Opening Moves

by Steven James

  “Dinner. On your anniversary.”

  “Actually, it turned out to be breakfast.”

  A sly grin. “You dog, you.”

  “No, no. Not like that. I mean…”

  “Did you guys check out any…action movies?” He gave me a wink.

  Oh man.

  How to do this.

  I debated about whether or not to tell him what’d just happened at Anthony’s. In the end, perhaps naively, I decided it probably couldn’t hurt anything. “This morning, just now at breakfast, Taci broke up with me.”

  “What? The day after your anniversary?”

  “She wanted to tell me last night.”

  “Oh man, that’s cold.” It looked like he was about to say more, maybe express in his own distinctively colorful way what he thought of a woman who would do that, but he held back—likely because he wasn’t sure if I was bitter, or if maybe I hoped there was some way we could get back together again.

  “Apparently,” I said, “it was a choice between me and her career.”

  We were both quiet, then he rested a giant paw on my shoulder. “If there’s anything, seriously, anything I can do. Anything you need, let me know. I’ve been there. If you can’t go to your friends when you need ’em, what good are they anyway?”

  I barely knew this man and he already considered himself my friend, one close enough to help me when I was really hurting. And in that moment, I realized the feeling was mutual.

  “I’ll let you know, Ralph. Thanks.”

  He removed his hand. “Maybe we grab a beer tonight, you know? After work? Get your mind off things?”

  “Yeah. We’ll see.”

  Then he smacked me on the arm in what I took to be a friendly gesture, but one that just might leave a bruise. “Hang in there, bro.”

  “Thanks.” I held back from rubbing my arm. “I will.”

  He stepped away and I tried to dial in to the case again, but thoughts of Taci just wouldn’t leave me alone. I shut my eyes and concentrated, concentrated, concentrated, promised myself I wasn’t going to cry. That I wouldn’t let it hurt that bad.

  And in the end I succeeded.

  I took the pain and shock and dismay and buried them as deeply as I could, telling myself that if I stuffed them down far enough, they wouldn’t be able to bother me anymore.

  I didn’t want the tape on my hands all day and the bleeding had stopped, so I peeled it off. Tossed it in the trash. Then I went back to work, reviewing what we knew about yesterday’s homicide and the attack on Adele Westin, a woman who was engaged to a man who was willing to do the unthinkable to save her from a madman.

  But I hadn’t succeeded in burying my feelings. Not really. When you stuff your pain like that, it can never be called a success.

  52

  Watching the news last night had been informative to Joshua.

  He’d learned more about Hendrich’s murder. The Channel 11 News team was reporting that he’d been, “brutally attacked in a neighborhood known for its aggressive gangs and uncontrolled street violence.”

  By the end of the night, the anchorwoman was stating that unnamed sources in the police department were confirming “that law enforcement personnel are looking closely at outsiders who frequent that neighborhood” and “that if you have any information regarding the crimes, you should call the police.”

  They gave a hotline number.

  As Joshua had thought, Hendrich had been off duty yesterday and no one was sure why he’d been in the train yard in the first place.

  The coverage was extensive enough for Joshua to realize that it was all possibly a coincidence after all.

  But then how did he get in after you locked the gate? You really think he crawled in under the fence? Or was he in there already?

  Yes, there were still questions. A lot of questions. But Joshua had enough information right now to move forward with his plans, right after a visit to the bookshelf to remind himself why he did what he did.

  Yesterday he’d thought about the cache he’d found stashed under the basement steps at Timothy Griffin’s house in Fort Atkinson.

  Now, he went to look at the cache of his own.

  Over the years he’d kept a memento from each victim, all the way back to that first time in the barn when his father gave him one of Kenneth’s teeth.

  Coincidently, his collection was in the basement, just like Griffin’s was, but Joshua’s wasn’t in a fake cabinet under the steps, but rather in a small enclosed space behind a bookcase that he’d built when he first moved into the house, before he and Sylvia got married.

  Nomads in the Sahara value their freedom and their ability to pitch their tents wherever they please so much that they call houses “graves of the living.”

  In the United States we call a nice big home the Great American Dream.

  A grave or a dream. Depending on your perspective.

  Two truths piercing each other: freedom and security. And you end up with the great irony of American life—living in the grave you have always dreamt of owning.

  He slid the bookcase aside and looked at the crate that bristled with bones. He didn’t know how many there were, the statistics of it all were, perhaps surprisingly, one of the things he hadn’t kept track of. It was as if a part of his mind needed to shut that out in order for him to live as normal a life as he could.

  But even though he couldn’t remember the name of each victim, just seeing the bones brought the flood of images and memories back again, merging across each other, faces pulled from time in an order that didn’t make sense but that played out in his mind as real, just the same.

  They were mostly images of things that’d happened beneath the barn, in that secret place his father took him to. Images of the victims, and the most striking memories of all—of the last day Joshua ever went down there.

  He reached into the box and picked up the tractor keys.

