by Steven James
The man named Kenneth stared at them wide-eyed, shook his head frantically.
Joshua’s father went over, removed a black hood from his jacket pocket, and tugged it over Kenneth’s head. “This is your first time, Joshua. It’ll be easier if you don’t have to look at him.”
Beneath the hood, the man was making sounds that Joshua did not like.
Joshua didn’t move, didn’t accept the knife, which his father brought back to him now.
His father spoke softly. “Take the knife, Joshua. This is very important.”
“But sir, it’s…I’m scared.”
Kenneth shook and rattled his chains, trying to pull himself free from the wall. But he couldn’t do it. Joshua thought he wouldn’t ever be able to do it.
“I know, Son. Don’t be frightened. Just take the knife.”
At last his father gently positioned the knife in Joshua’s hand, as if it were a precious gift, and that’s what Joshua thought of in that moment-a gift, and of course, his upcoming birthday.
A gift.
And Joshua thought of what he wanted. Instead of something like a shiny knife, it was something childish and embarrassing: a stuffed animal like he used to have when his mom was alive.
And he thought of going to sleep with it, holding it close, deep beneath the covers where his father wouldn’t see and would not find it and be disappointed in him for turning to a stuffed animal for comfort.
The handle of the knife was well-worn and leather. Soft to the touch.
A gift from his father.
“Now, take the knife over to the man.”
Joshua hesitated. He smelled bathroom smells and saw that the man’s pants were stained wet in the front. Joshua wondered how long the man had been down here in the cellar, in the special place.
“Go on, Joshua. Go closer.”
He took two steps.
“I want you to take the blade of the knife and push it into his belly.”
The sounds coming from the man named Kenneth grew louder, more desperate.
“You need to learn how to do this, Joshua. You need to be able to do this yourself. Remember when I told you that everyone dies?”
Joshua didn’t answer. He was too busy looking at the man.
“Son?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Everything dies.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The life is in the blood. You remember that.”
Joshua was silent.
“Say ‘Yes, sir,’” his father told him.
“Yes, sir.”
But Joshua didn’t move any closer to the man and at last his father knelt beside him. “It’ll feel kind of soft and springy. It might be a little difficult at first because the knife needs to push through his skin.” He pointed to the end of the knife. “But, once the tip is inside, it’ll get easier. See how it’s curved here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That’s so it’ll poke in better and slide out easier when you’re done.”
His father walked to Kenneth, and then pulled up his shirt, revealing his round, white belly. Kenneth shook violently, and the fat in his stomach wobbled in a strange way.
“I want you to push the knife in and then move it back and forth. Like this.” In the air in front of him, Joshua’s father demonstrated the way he wanted him to wiggle the knife back and forth in the big man’s belly. “See? You can slide it in and out too. It’ll get easier each time.”
Joshua said nothing. His heart squirmed in his chest.
“Go on, now.”
Joshua stared at the man who was struggling so hard to get free.
Everything dies.
Yes, everything dies.
Joshua approached him.
“You can do it.” His father reassured him, but when Joshua didn’t raise the knife, his father wrapped his hand around Joshua’s and bent over. “Here. This is your first time. I’ll help you.”
There was a lot of blood.
And nothing in the cellar smelled right when they were done.
It was hard, looking at the man hanging by his wrists and not moving. Not even a little bit. Not even breathing. Joshua kept expecting him to move. He couldn’t believe that anyone could ever be that still. The hood was off now and the fat man was staring at Joshua, but he wasn’t blinking at all, not once, and that was scary too.
Finally, his father noticed and reached down and closed the man’s eyes. Then he put a hand on Joshua’s shoulder. “You did well, Son, but I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you, shouldn’t have tried to make you do it all by yourself.”
All Joshua could think was, “The life is in the blood.”
“From now on you can help me, okay? I’ll show you how, and when you’re ready you can do it by yourself. But only when you’re ready. It’ll get easier each time. There’s no hurry. Don’t worry. I’ll teach you.”
Then his father took the knife again and showed Joshua what to do when the person who’d been brought to the special place beneath the barn wasn’t moving anymore.
Now, nearly three decades later, Joshua sat in his basement and watched the CNN coverage of the story about the ongoing homicide investigation in Champaign, Illinois, concerning the death of twenty-three-year-old Juanita Worthy.
On the newscast they were interviewing an expert on violent crimes against women, someone named Jake Vanderveld, and he was speculating that the lungs of the victim had not just been removed, but had also been consumed by the killer.
“Anthropophagy,” he said soberly. “Cannibalistic behavior.”
Joshua knew the term “anthropophagy” already. He’d learned it long ago from his father, and now he was understandably intrigued by what the man had to say about the crime. Joshua watched and listened and thought of Dahmer.
Back before the city of Milwaukee had raised nearly half a million dollars to buy Jeffrey’s old apartment building just so that they could level it, Joshua had snuck in with a video camera and walked through the place room by room, taking careful footage of the living room where Jeffrey cuffed and overpowered his victims, the bedroom where he killed them and slept with their corpses, the kitchen where he sat at the table and ate their skin and meat and viscera and brains.
