“There can’t be any cameras on that street,” Mechanic said. “There’s nothing back there worth looking at.”
“There doesn’t need to be,” I said. “Surveillance doesn’t need to get them on South Wallace. You can catch them leaving when they turn onto busy Sixty-Ninth Street.”
24
I DROPPED MECHANIC OFF in time for his evening appointment, then headed back to the office to work on the timeline of dumping Chopper’s body. As I pulled up to my building, an unmarked pulled in behind me. Only the passenger door opened. Burke unfolded his two-hundred-plus-pound body out of the front seat. He had one brown bag under his arm and another in his hand. It was barely forty degrees, and he still wasn’t wearing a coat. Once we got into my office, he arranged everything with great precision on the small worktable opposite my desk. He took a glance at the timeline I had mapped out on my dry-erase board and nodded.
“Dinner’s on me tonight,” he said, tearing open the Harold’s Chicken Shack bag and spreading out one of my old newspapers as a place mat.
“Thanks for splurging,” I said. “I’m sure it was a stretch on a commander’s salary.”
“Grease and Jack,” he said, pulling out a long bottle from the other brown bag. “A proper meal.”
I pulled open the bottom desk drawer and found two glasses that were reasonably clean, then grabbed a can of soda from the fridge. Once we had divided the bucket of chicken and commenced the business of eating, Burke got down to the business of his visit.
“You making any headway on the family front?” Burke said, chewing vigorously.
“Coming along,” I said. “Family dynamics aren’t as perfect as their Christmas card photo. There could be some complications between mother and daughter, and he might be in the middle. It’s what Carl Jung called the Electra complex.”
“Who the hell was Carl Jung?”
“Sigmund Freud’s sidekick.”
“What the hell does he have to do with Gerrigan?”
“Freud wrote about the Oedipus complex, where the boy has an unconscious sexual desire for his mother. Jung turned it around for the girl and her father and called it the Electra complex. Electra was the character from Greek mythology who with her brother plotted the murder of their mother and stepfather, because the two of them were behind the killing of their father, Agamemnon.”
“Jesus Christ!” Burke said, crushing another chicken breast, then licking his fingers. “You really study this shit.”
“Only when I’m not chasing the little white ball.” I took a sizable bite of a drumstick and felt my cholesterol level skyrocket instantaneously.
“Well, I didn’t come all the way over here to talk Greek mythology and Freud,” Burke said. “We have the tower dumps from the phone company.”
“How investigative of you,” I said.
Burke finished off another piece of chicken, wiped his hands on a paper napkin, then pulled out a small pad from the pocket of his starched white shirt. He had notes from the call detail record. “CDR shows that there was activity from the girl’s phone in the Hyde Park area at eleven thirty-three that night. No calls were made or received, but she probably downloaded something or did something with the internet that put her on the tower.”
“That’s strange,” I said. “Her last call was at eleven fifteen that night to a Dr. Bradford Weems. They talked for seven minutes.”
“We saw that. A couple of our guys already talked to him. He checks out clean. They’ve had a lot of contact over art. He hasn’t heard from her since and doesn’t have any idea where she might be.”
“So he says.”
“You don’t believe him.”
I brought him up to speed on Weems and his wife and my suspicions. I wasn’t exactly sure how they figured into all this, but my radar was blinking really fast.
“Then there’s another call,” Burke said.
“What call?”
“Looks like seven days after she disappeared, there was a call placed from her phone to Chopper’s phone at nine thirty-four p.m. Lasted thirty-three seconds.”
The logs Carolina had given me didn’t have that call, because they’d been pulled before this last call was made. This changed the entire picture.
“What tower was she on?” I asked.
“Hyde Park again.”
I looked up at the board. This helped fill in the timeline. The call would mean Tinsley had talked to Chopper a couple of nights after he and I had met in my office. This was seven days after I had been hired and two days before his body was found in Englewood. The first question I had was why the call lasted only thirty-three seconds when they hadn’t talked to each other in so long? Wouldn’t there be a lot of catching up to do? Instead, there had been no more activity on her phone since that last call.
“What are you thinking?” Burke said.
I looked up at the timeline. “Hunter Morgan said Tinsley never came over that night, nor did she call to let her know that she wouldn’t make it. Chopper said she’d also told him she was going over to the Morgans’, but she never responded to his text later that night, and her phone was off when he called her twice the next day. So Tinsley didn’t go to the Morgans’, yet she was in Hyde Park. And she wasn’t communicating with her boyfriend. Then she just disappears. Did she leave? Did someone abduct her? Was she killed?”
“We checked her rideshare accounts,” Burke said. “No trips on that day. Was she seeing someone else besides Chopper that he didn’t know about who lived in Hyde Park? We’ve already done a big canvass of Hyde Park. Two full days and got nothing. Not one person recognized her picture or her name.”
We stared out my window over Grant Park and looked into the lake. It was impossible to make out
