Threads of Suspicion

by Dee Henderson

  Am I a banker’s wife? That question was now back center stage. She’d been answering that question with, No, I’m not a banker’s wife either, even before Rob had asked her to consider marriage. But she wasn’t sure of that response anymore. Rob Turney was as different from a Michael Foster or Gabriel Thane as she was going to find. If her cautions were encompassed by work overlap, she’d solved it and found a great guy. She would have no work overlaps with Rob, be free of the weight that had led her to back away from Michael, to not consider Gabriel in a serious way. She just needed to say yes to the idea of getting married to Rob, then make the necessary compromises that would come with choosing him.

  But in a way she didn’t understand, she found herself torn just thinking about saying yes. She felt herself shift toward a prayer that had been forming for a while, and she finally risked putting it into words. “God, I’m not interested in a long conversation right now, I’m still too tired for that. But I’m aware the days are going by and I’m not getting my head—or my heart—around Rob’s proposal.

  “I really don’t see how I can be married and have the career I do now. That seems like part of this. But there’s more. And I guess I’m asking if you’d like to dig it up for me and show me what’s going on inside. Because I truly don’t understand it. Rob wants to marry me, and I’m dragging my feet. I need help. And you’re my ‘go-to guy’ for perfect help. You’re always honest with me, and always say things in a kind way. I need that inner mirror right now. I just want a day, more sleep, some space before you and I have that in-depth conversation, but I do need it, and I realize it needs to be soon. Okay?”

  Evie felt some of the stress come off her chest just having the prayer out there. She quietly listened to see if God wanted to say anything in reply. The thought that came to mind within a moment was a Scripture, the beginning and end of a longer passage she knew well. “Come to me . . . and I will give you rest.” The peace accompanying the gentle words settled her emotions. “Thanks, God.”

  She knew she was loved, that God cared about sorting it out with her. She didn’t know how it would get resolved, but it wouldn’t be her floundering around, trying to find the way forward. God would help her out. She was pretty sure she was destined to be married. She didn’t want to be sixty and single. But the who and the when, the right choice—she often felt as though she was walking through a thick fog. It was hard to be confident about her personal life when she was so afraid of messing it up. God would be her help like no one else could, for He knew her and loved her. She’d trust what He had to say.

  Evie checked the time on the latest message from David and decided to stop at the hotel first. She parked her rental, arranged for its pickup, and headed up to her room for her backpack. Ten minutes later, she settled into her own car and turned toward the office suite.

  David was just walking into the building, saw her arrive, and waited as she parked. “Welcome back. So, not your arson guy.”

  She shook her head as she retrieved the backpack. “Different accelerant, and the three fatalities had been shot. Local cops are looking for a brother of one of the victims.” She didn’t bother to describe how grim the scene had been. David would have worked more than one arson fire in the past. “I’ve been keeping up on your notes,” she told him.

  “Lists are being crossed with lists, producing baby lists.”

  Evie laughed at his analogy.

  “There are a few possible candidates with Wisconsin speeding tickets, and the union folks who worked various concert venues yielded two names of interest.” David held the door for her. “As soon as the background reports come in, I’m going out on interviews.”

  “Your note this morning said there was good news regarding the credit-card data?”

  “The historical credit- and gas-card info we would like to search was sold to marketing companies for analysis, the data stripped of names, but it still shows card numbers and full purchase histories. Since what they label historical data is anything over three years old, we’ve got the data set we wanted without even having to argue for a warrant. With the names gone, we cannot correlate them across various cards he might have used. But if he used the same gas card or the same credit card on at least two of the five dates of interest, there’s going to be a hit. With that, we can get a warrant for a name on that card number, then turn that name into other card numbers, and presto, we can search to find his travels in all five cases.”

  Evie grinned. “I love that news, David. We need the data, and companies still have it since they’re turning it into a profit of pennies per card.”

  “More like fractions of pennies per card. But it’s free income, simply selling information about what somebody’s already bought. Marketing companies love the data. The FBI does too, from the sound of it. The only drawback is the size of the data sets, how long it takes to crunch for an answer. We may be looking at a week unless there are early matches.”

  “Whatever it takes. It puts someone in a specific place and time years after the fact—that’s good info to have.”

  David unlocked the office suite. Evie stepped inside, saw Rob’s flowers had been transferred to her desk, two new whiteboards had been added, and a dozen new boxes were stacked by the east wall.

  “That’s Maggie’s physical mail that’s considered suspicious. The box with the red lid has the top concerns. They try to sort out incoming mail and match it with other letters sent by the same individual if possible, but a lot of it isn’t signed, so they go by writing style.”

  “The emails she receives?”

  “The most troubling ones went over to the FBI this morning. Ones from the Midwest are getting special attention, as are those where the sender tried to mask the email’s origin.”

  “Good.” Evie lifted out her master notepad filled with facts, theories, and ideas to help pull her mind back into Jenna’s disappearance. “We think this is someone keyed into Maggie’s music, so the probability that he’s written her is likely—what, in the ninety-percent range?”

