CHICAGO
AUGUST 1979
IT WAS SUNDAY MORNING, LESS THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS SINCE HER bizarre discovery in the warehouse, and Angela had not slept a minute. She was up all night updating the biographies of the missing women, and adding everything to her notes that she had found in the last three days about Leonard Williams. After leaving the warehouse yesterday, she had spent hours at the library, spinning microfilm and researching hanging and strangulation deaths associated with women in and around Chicago. Below the graph diagram Angela had put together depicting the trend of killings over the last decade, she now added relevant information from her library research. She was trying to make sense of the contraption she had found in the hidden storage room, and believed she was onto something. Of the women on her graph who fit the description, who fell into the profile, and who had been killed in and around Chicago, most had been strangled. On the last page of her file, Angela had drawn the odd, M-shaped wooden beam with the dual hanging nooses.
Ever since rushing from the warehouse to pore through microfilm at the library, the entire time she was creating her documents and graphs and working out her theory about Leonard Williams, all through the night and up until this morning when she arrived at Catherine’s house, that soft whisper in her mind nagged and annoyed. Angela never stopped her work to listen, and feared the voice that was calling her was a side effect of the Valium, which she was swallowing at an alarming rate. Or it was the logical and reasonable part of her mind working to be heard, trying to tell her that she was overmedicating herself and that her ideas about the missing women were ridiculous.
She sat at Catherine’s kitchen table now, pushed the whisper of that voice away, and showed her work to her friend. Catherine sat patiently and listened to Angela tell the story of her trip to the warehouse, her discovery that Leonard Williams lived so close to where Samantha Rodgers’s body had been found, that of the women who had been killed and who matched the description of the missing women from this summer—all had been strangled. And finally she showed Catherine the bizarre image she had drawn of the dual noose contraption.
Catherine took a sip of coffee when Angela finally looked at her. “You know I always support you,” Catherine said. “But . . .”
“But what?” Angela asked.
“I think everything that’s going on this summer has set you off.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think you’re very nervous about what’s going on. So am I. But I think you feel like it’s your responsibility to figure this out, and, Angela, some of what you’re showing me is . . .”
“Is what?”
“It’s hard to digest. All the research you’ve done on the missing women, and how they might be connected to a decadelong string of murder.”
“I think they are.”
“But now you’re telling me you think you know who did this, and that it’s a man who works for Bill and Thomas.”
Angela looked away from Catherine and back to her notes, her cheeks suddenly red and searing. She gathered the papers and stuffed them into the file folder. Her research and her theories, all contained in the file folder, sat on the kitchen table like some foreign and unwanted artifact found in the wild. Neither knew quite what to do with it or how to handle it—if it were worth anything at all, or just a useless bit of something unearthed and dragged inside.
“I think Leonard Williams scared you in the alley,” Catherine finally said, placing her hand on Angela’s. “And I think that’s made you look at him in a way that most wouldn’t see him. From what I know, he’s a family man. He’s got a wife and kids, Angela. He’s not some deranged serial killer. I don’t think you’ve done anything foolish, let me be clear. But reasonably looking at all of this, I don’t know that I totally agree with everything you’re suggesting. Angela, I’m not sure . . . I’m not sure I totally believe all of this.”
Angela swallowed hard at the rejection. Her surroundings faded as memories of her childhood flooded her mind. Her teachers’ disparaging comments anytime Angela made a remark in school, her parents’ constant refusal to listen to Angela’s reasoning on any subject, her psychiatrist’s outright dismissal of her pleas for help when the lithium drew wild hallucinations in her vision. All the images from her childhood carried her away, and only when she heard talking did she come back to the present. When she did, she found Bill Blackwell standing next to Catherine.
There was a far-off echo. Angela tried to hear it, but it was hollow and muted. She saw Bill’s lips moving and realized the man was speaking to her. She blinked her eyes.
“The second time in a week that I come home to a surprise,” she heard Bill say. “Is Thomas back from Indiana yet?”
Angela focused her eyes on the bandana around Catherine’s husband’s neck. She realized the soft echoing voice she had heard a moment before was not that of Bill Blackwell, but instead the whispered voice she had been hearing since her visit to the Kenosha warehouse. It was finally loud enough to decipher. It was screaming, in fact, as she stared at the man in front of her. Angela’s mind flashed to the night they all ate dinner in her home. She remembered Bill’s red neck, explained then as an allergic reaction to insect repellent and the remnants of mosquito bites. She remembered his bandana from the last time she sat in this kitchen with Catherine. And now today, she looked at his bandana-covered neck to see deep red marks on his skin. Marks that could come from a noose.
Angela stood quickly. The kitchen chair toppled backward and ricocheted off the kitchen floor. She backed away and, without saying a word, turned and hurried out the front door. Her thick file folder remained on the table.