Chapter 24
Most evenings, we had the television on, though Benjamin paid only half attention to the programs I liked.
He’d get up from the couch often, as he always had—restless, scrounging for snacks or taking longer than expected in the bathroom, where he was probably watching his own videos or scrolling.
That night, he was more restless than ever.
“Don’t pause it,” he said, getting up from the sitcom we were watching.
“I don’t mind.”
I kept looking for stories that matched Sidney’s and Izzy’s, but what I came across the most were girls and women drugged at parties, in bars, at travel resorts—as well as articles telling what women should do to keep a better eye on their drinks. Right. Leave it to the victims.
It wasn’t really just about drinks, other articles agreed, or about the wide availability of drugs, either. It was about consent.
Izzy had been the one to remind me what a recent concept that was.
The subject of SNL jokes in the 1990s. A commonplace topic by the time I was in college.
And now? Maybe things were backsliding or even reversing, as things all too often seemed to do.
Maybe men were just tired of asking. Tired of waiting.
Maybe it was more of a turn-on to see women as they often appeared in bad porn—as the recipients, willing or not willing, of whatever a man decided to do to them.
Maybe for a certain breed of man, inexperienced or confused or full of loathing, “not willing” was even better, as long as there was a way to ensure he’d have control of the situation.
Benjamin still hadn’t emerged from the bathroom. No sound of flushing or running water. I opened an incognito window and quickly typed murder date rape drugs.
I flinched at the first search result. According to a UK headline, an east London man named Stephen Port had murdered four men he’d drugged. Obsessed with date rape drug pornography, the article read.
At least one of the victims’ deaths was ruled a suicide—no investigation conducted—because the police simply assumed.
Dead body. Drugs in his system. A suicide note nearby.
But the note hadn’t been written by the victim.
It was written by the killer. The killer’s landlord was the one to read about multiple murders and notice the connection.
Still, the police ignored the landlord. Port was given free rein to continue doing what he wanted to do.
Why, I wanted to know. But I couldn’t find any quick insights into Port’s psychology. The search results were overloaded with articles about the police’s baffling mishandling of the case.
While walking her border collie, a woman found one of the bodies in a churchyard.
She called the police. Several weeks later, she found a second body in the same spot.
She called the police again. I am the same woman that found the other body a few weeks ago . . . and I have found another young boy.
And still, even with bodies dead from the same apparent cause, in the same location, the police didn’t interpret the deaths as murders—and certainly not connected murders. With idiocy like that, it was easy to imagine why serial killers remained uncaught.
As soon as the thought struck, I regretted it.
Uncaught. That was terrifying. Serial killers.
That was worse. A predatory killer who murders again and again—the stuff of horror movies and sensationalist tabloids and TV shows.
It seemed so . . . 1970s. As outdated as an avocado-colored refrigerator or a macramé wall hanging.
But Port had killed his victims in 2014 and 2015.
He wasn’t one of those California sadists picking up stray bell-bottom-wearing hitchhikers.
He was someone of my generation, using a dating app to find his victims. He didn’t need to drug or deceive them into following him home.
They expected sex, most likely. But that wasn’t enough for him.
He was in pursuit of a particular experience.
Port’s description of one of his victims: like a rag doll.
Part of me wanted to pretend I couldn’t imagine such a man—never mind the person who’d killed Izzy or Sidney.
But of course I could. It didn’t take a psychology degree.
I’d known my share of aggressive, empathy-deficient men with fragile egos and short fuses.
I had no trouble imagining them as serial domestic abusers.
But take that self-entitlement and penchant for abuse, then add a warped sexual fantasy . . .
I heard footsteps and rapidly closed the window on my phone. Benjamin chuckled at the scowl still visible, evidently, on my face. “Irritating text from your ex-boyfriend?”
“Just . . . news,” I said, trying to banish the images in my head. “Politics.”
Benjamin looked around without sitting. He gestured at the paused sitcom.
“I don’t really want to watch anymore.”
“You sure?”
He picked up his socks from the floor.
“Thanks,” I said.
He was doing that more often lately. Picking up his socks. Flossing his teeth.
The hair trim Curtis had suggested for Benjamin last week—that was something a detective or judge might notice.
But not the socks. Not the used floss in the garbage can.
And certainly not the made bed, sheets tucked in and pillow centered with perfection.
Wasn’t there some Navy SEAL who gave a commencement address about that?
A mother couldn’t complain. Only wonder.
“I’m turning in,” Benjamin said, though it was only nine o’clock.
“Okay. Good night.”
I’d given up on the Netflix program and gone into the kitchen, hoping we still had some ice cream left, when my phone rang. Robert.
“I need a cop’s intuition here,” I said, a few minutes into the call. “Do you think the police are doing everything they can? I mean—two local girls. And did you hear about the twenty-year-old who went missing? That’s the girl I saw, on Green Bay Road.”
“Let it go, Abby. My hunch says that girl has nothing to do with Izzy or Sidney. You can’t begin to imagine how many people go missing.”
“How many?”
“Over twenty years in Chicago, hundreds of thousands.”
“Not hundreds of thousands.”
“Look it up. Most of them are cleared as noncriminal cases, but that still leaves a lot of missing people. Girls and women, especially.”
“There could be a killer out there, preying on young women. They should have more leads.”
“Forty percent of homicides go unsolved.”
“But not in wealthy communities with parents pressing for answers, I imagine.”
“They never found the person who murdered Harper McKibben, and she was a Winnetka girl, from a posh local family. Nannies and private schools, the whole bit.”
