Look Closer

78 Jane

“Thanks for this, Dee. I owe you big time.”

“No worries. Sounds like time is of the essence, so let’s get to it.” Special Agent Dee Meadows shows Jane Burke and Andy Tate into a conference room at the FBI field office. “You guys deal with CSLI much?”

“Don’t have too much occasion to,” says Jane. “But we get the gist. Your cell phone sends a signal, it pings off a cell tower, usually the nearest cell tower, and that cell tower keeps a record of the ping—which phone and when, down to the minute and second. So we can track a phone’s movements, which means we can track its owner’s movements. The phone company gave us the historical cell-site location information for Lauren Betancourt’s pink burner phone and for the phone she was communicating with. And we gave it to you for analysis.”

“Yep, that about covers it.” Dee Meadows works mostly in forensics these days but, once upon a time, did a fair amount of field work with Jane’s mother. “So first off,” says Meadows, “let’s talk about the history of their communications but leave out Halloween night, which seems different.”

“Sure.”

“Okay, aside from Halloween night: These two burners communicated with each other and only with each other,” says Meadows. “Not a single other communication.”

“Got it.”

“And as you know, their communications were carefully planned. At ten a.m. Monday through Friday, they would text each other. And eight p.m. Monday through Thursday. They took Friday nights and the weekends off.”

“Yes.”

“And they kept their phones off at all other times.”

“Interesting,” says Jane. “Didn’t know that.”

“No way you would until you look at the historical CSLI. But you’ll see that their phones aren’t sending any signals except at those times. So that right there—those synced-up times, turning off the phone otherwise—these are obviously the classic signs of two married people having an affair. Who really didn’t want their spouses to know.”

“We know Lauren was married, Dee. But we don’t know about the man.”

“Fair enough,” says Meadows. “Well, here’s another thing. Every one of Lauren’s communications took place at her home. I mean, down to the last one. And the other phone? The offender’s burner? Other than Halloween night, which was different—”

“Right, Halloween is different.”

“But putting aside the night of Halloween, it sure seems like the guy was texting from the same location every morning and the same location every night. Both locations were in Chicago. So let’s get into that.” Meadows starts to work her laptop. “You guys understand, I assume, that CSLI isn’t an exact science down to the microscopic point. You get that?”

“Yeah, you get a range from the cell tower. You get an area. The more cell towers around there, the smaller the area per cell tower.”

“Right, if you’re out somewhere rural, historical CSLI isn’t always your friend. But this guy was in the city, with a lot of towers, so it’s a bit more precise. Okay, I told you all of Lauren’s texts came from her home. Or from a fairly small area that includes her house, more accurately.”

“Right,” says Jane. “She could have been inside her house or on the back patio or the driveway—”

“Hell, she could’ve been half a block from her house, at least, and she’d still be pinging the same cell tower out in Grace Village. But yeah, all of Lauren’s texts, every one of them, hit her local cell tower, so you don’t need to see that. What you wanna see is the guy’s phone. The offender’s phone.”

Agent Meadows kills the lights and returns to her laptop. An image pops up on the conference room’s white wall, showing an aerial map with hundreds of blue dots and several thick red circles.

“This is the area by the elevated train downtown, near Clark and Lake,” says Meadows. “For the ten a.m. text messages, and I mean every single one of them, the burner pinged one of two different cell sites. One is right at Clark and Lake, the other is a couple blocks south and east on Dearborn between Washington and Randolph. Now, these are high-density areas.”

“Lots of large commercial buildings,” says Andy Tate.

“Well, hang on,” she says. “Each cell site has directional antennas that divide the area into sectors. So for the cell site at Clark and Lake, the southeast antenna was pinged. And for the one on Dearborn, the northwest antenna was pinged. So that gets us a fairly small cross-sectional area.”

“An area of large commercial buildings?”

“Actually, no,” says Meadows. “Look at the buildings that fall into these sectors. At the intersection here of Clark and Randolph, you have the Daley Center. County offices, right? Judges, prosecutors, law enforcement. Then you have the Thompson Center—state governmental employees. And the county building and city hall. Same idea—government employees.” Meadows looks at Jane. “That fit your profile of the unknown subject? Some government employee? You said you had a working theory that this guy had money.”

“Just a theory,” Jane says.

That’s what Conrad’s ex-wife Cassandra thought—Lauren was looking for a fat wallet to replace the one who was divorcing her.

“Okay, well, we have a bunch of government buildings, and we have a massive parking garage in this sector. You think your guy was texting from a parking garage at ten in the morning?”

“Presumably not,” Jane says. “The assumption is he was at work. Just an assumption.”

“But a good one,” says Meadows. “So if someone with a lot of dough is at work, and he’s within this sector, he’s probably working in this building right here.” She taps a building on the corner of Randolph and Clark. “Forty, fifty floors tall. Lots of commercial companies, lenders, lawyers, the white-collar private-sector type. People with some money in their pocket.”

