Look Closer

85 Jane

“Thanks, Simon. See you tonight.” The meeting with Simon Dobias confirmed, Jane Burke punches off her phone and looks around the master bedroom inside Lauren Betancourt’s house. It is spacious and nicely decorated but not as ostentatious as she might have expected. Simple and elegant. High ceilings and ornate crown molding, large flat-screen TV with torchlights on each side, a fireplace below. No chests of drawers in the main living room; those are reserved for the walk-in closet. Must be nice.

“Today would be great. As soon as possible.” Andy kills his phone and looks at Jane. “The chief security officer at the Grant Thornton Tower is sending us a list of all companies in their building and everyone who has been assigned a key card,” he says. “We should have it by day’s end. That’ll be an exhaustive list of everyone working in the old Chicago Title & Trust Building, as your FBI friend put it. Did you talk to Dobias?”

“I talked to Simon, yeah. We’re going to his house at eight tonight.”

She checks her watch. What a day so far. Feels like it should be midnight, not four-thirty in the afternoon. It’s only November 2, day two of this investigation, and it feels like week twenty.

“His house? Not the station?”

She shrugs. “I want to see his house. And I wanted to see how he’d react to the idea of my being in his house.”

“You thought he might not want you looking around in there? Might resist, might offer to come to the station?”

“Yeah, but he didn’t. He said it was my call, whatever I wanted.”

“Like he doesn’t have a care in the world.” Andy wags a finger at her. “Just what he wants us to think!”

“Now you’re mocking me.”

“I am, it’s true,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean I think you’re wrong. I just think it’s early. I want us to keep an open mind. I mean, we have a lot of reasons to believe that Lauren was having an affair that turned ugly—and we don’t think Lauren would be having an affair with Simon, do we? I mean, with their history? Lauren would be the last person on the face of the earth Simon would cozy up with. And vice versa, I’d suspect.”

“Well, that’s why we’re here, right?” Jane sweeps a hand. “Let’s look for evidence of another man being here. Someone other than Conrad. Assuming they’d come here for their liaisons.”

“It would make sense,” says Andy, heading into the walk-in closet. “If he’s married, like we think, they can’t go to his place. Conrad’s permanently living in the condo as of mid-September. Who wants a hotel with security cameras and doormen and credit-card receipts when you can just come here and get your rocks off?”

“I’ll check the bathroom,” she says. She drops her bag off her shoulder onto the bed and removes some paper evidence bags.

Andy comes out of the walk-in. “Nothing in there at first glance. Conrad definitely cleaned out his side in there. It’s totally empty.”

Jane walks into the master bathroom, full of marble, a claw-foot bathtub, enormous shower. A double vanity with medicine cabinets on each end made of ornate cabinetry, as if they were furniture pieces. She pictures her tiny little bathroom and makes a noise.

Andy joins her in the bathroom and takes the medicine cabinet on the left. “This one definitely looks like Lauren’s,” he says.

Jane opens the one on the right. Contact solution, lotion, ibuprofen, vitamins—

“Hey,” she says. “Look at these.”

Andy walks over. “A shiny black electric razor. Pretty fancy one. And what’s that—a matching trimmer?”

“Like a trimmer, yeah, for nose hair or hair in your ears. Pretty fancy one,” says Jane, peering at it, not wanting to touch it yet, even with gloves on. “The brand is ‘BK’ and this is . . . titanium, it says. Yeah, fancy.”

“Would a woman use a nose-hair trimmer?” Andy asks.

“I never have. I pluck. But the electric razor? This has to be a man’s.”

Andy pulls out his phone and types on it. “Here we go,” he says. “The Bentley-Kravitz Elite Men’s Care Set,” he says. “All titanium, and it comes in matte-black. Toothbrush, nail clippers, electric razor, nose-hair trimmer, and dental-floss holder. A five-piece set. This thing retails for nearly nine thousand dollars, for Christ’s sake.”

He shows her the photo. Yep, it’s a match.

She holds up an evidence bag and uses a pen to tip the nose-hair trimmer off the shelf and into the bag. She repeats the process with the electric razor, using a different bag.

“These could be good for prints,” she says. “It’s something you hold pretty firmly. If you can even get fingerprints off titanium.”

“Maybe DNA, too,” he says. “Long shot, but possible.”

Jane nods. “So these are two pieces of a five-piece set,” she says. “Let’s find out if these belong to Conrad.”

