by Steven James
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 then 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.
I was glad to follow up on this, but Fort Atkinson was an hour away. I asked Thorne, “If Griffin lives in Fort Atkinson, will that be a jurisdictional problem?”
He deferred to Ralph who gave a knowing half grin. “That’s one of the advantages of having me here, bro. If Griffin’s selling crime scene tape from a homicide in Illinois, we have an interstate connection. And that means it’s under my jurisdiction.”
He might have been stretching things a bit, but it worked for me.
In the garage we found out that Radar had taken our cruiser, but Thorne signed off for Ralph and me to use an undercover sedan that was typically used on drug busts. Ralph asked him, “Has this guy Griffin ever surfaced before? Any priors?”
“No. Thompson checked his record right off the bat. Apparently, he’s a celebrity in his own right in certain circles, though. An author named
Heather Isle-she writes those true crime books-anyway, she uses him as one of her ‘expert’ sources.” Thorne turned to me. “You know her, right? The true crime writer?”
“No, Saundra Weathers. A novelist. Writes mysteries. She lived in my hometown, back when we were kids.”
“It was…” I could see him struggling to find the right words. “The Weathers’ tree house, right? Where you found-”
“Not theirs, exactly. No. But it was next to their property.”
Thorne knew this was a touchy subject for me and he let it go at that. “Well, go have a talk with Griffin. See what he can tell us about the police tape and how he knows it was from the scene of a ‘maneater.’”
We briefly discussed the observations Ralph and I had come up with while we were at the restaurant and at my desk a few minutes ago. Thorne promised to assign the projects to the task force and contact us if they came up with anything, then he left, and Ralph and I climbed into the UC car. I called in to check Griffin’s DMV records and got his address.
“So I’m curious,” Ralph said when I got off the radio. “What did you find in the tree house?”
“I’ll tell you on the way.”
Plainfield, Wisconsin
Joshua caught hold of Adele Westin as she swayed, then supported her as she lost consciousness and drifted into his arms.
He lowered her gently to the kitchen’s linoleum floor.
The drugs he’d used on her were powerful and she didn’t wake up, not even when he brought out the pruning shears to get the item he’d decided to leave behind for her fiance to show him how serious he was about his demands.
He left the note detailing what needed to happen before five o’clock, and after placing the proof in the refrigerator that he had Adele, Joshua carried her to the Ford Taurus and laid her in the trunk.
Then left for Milwaukee.
For the train yards.
Being mid-November in Wisconsin, it was starting to get dark early. Based on the drive time, he figured he’d be able to get started on her right when he needed to, just before the gloaming.
20
As I recount to Ralph the events surrounding the discovery in the tree house, it’s as if I’m reliving them all over again, so I do my best to detach myself from the emotions, to view the memories from another person’s point of view entirely…
You’re a junior in high school.
Leaves, dead and brown, swirl on the ground, then skitter around you and across the mountain bike trail in front of you, caught up in little whirlwinds of air. Tiny tornadoes of late fall.
You pedal hard to try to outrun the impending storm.
The trail skirts along the edge of the vast marsh outside of town. You’re on your way home after football practice and can’t help but think of what happened yesterday afternoon.
You jump a root. Pick up speed.
Everyone has been talking about the girl all day. Nothing like this has ever happened in your hometown. No one knows what to do.
They haven’t said much on the news, just that Mindy Wells had been last seen leaving her school at about three p.m. Her home was six blocks away. She never made it. The police were checking out a lead on a blue van that had been seen nearby. That was all.
At first, her mom thought that Mindy’s father had picked her up. Then, when he came home alone, they thought maybe her grandmother had her. The family was new to the area and there weren’t many other choices. But, no, when they checked, the grandmother didn’t have Mindy either.
The police were called in and the rumors quickly spread that they were waiting for a ransom note, but from the beginning that hadn’t seemed right to you. The family wasn’t rich, and without a ransom demand, there aren’t too many reasons to kidnap a child.
The water on the marsh becomes restless and choppy in anticipation of the coming storm. The angry wind scratches at your cheeks and gray steely clouds begin to drip rain onto your back.
You head for the old county road along the edge of the marsh where it’ll be faster to get home.
She’s an eleven-year-old girl. If you wanted to take her someplace where you could be alone with her, where would you go? A basement? An old barn? A shed? Somewhere that no one knew about, out here by the marsh?
You think these things.
You cannot help but think them.
