Emphasis on the danger. I try not to think about it. But it’s always going to be there. She replies again quickly:
Just a *fair* lady?
Fair as in blond, but she’s playing with me.
You are a little more than fair, I’d say. You are sexy and funny and surprising and you make my heart race a mile a minute. How’s that?
She responds:
That’s more like it.
A chant goes up on the patio, the patrons at Viva. There’s a TV out there, and Contreras just hit a homer for the Cubs. It’s good to be young. I return my attention to the phone:
I want to do things to you.
Her reply:
To me or with me?
That’s a softball:
To you.
Bubbles, as she plays with a response. Then:
Oh, my. For someone with such a religious name to have such a naughty side...
Nice. I like that. For the record, my mother didn’t name me Simon Peter as a nod to a biblical character. She always wanted Simon for my first name, and Peter was her father’s name. But the religious ed teachers at Saint Augustine loved to use my full name.
I reply:
You haven’t seen naughty yet.
I smile to myself and power off the phone. I remove the SIM card and stuff them both into the pocket of my running shorts.
This way of communication will serve our purposes perfectly. As long as we’re careful.
As long as we’re very, verycareful.
THE DAY AFTERHALLOWEEN
17
Jane
Sergeant Jane Burke bends down and looks carefully at Lauren Betancourt’s face.
All photographs have been taken, from every conceivable angle, of Lauren dangling from the bannister, including the close-ups of where the knotty rope wound in and through the bannister’s wrought iron design. It was finally time to remove the body. The lowering of her body took place under the supervision of the Cook County medical examiner, who issued instructions to the Village officers, some on ladders, some on the floor of the foyer, as the rope was untied from the bannister and the body surrendered to gravity, into a body bag placed on a gurney.
Lauren’s face has scratches around her jawline, which Jane is certain will match the broken nails on her fingers, where she desperately attacked the rope wrapped around her throat. The rope abrasions make it clear that the slipknot was forced against her throat in more than one direction. There’s the obvious abrasion pattern from the rope when it ultimately cut off her oxygen and snapped her neck in the hanging position. But there is another abrasion pattern running more horizontally across her throat, as if the assailant was directly behind her and yanking hard on her windpipe, just as Jane suspected, as Lauren tried to free the noose from her neck.
She knows that it may be impossible to perfectly reconstruct the events. And that may be doubly true if the assailant tried to mess with the scene, though it doesn’t appear that he did. Even a pristine crime scene, her mother always explained, never tells the story precisely how it happened.
—
“Jane.” Jane’s partner, Sergeant Andy Tate, who is heading the neighborhood canvass, comes in through the south entry, the kitchen door.
“What’s up?”