Visiting Jeffrey’s apartment had made the connection between them more real, more concrete, more intimate.
Joshua heard his wife, Sylvia, calling from upstairs, “What are you doing down there, honey?”
“Nothing. Just watching the news.”
“Are you coming up? It’s almost ten o’clock. I made you some brunch.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
“I need to leave, remember? I have two houses to show before noon.”
“I’ll be right up.” He turned the volume down a little so he could watch the last few minutes of the interview without Sylvia hearing it.
Joshua’s job allowed him a somewhat flexible work schedule. He’d taken the rest of the day off because he had something to take care of in Plainfield, a couple hours northwest of his home on the outskirts of Milwaukee.
He figured that if he left in the next half hour there would be just enough time to make it there and back by dusk, or the gloaming, as it used to be called. That was the term he preferred, the one he’d first heard in the Celtic folk song “Loch Lomond,” a song of death and the pining but ultimately futile hope of a soldier to return home to his sweetheart.
’Twas there that we parted in yon shady glen,
On the steep, steep side o’ Ben Lomon’,
Where in purple hue the Hieland hills we view,
An’ the moon comin’ out in the gloamin’.
The moon coming out in the gloaming.
Tonight at dusk.
But until then, Plainfield.
He’d been to the small town numerous times and knew exactly where he was going. And, of course, since he was visiting Plainfield, he didn’t just think of Jeffrey Dahmer, but also of Ed Gein, the cannibal and necrophile who’d made the s
mall Wisconsin town famous in the 1950s.
Over the years most people had forgotten about Gein, but they hadn’t forgotten about the novels and movies his life and crimes inspired: Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even the Buffalo Bill character in Silence of the Lambs. One quiet Wisconsin handyman inspired the villains of three of the most iconoclastic horror movies of all time.
Ed had been in the habit of digging up graves and taking the bodies of the women back to his home where he would make lampshades and clothes out of their skin. He sewed together belts from their nipples.
At first Ed was just a grave robber, but eventually that wasn’t enough for him. He killed Mary Hogan on December 8, 1954, managed to suppress his urges for a few years, and then murdered Bernice Worden almost exactly forty years ago on November 16, 1957, at the hardware store on Main Street.
Even though the original owners had sold the business long ago, amazingly, the place was still operating as a hardware store. Maybe the stories that surrounded it, the aura of death, actually attracted attention-and attention is almost always good for business.
In any case, Ed had taken Bernice’s body to his home, hung it in his garage, and gutted her like a deer. That was how the police found her the next day when they paid Gein a visit. He’d also decapitated her.
Gein and Dahmer.
For some reason, Wisconsin had more than its share of anthropophagous psychopaths.
The Vanderveld interview ended and Joshua went to the basement’s chest freezer, rooted around beneath the bags of frozen vegetables, the TV dinners and the venison steaks from the four-point buck he got bowhunting a few weeks ago, until he found the two packages wrapped in butcher paper.
He placed them in the small cooler he was taking with him on his trip, but he didn’t add any ice. He wanted the contents of the packages to thaw on the way to Plainfield.
Even from the basement he could smell the sizzling sausage frying in the pan, just waiting for him in the kitchen, cooked up lovingly for him by his faithful wife, the woman he’d been married to for nearly five years.
He headed upstairs to join Sylvia for brunch.
15
Ralph and I worked all morning and even into the early afternoon, but we couldn’t find any solid, incontrovertible connections between the cases in Ohio and Illinois and the one here in Wisconsin-all just circumstantial.
Though it was frustrating, admittedly, it wasn’t all that unexpected. Investigations in real life aren’t like the ones you see on TV. You don’t find a clue every eight minutes and solve cases every forty-two. I’ve often thought of how great it would be if it worked that way, but it’s just not the real world.
Now we were seated at the Skillet, a restaurant just down the street from HQ, looking over the menu. We needed to be back in forty-five minutes for the one-thirty briefing.
The national media outlets had already jumped on this case and with the reports of Hayes abandoning Lionel naked and cuffed in the same alley where Konerak Sinthasomphone had been found, and then the amputation of Colleen Hayes’s hands, Dahmer and his cannibalistic crimes were already making their way through the news cycle.
An unholy resurrection of a man who-
“They have Hungarian beef goulash.” Ralph jarred me out of my thoughts. He was pointing at the menu. “I’ve never been to a restaurant before that actually serves Hungarian beef goulash.”
“Yeah.” It took me a second to refocus, to be present here again. “I’ve heard it’s good here.”
“Really?”
“That’s what they say.”
“Huh.” He set down the menu authoritatively. “Well, that’s what I’m gonna get. Goulash. It just sounds like a man dish. I mean, can you imagine a one-hundred-five-pound supermodel ordering that? I’d say you gotta be at least two hundred pounds and have hair on your chest to truly enjoy a good bowl of Hungarian beef goulash.”
Honestly, he was right; I couldn’t picture a runway model working her way through a plate of goulash.
