WITH ONE HAND on the doorknob of the interview room where Rose Daniels sat waiting, Jack paused long enough to clear his head of babies, job offers and Emily. Yes, even her. Every interview demanded focus and control, this one more than most because there was a possibility this young woman had been more than an innocent bystander to three murders. The grizzly stabbings that had occurred on three consecutive days, in three different parts of Chicago, to three women who appeared to have nothing in common. In spite of that, Jack had been convinced they were connected.
There had been no sign of robbery—even the homeless woman was found with two pieces of ID, fourteen dollars and change, and her next fix in her coat pocket. All three victims were fully clothed. There had been no physical assault and no sign of a struggle, which suggested the women had either been skillfully ambushed or they had not felt threatened by their assailant. Jack’s gut told him it was the latter and that there was a single perpetrator. He’d learned to go with his gut, and it almost always paid off.
The common thread had turned out to be Rose Daniels. Daughter of the drug addict, former client of the social worker, former foster child of the housewife. Rose had recently worked as a waitress at an all-night diner in the Rogers Park area, and she had been on duty at the time of all three murders. Rose’s boss, a sinewy woman with bad teeth and tobacco-stained fingers, along with her gum-chewing coworker, a handful of late-night regulars and tedious hours of grainy surveillance footage had provided Rose with a rock-solid alibi. Problem was, by the time Jack had connected the dots, Rose had vanished. He hadn’t known if she was dead or alive, but now here she was in his hometown, of all places. He adjusted his posture, pushed open the door and strode into the room.
Rose lounged carelessly in a chair designed for anything but comfort. Jack closed the door, and she barely glanced up from the purple polish she was picking off her thumbnail. Her dark brown hair, which had been long in all the photographs and video he’d seen, had been shorn into a short pixie cut. Long, purple-streaked bangs were swept to one side, covering one eye. Rose’s visible eye was black rimmed and bloodshot. She wore faded, distressed jeans and scuffed combat boots. Her black-and-white T-shirt sported a cat’s face with a thought bubble above its head. “Meow.”
Jack set a bottle of water in front of her, then pulled the other chair away from the table and dragged it around so he could sit facing her without the table between them. “Hi, Rose. I’m Detective Jack Evans, Chicago PD.”
“Took you long enough.” She didn’t look up.
He ignored the quip. “I need you to know I’m going to record our conversation.” He placed a recorder on the table, in plain view, pushed the record button and said his name again.
“I need you to state your name, please, and spell it.” She complied. Rose Marie Daniels.
“Thank you, Rose,” he said. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
She made eye contact then, briefly, warily, then shrugged and looked away. “Whatever.”
So this is how it’s going to be. He had pored over her police file and her mother’s, had spoken with several social workers and former foster parents at length, so he understood where the attitude came from. He was a patient man, and he had all afternoon, his anticipated rendezvous with Emily Finnegan notwithstanding. Given the tremble in Rose Daniels’s hands and the way her gaze darted around the small room, she didn’t have that luxury. She needed a drink.
“Can I get you anything besides water?” he offered. “A soda, maybe?”
“How ’bout a smoke?”
“Sorry. That’ll have to wait till we’re done here.”
That earned him another shrug.
It would be interesting to see how long the cold shoulder would hold up against the young woman’s need for another drink, a nicotine fix or any other substance she craved.
“So, Rose, Riverton’s a long way from Chicago. What brings you here?”
She brushed flecks of purple polish off her jeans and started chipping away at the other thumbnail. “Vacation.”
Sure, because Riverton was right up there with Disney World and Vegas. “I get that,” he said instead. “I’m sure you needed a break from working at the diner.”
Rose flicked him a glance.
“Oh, wait. You quit that job, didn’t you? Or are you on a leave of absence? Your boss wasn’t sure.”
“I got bored.”
“Fair enough. How long do you plan to stay here?”
“A few days. A week, maybe.”
“Where are you staying?”
“At some bed-and-breakfast place.”
Interesting. The only B & B in town was operated by Annie Finnegan, who also happened to be Emily’s older sister. This was either one very weird set of coincidences, or it wasn’t.
“That would be Finnegan Farm,” he said, careful not to make it a question. “Out on River Road.” The more Rose believed he already knew about her, the more likely she’d be to spill the details he didn’t.
She looked startled. “Yeah.”
“Tell me about your mother.”
“She was lousy at being one.”
