“Her son?” Nick asked as Annalisa stroked the photo of the other victim. “You know that woman?”
There was a time when she couldn’t have imagined a future without Katie Duffy in it. Now her corpse was tacked up on a dead woman’s wall—a dead woman who could have been her twin sister, from the looks of it.
“I knew her, yes. Her son Colin and I, we … we went to school together.” It was the barest truth she could tell. She’d been careful to keep Colin a secret from Nick during their brief marriage. She’d kept Colin from everyone. In her memories, he was always hers.
“This is some supremely freaky shit,” Nick said, rolling his shoulders like he couldn’t get loose. “We find our victim dead on her bedroom floor, tied up like a Christmas roast, and she’s got pictures hanging up like she was alive to take photos of the event. It’s like she was working her own murder.”
“In a way, maybe she was.” Annalisa’s gaze roamed over the wall.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re saying you don’t recognize this?” She regarded him with surprise. “This whole wall is covered in information from the Lovelorn Killer case. Katherine Duffy was the last known victim.” She pointed at another picture at the top right that showed a similarly macabre corpse, bound in intricate fashion and laid out on the floor. “That one looks like Lisa Sheffield. And there’s Denise Marklund.” Grace Harper had tacked up all seven victims, along with a map showing the locations of the crimes and a police artist’s sketch of the possible suspect—a nondescript white man with a broad forehead and thin mouth. The picture had circulated for years without generating a single lead. The killer, if it was even him, wouldn’t resemble the sketch anymore.
“Oh, right, yeah. The Lovelorn Killer. I remember that guy. He’s the one who wrote letters to the papers afterward about how much he loved his victims. He was so sorry he had to kill them.” He scanned the row of victims. “What a crock.”
She looked at him, confused by his detachment. Then she remembered he was a first-generation cop who had been born in Jacksonville, Florida. He hadn’t grown up with this case in his house, an unwanted guest who moved in one night and then stayed for twenty years. Annalisa’s father was on the job for thirty years, and he once had a room just like this. She felt a fresh pang at the thought of Pops. She would have to tell him, too. “He killed seven women over a period of a few years in the late ’90s. Then he dropped out of sight around Y2K. He murdered Katie Duffy on Halloween night and then nothing since. I think most people thought he was dead or locked up somewhere.”
Nick glanced back toward the other room. “Yeah? Well, it looks like he got hungry again. Either that, or he’s got a gifted understudy. You realize this is a goddamn powder keg we’re sitting on, right? The whole city’s going to go boom.” He rubbed his hands together, maybe nervous, maybe excited by the prospect. Annalisa flinched. She had been caught in the explosion once before, her whole world imploded. Katie’s murder had been horrible on its own, never mind everything that had followed. Annalisa had known that her father worked on murder cases sometimes, but she had not understood then how one death could blow a hole through an entire neighborhood.
They went back to survey Grace Harper, careful not to get too close before the scene could be processed and documented. Annalisa saw the same meticulous character in the bedroom that she’d noted downstairs: a brass bed, neatly made, one nightstand that had a lamp, a clock radio, and a single mystery novel bookmarked halfway through, all precisely placed with no traces of dust. She drifted to the dresser, which displayed a series of different silver music boxes. All of them sat open but noiseless, like a row of clams gaping for a feed. Annalisa’s skin felt tight and itchy, looking at them. “He opened all these music boxes,” she murmured to Nick. “I think he made her listen to them while he was strangling her.” There was no way a woman as persnickety as Grace Harper would leave her collection sitting open like that.
She turned and saw Nick crouching by the bed. “I think he must’ve sat here to do it. See how there’s a slight dent in the bedspread? And that rope looks like it probably stretches six feet or so. He sat back in comfort to watch her struggling on the floor.” Nick rose and looked to the door. “Where the hell is the medical examiner already? We need to get the scene processed now. This guy has at least a couple of days’ lead on us already.”
