CHAPTER 12
Chicago, October 22, 2019
RORY ENTERED THE TAVERN ON THE AFTERNOON AFTER LANE’S courtroom appearance. She and Lane sat at the corner of the bar and ordered drinks. Rory took off her beanie hat and removed her glasses. There were few people in this world Rory Moore felt comfortable around, Lane Phillips was one of them. The bartender placed a Surly Darkness stout in front of her, and a light beer in front of Lane. Rory made an ugly face when she looked at Lane’s beer.
“What?” he asked.
“Your beer is the same color as urine.”
“That dark stuff hurts my stomach.”
“You hurt my stomach,” Rory said. “Why do you put yourself through that crap?”
“On the stand? Every expert witness has his credentials questioned. It’s part of the gig. Gotta have thick skin to deal with it, and you have to see it for what it is. The defense is attacking me to distract the jury from the fact that his client killed his wife. If my credentials need to get shredded in order for my opinions to be heard, that’s okay with me, as long as the son of a bitch is found guilty.”
“I hate bullies.”
“He’s just doing his job.”
“Lawyers are the scum of the earth,” Rory said, taking a sip of stout.
“Says the lawyer next to me. And he’s right, by the way. I haven’t practiced psychology for years. And I haven’t dealt directly with the criminally insane for more than a decade.”
“That might be about to change. I need a little help.”
“With the Camille Byrd reconstruction?”
Rory thought briefly of Camille Byrd, whose photo she had pinned to her corkboard days before. Her father had died of a heart attack just after she agreed to take the case, and tying up his affairs had been an all-encompassing task. A pang of heartache struck as Camille’s face popped into her thoughts. Rory had all but abandoned the case, and the guilt of leaving a cold case unattended suddenly felt heavy on her shoulders. She made a mental note to put in some hours on the reconstruction, once she had this last file of her father’s settled.
“No, something else,” she finally said.
Rory reached into her purse and pulled out the file Judge Boyle had given her.
“I’ve got my father’s firm pretty well settled, besides this one case.”
She pushed the folder across the bar, and saw Lane’s posture straighten. Paging through a criminal’s file gave him a thrill. And despite any stiff-suited attorney trying to convince people otherwise, Lane Phillips was one of the best at dissecting the mind of a killer. He’d resigned from the FBI not because his profiling skills were suspect, but because he was too proficient at it. Diving into criminal minds left him shaky and tormented by what he found there. He understood their minds so well that it left a haunting impression he had difficulty shaking off. So when his true-crime book, which chronicled the minds of the most notorious serial killers of the last one hundred years, including personal interviews with many of them, sold more than two million copies during its first year in print, he quit the Bureau and started the Murder Accountability Project with Rory. The MAP was an effort to track unsolved homicides and identify patterns that might highlight similarities between crimes, often pointing to serial killings. Rory and Lane’s skills complemented each other. She was able to reconstruct homicides better than anyone in the country, and Lane Phillips was one of the world’s foremost authorities on serial killings.
“Ever hear of this guy?” Rory asked as Lane paged through the file.
“Yeah. They called him The Thief. But, Christ, that was forty years ago. Your father represented this guy?”
“Apparently. I’m still sorting the details. Garrison Ford, the big criminal defense firm, originally handled the case. My father worked at Garrison Ford after leaving the public defender’s office, but his tenure was short. Just a couple of years. When my father left to start his own firm, he took this case with him.”
Lane turned a few pages in the file. “When was the last time your father worked at Garrison Ford?”
“Nineteen eighty-two,” Rory said. “And he’s had this guy as a client ever since.”
“Doing what?” Lane asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. After Garrison Ford mounted an unsuccessful defense at trial, my father worked on appeals and represented him at parole hearings. The guy also has a small fortune from before he was put away, and it looks like my dad oversaw the money. Set up a trust and protected it for three decades. Settled some debts, looked after some property, and paid himself out of the trust for legal services rendered.”
Lane turned the page. “And visited this guy a lot. Look at all these visitor log entries.”
“Yes, my father had quite a relationship with this man.”
“So what’s the issue? Pawn this case off like you’ve done with all the others.”
