Opening Moves pbf-6

by Steven James

  He looked thoughtful for a moment. “I was not aware of that.” He eyed the map more carefully, then muttered something about awareness space and distance decay, but it was hard to hear what he was saying.

  Then all at once his eyes lit up. “My boy, I think perhaps we’ve been looking at the wrong roads.”

  “Which ones should we be looking at?”

  “The ones you can’t see.”

  “The ones you can’t see?”

  He grinned and pointed at the ceiling.

  “Um…” Then it hit me. “What? You mean in the air? Flying?”

  “That could explain why he skipped over Indiana. He wasn’t driving through it.”

  “He was flying over it,” I said reflectively.

  “The missing persons cases you mentioned yesterday. Were they spread out or clustered?”

  “Clustered.” I picked up one of his markers. “May I?”

  “Of course.”

  Using the marker, I placed dots on the map where the sixteen women lived or were last seen.

  He studied the distribution.

  The clusters were grouped vaguely around Milwaukee, Madison, and Green Bay, Wisconsin; Rockford and Champaign, Illinois; and Cincinnati, Ohio.

  He pointed to the cities. “We’ll want to see if General Mitchell International Airport has direct flights from Milwaukee to these cities.”

  It took us only a few minutes on the phone to find out that you could get to all the cities, but not all of the flights were direct, not all were daily. However, Rockford, Madison, and Green Bay would all be within a couple hours’ drive. The killer could’ve easily taken the roads you can see to get to them.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t look at shipping centers or distribution centers per se,” Calvin said, “but at businesses that do business with other businesses.”

  “Consulting firms?”

  “Along those lines, yes. A firm that might be flying people throughout this tri-state region. Have your task force check the flight manifests from perhaps a week before and a week after the crimes in those locations. See if the same name shows up.” He paused. “That will, admittedly, take some time, however.”

  I was ready to get started on it right away. “Did you come up with anything on your computer?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.” He positioned himself in front of the keyboard. “So let’s look at the specific abduction/demand cases.” A few keystrokes later, a map of Milwaukee with a myriad of lines and circles of different colors appeared.

  Lines and nodes.

  The awareness spaces of the victims.

  “You’ve been busy,” I said.

  “Indeed.” He tapped the screen. “Here. The boxcar as the anchor point. Then the sites you noted on your corkboard map yesterday. Plus, I’ve taken the liberty of adding the victimology information your team came up with-the typical travel routes and activity nodes for Colleen Hayes and Adele Westin.”

  “How did you get those?”

  “After you rang me at eight, I contacted Agent Hawkins, told him that Lieutenant Thorne had agreed to let me consult on the case, and he shared with me what Agent Parker and he had come up with yesterday in their research into the lives of the victims. Incidentally, the two women’s lives did intersect at one point, only not at the same time.”

  “Where is that?”

  “The Milwaukee Regional Medical Center. It seems Adele was in a small fender bender last summer and spent the night there. Colleen, of course, was taken there this week.”

  But Colleen was taken there after the crime, so the link wouldn’t involve the initial encounters with their abductor. “That’s stretching it a bit. Do you think it matters?”

  “Everything matters.”

  Hmm. I kind of liked that line.

  I might just add it to my repertoire.

  “Of course,” he acknowledged, “it’s also possible that the abductor chose Adele simply because of the availability of the recently buried corpse of her fiance’s grandmother.”

  “Or he might have killed Miriam Flandry himself to provide the necessary corpse for his plan.”

  “The timing would favor that,” he said quietly.

  “I’ll have the team look into the circumstances surrounding her death.”

  He typed, the map morphed. “As you can see, the centroid spatial distribution helps us identify the most likely location for the abductor’s residential address…Here.” He paused, then gestured toward the screen. “Near Franklin Heights. On the north side of the city. You’ll want to have your task force focus on people on the tip list and suspect list who live in this sixteen-block radius.”

  Amazing.

  If it really was accurate, that is.

  Even though there was a clock on the wall, he consulted his pocket watch just as he had yesterday. “I’m sorry, this afternoon’s lecture is a new one and, with the time I spent on this research this morning, well, let’s just say I have some long hours of preparation in front of me.”

  He slid me a packet of photocopied pages. “I took the liberty. You never know what the day might bring.”

  “Notes for today’s lecture.”

  “What I have so far.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Ring me if your team finds out anything.”

  “I will.”

  “And we’ll reconnect again, perhaps after lunch. If I can, I’ll swing by police headquarters before the seminar.”

  “Great.”

  Notes in hand, and feeling like we might have an avenue of inquiry that could take us someplace productive, I left for police headquarters.

  74

  9:25 a.m.

  7 hours until the gloaming

  I found Corsica, Lyrie, and Gabriele in the conference room.

  The other task force members were either out following up on leads or hadn’t made it to the office yet. Thompson had called in asking what kind of doughnuts people wanted-he was going to “pick up a few for the crew on the way in.”

