Opening Moves

by Steven James

  “You really don’t like France.”

  “No, I do not.”

  “What happened in France, Ralph?”

  “I’ll tell you someday.” He eyed the ten old and mismatched mattresses, then left the topic of the metric system behind. “It’d be tough for one person to carry those in by himself, don’t you think? A lot easier with two people.”

  And a lot of trips driving in—unless you have a U-Haul.

  Hmm…a moving truck…

  “And he obviously got ’em from somewhere,” I muttered. “I mean, who would have ten used mattresses just lying around? A hotel? A used furniture store? A Goodwill store?”

  “We should have some officers follow up on that.”

  “There’s a Salvation Army thrift store about half a mile from here.” It was Gabriele again. She’d returned and was lingering by the door.

  “Try them,” I told her. “See if they’re still open, if they might’ve sold some guy ten used mattresses.”

  A nod. She left.

  “Okay, step two,” I told Ralph. “We try to notice the obvious.”

  41

  “Notice the obvious?”

  “Yeah, it’s often the hardest thing to see. It’s like Pascal wrote in Les Pensées, ‘For we always find the thing obscure which we wish to prove and that clear which we use for the proof; for, when a thing is put forward to be proved, we first fill ourselves with the imagination that it is, therefore, obscure and, on the contrary, that what is to prove it is clear, and so we understand it easily.’”

  “I’m not sure I quite followed that.”

  “We start with the preconception that what we want to find out is obscure, but it might not be. It might be clear, but our preconceptions blind us.”

  “Oh. Why didn’t he just say that?”

  “He was a philosopher.”

  “And you memorized that?”

  “Seemed like a good idea at the time.” I inspected the chair. It was bolted to the floor to keep the struggling victims from tipping it over. “We have three new locks…” I said softly. “The boxcar with Hendrich, the one with the woman, the front gate. They’re the only new locks in the yard. But they’re not all the same type of padlock. The brand of the one on the front gate and this boxcar match; the other doesn’t and it was on a rusty chain while the other two had new chains.”

  “Maybe he had to come in here a bunch of times to deliver those mattresses and that chair, brought different locks on each trip.”

  “Yeah.” I mulled that over. “Maybe.”

  A swarm of questions buzzed through my mind.

  How many people did he bring here? Just these two victims, or have there been more? If this is the same guy who was committing the cannibalistic homicides elsewhere in the Midwest, is this his base of operation? If so, why is it so far from the other two locations?

  And why are there two different styles of locks?

  Two different offenders?

  I heard someone outside mention that the CSIU had arrived in the parking lot.

  Just a couple more minutes.

  I knew that the crime scene unit would search for DNA and prints and would compare the blood samples to find out whatever they could about the offender. They had the instruments and materials for all that, Ralph and I didn’t. But DNA and prints help you only if you have something to compare them to. If the guy wasn’t in the system, his name wasn’t going to pop up.

  Tonight the CSIU had a lot of evidence to process: the Taurus, two boxcars and their contents, the locks and chains, the fence material around that opening, the gate…and I had a sense that this guy was smart. Careful. That he wasn’t going to leave behind anything that he didn’t want to.

  I’m no expert on blood spatter analysis, but when I scrutinized the stains on the wooden floor, I could tell that some were darker, had seeped in more. The fresh blood from the woman tonight had sprayed across the floor when her left ankle was cut. The other stains were just below where Colleen’s wrists would have been if she’d been sitting in the chair.

  I bent beside it. “Ralph, look at the blood spatter on the floor here: the pattern of the darker stains.”

  He studied them with me. “Dried. Soaked in more. From Colleen.”

  “So it would seem.”

  He could tell I was looking at something else. “What is it?”

  “Well, at first it sprayed a little, you can see that, but then it stops abruptly.” I pointed. “Almost in a straight line.”

  “So, the blood hit him. His arm maybe. Or his leg.”

  “Yeah, I’m not sure, but…”

  Ralph saw me glance toward the plastic bags. “Ah. He learned his lesson. Bagged up a set of clothes tonight.”

  “He didn’t have a bag of clothes with him when he fled, so he might have stashed one somewhere or slipped a pair of clothes back on.” I pointed to the bags. “If he did stick some clothes in there, even momentarily, he might have inadvertently left us a little present.”

  “His DNA. From his clothes.”

  “Yes.” The CSIU would have undoubtedly checked the outside of the bags for prints; the inside was another story, something they might easily have missed.

  “Nice.”

  I finished looking at the blood spatter while Ralph examined the amputation saw. “There’s a date engraved on the handle—1864.”

  Often, killers will choose a very specific and unique weapon that holds some sort of special meaning to them. But that’s not smart. The more unique your weapon, the easier it is to trace. An amputation saw that old had to be rare. There are experts in just about every obscure field, and I expected we could find someone who specialized in Civil War–era surgical instruments. He or she would be able to tell us more about the saw, maybe where our guy might have purchased it, or even who he might be.

  “That’s good,” I said. “That’ll help.”

  “You think our guy got it from Griffin?”

