The Innocence Game Part 10

"Please."

She kissed me on the cheek and traced the curve of my face. "It would never work, anyway." Her voice hovered now, barely above a tipsy whisper.

"I know."

"But it could have been fun."

"Maybe it's better not to talk about it."

She was quiet again, and we listened to the surf.

"Friends?" she said.

"For sure."

We sat in the dark and watched the waves, a mostly empty bottle and our stillborn romance lying on the sand between us. After a while, it got too cold, even for Sarah. I offered her my jacket, and she took it. We held hands and walked the rest of the way back to campus. I made sure she found her car. Then I walked home. My head hurt from the alcohol, and I wondered how well I'd sleep. But it wasn't a problem. I closed my eyes and the waves were there, heavy and thick, sweeping me into the deep reaches of the lake, where I waited for the rip to take me under.

18.

I woke to the sound of a knock downstairs. Jake Havens was at my front door.

"It's Sunday morning, Havens. What do you want?"

"Thought we'd pick up Sarah and grab some breakfast. Unless, of course, she's already here?" He shot a playful look up the stairs.

"f.u.c.k you." I pushed him into the kitchen. "Wait here while I get dressed."

I pulled on some clothes, listening for footsteps as Havens explored my house. But I found him right where I'd left him, at the kitchen table, reading the morning Trib.

"Still nothing about the body in the cave," he said and pushed the paper across. "By the way, why do you have me copying things when you have a photographic memory?"

"I don't have a photographic memory."

"Show me what you came up with."

"What about Sarah?"

"She can wait."

I pulled out my notes. Havens pored through them while I made coffee. When he'd finished, he stacked the pages into a neat pile and folded his hands over them.

"Good stuff, Joyce. Stuff I can use."

"I'm thrilled."

Sarcasm appeared to be yet another thing that had no effect on my cla.s.smate.

"You want to see what I'm working on?" he said.

"Lead on."

We walked out to his car. Havens popped the trunk. Inside were three Bankers Boxes. I lifted one out. Heavy. Scrawled in Magic Marker on the side were names, dates, and case numbers.

"I've been busy," Havens said with a grin.

"No kidding. What do we got here?"

"Let's bring them inside."

We lugged the boxes into my living room.

"Did Sarah tell you about the records center?" I said.

"She said everything in the files was cut up and blacked out. Tell me about the cops that stopped you."

I gave him the firsthand account. Havens listened closely.

"Someone's worried," he said.

"My thoughts exactly."

He opened one of the boxes and began to remove files.

"What is all this?" I said.

"Ever heard of ViCAP?"

"No."

"Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. It's an FBI program that a.n.a.lyzes crimes and sorts them into different categories."

"What kind of categories?"

"All kinds. Guys that like to tie up their victims. Ones that like to use a knife. Strangle. Different variations of s.e.xual a.s.sault. ViCAP identifies the signature of a crime and then matches it up with similar cases. Gives the police a way to look for patterns."

"And you have access to ViCAP?"

"One of my law profs at Chicago does. I told him I wanted to get a jump on the a.s.sholes from Evanston." Havens winked. "He let me run Harrison's case through the system. Pretty interesting."

Havens pulled out a laptop and powered it up. "I punched in all the signature details I could think of. Age of the victim. Kidnapping. School. Proximity to water. Strangulation, drowning. Some evidence of a knife."

"Yeah?"

"Then I ran a search in the Chicagoland area. Anything within a five-year window of Skylar Wingate."

My head felt heavy, and my skin itched. I wanted Havens to get to the punch line. The barrister in him, however, was nothing if not methodical.

"I picked five years because I thought it was a reasonable amount of time to expect a killer to be active. If you look at the research on most serial killers-"

"What did you find, Jake?"

Havens pointed to two case numbers highlighted in a doc.u.ment he'd opened up on his laptop. "Two cases. Within three years of Wingate's death."

"How close are they?"

