Look Closer

73 Jane

Sergeants Jane Burke and Andy Tate get out of their car and head into the West Suburban Major Crimes Task Force center in Forest Park. Jane was in the station by six this morning—Day 2 of the investigation—Andy, by six-thirty.

“Harsh, yes,” says Jane.

“Doesn’t get any harsher,” says Andy. “‘I don’t love you’? ‘I never did’? ‘I needed someone different after a bad marriage’? ‘You were my bridge, that’s all you were’? I mean, cruel doesn’t get any crueler. Can you imagine someone saying that to you?”

She gives him a sidelong glance. “No,” she says. “That’s my point. It feels . . . I don’t know, staged.”

“Oh, c’mon, Janey. You really like a woman for this? You really think Lauren’s boyfriend had a wife, and the wife did this?”

Jane stops before entering the door for the task force. Their breath hangs in the cool air. “I know that that blood trail Ria showed me doesn’t lie, Andy. Somebody moved the pink phone after the murder. It had to be the offender. And if the offender was Lauren’s boyfriend, he would have to be the dumbest shit on the planet to not pick it up and take it with him.”

“And you’ve never met an offender who made a mistake.”

A couple of uniforms from Forest Park, one of whom Jane recognizes but can’t place the name, pass them on their way into the station. She steps back and nods to them.

“Yes, offenders make mistakes, but it’s not like the offender ignored it or was so freaked out that he missed it. That I could understand.” She steps forward, lowering her voice. “But he didn’t miss it. He focused on it. He paid careful attention to it. He gently, carefully nudged that phone under the table. It took deliberation, Andy. It took care. It took conscious thought. That whole time he—or she—is carefully pushing that phone under the table, it never occurred to him—or her—that hey, this phone is really incriminating, probably better I scoop it up and take it with me? Or smash it into thirty thousand pieces at least?”

“So it was a woman, the lover’s wife?” says Andy. “She kills two birds with one stone. She kills Lauren and frames her husband. All because a phone got moved not once, but twice?”

“Maybe it’s not a smoking gun, I grant you,” she says. “But something doesn’t fit.”

“A woman picked up Lauren and chucked her over the side, while she’s kicking and screaming.”

“Who said she was kicking and screaming? The blow to the head could have knocked her out. She’s unconscious, the offender gets the noose around Lauren’s neck and chucks her over the side. It might not be the easiest thing, but plenty of women could pull that off. Just—just do me a favor and keep an open mind.”

“Here you go, Jane.” Marta Glasgow, from Major Crimes forensics, pops up the image on her computer screen. “That’s it. That’s your boot.”

Jane leans over Marta’s shoulder, peering at the screen. “A . . . Peak Explorer.”

“Right. The brand is Paul Roy. They have a Peak collection, and this is the Explorer. See the treads?”

On the right side of the split screen is the bottom of the boot, a diagonal tread with a strip down the middle, a triangular shape of a mountain peak, filled by small treads of the same shape.

“A Paul Roy Peak Explorer.”

“Yup. Men’s size thirteen.”

“And you’re sure.”

“Yup. Matches the dental stone cast and the photographs from the impressions on the front door. Good thing for you it rained that afternoon. Just enough to moisten the mud behind the shrubs by the window.”

“Any idea how old these shoes are?” Jane asks.

Marta laughs. “I’m not a miracle worker, Jane. But I will say this much. The treads weren’t very worn. The shoes could’ve been new or not used very often.”

“Thanks, Marta.”

Jane dares to glance at Andy. “Don’t even say it.”

He leans into her. “A woman with a man’s size thirteen foot?”

“Do you have any idea how many calls I’ve gotten in just twenty-four hours? People are incredibly upset. Some are scared.” The Village president, Alex Galanis, hikes a knee up on a chair inside the chief’s office. “I’ve had more than one person say to me they moved here from Chicago to get away from this kind of violence.”

“I think they’re overreacting, Alex,” says Chief Carlyle. “My statement said the public was not in danger.”

“That statement wasn’t strong enough. Do we have a suspect or a person of interest at least?” Galanis sighs, plays with his tie. Alex Galanis is a downtown lawyer in his second term as village president. The word around town is he’s being groomed for a shot at the state senate in 2024. Jane knew his younger brother, Nikos, in high school.

