by Steven James
I holstered my weapon, hailed Radar, then asked Vincent, “Why would he kill her?”
“I don’t know! He made me do it. Like I told you, he said if I got caught, he’d slit her throat! You have to—”
“You alright, Pat?” It was Radar jogging toward us, weapon out to cover me.
“I’m fine. You hearing this?”
“Yeah.”
He arrived at my side.
“Get two cars over here, Radar. I want this guy in a cruiser ASAP so we can talk to him in private.”
He was eyeing my face where Vincent had punched me.
“Go on,” I told him.
“You sure you’re okay?”
Only then did I become aware of the pain emanating from my jaw and pounding through my head. It was hard to imagine that I hadn’t noticed it a few seconds ago, but adrenaline does that to you. My index finger ached too; it’d gotten wrenched pretty badly when Vincent yanked at my SIG, and now the proximal interphalangeal joint felt thick, swollen, hard to move. “I’m good. Make the call.”
While Radar stepped away to radio the cruisers, I asked Hayes, “How would he know you did it? Were you supposed to meet him? Call him?”
“He said he’d be watching.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know.”
I scrutinized the area again. “Tell me what happened. Make it quick.”
He snatched a breath and quickly recounted the story. “I came home, found blood in the kitchen. He’d taken her. There was a note with a phone number and I called it. He told me I needed to leave a black man in his twenties, naked, cuffed in that alley, that if I got caught or went to the cops, he’d kill Colleen.”
“Did he tell you that alley on Twenty-fifth, that specific one?”
“Yes.”
That was the alley where, back in 1991, Konerak Sinthasomphone had been found. The teenage Laotian had been drugged and was disoriented, but had escaped apartment 213 when his abductor, a serial killer named Jeffrey Dahmer, briefly left him alone.
When the police arrived, Dahmer convinced the two MPD officers that Konerak was his drunk lover. When the officers returned Konerak, who was still disoriented from the drugs, to Dahmer’s apartment, they caught the scent of a terrible smell that Dahmer told them was his aquarium he’d been putting off cleaning—but it was really the decomposing body of a victim Dahmer had killed earlier that week, Tony Hughes. The officers left Konerak with Dahmer, who, within minutes, overpowered him, killed him, and began to eat his heart.
The same alley.
When Konerak was found there, he’d been handcuffed—naked and cuffed, just like the guy tonight. Two months later, when a young African-American man named Tracy Edwards escaped from Dahmer and led the police to Dahmer’s apartment, one of his wrists was cuffed as well. He’d fought back when Dahmer attacked him and barely managed to get away in time. Everyone on the MPD knew the story.
I processed everything, made a decision, told Radar, “Send out a call that the suspect got away.”
He glanced at Hayes, then looked at me again quizzically. “That he got away?”
“If this guy’s telling the truth, as long as he’s free from the police, his wife stays alive.”
“Got it.” Radar went for his radio again.
“Okay.” I turned to Vincent. “What’s the phone number you found at your house?”
“On my portable phone. The last number I called. I don’t remember it.” Obviously he was scared, worried, desperate, but he must have been able to tell that I was trying to help, that I wasn’t discounting his story, and his straight answers were just what I needed.
I took out his phone and yanked the antenna up. I wished there were a simple way to redial portable numbers, but a quick call to the station, then to the telephone company, got me what I needed.
I punched in the number and let it ring.
While I waited for someone to pick up, the two cruisers I’d requested pulled up to the curb and four officers jumped out. Radar helped them hustle Vincent Hayes into one of the cars.
The phone kept ringing. Still no answer.
Radar returned and I told him urgently, “Have everyone keep their red-and-blues on. I want it to look like we’re still searching for the suspect.” It wasn’t much, and if Vincent was telling the truth and his wife’s abductor was watching, or maybe if he was monitoring emergency frequencies, it would already be too late. But it was worth a try and—
The ringing stopped. I waited, but whoever was on the other end said nothing, so I did: “It’s done.” I kept my voice low and tried to sound out of breath so that whoever was on the other end wouldn’t recognize that I wasn’t Vincent. “The cops came, but I got away.”
No answer.
“They found the black guy,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You said you’d let Colleen go.”
“Who is this?”
“Vincent,” I lied. “I did it. I swear. Let me talk to—”
I heard a gasp and then a scream on the other end of the line, and then nothing at all.
“Colleen!” I yelled.
A blank silence, and then a rapid beeping sound. The man had hung up.
I redialed, nothing. Called the station: “Get me a trace on 888-359-5392. Now!”
4
We were unable to trace the call, found no one at the Hayes residence, didn’t learn anything helpful from the bartender at New Territories, and when I met up with Vincent at police headquarters in interrogation room 2A thirty minutes later, I had no good news to share with him.
It was possible that the woman I’d heard scream on the phone wasn’t Colleen Hayes, and it was also possible that the scream was staged, that no one had even gotten hurt. I found that unlikely, but all too often premature assumptions end up needlessly derailing investigations and I wasn’t about to let that happen in this case. Facts need to establish hypotheses, not the other way around.
