by Steven James
“I was in the Army for a while. Rangers. Bunch of missions in the Middle East.” He was wolfing down his goulash in between words. “Man, I can’t believe you counted up what bills he laid on the table.”
Earlier, he’d referred to a guy watching a chick flick with his wife, and he wore a wedding ring. “So, married?”
“Yeah. Three years.”
“Kids?”
“No. You?”
“No kids, no wife. I am seeing someone though. Actually, today is the one-year anniversary of when we first met.”
He raised his coffee cup. “In that case, lunch is on me.”
I thought again about how I would be having dinner with Taci tonight, discussing something that she wanted to talk about in private, but I didn’t mention that, simply accepted Ralph’s toast. “Thanks.”
We were both well into our meals now and I brought up the topic I’d been curious about since we first met in the police headquarters lobby. “Ralph, I gotta ask you something.”
“Shoot.” He was in the middle of a bite of goulash.
I indicated toward his turtleneck. “No overstarched oxford. No tie.” I figured maybe he didn’t wear one because of the thickness of his neck and his broad chest—that any tie he wore would’ve ended up looking like a clown tie and his supervisors didn’t want that. “Isn’t it pretty much a uniform for guys who are Feds?”
“Got an exemption. I can’t stand the idea of wearing a giant arrow pointing to my groin all day.”
“Oh.”
He looked at me slightly suspiciously. “I mean, can you?”
“Um, no. Of course not.” Man, was I glad I didn’t have a tie on today either. “And when you put it that way, I don’t think I’ll ever look at ties the same way again.”
He took a giant mouthful of food. “It seems kind of desperate to me, a pretty blatant invitation to draw people’s attention to…Well, it’s kind of like—” He was talking with his mouth full of goulash again. “So, my wife, her best friend has this teenage daughter.”
“Right.”
“The kid is always wearing shorts with words written on the butt. What is that about? ‘Syracuse’? Are you serious? I could never respect a college that’s so desperate for students that it needs to advertise itself on the butts of teenage girls.”
Hmm. That was actually a pretty good point.
“And then she wears these sweatpants with ‘Cute’ back there. Is that supposed to be referring to…?”
“Um…Probably. Yeah.” I thought of a time I’d seen a girl wearing shorts with ALL-STAR imprinted on the rump and I realized I didn’t even want to know what she was trying to tell the world.
He shook his head. “I’ll just say this: I’d be at a loss with a teenage daughter. They’re a complete mystery to me. I’d be clueless.”
“You and me both.”
Ralph finished inhaling the goulash and I polished off my cheeseburger. We ate quickly so we could get back to the department, then headed out the door, past the Ford Explorer by the curb.
There was a parking ticket tucked beneath the windshield wiper.
17
Plainfield, Wisconsin
Joshua parked the car in the pull-off at the end of the dirt road.
Barren, leafless trees ready for winter bordered him on both sides.
A sign on a leaning wooden pole beside a small clearing announced NO TRESPASSING.
The house that used to stand here was long gone.
Joshua wasn’t sure exactly when it’d burned down, but he knew it was within a couple months of Ed Gein’s arrest in November of 1957, and he was pretty sure the fire hadn’t been accidental. Just like the people of Milwaukee who tried to purge the memory of Dahmer from their consciousness by razing his apartment building, the good people of Plainfield had undoubtedly hoped to sear the memory of their most infamous inhabitant by getting rid of the place he’d called home.
Joshua stepped out of the car and stretched his legs, then removed the cooler from the backseat.
It’d taken a fair amount of research, but eventually he’d been able to locate the precise spot where the house had stood.
Ironically, or at least conveniently as far as Gein would have been concerned, it was less than five miles from the nearest graveyard—the same graveyard where things would happen this afternoon, during the next chapter of the saga Joshua had recently been putting into play.
Honestly, it’d never been his intention to kill Colleen Hayes. Cutting off her hands had been all he was planning to do to her, even from the start.
In fact, murdering her might actually have been counterproductive to what he was hoping to accomplish.
Well then, what about Petey Schwartz back on Friday?
No, nobody would connect the two crimes.
Besides, that wasn’t planned. It was spontaneous and had nothing to do with the Hayes kidnapping or what he had in mind for Adele today.
Still, you remember what you did, remember how you—
Enough with those kinds of thoughts.
Joshua walked to the place where Ed Gein’s kitchen used to be, set down the cooler, and took a seat beside it.
The view before him was the same one Ed Gein would have had if he were looking out his kitchen window.
Joshua pulled a bottle of cream soda out of the cooler, uncapped it, and took a long refreshing swallow.
Last night it hadn’t been easy, doing to Colleen what he’d done. And, unquestionably, it would have been easier on her if he’d knocked her out beforehand, but somehow, though the deed itself was disturbing, her screams had brought him a degree of pleasure that’d surprised him.
It was a bit disconcerting.
That hadn’t happened before, but then again, he’d never done something like that to someone and let the person live.
It’d led him to acknowledge a certain yearning rising to the surface, one that’d been birthed in him long ago in the cellar beneath the barn.
