Opening Moves pbf-6

by Steven James

  “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.”

  “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 g
onna 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.r />
  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.