  I told the three people who were here what Calvin and I had been thinking. “We’ll need to make some calls to airports, check flight manifests, and I want someone to go through the suspect list and tip list looking for people who live in that area near Franklin Heights. Also, let’s find out what we can about Miriam Flandry’s death-if there were any indications of foul play. Oh, and consulting firms in the cities under question, businesses that do business with businesses.”

  We split up the assignments and set to work.

  The more attached you get to people before they die, the more you’ll ache after they’re gone.

  So, really, the Maneater could think of no good reason to put yourself through any of that, to form any sort of emotional attachments with the people around you. After all, since you’ll be leaving them eventually, or they’ll be leaving you, why cause more grief in the world by extending or receiving love in the first place?

  Now, this morning, he didn’t find it difficult at all to get the person he’d decided to abduct into his car. She was a petite woman and he was strong for his size.

  He carried her into the slaughterhouse and set her in one of the walk-in freezers that was now without power, but quite soundproof and secure. She was still unconscious when he locked the freezer door.

  He would come back and visit her later, then take her to the place in the building where he’d taken Celeste last night.

  A test? Maybe. You could call it that. But the Maneater wanted to know how serious Joshua really was about all of this.

  If he did carry out something memorable at dusk, as he claimed he was going to do, they would meet up tonight and the Maneater would reward him with this woman.

  And they would share their first meal together.

  75

  10:25 a.m.

  6 hours until the gloaming

  In light of our current projects, the ten o’clock meeting had been cancelled. It seemed more prudent to pursue our leads than to sit around a table talking about them.


  While we were working, Ellen showed up and told us she’d interviewed the two waste management workers who drove the truck of Dahmer’s things. Both claimed they didn’t know Griffin or anything about him, but Strickland did know Detective Browning and went deer hunting with him.

  It was a link.

  Links form a chain.

  Chains form a case.

  She went on. “When I asked him if he might have mentioned to Browning where Dahmer’s possessions had been deposited, his memory seemed to become a bit fuzzy.”

  Yes, so information could’ve easily been passed from Strickland to Browning to Griffin, if the links were connected.

  As she was finishing up, Radar walked in and informed us that he’d just spoken with Colleen Hayes downstairs. “She was brought over here to see Vincent-he’s still in custody. Anyway, I thought we could finally get some answers from her about those cuffs. I pressed her about why she’d purchased a pair that had been used in the Oswalds’ arrest. It took some prodding, but she told me that a guy at work had thrown out a catalog. She saw it in the trash, flipped through it, saw the cuffs. She thought it would be…well, discreet to order them through there.”

  That was a little disappointing. “So she didn’t ask specifically for the ones involved in the Oswalds’ arrest?” I said.

  “It didn’t sound like it, no.”

  So, the killer could have found out about the cuffs from Griffin’s records and chosen Colleen that way. The connection between Adele and Colleen might not be the breakthrough clue we were hoping it would be after all.

  “Does she know who threw out the catalog?”

  He shook his head. “No, and she said she didn’t know who the guy was she ordered them from either, that it was all done through a post office box. The cuffs were shipped to her house.”

  Another corner of the labyrinth closed off, moving us inexorably in another direction.

  As far as the rest of our progress, Miriam Flandry’s stroke hadn’t seemed in any way suspicious and no autopsy had been done. The search for consulting firms had come up dry, but Lyrie had found that four people on the suspect list and tip list did live in the Franklin Heights area.

  I turned to Thompson who’d arrived during our recap and had, as promised, brought plenty of chocolate cream-filled and glazed doughnuts for everyone. “Don’t you go to church in that area?” I asked him. “Over near Franklin Heights?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why don’t you follow up on those names. See what you can dig up.”

  “Right.” He grabbed three doughnuts and left again. Didn’t even get a chance to sit down.

  The rest of us went back to work.

  It took a little while, but all three airlines that flew out of General Mitchell Airport and serviced the cities we were looking at faxed us the flight manifests we’d requested and we took our time inspecting them. In the end, however, we didn’t come up with any names that matched.

  It was possible this whole airline idea was off base.

  Come on, Pat, you’re missing something here!

  I rubbed my head, then studied the maps on the corkboard again, thought about what Calvin had said about consulting firms, businesses that do businesses with other businesses.

  Roads you can’t see…

  Notice the obvious, Pat…The truth isn’t as obscure as it appears…Our preconceptions blind us to-

  “Hang on,” I said. “Chartered flights. Private jets. And let’s take a closer look not just at consulting firms but at any businesses that have satellite offices in those cities.”

  Agreement from the team.

  We pulled out phone books and began to make some calls.

  76

  11:25 a.m.

  5 hours until the gloaming

  Ellen struck gold.

  She found one company, High Profile Charter Service, based out of Milwaukee, that made regular chartered stops in Cincinnati and Champaign and had even done so two days before their respective murders, then returned to Milwaukee the day after them. They’d also sent a flight to Green Bay two days prior to the disappearance of a woman from nearby Appleton.

