The Woman in Darkness Read online

  The man took a step forward to the precipice of the garage, bringing his murky shadow closer until it bent off the floor and climbed up her legs. Angela could almost feel it.

  “You sure I can’t help?”

  Angela backed farther away; she turned and hurried through the utility door and into the backyard. She ran to the kitchen door and fumbled with the handle until she pulled the door open and stepped into the safety of her home, immediately locking the door behind her. She peeled the curtains to the side to peek outside. The man stood next to the abandoned couch, staring through the open garage door at the back of Angela’s house. Over the pounding in her ears, the squeaking brakes of the garbage truck broke through as it turned into the alley. The stranger looked behind him and hurried away as the truck approached.

  Angela’s hands were shaking. She couldn’t bring herself to go back outside to talk with the garbagemen, to deliver the sandwiches in exchange for them taking the couch. Instead, she ran to the bathroom, lifted the lid to the toilet, and vomited until her eyes teared and her sternum ached.

  CHAPTER 6

  Chicago, October 16, 2019

  RORY MOORE PULLED UP NEXT TO THE UNMARKED SQUAD CAR, driver’s side to driver’s side. She rolled down her window and pushed her nonprescription glasses up the bridge of her nose. It was dark and shadowed inside her car. She was sure Detective Davidson couldn’t see her eyes, always a plus.

  The detective handed her a manila envelope through the window.

  “Autopsy and tox results,” he said. “Plus all the notes and interviews taken on the case.”

  Rory took the package, saw Camille Byrd’s name printed on the bottom of the folder, and thought of the girl’s shattered Kestner doll and her father’s pleas for help. Rory dropped the file on the passenger seat.

  “You’re officially on the case,” Ron said. “I filled out the paperwork this morning.”

  “When was the last time any of your guys looked at any of this?” Rory asked.

  Davidson ballooned his cheeks as he exhaled a defeated breath. Rory knew he was embarrassed by the answer he was about to offer.

  “It’s over a year old, with nothing new in months and over five hundred new homicides so far this year. It’s cold.”

  Rory’s mind flashed back to the morning in Grant Park when Ron had shown her where Camille’s frozen body had been found. Rory’s heart ached, the way it did for the victim of every case she took on. It was why she was so selective. Within the tiny world of forensic reconstruction, no one could do what Rory Moore routinely accomplished. She had breathed fresh life into cases that were colder than a Chicago winter. It was simply in her genes. Her DNA was programmed to see things others missed, to connect dots that looked scattered and incongruent to everyone else. She left the straightforward reconstructions—the car wrecks and suicides—to others in her profession who were better suited to handle such trivial cases, the ones detectives could figure out on their own with a little effort and a lucky break. Those clinical cases never challenged Rory. She reconstructed cold case homicides, cases others had abandoned and given up on. But she accomplished this by developing a deep and personal connection with the victim. She accomplished this by learning their story, discovering first who they were. Why they were killed always followed. It was a taxing technique that drained her emotionally and often brought her closer to the victim for whom she was seeking justice than she was to anyone else in her life. But it was the only way Rory knew how to do her job.

  Rory knew that Ron Davidson, who ran the Homicide Division inside the Chicago Police Department, was under pressure from every direction, political and social, to pull Chicago’s unsolved murder rate out of the toilet. The city had one of the nation’s lowest homicide solve rates; so when Rory agreed to take on Camille Byrd’s icy cold, unsolved homicide, it represented an opportunity for Ron to knock a case off his docket without expending many resources. Rory reconstructed crimes on her own, rebuffing assistance from any of the Homicide detectives. For years, the force had kept Rory on retainer, and if she weren’t so selective about the cases she took on, she’d have a new one every week.

  “I’ll take a look and let you know what I find,” Rory finally said.

  “Keep me posted.”

  Rory’s window began its ascent.

  “Hey, Gray,” Davidson said.

  Rory stopped the window halfway up, looked through the glass at him.

  “Sorry about your dad.”

  Rory nodded and started the window back up before the two cars drove off in opposite directions.

