Opening Moves

by Steven James

  The photographer mumbled something about how this guy had not died in a very desirable way. The words floated toward me and then disappeared into a narrow, shy spot in the air above the corpse, but I wasn’t really listening to her. I was looking at Hendrich’s body.

  He was in his late thirties, Caucasian, slight build, with salt-and-pepper hair and a goatee. A frenzy of blood was spread across his abdomen.

  And he was now and forever dead.

  At the scene of a homicide, evil isn’t airbrushed or sanitized as it is on the evening news. Out here it gets right in your face and you can’t turn the channel or look away. Newscasters must know that if they dwell too long on the realities of death it’ll be too depressing and people will flip the channel to watch Seinfeld. Evil is either sensationalized or muted. On the air it’s almost never shown to be honestly, fully, what it is.

  If you believe in eternity, Bruce’s soul was either in paradise or the inferno. If you don’t believe in eternity, you’d have to accept that he had entered oblivion and all that he had been was now and would forever be no more.

  I couldn’t help but think about how paper-thin the fabric of life is. I once worked a case in which a man slipped in the shower and the broken glass from the stall gouged into his throat and he bled to death in less than a minute—just that quick.

  It might be a screech of tires as someone swerves into your lane. Or a heart attack or stroke. Or something as harmless as dropping a bar of soap in the shower. And that’s it. Most people live their whole lives without ever realizing that every moment is a near-death experience.

  Truthfully, when I think about it, it’s baffling and astonishing to me that I’m here, in this place at this time, breathing, thinking, dreaming, believing. Aware of being aware of being alive.

  And it’s mind-boggling that we die, every one of us, that all of humanity’s hopes and dreams come to an end, one person, one tragic death at a time.

  Without heaven to spend eternity in, or another go-around here on earth to try to make things right, what could possibly, ultimately matter?

  No wonder so many people believe in reincarnation.

  And in heaven.

  I wasn’t exactly sure what I believed about those things, but doing this job I’ve learned three things for certain, three things I do know for sure: life is a mystery, death is a tragedy, and hope—when it exists—is always a gift.

  Hendrich was wearing civilian clothes, no security guard uniform. There was blood on the floor of the boxcar, but none leading to it, which told me he was killed in here.

  I wondered how long he might have been kept in this train car before he was killed.

  Evidence and evident both come from the same root word meaning “obvious,” but all too often the two concepts—what is evident and what is evidence—don’t mesh very well in an investigation. Evidence isn’t always evident and what’s evident doesn’t always end up being evidence.

  I wanted the walls and the wounds and the clues to speak to me; wanted everything in the boxcar to bring a collective voice together and whisper to me the name of the killer, but for the moment I noticed nothing else that seemed in any way pertinent. All the evidence was silent.

  As I looked around the boxcar, I ran through the five investigative steps but came up with nothing revelatory.

  “Did you go through his pockets?” I asked the head of the CSIU team.

  “Not yet.”

  “Now would be good.”

  After a small pause, he did, and produced $14.73, a well-used, much-stained handkerchief, a set of keys, a wallet, and a pocketknife. I knew that the CSIU team would follow up on all these things later. I wanted to follow up on one of them now.

  The keys.

  45

  I still had on the same pair of latex gloves from earlier, and now, so that I wouldn’t cross-contaminate the two scenes, I donned a new pair. My hands were sore and tender and, to say the least, it didn’t exactly feel good tugging gloves off and on.

  First, I took the keys to the lock on this boxcar, then to the gate, then jogged back to the boxcar where we’d found the woman.

  None of the keys opened any of the locks. Hendrich didn’t have a Ford Taurus key on the ring.

  All of which intrigued me.

  I returned the keys to be logged in as evidence, and Ralph and Radar ran into me outside the boxcar. “Nothing from the neighborhood,” Ralph announced. “No one saw anything, not even that little kid.”

  “Okay…” The wind still hadn’t let up and I caught myself muttering, “I wonder if he heard me…”

  “Heard you?” Radar said.

  “I shouted into the boxcar when I first saw Hendrich’s body,” I explained, “but considering the distance to the car where we found the woman, also the mattresses and the wind…” I started for the boxcar door. “I’ll yell at you two.”

  Ralph looked confused. “What do you mean, you’ll yell at us?”

  I indicated toward the car where we’d found the woman. “Go down there. I’ll stay here and yell like I did when I was trying to see if there was anyone in this boxcar. We’ll try it a couple times, door open, closed. You get the idea.”

  He caught on. “See if it was possible for the guy who attacked her to hear you shouting.”

  “Right.”

  It only took a few minutes to do the reenactment and when we reconvened, Radar shook his head. “Nothing.”

  But you heard the muted cries, Pat…

  How?

  Well, if it was the woman, she would have been screaming as loudly as she could.

  I’m not sure that explained what I’d heard, but the reenactment did tell us one thing. “So,” I said, “it’s unlikely the shooter heard us; and if his door was closed, he didn’t see us either, unless someone else—”

  “Warned him,” Radar said, concluding what I’d been finding myself inclining toward. “A sentry? A scout? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “We need to stay open to the possibility.”