  “I’m willing to lean that direction. But he’s not going to want to stand out. The odds that he’s in these boxes is low.”

  “I’ll take any odds. Want me on her physical fan mail?”

  “Sure. Just brace yourself if you haven’t worked with fan mail before. I’m finishing the box Tammy’s parents sent back with us, using it to generate yet another list of names we can use in the comparisons.” David moved over to where those materials were now spread.

  Intrigued by his caution, Evie crossed over to the fan mail, opened the one with the red lid. She soon realized why David had said it held the most disturbing correspondence—letters that ran ten pages, single-spaced, laying out the hidden messages in her lyrics she had especially coded for the sender, those who wanted Maggie to marry them, some who gushed with delight over having received a signed photograph, sending travel arrangements to be picked up at the airport on arrival.

  “This mail is just . . . strange,” Evie said, rather shocked.

  David paused to glance over. “Welcome to the world of the general public writ large. About one percent of the people who like Maggie’s music are at the ends of the bell curve for normal. The vast majority are, as you say, strange, but mostly harmless. A few, though, can tip toward violence when they feel affronted by Maggie’s lack of reply or encouragement. You can’t fix them—you simply stay aware of who is out there so a problem doesn’t become more than a problem.”

  “How many people are on the ‘concerns list’ for Chicago?”

  “Her security has photos of about two hundred people they make sure don’t get near Maggie. Another four hundred would be considered a concern.”

  Evie pulled out the thickest of the folders—indicating individuals who had sent the most mail—as she was looking for a person who’d been writing Maggie for close to a decade, back to when Jenna disappeared.

  “Not all this mail is creepy.” She held up a piece of light pink paper from a handful of s
imilar pink pages in one of the folders. “Song lyric suggestions.” She read a few of the pages. “Some of these are pretty good. Why is this folder in the problem box?”

  “It’s a possible source of lawsuits. Song lyrics are a really touchy area. You write a hit song, fans have sent similar ideas, maybe somebody claims the idea was plagiarized—how do you protect yourself from the honest fans who think a song was partially their idea too? So it’s policy that song lyrics never get to Maggie. Those who do send her material get a rather personal letter, explaining why Maggie can’t read their lyrics, then they’re provided places where they can submit song lyrics and receive compensation if an artist wants to use their idea. Writing hit songs is a business all its own. Maggie’s an exception since she chooses to write her own material. Most singers are not songwriters—different skill sets.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “One doesn’t see the realities of a career unless you’re within that sphere. The same with us. It’s not glamorous being a cop, in spite of the TV shows. It’s mostly talking to people, paperwork, and trying to figure out who to talk with next.”

  “Glamour it is not,” Evie agreed. She flipped through the letters on pink stationery. “This woman has been writing to Maggie a couple times a month for the last . . . wow, eleven years.”

  “Holly Case?”

  “It’s signed Holly, yes.”

  “We’ve actually met her. She’s a waitress, has a good voice, loves to sing. But she’s shy, never got up the courage to solo at church, coffee shops, weddings—that early stage where a singer builds confidence, and maybe a career down the road. We put her in touch with some people. She now sings backup occasionally for a recording company here in Chicago. She keeps sending lyrics to Maggie, a safe outlet for her because she knows Maggie will never see the material and so can’t reject her as not being good enough. It’s sad, but until she’s ready to send her material where it might be used, there’s not much that can be done. She needs people in her life who have faith in her. She’s got potential, just lacks self-confidence. Maggie can’t save everyone, and Holly is often a code word between us when we encounter similar dilemmas.”

  Evie read a random dozen pages of the lyrics, closed the folder. Holly was using Maggie as a security blanket for her song lyrics rather than taking a risk and possibly failing at something she loved. Evie wasn’t going to judge. She was sitting on a marriage proposal because she couldn’t find the courage to take the risk.

  But that did raise an interesting question. “Assume for a moment the five women were abducted by the same individual. It would suggest the killer has confidence in his ability to commit a crime and get away with it. Do you suppose it’s frustrated rage driving him? ‘I wanted to be a success, and the doors never opened for me’?”

  “Killing young women with bright futures ahead of them so they can’t fulfill their dreams?” David asked.

  “Something like that,” Evie said. “To smother someone isn’t rage. It’s ending something—a person’s potential, voice, life. It’s that ‘Shut up, I want you dead.’ Smothering is a different kind of personal.”

  “Not quite the same as strangling someone, but still, it’s face-to-face murder, and that’s personal.”

  “There’s something in that thought that fits this. I just can’t see what it is yet.”

  “Keep thinking—you’ll have that lightbulb moment.”

  She was back to the idea it was a woman. Smothering the victim feels female . . . Evie opened the next folder and found cutout letters pasted on a page with death threats, a lot of them. Her adrenaline shot up. “You’ve got here a writer calling her foul names and wanting to kill her, done in letters and words from magazines. The folder reads ‘Kevin Ought.’”

