Look Closer

“But putting aside the night of Halloween, it sure seems like the guy was texting from the same location every morning and the same location every night. Both locations were in Chicago. So let’s get into that.” Meadows starts to work her laptop. “You guys understand, I assume, that CSLI isn’t an exact science down to the microscopic point. You get that?”

“Yeah, you get a range from the cell tower. You get an area. The more cell towers around there, the smaller the area per cell tower.”

“Right, if you’re out somewhere rural, historical CSLI isn’t always your friend. But this guy was in the city, with a lot of towers, so it’s a bit more precise. Okay, I told you all of Lauren’s texts came from her home. Or from a fairly small area that includes her house, more accurately.”

“Right,” says Jane. “She could have been inside her house or on the back patio or the driveway—”

“Hell, she could’ve been half a block from her house, at least, and she’d still be pinging the same cell tower out in Grace Village. But yeah, all of Lauren’s texts, every one of them, hit her local cell tower, so you don’t need to see that. What you wanna see is the guy’s phone. The offender’s phone.”

Agent Meadows kills the lights and returns to her laptop. An image pops up on the conference room’s white wall, showing an aerial map with hundreds of blue dots and several thick red circles.

“This is the area by the elevated train downtown, near Clark and Lake,” says Meadows. “For the ten a.m. text messages, and I mean every single one of them, the burner pinged one of two different cell sites. One is right at Clark and Lake, the other is a couple blocks south and east on Dearborn between Washington and Randolph. Now, these are high-density areas.”

“Lots of large commercial buildings,” says Andy Tate.

“Well, hang on,” she says. “Each cell site has directional antennas that divide the area into sectors. So for the cell site at Clark and Lake, the southeast antenna was pinged. And for the one on Dearborn, the northwest antenna was pinged. So that gets us a fairly small cross-sectional area.”

“An area of large commercial buildings?”

“Actually, no,” says Meadows. “Look at the buildings that fall into these sectors. At the intersection here of Clark and Randolph, you have the Daley Center. County offices, right? Judges, prosecutors, law enforcement. Then you have the Thompson Center—state governmental employees. And the county building and city hall. Same idea—government employees.” Meadows looks at Jane. “That fit your profile of the unknown subject? Some government employee? You said you had a working theory that this guy had money.”

“Just a theory,” Jane says.

That’s what Conrad’s ex-wife Cassandra thought—Lauren was looking for a fat wallet to replace the one who was divorcing her.

“Okay, well, we have a bunch of government buildings, and we have a massive parking garage in this sector. You think your guy was texting from a parking garage at ten in the morning?”

“Presumably not,” Jane says. “The assumption is he was at work. Just an assumption.”

“But a good one,” says Meadows. “So if someone with a lot of dough is at work, and he’s within this sector, he’s probably working in this building right here.” She taps a building on the corner of Randolph and Clark. “Forty, fifty floors tall. Lots of commercial companies, lenders, lawyers, the white-collar private-sector type. People with some money in their pocket.”

Jane looks at the map. “The Grant Thornton Tower.”

“That’s what it’s called now,” says Meadows. “I’m old-school. I’ll always think of it as the Chicago Title & Trust Building.”

—

“So this is where the eight p.m. text messages came from,” Meadows says. “This is the Bucktown/Wicker Park area. You know, by that three-way intersection of North, Damen, and Milwaukee.”

“I know it better than I care to admit,” says Jane. “From my younger days, of course.”

Meadows winks at her. “So again, looking at the overlapping sectors from these cell towers, it looks like your offender was in this neighborhood right here.” Meadows finger-draws a circle on the projection screen. “North of North Avenue, south of Wabansia, around Damen or Winchester.”

“And what’s there?” Jane peers at the map.

“Some condos on Winchester, which is residential,” says Meadows. “Otherwise, you have some commercial establishments on Damen. An AT&T store, Nike, Lululemon, a pizzeria, and a restaurant called Viva Mediterránea, which I highly recommend, by the way. Great martinis.”

Jane’s been to Viva. Not for martinis but for a man. The martinis were better.

“But unlikely he was texting from Nike or Lululemon or Viva Mediterránea every single night. Most likely,” says Meadows, “he lived right up here in Wicker Park. Probably the 1600 block of North Winchester.”

“That’s your best guess.”

“By far,” she says. “Especially because, that’s where he went after the murder.”

Jane sits forward. “The CSLI—”

“He’s texting her on the night of the murder, on Halloween, right?”

“Right,” says Jane.

“Right outside her house, right?”