Opening Moves

by Steven James

  He wouldn’t be able to drive all the way to the boxcar that he would be using today, but he could get partway there, and then park out of sight behind a line of tankers.

  Which was what he did.

  Carrying Adele to the train car he’d prepared for this afternoon wouldn’t be a problem. A forest nudged up against the razor wire fence on the south end of the train yard and there was only a narrow channel between that fence and the line of boxcars stretching alongside it.

  When he’d been scouting out locations, Joshua had driven around the neighborhood and confirmed that—even from the highway, the bridge just west of here, and the parking lot itself—a person walking along the edge of the fence would be hidden from view by the boxcars on one side and the woods on the other. Especially if they stayed in the drainage ditch that followed one section of the fence.

  Of all the times Joshua had been in the yard, he’d seen only five people in here: two teen punks with spray cans, a wino, and a college-aged couple making out. But all of them had been on the other side of the yard near the coal cars.

  Still, this was not the time to be careless, and before taking Adele to the boxcar, he wanted to make sure the coast was clear. So, leaving her locked in the trunk for the moment, he took his pistol, a 9mm Glock 19, from the glove box and walked along the edge of the ditch paralleling the razor wire fence.

  Most of the cars in the yard had gang-related graffiti spray-painted on the sides and nearly all of them were ravaged with rust. The boxcars had large sliding doors, many of which were padlocked shut, a few were left open, some were missing entirely.

  He went to a light gray Soo Line boxcar with a chained-shut door, slipped a key into the lock, which he’d made sure was the same kind he’d used on the front gate, and clicked it open.

  Gloves still on, he cranked the door open, peered inside.

  His materials were all there waiting for Adele. The rope and duct tape. The chair. The plastic bags, butcher paper, and heavy-duty plastic ties. The battery-operated light on the wall to the left. And the Civil War–era Gemrig amputation saw that he had used to cut through Colleen Hayes’s wrists last night.

  He already had the necrotome with him in a sheath on his belt. The word meant “cutting instrument of the dead” and it was an Egyptian knife popular between 1500 and 1000 BC.

  Necrotomes are, of course, extremely rare, but he’d managed to get this one at an auction in San Francisco five years ago. It was one of the actual knives used by the priests of ancient Egypt to slit open the abdomens of the people they were about to mummify in order to remove their inner organs. They did so by hand, pulling out all the organs except for the heart. Then they stored those organs in jars—all of them except for the brain, which they considered useless, and simply discarded.

  Joshua kept the necrotome with him at all times.

  He’d used it last Friday on Petey Schwartz when the homeless man followed him, then grabbed his jacket collar. Joshua had met Petey before, knew him in an informal way, and knew that he had violent tendencies. In an instant he’d whipped out the necrotome and buried it into Petey’s stomach, just as his father had taught him to do with that hunting knife in the special place beneath the barn.

  It’d all happened so fast that it was hard to differentiate one action from the next. It’d been impulse, pure and simple. Instinct. And now a man was dead.

  He knew the verse, knew what killing would mean: “No murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.” First John, chapter three, verse fifteen.

  No eternal life.

  But yet he desired eternal life. Believed in grace, in forgiveness, in atonement.

  His life was a throbbing contradiction. Just like St. Paul, who wrote in Romans, chapter seven, “What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. For to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

  The evil which I would not.

  That I do.

  I do.

  After making sure the coast was clear, Joshua returned to the car to retrieve the unconscious woman from the trunk.

  27

  The afternoon was stretching thin.

  As I drove, Ralph scribbled notes on his pad and collected his thoughts. “So, Griffin could have known that the Hayes couple had their own cuffs. That puts him on our short list.”

  “Yes, but according to Colleen’s description, her abductor was a large man; Griffin has a slight build.”

  He processed that. “True.”

  “Also, when I brought up Hayes’s name, Griffin didn’t seem familiar with it.”

  Ralph certainly knew, as I did, that killers are often accomplished liars, but even for them, first impressions are hard to fake. Often, our faces betray us before our minds can start coming up with ways to hide what our bodies have already subconsciously expressed.

  “But, Pat, he has to be related to this somehow. He might not be at the center of it, but his connection with the crime scene tape and the cuffs is too much of a coincidence. They tie him to both the murder in Illinois and Colleen’s abduction last night. Besides, he called Hendrich ‘a source,’ and mentioned he’d shipped ‘stuff’ to him. Is that how you’d phrase things if you’d only worked with the guy once?”

  “I see what you mean,” I admitted, “but both the cuffs and police tape could have come from a cop—there’s no saying the police tape came from the killer.”

  “We need to find out more about Hendrich.”

  “Yes, we do,” I said. “And cross-reference the names on the evidence room forms and the chain of custody list against the officers who worked the case in Illinois. An officer may have moved from—”

  “Waukesha to Champaign.”

  “Yes.”

  While we’d been driving, Thorne had sent Lyrie to Hendrich’s home address, but we hadn’t heard from him yet whether he’d found out anything from him.

