CHAPTER 19
Chicago, October 27, 2019
MEETING WITH NEW PEOPLE RANKED RIGHT UP THERE WITH ROOT canals. Rory did better when the stranger was otherworldly, a victim who needed Rory to reconstruct their death and discover what had happened to them. She had a harder time with the living. They interacted and questioned and judged. But the meeting with Catherine Blackwell presented an opportunity Rory would find nowhere else. The lure to talk with someone who had known Angela Mitchell was all consuming. Rory had an unexplainable urge to know everything about her.
It was noon when Rory walked up the steps of the bungalow house and rang the bell. Although she had never created a mental image of Catherine Blackwell, other than the grainy Facebook image, Rory was surprised to see a white-haired lady when the door opened. Rory guessed she was seventy, perhaps older. The math made sense if she was a friend to Angela Mitchell in 1979.
“Rory?” Catherine asked.
“Yes, Ms. Blackwell?”
“Call me Catherine. Come in.”
Rory walked inside and followed the woman into the kitchen. “Can I take your coat?”
Rory unconsciously had her fist tight on the top button, which was latched and secured at the base of her throat.
“No, thank you.”
Rory managed to remove her beanie hat, but that was as far as she would go.
“Can I get you a coffee?”
“I’m okay.”
Catherine poured herself a cup and they both sat at the kitchen table. Stacked on the table were several binders of information.
“I was very excited to receive your message,” Catherine said. “I haven’t had much traffic on my Facebook page lately.”
“I was glad to find you,” Rory said, pushing her glasses up her nose.
“I’ve become a bit of a sleuth in my old age,” Catherine said. “And I’m proud to be a friend to the digital age rather than a stranger, as many people my age are. After I saw your comment on my Facebook page, I did some snooping. You have quite a reputation in the world of forensic investigation.”
Rory nodded, averted her eyes, and reached again for the collar of her coat, making sure the top button was still secured. It made her feel safe and protected, anonymous somehow, even though she was anything but.
“Yes. I work for the Chicago Police Department as a special counsel, of sorts.”
“And with the Murder Accountability Project,” Catherine said with a smile. “Is that why you contacted me? Are the Chicago Police looking into Angela again?”
Rory paused. Looking into her?
“No, I’m afraid not. My curiosity about Angela Mitchell is mine alone.” Rory shifted in her chair, leaned a little closer. “How did you know Angela? If you don’t mind me asking.”
Catherine smiled, setting her gaze on the steaming coffee. “We were dear friends. I mean, it was so long ago.” She looked up. “Maybe I embellish our friendship when I think of it now. Perhaps I make more of it than it really was. But Angela meant a lot to me. She was a special woman, indeed.”
“Special in what way?” Rory asked, although she believed she knew the answer.
“Angela was a beloved friend, but also a terribly troubled woman. She had a lot of... issues. Maybe that’s why she and I were so close. She didn’t have much of a support system. She was estranged from her parents, from what little she told me about them, and she had no other family to lean on. Angela was what we would now label autistic, but back then she was just horribly misunderstood by most. She was also an obsessive-compulsive. She suffered from debilitating bouts of paranoia. But despite it all, somehow she and I settled into a perfectly normal friendship that I cherished. During the summer of 1979, before she disappeared, she was going through another spate of her illness and I’m afraid . . .”
Rory waited a moment. “Afraid what?”
“I’m afraid I treated her no better than any of the people she tried to avoid.”
“What happened?”
Catherine took a sip of coffee to steel herself. “I’m sure you are aware of the missing women from 1979.”
Rory nodded. From what Lane had told her, she knew a brief amount about the women who went missing. None had been linked to Thomas Mitchell, despite wide speculation that he was responsible for their deaths.
“Angela had become consumed with the missing women that summer. She came up with a theory of who took them, and how he had killed them. But they were wild ideas, perhaps considered by some to be a conspiracy theory, of a decadelong string of missing women who had all succumbed to the same man. She had researched it all. She had reams of material and graphs and a detailed model of how it had all transpired. Similar women killed in similar ways, all in a tight location in and around the city.”
