The Woman in Darkness

by Charlie Donlea

  Thomas looked at her. “You’re taking the medication, right?”

  “I am. It’s helping.”

  “I’m worried about being gone overnight. Bill should be able to handle this without me.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Angela said, trying to hide the urgency in her voice. “And we need this contract. It would make our year.”

  “We’re doing fine,” Thomas said. “It would be nice, but we don’t need it.”

  “Go,” she said, looking him in the eye the way she seldom did anyone else. “I’m okay.”

  An hour after she watched Thomas back his truck out of the garage and drive down the alley on his way to Indiana, Angela pulled away from the curb and headed for the highway. Thomas and Bill had four warehouses spread between Kenosha, Wisconsin, the north and west sides of the city, and Hammond, Indiana. Leonard Williams ran the warehouse in Kenosha, so with Thomas gone, Angela was on her way to the Wisconsin location.

  Kenosha was about an hour and a half from the city, and Angela consulted her map after she turned off the highway. Eventually she turned down the long road that led to her husband’s Wisconsin office and construction warehouse. A trail of dust floated behind her vehicle as she drove. Situated at the end of a long industrial park, the office was one of many single-story buildings that lined the gravel road. When Angela pulled up to the office on Saturday morning, hers was the only vehicle present. She put the car into park, but left the engine running and the air-conditioning raging as she listened to the radio. There had been a development overnight in the case of the summer’s missing women and WGN offered the latest details.

  “We can confirm,” the reporter said through the radio, “that the body found early this morning is suspected to be that of Samantha Rodgers, who had gone missing three weeks ago and was considered to be The Thief’s fifth, and most recent, victim.”

  Sitting in her car, Angela’s mind flashed to the night she and Catherine had watched the news report in her living room about the missing woman named Samantha Rodgers. She had since created a biography on the woman and Angela knew all the details about her disappearance: the date she went missing, the last place she was seen, the last time her parents and friends had spoken with her, and the exact location where the cab had dropped her the night she disappeared—Western and Kedzie, a mere block from her apartment. Angela knew the details about Samantha Rodgers before the reporter spoke. In fact, she knew much more than the news story offered. Angela knew the girl so well that her heart ached at the idea that there was no hope she would be found alive.

  “We are still waiting for the Chicago Police Department to confirm the victim’s identity, but it is widely believed that the body of Samantha Rodgers has been found in a wooded area in Forest Glen, miles away from the victim’s apartment in Wicker Park. We will stay on top of any new developments and interrupt regularly scheduled programming with any breaking news.”

  As Angela shut off the car’s engine, she realized her heart was drumming. When she pulled the keys from the ignition, they jingled with the tremor in her hand. She steadied herself as she climbed from the car and looked around. She knew the warehouse would be quiet at this time on a Saturday morning, the work crews were already out to job sites.

  She walked across the gravel lot. The office door was locked when she tried the handle. Before she left her house, Angela had retrieved a set of keys attached to a Chicago Bears keychain, which rested in the back of the kitchen drawer. Pulling the ring from her purse, she went one-by-one until she inserted the correct key into the door handle and twisted it open. She slipped into the office and closed the door behind her, looking back through the window and out into the parking lot. Her car sat all alone, the dust storm she had caused by driving down the industrial road had dissipated to a white cloud that hazed the area. Angela took a moment to look toward the far end of the road, which was empty and quiet. She locked the door and turned away from the window.

  She went past the desk in the front office and pulled open the drawers to the file cabinets that lined the back wall. It took ten minutes of fingering through the files for Angela to find the employment records. Mitchell-Blackwell Construction had seventy-seven employees. It took only a minute to locate the file that held the name Leonard Williams; she pulled the file and sat on the floor to read it.

