by Steven James
“Yeah. No kidding.” He pushed back from his desk, then rose from his chair. “I’m assigning a task force to this. I can probably get you two or three people plus Radar. You’ll be lead.”
“Good.”
“And I’ll get the crime scene guys to finish processing the scene.”
We actually had four known crime scenes. “And the bar, the van, the alley.”
“Don’t worry. We got it.” Thorne looked at his watch. “It’s coming up on one thirty. I want you on your A-game in the morning. Go home. Get some rest. And put some ice on that jaw. That bruise is gonna be nasty in the morning. I’ll see you at nine.”
“Call me if—”
“Don’t worry, I will.”
I have a small apartment.
It’s the kind of place you might expect a single guy who’s almost never home to have. Sparse furniture. A fridge that’s almost always empty except for some leftover Chinese or Thai food and a dozen half-used bottles of condiments. A pull-up bar in the living room. A bed that’s almost never made. A few too many dishes in the sink.
Okay, more than a few.
Working on a detective’s salary while also taking grad classes in criminology and law studies at Marquette, I don’t have a whole lot of time or extra cash floating around for home decorating.
It’s my own little balancing act: a professional life that has to be meticulously organized, that consumes most of my time and mental energy; a home life that ends up paying the price. All part of the deal when you sign up for this gig.
I checked my messages and found one from Taci Vardis, the woman I was seeing. She was finishing her residency in surgery through the Medical College of Wisconsin, so both of our schedules were insane and we’d had some difficulties coordinating them lately.
“Hey, Pat. It’s me. Um…Well, it’s kind of late, but if you get in before midnight, give me a call. I’m still at the hospital. I’m looking forward to tomorrow night. Supper.” A pause. A sigh. “I can’t believe it’s been a year since we met. Anyway, I was just thinking of you. Gotta go. Love you. Bye.”
Despite the warmth in her voice I caught the hint of something else. A touch of loneliness? I couldn’t tell. Even after listening to the message four times, I wasn’t able to read exactly what might lie beneath her words.
A little disquieted, but unwilling to call her this late, I grabbed some ice for my jaw and my finger, then took some time to review what I knew about the case. After filling out the paperwork from Hayes’s arrest, I read over my notes for tomorrow afternoon’s class at Marquette.
With this Hayes case suddenly dropped in my lap, I wasn’t sure if I’d make the three o’clock seminar, but we had a guest lecturer coming in to teach a two-week course on geographic profiling and environmental criminology and the topics intrigued me. He’d assigned readings to do before the session began, and as usual, I was behind.
From what I’d read so far of his work, he was using cutting-edge computer models to analyze the timing, progression, and location of serial offenses, and then overlaying that data against the lifestyle choices of the victims and the cognitive maps that both they and the offender formed of the areas in which they lived. The concept of cognitive mapping had been especially interesting to me.
The geospatial-analysis process was still a little fuzzy to me, but ever since the semester began nearly three months ago, I’d been looking forward to hearing Dr. Werjonic talk us through it.
When I caught myself dozing off, I knew it was time for bed. The clock on the wall was a little fast but told me it was almost three, and that was plenty late for me.
As I lay down in bed, I took a few minutes to try and clear my head.
I’ve never been good at shutting out the images of the crime scenes I see, turning off that part of myself, and all too often the memories plague me in my dreams where I can’t fight them off. Tonight, even though I hadn’t seen her yet and didn’t even know if she was injured, I was afraid I would have nightmares about a dead Colleen Hayes.
But I didn’t.
I had nightmares about someone else.
6
In my dream, I’m standing in a forest, bristling pines surround me. Mist whispers through the trees, through the dusk. Ethereal and surreal. Images of past crime scenes are passing before me, layering and overlapping. Blood and broken bodies, the tears of survivors, heartache and terror sketched across their faces.
It isn’t like I’m seeing with my eyes; more like a slightly blurred reality sliding slowly across itself somewhere beyond, but also somehow within, my field of vision.
Then the images fade and a cocoon appears, hanging from a branch just a few feet away. The skin is rich and translucent and something inside the cocoon is moving, but as it pushes against the skin, I see that it’s not a butterfly, not a moth, but rather a worm encircled with wide black veins. The worm is grayish pink, like a sad November twilight.
I’m aware of reaching for the cocoon, but as I do, it falls to the ground.
However, time moves at a different speed here in my dream and the cocoon drops slowly, slow enough for me to take two long breaths as I watch it descend.
Finally, it lands, moist and alive at my feet, where it suddenly grows to the size of a bloated python and becomes something terrifying, with bristling teeth and bulging eyes. I back up, but it writhes toward me.
Gray, but veined in black.
As I retreat, sharp branches scratch my back, forcing me to stop, but the grisly creature does not. I kick at its head, but at the last moment it dives into the soft earth.
I realize that the snake, or worm, or whatever it was, might emerge again, might encircle my legs, so I hurry away from that part of the forest. The bare tree branches reach for my arms as I pass and sharp twigs like skeleton fingers claw at me from inside the curtain of evening mist. As I bump into the branches, droplets of water fall from above me onto my neck like teardrops in the mist.
