Opening Moves

by Steven James

  (4) Based on the grisly and flagrant nature of the crime, I could hardly believe that this was the kidnapper’s first offense. The stark brutality of his mutilation of Colleen might actually help us narrow down the suspect pool, might actually help us find him.

  Radar was waiting for me when I arrived at the hospital, and he met me at the front door. After asking me about my jaw and my wrenched finger, and after I assured him, honestly, that they were feeling remarkably better, he said, “It’s gonna be a cold one today.” His eyes were on the spreading slabs of gray clouds blanketing the sky.

  “Yeah.”

  “I wish it would just snow and be done with it.”

  Wisconsin winters are long enough for me as it is. Besides, I’d been hoping to squeeze in a few more weekends of rock climbing at Devil’s Lake State Park over near Baraboo before the snow and ice settled in for the next four months. But I didn’t really want to talk to Radar about the weather. The attack on Colleen and the dark residue of my dreams were weighing too heavily on my mind.

  “How is she?” I asked.

  “Doing pretty well. Considering.” He paused. “At least physically.”

  We passed through the doors. “Has she said anything?”

  “Not yet, no. You should know Captain Domyslawski contacted the FBI last night after the abduction. There are a couple agents from the NCAVC coming over this morning.”

  Oh, great.

  The FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime was the division of the Bureau dedicated to providing investigative support for tracking and capturing the country’s most violent offenders. I hadn’t worked with the Feds before, but I’d heard horror stories about doing so, and that didn’t give me a whole lot of confidence on how all this might play out. I trusted the officers I worked with here on the force, but consulting with a couple of desk jockeys from Quantico didn’t exactly thrill me.

  Radar was on the same wavelength. “Let’s hope they don’t get in the way,” he said.

  “You read my mind.”

  There wasn’t a gentle way to frame the next question, but it had to be brought up and direct is usually best. “Do we know if Colleen was sexually assaulted?”

  “The docs who helped her last night didn’t find any evidence that she had been. So at least there’s that to be thankful for.”

  “Yes,” I said. “At least there’s that.”

  We found Colleen Hayes’s room, showed our IDs to Thompson, the officer in our department who was stationed as a sentry outside it, knocked and, at her invitation, stepped inside. She’d been mute since she was found, so hearing her voice surprised me, but when we entered, I realized it wasn’t Colleen who’d called us in after all, but rather the stout nurse who stood beside the bed, checking the IV.

  The nurse seemed taken aback when she saw us; perhaps she’d been expecting a doctor on rounds or maybe another nurse. She didn’t hide her scowl when we showed her our badges, but she held back from making any sort of a scene, perhaps just to keep from upsetting her patient.

  Colleen lay on the bed, her legs beneath a blanket, her arms also tucked beneath it, no doubt to hide the stumps where her hands used to be. She was conscious and was staring away from us at the shrouded window on the south side of the room. With the curtains drawn, there was no view, but I had the feeling she wouldn’t have really been seeing it if there was.

  Once again I was struck by the horrifying nature of this crime. Without prosthetics she would never again comb her hair, type on a keyboard, flip the page of a book, slip a key into a lock—the little things we all take for granted.

  And the big ones.

  Like feeding herself. Or caressing her fingers across her lover’s cheek.

  Radar and I introduced ourselves and took a seat beside her bed.

  9

  The nurse finished her duties and exited, leaving Radar and me alone with Colleen Hayes.

  To me, hospitals don’t just smell sickly clean, they also seem to be permeated with the stench of death from those who’ve died inside them. And—

  Man, there was just too much death on my mind today. With the weight of my job and my troubling dreams, the morning already felt heavy, too heavy. I needed to find a way to lighten things up.

  But, unfortunately, that wasn’t going to happen at the moment.

  “First of all, Ms. Hayes…” I saw a rosary on her bedside table and was hit with the tragic truth that she would never be able to work her way through the beads again. “I’m very sorry you were attacked. I promise that we’re going to do everything we can to catch the man who did this and we’re going to put him away.”

  She was quiet.

  “I want you to know that Vincent is alright. He’s in—”

  “What,” she said abruptly, “did he make Vinnie do?” The fact that she was already speaking to us took me aback. Her words were tight with concern, but also sharp with anger: “The guy who sawed off my hands.” She paused. “The doctors told me Vinnie is okay, but that he couldn’t come to visit me because he’s in jail. What did that man make my husband do?”

  It was her right to know what Vincent had done and I summarized what’d happened last night concerning Lionel. I didn’t mention Vincent’s flight through the neighborhood or the fact that he’d physically assaulted me when I was apprehending him, but Colleen stared at the bruise on my jaw and I imagined she was able to put two and two together. I slid my left hand over my right to hide the swollen, discolored finger.

  “So my husband is in jail.” It didn’t sound like a question.

  “I understand you must be—”

  “You understand what? Exactly?” She glared at me, then pulled her arms out from under the blankets and held them up in front of me. Where her hands used to be were nothing but thick bandages. That was all. “What is it you understand?”

  I felt so underqualified to be here. She needed a minister or a psychiatrist rather than a detective. “I’m sorry,” I told her truthfully. “You’re right. I don’t understand. I couldn’t possibly.”