I’d never heard the name, but it still sent a shiver through me.
“What happened? They just gave up?”
“They never really close a case like that, but they pretty much stopped dedicating significant resources four or five years ago.”
“Anything similar between that case and the Summit girls?”
“Not at all. The McKibben case was hardcore. Seemed like a pro. Rape, bondage, blunt head trauma, disposal in a ravine. She was probably picked up by someone she trusted after her family’s private driver didn’t show up at the train station.
Middle of the day. No drugs or alcohol involved.
No private home or motel. No witnesses.”
“It’s unbelievable what people think they can get away with. Where was the McKibben girl found, exactly?”
“Fourteen miles north of her home.” That put the location only ten or so miles north of Pleasant Park. “But it was even closer to the train station where she was picked up—only a couple of miles. That’s the thing about killers. They’re generally stupid. They don’t travel too far.”
I thought of the Stephen Port case again—multiple bodies found dumped close to Port’s apartment. Reckless behavior. An allegation of rape already on his record. And even so, he avoided the police’s notice.
“I should know this stuff. Can you recommend a book?”
“I’ll give you more than a book. I’ll bring over my files.”
“I don’t think you should be showing me confidential files.”
“What, you think I can lose my job twice? Anyway, it’s all public.
From back when I was studying to become detective.
” He laughed bitterly. “I’m surprised I haven’t shredded it all.
It’s mostly FBI stuff, plus some Wisconsin and Illinois maps I marked up.
Cluster maps. Kill sites. I’ll have to dig it out of the basement.
Half of the boxes down there aren’t worth keeping. ”
It sounded like awful stuff. The last thing I wanted to read.
“As soon as you get a chance,” I said.
Robert’s call had left me with an uneasy feeling I couldn’t shake. I emptied the cheap vanilla ice cream carton of its last two spoonfuls of freezer-burned goop. I took the garbage out, came back and closed the apartment blinds, then checked twice to make sure the apartment door was locked.
I wasn’t sure why I needed to see Harper McKibben’s face, but I did. In the first online photo I found, she looked younger than the Summit girls by two or three years and childlike compared to Veronica Lovell.
Harper was short, with braces, heavy brown bangs, and splotchy skin, and in the news photo she was wearing a school uniform that was more traditional than Summit’s.
Dark green-and-black plaid skirt well past the kneecaps, white button-down blouse, white thick-cabled knee socks, penny loafers.
The word homely came to mind—shame on me for thinking the word, as if it mattered, though for the detectives it probably did.
One killer targets a certain kind of girl; another chooses a different one.
The same question in both cases—what drives a man to do something like that?
Because it was a man, surely. I didn’t need a criminology class to know how women more often killed: furtively, without a man’s bold assumption that he’d never be caught.
I couldn’t imagine any person who’d want a career dedicated to parsing the contrasts.
In any case, the Harper McKibben murder was already seven years old.
No overlap, I told myself again, wondering if this should make me feel better or worse.
I felt a sudden, desperate impulse to drink.
To call Robert to come over with his gruesome box of files and open up one beer after another until I understood why men did what they did or was drunk enough to stop asking.
I was close—oh, so very close—and then the phone rang, and it wasn’t Robert sensing my weakness.
It was Curtis, calling as he’d promised.
He said, “I’d like to see Benjamin for three hours tomorrow, if that’s okay. Starting at nine?”
“That’s fine. I’ll drop him and do some errands.”
He reminded me, “And I wanted to follow up on the hypnosis idea.”
“Yes. I talked about it with Benjamin after seeing your note. He seems curious, but he challenged me to go first.”
Curtis laughed. “Has he been challenging you more in general, since the sessions started?”
“In small ways—very visible ways—he’s behaving better. But in other ways, I feel like he’s testing me, like he wants to prove something.”
“Or maybe just to know something. Your son is a curious boy.”
Not usually, I wanted to say. I’d spent my whole life with Benj without him being curious about anything related to my life.
“I’m willing to be hypnotized, if it will help,” I said. “I was thinking we could do a session focusing on smoking cravings.”
“You still have them?”
“Unfortunately.”
Curtis hesitated. “Hypnosis isn’t usually a one-off treatment.”
“I know. I’m not expecting stellar results. It’s just to show Benjamin there’s nothing to worry about.”
“I’ll tell you what. We’ll have you do a session, and then we’ll back off and see if Benjamin feels confident enough to try hypnosis next week. Between now and then, I’ve got a long list of moving errands.”
“Could I do any of the errands for you, during Benjamin’s morning session tomorrow?”
The line went quiet for a moment.
“Boxes—I need two dozen, medium size. Printing. I already moved my good printer up to my father’s house. That was a mistake. I’m in the middle of a big edit and I need to see it on paper.”
I smiled. “I can do boxes. I can do printing.”
“It sounds like we have a plan. And one more thing. You mentioned Benjamin’s soccer accident. He had brain scans done? I’d like to see those, if possible.”
Concussions could affect behavior. But Benjamin’s concussion had happened a long time ago. “Do you think his accident caused a personality change?”
“Doubtful. The scans are just useful for looking for biological indications of certain preexisting disorders. Obviously, new scans might be a good idea, but let’s hold off for now and see what we get from looking at the old ones.
I’ve stepped away from active research, but my Menkoka Institute team gives me access to plentiful comparison data with my patients of his type. ”
“And what types are those?”
“We’ll talk about that soon. Scans first. Then I have a few more tests I want to do.”