“Yes,” Angela said in a soft voice. “I’m sorry I haven’t been able to call back.”
“Mrs. Mitchell, I need you to stop taking the Valium I prescribed.”
The bottle was empty. It wouldn’t be a problem.
“Mrs. Mitchell?”
“I’m here.”
“Stop taking the Valium and come back in to the office.”
Dr. Solomon continued to talk, his voice static-filled and echoing as he explained to Angela the findings from his exam. Angela let the receiver fall to her shoulder as she released her grip on it. It bounced off her chest and hung from the wall mount, twirling in a circle. She thought she heard Dr. Solomon’s voice again, asking if she was still there. Angela sunk to the floor, her back pressed against the wall. If the bottle of Valium was not empty, she’d have swallowed the rest of it.
CHICAGO
August 1979
SHE LAY AWAKE THURSDAY NIGHT, THE NEWLY EMPTIED GARAGE RUNNING through her mind. All that was left were the only things that mattered—Samantha Rodgers’s necklace and Clarissa Manning’s driver’s license—both of which Angela had hidden. Thomas had barely spoken to her since he found her in the laundry room, so she had no idea if he knew she’d found the relics.
In addition to the image of the now-barren garage shelves constantly blinking in her mind, Dr. Solomon’s voice played over and over in her ears, like a record stuck and repeating. She hadn’t slept the previous few nights and finally, with the bed empty next to her while Thomas continued his purging downstairs, fatigue overcame her and she drifted into a fitful trance.
Her sleep-deprived mind took her back to the hidden storage room in the Kenosha warehouse. She walked through the dingy, unlit space, the gray light of early morning barely brightening the windows high in the rafters. When she headed to the back of the warehouse, she twisted the handle on the storage room door and it creaked open. When the groaning door hinges quieted, Angela heard something else. It was a soft moaning. She stepped into the dark storage room and found Clarissa Manning hanging from one of the twin nooses. Help me, the missing girl said. She was holding a bundle of something in her arms. Angela walked closer to see what it was. As her eyesight adjusted to the darkened space, she saw an infant child wrapped in the green tarp that had been hanging in front of the door. As she reached for the bundle, the baby began to shriek.
Angela bolted upright in bed. She gasped for breath as if finally surfacing from minutes beneath water. Clarissa Manning’s moans and soft pleas for help from her nightmare were replaced now by the growl of Thomas’s truck. She threw the covers to the side and raced to the window. She saw Thomas pull his truck down the alley, the bed filled with boxes and cartons from the garage and the basement.
Angela quickly dressed. She knew she had only a small window of time. When she raced down the stairs, she saw that Thomas had been through every corner of the house. Angela had forgotten her file folder at Catherine’s on Sunday morning, when she raced out of the house after Bill had come home. Now she was happy to have left the research file behind. If she had kept it hidden in the bedroom trunk, where she had always placed it when she was not working on it, Thomas would surely have discovered it. Angela badly wanted to bring that file with her, but knew there was no way to retrieve it. She had no time.
Clarissa Manning’s driver’s license had not been moved since she stuffed it down the front of her pants. She retrieved it now, and ran down the basement steps. When she reached the landing, she saw that Thomas had been through every inch of the space. Drawers were opened and the contents spewed haphazardly to the sides and onto the ground. Shelves were emptied, and Angela could hardly remember what had once filled them. An eerie chill came over her body as she imagined all the evidence she might have been living with for the past two years. She wondered how many more items had been stashed here, and whether she could have done anything to thwart Thomas’s reign of terror, which she was sure had been going on for a decade. On the now-empty shelves may have been everything she needed to prove her theory. Still, though, she believed she had enough.
She ran to the washing machine and lifted the lid. The clothes she had put there the previous morning were flat and damp, the spin cycle having stuck them to the walls of the drum. She ripped one item after the other free until she heard a clanking within the machine. Angela reached in and found Samantha Rodgers’s necklace. A slight bit of peace found her gut, now that she knew Thomas hadn’t discovered it.
Back upstairs, she spent thirty desperate minutes jotting notes about her discoveries over the last week. Angela had passed the dark hours of night listening to Thomas rustle through the house, moving from the basement to the backyard and out to his truck as he emptied the house of evidence. She had listened, and prayed. Drifted between panic and fitful sleep, where she had dreamt of Clarissa Manning hanging from a noose. She fought against her urge to run and scream and cry. She had held her breath, and formulated a plan.
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.”
CHICAGO
August 1979
IT WAS APPROACHING MIDNIGHT WHEN THOMAS MITCHELL PULLED INTO the parking lot of his Kenosha warehouse. The long industrial road that led to his secluded lot had always made for perfect cover. During the day, he could see a car approaching as soon as it turned down the smoky road and threw dust into the air. At night, headlights announced another’s presence as clearly as a lighthouse spotlight. And if someone attempted a stealth approach, the gravel road would betray the vehicle with loud crunches well ahead of their arrival.
Until recently, though, he had never been concerned with such things. He had covered his tracks well, and had a nice distance between the locations of the bodies and his warehouse. But he’d made a grave error by underestimating his wife. Mostly, he overlooked her aptitude for suspicion. Now he needed to take precautions while he considered the best way to deal with her. It was a risk to leave her alone in the house, b
ut he had no choice but to visit the warehouse. The unknown, of course, was how much Angela had found, and what, exactly, she knew. The safest assumption was that she knew everything, even though this was impossible.
He thought briefly of the previous night when he emptied the house. He considered taking her here to the warehouse to end things properly, but several obstacles stood in the way of that decision. The greatest of which would be that he’d have to report his wife missing. She would be added to the list of victims claimed by the man the police called The Thief, and the pressure on him would be uncomfortable. Part of him was enthralled with pretending to be stricken by the horror gripping the city this summer. But the logistics of that move were complicated, and Thomas had decided, instead, to take a different route. He had hauled everything he collected from the garage shelves and the basement crawl space—a decade of memorabilia, much of which he didn’t remember—into his warehouse and to the storage room in the back.
He had precautions set in place in case things started falling apart, or if he ever made a mistake. He never thought the threat would come from inside his own home, and the dilemma had put him in a crunch. His wife was typically a very predictable person. He never had trouble manipulating her emotions, or controlling her movements. He was sure with time he could learn everything she had discovered, and mold it in a way that would convince her that she had made a great mistake. But to do that required time, and he wasn’t sure how much of that he had.
When the bed of his truck was empty, he crawled under each of his cement trucks and punctured the gas tanks. The smell of fuel was pungent when he locked the doors ten minutes later. As he drove down the dusty road and out of the complex, he saw in the rearview mirror the subtle glow of flames starting to rise from the warehouse.
CHICAGO
August 1979
THE PACKAGE WAS DROPPED SATURDAY MORNING, ALONG WITH A large stack of mail, on the reception desk at the front of the police station. It sat unattended for two hours before the clerk got around to sorting the pile. The package—an oversized, thick-padded manila envelope—was finally placed in the detectives’ bin, where it sat for another hour. Just after lunch, one of the detectives picked up the envelope and inspected it. There was a name and a return address in the upper left corner.
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