  “And this man…” She fumbled to stick her arms under the blanket again. Radar was closer to her than I was and he quietly helped pull the blanket back for her. She finally got her arms beneath it. “… Lionel, he’s alright?”

  “He is,” Radar answered. “He’s already back home and it doesn’t look like he’s going to press charges.”

  She said nothing, looked toward the window again.

  I waited a few moments to let her sort things through, then pulled out my notebook and said softly, “Mrs. Hayes, can you tell us anything about the man who hurt you?”

  She took a deep breath but didn’t answer. I noticed the tear in her eye and felt even less qualified than before to be here. Thankfully, Radar put one hand on her shoulder, and with the other, he wiped away her tear. He was a married man, had a daughter and a son; I was neither a father nor a husband. He knew a lot more than I did about how to comfort hurting people and I was glad he was here.

  Neither of us told her things would be okay; rather, both of us were silent and that seemed to be the better choice at the moment. She began to instinctively reach for her face to dry her tears, but stopped just short of removing her arm from beneath the blanket. I found some tissues, handed them to Radar, and he gently pressed away her tears.

  At last she took a deep breath. “He wore a black ski mask. But I saw his skin. He was white. Had brown eyes. I saw that too, before he blindfolded me. After that I only heard his voice.”

  “Could you tell how tall he was?”

  “Big. I’d say over six feet tall.” She looked at me. “Kinda like you. And strong too.”

  “Was there any indication that there was more than one person?”

  “No. I mean, nothing that I could tell.”

  Radar cut in, “Colleen, do you have any idea where he took you?”

  “No. I was in his trunk.”

  Good. That was something. The car had a trunk. The man drove a sedan of
some type.

  “He never took off the blindfold. My arms were tied up when he did it. I was in a chair. He didn’t knock me out when he cut off my hands. I screamed, I just kept screaming. Then he gave me a shot and I fell asleep. I woke up in the hospital like…” She let her voice trail off, then stared down at the blanket covering her arms.

  I leaned close. “Think about the drive there, Colleen, the time you were alone with him. Could you tell how long you were in the car or how many times he stopped at traffic lights or stop signs?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know how many times we stopped or how long we drove. I was too scared. It seemed like forever.”

  “Did you hear anything unusual—sirens, trains, whistles, alarms, anything? Or notice any odd smells that might help us narrow down our search? Cologne, body odor, anything like that? Maybe he was a smoker?”

  She thought about it for a long time. “I smelled yeast. That I remember. It was a little faint, so I’m thinking we were somewhere near the breweries, but not too close.”

  Wind, temperature, and humidity as well as production schedule would all affect how far the smell of the breweries would have spread. Things to look into.

  “That’s good,” I told her. “Very good. That helps. Anything else?”

  “It was cold when he did it, like we might have been out in a garage or something. He carried me there from the car. When I screamed I could hear it echo a little, but it was sort of muted too. I don’t know. I can’t think of anything else.”

  “Do you think you could recognize his voice?” Radar asked. She shook her head again.

  And then she was quiet and we didn’t want to press her, but we also didn’t want to leave her alone, so we sat with her for a while even though it meant being late for the briefing at police headquarters. But Thorne wasn’t exactly famous for starting his meetings on time and there are some things that are more important than punctuality.

  Finally, our police chaplain, Reverend Padilla, who served the force but also comforted the victims of violent crimes, came in. We excused ourselves, left the room, and silently passed down the hallway.

  Although we needed to get to the department, before leaving the medical center I called Taci’s wing to see if she could meet me by my car. She was in the next building over and by the time I’d made it outside, she was already on the sidewalk that led to the parking lot.

  “Hey, Pat.” She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, the kind you might give when greeting a friend. Just a friend.

  “Hey.”

  Radar went on ahead to give us a chance to talk.

  Today Taci, a brunette with striking dark brown eyes and a kind smile, wore a cream-colored double-breasted peacoat, cerulean skirt, white tights and modest heels. She looked as charming and attractive as ever.

  “I got your message last night,” I told her as we started for the car. “But I didn’t get in until after one. It was too late to call.”

  “Our schedules make this hard, don’t they?”

  “It’s been a little rough lately, sure, but things will settle down once your residency is over.”

  She was quiet. “I heard about everything that’s going on. About Mrs. Hayes. All the doctors are talking about it. That poor woman.” Her words were marked with deep compassion, one of the qualities that had caught my attention the first time we met. “It’s horrifying what happened.”

  “Yes.”

  “How are you? Through all this?”

  “Focused.”

  “You’re going to catch this guy, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I am.”

  A moment passed. “Pat, I’d hate to be the person you’re after.”

  I hadn’t really wanted our conversation to be about the case or about Ms. Hayes, so I tried to lighten things up a little. “You are the person I’m after.”

  I was sort of hoping she’d say, “You too” or “You already have me” or something along those lines, but instead she looked a little uncomfortable. “Thanks.”

  This whole conversation was becoming slightly discomfiting.

  “Listen,” she said. “About tonight. Dinner.”

