I walked toward the tree and instinctively knew what I was seeing. A one-year anniversary noted with flowers.

when I got to the tree I saw that the flowedright red roses splashed like blood on the snow-were fake, made of wood shavings. In the cleft made by the first branching of the tree's trunk I saw that someone had propped a small studio photo of a smiling boy, his elbows on a table and his hands propped against his cheeks. He wore a red jacket and white shirt with a very small blue bow tie. The family had been here, I guessed. I wondered why they hadn't placed their memorial at the boy's grave.

I looked around. The lagoons near the barn were iced over and there were a couple of skaters. No one else. I looked over to Clark Street and saw the cab waiting. Across the street from it a brick tower rose. I saw that the sign on the awning out front said HEMINGWAY HOUSE. It was the place the zoo docent had come from before finding the small boy's body. I looked back at the photo propped in the tree's cleft and without any hesitation reached up and took it down. It was sealed in plastic like a driver's license to protect it from the elements. On the back of it was written the boy's name but nothing else. I slid the photo into the pocket of my long coat. I knew that someday I might need it to run with the story.

The cab felt as welcome and warm to me as a living room with a fireplace. I began scrolling through the Tribune stories while we drove on to Area Three.

The major facts of the case were as horrifying as those in the Theresa Lofton killing. The boy had been lured from a fenced recreation center at a Division Street elementary school. He and two others had gone out to make snowballs.

When the teacher noticed they were missing from the classroom, she went out and rounded the boys up. But by then Bobby Smathers was gone. The two twelve-year-old witnesses proved unable to tell police investigators what happened. According to them, Bobby Smathers simply disappeared. They looked up from their work in the snow and didn't see him. They suspected he was hiding and waiting to ambush them, so they didn't go looking.

Bobby was found a day later in the snowbank near the bocce clearing in Lincoln Park. Weeks of full-time investigation headed by Detective John Brooks, who caught the case as lead investigator, never got any closer than the explanation of the two twelve-year-olds: Bobby Smathers had simply disappeared that day at the school.

As I reviewed the stories I looked for similarities to Lofton. There were few. She was a white female adult and he a black male child. As far different in terms of prey as would seem possible. But both were missing for more than twenty-four hours before being found and the mutilated bodies of both victims were found in city parks. Lastly, both had been at children's centers on their last day. The boy at his school, the_ woman at the day care center where she worked. I didn't know the significance of these connections but they were all I had.