  CHAPTER 7

  Chicago, October 16, 2019

  RORY WALKED INTO THE NURSING HOME AND ENTERED ROOM 121. The lights were dim, and the television cast the room in a blue glow. A woman lay still in the bed, her eyes open but not acknowledging Rory’s presence. Rory approached the hospital bed, which sported tall guardrails on either side to protect its occupant. She sat in the adjacent chair and looked at the woman, who continued to stare at the television as if Rory were invisible.

  She reached out and took the woman’s hand.

  “Aunt Greta. It’s me, Rory.”

  Her great-aunt inverted her lips, sucking them into her mouth the way she did after the nurses had removed her dentures.

  “Greta,” Rory said in a whispered voice. “Can you hear me?”

  “I tried to save you,” the old woman said. “I tried, but there was too much blood.”

  “Okay,” Rory said. “It’s okay.”

  “You were bleeding.” Her great-aunt looked at Rory. “There was too much blood.”

  A nurse walked into the room. “Sorry, I tried to catch you before you came in. She’s having a bad day.”

  The nurse adjusted the pillows behind Greta’s head, placed a white Styrofoam cup with a straw extending out of it on the over-bed table.

  “Here’s your water, hon. And there’s no blood around here. I hate blood, that’s why I work in this place.”

  “How long has she been like this?”

  The nurse looked at Rory. “Most of the day. She was fine yesterday. But, as you know, dementia takes them back to another part of their life. Sometimes just briefly, other times for much longer. It’ll pass.”

  Rory nodded, pointed at the Styrofoam. “I’ll get her to drink.”

  The nurse smiled. “Call me if you need anything.”

  As soon as the nurse was gone, Rory’s great-aunt looked at her again.

  “I tried to save you. There was too much blood.”

  Greta had been a nurse, and though it had been many years since she practiced, the dementia, which was ravaging her mind, pulled her back to the darkest moments of her profession.

  Greta went silent and looked back at the television. Rory knew it would be one of those visits. Her great-aunt was ninety-two years old, and her mental capacity varied widely. Sometimes she was as sharp as ever. Other times, like tonight and over the past two weeks since Greta had learned about the passing of Rory’s father, she was lost in the past. In a world that Rory could not penetrate. The best chance over the last several years to catch her in a coherent state came at night. Sometimes Rory came and went in a matter of minutes. Other times, when Aunt Greta was alert and talkative, Rory stayed into the early hours of morning, talking and laughing like she remembered doing as a child. Few people fully understood Rory Moore. Her great-aunt Greta was one of them.

  “Greta, do you remember what I told you about Dad? About Frank, your nephew?”

  Greta chewed some more on her capsized lips.

  “The funeral was last week. I tried to bring you, but you weren’t feeling well.”

  Rory saw her great-aunt’s chewing grow faster.

  “You didn’t miss anything. Except me squirming in the corner trying to avoid everyone. I could have used you for cover, old lady.”

  This brought a quick glance from Greta and the subtle twitch of a smile. Rory knew she had broken through on a night that had offered little opportunity.<
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  “What better way to deflect attention from myself than to wheel in a little old lady everyone loves?”

  Rory felt her great-aunt squeeze her hand. A tear formed on Greta’s eyelid and then rolled down her cheek. Rory stood and quickly pulled a tissue from the box to wipe Greta’s face.

  “Hey,” she said, trying for the eye contact she normally worked to avoid. “I’ve got a tough one I need your help with. It’s a Kestner doll with a bad fracture through the left eye socket. I can fix the break, but I might need some help with the coloring. The porcelain is faded and I’ll need to color over the epoxy. You want to lend a hand?”

  Greta looked at Rory. She stopped chewing her lips. Then she nodded with a subtle bob of her head.

  “Good,” Rory said. “You’re the best. And you taught me everything I know. I’ll bring your colors and brushes next time I visit and you can take a look.”

  Rory sat back down in the bedside chair, reached for Greta’s hand again, and spent an hour watching the muted television screen until she was sure her great-aunt had drifted off to sleep.