According to social services, Rose had been in and out of foster care for most of her childhood. Six different homes in all. She’d been returned to her mother’s care five times—after Scarlett Daniels had done a stint in rehab, promising every time she was clean for good. Those periods had been brief, lasting anywhere from three to six months. Scarlett would end up back on the street and Rose in yet another foster home.
“So I’ve been told,” he said. “I’ve also heard she tried to turn her life around, more than once, but the drugs always got the best of her.”
“Yeah, those and the stupid, loser boyfriends.”
“Do you want to talk about them?”
“Not really.”
“What about you? Do you have a boyfriend?”
She looked up, and this time challenged him with a direct stare. “What do you think?”
“I hear you’ve been hanging around with a guy named Jason Caruthers. I hear he’s pretty crazy about you.”
Rose huffed and then rolled her eyes in a way that was meant to show her disdain. However, it wasn’t quick enough to mask a wave of panic.
“I hear he’d do pretty much anything you asked him to do,” Jack said.
The girl’s reaction was swift and forceful. “I never asked him to do anything for me. Never.” She practically spat the last word before regaining a smattering of self-control. “Anything he did—if he did anything—it was all his doing.”
“Oh, he did some stuff, all right. As for acting alone, that’s not what Jason’s saying.” He leaned closer. “I’m going to level with you, Rose. You could be in a lot of trouble here. Three people who were close to you are dead. Your boyfriend’s DNA was found at each crime scene. He’s up on murder one charges on all three counts, and he’s implicated you as an accomplice.”
“He’s not my boyfriend.” She reached for the bottle of water and, with shaky hands, struggled with the cap.
Jack took it from her, broke the seal and handed the bottle back to her.
She unscrewed the cap, gulped the water too quickly, coughed and sputtered, set the bottle on the table, and swiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” she said again. “It was never like that.”
“Okay.” He wasn’t sure he believed her, but he needed her to believe he did. “If Jason wasn’t your boyfriend, then how about you start at the beginning and tell me what it was like? I can’t help you, Rose, unless I have all the facts.”
She gave a quick head toss that flipped the too-long bangs away from her face, momentarily revealing the distrust and indecision in those dark, black-lined eyes. He watched her roll the bottle lid back and forth between her fingers, glad she’d finally stopped picking at the scabby remains of her nail polish. She remained silent.
Jack leaned back a ways, confident he had more staying power than she did.
Rose continued her nervous fidgeting until the lid unexpectedly spun out of her fingers. He deftly caught it in midair and returned it to the startled girl.
“How old are you, Rose?”
“Twenty.”
“You spent a lot of time in foster homes. How long have you been on your own?”
“Coupla years.”
“Don’t kids in Illinois stay in foster care until they’re twenty-one?”
“Yeah, in sleazy group homes,” she snapped, her voice dripping with disdain. “I can look after myself.”
Right. Everyone knew how well that turned out. But he would let it drop and try penetrating the tough-girl attitude with a different line of questioning.
“Have you ever been in prison?”
She gave him a sharp stare. “No.”
“Just that one stint in juvie,” he reminded her.
“Right.” The single word was barely audible.
“What was that?”
“Right,” she repeated, this time with force.
He leaned forward again, forearms on his thighs, and wove his fingers together. “Compared to a maximum-security prison, juvie’s like a walk in the park, summer camp, all fun and games.” He gave her a few seconds to absorb that before he continued. “If someone accused me of some bad stuff I didn’t do...I’d be doing whatever I could to avoid doing time. You know what I’m saying, Rose?”
Eyes downcast, she responded with a one-shouldered shrug. Over the years, he’d met a lot of kids—young adults, he reminded himself—like Rose. They’d grown up in the system but had pretty much raised themselves. Street smart, yet socially inept and immature, a thin veneer of tough-guy attitude barely masking their vulnerability.
Rose swallowed. “I never asked him to hurt anybody. I swear I didn’t.”
Finally, a chink in the armor. “Okay. Tell me about Jason. How did you meet him?”
“At the diner. He’d come in for coffee. At first, he’d sit at a table near the back. He always had a tablet with him, and the diner has Wi-Fi, so sometimes he’d hang out for quite a while.”
“Did you ever see what he was doing online?”
“Not really, but I’m pretty sure he has a Facebook page.”