  The first page held a Xeroxed photo of Leonard Williams’s driver’s license. A feverous chill claimed Angela’s shoulders as she stared at the dark-set eyes and expressionless face of the man who had approached her weeks ago in the alley behind her home. Angela learned that he was fifty-two years old, previously employed by another construction outfit in the western suburb of Wood Dale, and had come to Mitchell-Blackwell with glowing letters of recommendation from his previous employer. He was married, with two children. As she paged through the thin file, something pulled at her mind. It was the way her brain operated. There was something she had seen, but not recognized. Some bit of relevance that had buried itself in her subconscious, but which hadn’t yet floated to the surface of her awareness. Angela had always been able to sense this acute mindfulness of something critical, even if she wasn’t able to immediately identify it.

  She blinked away the glitch in her thoughts, ignored the soft whisper that echoed in the far-off parts of her mind, and continued to flip through the file—1099 forms, employment contracts, workmen’s compensation paperwork, and union credentials—until it finally dawned on her. Until the whisper turned into a scream. She turned back to the opening page of the file and looked at Leonard Williams’s driver’s license again. Her vision narrowed to focus on his address. He lived in Forest Glen, the same neighborhood where Samantha Rodgers’s body had just been discovered.

  CHICAGO

  August 1979

  ANGELA JOTTED LEONARD WILLIAMS’S ADDRESS ONTO A PIECE OF scratch paper, replaced the file, and closed the cabinet. She walked around the secretary’s desk and to the side door that led to the warehouse, pushed it open and entered the cavernous space. The rafter ceilings were three stories high and light penetrated the grimy windows in a cloudy gray film that left Angela squinting in the murkiness. She found the light switch and clicked the warehouse to life with fluorescent bulbs that blinked and warmed.

  Giant trucks occupied the space, and pallets of dry concrete lined the walls, packaged in green bags and stacked high. Other equipment she didn’t recognize or understand hung from the walls and stood in tall piles in the middle of the warehouse. Angela walked around the equipment. This was the place Leonard Williams operated and supervised.

  In the back she came to a filmy window that looked out onto the parking lot. She saw her car isolated in the gravel lot, and again looked to the end of the long road that led from the main thoroughfare to the warehouse. It was desolate, and the emptiness of the place suddenly brought Angela aching lungs and shallow breaths. She felt the twinge of an impending attack, and fought against the pull of her mind to go to that dark place and entertain disturbing thoughts of Leonard Williams from the morning in the alley, his shadow climbing over her legs as he came closer to her, his black eyes, and his body silhouetted by the steep angle of the sun. But she felt something else, too—something that made it easier than normal to get past the roadblocks in her mind. The same stutter in her thoughts from a few moments earlier—while she looked through Leonard Williams’s file, and unknowingly saw his address—was happening again now as she stared out the window. Something screamed for her attention.

  She was in the corner of the warehouse, with the back wall immediately to her left and the sidewall with the grimy window in front of her. Something was off. As Angela looked again out at the parking lot, she remembered the image from when she had climbed from her car. She had parked at the edge of the warehouse, yet her car was many feet to the left of the window she was staring through. Angela looked at the back wall and realized the warehouse did not end where she stood, but continued beyond this point.

  Moving away from the window, she wal
ked along the back wall. It was covered in wooden shelving that rose up a full story. Heavy equipment and pallets of material filled the shelves. A forklift was parked nearby to claim the items from the higher shelves. As Angela walked along the back wall, she noticed a break in the shelving, in front of which sat a pallet of concrete. Behind the pallet a tarp hung like a curtain and partially covered a door. An eerie feeling came over her as she looked back through the warehouse toward the office. The rafters creaked with the wind. The roll of her stomach returned. She had swallowed two Valium on the way over, and resisted the urge to fish another from the bottle. She turned back to the partially hidden door, squeezed her small frame past the stacked bags of concrete, and tried the handle. Locked. She opened her purse and pulled out the keys attached to the Chicago Bears ring. She stuck one after the other into the doorknob until, on her fifth try, the lock twisted open.