A cocoon.
Birthing a monster.
Burrowing into the earth.
Even in my dream I’m somehow aware that the cocoon and the disturbing creature have some greater significance, some meaning beyond themselves, but I have no idea what that might be.
As I pass through the cool, dewy evening, I sense that I am not alone.
I reach the edge of the forest. A field stretches out of sight before me, open and wild, cleared of the ghostlike fog by a steady prairie wind.
Where I am, I cannot say.
The sun is low.
Dusk is near.
The air deepens to a chill. Something is happening. Something bad.
I want to wake up, but I cannot. Even when I pinch myself, even when I bite down hard on my cheek, I cannot.
Fifty meters away a man appears, stepping out of the bleary mists. He’s carrying a shovel and dragging something. A sack. No—
A sleeping bag.
It is not empty.
My heart thumps heavily, unmanageably, inside my chest.
It’s a little girl’s sleeping bag, pink and embroidered on top with large yellow flowers, but now encircled with duct tape in three careful places.
A tragic, terrible cocoon.
Like the one that gave oozing birth to the worm.
I cannot see the man’s face.
The sun pauses on its way to the edge of the world and the man stares long and hard at the earth. For a moment everything in my dream wavers, as if time itself were catching its breath, and then the man takes a few steps farther into the meadow. Stops.
Though I want to approach him, my desire doesn’t affect how things play out in my dream and I remain standing there, watching, deeply unsettled because of the sleeping bag and its contents, which I fear I know.
Heartbeat quickening, I watch the man dig, and when the hole is complete, he drives the shovel into the earth beside him and reaches for the sleeping bag.
It sags heavy and sad in his arms. Then he lowers the bag, the tender-child-shaped bundle
, into the shallow grave he just dug.
I want desperately to do something, to stop him, but it’s a dream and I can only watch.
Only—
He rises again, considers the hole, and then, as the day grows thin and the shadows grow long, he retrieves the shovel and begins to fill in the grave.
I’m aware of a profound sadness because I know it’s too late. The child is dead. There’s nothing more to be done.
Despite that, a banshee voice screams in my head, telling me to stop him.
And this time I’m able to move.
I run into the field.
The man continues to shovel, and as he does, I race toward him. I know it’s a dream, but I sense that still, somehow, he will see, or at least hear me coming.
But he doesn’t seem to notice, doesn’t look my way.
I wish I could see his face.
He drives the shovel into the pile of dark earth beside the hole and brings the blade up with its mouthful of dirt, tips it onto the pink cocoon. And I hear him singing softly, in a voice surprisingly gentle and loving, a father’s voice. Words falling like soft petals to the ground:
“Hush, little baby, don’t say a word…”
Shoveling in time with the words.
“Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.”
Emptying the shovel, driving it into the ground again as I approach.
“And if that mockingbird don’t sing…”
I’m close now, almost ready to stop him.
But another voice urges me to see what’s in the bag. The dying daylight lands on my face and it feels like the coming night is seeping into me. The cop in me insists on stopping him, but the dream world directs me to the hole instead.
“Daddy’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.”
I arrive. Look into the hole.
And see the bag move.
Whatever is wrapped inside it is not dead.
“No!” I can hear myself scream.
I go for my SIG but find no gun by my side. I leap at the man to tackle him, but my arms pass through him. He’s a ghost to me, even though he’s shoveling real dirt onto a living child. He continues his work, oblivious to me. I jump into the hole and reach for the duct tape, to undo it, to free the child.
Dirt is landing on my back. Real dirt. He keeps shoveling. The gentle singing doesn’t stop.
“And if that diamond ring turns brass…”
I struggle with the tape, but can’t find its end, can’t get the crying child out.
The girl inside the bag is calling for her mommy to help her. The man doesn’t stop his terrible work. More dirt falls on my back, spilling over me and into the hole, onto the girl.
“Daddy’s gonna buy you a looking glass…”
No!
Frantically, I brush the dirt aside, but suddenly I’m being drawn backward as if a great hand has grasped my neck and is lifting me, dragging me from the scene. I struggle, but it does no good. As the image shrinks, the man shoveling the dirt appears smaller and fainter, his song fading as darkness and distance swallow him. Then the fog around me deepens and the sound of the little girl crying becomes nothing but an echoed memory lost in time.
She was not dead.
No, she was not.
And then I’m awake, my blankets wound around my legs, a tight, tangled cocoon.
A terrible, terrible cocoon.
Sickly light seeps through the curtains. Reluctant sunlight from a day that does not want to be born.
I wrestle free of the blankets and stand, my breathing harsh and heavy.
Somehow, I can still smell the pine trees of the forest, still hear the terrible lullaby: “Daddy’s gonna buy you a looking glass.”
No, I hadn’t dreamt of Colleen Hayes, hadn’t dreamt of the terrible things that might have happened to her, that might have evoked the scream I heard on the phone. Instead, I’d dreamt of Jenna Natara, a seven-year-old girl who disappeared three years ago—one of the first homicide cases I worked as a detective. When she was found, forensics verified that she’d been buried alive in that sleeping bag after she’d been raped.