Ralph rapped his knuckle against the table. “Some things just sound tough. Like ‘Bulgaria.’ I’m a big boy, but I wouldn’t want to mess with someone from Bulgaria. The word alone makes me think of meat cleavers and dark forests. Werewolves too.”
“All that from ‘Bulgaria’?”
“Yeah. Unlike ‘France,’ which makes me think of lattes and poetry about feet.” He downed his coffee in one gulp. “Know what I mean?”
“Did you just say ‘lattes and poetry about feet’?”
He shrugged. “It just came to me.” He gestured toward my cup. “You sure you don’t want any java?”
“Naw, I’ve never been able to get past the taste.”
“Well, you gotta add sugar and cream.”
“To kill the taste.”
He considered that. “To calm it.”
“Ah. Well, why would I want to develop a habit of drinking something that I need to…um…calm the taste of?”
“Because caffeine is a beautiful thing.” He drew out the word “beautiful,” turning it into its own paragraph, then snapped his fingers toward our server and ordered the goulash. I went for a medium-rare cheeseburger-one of my weaknesses-and while we waited for our food, we reviewed some of the details of the case.
Although documentation and collection of physical evidence are important, interpretation of that evidence in relationship to the nature of the crime is just as vital. All crimes occur in a specific place at a specific time by a specific individual and, though some people believe in “random acts of violence,” I don’t buy that. Crimes always have a context in time and space and in the life of that individual offender. The search for clues is essentially the search for context.
And that’s what we were trying to do.
And failing at.
So far.
Ralph leaned across the table, his hefty forearms causing it to wobble. “So, seriously, Pat, what are you thinking here?”
“I’m not really one to venture hypotheses this early in an investigation.”
“Motive and all that?”
“Well, like I said at the department, I try not to read too much into-”
He waved that off. “No, I get it: you don’t trust your instincts. Motive. Whatever. Okay. But if you did?”
I was about to try staving off the topic again, but I changed my mind when I realized he was being persistent because he respected me and I wanted to show him just as much respect. I deliberated on his question carefully. “Ralph, do you ever read novels?”
“More of a movie guy myself.” Then he added nonchalantly, “The two kinds of action movies.”
“Two kinds?”
“Yeah, the Bruce Willis kind, and the chick flick kind.”
“How are chick flicks action movies?”
He looked a little embarrassed. “Well, you watch one with your wife, and that night you get some…”
“Ah. Action.”
A sly smile and a nod.
“Well, sometimes an author, or maybe a painter, will produce a piece of work to honor a previous artist, one who has passed away. Let’s say, write a new Philip Marlowe crime novel, or a new Sherlock Holmes story or copy the strokes of Picasso. Or, I suppose, possibly film a movie in the style of Hitchcock. It’s called a pastiche.”
“A way to pay homage to ’em.”
“Exactly.”
He considered that. “And what-you think that’s what our guy’s doing here? A pastiche to Dahmer?”
“There’s no way to know for sure, but it’s something to think about, especially with the amputation and the location of…” I considered something that hadn’t occurred to me before. “That pier where Colleen was found. It’s just down the street from the chocolate factory where Dahmer worked. They might very well have shipped goods from there. I’d say it wasn’t a mistake our guy left her at that pier. I don’t believe in coincidences.”
He eyed me. “Really?” To my surprise he sounded skeptical.
�
�Course not. Coincidences are just facts looked at out of context. You study a case from the right perspective and you’ll see that they don’t exist.”
“But…” He tapped a thoughtful finger against the air. Obviously we were not on the same page here. “Coincidences happen all the time. You think of someone you haven’t thought of in years, then ten minutes later you get a phone call from him. You dream of an event and then two days later it happens. What about deja vu? Life is full of coincidences.”
“I would say there has to be a scientific explanation for those things.”
“Why?”
“Because…well…” As I debated how to answer, I found myself at a loss for words. His question really was a sweeping one, encompassing the breadth of a person’s beliefs about the nature of reality, God, miracles, the supernatural-a lot more than I felt ready to delve into at the moment. “Well…”
The server returned. I prefer Cherry Coke, but the only cola on the menu here was Pepsi. She refilled Ralph’s coffee and my soda, giving me a moment to consider my response.
“Pat, there’s a limit to what science and reason can explain. For example, no philosopher yet has ever been able to prove that we’re not all just brains in a jar.”
I’d read about that famous philosophical dilemma before: “I think, therefore I am.” But how do you know you’re not just a mind thinking that you’re a person with a body? It’s the quintessential question of how we know we truly exist and I couldn’t think of any good response.
He folded his hands. “I want to hear more about this deal with you and coincidences, but right now, finish up with what you were saying a minute ago. Pastiches. The alley. Dahmer.”
“Right. The timing and nature of the previous homicides to what we have here certainly makes it appear that they’re related.”
“But we studied the case files all morning, didn’t find anything solid. It’s possible they’re not.”
“Correct. So let’s just take the crimes last night for a sec. They go much deeper than just some teenager finding out that alley is next to where Dahmer used to live, and then spray-painting profane graffiti on a wall or leaving a chopped-up mannequin in the alley. We’ve had that before.”