LITMIR.BIZ

      CHAPTER 8

      Chicago, October 16, 2019

      SHE PULLED TO THE FRONT OF HER BUNGALOW AND PARKED ON THE street, which was lined with her neighbors’ cars. It was just past eleven o’clock, and Rory felt good about her visit with Greta. She didn’t always feel that way when she left her great-aunt’s side. Alzheimer’s and dementia had stolen most of her personality, turning her at times into a nasty old woman who could spit insults like a drunken sailor one moment, and babble incoherently the next. Despite the ferocity of the abuse, the vile version of Aunt Greta was preferred to the vacant-eyed, hollow soul Rory often found when she visited. Each of Greta’s personalities was tolerated because occasionally, like tonight, there was a glimpse of the woman Rory had loved her whole life. It had been a good night.

      The dog across the street barked as Rory walked up her steps and keyed the front door, grabbing the mail on her way in. She dumped the stack of envelopes, along with Camille Byrd’s autopsy report, onto her kitchen table and pulled a glass from the cabinet. The middle shelf of her refrigerator held six bottles of Three Floyds Dark Lord, an impossible-to-find imperial stout that Rory managed to keep well stocked through an Indiana connection. Each twenty-two ounce bottle was positioned label out and in flawless rows—the only way Dark Lord should be shelved. She plucked one from the front, popped the cap, poured it into the tall glass, and topped it off with blackcurrant cordial. With an alcohol content of fifteen percent, the beer was stronger than most wines and it took only a couple of glasses to obtain the desired effect. At the kitchen table, she pushed the stack of mail to the side and pulled the manila envelope she had received from Detective Davidson in front of her. Two full swallows of stout and a deep breath, then she dove in, opening the file to the first page of the autopsy report.

      At the time of her death, Camille Byrd was a twenty-two-year-old recent University of Illinois graduate. She’d finished college in May and was still hunting for a place to put her communications major to use. She lived in Wicker Park with two roommates. The medical examiner determined the cause of death to be throttling, or manual strangulation. Manner of death, homicide. No evidence of sexual assault.

      Two more swallows of stout and Rory turned the page. She read through the ME’s findings. Classic signs of asphyxiation were noted—bloodstained fluid in the airway, swelling of the lungs, petechiae on the face, and subconjunctival hemorrhage in the eyes. Severe bruising was noted to Camille’s neck, along with fractures to the hyoid bone and larynx, confirming the conclusion of strangulation. The presence of “fingerprint” markings left no doubt. Rory pulled an autopsy photo in front of her. She re-read the findings. Camille Byrd had gone missing one night, and her body was discovered the next. Rigor mortis and lividity allowed the time of death to be gauged at twenty-four hours prior to her body being discovered. Whoever killed Camille Byrd had done it quickly. Leukotriene B4 was detected in skin samples, Rory read, indicating that the bruising on the neck took place antemortem—before the girl had died, and now present forever more as the healing power of her body faded with her last breath.

      She spent an hour in her quiet house, flipping through the rest of the medical examiner’s report before she switched to the detective’s notes. The autopsy report had been computer generated; the Homicide Division of the Chicago PD still worked with paper charts. Opening the file brought an assault of ugly, curt penmanship that was difficult to decipher. Rory was certain of some Freudian link between male detectives’ atrocious penmanship and their mothers, as if their childish writing was evidence of a man’s constant need for pampering.

      For an hour, and over another Dark Lord spiked with blackcurrant cordial, Rory read about the life of Camille Byrd. From her childhood, to the day she went missing, to the morning her frozen body was found in Grant Park. She took notes, single-spaced, one sentence after the other, until she filled an entire page. Unlike the detective’s writing, Rory’s was perfect cursive. However, with no spaces between sentences and few punctuation marks, she was sure her notes looked nearly as indecipherable as the detective’s piggish scribble.

      When she closed the file, Rory knew she was a long way from knowing Camille Byrd as well as would be necessary to find the answers she was looking for. But tonight was a start. Stacking the reports to the side, Rory finally closed her eyes. She settled her mind and allowed the facts to take hold. That night, she would dream of Camille Byrd the way she always dreamt of the victims she studied. This was how every reconstruction began. She chose each case carefully, and devoted her full attention to it until she reached her conclusion and turned everything over to the detectives to finish the job.

      After twenty minutes of meditation, she opened her eyes and took a deep breath. She carried the files into her office and placed them neatly on her desk, removed the 8-by-10 photograph of Camille Byrd and pinned it to the large corkboard on the wall. Pocked with holes from previous reconstructions, the board had told many disturbing stories over the years. Tonight the echoes from previous cases went unheard as Rory stared at the photo of Camille Byrd, who stared back from some unearthly place, waiting for Rory’s help.

      She hit the lights on the way out of the office. With the rest of the house dark, she grabbed another beer from the fridge and headed to the den. The room contained only indirect lighting, no overhead bulbs or lamps, just carefully positioned spotlights. The first switch Rory tripped brought to life the built-in shelves and silhouetted two dozen antique China dolls that stood on the ledges. Positioned three per shelf and in seamless columns, the recessed lighting cast each doll in a perfect combination of luminance and shadow. Every doll’s porcelain face shined under the spell of the lighting, both the coloring and polish flawless.

      Exactly twenty-four dolls stood on the shelves. Any less left a vacancy that gnawed at Rory until the empty slot was filled. She’d tried it before—removing one doll without replacing it with another. The unfilled space created an imbalance in her mind that prevented sleep and work and rational thought. The nagging annoyance dissipated, Rory had discovered, only after she filled the vacancy with another doll to make the shelving complete. She’d come to terms with this affliction years ago, and had finally stopped battling it. It had been embedded in her since she was a young child standing in Aunt Greta’s house staring at doll-lined shelves. Rory’s love of restoration originated during her formative years when she spent her summers with Greta bringing broken dolls back to perfection. Now Rory’s den had looked the same for more than a decade and was a replica of Aunt Greta’s house from years ago, the built-ins lined with some of her most triumphant restorations. Never a vacancy present.

      A thin drawer was positioned under each shelf, in which rested “before” pictures of each doll featured on the ledge above. The 8-by-10 glossy photos depicted cracked faces, missing eyes, jagged tears that spilled white stuffing, stained garments, missing limbs, and faded porcelain that had shed its glaze over years of life. The images in the drawers stood in stark contrast to the immaculate dolls standing on the shelves above, which Rory had meticulously

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