  “But where did he go?”

  “It’s possible to get over the fence.” I held up my gloved, bandaged hands. “I improvised, but someone could have certainly planned better than I did. When our attention was focused on the shooter, the other person—if there really was another person—could’ve fled in another direction.”

  This line of reasoning opened up a whole range of interesting possibilities.

  If there were two offenders, were they working together? If not, how do you explain the timing?

  Ralph must have been thinking the same thing. “Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that there were two separate crimes right here, at the same time?”

  I tried to process what we had going on here. Two victims. One shooter. Even though the proximity of the crimes favored the possibility that the victims were attacked by the same offender, the MO really was completely different: the woman had been restrained in a chair just as Colleen Hayes had been last night, the man had not. He had no ligature marks and had been stabbed numerous times in his stomach, unlike any of the other victims, not even from the homicides in Illinois and Ohio. No lungs removed here. No intestines eaten. No limbs sawed off. All the other victims had been women, this guy wasn’t.

  “It’s true,” I admitted. “There are a lot of things that don’t measure up here.”

  “Unless we really are talking about two different offenders,” Radar offered.

  “Or three.”

  They looked at me curiously. “Three?” Ralph said.

  “The out-of-state homicides, the kidnappings, and Hendrich’s murder.”

  He shook his head. “But they’re not entirely unrelated. Griffin’s merchandise sales to Colleen Hayes, the police tape from the murder in Illinois, tie them all together.”

  I said, “The two homicides in Ohio and Illinois bear no semblance to the pattern of abduction, coercion, and mutilation that we saw with the Hayes family and now, evidently, with this woman tonight. There was no ransom note
in the previous deaths and the victims of the last two days were left alive, even though they could have easily been killed.”

  “And here, there’s no cannibali—” Ralph caught himself short. “The hands.”

  We were quiet. We didn’t know what Colleen’s abductor had done with her hands, but we could imagine, and by the looks on Ralph’s and Radar’s faces, I think we all were.

  Backpedaling a little, I stated the obvious: “Hendrich was a part-time security guard here. Maybe he just came upon our guy and got taken out.”

  Don’t assume too much in any direction.

  Radar offered to dig up a list of Caucasians fitting our suspect’s description who might visit this neighborhood regularly enough to become familiar with the woods, invisible to the neighbors. “You were right, Pat. We’ve got a white guy who knows how to evaporate into a neighborhood of gangbangers of another race. I’ll look at social workers, youth coaches, parole officers, pizza delivery guys. Everyone. I don’t care. Including cops.”

  Even though I didn’t like to even consider the idea that a cop could be involved, I agreed that it was worth pursuing.

  Ralph said to me, “I’ll stick with you. Coordinate the searches. I’ll stay as late as I need to.”

  My eyes were on the flashlight beams from the officers who were working their way through the forest. “Good to hear, Tonto.”

  46

  Joshua’s wife had supper waiting for him when he came through the door, but she looked at him with concern as he dropped his keys onto the counter. “What is it, hon?”

  “What?”

  “You look pale. Like you just saw a ghost.”

  “No, it’s just…traffic. It’s nothing.” He kissed her. “I’ll be back in a sec. Let me kick off my shoes.”

  As he crossed the hallway to the bedroom, he tried to piece together what had happened out there tonight.

  Just before coming into the house, he’d heard through the police scanner that law enforcement had made the connection to Carl Kowalski, which explained why he hadn’t called at five—he was in custody. But at least he’d done as asked and Miriam Flandry’s skinned corpse had been found. The media would undoubtedly be jumping all over the story tonight.

  Joshua put his gun away.

  And of course, when law enforcement made the connection to Carl, they’d also discovered that the woman who’d been found in the train yards, the woman who was missing a finger, was Carl’s fiancée, Adele Westin.

  But.

  They’d also found Bruce Hendrich. He was the part-time security guard whose hours Joshua had researched so thoroughly, been so careful to avoid whenever he entered the train yard. And now he was found dead there. Stabbed. Locked in another boxcar.

  Why then? Why there?

  From Hendrich’s schedule, Joshua knew he hadn’t been on the docket to work today.

  Questions chasing him, Joshua returned to the kitchen and helped Sylvia set the table.

  “Did you have a good afternoon?” she asked him.

  “Yes.” He tried to concentrate on her, to not let the events of the day come between them. “How did the house showings go?”

  “Didn’t sell any, but you know what they say…” She smiled, but Joshua could see that it was a bit forced, that she wasn’t exactly optimistic but was trying hard to be. “Just live it through.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Just live it through. It’ll all work out. You’re good at what you do.”

  A welcome smile. “Thank you, dear.”

  He looked over the meat loaf, baked potatoes, and carrots she’d prepared. “Supper looks great.”

  A pause. “Where were you all day?” she asked. “I tried calling.”

