Some Choose Darkness - Charlie Donlea A Rory Moore/Lane Phillips Novel

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at her workbench, she turned on her gooseneck lamp and directed its beam to the ruined Kestner doll Camille Byrd’s father had used to lure Rory into reconstructing his daughter’s death. She took another sip of Dark Lord and began her cursory examination, photographing the damaged doll from every angle until finally laying it flat and taking a conclusive picture that would become the “before” image against which her restoration would be gauged. The beer buzz, coupled with the preoccupation of a new project—both Camille Byrd’s childhood doll, and the woman herself—was enough to penetrate the deep folds of Rory’s brain and distract her from the gnawing image of the files waiting for resolution in her father’s law office. The distraction of a new project was just sufficient to push into the shadows of her mind the thought of her father dying alone in his home.

      CHAPTER 9

      Stateville Correctional Center, October 17, 2019

      HIS KILLING SPREE DECADES AGO HAD, FOR A SHORT TIME, MADE him a celebrity. But soon after his conviction, the world moved on and had mostly forgotten about The Thief. Only in recent months had his star begun to rise again as journalists relived the summer of 1979 by recounting the women who had been informally counted as his victims. Family members were tracked down. Friends, now gray and wrinkled by age, spoke of long-forgotten kinships with those they lost. Ambitious newscasters replayed old footage in an attempt to recapture the panic of the city during that sweltering summer when The Thief ran loose through the shadowed streets of Chicago, stealing young women never to be seen again.

      And now, as his celebrity began its slow ascent, he would need to rely on the one man who had helped him most over the years. He had access to the prison e-mail system, but it was a tedious process to receive and deliver messages, and prison rules placed strict word counts on his e-mails. It was faster and easier to write his letters by hand and send them through the post office, which he had done several times in the last three weeks without a response. The United States Postal Service—jail mail—had always been his swiftest form of communication. Faster even than a phone call, which required him to make a formal request, wait for approval, and then schedule a date and time to use the prison pay phone. It had always been his preference when he needed to get ahold of his attorney to simply pen a letter, stuff it in an envelope, and drop it in the mail. But after two weeks without a reply, he decided to petition for a phone call. With his final parole board hearing fast approaching, his attorney had been in constant contact with him regarding the details of his impending release. But for the last two weeks, his attorney had been silent and unreachable.

      The Thief lay on his bunk now and folded his hands across his chest as he waited. There was an imbalance in the universe. He could feel it in his gut. Passing time had never been a challenge. At least, not for many years. But of late, since the parole board had stamped him approved, time became something more difficult to manage. His sentence was coming to an end, and he allowed himself to taste what waited on the outside. It was a dangerous practice to entertain thoughts about the freedoms that might soon come to him. It was especially dangerous to imagine the satisfaction of finding her. Still, despite the hazards, he closed his eyes as he lay on his bunk and imagined finally coming face-to-face with her. What a joyous moment it would be. The woman who had put him here would finally receive retribution.

      “Forsicks,” the guard said, interrupting his thoughts. “You got phone privileges today?”

      He sat up quickly and stood from his bed.

      “Yes, sir.”

      The guard turned his head and in a booming voice yelled down the length of the cell block. “One-two-two-seven-six-five-nine-four-six.” His voice echoed off the walls and conjured prisoners to the front of their cells, where they stuck their arms through the bars and rested their elbows on the metal as they watched what was transpiring.

      Forsicks’s cell door rattled open and the guard motioned for him to take the lead as they walked down the long galley. Seeing nothing exciting, the other prisoners melted back into their cells. A door buzzed as they approached the end of the gangplank and Forsicks pushed through it. Another guard was waiting for him on the other side. He did a quick pat down, and then motioned him toward an isolated pay phone on the wall.

      Forsicks went through the practiced routine of navigating the automated prison phone system that allowed outgoing collect calls, dialed the number from memory, and listened to the staticky ring through the receiver. After the eighth loop of buzzing, the call went to voice mail, where he learned that his attorney’s mailbox was full.

      The universe was off. Something was wrong. All of his fantasies about finding her began to fade.

      CHICAGO

      AUGUST 1979

      THE VOMITING CONTINUED FOR THE ENTIRE WEEK AFTER HER ENCOUNTER with the stranger in the alley. Her head swam with vertigo and her stomach roiled with nausea every time Angela thought of that morning. The dirty couch had sat abandoned for the entire day. The garbage men hadn’t touched it. The couch sat at an odd angle at the precipice of the open garage door, and Angela imagined they assumed it was there temporarily while the garage was being cleaned. She had watched through the slit in the curtain that covered the kitchen window as the garbage truck stopped in the alley and the guys emptied her overflowing trashcans into the back of the truck before hopping back onto the fender as the driver continued down the alley. Angela couldn’t bring herself to open the kitchen door and run to the alley to ask them to haul the couch away.

      It was early afternoon when Angela had heard the honking that day. Her neighbor was attempting to pull his car into the garage directly across from Angela’s, but couldn’t make it past the couch to cut the tight angle. As was typical in Chicago, the constant honking of one’s horn was the chosen solution to nearly every problem a driver faced, from slow-moving traffic, to kids playing ball in the street, to a deserted couch in an alley. When the honking reached five nerve-racking minutes, Angela had finally gotten up the nerve to leave the house. She pulled the couch back into the garage, shut the door, and hurried back inside to bolt the door behind her. Once. Twice. Three times, to be sure.

      She told Thomas about the day’s adventure as soon as he’d gotten home. He suggested they call the police, but when they discussed it further, Angela was at a loss for exactly what she would be reporting. That a stranger, and likely a neighbor, had been kind enough to offer his assistance? That a cat had frightened her the night before and filled her with the sense that she was being watched? Angela knew how that conversation would go. She could already see the sideways glances the officers would give each other while Angela stuttered through her explanation, all the time doing her best to avoid eye contact. The nervous plucking of her eyebrows would be looked upon like a contagious disease until the officers excused themselves to speak with Thomas in private about his paranoid wife, who was clearly making more out of things than was there. The further she discussed the incident with Thomas, the more absurd it sounded to call the police.

      More pressing now, a week later, was Angela’s fear that she was on the verge of an obsessive-compulsive breakdown. That she even recognized its imminent approach, like thunderclouds on the horizon, could be considered progress. Years before, the affliction would descend upon her without warning to steal a week or a month as the demands of her mind sent her on meaningless tasks of redundancy. But in the new paradigm of her life, Angela not only sensed the collapse approaching, she fought like hell to prevent it. While she battled her condition, she also worked hard to hide the worst of her symptoms from Thomas. The lack of eyelashes was camouflaged by a thick application of mascara to the few follicles that remained, and a shadowing pencil bolstered her thinning eyebrows. Despite the sweltering heat, Angela had taken to wearing jeans and long shirts in lieu of shorts and tank tops in order to hide the bloody scabs that marked her shoulders and thighs from her nervous scratching.

      The masking of her symptoms, however, was a venomous crutch that made things worse. The better Angela was able to conceal her habits of self-mutilation, the more dramatic her dependency on them became. She tried to stop herself with subtle tricks that had worked in the past. She kept the tips of her fingers slick with Vaseline to make more difficult the grasping of her eyebrow follicles. And she clipped

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