Free The Innocence Game by Michael Harvey Page B

said.
    “Lead on.”
    We walked out to his car. Havens popped the trunk. Inside were three Bankers Boxes. I lifted one out. Heavy. Scrawled in Magic Marker on the side were names, dates, and case numbers.
    “I’ve been busy,” Havens said with a grin.
    “No kidding. What do we got here?”
    “Let’s bring them inside.”
    We lugged the boxes into my living room.
    “Did Sarah tell you about the records center?” I said.
    “She said everything in the files was cut up and blacked out. Tell me about the cops that stopped you.”
    I gave him the firsthand account. Havens listened closely.
    “Someone’s worried,” he said.
    “My thoughts exactly.”
    He opened one of the boxes and began to remove files.
    “What is all this?” I said.
    “Ever heard of ViCAP?”
    “No.”
    “Violent Criminal Apprehension Program. It’s an FBI program that analyzes crimes and sorts them into different categories.”
    “What kind of categories?”
    “All kinds. Guys that like to tie up their victims. Ones that like to use a knife. Strangle. Different variations of sexual assault. ViCAP identifies the signature of a crime and then matches it up with similar cases. Gives the police a way to look for patterns.”
    “And you have access to ViCAP?”
    “One of my law profs at Chicago does. I told him I wanted to get a jump on the assholes from Evanston.” Havens winked. “He let me run Harrison’s case through the system. Pretty interesting.”
    Havens pulled out a laptop and powered it up. “I punched in all the signature details I could think of. Age of the victim. Kidnapping. School. Proximity to water. Strangulation, drowning. Some evidence of a knife.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Then I ran a search in the Chicagoland area. Anything within a five-year window of Skylar Wingate.”
    My head felt heavy, and my skin itched. I wanted Havens to get to the punch line. The barrister in him, however, was nothing if not methodical.
    “I picked five years because I thought it was a reasonable amount of time to expect a killer to be active. If you look at the research on most serial killers—”
    “What did you find, Jake?”
    Havens pointed to two case numbers highlighted in a document he’d opened up on his laptop. “Two cases. Within three years of Wingate’s death.”
    “How close are they?”
    “You tell me.” Havens reached into one of the boxes and pulled out a folder with a green tab. On the cover was a picture of a kid, smiling in his Little League uniform. “Nineteen ninety-six. Billy Scranton from Indiana. Ran away when he was thirteen. Six months later, they found him partially buried in the forest preserve. Maybe a mile from Skylar. He’d been drowned. Possibly strangled.”
    A second jacket hit the table. On the cover was a blurry shot of a black kid.
    “Ninety-seven. Richmond Allen. Fourteen. Another runaway, from Texas. They found him in a wooded area on the South Side. Twenty miles from Caldwell Woods, but near a lake. He had a rope around his neck. Just like Skylar. And water in his lungs.”
    “No one ever connected the cases?”
    Havens shook his head.
    “And they’re still unsolved?”
    “That’s where it gets interesting.” Havens opened up a second box and pulled out a stack of red-tabbed folders. Where did he get all this shit? And where did he get the time?
    “Both cases were ‘solved.’ ” Havens made quote marks in the air with his fingers. “Remember, this was still the early days of DNA. Very difficult. Very expensive. Barely understood.”
    “So no DNA requests in either case?”
    “That’s right. In the Scranton case, they nailed the guy with fibers that allegedly came from his car and his coat. Wayne Williams sort of thing. Guy from Atlanta.”
    “I know who Wayne Williams is.”
    “In the Allen case, it was blood typing.”
    “What about witnesses?”
    “No witnesses other than experts and cops. Public defenders in both trials.”
    “And where are the guys that got