  Angela pushed the door, allowing it to swing on the hinges and glide into the darkened room until it struck the wall after a full 180-degree turn. She reached her arm in and felt for a light switch. The overhead lights brought the space to life, and she slowly walked into the large storage area. Rows of shelving lined the walls. Another wall was lined with barrel-sized oilcans. The floor was caked with mud, unlike the dusty concrete slab of the warehouse.

  On the floor next to the large oilcans was a dirty tarp, a shovel, rope, and a stack of cinder blocks. She lifted the top from one of the cans and peered inside. It was dark and empty. As Angela slowly turned in the storage room, her skin was itchy and flushed. She took deep breaths to settle her stomach, but still bile rose in her throat. In the darkened corner, she saw a strange contraption hanging from the tall ceiling. She walked closer to get a better look. Bolted to the ceiling was an M-shaped wooden beam. Five pulleys were fastened at each point of the M, through which thick rope was strung. The rope hung down from each end of the beam like the loose limbs of a willow tree. Six feet separated the two ends of the rope. Angela walked even closer. Attached to each end of the rope was a strap of red nylon tied in a noose. It reminded her of some contraption from medieval times.

  Angela held the nylon noose in her hand, pinching the soft, red material between her thumb and forefinger, when she heard a thud outside. She released the noose, ran to the door of the storage room, and peeked out into the warehouse. It was still dingy and gray, and the large overhead doors were closed. She heard the pounding once again. Squeezing between the shelving and pallet of concrete that hid the storage room door, Angela ran back to the window and looked out at the parking lot. One of the concrete trucks had returned and was dumping waste into a reservoir across the parking lot. The truck was backed up against a retaining wall, with its tank at a ninety-degree angle as workers barked orders to the driver.

  Angela ran the length of the warehouse and into the office. She locked the door on the way out and hurried to her car as the workers continued their dumping fifty yards away. She steadied herself by leaning on the hood and breathing in the humid summer air. When the nausea passed, Angela climbed into the driver’s seat and reached for her purse. She pulled out her bottle of Valium, swallowed another pill, and tore out of the parking lot, accelerating down the industrial road and kicking up a cloud of dust in the process. The M-shaped contraption and dual nooses burned in her vision like the afterimage of a flashbulb, just like the reporter’s image from the night she watched the news report about Samantha Rodgers. And then something else … another whisper, far in the recesses of her mind, just a slight murmur, asking to be heard. She knew she should stop and listen to it, attempt to decipher what it was trying to tell her, but she was hardly aware of it as she sped along the gravel road, fighting to breathe and control her shaking hands, let alone able to comprehend its muddled message.

  CHAPTER 14

  Chicago, October 24, 2019

  RORY HAD NEVER APPRECIATED POSTCOITAL AFFECTION AND, IN FACT, needed her space after intimacy. Having slept together for ten years, Lane no longer questioned Rory’s stealthy escape from the bedroom after sex. During the early phase of their relationship, she used to wait until Lane was asleep before attempting her getaway, but now it was just expected. She was slow and quiet as she slipped from beneath the covers, pulling a tank top over her head and tiptoeing downstairs.

  In the kitchen, she opened the refrigerator, spilling soft light across the floor as she grabbed a Dark Lord. In her office, Rory sat at her desk and opened the file that waited there. With the rest of the house dark, her workspace was lit only by the soft auburn glow of the desk lamp. She took a sip of stout and began reading.

  The Thief had hired the law firm of Garrison Ford immediately after his arrest. The 1979 retainer had been $25,000, which was paid with a cashier’s check. The total fee for representation, which included the failed defense and the contentious trial, was close to $120,000—also paid via cashier’s check in four lumps between the summer of 1979 and the winter of 1981. All of this information was contained in the third and final box Ron Davidson had delivered, along with the file from her father’s office and the information Judge Boyle had provided.

