The female FBI agent fell at the back door in the laundry room, her bloody head resting awkwardly in a laundry basket of unfolded towels.
Alyssa Bennett died with her beautiful blue eyes open. In the first picture from madddog12296, an image tormenting me since I’d opened it up on my phone at the ranch, her face had been turned away. It occurred to me now that was probably because he wanted me to imagine Maddie in her place.
In this one, Alyssa lay on the same ugly gray carpet and appeared to be reaching for her dead mother’s hand six inches away. The blood-spattered leg of another child stuck out of a doorway behind them. The boys’ bedroom?
I was familiar with crime scene photos. Before treating children, I insisted on seeing any tangible evidence of the horrible things they had witnessed. These pictures defacing my computer screen were definitely snapped with the aloof, detailed eye of a forensics expert.
The crime scene photographer never knew what might wind up being important, so his job was to shoot it all, the ordinary and the unimaginable: half-unpacked suitcases, the dirty contents of the dishwasher, a worn copy of Goodnight Moon on a nightstand, the Herbal Essence shampoo bottle in the shower. And, of course, every angle of every dead body, every single drop of blood.
About thirty pictures in all-probably not nearly everything that was shot that night, but the goriest highlights. These weren’t downloaded from a website. These were hacked from a police file or from the FBI’s photo archive.
I glanced over at Hudson. He hadn’t moved. My fingers stumbled over the keyboard while I forwarded the slide show to Lyle so his practiced, less emotional eye could run over this carnage.
It was still too early to get up, but I couldn’t imagine closing my eyes, knowing my brain would play the images endlessly. Better to focus on another task. Lyle had provided me with the password and access code for an extensive open-records site that the newspaper paid dearly for every year. Birth and death certificates, phone numbers, addresses, court documents-all only seconds away.
It didn’t take long to find Barbara Thurman. She was now Barbara Monroe, in her fifties and no longer a reporter covering kidnappings for a Chicago tabloid. I wrote down her phone number and address on the hotel notepad and shut down my computer.
Adriana Marchetti’s kidnapping, the murders of Fred Bennett’s family, the newspaper clippings from my mother’s safe deposit box. How were they connected?
An hour later, when Hudson’s watch alarm beeped, I was showered, dressed, and ready for a little more business in Chicago before my flight out tonight.
Madddog12296 had done his job. He’d dragged me to a hellish, fertile playground in my head that I hadn’t known existed.
Barbara Monroe lived in one of the renovated stone cottages in a gentrified neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. A chaotic herb and flower garden meandered up the stone walkway, fighting off weeds, giving me a good vibe about her. In my occasional vegetable gardens, weeds rarely got the death penalty.
“Hi, guys, I’m Barbara,” she greeted Hudson and me, opening the door for us while holding the collar of a tall, lunging black animal that was hands-down the ugliest dog I’d ever seen. Black hair stuck out of bald patches. There were dime-sized red sores on his back that appeared to be healing. “Cricket, get back. Sorry, my teenage daughter has a thing for strays, and this one isn’t trained yet. Also, he’s not contagious, just ugly for life, according to the vet.”
I tried patting his bony, scaly head, bare of hair except for a tuft behind his ear, and he licked me appreciatively. Whatever happened to him, Cricket appeared to have sustained little psychological damage.
I’d called and introduced myself to Barbara only two hours ago, and she sounded busy but cheerful enough on the phone about helping. “I gave all that up a long time ago for a more lucrative PR career,” she informed me. “I’d met my first husband, and he didn’t like the idea of taking death threats in the middle of the night.”
Still playing tug-of-war with Cricket, she gestured to a cozy room on our right, bulging with books, antiques, and stacks of The Atlantic, the Utne Reader, and Scientific American. Again, a good sign. Someone who reads about intelligent life.
“Have a seat. Let me crate Cricket.” She and Cricket disappeared into the back of the house, and I zeroed in on the cardboard box open in the middle of the floor. How could I not? It called out to me in large black Sharpie letters: CHICAGO INQUIRER.
“Don’t even think about it,” Hudson said, pulling me with him onto a leather love seat. “Just wait for her.”
The box spilled over onto the floor with what I presumed were the oddball accessories of a newspaper reporter’s desktop-a dusty, tarnished trophy, a windup toy of a human peanut with Jimmy Carter’s face on it, a stained coffee cup that advertised the paper, miscellaneous clippings, a bulging Rolodex, and-most fascinating to me-stacks of old notebooks.
“Hard to believe I didn’t dump this stuff,” Barbara said. Unhindered by the dog, she stood an elegant five feet, eight inches in Manolo Blahnik heels and a well-cut black suit, vibrating with the kind of energy I’d seen in her reporting. I suspected that Barbara was a fierce competitor in the land of public relations.
She ran a hand through artfully chopped hair, too inky black to be anything but dyed, and picked up a lint roller from a library table, removing Cricket’s hairs from her jacket.
“I suppose I kept it all because I never got closure.”
“When did you quit?” I asked.
“A lifetime ago. Right after the Marchetti girl’s kidnapping. It was my last, and biggest, story. A career-maker, my editor told me. I didn’t have the stomach for it or I wouldn’t have let my husband talk me into quitting. Then, again, I was only twenty-five. What do you know at twenty-five?”
I nodded encouragingly. “I read the column you wrote telling everybody off.”
“Oh, yes. The naïve rantings of a young reporter. It was like spitting into the ocean. By that time, my boxes were packed. The publisher was ticked that my editor even let that column see the light of day.”
“You got actual death threats?” Hudson asked.
“Just two. The same guy. It was long before caller ID. He called to tell me to drop the story or he’d kill me in an unpleasant way. Real scary, because he called my apartment after midnight when I was alone in bed. Liked to wake me up.”
She kneeled and pulled out four more notebooks I hadn’t noticed, hidden out of sight on the floor behind the box.
“For you. I thumbed through these. There isn’t much I didn’t print.”
“It’s OK for me to take them?” Even years later, I was surprised Barbara could hand her notes off so easily. Lyle would rather cut off an ear.
“I never really believed Rosalina’s whole story. She was a drugged-out mess at the time, although she knew how to use her looks to pull the sympathy chain. I always doubted her, but the police thought she was telling the truth because of the witness to the kidnapping.”
I abruptly stopped flipping through the scratchings in her notebooks. “I didn’t know there were any witnesses.”
Barbara glanced at her watch. Platinum, I noticed. Not a reporter’s accessory. It made me rethink her a little. Her earrings were expensive hammered silver squares that matched a cuff on her wrist.
“It was a detail kept out of the press,” she told us. “I didn’t find out until several days after the kidnapping, when a cop slipped up talking to me. The witness was a stripper friend of Rosalina’s who claimed her pimp would kill her if he knew she spent an afternoon off-duty to be with Rosalina and her kid. She had one of those indulgent Italian princess names. Gabriella, maybe? I’m sure I wrote it in there. Her story matched Rosalina’s word for word, maybe a little too closely. The police cut her a break and left her out of it, and so did I.”