“The shaded area on the map is the cell-site coverage area,” says Andy into his phone as he and Jane return to the station. “It’s like a two-square-block area, including Damen. Check every commercial establishment and see if they’re even open at eight o’clock at night. If they are, then maybe our offender was going in there every night at eight p.m., at least Monday through Thursday, and sending text messages. Someone who’s that much of a regular inside a store or restaurant is gonna be known by the staff. Or—yeah, agreed, is a member of the staff himself. So get employee names. And security cam footage, too.

“More likely,” he goes on, “it was someone texting from their home, so get addresses of all the homes in that area, whether single-family or townhouses or condo buildings. Then run down property-tax records for ownership, and we’ll have to contact all the owners. Probably a lot of them in that area are renters.”

They walk through the station house to the war room. Jane walks in and looks around the room. At the garish photos of Lauren in death; at the pages of the text-message transcripts that provide the most information, blown up on boards and fastened to the corkboard; at the rope used to hang Lauren; at the pink telephone, back from fingerprinting and plugged into a charger on the wall.

She walks up to one of the text messages blown up on a poster, from the evening text exchanges for Wednesday, August 17:

Oh, my. For someone with such a religious name to have such a naughty side . . .

“Simon Peter Dobias,” she whispers to herself.

But Andy’s right. Why would Simon be texting these love notes with Lauren? Simon despised Lauren, blamed her for the death of his mother. He wouldn’t go near her. And even if he were diabolical—Andy’s word, always makes her think of an Agatha Christie novel—even if Simon were diabolical enough to pretend to have an interest in Lauren, to get close to her so he could hurt her, Lauren wouldn’t go along with that, would she? She knows what she did to the Dobias family. She would never, in a million years, believe that Simon wanted to start up a romance with her.

It doesn’t make sense. Something isn’t right.

“Okay, Timpone’s handling Wicker Park,” says Andy, putting down his phone. “Ah, the ‘religious name’ text message. Religious as in ‘Simon Peter,’ right?”

“But you’re right, Andy,” she says. “This doesn’t work. Simon might be behind this, but there is no way in hell this is Simon and Lauren texting each other.”

“So it’s Lauren texting someone else,” he says. “Maybe someone who has a titanium nose-hair trimmer.”

“And a religious name,” she adds.

A phone buzzes. Andy pats his pocket. Jane picks up her phone, which isn’t ringing.

“Holy shit,” Andy says.

Jane looks at Andy, who’s pointing at the table. Jane looks, too.

The pink burner phone is buzzing.

Jane steps over, giving Andy an inquisitive look. He nods and waves her on.

Jane answers the phone. “Hello?”

“Who is this, please?” A man’s voice.

“Who is this, please?” Jane responds.

A pause. “Is this . . . Lauren?”

Jane looks at Andy, who is standing close and can hear everything. “Him first,” Andy whispers.

“Please tell me who’s calling,” Jane says.

The man clears his throat. “This is Sergeant Don Cheronis, Chicago P.D. Am I speaking to Lauren?”

“No. This is Sergeant Jane Burke, Grace Village P.D.”

“No shit?” he says. “We’re investigating a suspicious death.”

Jane looks at Andy, a look of revelation on his face.

“What a coincidence,” she says. “So are we.”

86 Jane

Sergeant Donald Cheronis of the Chicago P.D., Fourteenth District, a head full of wavy gray hair and a narrow, lined face, is waiting by the doorway when Jane and Andy are buzzed through the front door.

“We need to get the body out of here,” he says, shaking hands with them. “But I made them wait for you.”

“I appreciate that, Don. Very much.”

Jane is immediately hit with the pungent odor of a dead body’s decay. The medical examiner and the circumstantial evidence, according to Cheronis, put the time of death at approximately two nights ago, on Halloween night.

He waves them in. “To your left,” he says. “Say hello to Christian Newsome.”

Jane stops, keeps her distance, takes it all in. On the coffee table, a bottle of Basil Hayden bourbon, the top off.

On the couch, stiff and pale, sits Christian Newsome, his head lying back on the couch cushion, his vacant eyes facing the ceiling, exposing his throat and the single gunshot entry wound under his chin. Next to him, a spilled pill bottle, stripped of any name or indication, and several pills scattered on the couch and floor.

Behind him, on the wall, is massive blood and brain spatter.

He is wearing a white T-shirt and gym shorts.

His feet are bare. But next to them, haphazardly arranged as if tossed from his feet, a pair of boots, the color of caramel, with thick treads.

“Mind if I look at the boot?” she asks.

“Be my guest,” says Cheronis. “Photos and video are done. I’ll bag it when you’re done with it.”