“Sergeant Burke has been running this investigation around the clock,” says the chief. “She’s our best. Jane, why don’t you take that?”

Her instinct is to appreciate the chief letting her field the question, giving her the rope to do her job and take the credit. But credit can quickly turn to blame, and that rope to a noose.

“It seems clear to us that this was personal,” she says. “We have text messages from a prepaid burner phone. Love notes. She was having an affair. And the text messages indicate that she’d just broken things off. So that gives us a pretty clear motive. Finding the person on the other end of those phone calls is the challenge.”

Jane doesn’t think it’s quite that simple, but the summary is accurate enough.

“Well, that’s good, at least, the personal part.” Galanis throws up a hand. “We don’t have some roving serial killer or something. And you think this killer . . . might have killed himself?”

“Well, sir, his last text to her, after she was dead, sure seemed like a suicide note, yes.”

Galanis nods, not wanting to hope for someone’s death, but it would obviously eliminate any further violence in his town. “So how long will this take?”

“I wish I could say, sir.”

“Weeks? Months?”

“I hope not. It’s too early.”

“So it could take months?”

“It will take as long as it takes, sir,” she says, steeling herself.

“Oh, it won’t be months, Alex,” the chief intervenes. “Sergeant Burke is very methodical. We’re hopeful it won’t take long at all. But we can’t guarantee anything.”

“You know what everyone’s going to say,” says Galanis. “They’re going to say we’re dealing with a small-town batch of keystone cops. We’re in over our heads. Are we?” He looks around. “Are we?”

“Of course not. We’re working with the FBI and with WESTAF, the West Suburban Major Crimes Task Force. And we have full manpower on this.”

That doesn’t seem to satisfy the Village president. “I want daily updates.” He buttons his suit coat and leaves the office.

The chief looks at Jane and winks. “Another satisfied customer. Who’s doing the CSLI with us? WESTAF or the FBI?”

“FBI,” says Jane. “I know an agent there who can decode that stuff like the back of her hand.”

“Okay. And that’ll be today?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Oh and, Jane—what did Grace Park just send over to us? A bunch of file boxes.”

“Everything they have on Simon Dobias,” says Jane.

“That’s the . . . guy who filed that complaint back in ’04?”

“Right.”

“He’s still in town? Grace Park?”

“According to property tax records, he is.”

“So you think there might be something to that? That was a long time ago.”

“I know,” says Jane. “I know this guy a little. Went to high school with him.”

“And you could see him doing this?”

“Oh, well, it’s been so long. I never really knew him.”

“Yeah, but tell him that story you told me, Jane,” says Andy Tate. “From high school. That story about Mitchell Kitchens.”

74 Jane

“Simon and I were freshmen together,” says Jane. “I didn’t know him well. We had some classes together. He was this little guy. He grew a lot by senior year, and he was a pretty good runner, one of those skinny track guys. But back when Simon was first entering high school, he was this small, skinny, shy, super-smart kid. And he got picked on.”

“Sounds right,” says the chief.

“When we were freshmen, there was this senior named Mitchell Kitchens,” she says. “Big wrestler. Like the best in the state at his weight class. I was dating a sophomore on the wrestling team back then, and to him, to the younger kids, Mitchell Kitchens was like this god, right? This senior stud wrestler? All-state, looking at a scholarship, that whole thing?”

“Okay,” says Chief Carlyle.

“So apparently, Mitchell bullied Simon pretty badly. This all came out afterward.”

“After what?”

“Well, so here’s the story. Apparently, Mitchell would pick on Simon. They said when Simon got off the bus every morning, Mitchell would pick him up and throw him.”

“He’d— What do you mean, ‘throw him’?”

“I mean, like, pick him up by the shirt collar and belt and toss him through the air.”

“Like one of those dwarf-toss contests they used to do in bars?”

“I don’t know. But yeah, Mitchell apparently treated it like a contest. How far could he toss the little freshman today?”

“Jesus. And nobody stopped him?”