Rory’s breath caught in her throat. She thought about her work at the Murder Accountability Project, her and Lane’s efforts to find similarities between homicides that might point to trends and serial killings. She thought of the cases that had been solved because of their algorithm. Angela Mitchell had been doing something similar before computers were widely used, before algorithms could be produced, before the Internet existed and put information at one’s fingertips. The roots of Rory’s curiosity about Angela Mitchell grew deeper, stretching into the folds of her mind.
“Here,” Catherine said. “Take a look at her research.”
Catherine pushed a three-ring binder across the table.
“This is everything Angela compiled that summer on the missing women, and all her theories on what happened to them.”
Rory slowly pulled the binder in front of her and opened the cover. It was strange to see such a large volume of work with so much of it handwritten. There were many pages that looked to have been copied from books, the shadows of the old Xerox machine present on each page. But most of it was written by hand in neat print. Rory remembered the piggish writing from the detective’s notes on the Camille Byrd case. Angela Mitchell’s penmanship was immaculate.
Rory turned page after page that described the women who had disappeared in 1979, full biographies that must have taken hours to compile. She read each name, the details of their lives and disappearances sketched in her memory the way everything she looked at was imaged and categorized. Only the body of one woman featured in the biographies was ever found. Her name was Samantha Rodgers, and Angela had gone to long lengths to describe the woman.
Rory turned a page and came to a detailed drawing.
“What’s this?”
Catherine leaned over the table to get a better look.
“Oh,” she said. “That was one of Angela’s final theories. She told me she found that contraption at Thomas’s warehouse, hidden in a back room. Angela believed it was how he killed the women, hanging them in some fashion. I’m afraid that was all too much for me.”
Rory analyzed the bizarre drawing that depicted two nooses juxtaposed to one another, the rope between them winding through a triple pulley system that took on the shape of an M and looked barbaric.
“And I’m sad to admit,” Catherine continued, “that when Angela showed me all of this just before she disappeared, I turned my back on her. I told Angela her theories were over the top. That she couldn’t possibly be right. I told her that the summer and the missing women had gotten the best of her, and that she was on the wrong track. I tried to convince her that she was in no danger. But then . . .” Catherine looked away from Rory, down into her coffee again. Her voice was lower when she finally spoke. “Then she was gone.”
Rory didn’t recognize what was happening at first, and then she noticed that Catherine Blackwell had begun to cry. Rory stirred with anxiety. She was incapable of comforting strangers.
“There, there,” Rory heard herself say, wondering where the words came from or what on earth they meant. Rory cleared her throat and continued on. “Why do you have all of Angela’s notes?”
“Just before she went missing, she left them at my house—whether she did it accidentally or on purpose, I’ve never known for sure.”
“Why didn’t you give them to the police?”
“Because the police were never going to charge Thomas with anything but Angela’s murder. That was clear from the start.”
“But this drawing.” Rory pointed to the binder. “Didn’t the police find this device at Thomas’s warehouse?”
“His warehouse burned to the ground. He made sure there was nothing to find.”
Rory took one last look at Angela Mitchell’s notes before she closed the binder. “I’m curious about the Facebook page. You call it Justice for Angela and ask for anyone with information to come forward. What exactly are you looking for all these years later?”
Catherine collected herself and looked up at Rory. “Answers,” she said, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “I’ve been looking for answers for decades. The Facebook page is just a more public way for me to do it.”
“But that’s what I’m having trouble understanding. What kind of answers? There was a trial, and a conviction.”
Catherine smiled. It was more a disappointed look than it was a kind gesture. “That trial provided no closure. It provided the City of Chicago and all its frightened residents with peace of mind. But it answered no questions about Angela Mitchell. It’s been forty years, and I still want to know what happened to her.”
Rory stared at Catherine Blackwell, narrowed her eyes, and cocked her head just a bit. “Her husband killed her.”
“Oh,” Catherine said, shaking her head. “I’m afraid that’s just not true. See, there’s something you need to know about Angela.”
Rory waited. “What’s that?”
“She was fiercely intelligent. Much too smart for Thomas to have killed her. Angela disappeared on her own accord. I turned my back on her just before she left, and I’ve never forgiven myself for it. I hope someday to tell her how sorry I am for how I treated her.”
Rory leaned closer, resting her elbows on the kitchen table. “You think Angela is still alive?”
Catherine nodded. “I know she is. And I pray you’ll help me find her.”