“The ME’s office is running late. What else is new?” Bogged down by short staffing and an upsurge in opioid-related deaths in addition to the ubiquitous South- and West-Side gang violence, the Cook County Medical Examiner faced a large backlog of investigations, many of which were incomplete. Annalisa looked again at Grace Harper and the ligature marks all over her body. She suspected Grace would jump the line once the ME got a look at her.
She moved to check the bedroom window. There was a fire escape outside, but the window looked locked and undisturbed. The tidy bed said their victim hadn’t been surprised in her sleep, but the extended torture suggested the killer knew he could be alone with Grace Harper for many hours without being interrupted.
“No photos on display, only one bedroom in the place. Seems like our vic was pretty isolated.” He picked up the novel, opened it, and put it back down. “You said that other woman had a son?”
Colin. He’d been the sun in Annalisa’s sky once, the first boy to notice she was a girl in a family full of brothers. They’d been inseparable her whole junior year, right up until his mother died. She remembered him on the day of Katie’s funeral, sitting on a ratty lawn chair on the front porch and watching the rain gush down from the overflowing gutters. No delicate teardrop mist for Katie Duffy. It was an ugly rain, like someone took a hunting knife to the belly of a cloud. The rest of the mourners had crowded into the house, the street jammed with cars, many of them black-and-whites. Katie had been a cop’s wife once, her husband, Owen, partnered up with Pops, and her death brought out the whole family.
Annalisa’s eyes had been raw from crying that day, but Colin had stared straight ahead, no emotion evident on his face. His pale wrists and ankles had poked out from his dark suit. “I brought you a coffee.” She’d held out a paper cup that was steaming in the cold November air.
“I don’t want coffee.”
Inside the crowded house, the adults drank it by the potful, like it had magically restorative powers. She’d tried some for herself and it was dark and bitter, sour on her tongue. She’d drank it down anyway and felt it bubbling, lavalike, in the pit of her stomach. “I’m so sorry about your mom.” She’d wanted him to hold out his arms like he usually did, inviting her into his lap, but he didn’t even look at her.
“I don’t like all this rain on her.”
Back at the cemetery, Annalisa’s heels had sunk into the soft earth, and she had a flash of terror that she would slip all the way down to the coffins underground. Later she’d scrubbed the dirt off in the bathroom sink, sobbing as she’d washed away the dark smears of mud that once were human flesh. “It’ll stop soon,” she told him on the porch. “Rain this bad, it doesn’t last long. We could go inside. To your room.” They’d had many stolen moments in his twin bed, frantic couplings under an open window while their families laughed outside at a backyard barbecue.
“You think I want that now?” His hands had balled into fists so tight that she’d taken a step back. “You think I want her looking down and seeing that, today?”
She’d wanted to go somewhere, anywhere with him. Alone, they could talk freely. He would see how devastated she was. She’d known Katie her whole life, grown up eating snacks in her kitchen and turning cartwheels in her backyard. Katie had taught her how to paint her nails without the polish getting everywhere and taken the blame when Annalisa’s bike got stolen from the front yard. Before the murder, the worst thing she could’ve imagined was making Katie or one of the other parents angry with her, especially Pops. Annalisa’s father was a man’s cop, big and strong, always cautioning his kids about the dangers out there, and that’s exactly how it had felt to Annalisa—the danger was out there, someplace amorphous and far away from their tree-lined blocks. The muggings and beatings and killings were part of some comic book world her father played in before coming back home to them. Not anymore. The entire police force had crowded in the shingled house, bringing their fear with them. They spoke among themselves in low, tense voices and hushed whispers. Annalisa didn’t have to hear their conversations to realize they had no answers.
“Colin Duffy moved away after she died,” she told Nick, shaking off the memory. “Never came home again.” Years of tamped-down anger kept the bitterness from her voice.
Nick looked pointedly at the corpse on the floor. “Would you?”