  Curled his hand around them.

  And remembered.

  It all.

  The day he’d left, the day he’d locked that trapdoor shut, leaving those two people behind him—one, a corpse; the other, soon to become one.

  You saw what your father was doing, Joshua. You had to do something. You were finally old enough to take action. Fourteen years old. You had to do it. You know you did.

  Yes—running up the steps that day, out of the secret place, into the barn.

  You were scared. You had to stop him.

  Yes—hearing his father pound up the stairs after him, knowing he was going to make him do things that he didn’t want to do, that he would always hate himself for doing.

  Yes—closing the trapdoor and locking it quickly, then standing beside it for a long time, listening to his father bang on it from the bottom and yell. Yell so many things. Bargaining. Threatening. Cursing. And then screaming.

  And then the banging started all over again.

  His father had handed him the knife before he ran up the stairs, so he knew his father wouldn’t be able to use it to chip away at the thick wood of the trapdoor to escape.

  But still, to make sure there was no way for him to get out, Joshua had positioned a long piece of sheet metal over the opening and then drove the tractor over the two ends, positioning the tires, just so, to hold the metal firmly in place. No one else knew about the place beneath the barn. No one else came to their ranch. No one would be moving that tractor.

  Now he uncurled his fingers and looked at the keys.

  He’d gone out there every day for three weeks, spent long hours sitting in the barn on the seat of the tractor listening to the muted sounds coming from beneath him. The screaming, the pounding. Eventually the crying. His father had a lot of meat down there and it took him a while to die. But eventually, with time, the sounds stopped.

  Joshua went out there for another week after that, listening to the enduring stretches of silence, then he left the house for good and never went back.

  You were brave to stop him. You were right
to leave.

  But another voice inside his head convicted him of his sins and would not stop recounting them, naming them, would not let him rest, never rest, for sealing his father in that earthen tomb with the man he’d just killed.

  Thinking of what it would have been like for his father down there made Joshua remember an article he’d read so many times.

  He replaced the keys in the crate, closed up the bookcase, and then removed from the shelf his well-worn copy of Wisconsin Death Trip, Michael Lesy’s cult classic first published in 1973.

  The entire book was a collection of reproduced newspaper clippings from the 1890s and obscure, somewhat troubling turn-of-the-century black-and-white photographs.

  Nearly all of the articles were reports of pestilence, suicide, murder, arson, and announcements of people being declared insane and committed to a nearby asylum. It seemed there’d been an inexplicable outbreak of madness in that area of the state around the turn of the century.

  No one knew why, but it was well documented.

  Black River Falls, Wisconsin.

  The 1890s.

  The photographs showed life in Wisconsin at the time. Some photos were the typical tired-looking nineteenth-century women in somber dresses, scowling ministers, and stern, thickly mustached men in work clothes. But most of the photos skewed toward the bizarre—a woman with a malicious grin holding two snakes with a third draped around her neck, lithographs of dwarfs and deer heads and a one-legged man, and young children who’d died and were lying in small tragic caskets laid out in a neat row on the wooden floor of a funeral home.

  The book had no page numbers, but Joshua had dog-eared the page that contained a copy of the newspaper article from the Badger State Banner on April 14, 1898:

  A horrifying discovery was made at the Rosedale Cemetery in Pardeeville. The grave of Mrs. Sarah Smith was unearthed for the purpose of removing the remains and, on opening the coffin, it was discovered that she had been buried while in a trance.

  The body was partly turned over and the right hand was drawn up to the face. The fingers indicated that they had been bitten by the woman on finding herself buried alive.

  The fingers had been bitten—not the fingernails.

  That was the line Joshua had always found the most intriguing.

  How much of her fingers did Sarah Smith chew off after she woke up in that coffin?

  How much meat did she swallow?

  You are a lost and evil man, Joshua. A man beyond redemption!

  Beyond atonement!

  You did that to your own father!

  That thought jarred him back to the present. He closed the book. Put it back on the shelf.

  And went to pray.

  Perhaps he would find a way not to go scout out the bank today. Perhaps he would find a way not to go rent the moving truck he would need when he took the children tomorrow. Perhaps he would find a way to stop all this before it went too far.

  It’s already gone too far, Joshua. There’s no turning back. You’re going to finish this. It’s who you’ve become.

  Yes. He had to pray first, see if he could find the strength to change.

  Then he had to go to work.

  In the normal world, where no one knew what he really was.

  53

  Indiana.

  Why had he skipped over Indiana?

  If Dr. Werjonic’s theories were right, it would most likely be because the killer lacked familiarity with the area.

  But when I reviewed the tip list and suspect list as I’d decided to do while I was at the climbing gym, I found that in most cases there simply wasn’t enough information about the people’s backgrounds to make any real headway in that direction.

  Slightly frustrated, I reviewed the other case files that the task force members had left on my desk. Based on Ellen’s interviews with Vincent, it was looking more and more like he couldn’t possibly be complicit in his wife’s abduction. Additionally, only the guys at work knew he would be staying late.

