It wouldn’t help her do her job and find Hen’s killer. The person who’d taken Hen from him and his daughter, turning them from a family of three to a broken two.
CHAPTER 29
Zoe stepped into the precinct conference room, a large Starbucks cup of hot chocolate in her hand. She wasn’t sure how long this meeting would be, but she had a hunch it might take hours. Most of the participants were already seated. There was an empty spot between Tatum and a police captain.
She sat down and took a sip from her hot chocolate, letting its sugary goodness linger on her tongue. She thought about Glover’s phone call. At first, she’d received a jolt of trepidation and excitement each time she’d listened to the audio of Glover’s voice reporting the suspicious activity. Only after listening to it dozens of times could she analyze it objectively, already knowing the words and the inflections by heart. He’d sounded tense in the recording, and she didn’t think it was an act. Glover was unsettled. And underneath the tension she could hear an undercurrent that she knew well. Rage.
“Everyone here?” the police captain by her side asked. “Let’s start. A quick introduction—I’m Captain Royce Bright from Area Central Violent Crimes.”
He then introduced the rest of the participants. Officer Ellis sat next to O’Donnell. Agent Valentine represented the FBI’s Chicago field office, and Zoe recognized him as one of the agents who’d befriended Tatum. Detectives Koch and Sykes from Chicago South . . . Zoe almost didn’t catch the last name because a strange smell was distracting her. For a moment it almost reminded her of livestock, but an industrial undertone accompanied the scent, like burnt plastic. It took her a few seconds to realize the odor came from Captain Royce Bright, who sat next to her. Now she realized why the chair on his other side was empty as well.
Zoe put her cup next to her nose, sniffing the hot chocolate. It did a reasonable job of masking Bright’s odor.
“Most of you know Dr. Terrel, the medical examiner,” Bright said. “And finally, Agent Tatum Gray and Dr. Zoe Bentley from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico.”
He let the introductions sink in and then asked O’Donnell to summarize the initial investigation of Henrietta Fishburne’s murder.
O’Donnell cleared her throat. “Yesterday at four thirty-two a.m., Bill Fishburne called the Chicago PD to report that his wife, Henrietta Fishburne, hadn’t returned home from work. Officers Ellis and Woodrow showed up to take his statement. They forwarded all the pertinent information to Missing Persons and resumed their shift. When it was over, Officer Ellis decided to check if Henrietta Fishburne’s car was in the train station. He found it on the far side of the parking lot and spotted several bloodstains on the pavement nearby. He called it in, and Koch and Sykes were assigned to the case. The crime scene technicians found additional bloodstains leading away from the car toward the trees in the northern part of the parking lot. There were some signs of a possible struggle, but they found nothing else.”
She kept talking as she hooked up her laptop to the room’s projector. “This morning at six and three minutes, dispatch got an anonymous phone call informing them about a suspicious activity in the Kickapoo Woods forest preserve. Patrol investigated and found the dead body of a woman in her late twenties.” She paused for a moment as an image materialized on the large screen, and everyone turned their heads to look at the victim lying in the center of the white pentagram.
“There were no possessions by the body, so there was no quick way to identify her. However, dispatch correctly assumed it was Henrietta Fishburne. Officers Ellis and Woodrow were on shift and were sent to the location. Ellis made the informal identification with the assistance of Dr. Terrel, and we later verified it with fingerprints.”
O’Donnell then flipped through several shots of the train station’s parking lot, of Fishburne’s car, and of the trail of blood leading toward the trees. Zoe felt momentarily dizzy, images flickering in her mind. A glimpse of darkness. Henrietta running away from her attacker, stumbling on the uneven pavement, her neck pulsing with pain—Zoe forced the thoughts down. Later.
“Livor mortis indicates the body was moved about two hours after death,” O’Donnell said. “We found thirteen different bloodstains in the train station’s parking lot and no bloodstains in the forest preserve where the body was found. Traces of color