on if you’d like some,” he said as he pushed himself toward the kitchen.
“No, thanks,” said Nick. “Any more of the stuff, and my blood will run brown.”
“I hear that,” Barnes said as he helped himself to a cup. “Did you know back in the Army, they ran tests on us to determine the exact amount of caffeine consumption required to achieve peak performance? Made us take these capsules and do all kinds of reaction-time tests.”
“Oh, yeah?” Nick sounded intrigued. “What’d they find out?”
Barnes smiled broadly. “Well, now, that’s classified.” He gestured at the living room. “Please make yourselves comfortable.”
Annalisa and Nick sat side by side on a cheap, futon-style couch. Like Chris Colburn, Jared Barnes had a large-screen TV and an extensive computer setup at the desk in the corner. Unlike Chris Colburn or Grace Harper, Barnes didn’t display his macabre hobby on his walls. Instead, he’d hung a canvas painting of a stylized American flag with a soldier in silhouette and a framed Ansel Adams picture print showing a black-and-white forest, full of skinny ghostlike trees.
“I’m still in shock over Grace’s death,” he said, shaking his head. “And what they’re saying on the news, that it’s the Lovelorn Killer … is that true?”
“The media is focusing on that angle, but we’re investigating all possibilities right now,” Annalisa replied. “How long had you known Grace?”
“Let’s see. I joined the Grave Diggers shortly before she did, so that would have been about three years ago.”
“What attracted you to the group?”
“I’m online all day now. I do medical transcription from home, and, not to brag, but I can type a hundred fifty words a minute, so I can knock out my work in a few hours and then have the rest of the day free. I ran across a little news story a few years ago about Chris Colburn and the group’s efforts to locate a girl who went missing in Rhode Island back in 1986. I thought with my training and background, I could be of some help.”
“You mean your service as an MP,” Nick said.
“That’s right. There are a number of us vets in the group, from all over the place. Ex-cops, too. Most are civilians, through and through, but that doesn’t mean they can’t make valuable contributions to the investigations.”
“What about Chris Colburn?” Annalisa asked.
Barnes blinked at her. “You haven’t talked to him?”
“We have, but we’re interested in your opinion of him.”
“Chris is … intense. He’s extremely committed to the mission of the group, but he can be territorial about the cases.”
“Like the Lovelorn case?”
Barnes’s mouth thinned out and he put his coffee cup aside. “Especially that one. He didn’t want us investigating, but Grace was determined to take it on.”
“What did you think?”
He tented his fingers together as he considered his words. “I thought it could be an exciting challenge. It’s higher profile than anything the group has attempted before—a bigger puzzle, if you want to think of it that way.”
“How did Chris react when he found out Grace wanted to pursue the case?”
“He went off on her. Threatened to shut down the whole group. She said we didn’t need him and could just start another site with a different name. He’d be all by himself with no group to lead.”
“I can’t imagine that went over well,” Annalisa replied.
“It was a huge mess for all of us, especially because most of us didn’t want to choose sides. It was like we were the kids and Mom and Dad were fighting.” He paused. “And, well, like any family fight … things can get personal.”
“What do you mean?” Nick asked.
Barnes looked almost coy. Annalisa repressed a beleaguered sigh at the prospect of dealing with another would-be Sherlock Holmes eager for his time in the sun. Whatever this guy knew, he was going to make them work for it. “Oh, I assume you know about Chris already, but it was news to us.”
Annalisa gritted her teeth. “What news?”
“About his application to join the Chicago Police Department. He was always bragging to us about how he got a perfect score on the entrance exam, like he was some investigative super genius. But Molly has an uncle on the job, and she finally asked him about Chris and his perfect score. It turns out he aced the written test, all right—but he flunked the psych evaluation.” There was a triumphant gleam in his eye. “Perfect on paper, but he couldn’t hack it in the real world.”
Annalisa made a note. There were myriad reasons to fail the psych screening, so they would need to follow up for additional insight. “Did Molly tell Grace this news?”
“Oh, yeah, and she told Chris, too. I kind of don’t blame her, the way he’d been acting like he was the only one who got a vote in determining the cases we took on. Like he had some divine knowledge.”
“How did Chris react?”
“He had his usual temper tantrum. He locked Grace out of the forums and accused her of stealing his stuff. Molly had to use her admin power to override him and let Grace back in.”
“What was your relationship like with Grace?” Nick asked. Annalisa recalled Chris’s assessment: if Grace told anyone her theory, it would be Barnes.
“I liked her. She got the group to start meeting near public transportation so that I could join them, and she was fearless about calling out bad behavior. One time, we were walking to the L together, and this guy ahead of us tossed his lit cigarette into the grass on the common. He was a big dude, over six feet and two hundred pounds at least. She snatched up that butt and chased him down to give him hell about it. I think he was genuinely remorseful by the time she got done.”
