Opening Moves

by Steven James

  The politically correct answer, but an obviously untenable moral position.

  After all, in the 1940s it was culturally acceptable in Germany to kill Jews by the millions. In some tribes in Africa, raping women is considered normal and acceptable—at least by the men. But nobody who’s being raped or tortured to death just shrugs it off and accepts that the person doing it to him is simply following his or her cultural values, so, oh well, what’s right for him is right for him, no big deal.

  No. Nobody who’s on the short end of justice wants to be treated subjectively. Relativism and equity just don’t go hand in hand.

  The Maneater had an extraordinary memory. He didn’t like to call attention to it to others and he didn’t take any pride in it himself, but it was there and he couldn’t help but make use of it. And that night he’d thought of the passage this woman had just referred to: Godley’s 1921 translation of The Histories by Herodotus, Book 3:38, an excerpt he’d read twice and remembered word for word:

  When Darius was king, he summoned the Greeks who were with him and asked them for what price they would eat their fathers’ dead bodies. They answered that there was no price for which they would do it. Then Darius summoned those Indians who are called Callatiae, who eat their parents, and asked them (the Greeks being present and understanding through interpreters what was said) what would make them willing to burn their fathers at death. The Indians cried aloud, that he should not speak of so horrid an act. So firmly rooted are these beliefs; and it is, I think, rightly said in Pindar’s poem that custom is lord of all.

  Custom is lord of all.

  Morality is not etched in stone but written, as it were, on a rubber band.

  Simply the result of cultural mores.

  What an attractive, attractive idea for those wielding power.

  But this wasn’t the time to debate the determinants of ethical action with his date, it was actually his chance to agree with her. “You’re right about that,” he said, “and, well, those dead people up on the slopes of that mountain in the Andes weren’t really people anymore actually. They were only meat that was going to rot eventually or just freeze and lie there indefinitely. I mean, right? And in a situation like that, what choice did the survivors really have? I mean what else could they be expected to do?”

  He watched her carefully, searched her eyes to gauge her reaction, to look for hints of what she might say, what she might be thinking. “So, what do you think? Could you have done it?”

  “Done it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean eaten someone?”

  “To survive. Yes.”

  “Well, I suppose, if I was on the brink of death, I guess I might have.”

  But really, that begged the question. How close to the brink of death does a person have to be, really, before it would be okay? How much desperation would justify cannibalism? Do you really need to be starving to death? What about famished? What about simply hungry? Or just sitting down for supper? How many hours away from death by starvation do you need to be to justify chewing off the skin or sucking the marrow out of another primate’s bones?

  Cultures disagree.

  So, really, it was a matter of societal preference.

  Pindar’s poem is right: custom is lord of all.

  Perhaps morally untenable, but still, a philosophical position that suited the Maneater.

  The one wielding power.

  He liked this woman and decided on the spot that he would cut out and eat her intestines.

  She was the first one, the one he still remembered the most fondly to this day.

  Now, tonight he was at a club. Trance music. Psychedelic cycling lights. Sweaty, pumping bodies. He was seated at the bar next to a woman who’d been flirting with him for the last twenty minutes. Even though it was just after ten o’clock, she’d made it clear what she wanted to do, but he hadn’t even gotten her name yet.

  He decided to just go ahead, see where that might lead. “I don’t sleep with women I don’t know.”

  “Well, then”—there was a breezy, alcohol-induced smile in her voice—“my name is Celeste.”

  “Hello, Celeste.”

  “And you are?”

  He made up a name. “Ashton.”

  “Well, Ashton”—she really was too tipsy for her own good, already, at this time of night—“do you need a last name, or is Celeste enough for you?”

  “Celeste is plenty.” He smiled and with one hand he took hold of her barstool and pulled it closer to him.

  “Mmm,” she cooed. “I like a man who’s got some strength. Do you have endurance too?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I can make things last for a long, long time.”

  “Ooh. I like the sound of that.”

  She finished her shot, turned the glass upside down and, somewhat unevenly, set it on the bar. “I also like a man who’s not all talk. Are you all talk?”

  “I’m not all talk, no.”

  She stood and swayed a bit. He rose as well and she put her arm in his.

  He led her out of the club.

  They went to her apartment. He enjoyed himself with her for a while, and as he did, the Maneater thought back to the events of the night, to the train yards, to killing Hendrich, a man whose identity he and Griffin had decided to use if there was ever a need.

  And he thought of why he’d led Hendrich to that car and then killed him there, because of what he’d found in that other train car. Because of the man he’d followed and then identified and because of the phone call from Griffin warning him that the police were following up on Hendrich.

  Why was Joshua doing this? Setting up these elaborate schemes? Dahmer? Now Gein?

  To get your attention?

  Well, if that was the reason, it had worked.

  The Maneater thought about what to do about that as he spent time with Celeste who, as it turned out, wasn’t so thankful that he could make things last for a long, long time.

