CHAPTER 23
Chicago, October 29, 2019
THE CHINA DOLL RESTED ON THE PASSENGER SEAT AS RORY DROVE south out of the city. She took the Kennedy Expressway until it turned into I-94, then followed I-80 east for a short spurt to exit at Calumet Avenue. She pulled into the town of Munster, Indiana, fifty minutes after she left her house in Chicago. Three Floyds Brewery was long closed when she turned into the parking lot. The last time she’d been to the brewery was in May for Dark Lord Day, a ticketed twelve-hour event where stout lovers got the only chance of the year to buy their favorite beer. Rory attended because it was one of the rare public events she enjoyed, because beer flowed liberally, and Lane had expressed interest. She didn’t go for the reason everyone else did—to stock up on Dark Lord, although she did that, too. For most regular folks, when their Dark Lord supply was gone, they had to wait until the next year to find more. Rory, thankfully, was not a member of the regular folk.
She grabbed the doll from the passenger seat and stepped out of the car. Her breath was visible in the chilled night air. She pulled her beanie hat low on her head, adjusted her glasses, and started toward the building. The parking lot was lit by a single yellow halogen bulb at the top of the tall post in the middle of the parking area. As she walked along the blacktop, the golden glow of the halogen mixed with her still-red footprints to create an orange trail away from her car. Rory noticed the strange footprints and stomped her combat boots to rid them of the last of the red clay that remained from Starved Rock earlier in the day. The memory of the bloodred prints she had tracked through the cabin gave her a shiver. Hence, the trip to Munster to settle her nerves. Her fridge at home was empty.
She walked to the side of the brewery and knocked on a gray metal door. It opened almost immediately.
“Rory the Doll Lady,” a large man said. His thick beard dribbled down to his chest and was striped with gray. He wore a 3 Floyds Brewing Co. ball cap. “You almost made it six months.”
Rory had left Dark Lord Day in May with what most would consider a year’s worth of stout. But she had been on hiatus for most of that time, and her alcohol consumption always increased when she was on a break. And the most recent developments in her life had caused her to prematurely run through the rest.
“Kip,” Rory said. “Always nice to see you.” She held up the doll. “Simon and Halbig. It’s German, rare, and in pristine condition.”
The large man took the doll and inspected it like he knew what he was looking at. He stroked his long beard.
“Can I find this at Walmart?”
“Not a chance.”
“Taylor’s been begging for one. She heard about the doll I gave Becky over the holidays.”
Rory knew Kip had handfuls of grandchildren. Always looking to one-up his rival grandparents at birthdays and Christmastime, restored china dolls had been his go-to gift for the past two or three years. They were rare and expensive and could not be one-upped by his competition. Rory wasn’t sure what she’d do when Kip ticked off all his granddaughters to charm with her rare dolls. She’d have to ration her Dark Lord like everyone else. Until then, she bartered.
“Retail?” Kip asked.
Rory shrugged. “Probably four hundred.”
“And what are you asking?”
“Two cases.”
“Straight up?” Kip asked.
“I’m feeling generous.”
Kip stroked his beard once more while he looked at the Simon & Halbig doll. “You got papers on it?”
“Come on,” Rory said, reaching into the pocket of her gray coat and producing the original papers describing the doll. She’d picked it up the previous year at auction for next to nothing. It had been in terrible condition with multiple fractures running through the porcelain and clumps of missing hair. Rory had expertly managed the fractures, erasing them to near invisibility. She relied on Aunt Greta to come up with a solution for the bald patches on the skull, which, of course, the old lady did. When Rory handed the doll over tonight, it looked brand-new. Had she returned to the same auction hall where she found it, unloading it would bring a payday far north of $400.
Kip nodded as he took the papers. “Be right out.”
A few minutes later, they walked across the parking lot. Kip pushed a dolly with two cases of stout stacked on it. He loaded them into Rory’s car and closed the trunk. Rory climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. She rolled down the window when Kip knocked.
“You walk through a pumpkin patch on your way here?” Kip asked, looking at the orange, lunarlike footprints around the car.
“Not a pumpkin patch,” Rory said, pushing her glasses up her nose. “But a real frickin’ mess, that’s for sure.” She attempted a smile. “It’s why I’m here at midnight, let’s just leave it at that.”
“Yeah. When I got your call, I figured you were in bad need of a fix.”
“It’s beer, Kip. Not heroin.”
“A fix is a fix.”
Kip reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a bottle of Dark Lord, frosted from having come straight out of the cooler. He produced a Swiss Army knife from his other pocket. The Dark Lord emblem was inscribed across the front of it. Peeling it open, the double-side blade shined on one side with the sharpness of a scalpel. The other side sported a bottle opener. Kip popped the cap and handed it to Rory through the window.