Reyes’s voice called up to them from the front door. “Detectives? I’ve got a woman out here who says she’s a friend of the victim. Says she’s the one who called it in. You want to talk to her?”
Annalisa and Nick regarded each other in a silent standoff. The initial witness statement on a case like this was a big get, a major “in” on a case that would probably get taken away from them when the chief of Ds saw what was at stake. “It’s a woman?” Nick said, looking Annalisa up and down grudgingly. “You should take it. I’ll stay with this one.”
Annalisa let out the breath she’d been holding and headed for the stairs. Technically, Nick outranked her, but he’d never been one to play power games. The night they’d met at the bar, he’d lent her his leather jacket in the fickle October air with no expectations of what she’d do for him in return. She went outside the Harper house and saw the crowd had thickened to three rows deep, and two news vans had arrived on the scene. Still no coroner. Setting her jaw, Annalisa sought out Reyes and asked him to point to their witness. He indicated a zaftig woman with red hair and mascara runs on her face. She was clutching the hand of a tall bearded man standing next to her. “That’s her. Gives her name as Molly Lipinski.”
Annalisa crossed over to where the woman stood by the yellow tape. “Ms. Lipinski?”
“Yes.” Molly dabbed at her face with a fistful of tissues.
“I’m Detective Annalisa Vega. I understand you’re the one who made the initial 911 call to this address?”
“That’s right. I hadn’t heard from Grace in two days, and that’s just not like her. When I called over at the Foodsmart, they said she hadn’t shown up for work yesterday, and that’s when I knew something bad must’ve happened. Grace hasn’t missed a day of work in eight years.”
“I see. Do you mind if we talk over here?” Annalisa saw the bright lights of the roving reporter coming toward them.
“Is she— Is she okay?” Hope quavered in her voice.
“Please come this way.” Annalisa held up the tape so Molly could walk under it. The man with her tried to follow. “I’m sorry, you are?”
“Travis Hefner.”
“Travis is my boyfriend. We were supposed to go out to the movies tonight, but I just couldn’t stop thinking about Grace. No one got back to me after I made that 911 call. So Travis drove me over here to check on her, and that’s when we found all this.”
Annalisa nodded. She couldn’t imagine the boyfriend would be of any value, but she let him follow them to the side of the house, out of sight behind some parked cars and an overgrown hedge. “When was the last time you spoke to Grace?”
“Wednesday night. We chatted online.” Molly was tearing up again. “Please, tell me what happened to her.”
“We’re not entirely sure yet,” Annalisa replied gently. “How do you know Grace Harper?”
“We met online in the Grave Diggers group, but we’re real-person friends too. We’d go to dinner and coffee and stuff like that.”
“The Grave Diggers group?”
“We’re like … amateur sleuths, I guess you could call it. Just a bunch of people interested in old crimes that haven’t been solved. We chat online and go over the clues and try to find new leads. Our group got some attention a couple of years ago when we helped find that boy’s body down in North Carolina. The one who got taken by the school janitor?”
Annalisa made some notes about this, but she felt they were getting off track. “Does Ms. Harper have a law enforcement background?”
Molly let out a laugh through her tears. “Gracie? Oh, no, she is an assistant manager over at the Foodsmart. She just grew up watching a lot of Law & Order, Forensic Files, kind of like all of us. We’re just nosy, you know? We like to ask questions. You read about these unsolved cases and it’s like a loose thread dangling in front of you. You can’t help but start pulling on it.”
“What thread were you all tugging on lately?”
Travis made a noise in the back of his throat that sounded like disapproval. Molly shot him a warning look. “We’re working on more than a dozen cases as always. But Grace wanted to tackle the Lovelorn Killer investigation. Do you know it?”
A frisson went through Annalisa but she kept her voice steady. “I’ve heard of it.”
“The cops have been saying he’s probably dead or in prison somewhere, but we thought maybe he went underground because he almost got caught.”