The reality was he had several, each created with a different identity. He’d used the tablet to surreptitiously take photographs of Rose and post them on his All-night Diner Guy page. The captions showed a creepy obsession with the young woman he referred to as My Caffeine Fix. Using a host of additional fictitious identities, he had also frequented numerous online chat rooms where the topics of discussion were dark and disturbingly morbid.
Better to withhold this information, Jack decided. Give Rose a chance to tell her story, her way. If she was as innocent as she claimed to be, they might be able to use her to get a confession from an unsuspecting Jason Caruthers.
“So he’d just sit at the back of the diner and drink coffee?” Jack asked.
“Yeah, at first, anyway. Then he started talking to me once in a while.”
“What did you talk about?”
Rose furrowed her brow. “Nothing, really. He’d ask stuff like how long I’d worked there, where had I gone to school and where did I live. Stuff like that.”
Jack sat back and waited for her to continue.
“One day he sat at a table closer to the front and then the next time he came in, he sat at the counter where we could talk when I wasn’t waiting on other customers.”
“Did your conversations change, get more personal?”
“I guess.” Rose sipped some water. She seemed a little calmer now that she was finally opening up. “He asked questions about my family, about what it was like growing up without a dad, about the foster homes. He asked a lot of questions, actually.”
“Did he ever talk about himself?”
She shook her head. “Hardly ever. He told me he was from New York, and his parents were still there. He talked more about the future, how he planned to go back to the city and be an actor.”
Jason Caruthers was from New York state, but not the city. He’d grown up in Albany, upstate. Jack suspected the lie was intended to impress Rose, and it seemed it had. Nothing about his background suggested an interest in theater. He was quite the actor, though.
Now that Rose was on a roll, she kept talking. Jack let her continue without interrupting. She appeared to know nothing about Jason’s own experience as a kid who’d been abandoned by his parents and raised, not in foster homes but by an elderly grandmother. By all accounts, she had taken him into her home out of some misplaced sense of duty. Worse still, she had ignored and then subsequently denied the indicators her grandson was struggling with mental illness. The forensic psychiatrist who now worked with Jason had diagnosed him with borderline personality disorder.
“Jason was one of the few people who ever really listened to me,” Rose said. “He wanted to know about my mother, the foster parents I had over the years, the social workers.”
“What did you tell him?”
Head down, she absently picked at the frayed threads on the knee of her jeans, expanding the gaping tear. “I told him everything. How bad it was with my mom, how the social workers would show up with the cops in the middle of the night...”
She hesitated, shot him a quick, wary glance.
Jack responded with a nod, hoping she could see his sympathy was genuine. In his early days with the CPD, he’d been present at a lot of child apprehensions. Too many. Every single one of them a heartbreaker.
“I told him how much I hated moving into some stranger’s house, how I never felt like I belonged there, or anywhere. Do you think that’s why he...?”
Murdered your mother? Words best left unsaid for now.
“We don’t know what motivated him. Can you remember anything else he said about his own life?”
She shook her head, slowly. “I can’t think of anything.”
“Did you ever meet him away from the diner?”
She hesitated, obviously startled by that question. “Um...he asked a couple of different times if I wanted to go someplace with him after work. I always said no. My boss was, like, superstrict about us ‘fraternizing with the patrons,’” she said, punctuating the sentence with air quotes. “A couple of months ago, I started running into him, though. Once at the Laundromat near my apartment building and another time at the convenience store on the corner. He told me he lived in the neighborhood.”
Believing him had been her first mistake, but it was easy to understand why she had. Rose wore her neediness like a neon sign. Jason Caruthers had likely zeroed in on that before she’d served him his first cup of coffee.
Jack shook his head. He needed to be honest with her. “Jason didn’t live in your neighborhood. He had a room near the Loop downtown.”
Rose’s overly made-up eyes narrowed to slits. “So, what are you saying? Was he, like, stalking me or something?” A possibility she obviously hadn’t considered at the time.
“All I can tell you for sure is he didn’t live anywhere near your place.”
“That’s creepy.”
He agreed. “To be clear, Rose, you used to see Jason pretty well every day at the diner, you ran into him a few times in your neighborhood, but you never went anywhere with him? No dates, no meet-ups anywhere?”
“Never. I already told you that.”
“You did, and I appreciate your honesty.” And his gut told him she was being honest. Still, he needed to keep stripping away the layers of this particular onion until there weren’t any left.
“When was the last time you saw your mother?”