  “It’s worth checking out. Did you hear if the search warrant went through?”

  “No, actually. Let me go call Ellen.” He stepped away to radio Agent Parker.

  As I moved on to analysis, I played out in my mind the way I would put things in my report later tonight:

  We searched the train yards, saw no one. I discovered the Ford Taurus inside the gate near the parking lot on the west side. After I found Hendrich’s body in one of the boxcars, I located a man fleeing along the fence line. The suspect engaged me with his firearm, I returned fire but did not hit him. He fled. A chase ensued. He was able to avoid apprehension.

  Okay, yes. But how did he know when to leave?

  That really was the question.

  If the shooter was in the boxcar with the woman, why did he leave when he did, right as he was getting started with her?

  He had to have known that you and Ralph were in the train yard.

  So did he have the door open? Possibly, but that didn’t really make sense, not if he was torturing a woman inside the car and not if he trusted the mattresses to absorb her screams. Did he hear us? Maybe, but how? We weren’t making any noise except speaking quietly into our radios. So, if he were—

  I heard someone climbing into the boxcar behind me. I figured it would be one of the CSIU members, but when I turned around, I saw it was Radar instead.

  42

  “Hey,” he exclaimed, “I just heard—the doctors are saying they’re hopeful about saving her hands and feet. The circulation had been cut off for a while, but you two did good. The cut on her ankle is pretty deep, but they expect she’ll walk again too. Oh, and it’s not Hendrich’s car.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No. It’s stolen. Reported a couple days ago by a guy named Norman Darr. Lives in Pewaukee. The VIN number led us to him, but the plates on the Taurus are from a second car that was in the same parking lot. That’s why it took a while to figure out what we were looking at. Our guy switched the plates with it before driving off.”

  “To avoid being
tracked down by an APB. Clever.”

  This was the first time I’d seen Radar since our morning briefing. Thorne had mentioned earlier that he’d gone to look into the names of one of the felons he’d been investigating and I asked him if he’d found anything.

  He shook his head.

  Back on topic: “The car is one thing,” I said, “but we really need to find out who this woman is.”

  “Well, based on what I heard, either she’s married or engaged. That’s something to start with.”

  I looked at him quizzically. “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I mean, I didn’t hear it exactly, but—the missing finger. Think about it—why would he remove her ring finger? That specific one?” This was classic Radar—inferences, hunches, intuition, gut instincts.

  Yeah, but they almost always end up being right on the money.

  “Could be symbolic.” I didn’t really believe that, but for some reason I felt obliged to play devil’s advocate. “He sees himself as marrying her? Having some sort of relationship with her?”

  Radar shook his head. “I doubt it. Think about it—escalation, Pat. He left it behind to prove to her husband or fiancé that he had her and that he was serious about carrying out whatever threat he’d made in his note. He didn’t leave Colleen’s finger for Vincent last night. He might have thought he needed something a little more persuasive this time around to make sure his demands were carried out.”

  “But they were carried out last night.”

  Yeah, except you caught Vincent.

  I tried to work all this through in my head, see where it might be leading.

  Even though it wasn’t verifiable yet, what Radar was saying made sense. I accepted it for now, and moved on. “So…if you’re right, he made a demand of the woman’s lover. And that would be persuasive. I mean, finding my fiancée’s or wife’s finger would certainly be enough to convince me that a kidnapper was deadly serious.”

  Over the past few months, Taci and I had discussed getting married and when I mentioned wives and fiancées, my thoughts naturally jumped to her. I glanced at my watch and saw that it was nearly six. Undoubtedly I’d need to stick around here for at least a couple hours. I was never going to make it back home in time to cook dinner for her by seven.

  Earlier, she’d mentioned that she had something she wanted to talk with me about privately and I hadn’t gotten the best vibe from her when she said that. I knew something was up, and I had the sense that canceling might not be the best idea.

  Meet her later for dessert. That should work.

  Radar eyed me. “You okay?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.” Wrap this up in here, then find a phone and call her.

  “Anyway,” he said, “I’m thinking the guy might not have gone to the police. As you said, he knew the kidnapper was deadly serious.”

  “Right.”

  Just thinking about what sort of demand the suspect might have made of the woman’s lover was disturbing—especially if he was escalating as it appeared he was.

  “Alright,” I said, “we need to get word out about this woman. I want to make sure we stop her husband or fiancé or whoever from doing whatever her abductor demanded. We can release word about her condition to the media, about the severed finger, emphasizing that she’s okay, safe, and under police protection.”

  Calculating when Colleen had been found at the pier this morning and the time of a round-trip drive during the day, I said, “The warm hood on the Taurus…There might be more than one missing woman within a six-hour drive of here, but I doubt there’d be more than one whose left ring finger was left behind.”

  “I thought you don’t like working with the media?”

  “Well, right now time is what matters most. Stopping the woman’s spouse or lover from carrying out the kidnapper’s demands, whatever those might be, and maybe getting us something we can use to actually find this woman’s attacker trumps everything. Get a physical description of her out now and as soon as she regains consciousness, release her photo to the press.”

