Opening Moves pbf-6

by Steven James

  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.

  He introduced himself: “Ralph Hawkins, FBI.” The words came out in a low rumble, a voice you’d expect from a guy who could bench-press a pickup. “This is Special Agent Ellen Parker.”

  I greeted them. He passed the bottle of soda to his other arm, then enveloped my hand in his as we shook. “Detective Patrick Bowers,
” I said. “Homicide. Just call me Pat.”

  “Ralph.”

  “And Ellen is fine,” Agent Parker told me.

  “Good.”

  A couple of moments later, as we passed down the hallway, she unexpectedly excused herself and walked off alone toward the elevator.

  Ralph paused. “Gives us a chance to chat.”

  Ah. So. Here we go.

  I gestured toward the stairs and led the way.

  “I understand you’re in charge of this case?” he said.

  “Yes.” I could only imagine what a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare this was going to be if he tried to pull rank and take over. It would have been audacious, but I wasn’t ready to put anything past the FBI.

  We entered the stairwell. Thorne’s office was on the fourth floor. We started up the steps.

  Despite his size Ralph was quick and light on the stairs. “There are two ways we can do this. We can either waste time dicking around trying to figure out who’s calling the shots, or we can work together to catch this psycho. Your call.”

  So, he had an attitude and got straight to the point.

  My kind of guy.

  “Agent Hawkins-Ralph…” We reached the second floor. “I have every reason to believe that you’re experienced and well qualified at what you do, but I need you to know that I’m going to find this guy and bring him in or take him down and if you get in my way I’ll do whatever is necessary to move you aside so I can do my job.”

  Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the ideal thing to say to kick off our working relationship, but I’ve never been especially known for my tact.

  He paused as we reached the third-floor landing. He wasn’t out of breath. Neither was I.

  I waited for his response. Tried to read him. Couldn’t.

  Then he took a long, unhurried swallow of his Mountain Dew, finished most of it, and smacked his lips. “Glad to hear we’re on the same page. But…” I caught the hint of a smile. “How am I gonna get in your way, Detective, when I’m going to be the one way out in front of you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I can be a bit determined at times.”

  “I’m counting on that.” We started for the fourth floor. “Besides, you couldn’t move me aside.”

  “I’m stronger than I look.”

  He cracked his neck and cords of muscle strained beneath his skin. “So am I.” He downed the rest of his soda and tossed the empty bottle into a trash can as we entered the hallway and passed the elevator bay.

  And as he strode beside me on the way to Lieutenant Thorne’s office, I couldn’t help but wonder-if he really was stronger than he looked-just how tough this guy, who was obviously not a desk jockey, actually was.

  12

  We met in Thorne’s office, all of us crammed around his desk on folding chairs.

  Six of us were at the briefing: Ellen, Ralph, Radar, Lieutenant Thorne, me, and Detective Annise Corsica, a severe-looking woman in her forties with short, choppy hair, thin lips, and probing, astucious eyes. Annise had been on the force more than twenty years and, to put it mildly, had not been happy when I’d been promoted to homicide detective seven years earlier in my career than she’d been.

  I’d seen her exhibit what I could only call incompetence on cases, and the amount of respect we shared for each other was mutual; however Thorne liked her and, apparently, she was on the case.

  He kicked things off with introductions and then turned the floor over to Ralph. “I’ll let Agent Hawkins explain exactly why we’ve brought the FBI in on this. It has to do with more than Vincent and Colleen Hayes.”

  That, I hadn’t heard. I directed my attention to Ralph.

  “There are two bodies that’ve been found,” he said, “one in Champaign, Illinois, one in Ohio, near Cincinnati. We’ve been doing our best to keep it under the media’s radar-” He glanced at Brandon. “Why do they call you Radar, anyway?”

  Thorne answered for him: “He zeroes in on people. Finds ’em. He’s got gut instincts like no one else.”

  It was true. Radar did seem to have uncanny instincts, and that bugged me, not because I envied him, but because I don’t trust hunches, gut feelings, intuition. I trust facts and logic, and when Radar’s unfounded inferences led to results, it always confounded me.

  “Gotcha,” Ralph said. “Anyway, we’ve been playing this close to the chest…trying to keep a few details from the public.” He looked around the room soberly. “Forensics has determined that the intestines of one of the victims and the lungs of the other, both women in their early twenties, were consumed. The killer doesn’t remove the organs all at once. Takes his time. Keeps the women alive while he does it.”

  “How could you tell the lungs and intestines had been eaten?” Detective Corsica asked. “And not just, well…discarded?”

  “He cooked ’em on the victims’ stoves. We found pieces on frying pans and on a fork, but no saliva. No DNA.”

  No one said a word.