The sky is crisscrossed by the stark Vs of Canada geese heading south, or in some cases, settling for a few hours to rest on the brackish waters of the marsh. Even with the rain picking up, even above the sound of your wheels whisking across the damp leaves on the trail, you hear the geese honking.
The police checked the neighborhood carefully but didn’t find anything. They brought one of the neighbors in for questioning but nothing came of that and they let him go almost immediately.
Someone could have just driven up and forced the girl into a car and then taken off, that’s what people said. It could have been that easy. It could have been anything.
But it wasn’t just anything that happened, it was something very specific that happened at that time on that street to that girl. To Mindy Wells. Something that had never happened before, not in that place, not in that way.
The family is new to the area. She wouldn’t have gotten into the car with just anyone.
She’s an eleven-year-old girl.
You duck to avoid a branch. The tires of your mountain bike skid across a smear of mud, almost sending you off the trail. It rained yesterday afternoon, leaving the ground soggy. Most of the water has drained into the marsh, but it’ll take a few days for the ground to dry out completely. Now, however, with the rain picking up, it didn’t look like that was going to happen.
You picture the street that leads from the school to Mindy’s house. You know it well, you’ve been on it any number of times, and as you think about it, you realize there’s one spot where a thick row of hedges would have hidden the view of the street from all of the neighbors’ homes.
One spot. Four blocks from the school.
A blind spot, and that term makes you think of football, of throwing downfield to your receivers. You have to know how to read the defense, how to pick your way past the cornerbacks, linebackers, and safeties, find their blind spots. It’s all about location and timing. Getting the ball to the right place on the field at exactly the right time to catch the defense off guard.
The trail evens out, bending toward the dirt road you’ll use to take the shortcut home. It’s not far.
Is that where it happened? Where she was abducted? By those hedges four blocks from school?
If the person who took her had parked right there he could have forced her into his car and no one would have seen, overpowered her quickly, and no one would have known. There isn’t anywhere else on that street that’s hidden enough from view to do it without taking a big chance at being discovered. Nowhere else made sense.
But that would mean the kidnapper knew the area well, knew that street well, knew exactly where to do it.
A local.
Maybe.
Or someone who’d lived here.
And if he knew the area he would know where to take a girl. A place he could be alone with her.
You feel a chill.
The kids from your high school use the dirt road up ahead to get to an old tree house to party and hook up on the weekends. It overlooks the road as well as the marsh, so if you’re up there, you’re able to see anyone coming either by car or by jon boat.
It’s a place where they know they can be alone. A place they know they won’t be interrupted by adults, or if someone does show up, they can get away before getting caught. You’ve biked past it. You know where it is.
But unless a person knows where to look, it’s not easy to find.
You arrive at the road. Pull your bike to a stop.
The storm has arrived and the wind drives cold pellets of rain against your face. If it were ten degrees colder out, the rain would be snow.
Besides the
rutted older tracks, pressed into the mud of the road in front of you are two sets of fresher tire tracks from a vehicle with a wide wheelbase, a pickup or maybe an SUV. One set is shallower, and the orientation of the tread marks tells you that’s from the return trip south, back to town. The other set is deeper, made when the mud was fresh.
You think about what you know, about the timing of the rain. It stopped in the middle of the afternoon yesterday, so that would mean someone drove out here during the rainstorm or shortly after it stopped, spent time here, and returned to town only after a substantial amount of the water had drained into the marsh.
That would have taken several hours.
Or maybe all night.
A chill ripples through you. You stare at those tracks, thinking about the time frame, and after a short moment of deliberation, rather than take the road south toward home, you aim your bike north, toward the trail that leads to the tree house.
It isn’t anything, it’s something-something specific that happened only once in only one way.
If the driver knew the area, he might know about the tree house.
Most people don’t know where that trail is.
A local would, though.
Yes, or someone who’d lived nearby.
You pedal along the side of the road, paralleling the tire tracks, but even from a distance, even in the dreary day, you can see where they stop.
Beside the trailhead to the tree house.
You feel your heart beating faster, not just from the exertion of pedaling, but from apprehension of what you fear might be waiting at the end of that trail.
You arrive, park your bike. Lean it against a tree.
After a moment you start walking along the path, into the woods.
A rush of adrenaline courses through you and your imagination plays out what might have happened.
One moment you’re seeing things through the eyes of the kidnapper and the next through the eyes of the girl. It’s startling how detailed you see everything. Not in bursts and blurs like some sort of psychic might, but in full color because you know the area and can imagine how things might have gone down.