  I said to Ralph, “It looks like we have a few things to follow up on.” I ticked them off on my fingers as I exited the highway to get to HQ: “Check that police tape for prints, locate Bruce Hendrich, look into the people at the Waukesha sheriff’s department who had access to the Oswald handcuffs, and find out how Colleen Hayes came to contact Timothy Griffin in the first place. Oh yeah, it’d be good to check the nearest video store to see if Timothy and Mallory rented The Fugitive and When Harry Met Sally.”

  “You think they made that up?”

  “Those two videos weren’t among the twelve in their living room, not by the TV or on the shelves. That points to renting them. People like to save time, money, and effort, so they most often shop, get gas, and rent videos from the grocery stores, service stations, and video stores closest to their homes. We should start there, see if they’re customers.”

  “Good call.”

  “I think we have enough to get a warrant to look through Griffin’s receipts, see what else Hendrich might have sold him.”

  “Or bought from him.”

  I nodded. “Also, we should get the warrant to cover Griffin’s subscription list so we can cross-check the people who get his catalog against our suspect list and tip list.”

  “Nice.” He jotted a few more notes.

  I gave him an inventory of the items that were in the living room and included the photo that had a price tag on it in the bedroom. “Have them compare that list to the items on the receipts that he hasn’t sold yet. And to the catalog.”

  “Did you write down that stuff when you were in the bedroom?”

  “No.”

  “You just listed like four dozen different things. You’re saying you remembered them?”

  “Yes.”

  “All of them?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  He blinked. “Just checking.”

  I felt the juices flowing. Admittedly, we still had more questions than answers, but a slowly emerging web of interrelationships was beginning to form. I mentally unwo
und and then rewound them, exploring the possibilities, evaluating the implications. Even though I couldn’t pin down anything solid yet, it felt good to have enough facts to be able to start sorting through them, searching for a pattern.

  “How many do you think are women?” Ralph said, drawing me out of my thoughts.

  “Who?”

  “The people who buy that stuff from Griffin, you know, like Colleen. I mean, on the one hand you’ve got the revulsion most women feel toward violence, but on the other hand some ladies get off on that kind of stuff, on killers, you know, the lost boys—want to be their pen pals in prison, marry them when they get out, that sort of thing.”

  Since males are generally more interested in crime and, in fact, much more inclined to commit violent acts than women, I expected that most of Griffin’s customers would be men. After all, ninety-five percent of the people in the prisons of the world are men—closer to ninety-eight percent if you look just at violent acts. Blame it on genetics, trace it back to upbringing, whatever it is, there’s no arguing that men corner the market on crime, especially cruel and brutal ones. “It’ll be interesting to see how it breaks down,” I acknowledged.

  “How far to the department?”

  “A couple minutes.”

  Ralph turned to the dispatch radio. “I’ll call this stuff in, get Ellen on the search warrant. If there’s one thing the Bureau is good at, it’s expediting search warrant requests.”

  At least that’s one thing, I thought.

  “I could make some sort of smart comment about that,” I said, “but I’ll refrain.”

  “I’m counting that as a smart comment, Tonto.”

  “Wasn’t Tonto just the sidekick?”

  “Yeah.” A tiny smile. “He was.”

  28

  Carl took Miriam’s corpse to the maintenance building to skin it.

  He laid it on the concrete floor and, as disturbing as this act was, started his work.

  Almost immediately however, he discovered that it was too difficult to keep a firm grip on the body while he maneuvered his knife to strip off the flesh. In the 1950s, Gein had hung the corpse of his victim to do it, and that made a certain amount of macabre sense.

  If he could use gravity to his advantage, it’d be a lot easier, go a lot quicker. He searched the shelves, found a chain, looped it over one of the rafters, and then under the arms and around the chest of the corpse, hoisted it into the air, and set to work.

  As Joshua stood beside the trunk of the sedan, he thought about last night and how it related to what was going to happen here in the train yards tonight.

  Last evening he’d slipped in the back door of Vincent and Colleen’s home even while Colleen was inside the house. He was in the kitchen closet, in fact, watching her through the slightly cracked-open door when she got the call from her husband telling her he was going to be late.

  Joshua had heard her side of the conversation and that’d offered him both a problem and an opportunity.

  “So, I’ll see you about ten, then?” Colleen had said. Then, “Love you too. Bye.”

  Just knowing that he was there alone with Colleen was, admittedly, exhilarating. There was no longer any urgency to move on her.

  Joshua had decided to wait and watch her and take her at nine.

  His day job called for him to have a police scanner, so last night after he had Colleen, he’d used it to listen to the chatter regarding the chase for Vincent. Amidst the confusion, an officer had reported that he had the suspect in custody, but not long after that he announced that he was still at large.

  So then, when Joshua’s portable phone rang, he hadn’t been sure if the person on the other end who was assuring him that he’d left a black man in the alley was Vincent or not. With all the sirens and all the chatter on the dispatch radio, he’d suspected it might be a cop.

  Today he wasn’t going to take any chances. He was going to get started on Adele before five, before Carl was scheduled to make the call.

  He lifted her, still unconscious, from the trunk, then nudged the hatch closed with his elbow.

