THE LAST WITNESS
The Alley
She would remember later that it was raining. She would not remember much else.
Sara || Murder || Rain || Night
The rain came down the way it always did in Chicago in November — not in sheets, not dramatically, but in the persistent, bone-finding way of a city that had decided to be cold and wet for the next six months and had very little patience for your objections to this arrangement. Sara Cole had been walking home from the parking garage on West Madison for exactly four minutes when she turned down the alley on Quincy, which was not her usual route, which was a decision she would examine obsessively in the coming weeks without ever arriving at a satisfying explanation for why she had turned when she turned. The alley was not a shortcut. It was not faster. It was, in fact, slightly longer than the route she normally took, which was the well-lit walk along Quincy itself, past the coffee shop that was always open too late and the dry cleaner’s with the orange neon sign that had been half-burned out for as long as she’d been working in the Loop. She turned anyway. That was the fact she kept returning to. She turned down the alley on Quincy at 11:14 p.m. on a Tuesday in November for no reason she could articulate, and what happened next was not an accident but it began with that one unaccountable decision.
She heard it before she saw it. A sound she processed initially as a garbage can being struck — the specific, hollow metal percussion of something being hit hard — followed immediately by something that was definitely not that, which was the sound a person made when they hit the ground on their side, the specific expulsion of breath combined with the wet impact of a body in a Chicago alley in November. Sara stopped walking. She was thirty-four years old and eight months pregnant and an assistant district attorney who had spent the last seven years prosecuting violent crime, which meant she had a professional relationship to violence that most people didn’t, a capacity to assess a situation quickly that her colleagues sometimes found unnerving in its speed and accuracy. She stopped walking and she listened and she took in the alley in the way she took in everything that mattered: systematically, moving from the obvious to the less obvious, cataloguing. There was a man on the ground approximately twenty feet ahead of her. There was another man standing over him. The standing man was holding something — long, dark, possibly a length of pipe — that he was raising above his head in the specific configuration of someone who intended to bring it down again. The man on the ground was not moving, which meant the first strike had already done considerable damage.
What Sara did next was not what most people in her position would have done. She didn’t run. She didn’t scream. She reached into her coat pocket and found her phone and said, in the clear, carrying voice she used in courtrooms, in the voice that had a quality of absolute authority that she had cultivated over seven years of practice: “Stop. Chicago PD.” Which was a lie she told without hesitation, because she had found in seven years of legal work that the specific words Chicago PD were more effective than anything else she might have said in that moment, and because the man standing over the man on the ground had stopped mid-swing at the sound of her voice, which meant the lie had bought them both a second. What she needed was one second. She was already dialing 911 with her other hand, the phone pressed flat against her palm, finding the numbers by memory without looking because she was not looking at the phone, she was looking at the man who was now turning. Looking at her. And what she saw in his face in the light that reached this far down the alley from the street lamps on Quincy — not much, but enough — was not panic and not fear but the specific expression of someone making a calculation, weighing options, assessing risk. She saw a mind working. She saw someone who was not acting from rage but from purpose, someone who had been here doing this deliberately, and she understood, in the three seconds it took for the 911 call to connect, that she was in considerably more danger than she had initially calculated.
He ran. Not toward her — away, back down the alley toward Monroe, a darkness absorbing another darkness, footsteps on wet concrete receding with a speed that told her he was young, fit, unhurried even in flight, someone who had planned for the possibility of a witness and had included in the plan the option of leaving. She let him go because she was eight months pregnant and not an idiot. She went to the man on the ground because whatever was waiting in her chest — the specific tightening that had started when she saw the second man’s expression — she was still a person who went toward the thing that needed help rather than away from it. She crouched beside him, which required a complicated negotiation with her own body at eight months, and she pressed two fingers to the side of his neck where the artery was and she found a pulse that was present but irregular and retreating. He was breathing. She could see the chest moving in small, effortful increments. His face was turned away from her and she didn’t touch him, didn’t move him, because you didn’t move a person who might have spinal injury and she knew this and acted on it. She told the 911 operator the address, the situation, the status of the victim. She said she was an eyewitness and gave her name and badge number from the DA’s office. She did all of this in the level, competent voice of someone managing an emergency and she kept her other hand pressed flat against her own belly, not for reassurance — not consciously — but because the baby had been still since she entered the alley and she needed to feel it moving. The baby moved. Sara breathed.