Right now Vincent didn’t need to know anything about someone screaming on the phone.
I found him seated at a metal table bolted to the floor, his hands and feet shackled. If his story was true, he’d been coerced to commit tonight’s crimes and theoretically might not pose a risk or need to be cuffed. But he had drugged and kidnapped a young man, resisted arrest, assaulted an officer of the law—in fact I wasn’t even sure how many laws he’d broken in the last two hours. We still hadn’t confirmed his story. Cuffed was good.
And what about that phone call? Somebody answered. Someone screamed.
“Okay, Mr. Hayes.” I took out a notepad and a miniature cassette recorder. “We were rushed earlier when I asked you to tell me what happened tonight. I need you to fill me—”
“Is Lionel okay?”
“Yes. He’s still at the hospital. They’re keeping him overnight.”
On the ride here, the officers with Vincent had grilled him on what kind of drugs he’d given Lionel, how much he’d used, when and how they’d been administered, how many drinks he’d seen Lionel have. “He’s okay for now,” I said, “but you gave him some pretty potent stuff.”
“And you got nothing on Colleen? Nothing?”
“We’re still looking for her.”
It struck me that he’d asked about Lionel first, rather than his wife.
Vincent was quiet. “Can I have some coffee?”
His request seemed a bit out of the blue, and was possibly a sign of interrogation avoidance, but on the other hand, it’s not uncommon for people to act unpredictably during times of intense stress.
Folks have been known to start cleaning their homes while the place is on fire, desperately trying to straighten things up or get the dishes in the dishwasher before leaving. Mothers who’ve lost their babies will sometimes hold the child to their breast and rock the corpse gently, even kiss its forehead as they would if the baby were still alive, though they would never think to snuggle with or kiss a corpse under any other circumstances.
Befor
e life squeezes us to the limit, we can never be sure how we’re going to respond, so even though I found it odd that Vincent didn’t immediately ask any more questions about his wife, I gave him a pass.
“Alright.” Protocol called for me to offer him something to eat, which I did, and which he declined.
Outside the interrogation room I found a young female officer whom I didn’t recognize. Her name tag: GABRIELE HOLDREN. Slim build. Black hair. Bright eyes. I asked her if she could get some coffee for Mr. Hayes.
“Would you like some too, Detective?”
“No, I never touch the stuff.” Grind up burned beans and pour water over them? Drink that sludge? Not my idea of a good time.
While she went for the coffee, I returned to my chair across the table from Vincent Hayes, flipped open my notebook, and started the cassette recorder.
“Mr. Hayes, I need you to tell me exactly what happened tonight. Starting with the last time you spoke with Colleen.”
“I talked with her at about seven. I run a PR firm; we’re under the gun with a deadline and I told her I wasn’t going to be home until at least ten.” His voice was balanced. He didn’t sound like a guy who was worried about his wife’s life being on the line; he sounded more like a man who was discussing his market earnings with his accountant.
I noted that.
“She was at the house when you spoke with her?”
“Yes. Everything was fine; she understood about my getting home late. No big deal. We hung up. I went back to work, came home a little after ten, and, just like I told you earlier, she was gone.”
“Tell me about the blood.”
“In the kitchen, on the floor. Spots of it, not that much.”
The clinical, objective way Vincent was describing everything was starting to disturb me.
I had some ideas about where to take this conversation, but I needed to cover the proverbial bases first.
“Did you notice anything missing?”
“No.”
“What was your wife’s state of mind? Had you argued earlier? Anything like that?”
“No, she was fine. Like I said.”
“How is your marriage, Mr. Hayes?”
“Our marriage?”
“Were you having any problems? Any other romantic relationships either of you were engaged in outside of—”
“No!”
“Mr. Hayes, is there anyone who might wish to harm either you or Colleen?”
“No. No one.”
A knock at the door. I answered it and Holdren handed me the coffee for Hayes, then disappeared into the hallway again. I slid the burnt-bean-flavored water to him. His wrists were cuffed, so he lifted the foam cup with both hands as he drank.
“What did you do when you found the blood? Did you call 911?”
He shook his head. “Like I told you before, there was a note there by the phone. I called the number and a man answered. He told me to go to a bar, get the black guy.”
“And did he specify which bar?”
“New Territories. I was supposed to try there first. Find a guy, someone in his twenties, drug him, then drop him off naked and handcuffed in the alley at 924 North Twenty-fifth Street.”
“Did you recognize the voice of the man on the phone?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“And 911, why didn’t you call it then?”
“He said no cops.” Hayes’s tone made it clear he was getting more impatient. He set down his cup. “I explained all this before.”
It didn’t bother me that he was getting upset. The more you rattle someone, the more the truth comes out. When people get angry, they stop waffling and hiding things from you and start saying what’s really on their minds.
Okay, enough with the stock questions.
“Where did you get the pills?”
“What?”
“The pills you gave Lionel Shannon. Where did you get them?”
“He left them for me. The guy on the phone did.”
“Where?”
“Two pills. In a kitchen drawer, wrapped in tinfoil.”