  Ellen had cross-referenced the names on the evidence room forms from the Waukesha County Sheriff Department but found no clues as to who might have gotten the cuffs to Griffin.

  After I had a good grasp on where we were with the case, I figured I should probably prepare as much as possible for my call to Dr. Werjonic following our briefing. I wouldn’t have much time to look over his notes later, so I turned my attention to the photocopied pages he’d left for me.

  It took a few minutes, but eventually I started to get used to his cryptic scribbles and was able to make out most of his writing.

  As I did so, I was struck by how his theories meshed with what I’d already learned hands-on doing my job, the information that was hardly ever emphasized at all to new cops and often seemed so inscrutable to my peers: the primacy of the timing and location of a crime, the understanding that people are motivated to commit crimes for reasons they themselves might not even understand and that spending time speculating about what those reasons might be stalls out an investigation.

  But Dr. Werjonic took things even further.

  He scrapped the whole notion of looking for means, motive, and opportunity in lieu of searching for context, patterns, and cues.

  Three interrelated concepts wove through all that he taught: activity nodes, distance decay, and victimology: “When investigating serial crimes, the key lies not in asking what the victims have in common, but where they have in common.”

  An activity node is simply a place where we spend time. So, when identifying activity nodes, you look for the eight “nodes” of a person’s life activities: the places he would normally eat, sleep, work, shop, study, worship, exercise, and relax.

  Each activity node has specific attraction factors that lead people to spend time there—that might be saving time, money, or effort, a balance of risk versus rewards, or participating in pleasurable or necessary activities.

  Then you can map out the person’s travel routes in terms of those activity nodes (circles) and the routes or roads between them (lines). Those circles and lines cover only a fraction of the geographic area of a city and help shape the person’s cognitive map of his surroundings. Almost all crimes occur within this awareness space—both with respect to victims and to offenders.

  In an investigation, you establish someone’s awareness space by pulling up his club memberships and frequent-buyer club cards, going through his credit card receipts, and analyzing where he typically purchases his gasoline and groceries and at what time of day, and so on. Also, by interviewing family and friends about his routines. Basically, doing all you can to examine the eight nodes of his life.

  Distance decay is simply the decrease in likelihood of a crime occurring as the distance from a person’s awareness space increases. That’s it.

  I thought again of Indiana.

  He skipped over it because it wasn’t part of his cognitive map.

  All of this made sense to me. People are creatures of habit. Basically, costs in terms of time, energy, and effort increase as the distance from their awareness spaces increases. So we avoid that. And killers are just as influenced by this “least amount of effort” principle as the rest of us are. Taking that into account, you get one of the primary reasons why eighty percent of murders occur within one mile of the killer’s home.

  As Dr. Werjonic wrote:

  In crime sprees, the distribution, timing, and progression of the crimes show us how the criminal understands his environment and interacts with the locations. The offender makes a choice to act at that time and in that place. It’s a rational decision that’s affected by cues from his environment and his social interactions.

  In homicide investigations, it’s possible, of course, for the initial encounter between the victim and the offender, the abduction, the murder, and the body disposal to all occur in the same general area, even in the same room, but often, especially in cases of serial homicide, several of those acts occur in different places.

  Dr. Werjo
nic postulated that the site of the initial encounter was perhaps the most important one in the analysis of serial offenses, something I’d never heard before.

  Contrariwise, law enforcement officers usually consider the site of the murder or the place where the body is disposed of as the most important location, but Werjonic was theorizing that in the specific cases of tracking serial offenders, by locating the place where the life of the offender and the life of the victims first intersected, you can begin to look for connections between them. That’ll help you more accurately zero in on the travel routes, the nodes, the awareness space of the killer, and then you can work backward to find his anchor point, or home base.

  Interesting.

  I pulled out a map of Milwaukee and one of Wisconsin so I could analyze what happened both here and in Plainfield. I tacked them to a corkboard easel, which I rolled to my desk. Since it looked like there might be two offenders, for now I focused on the crimes this week rather than on the previous homicides.

  It felt a little old-school to be doing this, to be sticking pins on a map, but I didn’t care. Anything that would help move this case forward.

  I used different-colored tacks—blue for the sites where we’d found Colleen, Adele, and Hendrich (the pier and the train yards), red for their homes, green for the site where Vincent had left Lionel and where Carl had left his grandmother’s corpse.

  Actually, since we knew two of the abduction sites (the Hayes and Kowalski homes), and we had the site where their abductor had taken the women to mutilate them (the boxcar), I was optimistic. We didn’t know if Hendrich’s murder was actually connected, however, so for now, I set him mentally in a different category and focused on the women.

  Unfortunately, we didn’t know where or how the initial encounter between either of them and their abductor occurred. How did he choose those two families who, at least on the surface, seemed to have nothing in common and lived in different parts of the state?

  This was shaping up to be one of the central questions in this case.