Jane, gloves on, lifts up the boot and looks at the sole, just to confirm what she already suspects. The boots are Paul Roy Peak Explorers. Inside, on the boot’s tongue, is the boot size.

She looks at Andy. “Size thirteen,” she says.

He looks happier than Jane feels.

“We removed the gun from his hand,” Cheronis explains. “Obvious protocol. It was a Glock 23, had a nearly full magazine, only two bullets fired. Serial numbers scratched out.”

Two bullets.

“So, suicide?” Andy says.

“Maybe,” says Cheronis. “Look up at the ceiling.”

A yellow sticky tab hangs in the corner, where the wall with the blood spatter meets the ceiling. A bullet hole.

“That’s not the shot that killed him, obviously,” says Cheronis. “Angle doesn’t work at all.”

“A second shot,” Jane says.

“A second shot.”

Jane looks at Cheronis, then Andy. “Maybe not suicide.”

“We don’t have the tox screen back yet, so who knows how full of booze and drugs he was,” says Cheronis. “But I’ll tell you, I’ve seen a lot in my time. I’ve seen a lot of suicides. I’ve seen a lot of hesitation with suicide victims. But I’ve never seen someone turn a gun on themselves and miss.”

“So his name is Christian Newsome,” Jane says, glancing at Andy, who’s thinking about that religious name comment in the text messages.

Cheronis hands her a business card. All green, the color of money. No logo or catchphrase. Just the name, “Christian Newsome,” in a simple black font, then beneath it, separated by a horizontal line, “Newsome Capital Growth.”

In the corner, the contact information:

NEWSOME CAPITAL GROWTH

Grant Thornton Tower

161 North Clark Street

Suite 1320

Chicago, IL 60601

Jane hands Andy the card. “The Grant Thornton Tower,” she says.

“That’s Clark and Randolph downtown,” says Cheronis. “Across the street from the Daley Center and the Thompson Center. Most people know it as the Chicago—”

“Chicago Title & Trust Building,” says Jane. “Yeah, I’ve heard.”

“Is this guy married?” Jane asks.

“Not so far as we know. We only found the body a few hours ago, so who knows, but nothing in this place suggests a woman lives here. Or even a second person.”

Jane bends at the waist, not touching the dead body but looking at the bullet wound under his chin, the blood and brain spatter on the wall, the angle of the other shot.

She uses her finger as a gun, sticks her index finger under her chin, then swipes it right, off her chin, and presses down with her thumb, firing.

That’s what happened here. The bullet that didn’t hit Christian was fired into the wall, just short of the ceiling, off to Christian’s right. The only way that bullet could land where it did was if the gun had been fired right by Christian’s face.

It was under his chin, and then it wasn’t. The gun angled off Christian’s chin to the right and fired.

“It’s not hard to imagine hesitation,” says Cheronis. “Not hard to imagine he shoves the gun under his chin, then loses his nerve and moves it off his chin.”

“But he wouldn’t fire the gun,” she says. “Or at least, not intentionally.”

“You’d think not,” Cheronis agrees. “Then again, if you’ve come to the point of suicide, who knows what’s going on in your head? Hands are probably shaking, right? It’s not impossible the gun would’ve gone off. Plus, who knows how many of these pills he took.”

Fair enough.

“Or,” she says, “someone shoved a gun under Christian’s chin, he knocked it away, and the gun went off in the struggle.”

“That is . . . possible, yes,” Cheronis agrees.

“Neighbors hear anything? A struggle? The gunshots?”

“Nope. We talked to all of them. Judging from the timing of the suicide note, he died around eleven on Halloween night. So most people were down for the night. And Wicker Park, Bucktown, I mean, it’s noisy around here, especially on Halloween night.”

“Suicide note,” she says.

“He sent a text message to this ‘Lauren’ on Halloween night at ten-forty-seven p.m.”

“Right. I have Lauren’s phone.”

“Let’s just make sure we’re on the same page with that.” Cheronis shows her a cell phone, a burner that looks just like Lauren’s, except it has a green cover rather than pink.

Jane takes the green phone in her hand. “How many people he talk to with this?”

“Just the one,” says Cheronis. “Just this ‘Lauren’ woman.”

With her gloved fingers, Jane taps on the phone. She finds only one name in the contacts, “Lauren.” She pulls up his text messages. Every text in the months-long text exchange with Lauren’s phone is there. All the way down to the last one:

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.

“This all tracks with what we have and what we know,” says Jane.

“Jane!” Andy calls to her. “Jane, you gotta come see this.”

Andy is standing in the bathroom, his hands stuffed in his pockets. “See anything interesting?” he says.

