by Steven James
It wasn’t a large graveyard and wasn’t visited often. He knew this since he was the one who mowed it on weekends. There was really very little chance that he would be interrupted, but if someone did happen to visit, he figured that since he worked the grounds, he’d at least be able to come up with an explanation for why he had the shovel.
But why he was digging up the grave of Miriam Flandry, that was another story entirely. No reasonable explanation for that came to mind.
Well, just get it over with quickly and you won’t have to worry about it.
Carl walked to the fresh grave.
The note had been clear: Dig up Miriam’s corpse. Skin it. Then leave it outside the hardware store where Gein had killed Bernice Worden back in 1957. Even though Carl hadn’t been born at the time, he knew the story, knew what had happened there. Everyone in Plainfield knew the story.
According to the note, if he didn’t do as requested, the person who’d taken Adele was going to skin her alive and leave her corpse on Carl’s porch. Whoever was doing this-or why anyone would dream up something so gruesome-was a mystery to Carl. A dark, blank, terrible mystery.
But he could try to figure that out later. Right now he had to get to work.
He drove the shovel into the loose soil, dumped it to the side.
If only it didn’t have to be Miriam. But that’s what the note said-it had to be her.
She’d been eighty-one years old when she passed away two days ago. Carl, of course, had been at the funeral. And yes, he knew that now he was desecrating her final resting place, but he told himself that the dead were dead, that you couldn’t really desecrate them, not really. Their souls had gone on to another place. Bones and hair and decaying meat were all that was left.
It sounded crass and unsympathetic, but skinning a corpse was essentially no different than skinning a squirrel, gutting a deer, or carving a turkey. Embalmers and medical examiners did that kind of work on human cadavers all the time.
That’s what Carl told himself.
But still, the thought of peeling the skin off a body that used to be a living, breathing human being with dreams and hopes and heartaches just like him was gut-wrenching. Especially considering who Miriam was, what she had meant to him over the years.
However, the thought of someone doing that to Adele while she was alive was even more horrifying and Carl vowed he was not going to let that happen.
The shoveling was going quickly, faster than he would’ve ever expected, which was good because according to the note, he had until five o’clock-exactly-to dig up the corpse, remove its skin, deliver it to the hardware store and call the kidnapper.
That didn’t give him a lot of time, but the dirt wasn’t packed down yet and, after working on a construction crew for the last ten years, he was used to hard physical labor. He would work as furiously as he had to in order to save Adele.
He threw another shovelful of dirt aside.
Then another.
It shouldn’t be too long before he had her, and after he did, it wasn’t far to the hardware store, so the only thing that might really slow him down was the skinning part. He needed to come up with a way to do that quickly.
So that’s what he thought about as he dug up his recently deceased grandmother’s body.
26
Ralph and I entered the Waukesha County Sheriff Department, which was located in an imposing, interconnected set of buildings that also housed the county courthouse and jail.
We were directed to a graying, portly detective in his early fifties who had a noticeable crescent-shaped birthmark on the right side of his neck. The photos on his desk showed him serving in several different police departments around Wisconsin over the years.
After taking a seat in front of his desk, we told him what we were looking for and why.
“So you think one of our deputies stole those cuffs and then sold them to Griffin?” Detective Browning said to me coolly.
“No, I don’t. We’re just trying to investigate how the cuffs, if they are legitimate, ended up in the hands of a man who sells memorabilia of serial killers.”
“Uh-huh.” But Browning still seemed antagonistic. It took Ralph’s telling him that we would get the information one way or another, with his help or without it, before he grudgingly produced the paperwork showing who was involved in the Oswalds’ arrest.
When I thanked him, he made it clear once again that he thought we were being out of line.
His hostile attitude surprised me. In the end I chalked it up to the fact that I had an FBI agent with me. To say there can be tension over interagency information requests is, unfortunately, a gross understatement.
Before Ralph and I left the building, we also picked up a copy of the chain of custody forms and evidence room visitation records for the Oswald case. There was so much evidence gathered against the father and son team-including parts of the van they were driving when they tried to flee, the cache of rifles they’d collected, thousands of rounds of ammunition, reams of paperwork and James’s voluminous journals-that the number of items listed on the forms was substantial.
Material in hand, we cruised back to the interstate and headed for HQ.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Joshua parked in the overgrown, empty lot just west of the deserted train yard.
Milwaukee used to be a major industrial railway shipping hub. To some extent it still was, but times change and trains weren’t being used nearly as much as they had been twenty or thirty years ago.