  CHAPTER 8

  Chicago, October 16, 2019

  SHE PULLED UP TO THE FRONT OF HER BUNGALOW AND PARKED on the street, which was lined with her neighbors’ cars. It was just past eleven o’clock, and Rory felt good about her visit with Greta. She didn’t always feel that way when she left her great-aunt’s side. Alzheimer’s and dementia had stolen most of her personality, turning her at times into a nasty old woman who could spit insults like a drunken sailor one moment, and babble incoherently the next. Despite the ferocity of the abuse, the vile version of Aunt Greta was preferred to the vacant-eyed, hollow soul Rory often found when she visited. Each of Greta’s personalities was tolerated because occasionally, like tonight, there was a glimpse of the woman Rory had loved her whole life. It had been a good night.

  The dog across the street barked as Rory walked up her steps and keyed the front door, grabbing the mail on her way in. She dumped the stack of envelopes, along with Camille Byrd’s autopsy report, onto her kitchen table and pulled a glass from the cabinet. The middle shelf of her refrigerator held six bottles of Three Floyds Dark Lord, an impossible-to-find imperial stout that Rory managed to keep well stocked through an Indiana connection. Each twenty-two ounce bottle was positioned label out and in flawless rows—the only way Dark Lord should be shelved. She plucked one from the front, popped the cap, poured it into the tall glass, and topped it off with blackcurrant cordial. With an alcohol content of fifteen percent, the beer was stronger than most wines and it took only a couple of glasses to obtain the desired effect. At the kitchen table, she pushed the stack of mail to the side and pulled the manila envelope she had received from Detective Davidson in front of her. Two full swallows of stout and a deep breath, then she dove in, opening the file to the first page of the autopsy report.

  At the time of her death, Camille Byrd was a twenty-two-year-old recent University of Illinois graduate. She’d finished college in May and was still hunting for a place to put her communications major to use. She lived in Wicker Park with two roommates. The medical examiner determined the cause of death to be throttling, or manual strangulation. Manner of death, homicide. No evidence of sexual assault.

  Two more swallows of stout and Rory turned the page. She read through the ME’s findings. Classic signs of asphyxiation were noted—bloodstained fluid in the airway, swelling of the lungs, petechiae on the face, and subconjunctival hemorrhage in the eyes. Severe bruising was noted to Camille’s neck, along with fractures to the hyoid bone and larynx, confirming the conclusion of strangulation. The presence of “fingerprint” markings left no doubt. Rory pulled an autopsy photo in front of her. She re-read the findings. Camille Byrd had gone missing one night, and her body was discovered the next. Rigor mortis and lividity allowed the time of death to be gauged at twenty-four hours prior to her body being discovered. Whoever killed Camille Byrd had done it quickly. Leukotriene B4 was detected in skin samples, Rory read, indicating that the bruising on the neck took place antemortem—before the girl had died, and now present forever more as the healing power of her body faded with her last breath.

  She spent an hour in her quiet house, flipping through the rest of the medical examiner’s report before she switched to the detective’s notes. The autopsy report had been computer generated; the Homicide Division of the Chicago PD still worked with paper charts. Opening the file brought an assault of ugly, curt penmanship that was difficult to decipher. Rory was certain of some Freudian link between male detectives’ atrocious penmanship and their mothers, as if their childish writing was evidence of a man’s constant need for pampering.

  For an hour, and over another Dark Lord spiked with blackcurrant cordial, Rory read about the life of Camille Byrd. From her childhood, to the day she went missing, to the morning her frozen body was found in Grant Park. She took notes, single-spaced, one sentence after the other, until she filled an entire page. Unlike the detective’s writing, Rory’s was perfect cursive. However, with no spaces between sentences and few punctuation marks, she was sure her notes looked nearly as indecipherable as the detective’s piggish scribble.

  When she closed the file, Rory knew she was a long way from knowing Camille Byrd as well as would be necessary to find the answers she was looking for. But tonight was a start. Stacking the reports to the side, Rory finally closed her eyes. She settled her mind and allowed the facts to take hold. That night, she would dream of Camille Byrd the way she always dreamt of the victims she studied. This was how every reconstruction began. She chose each case carefully, and devoted her full attention to it until she reached her conclusion and turned everything over to the detectives to finish the job.

  After twenty minutes of meditation, she opened her eyes and took a deep breath. She carried the files into her office and placed them neatly on her desk, removed the 8-by-10 photograph of Camille Byrd and pinned it to the large corkboard on the wall. Pocked with holes from previous reconstructions, the board had told many disturbing stories over the years. Tonight the echoes from previous cases went unheard as Rory stared at the photo of Camille Byrd, who stared back from some unearthly place, waiting for Rory’s help.

