No more murders had transpired in Maynard during that time. And Glover was gone.
He had disappeared that very night. Her dad and the cops had come knocking on his door, but no one had answered. The bedroom had been mostly cleared. He’d left a few magazines in the drawer, but no gray ties, no shoebox.
No one believed he was the killer.
They believed he had come into the house that day, that he had yelled at Zoe. But the police assumed it was because he was embarrassed she had seen his porn collection. That she misunderstood his intentions, that he just wanted to talk. She’d even overheard one of the cops say, as he left their house, “That crazy girl scared the poor guy away.” Her mother had begged her to stop telling people that Glover was the killer. Especially now that they knew who the killer really was.
Manny Anderson had been arrested, suspected of the murders. The police had found a picture of Beth in his home and other “suggestive evidence.” What could this suggestive evidence be? His Dungeons and Dragons collection? He and his parents maintained his innocence while his face was plastered on the front page of all the local newspapers alongside the portraits of the three dead young women.
And then he had managed to hang himself with a bedsheet in his cell. Case closed. The Maynard serial killer was gone. People could sleep again. Zoe had cried for hours when she heard about it. She cried for herself as much as for him. With his death, the chance to prove his innocence and shine the suspicion on Glover was gone. Rod Glover had raped and killed three young women and had gotten away with it. She didn’t know how he had managed to get his alibi to stick, but he had.
She kept thinking that if she’d been older, if she had had a shred of authority, Glover would be in jail. Manny Anderson would still be alive.
She turned her eyes to glare at her bookshelf, brimming with books about serial murders, psychopathy, forensic psychology. She didn’t bother hiding them anymore.
She sighed and put on the other shoe. It was time to face another day.
Her mother was in the kitchen making breakfast. The smell and the sizzle of the bacon and the eggs in the pan made Zoe’s mouth water.
“Good morning,” her mom said. “I was just about to check up on you. It’s late. You need to be outside in five minutes.”
“Okay.” Zoe yawned. Five minutes was plenty of time. Eat bacon and eggs, brush teeth, wash face, comb hair . . . yeah, she could definitely make it in five minutes.
“There’s a letter for you,” her mom said, her tone slightly disapproving.
Zoe had started to correspond with a freelance private investigator and profiler a month before. She suspected he mostly enjoyed the adoring letters of a young teenager. She was milking him for every bit of knowledge that he had.
“Thanks, Mom,” Zoe said and approached the small stack of envelopes. Mostly things for her parents, bills and similar stuff. One brown envelope, addressed to Zoe Bentley. She opened the envelope and shoved her hand inside to pull out the contents.
She frowned. There was no paper inside. Only a smooth strip of cloth. She pulled it out and stared at it, feeling her insides grow cold.
It was a gray tie.
CHAPTER 49
Chicago, Illinois, Thursday, July 21, 2016
Zoe bit her lip and opened the drawer in the desk. The three ties were discarded inside, on top of the envelopes, as foreboding as three snakes. She would give them to Martinez tomorrow; she just needed to present the case in a convincing manner. If she went to him now and told him that the murderer hounding Chicago might be a man she had accused of being a serial killer when she was fourteen, he’d assume she was crazy. He would probably remove her from the case. Maybe Tatum as well.
She had to do her research carefully before talking to him. Find all the corresponding evidence. The important thing was not to present this as the guy she had been obsessed with as a teenager but as a dangerous man, one who’d killed many times before.
Had Glover really sent her those ties? She tried to think of alternative explanations. Could it be the reporter himself? But how would he have known about the former envelopes? And though she was not a forensic document examiner, the handwriting on the three new envelopes seemed very similar to the handwriting on the envelopes she had at home. Was it possible that the same person had sent her all the envelopes, but it wasn’t Glover? No. There was no way anyone else would know about the ties and their significance.
The envelopes had come from Glover; she was convinced of that.
She was less convinced regarding her gut instinct, that he was the killer that the newspapers called the Strangling Undertaker. She tried to force herself to be objective about this. Did Glover really fit the profile of the embalming serial killer?
There was at least one distinct change in his behavior: the fixation upon dead women. Rod Glover’s targets were very much alive. They were alive when he raped them, and once he had killed them, they no longer interested him. Could this have changed? She could feel the gnawing of doubt in her mind.
She set that contradiction aside and examined the rest of the evidence. She could see many links between the murders in Maynard and the current murders in Chicago, but what had he done between then and now?
Years before, when Zoe had begun working with the FBI, she’d gained access to the bureau’s Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. She’d immediately begun using ViCAP to search for more murders that fit Glover’s MO and signature. She learned that the word tie was very problematic when searching for crimes since it brought up thousands of reports where victims had been tied. Searching for gray tie resulted in nothing relevant, but that meant nothing. The person who submitted the crime report to ViCAP might have simply neglected to mention the tie color. Or maybe Glover had switched colors. It took her months, but she finally concluded that if Glover had murdered anyone, the murder was not in ViCAP. She was disappointed to find that more than 90 percent of murders and rapes in the United States were not submitted to ViCAP at all. People were busy, it was a cumbersome procedure, and using it wasn’t required in most places.
That morning, Scott had helped her get access to the CLEAR system from her own computer. She was now going over all the murders involving rape or strangulation since 2002. She would have preferred to go all the way back to 1998, when Glover had disappeared from Maynard, but the database didn’t go that far back.
She was sleep deprived and rattled to the core, her usual detachment gone. Reading report after report of women being raped and murdered was overwhelming. After about forty reports, she felt a lump in her throat, and her fingers were shaking. She went for a walk in the hallway, breathing deeply, trying to relax. Then she sat down and sighed. She decided to play some music, feeling the need to have a background distraction for this soul-wrenching task. Desperate for cheerfulness, she plugged in her earbuds and played the album One of the Boys, by Katy Perry. The dissonance was too much to bear, and she turned the music off after “I Kissed a Girl.” Murder reports weren’t meant to be accompanied by pop music.
She found what she was searching for when she got to 2008. Two murder cases, seven months apart, of women whose bodies had been found naked and strangled. Shirley Wattenberg had been found in Little Calumet River under the bridge on Woodlawn West Avenue. The item used to strangle her was missing, and Zoe suspected it might have been washed away into the lake. The second victim, Pamela Vance, had been found in Saganashkee Slough. This one had had a tie around her neck. Both cases were still open.
“Hey, want a ride?”