Jane looks at the map. “The Grant Thornton Tower.”

“That’s what it’s called now,” says Meadows. “I’m old-school. I’ll always think of it as the Chicago Title & Trust Building.”

“So this is where the eight p.m. text messages came from,” Meadows says. “This is the Bucktown/Wicker Park area. You know, by that three-way intersection of North, Damen, and Milwaukee.”

“I know it better than I care to admit,” says Jane. “From my younger days, of course.”

Meadows winks at her. “So again, looking at the overlapping sectors from these cell towers, it looks like your offender was in this neighborhood right here.” Meadows finger-draws a circle on the projection screen. “North of North Avenue, south of Wabansia, around Damen or Winchester.”

“And what’s there?” Jane peers at the map.

“Some condos on Winchester, which is residential,” says Meadows. “Otherwise, you have some commercial establishments on Damen. An AT&T store, Nike, Lululemon, a pizzeria, and a restaurant called Viva Mediterránea, which I highly recommend, by the way. Great martinis.”

Jane’s been to Viva. Not for martinis but for a man. The martinis were better.

“But unlikely he was texting from Nike or Lululemon or Viva Mediterránea every single night. Most likely,” says Meadows, “he lived right up here in Wicker Park. Probably the 1600 block of North Winchester.”

“That’s your best guess.”

“By far,” she says. “Especially because, that’s where he went after the murder.”

Jane sits forward. “The CSLI—”

“He’s texting her on the night of the murder, on Halloween, right?”

“Right,” says Jane.

“Right outside her house, right?”

“Right.”

“Then the texts stop. That, we assume, is once he’s inside the house.”

“Right.”

“So he’s in the house, he kills her, and then he leaves. But this time, he doesn’t leave his phone off.”

“What does he do?”

“Well, as you know,” says Meadows, “your cell phone will stay active even if you’re not texting or calling from it. It will refresh, update—”

“So you’re saying after the murder, he left it on, and his burner kept pinging cell towers, allowing us to track him.”

“Yes, exactly. And if we isolate on October thirty-first, we have this nice trail.”

Agent Meadows works her computer, popping up a new screen, concerned only with the CSLI from October 31, Halloween. Jane stands up and stares at the trail of cell tower pings and the areas swept in by those cell towers.

“It sure seems to me,” says Agent Meadows, “he headed east from Lauren’s house, he went through some park toward Harlem Avenue, then he got on the Eisenhower, drove to the Kennedy, took the Kennedy up to North Avenue, and then went to his home in Wicker Park.”

Jane looks at Andy. “He probably caught a cab at Harlem and Lake,” she says.

“He could have parked his car there,” says Andy.

“Yeah, but it’s pretty tough to park a car around there,” Jane says. “I’ll bet he took a cab or Uber.”

“Meaning there will be records.” Andy makes a note. “I’m on it.”

“Anyway, so the offender gets home, someplace in Wicker Park near that three-way intersection. And then he sends his last text,” says Jane. “The so-called suicide note.” Jane looks at the transcript of the text messages, the final text Lauren received after her death:

Mon, Oct 31, 10:47 PM

I’m sorry, Lauren. I’m sorry for what I did and I’m sorry you didn’t love me. But I’m not sorry for loving you like nobody else could. I’m coming to you now. I hope you’ll accept me and let me love you in a way you wouldn’t in this world.

“Time of ten-forty-seven p.m., Halloween night,” says Jane.

“That makes sense,” says Agent Meadows, who doesn’t have the transcripts, only the CSLI information. “That’s the last ping we get on the cell phone. After ten-forty-seven p.m., the signal dies for good.”

“Meaning he turned off his cell phone.” Jane looks at Andy. “And then . . . killed himself?”

Andy shrugs.

“Not sure why he’d bother turning off his cell phone before committing suicide,” Jane says. “What, he’s saving the battery?”

“We don’t even know if he did kill himself,” says Andy. “Let’s find out.”

“So what’s your problem?” Andy asks as he and Jane leave the FBI field office.

Jane shakes her head. “You know what my problem is. It feels weird.”

“What’s so weird about how they were behaving?”

“Why does Lauren turn off her phone at home, after Conrad’s already moved out? I mean, while he’s living there, sure. But once he’s gone in mid-September? He’s not there to see her phone light up or hear it buzz.”

“Maybe she’s thinking ahead to the divorce,” says Andy. “Conrad playing hardball. Hiring an investigator to track her cell records.”

“A cell phone Conrad doesn’t even know exists?”

“Shit, I don’t know, Janey—it’s not that odd, is it? People having an affair acting paranoid?”

Jane goes quiet. Of course, what Andy’s saying is one way of looking at this.

“You’re thinking about Simon Dobias,” he says. “And everything we heard earlier today. How he manipulates people and covers his tracks.”