“About two months ago. She had my cell number, and she called out of the blue.”
“Did you get together with her?”
Rose gave a wistful nod.
“How was she?”
“She sounded good on the phone. Like she had it together, you know?”
“Did she come to the diner?”
“No way. I never told her where I lived or where I was working. I met her downtown. Turned out the place she suggested was close to a shelter where she used to hang out, so I figured she must’ve been staying there again.”
“The Helping Hands Women’s Shelter?”
“Yeah, that’s the place.”
“How was she when you saw her that day?”
Rose lifted one bony shoulder, let it drop. “Okay, I guess. I bought her lunch, and she asked for money. She doesn’t call very often, but when she does—did—that’s always what she wanted. So I gave her my tips from the shift I’d worked the night before, and then I left.”
For the first time since the interview started, he let his thoughts extend beyond the interview room. Compared to this poor kid, his upbringing had been decidedly normal. He would guess Emily’s was, as well. Her parents had been divorced for years, and he’d never heard much about her mother, come to think of it. She and her sisters had been raised by their father—a wheelchair-bound paraplegic who was something of a local hero in his own right—on the family farm. Thomas Finnegan could often be seen chauffeuring his grandson around in his specially equipped minivan. Last summer, Jack’s mother had raved about him being the marshal, on horseback no less, of the Riverboat Days parade. Jack would make a point of learning more about Emily’s family over dinner tonight.
He turned his full attention back to Rose. “Giving your mom some money, that was a nice thing to do.”
“Not really. I mean, she is—was—my mom and everything, but I knew she was going to use it to get high.”
“Do you use drugs, Rose?”
“No way.”
“Just booze, then.”
She had maintained eye contact throughout the exchange about her mother, but she quickly lowered her gaze when he mentioned the drinking. “Sometimes.”
He let that drop. “Did you tell Jason about getting together with your mother?”
“Yes,” she whispered. She swiped at her eyes with the back of one hand. For the first time since the interview had begun, her emotions were raw and gut-wrenchingly genuine.
Jack slid a box of tissues across the table and leaned back in his chair, watching her closely. Rose dabbed at her eyes, scrunched the damp, black-smeared tissue into a ball and formed a fist around it.
She’s grieving, he reminded himself. Give the poor kid a break.
She snagged a second tissue, did a little more damage to the eyeliner, blew her nose.
“I know this is hard,” he said, “but I need to ask a few more questions. Take your time and let me know when you’re ready.”
She tossed the tissues into the trash. “I’m fine. Can we just get this over with?”
“Sure. Tell me about your social worker, when you last saw her, what you told Jason about her.”
Rose answered his questions, appearing to do her best to be accurate with dates and places. The same was true when he moved on to her former foster mother. Her house had been the one place that had felt like a real home to Rose. She had screwed it up by acting out and finally stealing money from her foster mom’s purse so she could impress some of her so-called friends at school. Yes, she had told Jason about living there. Now she confessed to Jack, amid more tears, that she had embellished some of the facts and completely altered others to make herself seem like the victim.
Jack studied Rose’s face as Jason’s motivation slowly dawned on her. She might not have wielded the knife. She might not be guilty of murder—certainly no jury would ever convict her—but her poor-me attitude, combined with her indiscretion and naïveté, had contributed to the senseless killing of three innocent people. Three people who had at various times cared for her and about her, whether or not they had done an adequate job of demonstrating it. Eventually, Rose would have to find a way to come to terms with the reality of what had happened to those women; otherwise she would stagger beneath the guilt for the rest of her life. There would always be doubt, self-recrimination, what-if questions. For Rose’s sake, Jack hoped she didn’t keep looking for answers in a bottle.
“I’m going to recommend that the Riverton police let you go, on one condition. No more disappearing acts. I want you to keep me informed of your whereabouts at all times, and we’ll need you back in Chicago to testify at Jason’s trial. Agreed?”
She nodded reluctantly. “Will I have to see him?”
“I’m afraid so. Just in the courtroom, though, and there’ll be plenty of security.” At the beginning of the interview, he had toyed with the idea of putting her and Jason together before the trial to see if she could get him to admit he’d acted alone. Now that Jack had met Rose, he could see that wouldn’t be a good idea. Jason Caruthers was as intelligent as he was evil. He could easily manipulate Rose, and the whole plan could backfire. Better to let the forensics and Rose’s testimony do the talking.