she was Angela Mitchell’s closest friend.
“Can I get you something to drink?”
“No, no,” Angela said. “Thanks, though.”
“So what’s so urgent?”
“I know this is going to sound crazy,” Angela said, pulling a folder from her purse. It held newspaper clippings and her biographies of the missing women, in addition to the reams of paper from her latest research trip to the library. “But I’ve been looking into the women who have gone missing.”
This caught Catherine’s attention. “Looking into them how?”
“I’ve been collecting bits of information about them from the papers and from newscasts.”
Catherine pulled one of the pages across the table. It was a Chicago Tribune article about Samantha Rodgers, the latest girl who had disappeared from the streets of Chicago. Catherine had watched one of the news reports about the missing girl with Angela when they all had dinner together the week before. The girl’s picture was at the top of the article, a crease bent through her photo, where the clipping had been folded and stashed in Angela’s binder.
“Why are you collecting all this?” Catherine asked.
Angela looked up.
“I’m obsess—” Angela caught herself. Speaking the word “obsessed” out loud would be confessing to her friend the dark affliction that had plagued her life. It was unlikely, Angela understood, that Catherine hadn’t already recognized the signs of her condition, but Angela stopped herself, nonetheless.
“I can’t stop thinking about them,” she finally said.
“Why?”
“It’s hard to explain. When my mind gets focused on something, it’s hard for me to . . . let it go. So I started collecting information about the girls, and I think I’ve found something.”
Angela spread the information across the table. She had printed articles from newspapers and microfilm at the library, as well as pages from the books she had referenced, and her own notes that filled the first third of her spiral notebook.
“Five girls have gone missing since spring. Here are the dates each disappeared.” Angela pointed to a different page. “Here is a list describing each victim—age, race, ethnicity, occupation, and physical characteristics, like hair color, skin tone, eye color. You get the idea.”
Angela pushed the handwritten list to Catherine.
“The police say each disappearance is random. They believe the same man has taken all of these women, but they believe there is no connection between each woman. From what I can tell, they’re right about that. The women, in relation to one another, have no association. But the police say The Thief strikes unsystematically. That’s not true.”
Catherine looked at Angela. “How long have you been working on this?”
“All summer. Since the women started to go missing. It’s all I do, really. All I’ve been able to think about. But in reality, I realized this morning that I’ve been working on it much longer than just this summer. I just wasn’t aware of it until now. Until I put it together.”
“What did you put together?”
Angela lifted a random sheet of paper from within the scattered Xeroxed pages. “Look at this. I categorized all the characteristics of each missing girl—age, race, occupation, physical qualities—all the things on that list you’re looking at—and then I went back to look not just at missing persons cases, but also homicides in and around Chicago that involved women who match those characteristics.”
Angela produced the handmade chart she had created at the library.
“Look here.” She pointed at the graph paper. “On the bottom of my graph are years starting in 1960 and going all the way through to today, the summer of 1979.” Angela ran her finger from left to right across the bottom of the page. “On the vertical axis is the number of homicides of women who fall into the category of these missing women. Again, age, sex, race, physical characteristics. Now look, from 1960 to 1970, the number of homicides that involved women who match these descriptions was flat.”
On the graph, a horizontal line ran from 1960 to 1970 without any substantial spikes or dips.
“But in 1970,” Angela said, “there was a sudden uptick in homicides involving these types of women.”
On the chart, Angela’s handwritten line spiked upward dramatically in 1970.
“These are all the homicides in Chicago?” Catherine asked.
“No. In 1970, there were more than eight hundred homicides in and around Chicago. This graph only represents homicides involving women who match the characteristics of the five women who have gone missing this summer.” Angela tapped the page again, tracing her finger over her graph. “The increase in homicides begins in 1970 and continues until 1972, then tapers out but stays high relative to the entire decade of the 1960s. Then, this year, 1979, there is a sudden drop again back to levels equal to the sixties.”
Catherine was nodding her head as she listened. “I see the increase and the decrease. But what does it mean?”
“Here’s my theory,” Angela said. “The same person who is taking women this summer has been killing these types of women since around 1970. Between 1970 and 1978, he was careless and brazen. But since the beginning of this year, he’s been more diligent. Instead of the police finding a body some weeks after a girl goes missing, now the women just disappear with no bodies being discovered.”
Catherine squinted her eyes as she began to see Angela’s theory come together. “You’re saying this person’s reign of terror spans, not just to this summer, but for the entire decade.”
Angela made eye contact again. Her second time. “Yes.”
Catherine sat back in her chair. “This is some crazy stuff you’re telling me.”
“But you see how it’s possible, right?” Angela asked.
“When you present it to me this way, yes. That’s assuming all your facts are correct.”
“They are.”
“And you got all this information from the library?”
“It’s all there for anyone to find. You just have to look in the right places and with the right ideas in mind. This guy, The Thief, he has a type. And he’s been preying on a specific type of woman for ten years.”
“So why has this guy suddenly become so careful this year? Why is he hiding the bodies so much better?”
“Good question,” Angela said. “What happened last year? What was the big story around here?”
Catherine shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Angela pulled more pages from her folder and passed them to Catherine. “Out in Des Plaines?”
Catherine’s eyes widened slightly when it came to her as she read the headline: KILLER
