They started walking toward Bodie’s place. Amelia followed. She followed them all the way back and waited until they went inside, then hung around until the lights flicked on in his apartment, then went out in the bedroom. A glance at her watch. Just a little after one.
She was cold, damp, and so she called it, confident that Bodie would stay put for a while. There was a bar she knew, one that was open until 4:00 a.m., so she headed there. She wasn’t seeking company, though she wouldn’t turn it away if she found it. Amelia needed inspiration to feed her artistic nature. She needed life.
CHAPTER 34
Dr. Mariana Silva couldn’t sleep. She hadn’t slept a single night through since Bodie Morgan had walked out of Westhaven and away from her three days ago. Truthfully, she hadn’t had an untortured night for years, her mind too busy to shut off, vengefulness and a sense of urgency feeding the fire in her belly. How dare they? She had been the best in her field, the leading authority. Years of study, years of sacrifice and dedication, and it was gone, important doors closed in her face, like she was no one.
She paced the floors of her home office, her curtains opened to the middle of the night, an entire city beyond her windows, not caring if she lived or died. She was the best. Her research on psychopathy, her findings, were being taught in medical schools all over the world, but here she was. Stuck at insignificant Westhaven, a hellhole far beneath her, unworthy of her talents. They said she’d breached protocol, overstepped her bounds, gone way too far. They were wrong. She hadn’t gone far enough. She’d been on the brink, the very precipice of a breakthrough, only to have everything blow up in her face. Colleagues she respected suddenly refused to acknowledge her, and she discovered that she had no friends. She’d given everything to the advancement of science, and it had given her destruction in return.
But she had a plan. A book. Something to prove that Dr. Mariana Silva was still a force to be reckoned with. Her book on antisocial personality disorders with case studies highlighted to prove her theories would transform the psychiatric field and return her to her rightful place. And when she got there, when she was back, there would be hell to pay for those who’d cast her out.
The book was where Bodie Morgan came in. She had known him the moment he’d sat down across from her in their first session at Westhaven. She was enthralled by his brokenness and hungry to plumb its depths. He sought out women, coveted them, yet feared them. Silva found the broken a complex wonder, an intriguing excavation project, one she’d chosen over a personal life of her own. What could a husband and children give her that picking through a twisted mind could not?
Stravinsky wafted out of her stereo speakers as she stared out her window at the Chicago skyline and the desolate ribbon of Lake Shore Drive lit up below. Even this city didn’t deserve her. She was languishing here, dying on the vine, treating mild depressives and bipolars when she was made for much, much more. But the book and Bodie Morgan were her ticket out. All she needed was a plan, a way forward.
She could think of little else but that bogus childhood he’d tried to sell her. He an only child growing up with doting, loving parents on a quiet farm somewhere in Indiana. The two long years at university before striking out on his own. She chuckled unpleasantly now as she recalled it. Oh, it was stress, he’d said, that had driven him to the roof of his building, loneliness that led him to follow those women. Who did he think he was talking to? She sipped her wine, drew the curtains. He thought her a fool, just some hack at an insignificant hospital who couldn’t see what was right in front of her. That’s why she’d authorized that day pass. It was an experiment. She wanted to see how angry he got, how frustrated, at having a taste of freedom, only to have it yanked away and then quickly restored. Delayed gratification. Stress. Manipulation.
She turned from the window, set her glass on her desk, and pulled back the panels that covered a wide, tall corkboard. Quietly, she lifted a pair of scissors from her desk, picked up the morning’s paper, and cut out the article on Mallory Rea’s murder. Carefully, she cut around the photo of the lovely young woman who’d been found on Lower Wacker, not far from the first woman, Peggy Birch, the one with the pretty red hair.
How their mothers must be suffering, she thought as she worked the scissors around the two-column piece on the front page. Two deaths. Two young women. Few details, but she didn’t really need them. The moment she’d seen Peggy Birch’s photograph, she’d known. Such a pretty girl. The kind Bodie was drawn to, the type he preferred. The second woman didn’t fit. Silva stared at her photo, the brown hair, the blue eyes. What had drawn him to her? It was likely even he didn’t know. She would get the answer, though, when she had him back.
She used pushpins to tack the article on Rea up on the corkboard. The photo she’d secretly taken of Bodie Morgan was pinned next to it, along with an index card with his address. That would be her next move, an in-person appeal, an earnest offer of help. When she had him, she would study him, use him, help him, for science and for herself.
Stepping back to study the board, she took it all in, the drama shaping up before her. The articles on Birch and Rea were pinned by red pushpins. The locations where they’d been found were pinned by blue pins. Cop blue. She thought it fitting. Her head angled as she stared at the black-and-white photo of the female detective caught sweeping past the cameras and reporters at one of the murder scenes. Identified as Detective Harriet Foster, she was one of the lead investigators on the cases. Was she up to it? Silva wondered. She looked serious enough, determined, but she was up against a predator, and that required an extra gear. She searched for signs, tells, that Foster had that extra gear, but she wouldn’t know until she looked directly into her eyes, until she could see what she was made of. That was Silva’s talent, her calling.
“Detective Harriet Foster,” she muttered, “I can’t wait to meet you.”
CHAPTER 35
It was close to 2:00 a.m., and Foster should have gone home, but instead she walked along the Riverwalk listening to the city breathe and groan, whistle and sigh. Down here by the water, now that the frenzy of tourists and joggers and lookie-loos had gone, the quiet canyon of glass and steel was peaceful, the buildings and skyscrapers ringed around it steady watchers, lighted guardians as imposing as any rock formation.
She could see Teddy’s across the water, with its exterior lights on but closed for business. There was no one walking with her, no one else on the Riverwalk. She doubted it would have been any different at the same time on Sunday night as Peggy Birch had lain slaughtered and Keith Ainsley had slept. Peggy had come down here with someone. She’d walked down those steps of her own volition. It wasn’t Rimmer or Stroman, Dean or Keith Ainsley. On the video, she hadn’t appeared distressed; that dark figure hadn’t clutched her by the arm. Foster stopped and turned slowly in a circle. “Why here?”
Foster glanced at the decorative trees and the puny bushes where Peggy had been discovered. No clothes. Her backpack floating. No cell phone. Leaves. The sound of Foster’s hard-sole shoes echoed on the path as she made her way east toward the marina, smelling of wet earth and algae, the hint of rotten eggs more pungent here than it would be at street level. The lake.