  “Running errands. Taking care of a few things.”

  After they’d said grace and started eating, his thoughts wandered back to the train yard.

  Was it possible that it was all a coincidence?

  Possible, perhaps, but how likely was that?

  There was only one other explanation.

  Someone knew. Someone knew he was going to be in the yard, knew he was going to have a woman there tonight.

  It was unfathomable to think that, but Joshua let himself think it anyway. Because he had to.

  And if that was the case, if someone knew, that might explain why law enforcement showed up when they did—the person could have contacted them, called in a tip.

  But then why leave Hendrich dead? And locked in a train car?

  Someone out there is trying to set you up, trying to frame you for Hendrich’s murder.

  But why?

  As Sylvia ate, she told Joshua all about her day and he listened, not just because it was something a good husband should do, but because he was genuinely interested in her life. But despite that, admittedly, his attention did drift at times to what had happened tonight, to what was going to happen in the next two days.

  Tonight he would watch the news, find out what he could about how it might have been that Hendrich happened to show up dead when he did at the train yard. It was important to make sure everything was set for Wednesday, for what was going to happen with the cop, so tomorrow, he would return briefly to look over the best places to park near the bank on Highway 83 in Wales—the same bank the Oswalds held up the day they were arrested.

  The scripture verse was not just true for him, it would be true for the cop as well: “The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

  That.

  I.

  Do.

  Yes, the officer he had in mind would find out the true meaning of those words.

  47

  Two years ago the Maneater of the Midwest began to call himself, in his own mind, what he truly was.

  A ghoul.

  Of course he’d heard of ghouls before that. He knew what they were, that they liked to consume human corpses, often those dug up from graveyards, but the day when he finally began to think of himself in terms of being one, of placing himself in that category, was freeing and, in a way, like coming home.

  When you’re this way, you can’t help but want to find someone else like you. It’s inevitable. So, over the years he’d always hoped to meet another actual ghoul. Curiosity mostly—though he hadn’t been sure how he would respond if he truly found one. He had not always worked alone, but he had not yet found anyone else who shared his particular interests.

  However, there were a few times when he had met people who gave off hints that perhaps, yes, just perhaps, they would understand, so those were the times when he’d tested the waters, put out feelers, so to speak, to see if he’d found a kindred spirit.

  After a few beers, or on a long car ride, or during a period of marijuana-induced honesty, he would say something like, “Did you ever wonder about those soccer players back in the seventies? Up in the Andes Mountains? Remember hearing about that?” And maybe his friend would say yes she had, or maybe she would give him a blank look and shake her head no.

  “Yeah,” he would say, “when their plane crashed. Twenty-nine out of the forty-five survived. The mountain was isolated, snow-covered. The survivors had nothing to eat and when some of them started dying, they knew they needed to find something fast. They were all starving.”

  And at that point he would pause and study the face of the person he was talking to, study it to see if she was able to jump ahead to the inevitable conclusion.

  Finally, it would come. “You don’t mean they…that they ate each other?”

  “Well, only the dead ones,” he might joke, depending on the situation. In either case, it was a critical point, the telling moment. “Yes, they had to,” he would say. “If they were going to survive.”

  And here came the reaction that would either end the conversation for good, or give him hope that perhaps he’d finally found someone who could understand.

  Usually, the reaction was the same: “Ew. That’s horrible!” or “That’s disgusting” or “I’d rather die myself! I woul
d never do that!” or the like, and what could he do? The Maneater wasn’t the type of person to argue. So he would agree with her about how unthinkable such a thing was. “You’re right. It’s disgusting. I can’t imagine how civilized people could ever do that.”

  He would say things like that, and then take a long draft of beer or a drag of his joint and never bring up the subject to that person again.

  However, there was one woman he’d met who seemed to contemplate the situation a little more clearheadedly. They’d gone out for supper and were walking through downtown Milwaukee when he’d brought up the question. She’d thought about it and said, “The thing is, those guys had to survive, right? I mean, why should all of them die when some of them could live? Why, when there was fresh meat lying there preserved for them in the snow? Should they starve to death, just because of a social stigma, the cultural conventions of Western society?”

  “Good point.” He decided to step out on a limb. “In some cultures it’s perfectly acceptable to eat other people. Cannibalism isn’t frowned on in other places as much as it is in America, or, say, Britain. There was a group of Indians who ate their parents’ dead bodies.”

  “As a show of respect,” she said. “Yes, I’ve heard of that.”

  He stopped walking. Took her hand. “You have?”

  “We studied it in this anthropology class I had last year. Herodotus, right? He wrote about it?”

  “I guess. I don’t know; I’m not sure.” But it wasn’t a guess and he did know. For sure.

  He was nervous to ask the next question, but he had to find out the answer. “And what did you think of that? When you heard about it?”

  “What’s wrong in one country might not be wrong in another. That’s the way the world is. I think a person’s morality, her set of values, is determined by what culture she grows up in. We shouldn’t judge other people’s values.”