Jane shrugs. “He didn’t do it in front of the whole school or anything. The wrestlers used this small gym right by the school entrance. They’d go in there, and Mitchell would do his daily toss, and his wrestling buddies would laugh along. And I guess Simon never complained.”

“Nice.”

“The other thing, apparently—Simon would bring a lunch to school every day and it included a bottle of Gatorade. Well, apparently, Mitchell used to take it. He’d walk up to his lunch table and say, like, ‘Did you bring my Gatorade?’ At least that’s how I heard it. Later. After everything.”

“So maybe you should get to the good part, Jane.”

“Right. It was wrestling season, the end of the season, and I guess they called it ‘regionals.’ Like, the playoffs for wrestling, the next stop is the state championship.”

“The semifinals, regionals, whatever.”

“I guess. Anyway, Mitchell Kitchens, this big-time wrestler, has made it to regionals. But he’s up against another guy who’s also supposed to be great. Same weight class. It’s, like, the battle of the titans or something. My boyfriend at the time, he was so excited. We were hosting regionals at Grace Consolidated. It was Friday night. Apparently, there were college scouts there, too. The best wrestling colleges in the country. Like, Iowa, I remember, had someone there, and that was apparently a big deal.”

“Okay.”

“It was the craziest thing. The bleachers were packed, everyone was excited, all these pumped-up muscle heads running around in these ridiculous tight little costumes that looked like ballerina outfits.”

“And . . .” The chief rolls his hand. “Mitchell Kitchens wrestled this other big wrestler?”

“Well, that’s the thing,” says Jane. “He didn’t. They made this big announcement. Mitchell was disqualified after the drug test. He tested positive for a banned substance.”

The chief sits back in his chair, his tongue peeking out, eyes narrowed.

“I don’t remember the drug,” she goes on. “Chloro-something. I remember it sounded like chloroform. It was some diuretic or a— They called it a ‘masking agent.’ Like, a drug you take to hide the presence of other illegal drugs—”

“A masking agent, right. I’ve heard of them. But what does that have to do with your guy Simon—” The chief drops his chin. “Oh. Are you about to tell me that this boy, Simon Dobias, put a banned substance into his own Gatorade, knowing that Mitchell Kitchens would steal it and drink it?”

“That’s certainly what Mitchell claimed,” Jane says.

“That’s . . . Well, it’s—”

“Diabolical,” says Andy Tate. “No other word for it.”

“And they could prove all this?” the chief asks.

“That Simon spiked his own Gatorade? Oh, gosh, no. How could they prove it? Those drugs stay in your system for several days. Simon could have slipped something into one of the Gatorade bottles Michell took earlier in the week. Several days before the drug test. By the time the drug test came back positive, that empty bottle of Gatorade was long gone, probably in some landfill or under heaps of garbage, even assuming you could’ve discovered traces of drugs in it. There was no way to prove it. Mitchell was sure of it, and a lot of people thought it could’ve happened, but no—there was no way to prove it.”

“Right.” The chief smiles begrudgingly. “Right.”

“Mitchell tried. His family tried. But part of the problem was, to even tell the story, he had to explain why Simon would do something like that. Mitchell had to admit that he routinely stole from a younger kid’s lunch. He said Simon voluntarily gave him his drink every day, but c’mon—nobody believed that. Simon himself said Mitchell would take it every day. Everyone who ate lunch at his table, eight or ten people, confirmed it.”

“Sure, of course.” The chief nods. “Wow. To point the finger at Simon, to show a motive, Mitchell has to admit he bullied the shit out of this kid.”

“Exactly. So now consider Simon’s version,” says Jane. “All he had to do was deny it. He doesn’t know anything about those drugs. He doesn’t know anything about wrestling meets or anti-doping tests. He’s just a nerdy bookworm. Nobody could prove otherwise.”

“And the wrestler, Mitchell, got nowhere with his story.”

“The only place he got was making himself look even worse. All Mitchell proved, after the school investigated, was that he was tormenting a smaller, much younger kid. It didn’t exactly paint him in a sympathetic light. By the time the school was done investigating, Simon was looking like a victim, not a perp.”

“Which he was, actually.”