  “He’s sending them from a psychiatric jail facility. They haven’t figured out yet how he gets them smuggled out, but she gets one about every other month.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I don’t worry that much about the obvious mentally disturbed. Maggie isn’t the first person they have fixated on, and someone in their neighborhood or family is going to be addressing their problems with the help of mental-health authorities long before they could show up on Maggie’s doorstep. It’s the one who’s just crossing over that line, from devoted fan to fixated fan that is the worry. They’re unpredictable, and they don’t detach from their fixation easily. Typically someone else has to become the focus for them to let go of Maggie, and that just transfers the problem to another. So we are careful about Maggie’s personal whereabouts. She’ll post social media comments after she’s been somewhere, loved it, and left—not in anticipation of being there. The common-sense precautions that make her difficult to locate in advance.”

  “Looking at these letters, I’m glad she takes them.”

  Evie lifted more folders out, then paused as a thought hit. “What are the odds the guy we’re after will be at the charity event Friday night?”

  David looked up from what he was doing. “Her first appearance in Chicago in years? High. He won’t be inside, not at five thousand a plate with their running background checks on all the guests. But odds are high he’ll be among the rope-line fans. I already talked to security working the event, and there will be cameras on the crowds, so we can review footage with that in mind.”

  “Good. Thanks.”

  “I’m not taking chances with Maggie. We can also assume he’ll have a ticket for her scheduled performance at the McCormick Center on March seventh. We’ve got until then to find him. I don’t want a conversation with Maggie on whether to cancel the concert to avoid another missing-person photo going up on that board. So we find this guy before then.”

  “We’ve got time to get it done,” Evie replied. She paused as she realized what she was holding. “David, look at this one.” Evie walked over to him with it.

  I love the way you look when you sing “A Waiting Love.” You’re looking right at me.

  “There are more in that same vein. A lot more.” The thick folder held letters all on a blue paper, computer-printed in a fancy script, unsigned, but the similar messages laid out the same way on each.

  “Yeah. Maggie’s got an obsessed fan. She has them, Evie. I’ve added some of those letters to that folder over the years. The blue paper reads male, the choice of a fancy script and the text itself reads female, but we’ve drawn a blank trying to track down the sender. Can you tell if security has had any better luck with recent letters from this individual?”

  She reviewed the document in the front of the folder, was pleasantly surprised at the depth of the investigation to identify this sender. “No fingerprints on the letters, and the envelopes carry prints of postal employees only. That’s what has me wondering about this sender.” She sifted through the folder. “These letters go back ten years. A fan who takes that kind of care to conceal identity, to not leave prints? And has done so for years?”

  “Some people are paranoid about fingerprints.”

  “He doesn’t sound paranoid. If he’s already a criminal, wants to conceal his identity, but is drawn to Maggie, so he hides his fingerprints—doesn’t that sound a lot like the person who did Jenna harm?”

  David weighed the question. “Okay. For the sake of argument, say they are from the same person. How do we use the letters to help us find him?”

  “They’re all postmarked in Indiana. Two of our five possible matches are women killed in Indiana. Would Indiana be a false clue, in line with no fingerprints?”

  “The postmarks are probably an attempt to mislead.”

  “So someone who does not live in Indiana.” Evie spread out numerous letters from the folder across the desk. “What do you notice? What I see—mentions of specific songs, specific lyrics, all admiring in tone. He’s into the title and words of the songs more than just the music, suggesting maybe he writes lyrics too. Some of these letters are from this last year. He—or she—is still following her.”

  “Agreed,” David said, consideri
ng the letters. “The blue paper is the same shade, so the same brand, possibly all from the same ream of paper used exclusively for writing to her. But as promising as this is, Evie, there are dozens of similar people in her world. The lack of fingerprints is on the odd side, given the notes themselves seem pretty rational. I’d like a photo of this guy for Maggie’s security to carry with them—she doesn’t need to meet him—but ten years of writing letters without the letters escalating much in content still suggests someone reasonably harmless to her.”

  “So I should be looking for someone who wants to meet Maggie,” Evie said, “who talks about seeing her at a restaurant or visiting her home, something other than a history of questionable fan mail.”

  “Not necessarily. I think the tone here is the right fit for who you want. Your guy uses Triple M concerts as his trolling ground to select victims. He’s into Maggie and the Triple M band enough to be a fan who’d write to her. He’s paranoid about revealing his identity, so he leaves no prints. He stays with less traceable paper and envelopes rather than email or comment posts on her website.

  “All that sounds like the guy you want, Evie. But I would have expected over ten years to see less mail than this, being more selective about when he writes her, and something in the mix would change, would say or imply he did something. ‘There are those who sing your songs and don’t know all the words. They fill in whatever words they decide fits. I won’t let them botch your song lyrics anymore, Maggie. Your lyrics are perfect.’ Something like that.”

  “He would have shifted into the occasional creepy letter.”