“Oh, yeah, this guy,” says Cheronis. “Guy has a friggin’ titanium toothbrush and a matching set of other goodies. Know what this one is?”

Jane spots it on the sink’s countertop. Three pieces of the five-piece Bentley-Kravitz Elite Men’s Care Set, titanium and matte-black: toothbrush, nail clippers, and dental-floss holder.

“This thing is for holding friggin’ dental floss,” says Cheronis. “You imagine what something like that costs? How much spending money you gotta have—”

“Nearly nine thousand dollars,” says Andy, showing Cheronis his phone, the website pulled up. “All that’s missing is the electric razor and nose-hair trimmer. And guess where we found those?”

Andy lifts the robe with two gloved fingers, careful not to touch it or shake it. A long black robe with elongated hood. A Grim Reaper costume, resting on the bed in Christian Newsome’s bedroom, just like the one the neighbor kid saw on Halloween night.

Jane steps out of the room, pulls out her phone, and dials the number.

“Simon,” she says, “this is Jane Burke again. Listen, something’s come up, and I can’t make it back to Grace Park tonight. Can I meet with you tomorrow, November third?”

87 Jane

Chief Carlyle slams his hand down on his desk. “That’s beautiful. He has the burner phone. He’s got the damn Grim Reaper costume, the boots that match, and half his toiletry set is in Lauren Betancourt’s bathroom. He worked at the building where all the morning text messages probably came from, and he lived in an area consistent with the nighttime text messages. He’s ‘tall, dark, and handsome,’ like that text message described him. And ‘Christian,’ last I checked, sounds like a religious name to me.” The chief puts out his hands. “Jane, look happier.”

“I’m happy, Chief.”

“But not convinced. The evidence isn’t strong enough.”

“Oh, the evidence is strong. In fact,” she says, “about all that’s missing is a sworn affidavit from Christian Newsome that he and he alone, without any assistance from Simon Peter Dobias, murdered Lauren Betancourt. But I assume that’s arriving soon in the mail.”

The chief considers her, wetting his lips. “Remind me never to buy you a present, Janey. You’ll just tell me everything that’s wrong with it.” He flips his hand to Andy. “What about you, Sergeant Tate?”

Andy’s a loyal enough colleague not to show up Jane. But she knows he’s more convinced than she is. “It could be very solid, Chief, but I think Jane’s concerns are worth following up on.”

The chief takes a seat in his office, his fingers playing piano on his desk. “Okay, go through these concerns, Jane, start to finish, before I wish we had never heard the name Simon Dobias.”

Jane puts out her hand, ticks them off. “Number one, the pink phone. As you already know, after Lauren was dead, somebody moved that phone under the hallway table.”

“You think someone did.”

“The phone absolutely was moved a second time, and carefully so, not smudging the blood line at all. A level of care, sir, that all but rules out anything but an intentional act. And for the life of me, I can’t understand why the offender, coming upon Lauren’s burner phone that is absolutely, far and away, the most incriminating piece of evidence against him, would push it under the table, knowing that we’d find it.”

“So criminals never do dumb shit,” says the chief. “They never panic and make a mistake.”

“It was not a mistake, sir. If he didn’t see it, if he accidentally kicked it—something like that would be a mistake. Panicking and rushing, I get. This was not panic. This was careful and intentional.” Jane shakes her head. “He wanted us to find that phone. But he didn’t want to be too obvious about it.”

“He being Simon Dobias.”

“That’s the theory, yes.”

The chief crosses his arms. “Okay, agree to disagree. Go on.”

“Number two, the CSLI is so perfect, so on-the-nose, that it feels staged,” Jane says. “And Simon Dobias is a law professor who specializes in the Fourth Amendment. He has this blog we just found called Simon Says, ha-ha. He writes for lawyers and law students, plus a bunch of law review articles. He writes about how the government can track citizens and invade their privacy. He probably knows more than we do about how to track people with cell phone historical data.”

“Okay, so the CSLI is too convincing. Our evidence is too strong, basically,” the chief summarizes. “Go on.”

Jane takes a breath to control her frustration. She gets it—the idea of a quick solve, in a tidy package with a bow. The first murder in the history of Grace Village, and the police solve it within a week. The Village president slaps the chief on the back, and everyone breathes a sigh of relief, congratulating each other on a job well done.

“Three,” she says. “The mistake in the text messages. Lauren texts that she didn’t sleep well one night because Conrad was snoring, when we know Conrad wasn’t living in that house anymore. I thought, initially, that meant Lauren was lying to her secret boyfriend.”