  Not thankful about that at all.

  48

  I stayed at the train yards until almost eleven. We had a dozen officers comb the woods. I even helped them, but we found nothing.

  Everyone was focused, sharp. This was no longer just the case of a kidnapper’s twisted demands; with Hendrich’s murder, it was a full-fledged homicide investigation.

  But then at last, just as in all investigations, it was time to go home.

  But I had two stops to make first.

  Many of the criminology students in my grad program at Marquette have other jobs—some work in law enforcement, others are city officials. I’ve even had two people from the District Attorney’s Office in some of my classes. Because of the diverse schedules of the students, the graduate office has a work area that’s open late, and it’s not unusual to find people studying at all hours of the night hunched over a computer or a criminology textbook.

  On the way to my apartment I swung by to pick up a copy of Dr. Werjonic’s lecture notes, then snagged an extra-large fried potato and steak burrito from Henry’s Burrito Heaven, and headed to my apartment.

  I spread out the paperwork on the kitchen table and as I dug into my late supper, I reviewed five pieces of information we’d come up with over the last few hours.

  1. Adele Westin was the name of the woman we’d found in the boxcar. I hated to admit that the media had helped us out, but this time around the press had done an admirable job of getting the word out quickly. A man from Plainfield named Carl Kowalski, a man who’d been arrested for grave robbery while we were at the train yards, told the police about the finger. One of the officers in Plainfield had heard about it on the news and made the connection. A little serendipitous, but often that’s just the way things work in cases. Which led to #2:

  2. Kowalski had not only desecrated his grandmother’s grave, he had also skinned the corpse and left it at the same hardware store where Gein had committed one of his murders four decades ago.

  3. During the day, Ellen and Corsica had com
e up with sixteen unsolved missing persons cases in Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin spanning the last two years involving women who fit the general description (race, age, build, hair color, socioeconomic status) of the women killed in Illinois and Ohio.

  4. Thompson reported that no Champaign officers had ever worked in the Waukesha area and the chain of custody forms didn’t raise any red flags.

  5. When Ellen and Corsica had delivered the search warrant and picked up Griffin’s receipts and subscription list, Corsica had asked him for a physical description of Hendrich, hoping to find out if he really was the guy who’d dealt with him, or if someone else had impersonated him, but Griffin said they’d only communicated by mail or by phone. She’d also asked about amputation saws, but he claimed he’d never sold one—though he would like to get his hands on one if she had a contact.

  I reviewed: Dahmer and Gein.

  Two cannibals.

  Two days.

  And bad things come in threes.

  Wonderful.

  As both Radar and I had observed earlier, most killers escalate. I couldn’t imagine what our guy had in mind for later this week, not if he was moving up the ladder from Dahmer and Gein.

  After going through the case files and filling out my police report concerning the events of the evening, I came to the place where I needed to tip my thoughts in a less visceral, less disturbing direction, take a break from all the grisly images—both the ones on the pages before me and the ones in my head.

  It was late, but I tried calling Taci.

  She didn’t pick up.

  You’ll just have to sort things out in the morning during breakfast.

  Maybe I could get some emotional distance from all of this by looking not at the specifics of the cases, but at the theories concerning how to investigate them instead.

  I opened up the manila folder Dr. Werjonic had left for me and slid the papers out.

  There was a note on top of the stack of papers:

  Ring me in the morning, Detective Bowers, between 11:00 and 11:05. I’m at the downtown Sheraton. I think I may be able to help you with this case.

  Cheers.

  —C.W.

  I slowly set down the papers.

  Dr. Calvin Werjonic PhD, JD, eminent professor, world-renowned criminologist, was offering to help me with this case? Sure, the news media had released information regarding it, but how did he know I was the one working it?

  Curious to see if any of his lecture notes might be applicable to what we were looking at here, I spread the photocopied pages across the table.

  To my disappointment, his notes weren’t typed or organized in any clearly discernible manner, but they were handwritten scribbles that were, in most cases, almost indecipherable.

  He’d probably been teaching the material for so long that he didn’t need many prompts to get him started on each topic. That might have been good if I were sitting in a lecture hall listening to him, but it wasn’t good for me sitting here in my apartment tonight.

  However, he did include photocopied pages from one of his articles that appeared last year in the Journal of the International Association of Crime Analysts, a succinct summary of his two-pronged approach:

  Geospatial investigation involves the evaluation of locations related to a crime to deduce the most statistically probable region out of which the offender bases his criminal activity. The complementary field of environmental criminology focuses on understanding the way offenders cognitively map their environments and rationally choose to act within their awareness space while committing their crimes.

  The two approaches work in conjunction with each other to provide a vigorous and robust new paradigm for analyzing linked serial offenses and tracking those who commit them.

