The cab dropped me at the Hyatt across the river from the Tribune. I couldn’t check in until three, so I left my bag with the bellman and went to the pay phones. After fumbling with the phone book I called the number for CPD’s Area Three Violent Crimes and asked for Detective Lawrence Washington. When he answered, I hung up. I just wanted to locate him, make sure he was there. My experience with cops as a reporter had always been not to make appointments. If you did, all you were doing was giving them a specific place to avoid and the exact time to avoid it. Most didn’t like talking to reporters, the majority didn’t like even being seen with reporters. And the few that did you had to be cautious of. So you had to sneak up on them. It was a game.
I checked my watch after hanging up. Almost noon. I had twenty hours left. My flight to Dulles left at eight the next morning.
Outside the hotel I grabbed a cab and told the driver to turn up the heat and take me to Belmont and Western by way of Lincoln Park. On the way I’d take in the spot where the Smathers boy had been found. It was a year since his body had been discovered. My thought was that the spot, if I could find it, would look almost exactly as it did on that day.
I opened my satchel, booted the computer and pulled up the Tribune clips I’d downloaded the night before in the Rocky’s library. I scrolled through the stories on the Smathers case until I found the paragraph describing the discovery of the body by a zoo docent cutting through the park on the way from his girlfriend’s apartment. The boy had been found in a snow-covered clearing where the Italian-American League’s bocce tournaments were held in the summer. The story said the clearing off Clark near Wisconsin was within sight of the red barn, which was part of the city’s farm in the zoo.
Traffic was light and we were in the park within ten minutes. I told the driver to cut over to Clark and to pull to the side when we got to Wisconsin.
The snow on the field was fresh and there were only a few tracks across it. It also stood about three inches high on the boards of the benches along the walkway. This area of the park seemed completely deserted. I got out of the cab and walked into the clearing, not expecting anything but in a way expecting something. I didn’t know exactly what. Maybe just a feeling. Halfway across I came upon a grouping of tracks in the snow that cut across my intended path from left to right. I crossed these and came upon another grouping heading right to left, the party having headed back the way it had come. Kids, I thought. Maybe going to the zoo. If it was open. I looked toward the red barn and that was when I noticed the flowers at the base of a towering oak twenty yards away.
I walked toward the tree and instinctively knew what I was seeing. A one-year anniversary noted with flowers. When I got to the tree I saw that the flowers—bright red roses splashed like blood on the snow—were fake, made of wood shavings. In the cleft made by the first branching of the tree’s trunk I saw that someone had propped a small studio photo of a smiling boy, his elbows on a table and his hands propped against his cheeks. He wore a red jacket and white shirt with a very small blue bow tie. The family had been here, I guessed. I wondered why they hadn’t placed their memorial at the boy’s grave.
I looked around. The lagoons near the barn were iced over and there were a couple of skaters. No one else. I looked over to Clark Street and saw the cab waiting. Across the street from it a brick tower rose. I saw that the sign on the awning out front said HEMINGWAY HOUSE. It was the place the zoo docent had come from before finding the small boy’s body.
I looked back at the photo propped in the tree’s cleft and without any hesitation reached up and took it down. It was sealed in plastic like a driver’s license to protect it from the elements. On the back of it was written the boy’s name but nothing else. I slid the photo into the pocket of my long coat. I knew that someday I might need it to run with the story.
The cab felt as welcome and warm to me as a living room with a fireplace. I began scrolling through the Tribune stories while we drove on to Area Three.
The major facts of the case were as horrifying as those in the Theresa Lofton killing. The boy had been lured from a fenced recreation center at a Division Street elementary school. He and two others had gone out to make snowballs. When the teacher noticed they were missing from the classroom, she went out and rounded the boys up. But by then Bobby Smathers was gone. The two twelve-year-old witnesses proved unable to tell police investigators what happened. According to them, Bobby Smathers simply disappeared. They looked up from their work in the snow and didn’t see him. They suspected he was hiding and waiting to ambush them, so they didn’t go looking.
Bobby was found a day later in the snowbank near the bocce clearing in Lincoln Park. Weeks of full-time investigation headed by Detective John Brooks, who caught the case as lead investigator, never got any closer than the explanation of the two twelve-year-olds: Bobby Smathers had simply disappeared that day at the school.
As I reviewed the stories I looked for similarities to Lofton. There were few. She was a white female adult and he a black male child. As far different in terms of prey as would seem possible. But both were missing for more than twenty-four hours before being found and the mutilated bodies of both victims were found in city parks. Lastly, both had been at children’s centers on their last day. The boy at his school, the woman at the day care center where she worked. I didn’t know the significance of these connections but they were all I had.
The Area Three headquarters was an orange-brick fortress. It was a two-story sprawling building that also housed the Cook County First Municipal District Court. There was a steady stream of citizens going in and out of the smoked-glass doors. I pushed through the doors to a lobby where the floor was wet with melted snow. The front counter was made of matching brick. Somebody could drive a car through the glass doors and they still wouldn’t get to the cops behind the counter. The citizens standing in front of it were another matter.
I looked at the stairs to my right. I knew from memory that they led to the detective bureau and was tempted to ignore procedure and head up. But I decided against it. You break even the mundane rules with the cops and they can get testy. I stepped up to one of the cops behind the counter. He eyed the computer bag slung over my shoulder.
“You moving in with us, are you?”
“No, this is just a computer,” I said. “Detective Lawrence Washington. I’d like to speak with him.”
“And you are?”
“My name’s Jack McEvoy. He doesn’t know me.”
“You have an appointment?”
“No. It’s about the Smathers case. You can tell him that.”
The cop’s eyebrows climbed an inch up his forehead.
“Tell you what, open up the bag and let’s check the computer while I make the call.”
I did what he asked, opening up the computer the way they used to make me do at airports. I turned it on, turned it off and put it away. The cop watched with the phone to his ear while talking to someone I assumed was a secretary. I figured that mentioning Smathers would at least get me through the preliminary round.
“Got a citizen down here to see Larry Legs about the kid.”
He listened a few moments and then hung up.
“Second floor. Up the stairs, to your left, go down the hall, last door. Says Homicide. He’s the black guy.”