Look Closer(20)

That’s better. Yeah. I send it before I can talk myself out of it. Take another sip of my Starbucks. Her text box starts bubbling. She’s typing a response: C u later Wow. Phew. That went well.

I close out the phone, power it off, and remove the SIM card.

? ? ?

Wicker Park. Back when I was in college, this was the cutting edge of hip, the place to live, the place to hang. It still is to a lot of people, but it’s become a bit too yuppie now for the younger crowd, and some of the cool dives and concert rooms and coffee bars have been replaced with AT&T and Lululemon stores and Fifth/Third Bank branches.

I work late at the law school. At about seven-fifteen, I start out from the school on a ten-mile round-tripper to Wicker Park and back. At the halfway point, I stop outside a bar called Viva Mediterránea, on Damen north of North Avenue in the city. Never been here. The back patio, adjacent to the alley, is full of revelers tonight, people in work clothes enjoying an extended happy hour, college kids and grad students just getting started. These guys were robbed of fun summers the last two years thanks to COVID-19, and they’re enjoying being back.

I stand in the alley, sweaty and the good kind of tired, and look around. To my right, Viva’s back patio. To my left, the rear side of a condominium building on the next street over, a few of the condo owners out on their back patios grilling meat and enjoying a cocktail of their own.

I’m near people having fun without being elbowed and jostled. Not especially well lit, either.

Yes, this is going to be my spot. The alley behind Viva Mediterránea.

Our plan is to text twice a day, ten in the morning and eight at night, times that fit with our schedules. We will leave our phones off the rest of the time. We have to be careful. Anyone could understand why. You can’t just leave your burner phone lying around to beep or ring when the wrong person—say, your spouse—happens to be near it.

It means I will have to adjust my running schedule, which is disappointing, because I love my morning runs, but there’s something to be said for running in the evening, too, and this route from the law school to Viva wasn’t bad at all.

I pull out my green phone, as it’s 8:00 p.m., and send this: Testing, testing . . . oh never mind. Good evening my fair lady.

She replies promptly:

Hello stranger danger

Emphasis on the danger. I try not to think about it. But it’s always going to be there. She replies again quickly: Just a fair lady?

Fair as in blond, but she’s playing with me.

You are a little more than fair, I’d say. You are sexy and funny and surprising and you make my heart race a mile a minute. How’s that.

She responds:

That’s more like it.

A chant goes up on the patio, the patrons at Viva. There’s a TV out there, and Contreras just hit a homer for the Cubs. It’s good to be young. I return my attention to the phone: I want to do things to you.

Her reply:

To me or with me?

That’s a softball:

To you.

Bubbles, as she contemplates a response. Then: Oh, my. For someone with such a religious name to have such a naughty side . . .

Nice. I like that. For the record, my mother didn’t name me Simon Peter as a nod to a biblical character. She always wanted Simon for my first name, and Peter was her father’s name. But the religious ed teachers at Saint Augustine loved to use my full name.

I reply:

You haven’t seen naughty yet.

I smile to myself and power off the phone. I remove the SIM card and stuff them both into the pocket of my running shorts.

This way of communication will serve our purposes perfectly. As long as we’re careful.

As long as we’re very, very careful.





17

Jane

Sergeant Jane Burke bends down and looks carefully at Lauren Betancourt’s face.

All photographs have been taken, from every conceivable angle, of Lauren dangling from the bannister, including the close-ups of where the knotty rope wound in and through the bannister’s wrought iron design. It was finally time to remove the body. The lowering of her body took place under the supervision of the Cook County medical examiner, who issued instructions to the Village officers, some on ladders, some on the floor of the foyer, as the rope was untied from the bannister and the body surrendered to gravity, into a body bag placed on a gurney.

Lauren’s face has scratches around her jawline, which Jane is certain will match the broken nails on her fingers, where she desperately attacked the rope wrapped around her throat. The rope abrasions make it clear that the slipknot was forced against her throat in more than one direction. There’s the obvious abrasion pattern from the rope when it ultimately cut off her oxygen and snapped her neck in the hanging position. But there is another abrasion pattern running more horizontally across her throat, as if the assailant was directly behind her and yanking hard on her windpipe, just as Jane suspected, as Lauren tried to free the noose from her neck.

She knows that it may be impossible to perfectly reconstruct the events. And that may be doubly true if the assailant tried to mess with the scene, though it doesn’t appear that he did. Even a pristine crime scene, her mother always explained, never tells the story precisely how it happened.

? ? ?

“Jane.” Jane’s partner, Sergeant Andy Tate, who is heading the neighborhood canvas, comes in through the south entry, the kitchen door.