As the Wicked Watch(103)

As he shook his head, it wasn’t clear if he was giving me permission or simply signaling that he understood that I would never change.

Evening anchor Steve Schwartz: Tonight the parents of Derek Harvey, the thirteen-year-old boy charged along with two other minors, including his younger brother, in the death of fifteen-year-old Masey James, break their silence following the brutal assault on their son by adult inmates in Cook County Jail. Our Keith Mulvaney spoke with them at their home earlier today.



Marcia Harvey-Willis’s face was the picture of fear and anxiety. That was all she was capable of feeling while both her sons were locked up and branded as monsters.

While the real monsters roamed the streets.

Keith: The assault on Derek has inflamed already tense relations between the African American community and police. Activist Louise Robinson, who has been at the center of the protests over the charges against the boys, called an emergency meeting of the South Side Community Council tonight, but then canceled it along with a scheduled interview with Channel 8 earlier today.



I got to her. She’s scared.

“Jordan, what’s going on with this case?” Thomas asked to my surprise.

“That’s why I have to get back to work tomorrow. I know or I think I know what’s happening.”

He rolled over and sat up in the bed and started to get dressed. “Let me get out of your way,” he said.

His reaction was abrupt but true. He was in my way. Our dalliance had caused me to temporarily shift my focus away from things that truly mattered. But I didn’t feel the need to double down by putting it into words. I wrapped myself back up and walked him to the door in his now-crumpled suit, his shirt no longer perfectly tucked in.

Before he left, he had one parting shot. “Can you at least put the flowers in water?” He nodded toward the kitchen counter, where they’d sat since he arrived.

“I will. They are lovely. I’ll put them on the side of my bed,” I said. “Good night. Drive safe.”

The good night kiss felt different from the hello kiss a short while ago. This one was cold and distant. I stood in the doorway and watched him enter the elevator without a look back, a smile, or a wave.

*

Damnit! I forgot to remove my makeup last night!

I threw back the covers and leapt out of bed almost involuntarily. If Thomas could see my face right now, he would consider himself a lucky bastard. I stomped into the bathroom, giving the door a healthy nudge with my foot. Air rushed into my lungs, and my chest started to heave. The me that I wake up to before I become the version of Jordan who wears the mask that grins but doesn’t lie and speaks the least intimidating version of the King’s English needs this time to herself.

Just as I sat down to pee, my cell phone rang and nearly jolted me into standing up way too quickly. “Hurry up! Hurry up!” I said, ordering the urine stream to end. I rushed from the bathroom to grab the call, thinking it might be Joey, but it was Justin.

“Hey, Justin. Is something up?”

“Jordan, I hope I’m not bothering you.”

“No, of course not. What is it?”

“A body. Just heard it over the scanner,” he said, then laid out the details like he was reading directly from a police report. “Black female . . . found behind a dumpster at a small barbecue spot . . . 79th and State . . . partially burned . . . wrapped in heavy plastic.”





16




“Describe the perp.”

Thinking back on a grad school lecture by Dr. Chan on the tenets of profiling a serial killer, I walked through the steps in my mind to establish a profile of Masey’s killer.

Was he an (a) loner or (b) socially competent?

I would say b. The killer was streetwise and comfortable in society. He made friends easily and he probably knew his victims. They might even have liked him, trusted him.

And motive? Was it (a) a lust kill, (b) a calculated attack, or (c) a crime of opportunity?

It was hard to say. Maybe all of the above. He was ritualistic, that was for sure, cutting up his victims, burning their bodies postmortem, and wrapping them in heavy-duty plastic that he probably kept at home or picked up at a work site.

Was he an organized or a disorganized killer? I would say organized. He killed his victims in a set location, then transported and disposed of their bodies elsewhere. Although this time, instead of trying to conceal his crime, he left the body out in the open on purpose.

So does that make him psychotic or psychopathic? There was no doubt in my mind he was a psychopath, the same man who’d killed Masey James, only with his latest victim, Tania Mosley, he changed his modus operandi. He wanted her to be found quickly, so he left her body just visible enough to be spotted the next time a restaurant employee took out the garbage.

“When an organized killer changes his pattern, there’s usually a reason,” Dr. Chan taught me. “Either he wants to get caught, he’s playing a game of cat and mouse, or he’s angry.”

“Why would he be angry?” I’d asked him.

“Something didn’t go right for him. He wanted it badly, but he couldn’t get it. Or it could be that his heinous acts haven’t drawn the attention that he’d hoped they would. Maybe somebody or something took the focus off his actions, so he lashed out.”

It all made sense. Masey’s killer didn’t want to get caught, but he watched and thrived off the thunder, and the boys being charged with Masey’s murder had stolen it from him. But was he angry about that or something else? I believed he was angry because of something he wanted and didn’t get, and he satiated himself not just by taking a life, but by mutilating his latest victim even more savagely than before. He was sending a message. He was pissed.