At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(50)

So, okay. Tomorrow was fine. Wildberry Café was good. In the meantime, she had a case to handle. A serial killer case. With cryptic writing and strange posing. What more did a murder cop want?

She blinked. Two dead men. Why should she have a life when they didn’t?

She dialed the Chicago PD digital forensics department to see if they’d pulled anything from the six-months-old video of the assault on Talfour.

Stringer answered in his usual terse way. “I got ’em,” he said in his raspy voice. “They’re in an envelope on your desk.”

She shifted the Jeep into drive. “Anything good?”

A grunt. “Define good. I got some decent close-ups. But the guys who went after Talfour must have known where the camera was. They kept their backs turned the entire time they were beating up the poor shmuck. Most I got were some side angles.”

“If the attackers knew about the camera, maybe we can catch them scoping out the area earlier that day. Or earlier that week.”

“You been smoking something, right? You know that footage would be long gone. We only got this little bit from the store because someone thought to grab it right after the assault.”

“We have thirty thousand government cameras in this city, and not one of them caught these guys?”

Stringer sighed. “It’s not a targeted area.”

“What about banks? Any nearby?” Banks tended to keep video footage longer than most businesses—typically six months.

“There’s a Chase Bank ATM. I already put a call in with them, but don’t hold your breath. Talfour’s assault was more than six months ago.”

“Six months, four days, one hour, and”—she looked at her watch—“seventeen minutes ago. Roughly.”

“Addie.” Stringer sounded disappointed. “And here I thought you had a life.”

Not much of one, apparently. “Thanks for doing this, Stringer. I’m on my way in.”

“I guess that answers that,” he said and hung up.

She considered going home to change before walking into the station house. But that would waste time sending her in the opposite direction. And without Clayton in her immediate future, a sudden weariness had descended.

She’d just button up her coat and hope no one noticed the green sparkly stilettos.

Right.



The first thing Addie spotted on her desk was a stack of pink While You Were Out message slips. Hopefully at least some of them were because of the calls she’d made right after her breakfast with Gabe when she’d tried to reach the employees of James Talfour’s store.

She set the messages aside for the moment and picked up the envelope that Stringer had left for her. She shook out half a dozen eight-by-ten photos. The photos were remarkably clear, but Stringer was right—the men’s faces were in almost-profile, as if the attackers were aware of the cameras and knew to keep their backs turned. She got a general sense of the men—they had beards and wore their hair long and shaved around the ears, like the actors in that Viking series she’d watched on the History Channel. And they wore street clothes—jeans and hoodies and gloves. One wore a leather vest over his hoodie with the double lightning bolts Rhinehart had mentioned. If they were reenactors, they hadn’t been playing the part that night.

She returned to the first photo. One of the men’s sleeves had ridden up to reveal a few inches of flesh between his glove and the cuff of his sweatshirt. The skin bore an intricately patterned tattoo. Addie opened her desk drawer and fumbled for a magnifying lens. The glass revealed a series of geometric shapes needled in black ink on the man’s forearm.

Why were they wearing gloves in May? she wondered.

The answer came hard on the thought—to cover up their tattoos.

“Bastards,” she muttered.

She slid out of her coat, hung it on a nearby hook, and set aside the photos to see if she could find anything online about Tommy Snow’s Mr. X. But there were no local bone collectors with an X in their name. In fact, there was no one advertising a need for bones at all. Apparently, the collectors of bones didn’t need to advertise on the internet. So how had Tommy Snow and Mr. X found each other? Perhaps through the community college. She made a note on her phone to contact Tommy’s biology professor, Dr. Almadi, at the college first thing in the morning.

Finally, with a sigh, she turned to deal with the pink message slips.

“Here we go,” she said aloud. “Time for the crazies.”

She picked up the slip on the top.

For: Detective Bisset

From: Anonymous

Message: Tell that detective that was in the paper that wolves did it. I seen wolves near my house. The end days are coming.

Addie laid aside the slip. Picked up the next one, scanned it. Set it aside. Picked up the next, working her way through the stack. Wolves. Some guy’s neighbor was killing little boys. Another guy’s mother had served him something that looked suspiciously like eyeballs floating in his soup.

The mention of eyeballs made Addie frown. She opened a tab on her browser and brought up the Chicago Tribune article. There it was, smack in the middle of the article—the fact that Talfour was missing an eye. Whoever their leak was, they hadn’t held much back.

Addie set this message aside as well. Some of these callers’ claims would have to be investigated. But hopefully no woman was making a cannibal of her son.