  There weren’t any flights to Rockford or Madison, but again, those cities weren’t too far from Milwaukee and it made sense that the killer could have driven to them easily enough.

  When we checked which company had chartered the flights in question, we found that they were all hired by Hathaway amp; Erikson, LLC, one of the biggest acquisition firms in the Greater Milwaukee area.

  A business that did business with other businesses.

  I remembered what Griffin had said right before he was killed, when I asked him about the Maneater: “Now there’s a man who knows how to acquire what he wants. Does it for a living.”

  A man who knows how to acquire what he wants.

  Does it for a living.

  A guy who works at an acquisitions firm? A double entendre from the man who called Mallory “baby”?

  I wouldn’t put it past him.

  Oh yeah, things were popping.

  High Profile Charter Service didn’t have flight manifests, but they did have a record that nine people had been on the flight to Cincinnati, seven to Champaign, and five to Green Bay.

  “If we get those names from the acquisition firm,” Corsica said, “and the same name appears on all the lists-”

  “We have our guy,” Radar exclaimed.

  I didn’t think we could go quite that far, but I had the sense that it would certainly be one circumstantial link to the crimes that would be hard to discount.

  As it turned out, only Corsica was able to leave the department with me at the moment, but I didn’t care. I was willing to work with just about anyone if it meant moving things forward.

  We grabbed our things and left to pay a visit to Hathaway amp; Erikson, LLC.

  77

  A crowd of fifteen people had gathered in the West Reagan Street Mission’s cafeteria to remember Petey Schwartz.

  The small congregation sat behind folding tables with Styrofoam cups of coffee in front of them.

  All of the people, besides Joshua, worked for the mission or were transients who’d known Petey. And yet, because of his past involvement with the center, Joshua did not stand out.

  The question that seemed so hard to answer gnawed at him: “What kind of a God could ever forgive someone who’s done the things you’ve done?”

  And the answer he tried to cling to: “What kind of a God would he be if he couldn’t?”

  The Reverend Hezekiah Tate, the African-American preacher who’d started this shelter for the homeless more than thirty years ago, walked slowly to the front of the cafeteria, greeted those who’d come, unfolded his weathered Bible and laid it on the antique lectern he always preached from.

  After a few brief opening remarks, he started in with his “word from the Lord.” He spoke with the honest intensity, the intonation, the cadence of a veteran black preacher. “We all have choices that we face in this life. Petey had choices. I have choices. You have choices.”

  Yes, and you have chosen evil, Joshua. You will have to answer for that, you will-

  “Scripture is clear that we are each responsible for our own choices. No one can take credit for the godly works of another; no one will bear the blame for another’s ungodly acts. And this has been true, this is true, this will always be true. Amen?”

  The small group of homeless people knew Tate, knew the way he preached, and chimed in, “Amen.”

  “In Ezekiel eighteen, and verse four, we read that the word of the Lord came to Ezekiel and said unto him, ‘The soul that sinneth, it shall die.’”

  It shall die, Joshua.

  You shall-

  “‘If a father shall beget a son that is a robber, a shedder of blood, and that doeth the like to any one of these things…’”

  A shedder of blood.

  Like you, Joshua.

  A son.

  Who is.

  A shedder of blood. />
  “‘Shall he then live? He shall not live: he hath done all these abominations; he shall surely die; his blood shall be upon him…The soul that sinneth, it shall die.’”

  Tate emphasized that last word, let it ring and echo through the room, then went on. “‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him. Therefore repent, and turn yourselves from all your transgressions; so iniquity shall not be your ruin. Cast away from you all your transgressions, whereby ye have transgressed; and make you a new heart and a new spirit.’”

  Repent, Joshua, it’s not too late. You have to-

  “And where does this new heart and this new spirit come from?” Reverend Tate asked rhetorically. “Only through faith in the grace of God, only through mercy at the hand of God, only through hope in the Son of God. Amen?”

  “Amens” from the ragtag congregation.

  “As the Lord told Ezekiel in the thirty-sixth chapter, the twenty-sixth verse: ‘A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.’”

  Tate’s voice took on a flavor of fire born of love. “This new spirit comes to us only from God and is a gift of God and draws us closer to God. Amen?”

  More amens. Two disabled vets, one of whom was missing a leg, and both of whom lived under an I-94 overpass, lifted their foam cups in an impromptu toast to the preacher.

  Tate wrapped up his brief but passionate homily: “This new heart, this new spirit, this new hope, come to all who will turn to the Lord to find forgiveness and atonement for their sins. This, Petey did right here in this very cafeteria, one month ago. And this you can do today, if you have never done so before. Right here, in the same place where Petey was saved, you can be too.” He took an expectant breath. “Let us pray. And let us take responsibility for our sins, let us bring our hearts to God, let us trust in the Lord Jesus Christ, the one whose blood-”