“I can’t. This guy’s been granted parole. My father was working with the judge on the details when he died, and His Honor is under some pressure to get it off his docket, so he’s not letting me delay it.”
Lane took a sip of beer as he continued to page through the file.
Rory picked up her stout. “Tell me about this guy. I looked him up. He was convicted on a single count of Murder Two. Doesn’t seem like it would be so spectacular that he made parole after forty years. But when I talked with the judge, he said the guy killed a whole bunch of people.”
“Oh, boy,” Lane said, looking up from the file and staring at Rory.
“What?” Rory asked.
“Something’s piqued your interest about this case, hasn’t it?”
“Stop it, Lane.”
“I know how you operate, Rory. Something about your father’s involvement in this case has planted itself in that brain of yours and now you can’t let it go.”
With her father gone, Lane Phillips was the only other person who fully understood Rory’s obsession with things unknown. His history as a psychologist stopped Rory from pretending he was incorrect. Dr. Phillips knew the workings of the human brain well, and Rory’s, in particular, better than most. This quirk in her personality was what made her such a sought-after forensic reconstructionist. Until she had all the answers about a case, she was helpless to stop her mind from working to find them. Especially if an initial glance at a case held something that made no sense, and her father’s involvement with the man the papers called The Thief made no sense at all.
“Tell me about this guy,” she said again.
Lane wrapped his hand around the bottom of his beer mug, spun it in place as he collected his thoughts on the long-ago case. “The prosecution pushed for Murder One, the jury came back with second-degree for the lone victim. But this guy was suspected in many other cases of missing women,” Lane said. “Five or six . . . I’d have to look it up.”
“Five or six homicides? Nothing in his file mentions other victims. And it would be impossible to make parole if he killed so many.”
“He was suspected of more killings, never charged. And you won’t find anything formally linking him to the other killings. Just rumor and conjecture.”
“Why did they go after him for only one homicide if they thought there were more?”
Lane closed the file. “A few reasons. The city was in a panic in the late seventies. You had the Son of Sam still lingering on people’s minds—he was the nut who killed a bunch of people in New York in 1976. Then, here in Chicago, we had the horror of John Wayne Gacy having killed and buried thirty-some boys in his crawl space. Then, during the summer of 1979, women started disappearing and the city bubbled with fear. The whole summer was filled with heat and anxiety. Eventually, toward the end of summer, the police found their man. But the way they discovered him was very unorthodox, and it was entirely thanks to an autistic woman who pieced it all together.”
Rory leaned forward across the bar to listen more intently. She was more interested now than she had been.
“The method in which this woman gathered and delivered the evidence was very strange, and the DA knew none of the evidence would stand up in court. Most was flat-out inadmissible. Neither side wanted a trial. If the prosecution failed to convince the jury of his guilt, this guy would walk. If they succeeded, he’d be eligible for the death penalty, which was still around in 1979. So a trial was risky for both sides. In the end, the DA made the choice to go after him on the single homicide. They had shaky evidence, a lot of circumstance, and no body.”
“No body?”
“No. That’s why it was such a risk to go to trial, and why they went after him for only the single victim. No bodies were ever found, besides one that they could never tie to him in any meaningful way. And with no body, the jury came back with a guilty verdict for Murder Two. The conviction sent him away for sixty years, but allowed for parole after thirty. The sentence put the city’s fears to rest.”
“And now, after ten years of parole hearings and forty years in jail, he’s about to be granted his freedom.”
Lane shook his head. “I studied this case for my book, but the details never made it past the final edits. That woman who figured it all out. Goddamn, I still remember the headlines. ‘Schizophrenic Woman Brings Down The Thief.’ ”
“Schizophrenic?”
“No one knew anything about autism back then. Plus, ‘Schizophrenic’ sold more papers.”
Rory looked into the black abyss of her Surly Darkness stout, lifted the mug, and swallowed the rest of the beer. She wanted to order another. She longed for a touch of dizziness to soften her thoughts about this autistic woman she knew nothing about. She knew those curiosities were taking root in her mind and that they would be impossible to ignore. She stared up at Lane.
“What ever happened to her? The autistic woman?”
Lane tapped the file with his finger. “Her name was Angela Mitchell. He killed her before she had a chance to testify.”