I jotted this down, more for show than anything. My memory is pretty good, besides, I always verify everything later from the written transcript of the interviews. “Earlier you told the officers who were driving you here that you gave Lionel a drug called Propotol. How did you know the type of drug if the offender provided the pills for you?”
“He told me.”
“On the phone?”
“Yes.”
I watched him closely to gauge his reaction to my next question. “Mr. Hayes, do you own a pair of handcuffs?”
A pause. “Yeah. My wife and I, well…we’re into…Anyway, yeah, I used those. He told me to go to the bar and—”
I set down my pen. “Vincent, you live less than fifteen minutes from New Territories—probably closer to a ten-minute drive at that time of night—but we know from talking with the bartender that you didn’t arrive there until after eleven o’clock.”
“I guess so.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“You just told me you got to your house a little after ten. If your wife’s life was in danger, why did you wait nearly forty-five minutes before driving to the bar?”
A switch seemed to go off inside him. Finally, there was passion in his voice again. “You have to believe me! I went as soon as I could!”
“Then what did you do in the meantime?”
“I took the backseats out of my minivan and then drove to the bar. I sat there for a while, trying to get up enough nerve to go in. To actually do it.”
It was possible, but it seemed like a stretch. My suspicions were teeter-tottering back and forth.
And why would Colleen’s kidnapper tell Vincent the name of the drug?
I couldn’t think of a good reason.
Vincent must have sensed my reluctance to buy at face value everything he was telling me. “Listen, he’s going to kill her, I know he is!” He tugged violently at his shackles, snapping the chains tight. “You have to get out there. You’re wasting time talking to me!”
“We have good people looking for Colleen as we speak, I guarantee you. But the more you can tell me right now about what happened, the better our chances are of finding her quickly.” I said “quickly” rather than “alive” because part of me feared it might already be too late for that.
Once again, I asked him to recount the telephone conversation as closely as he could, and he did, but there was nothing new, nothing contradictory, nothing he hadn’t already told me. “Mr. Hayes, think carefully. Is there anything else—anything at all—that might help us find Colleen?”
He massaged his forehead roughly with two fingers and a thumb as if he were trying to squeeze out information. “No. Just believe me. You have to find her.”
“We will.” I hit the STOP button on the recorder and put it in my pocket. I wasn’t sure what to think, not anymore. There were enough red flags in his story to keep me guessing, but there was also enough consistency to make it believable. “Until we know more, we have to keep you in custody. I think you know that.”
He nodded silently.
“I’ll send an officer to take you to your cell.”
You never leave anything in the hands of an unsupervised person in custody, so I took the empty coffee cup from Hayes, left the interrogation room, and went to meet with Lieutenant Thorne to fill him in on what we knew.
5
After briefing the lieutenant, I told him, “Here’s what we need to do: look for a small piece of tinfoil on the floor of the van. Vincent didn’t have it on him when we caught him, and I can’t imagine that after he drugged Lionel he took the time to find a trash can and throw out the foil. Have the guys sweep Hayes’s house and the bar.”
Thorne was a broad, densely muscled man with simian arms. He didn’t speak at first, but his eyes did. Inquisitive. Calm. Confident. “You’re thinking there might be prints on the foil? Or no foil at all?”
“Yes.”
“We’ll check the trash cans too.”
“Good. Also, dust the handcuffs that were on Lionel. Hayes told me they were his, but we need to find out if there are any prints on them besides his and his wife’s.”
“Vincent might be lying about the whole thing.”
“It’s possible. Think about it—if you were the abductor and left the pills behind, wouldn’t you have also left the cuffs? If your primary demand required a pair? So either the killer knew Vincent had his own set—”
“Or Hayes is lying. Is working with him.”
“We have to stay open to that possibility.”
He chewed on his lip for a moment. “It’ll take at least two weeks before we can verify that the DNA of the blood in the Hayes kitchen is really Colleen’s.”
In the wake of the O.J. trial two years ago, it seemed like every defense attorney in the country wanted DNA tests done and there just weren’t enough resources in the system to process all that evidence. Every year the field of DNA testing is advancing by leaps and bounds, but it’s still exorbitantly expensive, time-consuming, and most crime labs are backed up for months, if not years. They say someday we’ll be able to get the results on priority cases immediately instead of two to three weeks later. That would definitely be a game-changer.
“But,” Thorne went on, “she is missing, there are signs of a struggle; it sure looks like she was attacked there in the house. The note with the phone number was there, just like Hayes said.” A pause. “And you heard a woman scream on the phone.”
“Yes, but her identity remains unconfirmed. It might not have been Colleen.”
He looked a little irritated. “You always hedge your bets, don’t you, Pat?”
“I don’t like making bets, I like—”
“Unearthing the truth.”
A pause. “I’ve mentioned that before?”
“Possibly. And why were you and Radar in that neighborhood again?”
“We were in the area following up on a call. A neighbor phoned dispatch, said someone was lurking around Dahmer’s old lot. The neighbors don’t like strangers around there.”