  She hit the lights on the way out of the office. With the rest of the house dark, she grabbed another beer from the fridge and headed to the den. The room contained only indirect lighting, no overhead bulbs or lamps, just carefully positioned spotlights. The first switch Rory tripped brought to life the built-in shelves and silhouetted two dozen antique China dolls that stood on the ledges. Positioned three per shelf and in seamless columns, the recessed lighting cast each doll in a perfect combination of luminance and shadow. Every doll’s porcelain face shined under the spell of the lighting, both the coloring and polish flawless.

  Exactly twenty-four dolls stood on the shelves. Any less left a vacancy that gnawed at Rory until the empty slot was filled. She’d tried it before—removing one doll without replacing it with another. The unfilled space created an imbalance in her mind that prevented sleep and work and rational thought. The nagging annoyance dissipated, Rory had discovered, only after she filled the vacancy with another doll to make the shelving complete. She’d come to terms with this affliction years ago, and had finally stopped battling it. It had been embedded in her since she was a young child standing in Aunt Greta’s house staring at doll-lined shelves. Rory’s love of restoration originated during her formative years when she spent her summers with Greta bringing broken dolls back to perfection. Now Rory’s den had looked the same for more than a decade and was a replica of Aunt Greta’s house from years ago, the built-ins lined with some of her most triumphant restorations. Never a vacancy present.

  A thin drawer was positioned under each shelf, in which rested “before” pictures of each doll featured on the ledge above. The 8-by-10 glossy photos depicted cracked faces, missing eyes, jagged tears that spilled white stuffing, stained garments, missing limbs, and faded porcelain that had shed it
s glaze over years of life. The images in the drawers stood in stark contrast to the immaculate dolls standing on the shelves above, which Rory had meticulously brought back to life.

  Sitting at her workbench, she turned on her gooseneck lamp and directed its beam to the ruined Kestner doll Camille Byrd’s father had used to lure Rory into reconstructing his daughter’s death. She took another sip of Dark Lord and began her cursory examination, photographing the damaged doll from every angle until finally laying it flat and taking a conclusive picture that would become the “before” image against which her restoration would be gauged. The beer buzz, coupled with the preoccupation of a new project—both Camille Byrd’s childhood doll, and the woman herself—was enough to penetrate the deep folds of Rory’s brain and distract her from the gnawing image of the files waiting for resolution in her father’s law office. The distraction of a new project was just sufficient to push into the shadows of her mind the thought of her father dying alone in his home.

  CHAPTER 9

  Stateville Correctional Center, October 17, 2019

  HIS KILLING SPREE DECADES AGO HAD, FOR A SHORT TIME, MADE him a celebrity. But soon after his conviction, the world moved on and had mostly forgotten about The Thief. Only in recent months had his star begun to rise again as journalists relived the summer of 1979 by recounting the women who had been informally counted as his victims. Family members were tracked down. Friends, now gray and wrinkled by age, spoke of long-forgotten kinships with those they lost. Ambitious newscasters replayed old footage in an attempt to recapture the panic of the city during that sweltering summer when The Thief ran loose through the shadowed streets of Chicago, stealing young women never to be seen again.

  And now, as his celebrity began its slow ascent, he would need to rely on the one man who had helped him most over the years. He had access to the prison e-mail system, but it was a tedious process to receive and deliver messages, and prison rules placed strict word counts on his e-mails. It was faster and easier to write his letters by hand and send them through the post office, which he had done several times in the last three weeks without a response. The United States Postal Service—jail mail—had always been his swiftest form of communication. Faster even than a phone call, which required him to make a formal request, wait for approval, and then schedule a date and time to use the prison pay phone. It had always been his preference when he needed to get ahold of his attorney to simply pen a letter, stuff it in an envelope, and drop it in the mail. But after two weeks without a reply, he decided to petition for a phone call. With his final parole board hearing fast approaching, his attorney had been in constant contact with him regarding the details of his impending release. But for the last two weeks, his attorney had been silent and unreachable.