Cahokia: When Murder Doesn't Die

CHICAGO:

The Windy City. Art and Architecture. Cronyism and Political Maneuvering. From the lake shore’s scenic drive to expressways diverged east, west and south. A cavernous horizon. Spiraled asphalt slithers a cosmopolitan jungle.

Cold. Breathing. Unforgiving.

Cahokia (KUH HO KEY UH), is a Native American word. It meant simply, what a thing is - the essence of itself. It is also a very small town in Southern Illinois. A place where secrets went to die ... and the place where they should stay buried. Chicago Police Lieutenant Quinton Marks heads the Homicide Division's Major Crimes Unit. The MCU. Marks and his team of four don't get the easy murder cases. The get the hard ones. The Yellow Ribbon Murders were a series of killings that rocked Chicago. Young women were being strangled and the only way to connect them to a serial killer was his signature calling card. The media labeled him The Yellow Ribbon Killer. The Chicago Police Department sent Quinton Marks and his MCU to find the killer and stop him. The MCU hounded killers, they scraped evidence. The did not relent. They were the best. And, in the case of The Yellow Ribbon Killer, they failed. The killer got away. He vanished. Many years would pass before Marks and his team were allowed to reopen the cases and seek their nemisis once more and this time, the most powerful man in Chicago was sending them. This time they couldn not fail. They couldn't fail, because The Yellow Ribbon Murders would't die - not for the victims - not for the police - and not for Dorian Willis, the future mayor of Chicago. He, most of all wanted the killer caught. For Marks and his team, a trail thought long dead would start in one location, then spiral like tentacles, intwining all those involved in this business of murder. That one place to start was Cahokia. Cahokia was the place where secrets had died ... and some of those secrets belonged to MCU Police Lieutenant Quinton Thomas Marks. Marks had not been sleeping well lately, haunted by the one that got away. His hauntings were about to extend past his dreams. Because as he and the MCU began the hunt for a ghost - The Yellow Ribbon Murders had begun All Over Again.