“But not now?”

“Now I think it’s a mistake. Because Simon Dobias didn’t know Lauren and Conrad were separated. He was fudging these text conversations and trying to seem authentic, but he went too far—he said something wrong, not knowing it was wrong.”

“That’s possible, maybe, but so is Lauren lying to her boyfriend. To Christian.”

“Why did Lauren have her phone on, on Halloween night?” Jane says. “After she dumped her lover, who we’re supposed to believe is Christian Newsome, she said she was leaving town and her phone would stay off. So why did she have it on?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” says the chief.

“Why would Lauren need to keep her phone off at all other times, besides when they were texting?” she continues. “Once Conrad moved out, mid-September, that house was all hers. She didn’t need to hide her texts. And I know they were getting a divorce, but what did she care? There was a prenup, and almost all of Conrad’s money was in a trust she couldn’t reach, anyway. So why would she need to keep her phone off all the time? What was she afraid of?”

“Jane, I have no—”

“And for that matter, sir, why did Christian Newsome turn off his phone at all, ever?” She waves a hand. “He wasn’t married. There’s no record of a marriage, there’s no indication of the presence of a significant other in that condo—a live-in girlfriend, a wife, a boyfriend or husband, for that matter. That man was single. He had nobody to hide that phone from.”

The chief’s eyebrows rise. He puts out his hands. “And what is your theory, again?”

“I’m not sure of anything yet,” says Jane. “I just don’t want to rush to judgment.”

The chief frowns. That’s not a phrase an investigator likes to hear. “All this evidence that we’ve put together against Christian Newsome doesn’t sound like a ‘rush to judgment,’ Sergeant.”

“But it’s worth considering,” says Jane, “that Simon Dobias was pulling strings all over the place here. The phones were off in between the intervals of the text messaging because he didn’t want anyone tracking his movements.”

“So what, Simon Dobias made those text messages from Christian’s phone?”

“Yes, that would be the theory.”

“So—Christian Newsome and Lauren Betancourt were not having an affair?”

“That would be the working theory, correct.”

“They didn’t even know each other.”

“Probably not.”

“Lauren wasn’t having an affair with anyone?”

“Probably not,” says Jane. “She didn’t tell any of her closest friends, Chief. In fact, remember, she told one of her friends that she ‘missed sex.’ Just last week, she’s telling them she misses sex. If you believe those text messages, she had no reason to be missing sex. She was getting it on a regular basis.”

“No chance she was lying to her friends about that fact?”

“A chance, sure, but I’m not sure why she would.”

“And Christian’s razor and trimmer—Simon planted them at Lauren’s house.”

“Correct.”

“So . . . Christian didn’t kill Lauren Betancourt? Simon did.”

“Correct. That’s the theory.”

“Because it sure looks like Christian had the Grim Reaper costume in his house, and it sure sounds like he was wearing the exact boots that treaded all over Lauren’s house.”

“It does, yes, it does.”

“So Simon kills Lauren around eight p.m. on Halloween, then goes to Christian’s house and kills him, plants the Grim Reaper costume, and puts the boots near his feet. Right?”

“That or something very close to that, yes.”

The chief leans back in his chair. “Then answer me this, Sergeant,” he says. “If Simon was sending text messages from Christian’s end of the phone call, who was responding to them? Not Lauren, I presume? Because from everything we’ve heard, Simon and Lauren were like oil and water.”

“That . . . that is the biggest hole in my working theory,” Jane concedes. “If I’m right, that means Simon must have had a partner.”

“And do we have any idea who that partner might be?”

“I haven’t even talked to Simon yet. We canceled tonight after we found Christian Newsome. Look, sir.” She approaches his desk. “I’m not saying I’m right about any of this. I’m just not sure about this answer that has been gift-wrapped for us. I just want to keep looking.”

The chief works his jaw, glances at her. “Well, it’s only been two days, I guess.” He thinks about it some more and nods. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to release a statement that we are focusing on a person of interest, that we are in the process of pursuing a few avenues of information, and that it is our firm belief that the murder was a personal domestic issue that poses no further danger to our residents. We can agree on all that, yes?”

“Yes, sir.” No need to mention that the person of interest is now a corpse.

“So tomorrow, go interview this Dobias fellow who interests you so much,” he says. “See what comes of it. But listen, Jane. There is no physical way that Simon Dobias could have been on both sides of all those text-message conversations when the two phones were twenty miles apart. So you wanna convince me to keep this investigation open? Show me the slightest hint that Simon Dobias had a partner in this scheme.”