The paramedics were there in six minutes, which was excellent response time for this part of the Loop at this hour. The police came ninety seconds behind them. Sara stood aside and let the paramedics work and watched the man on the ground — she could see his face now, turned by the paramedics with the practiced care of people who understood what they were doing — and she studied it with the same systematic attention she had applied to the alley. Forty years old, perhaps. Perhaps forty-five. Dark hair, some grey at the temples. A face that was ordinary in the way that most faces were ordinary, that would not stand out in a crowd, that you would not remember unless you had reason to. She did not recognize it. She was certain of this the way she was certain of most things that she processed consciously and deliberately — she had seen this face, in this alley, on this night, and she had never seen it before in her life. She was an attorney with a memory she had trained across seven years of casework to retain specifics. She did not know this man. She had never met him. She was sure of this. She would remain sure of this for approximately seventy-two hours, until the detective assigned to the case showed her the man’s phone records and she saw her own number appear three times in the hour before the attack, and the certainty began to fracture in ways she had no tools to manage.
The detective who took her statement that night was not Marcus Webb. That came later. The officer who came first was a young patrolman named Reyes who was conscientious and thorough and who took down everything she said with the care of someone who understood that a witness statement from an ADA was going to receive serious scrutiny. He asked her twice whether she recognized the victim. She said no, both times, with the same certainty. He wrote it down. He did not tell her the man’s name. Later she would think about that — the specific decision of the patrolman not to tell her who the man was. Whether it was procedure, whether it was oversight, whether it was something else. She would think about that moment many times in the weeks that followed, turning it over the way you turned over a coin whose authenticity you suspected. At the time she simply answered the questions and stood in the alley in the rain while the paramedics worked and the man who was not her patient and not her client and not anyone she knew was loaded onto a gurney with the specific practiced urgency of people who understood there was not much time. She didn’t know if he survived. She went home to the apartment on State Street and she sat on the edge of the bed and she put both hands on her belly and the baby moved against her palms like a reassurance she hadn’t asked for but needed anyway. She didn’t sleep. She lay in the dark and thought about the face of the man in the alley — the standing man, the one who ran — and she tried to hold it in her memory with the clarity it deserved. She could see it. She could hold it. She told herself she could describe it to a sketch artist in the morning with enough specificity to be useful. She was right about that. What she was wrong about — what she had no way of knowing yet — was how much more complex the situation was than anything she had seen in the alley. What had happened in that alley was not the beginning of the story. It was the moment she stepped into a story that had been building for fifteen years without her knowledge. And the man whose face she was trying to hold in her memory was not the danger she needed to be afraid of. The danger was the one she was about to bring home.
James was asleep when she got back. She stood in the bedroom doorway and looked at him in the dark — the shape of him under the duvet, the easy rise and fall of sleep, the particular helplessness of a person unconscious that she had always found both moving and informative. James Cole slept like a man with a clear conscience, which was something she had always noted with a combination of admiration and, lately, a small unexamined unease that she attributed to the pregnancy, to the hormones, to the specific anxieties of third-trimester waiting. She did not wake him. She went to the bathroom and sat on the closed lid of the toilet and held her phone and looked at it the way you looked at an object you were about to open that might contain something you weren’t ready for. She checked her outgoing calls. Procedure — she always checked outgoing calls when she came in late, a habit from years of managing case communication, of keeping the record clean. Her last outgoing call was at 8:17 p.m., to her mother. Before that, at 7:43 p.m., to the office. Before that — she kept scrolling back — at 11 p.m., a number she didn’t recognize. And again at 10:42 p.m. And again at 10:15 p.m. Three calls to the same number, in the hour before she had walked down the alley on Quincy. The calls were all less than thirty seconds, which meant they either rang out or whoever answered hung up immediately. She stared at the number. She did not recognize it. She had no memory of making these calls. She sat on the bathroom floor with her back against the wall and the phone in both hands and the baby pressing against her ribs from the inside, and she thought: I don’t remember. I don’t remember making these calls. That is not possible. That is not how memory works. But it was happening. And in the morning, when Detective Marcus Webb showed up at her office with the victim’s phone records and she saw her number in them three times, she would understand that her impossible memory gap and the dead man in the alley were not separate problems. They were the same problem. And it was enormous.