in psychology, Stephens said.
Moore was the only daughter of Dr. Davis and Jacqueline Moore of Northwood. Her father, a partner at the New Tech Fertility Clinic on Sheridan Road, was wounded in a shooting incident last year. Police say there is no evidence of a connection between the incidents.
On Thursday, the store remained closed, the sidewalks and entrances fenced in with crime scene tape, as police searched for clues. Individuals who had been to the Gap store on Wednesday, or who might have information regarding this crime, are being asked to contact police.
As news of Moore’s death spread through town, residents expressed a range of emotions.
“She was so beautiful and so kind. Who would want to hurt her like this?” Stephens said.
“It makes me real nervous,” said a female resident who asked not to be identified. “I’ve never thought twice about coming down here at night. Nothing ever goes on in this town.
“It’s scary,” she added, staring at the police tape across the front door.
By Thursday afternoon, a makeshift memorial of flowers and signs had appeared by the main entrance to Northwood East High School. Within hours, friends of the victim had added stuffed animals, photographs, poems, and other notes of remembrance.
“I can’t believe it,” said one student who described himself as a friend of the deceased. “She loved everybody. And everybody loved her.”
– 10 -
The detective was polite each morning when he called, and Davis feigned patience each morning when the detective, after small talk, confessed to having no leads. Well, not zero leads, exactly: a profile had been made of the attacker. The police believed he was white and fair-skinned. They had some general idea about his size, based on the placement of the bruises and the force exerted on her arm, breaking it in two, but that ruled out only the unusually short and the freakishly tall. They did not think he was obese, according to their reconstruction of the rape itself. He may or may not have been someone Anna Kat knew – probably not, because if she had been expecting someone that night, she might have told somebody, but then again, who can say? The medical examiner said the injuries were consistent with rape, but could not comment on whether the state’s attorney would include sexual assault along with the murder charge when police apprehended a suspect. When Davis expressed outrage after that information had appeared in the paper, the detective settled him down and assured him that when a beaten, broken, strangled girl has fresh semen inside her, that’s a rape in the cops’ book, no matter what the M.E. says; and then he apologized for putting it that way, for being so goddamn insensitive, and then Davis had to reassure the detective. That’s all right. He didn’t want them to be sensitive. He wanted the police to be as angry and raw as he was. The detective understood that the Moores wanted a resolution. “We know you want closure, Dr. Moore, and so do we,” he said. “Some of these cases take time.”
Often, the police told the Moores, a friend of the victim will think aloud during questioning: It’s probably nothing, you know, but there’s this strange guy who was always hanging around… This time, none of Anna Kat’s friends could offer even a cynical theory. Fingerprints were too plentiful to be useful (“Everyone in town has had their palms on that countertop,” the detective said), and the police were sure the perpetrator had worn gloves anyway, by the thickness of the bruises on her wrists and neck. Daniel Kinney, Anna Kat’s off-again boyfriend, was questioned three times. He was appropriately distraught and cooperative, submitting to a blood test and bringing his parents, but never a lawyer. Interviews with Northwood students continued.
Blond hairs were found at the scene, and police had determined they belonged to the killer by comparing the DNA to his semen. With no suspect sharing those same microscopic markers, however, the evidence was an answer to an unasked question. A proof without hypothesis. Before or during the rape, she had been beaten. During or possibly after the rape, she had been strangled. One arm and both legs were broken. Seven hundred forty-nine dollars were missing from a pair of registers, and there might have been some clothes gone from the racks. (The embarrassed store manager wasn’t sure about that, inventory being something of a mess, but it’s possible that a few pocket tees were taken. Extra large. The police noted this in their profile.)
Northwood panicked for a few weeks. The bakery, True Value, Coffee Nook, the fruit stand, two ice cream parlors, six restaurants, three hairdressers, and two dozen or so other shops, including the Gap, of course (but not the White Hen), began closing at sundown. More spouses met their partners at the train, their cars in long queues parallel to the tracks each night. The cops put in for overtime, and the town borrowed officers from Glencoe. If you were under eighteen, you were home before curfew. The Chicago and Milwaukee TV stations made camp for a while on Main Street (news producers determined that Oak Street, where the Gap shared the block with a carpet store, a parking lot, and a funeral home, didn’t provide enough “visual interest” and chose to shoot stand-ups around the corner, where there was more pedestrian traffic and overall “quaintness”), but there turns out to be a limit to the number of nights you can report that there is, as yet, nothing to report, and TV crews disappeared as a group the day a Northwestern basketball player collapsed and died of an aneurysm during practice.
The old routine returned in time. By spring, Anna Kat might not have been forgotten – what with the softball team wearing the “AK” patch, the special appointment of Debbie Fuller to fill the vacancy of student council secretary, and the three-page, full-color yearbook dedication all keeping her top of mind around campus – but Northwood became unafraid again. A horrible alien had killed on its streets; Northwood had been shattered, and the people made repairs. The town grieved and, like the alien, moved on.
– 11 -
Davis prescribed his wife too many pills. When he felt like taking some himself, which was often, he would remove a few capsules from the brown bottle in her bathroom, rub the scar on his belly, and chase the pills with scotch. The bottle’s cap boasted cruelly of a mechanism that could keep his child safe. Sometimes he’d sit on the toilet, rolling a crystal rocks glass between his hands, and wonder if he and Jackie were addicts yet, one day deciding it was okay if they were.
Jackie hardly laughed these days. Davis, always reticent, was noticeably more so. “We never make love anymore,” Jackie said one night across a cold chicken dinner and supermarket wine (the good stuff from their cellar having been depleted and never replaced). Davis agreed.
Old and strictly observed habits enabled them to go days without talking: Davis locked the doors at night and rose from bed first in the morning; Jackie paid the household bills; Davis curbed the garbage and recyclables early Monday before work; Jackie shopped for groceries on Wednesday; Davis kept the tanks in both cars more than a quarter full; Jackie picked up the laundry and dry cleaning twice a week and changed the sheets every Thursday.
Sometimes when they did speak, frequently drunk or numbed, the words came out in cruel, irretrievable bunches:
God, Jackie, is that really a lot to ask? Do I ever ask you for anything? I expect so goddamn little and you can’t even give me that!
You don’t ask for a thing, Davis. You don’t ask for anything, and you don’t give me anything. Honestly, it’s not human to live this way!
Northwood’s senior class president, a thinnish boy named Mark Campagna, came to the house with Anna Kat’s yearbook, or the yearbook she’d ordered anyway, with her name embossed on the cover in gold. Mark explained how he’d passed it around to every kid in the class, and they’d all signed, every single one. He’d made sure of that, even sat at a folding table outside the cafeteria every fifth period for a week and hunted down the kids he’d missed in the hallways between classes. Davis and Jackie thanked him and meant it, but Davis wasn’t ready to read a book filled with sentimental teen angst and melodrama, so he put it on the shelf next to her underclassman yearbooks and they promised each other they’d read it on her birthday next year. Jackie read every word the following day.
Then, just as the winter was ending, Jackie’s behavior went off-axle. No doubt there were many factors