“Did you see her socially?”
He looked from one to the other, incredulous. “You mean like a date?”
“Like whatever you Grave Diggers do when you’re not solving crimes,” Nick said.
He wrinkled his brow. “She came over here to work a couple of times. Once, we went to a screening of Psycho together, but we paid for our own tickets. I liked her well enough, but not in that way.”
“She told Channel Seven that she had a new theory about the Lovelorn case,” Annalisa said. “Any idea what it was?”
He cocked his head, curious. “You mean you didn’t find her notes?”
“Her computer is missing.”
“A MacBook Air. She took it everywhere with her. I believe she also kept a journal on it.” He leaned forward in his seat. “You mean the killer took it? She really was on to him?”
“I don’t know,” answered Nick. “You tell us.”
“I didn’t think it would work, her idea about calling him out. Who’s to say he’s even still around here to see the news story? The cops thought he was dead.” He shot them an accusatory look, as if miffed by how wrong they’d been. “If this guy thinks we know his identity, he could come for all of us.”
“We have no reason to think that’s the case,” Annalisa replied, soothing him. “But it would help if you could tell us everything you know about what Grace was working on before her death.”
He sucked on his top lip. “I can show you,” he agreed eventually, and he turned the chair around so that he could wheel it up to the desk. He moved the mouse to wake up the computer and clicked around until he found a file marked Lovelorn Killer. He called up what appeared to be a scan of an old news clipping from the Sun-Times. The headline read: MY NIGHTMARE TRYST WITH THE LOVELORN KILLER. “Chris found this a few years ago, but he never followed up on it.”
Annalisa leaned in to read the short article. A woman named Lora Fitz, who had worked as a waitress at O’Malley’s Bar, claimed the Lovelorn Killer had come into the bar about a month before Katie Duffy’s murder. He’d ordered a few pints and sweet-talked her into sex in his truck outside after the bar closed. “He called himself Ace,” she said. “He was nice and polite, flirting with me but not dirty about it the way some of them get. But then when we were alone, he changed. He started slapping me around and he tied my hands behind my back with rope.”
“I know O’Malley’s,” Annalisa murmured. Pops had liked to drink there. All the cops on the block did.
“Did you get to this part here?” Nick asked her, pointing at the lower half of the screen.
Anna continued reading. Lora said she’d fled the truck and not seen or heard from Ace since. “But a couple of weeks after that, I was walking home after work by Myrtle Street, behind the Duffy house. I saw this guy in the yard, standing in the shadows near the house in the middle of the night. He wasn’t doing nothing, just standing there, but I got the creeps and crossed to the other side of the street. Only then is when I saw it—Ace’s red truck parked down the block. When I heard later about the lady who got killed, I knew it had to be him.”
Annalisa straightened up. “That’s quite a story.”
“Chris didn’t believe it, and I guess the cops didn’t either. It’s surprising what people will make up about famous cases. We’ve had people join Grave Diggers who claim to be surviving victims of Son of Sam or Ted Bundy, and even one woman who said she was that missing nursing student, Maura Murray. Chris did some checking and found out ‘she’ was actually some weird guy living with his parents in eastern Texas. This is the only story Lora is ever mentioned in, but Grace wanted to talk to her. She found her living up in Niles somewhere.”
“Did she meet or talk to her?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did.” He rolled back to the living room area, so Annalisa and Nick followed. “Like I said before, Grace had no compunction about confronting people. She and Chris were alike that way. Most of us in the group, we sit around at our computers, analyzing databases or blowing up old pictures to try to find new clues. Grace and Chris would actually go out into the world to track a lead if they thought it would help. This guy, it’s possible he saw her piece on Channel Seven, but it’s also possible he looked out his kitchen window and saw her walking down the street. She liked to go to the scene of the crime.”
“Did you ever go with her?” Nick asked.
“I don’t get around as easy,” he replied, gesturing at the chair. “The perps, they don’t have to follow the rules laid down by the Americans with Disabilities Act. I never wanted to hold Grace back from wherever she needed to go.”
“What happened?” Annalisa’s gaze raked over his chair. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Not a bit, but I wish it were a better story. Wouldn’t you know it, I served three tours overseas and came back fine, only to have some idiot door me on Clark Street when I was riding my bike.” He pantomimed opening a car door and then arced his hand high in the air. “I went ass over teakettle and landed half over the curb. Broke my back in two places, and then I didn’t heal right after the surgery.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “Life is a kick in the nuts sometimes. Or a door to the handlebars, I guess. At least I didn’t break my head.” He rapped his knuckles against his temple. “Still hard as ever. Plus, it doesn’t matter for my current job, or my fun. Everyone lives their lives online now, and on the net, we’re all the same.”
Annalisa thought of an old cartoon, a schnauzer with a computer. On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog. The memory gave her a new idea. “You mentioned that the Grave Diggers always have new people wanting to join.”