"You tell me." Havens reached into one of the boxes and pulled out a folder with a green tab. On the cover was a picture of a kid, smiling in his Little League uniform. "Nineteen ninety-six. Billy Scranton from Indiana. Ran away when he was thirteen. Six months later, they found him partially buried in the forest preserve. Maybe a mile from Skylar. He'd been drowned. Possibly strangled."

A second jacket hit the table. On the cover was a blurry shot of a black kid.

"Ninety-seven. Richmond Allen. Fourteen. Another runaway, from Texas. They found him in a wooded area on the South Side. Twenty miles from Caldwell Woods, but near a lake. He had a rope around his neck. Just like Skylar. And water in his lungs."

"No one ever connected the cases?"

Havens shook his head.

"And they're still unsolved?"

"That's where it gets interesting." Havens opened up a second box and pulled out a stack of red-tabbed folders. Where did he get all this s.h.i.+t? And where did he get the time?

"Both cases were 'solved.' " Havens made quote marks in the air with his fingers. "Remember, this was still the early days of DNA. Very difficult. Very expensive. Barely understood."

"So no DNA requests in either case?"

"That's right. In the Scranton case, they nailed the guy with fibers that allegedly came from his car and his coat. Wayne Williams sort of thing. Guy from Atlanta."

"I know who Wayne Williams is."

"In the Allen case, it was blood typing."

"What about witnesses?"

"No witnesses other than experts and cops. Public defenders in both trials."

"And where are the guys that got convicted?"

"One got life. The other got the needle. I'd give you their names, but it doesn't matter."

"Like h.e.l.l it doesn't matter. We can talk to them. If we can establish their innocence and link them up with Wingate ..."

"They were both killed in prison. After less than a year inside. My prof knew a guy from the Department of Corrections who was able to get me some details."

Havens turned the laptop around so I could read his notes. An inmate named Michael Laramore was found in his cell, strangled with a length of packing wire. A second inmate, Jason Tyson, was discovered in the prison shop area at Stateville. He had five masonry nails through his forehead. With James Harrison, that made three convictions and three bodies.

"What the f.u.c.k?" I said.

"No s.h.i.+t. You got any coffee left?"

Havens and I walked into my kitchen. He insisted on making a fresh pot, so I showed him where everything was. Then I went back into the living room and picked through his work. It wasn't hard to understand why Havens was number one at the University of Chicago Law School. While Sarah and I had cobbled together a dozen pages of half-remembered thoughts, our cla.s.smate had developed a plausible theory linking Wingate to two more murders, generated impressive backup, and summarized the salient points in a series of short memos. He came back into the living room with a hot cup of joe. I was leafing through the autopsy report on Billy Scranton. Underneath it was an initial police report. The Allen file contained a similar stash of doc.u.ments.

"How'd you get all this case information?" I said.

"ViCAP allows you to access material from the actual murder file without making a direct request. Check this out." Havens pulled out copies of two photos and put them side by side.

"What are these?" I said.

"Bite marks. Both of these kids were bitten during the attack."

I stared at the pale bruised flesh. "Wingate's autopsy said he might have been bitten."

"I know." Havens tossed the photos on top of the other doc.u.ments.

"Should they have caught this pattern?" I said. "Back in the day, I mean."

"Be kind of tough. These crimes were spread out over three years. And remember, the locals didn't have access to ViCAP back then to sort it all out."

"I guess," I said.

Havens took a sip and made a face. "How old are these beans?"

"Forget about the beans. What should we do with all of this?"

"We can put in a request with the county for the physical evidence on these two. But I'm betting they sanitized them, just like Wingate."

"Who's 'they'?"

"Whoever's behind the cover-up." Havens sat down at the table. "I've been thinking about this."

I gestured to the stacks of information surrounding us. "I can tell."

"We agree these three might have been the work of a single killer?"

"Agreed."

"And whoever he is, he's no longer active. Probably dead."

"Fourteen years ago, I don't know that he's dead, but probably not active."

"My point is this. Someone downtown framed these three guys and got away with it."

"Do you even know anyone downtown, Havens? I mean one person? One name?"