“Oh, yeah. He was the victim of severe bullying. And you should’ve seen what happened when Mitchell got hold of Simon after the meet. Like, the next Monday, at school. That’s when everything came to a head.”

“What happened?”

“Well, I wasn’t there, but I heard about it. Everybody heard about it. Mitchell was standing there when Simon got off the school bus. He went for Simon right away. Threw him down and started pounding on him. This huge senior beating on a little freshman half his size. The school cop came out and tried to peel Mitchell off him. He punched the cop, too.”

“Mitchell punched the cop?”

“Oh, yeah, by the time it was over, other squad cars had pulled up. It was a whole scene, I guess. They had to use a Taser on him. Mitchell got taken away in handcuffs.”

“Was he arrested? Charged?”

“Yes and yes,” says Jane. “Simon refused to pursue charges, but forget about Simon—Mitchell had punched a cop. And he was seventeen, so he could be charged as an adult. Aggravated battery and resisting. He didn’t serve any time. The judge let him off with probation. But he got kicked out of school and got a felony conviction. I think he . . . I heard he works in construction now.”

The chief takes this all in, shakes his head, and leans forward. “Okay, so maybe just maybe, Simon Dobias is some evil genius. Diabolical,” he adds, nodding to Andy Tate, using his word. “He lulled this bully into basically injuring himself by stealing a spiked drink.”

“And in a way that made it almost impossible to prove,” says Jane. “And forced the bully to basically admit to his bullying to even tell the story.”

“He got him good,” says Andy Tate. “He got him every which way.”

“Okay, and then there’s his father’s death in St. Louis in, what, 2010?” says the chief. “Why does St. Louis P.D. think Simon Dobias killed his father?”

“To understand the story of Ted Dobias’s death in 2010,” says Jane, “we have to go back to 2004. The complaint Simon filed with Grace Park P.D. It ties this all together.”

75 Jane

“Okay, I’m with you so far,” says the chief. “So in 2002, Simon Dobias’s mother has a stroke, a bad one, she’s basically an invalid, living at home in a wheelchair, can hardly take care of herself.”

“Right,” says Jane.

“And the dad—Ted, is it?”

“Yes, sir. Theodore Dobias, sounds like he went by Ted.”

The chief waves a hand. “Ted’s hit it big on some personal-injury lawsuit, has a lot of money, and he’s feeling like Mr. Big Shot now with his cash and success, so he decides having a wife who can’t hardly feed herself isn’t so conducive to his lifestyle of the rich and famous, and he wants some arm candy on the side. I’m right so far?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And he basically blows all that money and can’t afford to care for his wife the way she needs caring.”

“Well, ‘blowing the money’ is not how Simon put it,” says Jane. “Simon Dobias said the money was stolen.”

“Stolen by who?”

Jane glances at Andy before she answers the chief.

“Stolen by Lauren Lemoyne,” she says.

The chief stares at her. “Lauren. Our victim Lauren?”

“Lauren Lemoyne, now Lauren Betancourt, yes.”

“She stole the Dobias family’s money?” He slaps his hand on the desk. “She was the arm candy?”

“Yes and yes,” says Jane. “Lauren Lemoyne was Ted’s ‘arm candy,’ as you put it. They worked together at the same law firm. He was the senior partner, she was some young, beautiful paralegal. The cliché writes itself.”

“No shit.”

“No shit,” says Jane. “Apparently, Simon found them together in Ted’s office one night having sex. And the affair continued after that. Ted wouldn’t break it off. He was in love.”

“The complaint Simon Dobias filed was for theft, fraud, whatever Simon could think of,” Andy Tate chimes in. “He wanted Grace Park P.D. to arrest Lauren. He claimed she seduced Ted, had a long affair with him, convinced him that she was in love with him, and convinced him of one other thing, too—to put her name on the money-market account.”

“And did they?” the chief asks. “Arrest her?”

Jane shrugs. “There was no crime. Ted put her name on the account. She was made a signatory with full access. She had just as much a right to that money as Ted did, legally.”

The chief runs his tongue along his cheek, thinking this over. “How much she steal?”

“Over six million dollars,” says Jane. “Wiped the account clean. All of Ted’s—virtually all of the family’s money was consolidated into that account. She took every penny.”