While he was listening to Colleen cry out, enjoying watching her suffer, he’d had a revelation of sorts, an epiphany about who he truly was, what he was becoming.
A voice of reason, of conscience: Go to God for forgiveness, Joshua. Turn yourself in! Don’t live in the den of the damned!
More cream soda.
The den of the damned.
He shifted his thoughts back to Colleen. After cutting off her left hand, he’d faced a choice—drug her before doing the other one, or leave her awake during the process.
Of course he might have gagged her as well, but where he’d taken her, it wasn’t as if they were going to be discovered. The screams hadn’t posed much of a problem. And he kind of liked hearing the strangely muted, yet metallic sounds as they echoed all around him in that place and then disappeared into the thin night air.
While he’d tried to decide whether or not to leave her conscious before sawing off her right hand, he’d tightened the heavy-duty plastic tie around that wrist to stop the bleeding once he got started.
He thought she might pass out from the pain of losing that left hand, but she must have been a fighter because she didn’t. In between her screams she’d struggled to pull free from the chair, begged him to stop, to let her go.
That ended up being distracting and with all of that going on, it took him a while to decide which direction to take things.
Finally, he chose to let her remain conscious while he laid the edge of the saw blade against her other wrist.
And then drew it firmly toward him.
Forward and back.
Forward and backward as the night became rich and thick with her screams and her blood.
His father had taught him all about that: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” Third book of the Bible. Seventeenth chapter. Eleventh verse.
Atonement. And the blood.
He thought of Coll
een now as he unwrapped the two packages and, sitting where Ed Gein might have sat, he did what Ed Gein might have done and ate the meat he had brought along with him from Milwaukee.
In a few minutes he would head to the house and pay a visit to Adele Westin. Joshua had researched more than just the location of Ed’s house and the graveyard, and he knew that Adele, who was living with her fiancé, worked out of their home.
She was a woman who followed a very strict schedule, but a quick phone call could confirm that she was there this afternoon. Otherwise, if need be, he would wait as long as necessary until she returned.
Her fiancé wouldn’t be arriving home from his shift until after two. Joshua figured that would give him plenty of time to get to Adele and then leave the token of his intentions toward her, as well as a note with his demands. All of this would, of course, initiate the next chapter in the story he was telling.
One that would be enough to attract the attention of the person he was hoping to meet.
And if not, what he had planned for Wednesday would most certainly do so, without a doubt.
On Wednesday, when the cop was dead, Joshua’s point would be unmistakable and he would finally be able to get the one thing he wanted most—a partner.
18
Back at HQ, Ralph and I began reviewing the notes everyone else had left on my desk, sorting through what we would be discussing at the meeting that was scheduled to start in less than five minutes.
As far as sedan-owning, six-foot-tall, brown-eyed male Caucasians, we had thousands in the greater Milwaukee area. If you added an inch or two to either side of that and included men whose family members had sedans as well, the number rose exponentially. Gabriele Holdren, the officer who’d gotten the coffee for Vincent last night when I was with him in the interrogation room, was still comparing that list with the tip list—which hadn’t produced anything so far either.
As expected, the four confessions had all been false. Ellen and Annise were still looking into missing persons cases, and Lyrie was on his way back from canvassing the Hayeses’ neighborhood again to see if anyone could tell us the color of the sedan.
Radar had dug up the names of fourteen felons in the area who’d been convicted of violent crimes against women and he’d apparently left the department to follow up on one of them.
A lot of things were in play.
“I’m still curious about the handcuffs,” I told Ralph. “Why didn’t Colleen’s abductor leave a pair for Vincent to use?”
“He had to know Vincent already had a pair.”
“I can’t really come up with any other compelling reason—unless Vincent’s involved somehow.” I evaluated the possibilities. “Vincent had planned to come home just after seven, but at the last minute he called Colleen to let her know he would be late, wouldn’t be getting home until after ten. However, she was abducted just after nine. If the offender had known Vincent’s schedule and been hoping to find Colleen alone—”
Ralph rubbed his chin roughly. “The guy would have taken her before seven, while Vincent was at work, before he was supposed to come home, not after nine.”
I tried to steer myself away from making unfounded assumptions, but I found it hard to keep my thoughts from leaning in the direction of suspecting that Vincent was somehow involved in arranging his wife’s abduction.
“I suppose her abductor could have been in the house already,” Ralph mused. “Found the handcuffs, decided not to leave a pair, not to take the chance that the cuffs could lead us back to him.”
“Yes,” I said. “But that still doesn’t explain how he would have known about Vincent’s last-minute change of plans.”
“After the briefing, let’s have Thompson go back and see if any of the neighbors remember the sedan driving around earlier.”
“And we should have someone interview Vincent again. Find out who might’ve known he owned that pair of handcuffs and who else knew he was going to be working late. Maybe Ellen could go.”
“Or Corsica?” he said.
“Ellen. Not that I don’t trust Corsica’s competence in these sorts of things, but—”
“You don’t trust Corsica’s competence in these sorts of things.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“So, what is it between you two, anyway?”
