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.
“What’s up?”
He wiggles his fingers. She follows him outside. Andy points across the street and to the north. “That white Victorian,” he says. “Northwest corner of Thomas and Lathrow.”
“Yeah?”
“The Dunleavy family,” he says. “Including six-year-old Mary Dunleavy.”
“Okay.”
“Mary goes to bed last night about seven-thirty p.m. A little early for her, but she has a tummy ache. Too much Halloween candy, right?”
“Right.”
“Somewhere around eight or eight-thirty, she looks out her bedroom window, which looks south.”
Jane can see the window from here.
“She sees a man standing behind a tree, looking in the direction of the Betancourts’ house. She said she watched him for a long time. She couldn’t be more specific than a ‘long time.’ But she said he was staring, watching for a long time, staring in the direction of the Betancourt house. She finally got spooked enough that she went downstairs and told her mother she was scared. But she didn’t say why. Not til today, just now.”
Jane points. “That huge tree right there, on the southeast corner?”
“That one, yes.”
“Tell me about the man,” she says.
“He was wearing a costume. A black costume with a big, long hood. Head to toe, covered in a hood and long black robe. She never saw his face.”
“Could she be more specific about the costume?”
“As a matter of fact, she could,” he says, showing Jane his phone. “We went through a catalog of Halloween costumes online.”
Jane looks at the image on Andy’s phone and shudders. A long black robe with an elongated hood.
“All it’s missing is that sickle or whatever he carries,” says Andy.
Jane looks at her partner. “This is . . . the Grim Reaper?”
? ? ?
“Jane, they want you back inside.”
Jane heads back in. Ria Peraino, a forensics technician with the West Suburban Major Crimes Task Force, is standing on the landing halfway up the staircase to the second floor. Jane worked with Ria on a sexual assault a couple of years ago and took a shine to her.
“We found something you’ll want to see,” she sings.
Jane takes the stairs carefully, Andy Tate following her. When they reach the second floor, Ria stops them. “Nobody moves except me,” she says. “We have blood spatter all over this landing.”
“Roger that,” says Jane.
Ria carefully steps over to the far wall, stepping around evidence markers. Flush against the wall, below colorful impressionist artwork left undisturbed, is a small antique wood table, a warm brown color, probably with a fancy name like cappuccino, with scalloped legs and a storage shelf below that is empty. The table appears to have served as the base for a vase of fresh flowers （lying in pieces on the floor） and a framed photograph of Conrad and Lauren Betancourt （knocked flat on its face）。