Look Closer

“Right.”

“Then the texts stop. That, we assume, is once he’s inside the house.”

“Right.”

“So he’s in the house, he kills her, and then he leaves. But this time, he doesn’t leave his phone off.”

“What does he do?”

“Well, as you know,” says Meadows, “your cell phone will stay active even if you’re not texting or calling from it. It will refresh, update—”

“So you’re saying after the murder, he left it on, and his burner kept pinging cell towers, allowing us to track him.”

“Yes, exactly. And if we isolate on October thirty-first, we have this nice trail.”

Agent Meadows works her computer, popping up a new screen, concerned only with the CSLI from October 31, Halloween. Jane stands up and stares at the trail of cell tower pings and the areas swept in by those cell towers.

“It sure seems to me,” says Agent Meadows, “he headed east from Lauren’s house, he went through some park toward Harlem Avenue, then he got on the Eisenhower, drove to the Kennedy, took the Kennedy up to North Avenue, and then went to his home in Wicker Park.”

Jane looks at Andy. “He probably caught a cab at Harlem and Lake,” she says.

“He could have parked his car there,” says Andy.

“Yeah, but it’s pretty tough to park a car around there,” Jane says. “I’ll bet he took a cab or Uber.”

“Meaning there will be records.” Andy makes a note. “I’m on it.”

“Anyway, so the offender gets home, someplace in Wicker Park near that three-way intersection. And then he sends his last text,” says Jane. “The so-called suicide note.” Jane looks at the transcript of the text messages, the final text Lauren received after her death:

Mon, Oct 31, 10:47 PM

I’m sorry, Lauren. I’m sorry for what I did and I’m sorry you didn’t love me. But I’m not sorry for loving you like nobody else could. I’m coming to you now. I hope you’ll accept me and let me love you in a way you wouldn’t in this world.

“Time of ten-forty-seven p.m., Halloween night,” says Jane.

“That makes sense,” says Agent Meadows, who doesn’t have the transcripts, only the CSLI information. “That’s the last ping we get on the cell phone. After ten-forty-seven p.m., the signal dies for good.”

“Meaning he turned off his cell phone.” Jane looks at Andy. “And then . . . killed himself?”

Andy shrugs.

“Not sure why he’d bother turning off his cell phone before committing suicide,” Jane says. “What, he’s saving the battery?”

“We don’t even know if he did kill himself,” says Andy. “Let’s find out.”

—

“So what’s your problem?” Andy asks as he and Jane leave the FBI field office.

Jane shakes her head. “You know what my problem is. It feels weird.”

“What’s so weird about how they were behaving?”

“Why does Lauren turn off her phone at home, after Conrad’s already moved out? I mean, while he’s living there, sure. But once he’s gone in mid-September? He’s not there to see her phone light up or hear it buzz.”

“Maybe she’s thinking ahead to the divorce,” says Andy. “Conrad playing hardball. Hiring an investigator to track her cell records.”

“A cell phone Conrad doesn’t even know exists?”

“Shit, I don’t know, Janey—it’s not that odd, is it? People having an affair acting paranoid?”

Jane goes quiet. Of course, what Andy’s saying is one way of looking at this.

“You’re thinking about Simon Dobias,” he says. “And everything we heard earlier today. How he manipulates people and covers his tracks.”

“Well, yes.” They reach their car. Andy takes the wheel. Jane prefers not to drive when she’s spitballing a theory. “You don’t think this feels a bit staged, Andy? Doesn’t this seem a little too obvious to you? I mean, could the arrows be pointing more obviously at these locations? These people never strayed from those locations?”

“Then what’s your theory?” Andy asks. “Say this is Simon Dobias behind all of this. What, Simon travels to this guy’s workplace every weekday morning to send text messages? And he travels to the guy’s house—”

“Or right around his house,” Jane interrupts. “It’s just an area, right? You could stand outside a guy’s house and text right there, and it will ping the same cell tower as if you were inside the house. Like Dee said, you could be a half block away and ping the same tower.”

“Okay, but that’s still going to an awful lot of trouble.”

“Exactly what he’d want us to say.”

“Well, shit, Janey, we can play that game all day. Every bit of information that exonerates Simon, you can say, ‘That’s just what he wants us to think,’ or ‘He staged it that way.’ I mean, do we—do we even know if Simon Dobias would know something like that?”

“I don’t know, Andy. People know that their cell phones send signals to cell towers.”

“Yeah, but do they know that the cell towers keep records of those pings down to the minute and second and store them for years? Do people know that we can draw on historical CSLI to trace someone’s movements years later?”

“The only question is whether Simon Dobias does,” she says. “And I’ll bet the answer is yes.”

79 Simon