  Unlike profilers, who deal with the psychological reasons that might have motivated a crime, environmental criminologists look for the significance of the location of the crime to both the offender and the victim. Instead of asking what the offender might have been thinking while he committed the crime, we ask why he was there at that specific place at that specific time:

  (1) What do the choice of the crime’s location and the timing of the crime tell us about the offender and the victim?

  (2) What purpose do these locations serve for him? Expediency? Opportunity? Isolation?

  (3) What do the locations of the crimes tell us about how he’s choosing his victims?

  (4) What led him to this specific victim and location? How and when did his life intersect with the victim’s to create the encounter that precipitated this crime?

  These were four lines of inquiry worth thinking about, in depth, in regard to this case.

  The article went on to discuss victimology, that is, the study of the victim and inferences that could be drawn from his or her cognitive maps. Fascinated, I read the rest of it carefully with a highlighter in hand.

  When I was done, I shuffled through the rest of the notes and realized that I wasn’t going to be able to decode them all tonight, not when I was so tired, but that I might be able to make my way through them better in the morning when I was fresh.

  Today had become one of those days when it seemed like the morning couldn’t possibly have occurred within the same twenty-four-hour span of time. Too much had happened, too much had filled in the spaces between the moments.

  Tomorrow never looked so good.

  At last, I crawled into bed with thoughts of the case and of Taci and of the nightmares I’d had last evening all vying for my attention, all wrestling to be the thing that followed me into my dreams.

  And when I closed my eyes, I had no idea which of them would win.

  DAY 3

  Tuesday, November 18

  The Landfill

  49

  6:02 a.m.

  The nightmares left me alone.

  I dreamt of Taci instead, and woke up thinking about our weekend getaway to Tennessee the first weekend of October. We’d been close as a couple when we headed down there and when we returned, we were even closer, with shared memories of day hikes in the Smoky Mountains and evenings in front of the fireplace at a bed-and-breakfast nestled up in the hills.

  It was a nice note to start the day on and when I got out of bed I felt much more rested than I had yesterday morning, which was a relief because I had the feeling this might shape up to be another long day.

  I wasn’t scheduled to meet Taci until seven thirty, nearly an hour and a half from now. Anthony’s Café was downtown, which gave me an idea.

  When you’re working cases like this, the odd hours, the long hours, it’s easy to eat poorly—admittedly one of my weaknesses. And, for me at least, it’s easy to miss workouts. Getting motivated to exercise wasn’t usually the issue for me because I loved to trail run, climb, hike, anything outdoors. But finding the time to get out and play when you’re in the middle of a case can be tricky.

  My climbing buddy, Reinhold Draeger, operated the South Wall Climbing Gym, which wasn’t too far from Anthony’s Café. The morning’s agenda seemed to lay itself out neatly for me: slip in a workout at the gym, grab breakfast with Taci, review Werjonic’s notes and the case files, meet with the task force at HQ, then call Dr. Werjonic at eleven.

  Even though I climb with ropes when I’m at the crags, working out close to the ground without them is a great way to develop finger strength, leg work, and breathing. It’s called bouldering and an hour of that would be more than enough of a workout for this morning.

  Before leaving my apartment, I taped up my hands to protect the sores from being torn open by the holds, some of which were pretty sketchy. Then I took off.

  Because of my unusual work hours, Reinhold had given me a key to the gym and now I parked, went in the back entrance, and had the place to myself. Climbers have their own jargon and, while most people might talk about pulling themselves up a climb when they’re making moves, we talk about pulling them down. So, after warming up and working past the pain in my hands, that’s what I did
on some of the stoutest climbs in the bouldering cave.

  Counterintuitively, it often seems that stepping away from a case and letting that curious, secret part of my brain work on it is the best way to get a fresh perspective.

  Often it’s in the moments of quiet that the tiny threads of a case imperceptibly intertwine. I guess it’s human nature, though. We gather facts, try to process them, but don’t often tie them together until we’re in the shower or on the golf course or waking up in the middle of the night. Just ask any novelist, any artist, any scientist.

  And sometimes we think of them when we’re upside down in a bouldering cave.

  Sometimes.

  Like today.

  Halfway through one of the hardest climbs in the cave, a V9 problem that I’d never been able to send, it struck me.

  Indiana.

  He passed through Indiana.

  All sixteen missing persons, as well as the homicide victims we knew about, came from Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Why did the offender—or offenders—skip over the state of Indiana?

  The questions from the article that I’d read last night from Dr. Werjonic flashed through my mind:

  (1) What does the choice of the crime’s location tell us about the offender and the victim?

  (2) What purpose do these locations serve for him? Expediency? Opportunity? Isolation?

  (3) What do the locations of the crimes tell us about how he’s choosing his victims?

  (4) What led him to this specific victim, and location? How and when did his life intersect with the victim’s to create the encounter that precipitated this crime?

  The conclusion about why he skipped over Indiana: he wasn’t familiar with the state.