  “I’ll call it in.”

  He left and I quickly moved on in my mind to step five: evaluation.

  Everyone is tempted to prove what he believes, and that affects not only conscious decision-making but the way our minds subconsciously process information. There’s even a name for it: confirmation bias. Most of the time we’re not even aware of it happening. Naturally, no one likes to be wrong, but the best investigators step back and actually try to find holes in their own theories. This moves you toward objectivity, and that always brings you closer to the truth.

  However, the CSIU arrived just as I was beginning to form a working hypothesis that I could try to disprove.

  “I want the different spots of blood spatter on the floor checked separately,” I told them. “I don’t care how many favors we have to pull in to get the DNA results back fast. We have no idea how many people this guy may have brought to this train yard. Until further notice, this whole area—everything inside this fence—is a crime scene.”

  “That’s a big crime scene,” one of them objected.

  A thought: “Let’s make it even bigger. We also need to include the woods.”

  “The woods?”

  “He knew where the fence was pulled loose, which path to take through the forest. That makes the fence part of the scene.”

  “And the woods.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “and the woods. Because he might have tossed evidence—his phone, a knife, his gun. Possibly a set of clothes.”

  They looked at me wearily, no doubt thinking about how long all this might take, but they said nothing more.

  Then, even if they weren’t as skilled at their jobs as I might’ve liked, I needed to respect them enough to let them do what Thorne had sent them here to do.

  Two things were on my immediate agenda: (1) call Taci; (2) get back to the boxcar I’d been standing on when the suspect fired at me and take a look at Bruce Hendrich’s body.

  43

  Joshua didn’t know exactly why he hadn’t killed Adele Westin.

  He could have stabbed her with the necrotome, shot her with the Glock, taken the amputation saw to her neck—any of a number of things.

  No murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.

  He protested against the thought, turned away from it.

  However, in this case, killing Adele would probably have been the best idea. Not to take any chances. After all, he’d already let Colleen live, and look where that’d led.

  Was that how law enforcement had found him at the train yard? He’d been careful with her, careful to make sure there was no way for her to tell where they were, but theoretically it was still possible.

  The deadline had come and long since gone, and Carl had not called.

  That bothered Joshua. It wasn’t going to make any difference anymore in the way he treated Adele, but still, the man’s fiancée had been abducted, her finger amputated and left behind, and he wasn’t even committed to her enough to call at the appointed time?

  If anyone ever took Sylvia away from him, Joshua wouldn’t have taken any chance whatsoever that she would be killed. He would have called the number no matter what. He would have gone to the ends of the earth to save his wife and he couldn’t imagine how Carl had not made a simple phone call to save his fiancée.

  Joshua needed to sort out a few things before going home, before returning to his normal life.

  So that’s what he thought about as the search for him went on in the train yard and the neighboring woods.

  One of the squads in the parking lot had a car phone, so I tapped in Taci’s number.

  I caught her just as she was about to leave her apartment to run some errands before coming over for dinner. Though I felt bad about having to cancel, the homicide investigation obviously took precedence over our supper plans and I trusted that she would understand.

  It wasn’t my place to tell her details about the case, but I was able to notify he
r that there’d been a homicide. “I’m not sure when I’ll be done here, but maybe we could grab a late supper, or dessert, whatever you feel up to.”

  “No. That’s okay. That’s where you need to be. We can connect at breakfast tomorrow. I have some reading to do tonight anyway.”

  “There was something important you wanted to discuss,” I said. “Maybe I should call you? When I get home?”

  She reiterated that it was something she wanted to discuss in person, so we agreed to meet at seven thirty tomorrow morning for breakfast at Anthony’s Café, then we said our “I love yous” and hung up. It was only when I was walking back to the boxcar to have a look at Hendrich’s body that I realized I’d hung up without wishing her a happy anniversary.

  And she had done the same with me.

  44

  As I approached the car, Ralph caught up with me and told me that the search warrant had gone through and that Ellen and Corsica were on their way to Fort Atkinson to pick up Griffin’s sales receipts and a copy of his subscription list.

  “Perfect.”

  He went on: “We’ll have the team look over the receipts in the morning.” Then he informed me that Lyrie had radioed in that he was still in Hendrich’s neighborhood. Apparently, Thompson was checking the names of officers in Champaign to see if any had ever lived in Waukesha. Lieutenant Thorne was at some sort of meeting with the captain. “The lieutenant scheduled a briefing tomorrow morning at ten in order to give the CSIU a little time to process some of the evidence first.”

  Ten o’clock should give me enough time to have breakfast with Taci, and then a chance to review the team’s findings before the briefing.

  “Sounds good.”

  My attention shifted to the homicide scene.

  Three CSIU members were already working the boxcar where Hendrich’s body had been found. One was dusting for prints, another was photographing the body, the third was searching for trace evidence on the east end of the car. They’d set up floodlights and the inside of the boxcar was such a bright contrast to the darkness outside that it was almost jarring.