  “Yes. Pasta. My place.”

  “I’m…Well, it’ll be good. Give us a chance to talk.”

  With the briefing at the department coming up, I really didn’t have a lot of time, but I offered anyway. “We can talk right now.” A few flecks of snow began to meander around us. We were almost to my car.

  “No. Not in the parking lot.”

  “There’s something we need to talk about in private?”

  “No.” But then she hesitated and backpedaled a little. “I mean…Well. No. Anyway…” She gave me another peck on the cheek. Friendly once again. “I’ll see you tonight. At seven.”

  “See you at seven.”

  Then she returned to the building, leaving me to wonder what exactly she wanted to discuss with me privately tonight on the one-year anniversary of the day we first met.

  I climbed into my car.

  When I radioed the department to tell Thorne I might be a little late, I found out the meeting was postponed until nine thirty, which gave me a few extra minutes. The alley where we’d found Lionel wasn’t too far out of the way, so I decided to swing by and have a look at it in the daylight.

  10

  I parked beside the alley.

  The fenced-in lot bordering it contained the place where Dahmer’s apartment building used to stand. Inside the fence, the ground was covered with dry, brown grass and a dusting of gritty snow. The lot looked unremarkable and anonymous, which was exactly what the city of Milwaukee wanted. Bulldozing the building and clearing the rubble had been a way of trying to erase from the city’s collective memory what had happened here.

  I got out of the car, walked to the chain-link fence, and peered through to the other side.

  The cloud-dampened light and flecks of restless snow accentuated the lonely, foreboding mood of this place.

  After working as many cases as I have, you realize that you can scrub a floor clean of blood, you can tear out a wall or knock down a building, but tragedies all too often seem to stain the air of these places of death, to rip open space and time and root themselves stubbornly to a specific location.

  The invisible, tormented geography of pain.

  My thoughts traveled back to hearing about what’d happened just on the other side of this fence, back to the stories about the sixteen young men who’d died at Dahmer’s hand so close to where I was standing, and I couldn’t help but feel a chill.

  The wind was picking up and bit into my face. But that’s not what was giving me shivers. My thoughts of Dahmer were.

  Even now, three years after he was beaten to death in prison, the shock was still there, fresh and painful in my city.

  It was like those stages of grief that psychologists talk about—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Milwaukee hadn’t reached the acceptance stage yet. I have my own theory about grief—you get angry, and then you repress it or it swallows you whole. Either it disappears or you do.

  But that was just me.

  And so, Jeffrey Dahmer.

  A psychopath like none in a generation.

  He would pick up young men from the bars in this neighborhood on Milwaukee’s west end—usually they were African-American, but he wasn’t picky when it came to race. He was more interested in looks and physique.

  His MO: drug their drinks, get them back to his apartment, handcuff them, overpower them, kill them, eat them. Sometimes he would stuff their corpses into vats. Sometimes he would sleep with the bodies or chop them up and keep the body parts in the fridge and the skulls beside a candlelit altar to Satan in his closet. Sometimes he drilled holes in the heads of his victims while they were still alive and poured acid into their brains, hoping to turn the men into zombie love slaves.

  During his trial he pled insanity. And lost.

  In the end, he was convicted of fifteen homicides, but he admitted
to two more, including one in Ohio. The city of Milwaukee later purchased his estate and all of his possessions were buried in a landfill, the location of which only five people knew—Captain Domyslawski, Lieutenant Thorne, Detective Annise Corsica (who’d led the investigation), and two city sanitation workers I hadn’t met who drove the garbage truck and dumped out its contents.

  The location was kept secret so the site wouldn’t be visited by curiosity seekers or scavenged by souvenir hounds. It was grisly just to think about, but a certain segment of society collects memorabilia from killers like Dahmer and, inevitably, the site where his belongings were dumped would’ve become a Mecca for people interested in collecting keepsakes of cannibals.

  Though by now Dahmer’s belongings were certainly covered by a mountain of other trash, I was still thankful that no one had discovered which landfill had been used. Keeping people away would have been an endless, disturbing ordeal for local law enforcement.

  I walked to the telephone pole where we’d found Lionel Shannon.

  No clues jumped out at me. No sudden revelations came to me.

  The snow picked up. The minutes ticked by.

  Finally, with the thoughts of what’d happened last night and the things Colleen Hayes had told us this morning circling through my head, I left the alley and drove to HQ for the briefing.

  11

  The public entrance to police headquarters is on North James Lovell Street. I used the department one on West State Street, just around the corner.

  And found the two FBI agents from the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime waiting for me just inside the door.

  The man: hulking and thickly muscled—bigger even than Thorne, and nearly my height. He had a presence about him that commanded respect and it seemed to affect everyone around us, almost as if he’d brought his own weather system with him into the building.

  The woman: petite, with stylish glasses, her light brown hair pulled back into a sensible ponytail. The guy looked about thirty; she looked fresh out of the academy. Both were dressed neatly and conservatively. Most male FBI agents who aren’t working undercover seem to be into ties, but not this guy. Black turtleneck all the way. He held a half-finished two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew in one hand, a leather briefcase in the other.