  Rory took a sip of beer and turned the page. The best she could piece together, her father had become involved with The Thief during the appeals process, after the sixty-year sentence had been handed down. Garrison Ford continued to bill for services into 1982, when her father left the firm to start his own practice. Cross-referencing documents she unearthed from her father’s file cabinets at his law office, Rory found a transition of invoicing that started in the later half of 1982. The first check was written to the Moore Law Group on October 5, 1982, to finance the second round of appeals.

  Rory found that all reimbursements—old Xerox copies of handwritten checks—were full lump-sum payments. Over another beer, she learned that in addition to being a cold-blooded killer, her father’s client was also a millionaire. At the time of his arrest, he had a net worth of $1.2 million. The man’s financials were intimately detailed in his file because, in addition to handling appeals and representation at parole hearings, the man had also hired her father to look after his fortune during his incarceration, a task that included resolving debts, bringing his estate into order, and liquidating assets. Dipping into the dark side of criminal defense, Rory saw how her father had structured this man’s fortune in an oasis of LLC corporations and trusts to hide assets and protect against the threat of civil lawsuits. Sheltered as it was, had the families of his other alleged victims gone after him, a large portion of his money would be off-limits.

  But no civil suits were ever filed. Without bodies, Rory knew, a civil suit would be deemed frivolous. The remains of only one woman were found during the summer of 1979. Her name was Samantha Rodgers, and although there had been an attempt, Rory read, to tie The Thief to this woman, the attorneys at Garrison Ford had managed to convince the judge that any evidence linking their client to Samantha Rodgers was purely circumstantial. The judge agreed and the prosecution dropped their pursuit, instead focusing on Angela Mitchell.

  Her father’s client’s money stayed protected, and, all told, when the killer settled into his cell in the early 1980s, he did so with more than $900,000 resting in a bank account. Through the 1980s, Rory’s father had drawn from those funds to pay his legal fees during the lengthy appeals process, which dragged on for a decade.

  In addition to checks rendered for legal services, Rory also came across additional payments categorized as “retainer fees.” Over the course of the 1980s, the Moore Law Group had been paid more than $200,000. It was a steep sum to simply file appeals. The roots of her curiosity stretched deeper into her mind as she recognized that her father’s connection to this man went beyond the typical attorney-client relationship.

  What were you doing for this guy, Dad?

  Rory read the details of the appeals her father had crafted, which highlighted the prosecution’s weaknesses. They included, conveniently, that the district attorney could produce no physical evidence against his cl
ient, including the body of his alleged victim. Adding to the absence of Angela Mitchell’s remains, Rory’s father had argued that the woman was mentally retarded, as was stated in the 1979 brief. The term “cognitively challenged” was still decades away, and labeling her as “autistic” was less dramatic, too medical, and didn’t fit the narrative. A mentally retarded schizophrenic was much more powerful. But no matter which adjectives had been used to describe Angela Mitchell, none were quite right. As Rory learned more about what the woman had done, and the lives she had surely saved, nowhere in the documents was Angela Mitchell described as “hero.”

  According to the statement by the prosecutor, Angela had spent the last days of her life compiling evidence that pointed a strong finger at the 1979 killer. She was killed during the process.

  CHICAGO

  August 1979

  IT WAS SUNDAY MORNING, LESS THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS SINCE her bizarre discovery in the warehouse, and Angela had not slept a minute. She was up all night updating the biographies of the missing women, and adding everything to her notes that she had found in the last three days about Leonard Williams. After leaving the warehouse yesterday, she had spent hours at the library, spinning microfilm and researching hanging and strangulation deaths associated with women in and around Chicago. Below the graph diagram Angela had put together depicting the trend of killings over the last decade, she now added relevant information from her library research. She was trying to make sense of the contraption she had found in the hidden storage room, and believed she was onto something. Of the women on her graph who fit the description, who fell into the profile, and who had been killed in and around Chicago, most had been strangled. On the last page of her file, Angela had drawn the odd, M-shaped wooden beam with the dual hanging nooses.