Page 70 of What Boys Learn

“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.”

“Nothundredsof 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 wordhomelycame 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?”