Look Closer

10 Jane

“Mary, Mother of God,” Sergeant Jane Burke whispers to herself as she stares at the body of Lauren Betancourt, dangling from a rope attached to the second-floor bannister. Her first homicide. The first homicide, as far as she knows, in the history of Grace Village.

Her partner, Sergeant Andy Tate, comes down the stairs carefully, avoiding the railing and boot and scuff marks on the individual stairs. “Chief call yet?”

“Any second.”

She’s been on the phone with the chief three times already over the last hour, since the cleaning lady entered the Betancourt house this morning and found Mrs. Betancourt dangling here. Jane was still at home, getting ready for work, when she got the call.

“Mr. Betancourt is on his way back now,” says Andy. “We’ll have an officer meet him at O’Hare.”

“Where was he again?” Jane asks.

“Naples. Golf trip with his sons.” Andy walks around the dead body like it’s a chandelier to avoid. “Not a bad alibi.”

Yeah, but if the husband’s involved, and if he has as much money as Jane is hearing he has, he wouldn’t do the dirty work himself.

“She was something,” Andy mumbles, looking her over. Even with the onset of rigor mortis, Jane agrees, Lauren Betancourt is gorgeous, slim and shapely with a delicate, sculpted face and silky blond hair. Her outfit, however garish it seems now in death, leaves little to the imagination: a formfitting leopard-print bodysuit—a cat costume for Halloween. Her eyes, wide open, look down on Jane, lips parted as if in mid-thought. Her lips are painted black, matching the whiskers painted on her face. She has an expensive manicure, black polish.

From the back side, nothing obvious to see, other than a dark stain between her legs. The loss of sphincter control is one of the many ugly accoutrements of death.

Jane’s phone buzzes in her AirPods. She whacks Andy and nods her head.

“Chief.”

“Okay, Janey, I’m in the car. I should be there in about three hours. First, is there press yet?”

“Not that I know of.” She looks out a window. No reporters yet, but the neighbors are out in full force, spilled onto their lawns or the street, in housecoats and slippers, some dressed for work; children with their backpacks headed off to school on a Tuesday morning, the first bell in ten minutes. The half dozen police cruisers would be enough on their own, but Jane imagines that word has filtered back to the neighbors now.

“Christ,” says the chief. “The first damn homicide ever, and I’m at a seminar in Indiana.”

Jane walks to the south door of the house, the kitchen door, because from everything they can tell thus far, it was not the point of entry or the site of the struggle. She wants to keep the crime scene as pristine as possible until Major Crimes brings its forensics unit.

She removes her shoe covers and walks outside, appreciating the fresh air. Andy follows her around the side of the house to the front, where the action occurred.

Grace Village, the day after Halloween. Remnants of smashed pumpkins, candy wrappers scattered in yards or stuck in the curb drains, plastic bags blowing about or clinging to the branches of naked trees.

The Village does a mean Halloween business, a mecca for kids from the west side of Chicago, from the other side of the Des Plaines River, even from Grace Park. Sometimes they take buses over here to the mansions, with the huge candy bars and elaborate decorations. The older teenagers come at the end of the four-hour window for trick-or-treating, hoping to clean up the remaining candy in the bowls, usually prompting calls from one of the more uptight residents.

Hundreds and hundreds of strangers roamed these streets last night, many in face paint or masks or disguises, on the one night of the year that it wouldn’t stand out. It’s going to make this investigation twice as hard.

You want to kill someone, Halloween’s not a bad night.

“I’ll walk you through what we know so far, Chief. It’s early.”

“I’m listening.”

“First, the window on the front of the house.”

Manicured shrubs along the façade of the house. A large window behind them. She walks along the grass and peeks over the shrubs.

Boot impressions in front of one of the windows. Good and deep, cemented in the dirt.

“We have deep boot impressions,” she says. “Looks like an adult boot. Our guess is adult size, maybe twelve, thirteen. We’ll have forensics do impressions and run ’em through the database.”

“Good.”

“It rained just a little yesterday afternoon, right before trick-or-treating started. That was a gift to us. The ground behind the shrubs was just soft enough to allow for impressions. Looks like he was standing there for a while.”

“Looking through her window?”

“Exactly. Nothing else he could do, standing in that direction, but look through this window.”

“We have a time frame?”

“Well, that’s the thing, boss. Last night was Halloween. So you know how that goes.”

“Three-to-seven, then lights out.”

Per tradition, the residents of Grace Village turn off their lights at seven o’clock, to tell everyone that trick-or-treating is over. At seven bells sharp, all the parents shout, “Happy Halloween!”—probably mumbling under their breath, Now get out of my neighborhood—then kill their outside lights.

“No way our creeper peeper was lurking outside her window before seven,” says Jane. “Trick-or-treaters would walk right past him. Everyone would see him.”

“But once seven o’clock hit . . .”

“Once seven o’clock hits, it’s the darkest night of the year in the Village. He could’ve stood there without notice for as long as he wanted.”

“Okay, what’s next?”

“Our creeper peeper goes to the front door,” she says. “We don’t see his boot prints on the walkway or the driveway. He goes from the window to the front door.”