“Sure. Cold crime is hot, hot, hot. I follow four different podcasts and watch three channels of it. Seems like everyone wants to be a detective these days.” He smiled at the pair of them, the genuine articles, apparently figuring they’d appreciate this admiration.
“I’m wondering if it’s possible to get a list of people who joined after Grace’s story ran on Channel Seven.”
“Well, sure, any of us can see the new members. Except…”
“Except what?”
“You can see for yourself.” He returned to the computer, where he called up the dedicated Grave Diggers website. The landing page was one Annalisa had seen before. It displayed a slick banner with the group’s name and a stylized cemetery beneath a full moon. Underneath, cartoon case folders marked SOLVED in red letters across the front linked to brief descriptions of some of the successes that the group had accomplished. Barnes went past the front door of the site to a password-protected section that included interactive forums. “See, if you search by join date, you can get the full list here.” He tapped a few keys and the list of user names came up on the screen. Each one had an avatar, some of which were tiny squares depicting people’s faces, but others had no human form at all: a magnifying glass, a Mardi Gras mask, or simply the blank blue face that the software generated if the user failed to select a personalized option. “Not everyone uses a real name,” Barnes explained.
Annalisa could see the problem as she scanned down the list. They had names such as Mermaid Life and The Real Slim Shady or even just numbers like 44202. Interspersed with these were recognizable names like Latrice Matheson, Joe Kelly, and Kendall Sommers, but that didn’t mean the names were real. “Did these people have to register to join? Give their real names?”
“There’s a form, yeah.” He paused. “But you can just lie. It’s not like anyone checks. Also, it’s run by Integra, the company that powers the software. We wouldn’t have access to that information. Not even Chris.”
Annalisa sighed. “Can you please print me out a list of the people who joined the Grave Diggers since April 28th in any case?”
He did as she asked, and Annalisa accepted the two sheets of paper, which had two columns of user names apiece. “There must be a hundred people here at least.”
“The Lovelorn Killer is very popular.”
She gave him a pointed look, and he held up his hands in defense.
“I don’t mean likable. I mean that people are curious about these guys. Men who are born to hunt humans for sport. There are groupies and collectors and people who send them love letters on death row. If you start looking around the internet, you can find some truly sick stuff.”
“What’s the attraction, do you think?”
“You tell me.” Barnes surprised her by calling up a picture from his archives. It showed a bunch of cops milling around the outside of Denise Marklund’s apartment building while her body passed by, zipped up in the coroner’s bag. “Everyone turns out for the big cases,” he murmured as he watched the screen. “It must be exciting, no?” He turned to look up at her. She kept her expression neutral.
“Someone has to stop them. That’s our job.”
“Of course. But you chose the job.” She tried to figure out an answer to this, but he didn’t seem to require one. He’d returned his attention to the screen. “I suppose everyone has a different reason for their interest, but at the core, it’s transgressive, right? Here is a line no human being is supposed to cross, but these men do so repeatedly and without remorse. Maybe you make yourself look because you want to understand, to find a reason for the sickness, or maybe you want to learn all the killer’s secrets so you can convince yourself it could never happen to you.”
“Oh yeah? So, what’s your reason?” Nick asked, his tone confrontational.
“The same as yours. To catch him. I saw an interview once with a cold case detective, and he said that when he sat down with a case file, the killer would almost always be in there already, usually in the first hundred pages. What if the cops have already seen this guy? What if they interviewed him and let him go?”
Nick shook off this possibility. “No. No way. A guy like this, he’d ping your radar.”
Barnes sat back in his chair. “Well, then. Happy tracking.”
They returned to Nick’s car, where a smattering of fresh raindrops covered the windshield. “Is it me, or do all the yahoos want to rub it in our faces how inept the cops have been?” he asked her as he started the engine.
“They’re not wrong,” Annalisa returned without looking at him. She had the printout in her hands and was scanning through the long list of names. “I refuse to take it personally at this point. Whoever the killer is, he’s been walking around free for decades now without attracting any attention. If the cops didn’t see him, we’re hardly alone.”
“What do you think about this Lora Fitz story?”
“I want to ask Don Harrigan about it to see if they followed up at the time. Wait a sec.” Annalisa brought the paper closer to her face, squinting to make sure she hadn’t invented the name she’d found on the page.
Nick glanced over, impatient when she didn’t continue. “What?”
“Rod Brewster is one of the names who recently joined Grave Diggers. Assuming it’s the same guy, he’s a neighbor of mine. I mean he was, at the time Katie Duffy was murdered. He still lives down the street from my parents.” She had a flash of him on that long-ago Halloween night—a hulking guy with broad shoulders, dressed as Frankenstein, carving jack-o’-lanterns with a large knife.
“Yeah, so?”
“So, he’s also a cop.”