“Jay-sus.” The chief shakes his head. “So she takes off, leaves the family in financial ruin, unable to support the mom.”

“Well, they certainly didn’t have the money to afford around-the-clock care anymore,” says Jane. “They decided on a nursing home.”

“And then she killed herself. Because of the affair?”

“Well, probably all of it,” Jane says. “She could hardly take care of herself, her husband was stepping out on her, the money was all gone, and she was headed for a nursing home—and who knows her mental state after having a stroke? But yeah, the affair could’ve been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Lauren left some real carnage behind.” She opens her hands. “So now you understand why St. Louis PD is so sure he killed his father.”

“Yeah, he strayed from Mom and brought a lioness into the den.”

“And you can see why he had plenty of motive to kill Lauren Betancourt. She didn’t just screw his father and break his mother’s heart. That might be enough right there for some people.”

“But she did a lot more than that,” says the chief. “Simon probably blames Lauren Betancourt for the death of his mother and the destruction of his family.”

76 Jane

“Do I think Simon Dobias killed his dad? Yes, I do.”

Jane, Andy, and Chief Carlyle sit in front of the chief’s laptop, on a Zoom conference with a lieutenant in the St. Louis P.D. named Brenda Tarkington, and with Rick Gully, now retired and living in Wyoming.

“I’m with Brenda on that,” says Gully. “During final exams week his senior year in college, he drove down to St. Louis, clubbed Ted Dobias over the head with a wine bottle, then stabbed him in the stomach while he was down on the ground near his swimming pool and pushed him into the pool. Then he drove back up to Chicago and called up his shrink early that morning to confess his sins. Only, we couldn’t force the shrink to talk to us because of the privilege. Courts ruled against us. Even though he hadn’t talked to his shrink for a few years, the courts said he was still contacting her in a ‘patient-therapist capacity.’”

“And without that,” says Jane, “you couldn’t prove it?”

“We had no physical evidence,” says Gully. “The knife didn’t yield any prints. We pulled a print off the wine bottle and found some female DNA on a wineglass, but the print didn’t get a hit in the NCIC or match Simon’s prints, and the DNA database was a dead end, too. It was probably a weapon of opportunity; a bottle of wine Ted had shared with a lady friend some time earlier. And other than that . . .”

“It’s not like we had the tools we have now,” adds Lieutenant Tarkington. “Simon had some old model car, so there was no GPS function, no memory to prove where he’d driven that night, or even if he’d driven the car that night. The interstate didn’t have POD cameras like now. If he stopped for gas, he didn’t use a credit card. And we checked, I’d bet, damn near all the security cameras of every gas station off the interstate between St. Louis and Chicago. Some had taped over the footage that night by the time we asked for it. Some didn’t really have functioning cameras, just used ’em for show. The ones that had working cameras and still had the footage—we never saw Simon Dobias in any of the footage.”

“We couldn’t disprove what he said, that he was home all night studying,” Rick Gully adds. “There was no way to show that wasn’t true. D.A. didn’t have a case.”

“He had a receipt, I think, for a pizza he ordered,” says Tarkington. “Right?”

Yes. Jane saw that in the case file they sent over.

“Yeah, shit, I’d forgotten all about that.” Gully laughs. “That’s how we got our time window. He signed a credit card slip for a pizza delivery at some specific time in the evening, early evening, like around five p.m. The pizza delivery guy confirmed that Simon Dobias answered the door and paid for the pizza. Left him a really big tip, too, I remember.”

Jane smirks. He left a big tip so he’d be memorable to the pizza guy.

“This guy is good,” whispers Andy Tate.

“So when we took that time and compared it against the time he showed up for his final exam the following morning at eight a.m.,” says Tarkington, “he barely had enough time to drive down to St. Louis, stab his father with a kitchen knife, and drive back up to Chicago and show up for that final exam. Just barely enough time.”

“Just about a perfect alibi,” says Gully.

“No other suspects?” Jane asks.

“None we could find. The dad had money, but there was no robbery. A lot of big companies probably hated him because he sued them and got huge awards, but big companies don’t murder plaintiff’s lawyers. They’d probably like to, but another one would just pop up and take his place.”