“She has a tendency to jump to conclusions. More than once I’ve had to redirect an investigation before more innocent people got hurt.”
“I’m sure she took well to that. The redirecting part.”
“Oh, it was just peachy.”
Ralph nodded. Jotted something on a notepad.
As we were finishing collecting our papers, I saw Lieutenant Thorne picking his way toward us through the labyrinth of desks, file cabinets, and business dividers that made up most of this floor of the department. He was carrying a magazine or catalog of some kind.
“We might have something,” he announced. “A connection to the homicide in Illinois.”
“What’s that?”
He flopped the catalog onto the desk in front of me.
“Police tape.”
19
“Your car down in the parking garage?” Thorne asked me.
“Yes.” I picked up the catalog. “What do you mean ‘police tape’?”
“Let’s go. I’ll walk with you. I want you two to look into this.”
Okay, so either our second briefing of the day had been postponed or Thorne was giving us permission to miss it. In either case that was fine by me. I’d rather be out in the field any day investigating something than sitting in a meeting talking about it.
The three of us maneuvered past the desks and made our way to the hall that led to the elevators. I was flipping through the catalog. “What do we have?”
“A guy who sells souvenirs. Thompson managed to locate the most recent issue. He came across it while cross-checking tips from Illinois.”
We filed into the elevator and he punched the button for the lower-level parking garage. “The guy who puts out this catalog has all his orders sent to a PO box, but we tracked down his name: Timothy Griffin. He lives in Fort Atkinson. Check out the back.”
On the catalog’s back cover, just below the return address, was a sticker advertising that a fifty-foot-long length of police tape was for sale:
“Just in! Maneater of The Midwest Police Tape!
Soon to be A Collector’s Item!! $350!”
It listed the date and location of the crime. The tape was purportedly from the Illinois homicide in which the woman’s lungs had been removed and evidently consumed.
“Unbelievable,” Ralph muttered.
As the elevator descended, I studied the catalog carefully.
The items were cross-referenced so you could search by killer, type of crime (pedophilia, homicide), postmortem activity (vampirism, cannibalism, rape), state, years, or price.
There were decks of trading cards of fifty-two of the most famous criminals in U.S. history, Christmas letters Dahmer had written to his mother, Gacy’s clown makeup, Manson’s Bible with his name scribbled on the inside front cover. Knickknacks, drill bits, pliers, saws, memorabilia, clothes and more. Hundreds of items. Even, supposedly, the original 1934 Albert Fish letter to Grace Budd’s parents. It was one of the most infamous and disturbing writings of any sexual predator or serial killer of the last hundred years and the guy who’d sent out this catalog, Timothy Griffin, claimed to have the original copy.
Just thinking about the letter made my stomach turn.
Fish, who was put to death in New York back in 1936, was perhaps the most depraved sadomasochistic pedophile and cannibal ever captured in the U.S. The authorities never found out how many people he killed, but he claimed to “have had children in every state.” Whether that meant molesting them or killing them was never established, but from what I’d read about the case, it wouldn’t have surprised me if it were both. In 1928 he abducted a ten-year-old girl named Grace Budd, murdered her, cooked her, and t
hen ate her. Six years later he wrote a letter to her parents about how much he’d enjoyed it.
That was the letter advertised in Griffin’s catalog.
Sickening.
We reached the parking garage level. Exited the elevator.
“How would you ever verify that the stuff’s legit?” Ralph, who’d been looking at the pages with me, asked Thorne. “I mean the signed letters, okay, I get that. Those might be available from relatives. But Gacy’s clown makeup? Couldn’t you buy makeup like that at dozens of stores here in Wisconsin alone? Just claim it was Gacy’s?”
Gacy.
A man responsible for one of the biggest body counts of any serial killer in U.S. history.
Remembering what all these guys had done was somewhat overwhelming. It was hard not to find myself just getting numb to it all.
Gacy, of course, was the civic leader in the Chicago area who was convicted of killing thirty-three young men back in the 1970s. He dressed up as a clown and volunteered on weekends cheering up children in local hospitals. Three times he was named the local Jaycees chapter’s Man of the Year and had been personally congratulated for his public service and contributions to the causes of the Democratic party by First Lady Rosalynn Carter. The police found a photo of her standing beside him when they were removing more than two dozen corpses buried in the crawl space beneath his house.
He claimed he’d been set up for the crimes.
Thorne shrugged. “You got me, but look at the price tags—people are shelling out big bucks for that garbage. Somebody believes it’s authentic.”
“And he knows about the lungs,” I said. “Griffin does, that they were eaten. He calls the guy a ‘maneater,’ not just a killer. That information hasn’t been released to the press.”
Thorne nodded thoughtfully. “True.”
Ralph let out a few choice words about what he thought of Griffin and his little business enterprise. Even though I was used to the rough language of cops, Ralph managed to phrase things in ways I’d never even heard before, but I found myself agreeing with the sentiment of everything he said.