“Any luck with the van?” O’Donnell asked, pointing at two grainy pictures of a banged-up Chevrolet van.
“Managed to get a better shot of the license plate,” Tatum said. “But it’s splashed with mud to a point where it’s almost certainly deliberate. However, Koch managed to find the moment they entered the parking lot. The van showed up at seventeen minutes past nine p.m. Parked somewhere in the western part of the parking lot, far from prying eyes, close to the train tracks. Left at two thirty-seven a.m.”
“They’d been waiting for a while,” O’Donnell said.
“Just over four hours.” Tatum nodded. “Glover is patient. Koch sent police patrols looking for that van in the area of McKinley Park and in the vicinity of Kickapoo Woods; maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Yeah.” O’Donnell’s eyes were glazed over. He doubted she’d heard anything he’d just said.
“Anything wrong?”
“It’s a decent picture of her.” O’Donnell pointed at Fishburne’s picture on the murder board. “But when I went to notify the husband today, there was an image on the computer, of Henrietta, with her daughter, on the beach. And she almost looked like a different person. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“No.”
“My daughter is about the same age.”
“As Fishburne’s daughter?”
“Yeah.” She sighed. “He asked me if Henrietta . . . if his wife suffered when she died.”
“They always ask that.”
“I told him she didn’t.”
“Good.”
“Her death was horrifying, Tatum. She was terrified and hurt. She couldn’t breathe—”
“But you don’t tell that to the family.”
“No,” she whispered. “You don’t tell that to the family. Never tell that to the family.”
“Are you okay?”
She blinked. “I need to call my daughter, say good night.” She took out her phone and glanced at it. “Shit! It’s ten forty. She’s asleep by now.”
“You’ll see her in the morning.”
“Right,” she said, slipping the phone in her pocket.
He eyed her, concerned. “Listen—”
“Any news about the phone used to report the murder?” Her voice was blank, the fragility he’d spotted before gone.
“Uh . . . yeah. The phone is a burner and was never used before that call. It was turned off after use. The call came from an area in the Loop.”
“That’s where Henrietta used to work.”
“You think it was somehow intentional?” Tatum asked.
“Could be . . . but it’s an area that’s easily accessible by the ‘L,’” O’Donnell said. “Glover might have gotten on a train, rode a few stations, got off, made the phone call, probably trashed the phone somewhere nearby, and hopped on a train back home.”
“Sounds plausible.”
“If that’s true, we can pull security footage from likely stations and see where he got off,” O’Donnell said. “Though it’ll be a nightmare to look through.”
“You can talk to Valentine; he might be able to help there,” Tatum suggested. The FBI had image-recognition software and enough CPU to go through all the footage, searching for Glover.
“That’s a good idea,” O’Donnell said. “I’ll suggest that to Bright tomorrow.”
A bitter tone accompanied her last sentence. He sympathized. When it was just the Catherine Lamb case, she’d been in charge. Now the whole investigation was managed by Bright, despite her catching the first murder. Even though he wasn’t an expert in police politics, it sounded like she was being pushed aside. He knew what that felt like.
“Any progress with the congregation members?” He changed the subject.
“I got an email with a list of names from Patrick Carpenter,” O’Donnell said. “Three hundred and twelve names, out of which one hundred and seventy-one are male. There’s no mention of age, so I’m not sure which are relevant. It’s far from a complete list; those are just the people he remembers. He doesn’t have phone numbers or addresses for most of them. I’m trying to get a similar list from Albert Lamb, but it sounds like he can barely get out of bed. It’s like pulling teeth. And with Valentine telling Bright that it’s a waste of time, it’s hell to actually get the damn thing—”
“Okay.” Tatum raised his hands as her tone rose. “I get it. It sucks being you.”
That gave her pause. “That’s a succinct way of putting it,” she finally said. “Though not very useful.”
“Look,” he said. “It’s late. You’ve been awake since six in the morning—”
“Five. I woke up early and couldn’t go back to sleep.”
“And when did you last eat?”
“I . . . it’s been a while.”
“There’s leftover pizza,” Tatum said, gesturing at the box on the table.
She lunged at it like a puma catching a stray deer. She flipped the