  Last night, Colleen Hayes.

  Tonight, Adele Westin.

  And it was going to be even better than it had been with Colleen.

  Trudging across the gravel, he carried his captive toward the boxcar.

  29

  We were almost to HQ when we heard from Corsica that Bruce Hendrich worked a couple days a week as a security guard in the abandoned train yards just off I-94 near the Domes.

  I thought of the location of the yards. I’d driven past them dozens of times, but they were encircled with razor wire fence and I’d never entered them. The surrounding neighborhoods were infested with gangs, drug dealers, and junkies. You’d have to be either pretty bold or pretty stupid to work a part-time security job in that part of town.

  Unless you just wanted a place where you could take people in the dark and not arouse suspicion.

  I mentally reviewed the most likely travel routes from the Hayes residence to the yards. Unless the kidnapper took an unusually circuitous route, he would have had to pass by Miller Brewery to get there, which could explain the yeast smell that Colleen remembered.

  My thoughts slipped back to the account of the tree house I’d given to Ralph earlier: If someone knew the area, he would know where to take a girl. A place he could be alone with her.

  Different killers, same need: seclusion. The tree house made sense and so did the train yards.

  There weren’t any trains running through there these days, so it made sense that Colleen wouldn’t have heard one pass by. The location was isolated enough so that, if her abductor had taken her to one of the freight cars or boxcars, no one would’ve heard her scream. Colleen had mentioned that it was cold, as though he might have taken her to a garage or something. A boxcar fit that too.

  If he took her to the train yards, he would have plenty of privacy to do just about anything he wanted with her. And even if, by some chance, someone did happen to hear her scream, the yards weren’t in a part of town where people were particularly inclined to call the authorities.

  Before she ended the transmission, Corsica mentioned that Hendrich hadn’t been home when Lyrie arrived to speak with him and it’d taken him a while to find out from a neighbor where Hendrich worked. Apparently, he was new to the area and wasn’t that well-known by his neighbors. She mentioned that the team was looking more carefully into his background.

  I resaddled the radio. “Ralph, let’s stop by the train yards. Have a look around before it gets dark.”

  “Now you’re talking my language.”

  To cover our bases, we called in to have Lyrie remain parked at Hendrich’s house in case he returned home, then I turned our car around.

  Sundown was almost here and I felt as if I were stepping into the zone again, the thing I live for, and I admit I didn’t quite observe the speed limit as I drove toward the train yards.

  Joshua slid the unconscious woman into the boxcar, then promptly clicked on the battery-operated light, shut the door, and locked it from the inside.

  He tied Adele to the chair.

  Blond hair, a sea green sweater, black jeans. He decided to leave her clothes on while he worked on her. That way, when they found her without her hands or feet, the blood-drenched clothes would add to the dramatic effect. Increase the shock value.

  Or maybe not. Maybe leaving her nude would shock them more.

  Well, that was certainly something to consider.

  Earlier he’d propped ten mattresses against the walls of the boxcar to absorb the sounds. Now, every time he took a step, there was only a tiny muffled echo from the wooden floorboards, an echo that was quickly devoured by the improvised baffling.

  Adele was beginning to stir, but it would still take her a few minutes to wake up.

  Next order of business, his clothes.

  He knew it would be shockingly cold if he were to stand here naked himself, but he’d found out last nigh
t with Colleen Hayes that, even with the plastic ties around her wrists, there was still a lot of blood. Tonight he didn’t want any of it getting on his clothes, so after one more moment of mental preparation, he removed his shoes, stripped off his clothes and placed them in one of the plastic bags, then tucked the bag in the corner of the boxcar.

  Actually, he thought the chilled air might add to the excitement of what he was doing. Sharpen his awareness. Heighten the experience.

  Adele was blindfolded and that was important to Joshua. No woman other than his wife had ever seen him naked and he didn’t want that to change tonight.

  Barefoot now, and unclothed, he walked to the mattress he’d left the amputation saw on top of yesterday. Caught up in his thoughts, he absentmindedly stroked the blade for a moment. Yes, he was anxious to get started, but he wanted Adele to be fully awake and aware, like Colleen had been last night, before he cut off any of her extremities.

  At last, leaving the saw there for the moment, he faced Adele, and naked, apart from the latex gloves he wore on his hands, he watched her as she slowly began to awaken.

  30

  I parked beside the train yard.

  Somewhere nearby there was supposed to be an access road to the yard’s parking lot, but I wasn’t familiar with the labyrinthine roads in this neighborhood, nor was I in the mood to drive around trying to figure out where to go. I decided Ralph and I could find a quicker way past the fence.

  Looking at the rusted condition of most of the train cars, I was struck by a thought: this wasn’t just a train yard, it was a train graveyard.

  I put that thought out of my mind: “graveyard” was not a term I wanted bouncing around inside my head at the moment.

  The sun had dipped to the skyline, leaving the whole yard draped in one long sweeping shadow. Though the snow had stopped, the wind was picking up and scraped at my face as we exited the undercover car. I zipped up my leather jacket.