I opened my satchel, booted the computer and pulled up the Tribune clips I'd downloaded the night before in the Rocky's library. I scrolled through the stories on the Smathers case until I found the paragraph describing the discovery of the body by a zoo docent cutting through the park on the way from his girlfriend's apartment. The boy had been found in a snow-covered clearing where the Italian-American League's bocce tournaments were held in the summer. The story said the clearing off Clark near Wisconsin was within sight of the red barn, which was part of the city's farm in the zoo.
Traffic was light and we were in the park within ten minutes. I told the driver to cut over to Clark and to pull to the side when we got to Wisconsin.
The snow on the field was fresh and there were only a few tracks across it. It also stood about three inches high on the boards of the benches along the walkway. This area of the park seemed completely deserted. I got out of the cab and walked into the clearing, not expecting anything but in a way expecting something. I didn't know exactly what. Maybe just a feeling. Halfway across I came upon a grouping of tracks in the snow that cut across my intended path from left to right. I crossed these and came upon another grouping heading right to left, the party having headed back the way it had come. Kids, I thought. Maybe going to the zoo. If it was open. I looked toward the red barn and that was when I noticed the flowers at the base of a towering oak twenty yards away.
I walked toward the tree and instinctively knew what I was seeing. A one-year anniversary noted with flowers. When I got to the tree I saw that the flowers-bright red roses splashed like blood on the snow-were fake, made of wood shavings. In the cleft made by the first branching of the tree's trunk I saw that someone had propped a small studio photo of a smiling boy, his elbows on a table and his hands propped against his cheeks. He wore a red jacket and white shirt with a very small blue bow tie. The family had been here, I guessed. I wondered why they hadn't placed their memorial at the boy's grave.
I looked around. The lagoons near the barn were iced over and there were a couple of skaters. No one else. I looked over to Clark Street and saw the cab waiting. Across the street from it a brick tower rose. I saw that the sign on the awning out front said HEMINGWAY HOUSE. It was the place the zoo docent had come from before finding the small boy's body.
I looked back at the photo propped in the tree's cleft and without any hesitation reached up and took it down. It was sealed in plastic like a driver's license to protect it from the elements. On the back of it was written the boy's name but nothing else. I slid the photo into the pocket of my long coat. I knew that someday I might need it to run with the story.
The cab felt as welcome and warm to me as a living room with a fireplace. I began scrolling through the Tribune stories while we drove on to Area Three.
The major facts of the case were as horrifying as those in the Theresa Lofton killing. The boy had been lured from a fenced recreation center at a Division Street elementary school. He and two others had gone out to make snowballs. When the teacher noticed they were missing from the classroom, she went out and rounded the boys up. But by then Bobby Smathers was gone. The two twelve-year-old witnesses proved unable to tell police investigators what happened. According to them, Bobby Smathers simply disappeared. They looked up from their work in the snow and didn't see him. They suspected he was hiding and waiting to ambush them, so they didn't go looking.
Bobby was found a day later in the snowbank near the bocce clearing in Lincoln Park. Weeks of full-time investigation headed by Detective John Brooks, who caught the case as lead investigator, never got any closer than the explanation of the two twelve-year-olds: Bobby Smathers had simply disappeared that day at the school.
As I reviewed the stories I looked for similarities to Lofton. There were few. She was a white female adult and he a black male child. As far different in terms of prey as would seem possible. But both were missing for more than twenty-four hours before being found and the mutilated bodies of both victims were found in city parks. Lastly, both had been at children's centers on their last day. The boy at his school, the woman at the day care center where she worked. I didn't know the significance of these connections but they were all I had.
The Area Three headquarters was an orange-brick fortress. It was a two-story sprawling building that also housed the Cook County First Municipal District Court. There was a steady stream of citizens going in and out of the smoked-glass doors. I pushed through the doors to a lobby where the floor was wet with melted snow. The front counter was made of matching brick. Somebody could drive a car through the glass doors and they still wouldn't get to the cops behind the counter. The citizens standing in front of it were another matter.
I looked at the stairs to my right. I knew from memory that they led to the detective bureau and was tempted to ignore procedure and head up. But I decided against it. You break even the mundane rules with the cops and they can get testy. I stepped up to one of the cops behind the counter. He eyed the computer bag slung over my shoulder.
"You moving in with us, are you?"
"No, this is just a computer," I said. "Detective Lawrence Washington. I'd like to speak with him."
"And you are?"
"My name's Jack McEvoy. He doesn't know me."
"You have an appointment?"
"No. It's about the Smathers case. You can tell him that."
The cop's eyebrows climbed an inch up his forehead.
"Tell you what, open up the bag and let's check the computer while I make the call."
I did what he asked, opening up the computer the way they used to make me do at airports. I turned it on, turned it off and put it away. The cop watched with the phone to his ear while talking to someone I assumed was a secretary. I figured that mentioning Smathers would at least get me through the preliminary round.
"Got a citizen down here to see Larry Legs about the kid."
He listened a few moments and then hung up.
"Second floor. Up the stairs, to your left, go down the hall, last door. Says Homicide. He's the black guy."
"Thanks."
As I headed up the stairs I thought about how the cop had simply referred to Smathers as "the kid" and whoever he had spoken to had understood what he meant. It told me a lot about the case, more than what had been in the newspapers. Cops try their best to depersonalize their cases. They are like serial killers in that way. If the victim is not a person who lived and breathed and hurt, he can't haunt you. Calling a victim "the kid" is the opposite of that practice. It told me that a year later the case still had a strong hold on Area Three.
The homicide squad room was about the size of half a tennis court and had dark green industrial carpet. There were three work pods consisting of five desks each. Two pairs of desks faced each other and the fifth, the sergeant's desk, was pushed in at the end. Along the wall to my left were row after row of file cabinets with locking bars running through the pull handles. Along the far wall, behind the work pods, were two offices with glass windows looking out on the squad room. One was the lieutenant's office. The other looked like an interview room. There was a table in there and I could see a man and a woman in the room eating sandwiches off deli paper unwrapped and used as place mats. Besides those two there were three others at desks in the room and a secretary sat behind a desk near the door.
"You want to see Larry?" she said to me.
I nodded and she pointed to the man sitting at a desk on the far side of the room. He was alone in the pod. I headed over. He didn't look up from his paperwork, even when I got to him.
"It snowing out there yet?" he asked.
"Not yet. But it's going to."