“Ted Dobias didn’t have a girlfriend at the time,” says Tarkington. “From what we could tell, he was paranoid about women. He had some escorts he used, some working girls. But no real relationships. Probably because of Lauren Lemoyne stealing his money, as we later found out from Grace Park P.D.”

“Besides,” Gully chimes in, “we settled on Simon pretty quickly. First thought, of course, a rich guy’s murdered, who benefits? Who’s the heir? It was Simon. Stood to inherit, what, sixteen, seventeen million? But we came to find, Simon and his dad never talked after Ted moved to St. Louis. Not a phone call. Not a Christmas card. So Simon, as far as we could tell, probably didn’t even know he was inheriting the money, or how much.”

“The money wasn’t what did it,” says Tarkington. “It was him. Simon himself. When we interviewed him, the guy was cold. I remember thinking that—ice cold. Emotionless. And then we find out from Grace Park P.D. about the complaint Simon filed against Lauren Lemoyne back in 2004—how Ted cheated on Simon’s mother and let Lauren waltz off with all the money, and his mother’s suicide, and, you know, Simon was institutionalized for a while not long after her death—”

“Yep, read that.”

“—and then we hear all about the shit he pulled with the wrestler and the spiked Gatorade. And then we come to find out, the morning after Ted’s death, Simon’s making a phone call to his therapist at the crack of dawn, the first call he’s made to her in years.”

“Lots of bells and whistles, but no proof,” says Jane. “The thing I don’t get, though—why do it in 2010? His mother died in 2004. He goes into a mental institution for, what, eighteen, twenty months or so? That’s still just 2006. Why wait four more years to do it? And why pick the week of his college final exams?”

A pause. Jane has silenced everyone on the call with that question.

Then Brenda Tarkington lets loose with a loud chuckle. Gully breaks into laughter as well.

“I say something funny?”

“No, Sergeant, not at all. No disrespect intended,” says Tarkington. “It’s just that we asked ourselves that same question. Why wait all that time? Time passes, he moves on, he’s about to get his degree from a fancy undergrad and go on to a fancy law school. He’s ready to rock and roll. Why pick then to get revenge on Daddy?”

“And what was your answer?”

“Those questions are the answer,” says Gully. “Because we’d ask those very questions and discount him as a suspect. Why wait so long before doing it? Why pick a time when he’s in the heat of final exams and it would be incredibly inconvenient, borderline impossible, to pull it off? And when he’s about to go on to law school and a successful life?”

“He played a long game.”

“Oh, yeah, Sergeant,” says Gully. “He played a very long game.”

“Seems like that’s his MO,” Tarkington adds. “He waited for the right opportunity to screw over that wrestler who was bullying him, too.”

“But the thing with his father feels different,” Andy Tate chimes in. “With the wrestler, man, he really stuck it to him. He used his bullying against him. He manipulated this bully into hurting himself and then having to admit to his bullying. His father—it wasn’t manipulative.”

“Well, he couldn’t manipulate things the same way with his father,” says Tarkington. “His dad was too far away. They were totally estranged. He’d have to spend too much time down in St. Louis putting together some plan, learning all about his father’s new life down there, and he’d have to explain why he was spending so much time in St. Louis. No, with his dad, it was different. The best he could do there was give himself a solid alibi and pull it off himself.”

“Or maybe that one was so personal, he wanted to do it himself,” says Jane.

“Yeah, sure, that could be, too.” Gully wags a finger at them. “But the more we interviewed him and the more Grace Park P.D. helped us learn about that wrestler—our take? He’s a manipulator first and foremost. Brenda’s right. He didn’t have the resources to orchestrate some scheme down in St. Louis, or else he would have.”

Jane sits back and nods, looks at Andy for any other questions.

“Listen, guys,” says Gully. “If you like him for Lauren’s murder, and you probably should, you better be ready for him to have a solid alibi, and you better be ready to push the envelope. He plays a long game, like you said. He plans out everything. He won’t leave a trace of his own fingerprints.”

Tarkington nods and smiles. “He’ll orchestrate the whole thing,” she says, “so that someone else is doing his dirty work without even realizing it.”