Look Closer(85)

Not Lauren’s light, though. It’s still on. What happened? What’s going on in there?

I walk along Lathrow, on the opposite side of the street, trying to be casual, the cool-customer Barack Obama, and look to my right. Lauren’s front door is closed, the outdoor light on.

What’s going on in there?

I slow my walk, as best I can. Visibility is poor, but it works for me, cloaking me in darkness with the contrast from Lauren’s outdoor light.

I head down the street a bit, craning my head back, wondering how long I can just “casually” stroll up and down the same side of the same—

The porch light on Lauren’s house goes out, leaving the outside of her house in darkness.

Then a broad gust of light—the front door opening?—disappearing just as quickly, as Christian emerges from the canopy and walks quickly down the walkway onto the sidewalk. He heads north, the direction opposite me. He’s walking too fast. He needs to slow down, look more casual.

But that only matters if anyone notices him, and they probably won’t. Anyone like him, like me, trick-or-treating in a town that has ended trick-or-treating, would probably be heading for the exits, anyway, as they say.

I turn and head north, too, just so I can pass her house again. The house light is off. That’s good. The front door is closed. Also good. Is that door locked? Does it have a knob that locks? Hard to know. I’ve never been inside that house.

I let out a long breath as I keep walking.

Thank you for your service, Christian. Even if you didn’t realize you were doing it for me.





78

Jane

“Thanks for this, Dee. I owe you big time.”

“No worries. Sounds like time is of the essence, so let’s get to it.” Special Agent Dee Meadows shows Jane Burke and Andy Tate into a conference room at the FBI field office. “You guys deal with CSLI much?”

“Don’t have too much occasion to,” says Jane. “But we get the gist. Your cell phone sends a signal, it pings off a cell tower, usually the nearest cell tower, and that cell tower keeps a record of the ping—which phone and when, down to the minute and second. So we can track a phone’s movements, which means we can track its owner’s movements. The phone company gave us the historical cell-site location information for Lauren Betancourt’s pink burner phone and for the phone she was communicating with. And we gave it to you for analysis.”

“Yep, that about covers it.” Dee Meadows works mostly in forensics these days but, once upon a time, did a fair amount of field work with Jane’s mother. “So first off,” says Meadows, “let’s talk about the history of their communications but leave out Halloween night, which seems different.”

“Sure.”

“Okay, aside from Halloween night: These two burners communicated with each other and only with each other,” says Meadows. “Not a single other communication.”

“Got it.”

“And as you know, their communications were carefully planned. At ten a.m. Monday through Friday, they would text each other. And eight p.m. Monday through Thursday. They took Friday nights and the weekends off.”

“Yes.”

“And they kept their phones off at all other times.”

“Interesting,” says Jane. “Didn’t know that.”

“No way you would until you look at the historical CSLI. But you’ll see that their phones aren’t sending any signals except at those times. So that right there—those synced-up times, turning off the phone otherwise—these are obviously the classic signs of two married people having an affair. Who really didn’t want their spouses to know.”

“We know Lauren was married, Dee. But we don’t know about the man.”

“Fair enough,” says Meadows. “Well, here’s another thing. Every one of Lauren’s communications took place at her home. I mean, down to the last one. And the other phone? The offender’s burner? Other than Halloween night, which was different—”

“Right, Halloween is different.”

“But putting aside the night of Halloween, it sure seems like the guy was texting from the same location every morning and the same location every night. Both locations were in Chicago. So let’s get into that.” Meadows starts to work her laptop. “You guys understand, I assume, that CSLI isn’t an exact science down to the microscopic point. You get that?”

“Yeah, you get a range from the cell tower. You get an area. The more cell towers around there, the smaller the area per cell tower.”

“Right, if you’re out somewhere rural, historical CSLI isn’t always your friend. But this guy was in the city, with a lot of towers, so it’s a bit more precise. Okay, I told you all of Lauren’s texts came from her home. Or from a fairly small area that includes her house, more accurately.”

“Right,” says Jane. “She could have been inside her house or on the back patio or the driveway—”

“Hell, she could’ve been half a block from her house, at least, and she’d still be pinging the same cell tower out in Grace Village. But yeah, all of Lauren’s texts, every one of them, hit her local cell tower, so you don’t need to see that. What you wanna see is the guy’s phone. The offender’s phone.”