“Watch yourself on I-80. Goddamn state troopers got eagle eyes.”
Rory smiled and took the ice-cold bottle. “Thanks, Kip. I’ll see you in May.”
“Here,” he said, handing her the Swiss Army knife as well. “I know that doll’s worth more than a couple cases of beer.”
Rory nodded her thanks, then pulled out of the brewery’s parking lot and onto Indiana Parkway. A few minutes later, she was on the highway with her cruise control set at one mile per hour slower than the posted speed limit. She sipped her Dark Lord and enjoyed the ride back to the city.
* * *
Rory found herself parked in front of her father’s house. It was close to one in the morning. She was becoming unhealthily fixated on the woman from 1979. Angela Mitchell had somehow reached back across the years to grab hold of some part of Rory’s consciousness. Like a tuning fork that has been tapped, the vibration from the mystery surrounding the woman was at once barely audible but yet impossible to ignore.
At first, she failed to understand why Angela Mitchell had such a hold on her. Or, at least, Rory wouldn’t admit it. To do so required self-reflection, and the acknowledgment of her own flaws and idiosyncrasies. Baring her soul had always been difficult, even if she were doing so only to herself. The connection had started when Rory learned that Angela was autistic. The link had strengthened when Rory read the descriptions that painted Angela as an introverted woman on the outskirts of society, someone who never truly fit in and who had few, if any, close relationships in her life. A woman who had been too scared to go to the authorities even when she suspected her husband was a killer. Since she had learned that Catherine Blackwell believed Angela Mitchell could still be alive, Rory’s mind was in overdrive. That her father had once searched for her, and perhaps had spent much of his life looking, had produced an unhealthy obsession with Angela Mitchell. From the low vibration in her mind, a single question formed: What did her father find? It was too much for Rory to neatly pack away, compartmentalize, and forget about. Rory knew she would use all her skills and talent to reconstruct Angela’s whereabouts.
She climbed from her car and strapped her backpack over her shoulder. Opening the trunk, she grabbed a second Dark Lord from one of the cases and then used her key to enter her childhood home. A wave of emotions suddenly washed over her. Rory couldn’t remember the last time she cried. In fact, she was unsure if she had ever experienced the emotion during her adult life. She didn’t think so, and wasn’t about to start now just from walking across the threshold to her childhood. Her father was gone. He had carried with him a great secret. It was enough for her to be curious. Crying would produce nothing useful.
She closed the door behind her, walked into her father’s office, and sat behind his desk. She used Kip’s Swiss Army knife to pop the top on her stout, and looked around the darkened room. Rory’s greatest gift was her ability to piece together cold cases, to pore over the facts and discover things other investigators missed until a picture of the crime—and sometimes the perpetrator—became clear in her mind. Her understanding of a killer’s thinking and motive came from examining the carnage he left behind. The frustration with attempting to reconstruct anything about Angela Mitchell lay in the fact that there had been nothing left behind. Thomas Mitchell left no carnage, and this made Rory wonder about the man’s guilt. Was it possible, she asked herself, that he had spent forty years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit? The more puzzling dilemma was whether he had spent decades in jail for a crime that had never happened.
She clicked on the desk lamp in her father’s office and pulled Lane Phillips’s thesis from her backpack. He had written it for his dissertation more than a decade ago. It was a dark and ominous look into the minds of convicted killers. A tour de force that came from Lane’s two-year crusade, during which he personally interviewed more than one hundred convicted serial killers around the world. The thesis still echoed in the hallways of the FBI, even though Lane had long ago moved on from his time as a profiler there. It was also Rory’s go-to reference material when she needed to remind herself how to think like a killer, a useful technique when trying to piece together a crime. Rory took a sip of Dark Lord and turned to the cover page: Some Choose Darkness By Lane Phillips.
She’d read the thesis many times, and was always drawn to the same section. She turned to it now. The heading always put a flutter in her chest: “Why Killers Kill.”
She read Lane’s discernments on what made a person choose to end another’s life: the rationalizing that occurred, the blocking of emotion, the pouring of societal norms and moral obligations into a black hole of the mind. This concept got back to the core of his thesis: At some point in every killer’s existence, a choice is made. Some choose darkness, others are chosen by it.
Rory finished her beer while she sat in her dead father’s darkened office. She looked around her childhood home, the quiet of the empty rooms allowing her mind to form the questions that gnawed at her. She thought about Angela Mitchell. She wondered if the mysterious woman had chosen darkness all those years ago, or if darkness had chosen her.