The lyrics to that lullaby, from a ripped-out page of a nursery rhyme book, were found tucked beneath Jenna’s pillow the night she was taken, after her parents discovered that she was missing. They’d been asleep in the room at the end of the hall when she was abducted.
We never caught Jenna’s killer, but the semen found on her underwear led me to tie that homicide to the abduction and murder of another girl, one in my hometown of Horicon, when I was a teenager. I was the one who’d found Mindy Wells’s body in the old tree house near the edge of the marsh just outside of town.
Suspects had surfaced and been cleared, nothing solid. No answers.
Those kinds of cases never go away.
Not when they involve children.
It sounds cliché, but the images do haunt you. Never let you go.
Not even in your dreams.
DAY 2
Monday, November 17
The Train Yard
7
At 6:58 a.m. I was doing pull-ups when I got the call.
A dockworker had found Colleen Hayes, unconscious, by a shipping container on one of Milwaukee’s piers jutting into Lake Michigan. Her hands had been cut off, heavy-duty plastic ties cinched tightly around her wrists to stop her from bleeding to death.
When I heard the news, I felt ready to crush the phone with my hand. As thankful as I was that Colleen was alive, I was also enraged that this had happened and I told myself that, unlike what had happened to me with the unsolved cases of Jenna Natara and Mindy Wells, I was not going to be haunted by the thought that the man who’d done this had gotten away. I have enough images for my nightmares, and so does the rest of the world—enough victims too.
As I hung up, I wondered if it was a good sign or a bad one that Colleen’s abductor had not carried out his threat to take her life. It might mean that he didn’t have the stomach for murder. Or it might mean that he enjoyed watching people suffer more than he enjoyed watching them die.
Evil.
Man’s inhumanity to man.
I wish I could claim that I’ve never understood how people could do the unspeakable things that I see in my cases, but there’s a part of me that does understand. I think everyone who’s honest about his own base, primal instincts has to, at least to some degree, see mirrored images of his own desires in the brutality of others.
It seems to be there, inside of us, from an early age. We don’t need to be taught to lie, or to be selfish or cruel or vindictive—we need to be taught how not to. And given the right circumstances, those impulses might rise, might blossom into something dark and uncontrollable.
One time, Taci asked me why I did what I did, why I’d chosen to be a homicide detective. At the time I didn’t think she was being completely serious, and I’d said lightly, “To catch the bad guys.”
“No, I’m not joking around, Pat.” Though her tone wasn’t sharp, I could tell she really was being serious. “There’s more. I know there is.”
Suddenly, unexpectedly, words came to me. Perhaps I’d heard them in a movie, or maybe they escaped from a private, reflective place I wasn’t even aware of before that moment, but they came, and they surprised me when they did: “To keep the demons at bay.”
“What demons?”
I’d gone to church as a child—my parents had taken me—but I’m not very religious. Still, the word “demons” was the one that’d come to mind. I had to think about what exactly I’d meant. “Um…I’m not sure. I just feel it sometimes—the darkness tugging at me. When the things you despise the most about human nature call to you, whisper for you to take a step closer to them. You know what I mean?”
She regarded me quietly. I saw love in her eyes, but also concern. “What things whisper to you, Pat?”
“Dark things.” I tried to say it in a tone that told her I preferred to be done with this topic.
But either she didn�
�t catch that, or she wasn’t ready to let the subject drop, because she said again, “What things, Pat?”
The things that lead us over the edge.
“The things I see in my cases.”
Even though I was closer to her emotionally than I’d ever been to anyone in my life, in that moment that was all I felt comfortable telling her. Her silence indicated to me that it might not have been enough. Or maybe it was too much.
The topic hadn’t come up again, but I sensed that the ghost of what I’d said was still there, had somehow crept between us, settled in, found a home, and wasn’t about to leave any time soon.
Colleen Hayes might have gotten a good look at her attacker, might be able to identify him, so before going to MPD headquarters for the nine o’clock briefing, the first order of business was paying her a visit at the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center.
I left a message for Taci that I’d be at the hospital, asked if she could meet up with me for a minute or two while I was there, then hopped into my car and took off.
Thinking about Taci.
About evil.
About keeping the demons at bay.
8
The Milwaukee Regional Medical Center lies situated on a sprawling campus now littered with autumn leaves. Only a few of the trees still clung to their leaves, but those had turned brown in the dreary fall and only served to help give the campus a tired, weary feel. It was the biggest academic health-care center in the state, with six different care facilities all on the same campus. I knew it well. I’d been here on a lot of my cases, as well as to see Taci.
Four things concerning the abduction and mutilation of Colleen Hayes were on my mind:
(1) I was profoundly thankful she was alive.
(2) Her kidnapper’s choice of the location in the alley showed that he (or they, if there was more than one) had some interest in or connection with Jeffrey Dahmer.
(3) It was impossible at this point to discern her attacker’s original intent, whether that was to kill or to maim—or possibly even to let Colleen go free.