They entered the dark building, each using Mini Maglites to help find their way through the shadows. Even though the windows lacked curtains, the glass was so grimy that little light made it through.
Using her Maglite, Prentiss searched and finally found a light switch. She flipped it, but nothing happened.
“Not a surprise,” she said.
“No wonder no one saw anything,” Morgan said. “If we can’t see out, it’s a good bet nobody can see in.”
“Where was the barrel situated?”
Morgan glanced around in the gloom, getting his bearings.
“Over there,” he said, pointing to a hallway that led to a bedroom.
The layout was fairly simple: a living room led into a small kitchen with an eating area and a tiny bedroom down the hall, which led to the second floor and two more bedrooms and a bathroom. Morgan walked the whole thing and got the feeling no one had lived here for a long, long time—nobody but an occasional homeless inhabitant, anyway.
Once he was back downstairs, he found Prentiss shining her light around the edges of the windows.
“You read the report,” Morgan said. “When was the last time someone lived here?”
“Three years ago.”
“No one since?”
“Squatters maybe, but no one on the books.” Morgan nodded. “What do we know about the corpse?”
“Other than he’s a John Doe?”
“Yeah.”
Prentiss lifted one shoulder in a tiny shrug. “He was stuffed in the barrel postmortem. The UnSub poured lime in to keep the smell down, and to hasten decomposition—of course, that means the UnSub doesn’t know that lime actually helps preservea body. I don’t know why people think lime speeds decomposition.”
“Old wives’ tale. Nasty COD?”
She nodded and raised a pale hand to her throat. “Cause of death was strangulation.”
Morgan watched Prentiss move to the next window in the front and start poking around the edges with her flashlight beam.
“What are you up to?” he asked.
She stopped and turned to face him. “One thing that wasn’t in the report was how the UnSub got inside. The door wasn’t jimmied and that barrel got in here somehow.”
Morgan nodded. “Right. He had to either have a key or he came in through a window and unlocked the door, so he could wheel the barrel in.”
They were already referring to the UnSub as “he”—these murders seemed a man’s crime, nothing about it indicated a rare female serial killer, although the lack of sexual assault left that open.
“If the UnSub had a key,” Prentiss said, forehead creased with thought, “where did he get it?”
“Or if he came in through one of the windows,” Morgan said, gesturing toward one, “why didn’t anybody see him?”
She put both shoulders into a shrug. “Late at night, probably. But with that barrel, he had to have it somewhere nearby.”
“The cops haven’t explained it?”
Prentiss shook her head. “I know it’s not supposed to be up to us to gather the evidence, but how this UnSub got into the place might tell us something about him.”
“Agreed,” Morgan said. “You keep looking here— I want to check something out.”
He went into the kitchen, where he turned the knob on a door he thought might adjoin the middle apartment; but he found a short hallway with the middle apartment’s door on the right, at the far end, and nearer, on the left, a stairway leading down.
Shining his light ahead of him, he descended ten steps into a dank basement redolent of urine and mildew.
No wonder nobody checked down here,he thought.
Cobwebs drooped everywhere but in the stairwell itself, where they had been removed. A thick layer of dust coated the floor, the furnace, and a few scraps of worthless furniture. He shone his light on the floor and saw footprints in the dust.
He used the light to follow them back to a half window on the far wall. One of two panes had been broken and the latch opened from there. The window was only about twelve inches high and twenty inches across.
Now they knew something about their UnSub: he was a lot of things, but overweight wasn’t one of them.
Morgan went back upstairs, told Prentiss what he’d found, and told her not to step on the floor. He had left the door open just in case, by some miracle, prints might turn up on the basement side.
He got out his cell phone and called Hotchner and detailed to the team leader what they had found, and suggested Lorenzon get his crime scene team back right away.
July 28 Chicago Heights, Illinois
Dr. Spencer Reid felt a little bit like the kid who had been dumped on his older brother for the day. He rode in back of the SUV with Rossi and Tovar up front. The Chicago Heights detective was behind the wheel, even though it was an FBI vehicle.
Up front, the two men were discussing baseball, the Chicago Cubs in particular, an area of expertise not among Reid’s skill set.
Rossi was saying, “You really think this is the year?”
Tovar nodded as he drove them south. “They won the division last year, didn’t they?”
“Then got spanked by Arizona.”
“Yeah, but the pitching’s better now.”
Rossi shrugged. “Believe it when I see it.”
From the backseat, Reid watched the neighborhood change as they cruised farther south from mostly Caucasian to mostly Hispanic to mostly African-American. By the time they reached their destination, however, the neighborhood had become a middle-class melting pot of variant homes and blacktop streets with no curbs and no apparent storm sewers.
Tovar drove through a neighborhood of well-tended homes that varied from ordinary single-story boxes to brick-faced two-stories that looked like they had fallen off the mansion truck and landed beside the road in the wrong neighborhood.
“Odd mix of houses,” Reid said.
“Yeah,” Tovar said. “Some of the old houses are being bought up, torn down, and replaced by newer ones. Other oldies are getting the renovation treatment.”
“Gentrification,” Rossi said. “Gotta love it.” But he clearly didn’t.
“Oh yeah,” Tovar said. “The neighborhood’s changing.”
Reid asked, “For the better?”
“Matter of opinion,” Tovar said. “Certainly isn’t better for the Andrews family.”
The Chicago detective pulled the Tahoe to a stop next to a plain but well-maintained one-story tan house surrounded by trees and bushes. “This is where the daughter was parked with her boyfriend when they were shot to death back in April.”
Reid looked around, trying to get a feel for the neighborhood. The houses were not terribly close together and they all appeared well cared for, a fairly typical middle-class neighborhood. Across the street, a park spread out before them, a parking lot on the far side of the block.
“Quiet,” Reid said.
“Too quiet, like they say in the old movies,” Tovar said. “No crimes to speak of, here.”
They climbed out of the SUV, each taking a moment to survey the area. Reid couldn’t take his eyes off the parking lot across the park. Trees shaded the cars that were nosed in, facing this direction. To see who was or was not inside those cars from there was impossible without binoculars or a high-powered camera lens. The powerlessness gave him an uneasy feeling.
Rossi asked the Chicago detective, “Did the boy and girl park alongside the house and make out, you know, as a regular thing?”
“They had been dating for a while,” Tovar said.
“I think it’s safe to say that night wasn’t the first time they’d sat there and necked, yeah.”
Reid nodded across the way. “That park would give someone an easy place to surveil the victims.”
“Of course,” Rossi said, “but how did he know they would be there on this particular night? Nothing indicates whether this was a randomly chosen couple, or one that the killer had selected and watched over time.”