Annalisa dropped her pen from the notebook and peered hard into Molly’s tearstained face. “What makes you think that?”
She swallowed visibly. “Well, Katherine Duffy’s murder—she was the last victim, you know. Number seven? Her death always seemed odd compared to the others. The other women’s husbands or partners were away at the time of their attacks, but Owen Duffy was right down the street when Katie got killed. She’d been out at a Halloween party and came home early because she’d started feeling sick. The killer would’ve had to have been waiting there for her—like, hanging out in her bushes, right?” She gave a small shudder and shot a look at the nearby hedge. Travis started rubbing her shoulders.
“So, he waited for her,” Annalisa replied. “Why did this matter?” As far as Annalisa knew, this was part of the Killer’s established pattern, to stalk his victims before murdering them. The letters he sent to the press after their deaths showed he knew them intimately.
“How did he know she’d be home by herself? Maybe he was watching the house and saw the opportunity, I don’t know. But Katherine’s husband, Owen, came home from the party to check on her just an hour or so after she’d left. What if the killer heard the car pull up and had to run out of there? A close call like that, especially with a cop, it might have spooked him. That’s why he quit.”
“Sure, maybe.”
“We got to talking about what kind of guy he probably was.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“The Grave Diggers,” Molly said with a trace of impatience. “The local ones meet for dinner once a month to talk about cases and chat online in between. Let’s see, there’s me, Grace, Barnes, Oliver Benton. Oh, and Travis tags along too, sometimes, but he mostly just plays games on his phone because he thinks we’re nuts.”
“Have you seen the pictures of this guy’s victims?” Travis interjected. “They’re completely hinky.”
Molly laid a hand on his arm to shush him. “Anyway, Grace has a theory about the killer. She thought wherever he was, he was probably stewing about not getting attention. ’Cause the killings were only part of his deal. He wrote those letters to the press afterward. He knew the victims’ addresses, right? He could’ve mailed the letters personally, but that wasn’t the point. He wanted everyone to see them.”
This struck Annalisa as a decent insight. “Sure, he wanted the press to put them on TV and in the papers.”
“Right. But when he had to stop killing, the headlines went away. No more Mr. Big Shot Killer on the front page every week. So, Gracie thought—why not give him what he’s craving? Make him feel important again. She called up all the papers and TV stations and pitched them the idea, how they could do a piece on our group and how we’re still hunting him. Her idea was that maybe he’d see the story and make contact with the press again.”
“I see. Did anyone do a story?”
Molly cast an anxious glance to the house, where the ME was at last making his way up the front walk. “Channel Seven did a feature last week. Gracie got interviewed and told them all about the Grave Diggers. She even said she had a new theory she was working on about the killer, one the cops hadn’t explored.”
“What was that?”
“She didn’t tell me. She said she wanted to do some more research, and she would share it at our next dinner. Why? Did she figure something out? Is that why you’re all here? Please tell me what’s going on.”
Annalisa couldn’t give the woman any answers, not yet. They didn’t even have an official ruling of death from the ME. But she couldn’t send Molly off without a strong word of caution. “We’re going to ask you to sit tight for a little bit while we gather more information. In the meantime, I strongly suggest that you and your friends refrain from saying anything online or to the press about the Lovelorn Killer.”
Molly sniffed hard. “You think Grace was right. That he could find out what we’re doing and make contact.”
“Ms. Lipinski, this man operates with a bunch of ropes. If you’ve looked at the pictures, you know what he does with them. Trust me when I tell you he’s not someone you want to make contact with.”
She thought of Grace Harper on the bedroom floor, her eyes shut and her mouth gasping for air that would never come. We liked to imagine what kind of guy he was, Molly had said. Grace now knew the answer. Maybe that’s why he’d come back, to show off for one of his greatest admirers. How he must have puffed up to see her wall of devotion to him.
You wanted me so bad?
Here I am.