Читать книгу Some Choose Darkness - Charlie Donlea - Страница 22

CHAPTER 6

Chicago, October 16, 2019

RORY MOORE PULLED NEXT TO THE UNMARKED SQUAD CAR, DRIVER’S side to driver’s side. She rolled down her window and pushed her nonprescription glasses up the bridge of her nose. It was dark and shadowed inside her car. She was sure Detective Davidson couldn’t see her eyes, always a plus.

The detective handed her a manila envelope through the window.

“Autopsy and tox results,” he said. “Plus all the notes and interviews taken on the case.”

Rory took the package, saw Camille Byrd’s name printed on the bottom of the folder, and thought of the girl’s shattered Kestner doll and her father’s pleas for help. Rory dropped the file on the passenger seat.

“You’re officially on the case,” Ron said. “I filled out the paperwork this morning.”

“When was the last time any of your guys looked at any of this?” Rory asked.

Davidson ballooned his cheeks as his exhaled a defeated breath. Rory knew he was embarrassed by the answer he was about to offer.

“It’s over a year old, with nothing new in months and over five hundred new homicides so far this year. It’s cold.”

Rory’s mind flashed back to the morning in Grant Park when Ron had shown her where Camille’s frozen body had been found. Rory’s heart ached, the way it did for the victim of every case she took on. It was why she was so selective. Within the tiny world of forensic reconstruction, no one could do what Rory Moore routinely accomplished. She had breathed fresh life into cases that were colder than a Chicago winter. It was simply in her genes. Her DNA was programmed to see things others missed, to connect dots that looked scattered and incongruent to everyone else. She left the straightforward reconstructions—the car wrecks and suicides—to others in her profession who were better suited to handle such trivial cases, the ones detectives could figure out on their own with a little effort and a lucky break. Those clinical cases never challenged Rory. She reconstructed cold case homicides, cases others had abandoned and given up on. But she accomplished this by developing a deep and personal connection with the victim. She accomplished this by learning their story, discovering first who they were. Why they were killed always followed. It was a taxing technique that drained her emotionally and often brought her closer to the victim for whom she was seeking justice than she was to anyone else in her life. But it was the only way Rory knew how to do her job.

Rory knew that Ron Davidson, who ran the Homicide Division inside the Chicago Police Department, was under pressure from every direction, political and social, to pull Chicago’s unsolved murder rate out of the toilet. The city had one of the nation’s lowest homicide solve rates; so when Rory agreed to take on Camille Byrd’s icy cold, unsolved homicide, it represented an opportunity for Ron to knock a case off his docket without expending many resources. Rory reconstructed crimes on her own, rebuffing assistance from any of the Homicide detectives. For years, the force had kept Rory on retainer, and if she weren’t so selective about the cases she took on, she’d have a new one every week.

“I’ll take a look and let you know what I find,” Rory finally said.

“Keep me posted.”

Rory’s window began its ascent.

“Hey, Gray,” Davidson said.

Rory stopped the window halfway up, looked through the glass at him.

“Sorry about your dad.”

Rory nodded and started the window back up before the two cars drove off in opposite directions.