  Without bite marks on the bodies, I imagined it would be hard to determine with certainty that the offender had exhibited anthropophagic behavior, but now, with our case’s connection to Dahmer-and the amputation of Colleen’s hands-the proximal timing and removal of body parts spoke to more than just coincidence, which I didn’t believe in anyway.

  Before we could tell if the incidents were actually linked, we would need to do a comparative case analysis, or CCA. By studying the physical evidence, eyewitness reports, crime scene locations and characteristics of the victims, we could judge the likelihood that the crimes were committed by the same offender.

  “We found a small soil sample at the scene of the homicide in Champaign,” Ellen explained. “The FBI Lab was able to use the NRCS’s soil data surveys to-”

  “NRCS?” Corsica asked.

  “National Resources Conservation Service. Part of the Department of Agriculture. They have soil sample data from every county in the U.S. Anyway, they matched the sample to southeastern Wisconsin. Two counties-Milwaukee or Waukesha.”

  Nice. Maybe these guys were the real deal after all.

  “That, however, was released to the media,” Ralph grumbled. Then he echoed what I’d been thinking. “Obviously it’s not one hundred percent certain, but now, with the timing, the severing of Ms. Hayes’s hands, the links to cannibalism, to Dahmer, well, there’s a good chance that what happened there and what’s happening here are linked.”

  “You have case files from the other homicides?” I asked him.

  A nod. “I’ll get them as soon as we’re done here. But for now, I want you to fill me in on what happened last night.”

  I did most of the talking, with Radar, Corsica, and Thorne offering a few details I hadn’t heard yet:

  (1) Colleen Hayes had been home from the time she talked to her husband at 6:35 p.m. until 9:15 p.m. when a neighbor saw a car pull away from the street behind her house.

  (2) According to Colleen, the blood in the kitchen came from a cut on her left hand when she was struggling with her attacker, who had a knife.

  (3) There was no sign of forced entry at the home.

  (4) A small square of tinfoil was found on the floor of the bar, but it contained no prints other than Vincent’s.

  When we finished, Ralph turned to Thorne. “Your department was responsible for bringing in Dahmer. What do you make of this wack job coercing the guy to leave a handcuffed man in that same alley?”

  He reflected on that for a moment. “In ’ninety-one, it was a cuffed African-American man close to the same age as Lionel who eventually led us to Dahmer. The alley, of course, is where Konerak Sinthasomphone was found cuffed and naked. Maybe our guy’s trying to say that Dahmer got caught; but that he’s better than Dahmer, that he won’t. What do you think, Corsica?”

  She’d been lead on the Dahmer investigation. “I agree. Definitely.” But then she saw the skepticism in my eyes. “What is it, Patrick?” My friends call me Pat, so I was cool with her calling me Patrick.

  �
�I think it’s premature to try guessing what this guy was trying to communicate by his actions or to conclude anything ‘definite’ about them.”

  “Well,” Ralph said to me, “you were there last night. Any ideas on possible motive?”

  “I’m not one to speculate on motives. The real issue here isn’t ‘why it happened’ but ‘what happened.’ On the surface there’s a connection, but-”

  “Hang on.” Ellen adjusted her glasses. “You don’t speculate on motives? What does that mean-you don’t look for them?”

  “No. I don’t. I’d rather-”

  “Patrick doesn’t believe in motives.” It was Corsica, a clear challenge in her tone.

  “Actually,” I countered, “that’s not quite right. I do believe in motives, but more specifically in reasons. We all have reasons for the things we do. All behavior is, to some extent at least, undertaken to achieve a goal, but since trying to figure out specifically what that goal is-considering that the person doing it might not even know why he’s doing it-ends up being fruitless, nothing more than a guessing game, I don’t put much stock in the process. Besides, nowhere in our justice system does the law require showing motive.”

  “But what about first-degree murder or arson?” Corsica pressed me. “You need to prove intent in arson cases; premeditation to get a first-degree murder conviction.”

  “Premeditation and intent are different from motive.” There was no way I should’ve had to be explaining this to her, especially not here in front of everyone. But she wasn’t letting it drop and if she wanted a lesson, I could give her one. “Intent is what you’re trying to accomplish, premeditation is how you’re going to go about it, but motive is the reason why. The first two can be proven beyond reasonable doubt, the third cannot.”

  She gave me a dubious look, and I took it as a prompt to go on. “People act certain ways because of needs, desires, unconscious impulses, habits, goals, personality differences-all those things affect our choices and actions, and all of them intertwine with each other. It’s impossible to untangle them and surmise their collective, or even their respective, influence in one word like ‘greed’ or ‘lust’ or ‘hatred.’ Besides, in the end, the why is always the same. Ultimately, all criminals commit their crimes for the same reason.”