“Well, yes.” They reach their car. Andy takes the wheel. Jane prefers not to drive when she’s spitballing a theory. “You don’t think this feels a bit staged, Andy? Doesn’t this seem a little too obvious to you? I mean, could the arrows be pointing more obviously at these locations? These people never strayed from those locations?”

“Then what’s your theory?” Andy asks. “Say this is Simon Dobias behind all of this. What, Simon travels to this guy’s workplace every weekday morning to send text messages? And he travels to the guy’s house—”

“Or right around his house,” Jane interrupts. “It’s just an area, right? You could stand outside a guy’s house and text right there, and it will ping the same cell tower as if you were inside the house. Like Dee said, you could be a half block away and ping the same tower.”

“Okay, but that’s still going to an awful lot of trouble.”

“Exactly what he’d want us to say.”

“Well, shit, Janey, we can play that game all day. Every bit of information that exonerates Simon, you can say, ‘That’s just what he wants us to think,’ or ‘He staged it that way.’ I mean, do we—do we even know if Simon Dobias would know something like that?”

“I don’t know, Andy. People know that their cell phones send signals to cell towers.”

“Yeah, but do they know that the cell towers keep records of those pings down to the minute and second and store them for years? Do people know that we can draw on historical CSLI to trace someone’s movements years later?”

“The only question is whether Simon Dobias does,” she says. “And I’ll bet the answer is yes.”

79 Simon

“Happy Wednesday, all, and happy November,” I say to the class. “Hope you all had a nice Halloween and a day of recovery yesterday. Let’s get to it. Carpenter versus United States, a case that best can be summarized as boy-is-it-scary-what-the-government-can-do-to-us.”

That gets a laugh. I try to keep it light.

“Cell phones,” I say. “No longer just mechanisms to make calls or shoot a text message. No longer simply little computers to search the internet or monitor your daily step count or play Spotify. Cell phones are now tracking devices, too. As the unfortunate Mr. Carpenter learned, cell phones allow the government not only to surveil your movements contemporaneously but also historically, going back years.

“Your cell phone is always working, even if you’re not using it, if for no other reason than to refresh and receive new text or email messages. It always seeks the nearest cell tower for a connection. And each cell tower then records that connection and memorializes it, stores it, down to the day, hour, minute, and second. So if the government has your cell phone number, they can go back and subpoena those cell-tower records—called cell-site location information, or CSLI—and retrace your steps. Not just the calls you made. Not just the text messages you sent. But every place you walked. Every place you drove. And exactly, down to the second, when you did so.

“In a nutshell, the government can go back in time and know, within a reasonable approximation, every place you’ve been and when. Unless, of course, you’ve turned off the phone. But how often do we do that these days?”

(Sometimes. Sometimes we do.)

“The government suspected Mr. Carpenter of robbing a series of stores over a four-month period. They received historical CSLI for his cell phones during that period. They came up with almost thirteen thousand location points for his movements during that period—or about a hundred per day. They were able to map out his movements and place him at or near the scene of four different robberies at the time they occurred.

“But did they violate his rights? That was the controlling question in Carpenter: Does the Fourth Amendment require a warrant for the government to access this highly valuable but highly private cell-site location information?”

When the afternoon class is over, I return to my office. I open up the Chicago Tribune for today—Wednesday, November 2—and reread the article on page three:

Not self-inflicted? Depends on how you define that term, I guess.

I scoop the paper up, walk down the hall, and drop it into a garbage can. I feel a bit guilty about not recycling, but I’ve done worse.

I’d love to go online and read more about the current updates. I’m reading an article published in this morning’s paper edition, meaning it was written last night, Tuesday night. And now it’s late afternoon on Wednesday. I can only imagine what they’ve found since then.

But I can’t check. Searches I do on my phone or computer are discoverable. So I’m stuck with archaic newspaper reports, stale as month-old bread by the time I read them.

My cell phone buzzes. I don’t recognize the number.

“Hello, this is Simon.”

“Simon? This is Jane Burke. I’m a sergeant with—”

“Jane Burke? From Grace Consolidated?”

“—Department.”

We talked over each other. I know who she is. I know where she works. I didn’t know if she’d catch the case, but she was as likely as anyone. It’s not a huge police force.

“Jane Burke from Grace Consolidated? Class of ’03?”

“That’s me, yes.”

“Sorry, I think we talked over each other. Did you say you’re a sergeant?”

“Yes, I’m a sergeant with the Grace Village Police Department. I was wondering if you’d have a chance to talk with me.”

“Well, sure. Is this . . . something official?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Okay. Well—can you tell me what about?”

“I’d rather we discussed it face-to-face, if that’s okay.”

Right. She wants to see my reaction when she tells me that Lauren Betancourt was murdered.

“Oh, okay,” I say.

“Is it okay if I stop by your house later? Tonight?”

“Sure, I’m free,” I say. “Just tell me what time.”