Opening Moves pbf-6

by Steven James

I’m not the biggest fan of our force’s CSIU. Captain Domyslawski didn’t budget nearly enough money to purchase the kind of resources or attract the kind of personnel he should’ve, and it showed through all too often in the form of lost or mislabeled evidence, contaminated crime scenes, and inadequate case documentation.

  Four or five minutes, huh?

  Well, at least that gave me a little time to look around before they started in.

  I’ll take what I can get.

  I asked Gabriele to wait outside, then climbed into the boxcar. “Ralph, I want your eyes in here.”

  He heaved himself up and stood beside me.

  Both of us had our flashlights on and they illuminated, in a somewhat eerie fashion, the macabre contents of the boxcar.

  “Alright, Mr. I-Notice-Things,” Ralph said bluntly, but softly enough for only me to hear, “you’re on.”

  I snapped on a pair of latex gloves over my taped-up hands. “Yes, I am.”

  Carefully, I began to study the contents of the boxcar.

  40

  A private little torture chamber.

  That’s what our guy had constructed.

  Ten mattresses lined the walls, evidently to serve as makeshift baffles to absorb the sound of his victims’ screams.

  I recalled that the kidnapper hadn’t gagged Colleen last night when he maimed her, so he must have trusted that the mattresses really did do their job.

  There was a half-used roll of duct tape on the floor next to a length of leftover rope. Beside them lay the antique-looking amputation saw I’d noticed when we first came in. Blood stained the floor beneath the sturdy chair in the middle of the boxcar, probably from Colleen last night, as well as from the injuries of the woman we’d found here just a few minutes ago.

  Maybe from others too.

  True. Considering the brutality of these crimes and the setup the guy had in here, there was no compelling reason to think that the two women were the only ones he had ever brought to this boxcar.

  The only other things I noticed were a light-now turned off-on the wall, the shredded ropes, tape, the plastic ties left from when Ralph had cut the woman free, some sheets of butcher paper, and two plastic garbage bags in the northeast corner, one neatly folded up, the other crumpled on top of it.

  When you process a crime scene, you follow a pretty well-established set of five procedures: orientation, observation, examination, analysis, and evaluation. I quickly, almost instinctively, ran through what needed to be done:

  1. Orientation: look at the big picture, including the place and timing of the crime, whether it’s indoors or outdoors, what the location might tell you about the offender’s familiarity with the area, if the crime appeared to be related to other crimes, and so on.

  2. Observation: note both the unusual and the obvious, remembering that the obvious is often the easiest thing to miss.

  3. Examination: collect and scrutinize physical evidence, such as fingerprints, DNA, hair samples, and so on-the things that come to mind for most people when they hear about police officers processing a crime scene.

  4. Analysis: take into account everything you know and probe deeper into the pertinence each fact or clue might have to the case. This should happen at the scene while everything is fresh in your mind, as well as later during a briefing when you recap the investigation.

  5. Evaluation: form a working hypothesis that you don’t try to prove, but rather try to disprove. Too many times initial hypotheses aren’t correct and trying to find ways to make the facts fit them only throws a monkey wrench into the works. This was the main problem I see with too many of the officers I work with, including, perhaps especially, Detective Corsica.

  Five steps.

  So, right now, number one-orientation.

  The big picture.

  I spoke my thoughts aloud to Ralph. “Track with me here. Last night Colleen is abducted and an unusual and disturbing ransom demand is left behind for her husband. Then, even though Vincent does as he was told, the kidnapper saws off her hands.”

  “And it looks like he was about to do that again here tonight, but this time to cut off both her hands and her feet.”

  I nodded. “Escalation.”

  “So,” he said, tracking with me, “we have another ‘ransom’ demand tonight?”

  “Very likely. Yes.”

  Another pastiche?

  “Ralph, we need to get a car over to the alley where Radar and I found Lionel last night-and one to the pier where the guy left Colleen.” I thought about it, then added, “And let’s get someone to the bar too, where Vincent abducted Lionel.”

  He called it in while I studied the inside of the boxcar and compared it to what Colleen had told me this morning about the place her abductor had taken her.

  When Ralph got off the radio I said, “This boxcar fits the description Colleen gave us. I think we should proceed with the theory that she was brought here too.”

  “Agreed.”

  I took a minute to mentally review the Dahmer connection, the locations, the information we had about the previous homicides, then noted the obvious: “The Taurus was inside the gate, so whoever drove it in there-whether that was Hendrich or someone else-must have had access to a key to that gate.”

  And keys to the two boxcars.

  It struck me that we still hadn’t heard back from the station about the sedan’s plates and whether the car was registered to Hendrich. When I mentioned that, Gabriele, who was lingering near the entrance to the boxcar and had apparently been listening in on our conversation, offered to follow up on it.

  “Good,” I told her. She left to make the call, I turned to Ralph. “Chaining the gate shut, parking in that particular place, choosing this line of boxcars, once again speaks to our guy’s familiarity with the area. With the forest paralleling the tracks, he would have been hidden from view from every nearby road, and from where the car is parked, he would have had to carry the victim, or lead her, more than sixty meters to the boxcar…”

  “By the way, what’s with you and the metric system? You never heard of yards before?”

  “Science, medicine, forensics, they all use the metric system,” I defended myself. “That’s why they measure things in milliliters, millimeters, and so on. Metric is the measuring system of the world. Even track and field events use the metric system.”

  “Yeah, well football doesn’t. It’s a game of inches, not centimeters. It doesn’t even sound American to talk like that. From now on, convert so I know what you’re talking about.”

  “Um…a meter is just a little longer than a-”

  “Yard. Yeah, I know that one. Everyone knows that one. But everything else-how many millimeters are in a foot? How many kilometers are in a mile? I don’t know that stuff. No more of this metric nonsense. It’s too European-reminds me of France.”

  “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 Pensees, ‘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 fiance
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 fiancee’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 fiancees, 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, thenfind 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 fiance 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.”