LITMIR.BIZ

      CHICAGO

      August 1979

      WHEN THEIR GUESTS WERE GONE, ANGELA CINCHED THE TOP OF THE garbage bag and tied it off. Her husband wiped his brow with his forearm as he stood in front of the sink and cleaned dishes. Entertaining was a new experience for her, and something to which Angela was still adapting. Before meeting Thomas, she had never enjoyed the experience of close friends, or any friends at all, for that matter. She had spent her life on the outskirts of societal norms. Vivid memories from Angela’s youth reminded her why traditional friendships were impossible.

      When Angela was age five, a girl had approached her in the kindergarten classroom to offer a Betsy McCall doll and the invitation to play together. To this day, Angela could feel the overwhelming sense of discomfort from someone standing so close to her, and the revulsion that came at the thought of touching a doll so many other children had handled. Even before kindergarten, Angela had taken to carrying her possessions in plastic sandwich bags to keep them safe from germs and filth. Her parents had learned that Angela’s tantrums—complete sensory detachments—were quelled only when her belongings were safe inside the plastic bags. The habit continued through grade school, and kept her sealed off from friendships as tightly as her possessions were protected from the world.

      So, hosting Catherine and Bill Blackwell for dinner had taken Angela as far out of her comfort zone as she’d been in months. But it was a good thing. It was making her life more normal. She had Thomas to thank for her transformation. Angela would forever be aware of the sideways glances she encountered from most of the world, but she took solace in the fact that Thomas accepted her, despite her many idiosyncrasies. Through her marriage, a new world had opened up. Catherine was the first person she called a friend. Around others Angela managed to control many of the unique habits that plagued the rest of her time. Catherine had seen some of these idiosyncrasies, and had accepted them. Like Angela’s aversion of physical contact by anyone other than Thomas, and her affliction to loud noises, and the way she could become transfixed by something her mind wouldn’t stop working on—as had occurred tonight when she watched the reporter explaining that another woman had gone missing. She had been unable to concentrate on anything else for the rest of the evening.

      Despite her friendship with Catherine, Angela had never warmed to Catherine’s husband, who was one of Thomas’s closest friends. But this, too, seemed to be a nonissue for Catherine. They met frequently for lunch while their husbands worked.

      “That was fun,” Thomas said.

      “Yeah.”

      “You and Catherine are becoming good friends?”

      “We are. And her husband is nice, too.”

      Thomas came over to her. “Catherine’s husband has a name, you know.”

      Angela averted her eyes, staring at her feet.

      “I know tonight was hard for you. But you did great. I also know Catherine provides a level of comfort for you, but you can’t only talk to her and me. You have to talk to everyone who’s in the house. It’s just polite.”

      She nodded.

      “And you have to call people by their names. Bill, right? Catherine’s husband’s name is Bill.”

      “I know,” Angela said. “He just . . . I’m not used to him, that’s all.”

      “He’s my business partner, and he’s a good friend, so we’re going to see him a lot.”

      “I’ll work on it.”

      He kissed her forehead again, like he had when she watched the reporter covering the latest disappearance, and went back to the dishes.

      “I’m dropping this outside,” Angela said, lifting the tied-off garbage bag.

      She headed out the kitchen door, which led to the backyard. She walked across the small plot of grass, and noticed the utility door to the garage was open. It was dark now and light spilled from the garage and through the door frame to form a trapezoid on the grass outside the door. When Thomas was grilling the chicken, Angela remembered Catherine’s husband—Bill, as Thomas had just reminded her—walking freely in and out of the garage. It was another part of the night that made her uneasy, knowing the garage was a mess of clutter and junk. Angela had a hard time with things that were not strictly organized, and she was so embarrassed by the appearance of the garage that she had considered closing the door at one point during the evening as a nonverbal way of asking Catherine’s husband to stay on the patio.

      Angela shut the utility door now and pushed past the chain-link fence to enter the darkened alley. Lifting the top of the trashcan, she placed the garbage bag into the empty bin. A cat hissed and darted from behind the cans. Startled, she dropped the trashcan top, causing a loud metallic ruckus to echo through the alley while she let out a scream. Dogs barked from adjacent lots.

      Angela took a deep breath and looked down the alley. A streetlight glowed at the far end of the block, casting swaying shadows of tree limbs onto the ground. In her mind Angela pictured a satellite image of the city limits, and referenced her location now as she stood in the shadowed alley on the far fringes of the city. Angela’s thoughts turned to the diagram she had meticulously created, in which she placed red dots to mark the suspected location of each abducted woman. She had highlighted in bright yellow the area that joined them all. Her neighborhood was far outside the colored pentagon.

      With a rumble in her chest and a tremor in her hands, Angela retrieved the top of the trashcan and haphazardly threw it back in place before running through the yard and into her kitchen. Thomas had finished the dishes and she heard the Cubs game playing in the living room. When she peeked in on him, Thomas was in a deep recline in the La-Z-Boy, which meant he’d soon be snoring. With her fingertips alive with adrenaline, she snuck into her bedroom and knelt at the foot of the bed. Opening the trunk, she found the stack of newspaper clippings and her map of the city.

      She’d spent the entire evening suppressing her obsessive-compulsive needs. Angela’s freshly learned self-restraint had done her well. It opened up a new world with Thomas, and had allowed her to forge a friendship with Catherine. But Angela knew she could not completely ignore the needs of her mind and the demands of her central nervous system, which screamed for her to organize and list and break down the things that made no sense. She saw things as either straight and ordered with sharp, ninety-degree angles, or in complete disarray. The calls of her mind to piece together in rigid order anything that did not line up smoothly had always been loud and impossible to ignore. But lately, those screams had been deafening. The idea that there was a man who had eluded the police, and who had thrown the city into a state of paralysis, was the very definition of chaos. And ever since Angela had allowed her fierce and unrelenting psyche to consider this man, whom authorities called The Thief, she had been able to think of nothing else.

      She brought her stack of newspaper articles to the small desk in her bedroom, clicked on the light, and spread them out in front of her. Angela read them all for the hundredth time, determined to find what everyone else had missed.