The front door is enclosed within a small A-frame brick canopy with stone trim. The welcome mat bears the family name, Betancourt. The outside light is turned off. The front door frame is intact. The floor on this porch is stone. And quite dirty, from the activity last night, all the shoes, dirty or otherwise, of trick-or-treaters.

“We see his boot impressions on the front porch,” she says. “They’re far more prominent than the other scuff marks and prints from the trick-or-treaters. The most recent, I’d guess. And we see them on the door, Chief.”

“The door. Meaning he was kicking the front door.”

“Right. The impressions are at a slight angle. We’re thinking he reared back and kicked hard.”

“Is that how he got in? He kicked in the door?”

“No. There’s no forced entry, no splintering, no damage to the door whatsoever.”

“So she let him in.”

“She let him in.”

“She let in someone who was kicking at her front door?”

“I know, right? So we’re thinking they must have known each other.”

“Huh. All right, all right, I hear you, you piece of shit!”

That sounds like the chief, the way he drives, drawing angry horns from fellow drivers. Cops think they can drive like cops even when they aren’t being cops.

“Sorry. Anyway, yeah, seems pretty obvious that she knew the guy and let him in.”

“Maybe he was making a scene outside,” says Jane, “and she didn’t want that.”

“That’s a theory. That’s a very specific theory. Don’t get locked in too quickly, Janey.”

“I’m not locked in on anything, Chief. But there’s almost no doubt that the guy standing by the bushes, peeping through her window, went to her front door and started kicking it, and she let him in voluntarily.”

“Okay, then what?”

Jane and Andy put back on their shoe covers. Jane opens the front door carefully, ushers Andy in, and closes it quickly behind her. The last thing she needs is for the neighbors to see a body hanging from the second-floor railing.

“Inside,” she says. “A glass bowl of Halloween candy, shattered in the foyer. Maybe he knocks it out of her hand, maybe she throws it at him. Hard to say.”

“Okay.”

“She runs for the stairs.”

“The stairs. Not the kitchen, for a knife?”

“Nope. There’s no sign they were in the kitchen, and every sign he chased her up the stairs.” She follows the same boot impressions along the marble floor, then onto the wooden staircase. “Lauren was running in heels, which couldn’t have been easy, although on stairs, it’s easier than on flat ground.”

“Is that true?”

“Stairs, you run on the balls of your feet, even in heels. Flat ground, you can’t.”

She follows the boot impressions, and a few scuff marks where the heels did manage to strike down, all the way up the wraparound staircase.

“They reach the top of the stairs. This, we think, is where he subdues her.” She stops before walking any farther on the landing. “There’s blood up here, right on the landing, the second-floor hallway. Forensics hasn’t been through yet, so we’re just eyeballing. But he hits her up here on the second floor, on the back of the head.”

Jane looks down on Lauren’s dead body, in particular her scalp, bearing a bloody gash.

“Hits her with what?”

“We don’t know yet. But he hits her hard enough to draw blood. We figure it stuns her enough, at least momentarily, so he can get the noose around her neck.”

“How’d he tie off the rope?”

“Well, it was kind of clever,” she says, squatting down. “This is a thick, knotted rope, knotted every foot or so. The wrought iron bannister—well, you saw the photos.”

“I saw them but didn’t focus on the bannister.”

“Sure. It’s one of these ornate spiral patterns, right? It looks like some Gothic design, like some old family coat of arms.”

“Or a series of Rorschach tests,” says Andy.

“Right, or like Rorschach tests. A bunch of intricate spirals and whirls and shapes.”

“Okay, so . . .”

“He shoved one end of the rope into the curves of the pattern and wrapped it around once or twice. It held firm.”

“And then what?”

Jane shrugs. “Then he chucked her over the railing.”

“Ugh.”

Yeah, ugh. But the most likely way this happened.

“Why not just strangle her?”

“He probably couldn’t,” says Jane. “Or not easily, at least. She put up a struggle. He’s behind her, with the slipknot around her neck and tugging, but she doesn’t go down easily. We have some broken painted fingernails up here. She was struggling against the noose around her throat. And if she were able to kick with those heels—well, they’d be sharp as knives. It might have been easier to keep the noose taut around her neck with one hand, stuff one end of the rope into the bannister curves with the other, then pick her up and throw her over.”

“Jesus. Okay. I got it. So, Jane, listen. Major Crimes can bring forensics, but otherwise this stays in-house, understand?”

“Yes.” Jane feels butterflies through her chest, not for the first time today.

“No statements to the press until I get there. Understand?”

“Yes.”

He goes silent. He’s thinking.

Outside, Jane hears heavy car doors closing. Probably the medical examiner or forensics arriving.

“You think this was a lover’s quarrel, something like that?”

“No robbery,” she says. “No sexual assault or, from what we see preliminarily, even an attempt at sexual assault. It sure seems like this guy came here to do one thing and one thing only, and that’s kill Lauren Betancourt.”

“Personal,” says the chief. “Someone who really wanted her dead.”

Jane looks down at the body and shudders.

“Or really wanted her, period,” she says, “but couldn’t have her.”