Threads of Suspicion(68)

“Glamour it is not,” Evie agreed. She flipped through the letters on pink stationery. “This woman has been writing to Maggie a couple times a month for the last . . . wow, eleven years.”

“Holly Case?”

“It’s signed Holly, yes.”

“We’ve actually met her. She’s a waitress, has a good voice, loves to sing. But she’s shy, never got up the courage to solo at church, coffee shops, weddings—that early stage where a singer builds confidence, and maybe a career down the road. We put her in touch with some people. She now sings backup occasionally for a recording company here in Chicago. She keeps sending lyrics to Maggie, a safe outlet for her because she knows Maggie will never see the material and so can’t reject her as not being good enough. It’s sad, but until she’s ready to send her material where it might be used, there’s not much that can be done. She needs people in her life who have faith in her. She’s got potential, just lacks self-confidence. Maggie can’t save everyone, and Holly is often a code word between us when we encounter similar dilemmas.”

Evie read a random dozen pages of the lyrics, closed the folder. Holly was using Maggie as a security blanket for her song lyrics rather than taking a risk and possibly failing at something she loved. Evie wasn’t going to judge. She was sitting on a marriage proposal because she couldn’t find the courage to take the risk.

But that did raise an interesting question. “Assume for a moment the five women were abducted by the same individual. It would suggest the killer has confidence in his ability to commit a crime and get away with it. Do you suppose it’s frustrated rage driving him? ‘I wanted to be a success, and the doors never opened for me’?”

“Killing young women with bright futures ahead of them so they can’t fulfill their dreams?” David asked.

“Something like that,” Evie said. “To smother someone isn’t rage. It’s ending something—a person’s potential, voice, life. It’s that ‘Shut up, I want you dead.’ Smothering is a different kind of personal.”

“Not quite the same as strangling someone, but still, it’s face-to-face murder, and that’s personal.”

“There’s something in that thought that fits this. I just can’t see what it is yet.”

“Keep thinking—you’ll have that lightbulb moment.”

She was back to the idea it was a woman. Smothering the victim feels female . . . Evie opened the next folder and found cutout letters pasted on a page with death threats, a lot of them. Her adrenaline shot up. “You’ve got here a writer calling her foul names and wanting to kill her, done in letters and words from magazines. The folder reads ‘Kevin Ought.’”

“He’s sending them from a psychiatric jail facility. They haven’t figured out yet how he gets them smuggled out, but she gets one about every other month.”

“Ouch.”

“I don’t worry that much about the obvious mentally disturbed. Maggie isn’t the first person they have fixated on, and someone in their neighborhood or family is going to be addressing their problems with the help of mental-health authorities long before they could show up on Maggie’s doorstep. It’s the one who’s just crossing over that line, from devoted fan to fixated fan that is the worry. They’re unpredictable, and they don’t detach from their fixation easily. Typically someone else has to become the focus for them to let go of Maggie, and that just transfers the problem to another. So we are careful about Maggie’s personal whereabouts. She’ll post social media comments after she’s been somewhere, loved it, and left—not in anticipation of being there. The common-sense precautions that make her difficult to locate in advance.”

“Looking at these letters, I’m glad she takes them.”

Evie lifted more folders out, then paused as a thought hit. “What are the odds the guy we’re after will be at the charity event Friday night?”

David looked up from what he was doing. “Her first appearance in Chicago in years? High. He won’t be inside, not at five thousand a plate with their running background checks on all the guests. But odds are high he’ll be among the rope-line fans. I already talked to security working the event, and there will be cameras on the crowds, so we can review footage with that in mind.”

“Good. Thanks.”

“I’m not taking chances with Maggie. We can also assume he’ll have a ticket for her scheduled performance at the McCormick Center on March seventh. We’ve got until then to find him. I don’t want a conversation with Maggie on whether to cancel the concert to avoid another missing-person photo going up on that board. So we find this guy before then.”