A metal chain-link fence with wickedly sharp razor wire curling across the top of it ran along the entire perimeter of the train yard. However, there was a swinging gate here in the parking lot that was large enough for a car to pass through. Two sets of railroad tracks also entered beneath the fence, and then branched off in the yard into the nineteen dead-end tracks that held the abandoned cars.
Apart from a small crawl-hole in the fence that bordered the woods, this gate was the only way to access the yard.
Two days ago Joshua had cut through the chain that held the gate shut, then padlocked it closed again with his own lock and chain. His lock was still there, so obviously, no one had noticed, and that hadn’t surprised him. This was not exactly a tourist hotspot.
The tracks that terminated in the yard were rusted and overgrown with scraggly weeds that broke through the thin, sporadic layer of snow. Dozens of boxcars, coal cars, tankers, and a few engines and cabooses that’d been retired from service sat languishing in the yard. With the rails in such disrepair, these cars weren’t going anywhere any time soon.
Apparently, when a train car gets retired, there aren’t a whole lot of places to leave it, and over the last twenty years, more and more cars from the Milwaukee Road, Wisconsin Central, and Soo Line railways had been abandoned here and left to the mercy of weather and time.
Wearing gloves so that he wouldn’t leave any fingerprints, Joshua unlocked the gate, swung it open, drove toward the tracks containing the abandoned boxcars, then closed and padlocked the gate behind him.
He wouldn’t be able to drive all the way to the boxcar that he would be using today, but he could get partway there, and then park out of sight behind a line of tankers.
Which was what he did.
Carrying Adele to the train car he’d prepared for this afternoon wouldn’t be a problem. A forest nudged up against the razor wire fence on the south end of the train yard and there was only a narrow channel between that fence and the line of boxcars stretching alongside it.
When he’d been scouting out locations, Joshua had driven around the neighborhood and confirmed that-even from the highway, the bridge just west of here, and the parking lot itself-a person walking along the edge of the fence would be hidden from view by the boxcars on one side and the woods on the other. Especially if they stayed in the drainage ditch that followed one section of the fence.
Of all the times Joshua had been in the yard, he’d seen only five people in here: two teen punks
with spray cans, a wino, and a college-aged couple making out. But all of them had been on the other side of the yard near the coal cars.
Still, this was not the time to be careless, and before taking Adele to the boxcar, he wanted to make sure the coast was clear. So, leaving her locked in the trunk for the moment, he took his pistol, a 9mm Glock 19, from the glove box and walked along the edge of the ditch paralleling the razor wire fence.
Most of the cars in the yard had gang-related graffiti spray-painted on the sides and nearly all of them were ravaged with rust. The boxcars had large sliding doors, many of which were padlocked shut, a few were left open, some were missing entirely.
He went to a light gray Soo Line boxcar with a chained-shut door, slipped a key into the lock, which he’d made sure was the same kind he’d used on the front gate, and clicked it open.
Gloves still on, he cranked the door open, peered inside.
His materials were all there waiting for Adele. The rope and duct tape. The chair. The plastic bags, butcher paper, and heavy-duty plastic ties. The battery-operated light on the wall to the left. And the Civil War-era Gemrig amputation saw that he had used to cut through Colleen Hayes’s wrists last night.
He already had the necrotome with him in a sheath on his belt. The word meant “cutting instrument of the dead” and it was an Egyptian knife popular between 1500 and 1000 BC.
Necrotomes are, of course, extremely rare, but he’d managed to get this one at an auction in San Francisco five years ago. It was one of the actual knives used by the priests of ancient Egypt to slit open the abdomens of the people they were about to mummify in order to remove their inner organs. They did so by hand, pulling out all the organs except for the heart. Then they stored those organs in jars-all of them except for the brain, which they considered useless, and simply discarded.
Joshua kept the necrotome with him at all times.
He’d used it last Friday on Petey Schwartz when the homeless man followed him, then grabbed his jacket collar. Joshua had met Petey before, knew him in an informal way, and knew that he had violent tendencies. In an instant he’d whipped out the necrotome and buried it into Petey’s stomach, just as his father had taught him to do with that hunting knife in the special place beneath the barn.
It’d all happened so fast that it was hard to differentiate one action from the next. It’d been impulse, pure and simple. Instinct. And now a man was dead.
He knew the verse, knew what killing would mean: “No murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.” First John, chapter three, verse fifteen.
No eternal life.
But yet he desired eternal life. Believed in grace, in forgiveness, in atonement.
His life was a throbbing contradiction. Just like St. Paul, who wrote in Romans, chapter seven, “What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. For to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”
The evil which I would not.
That I do.
I do.
After making sure the coast was clear, Joshua returned to the car to retrieve the unconscious woman from the trunk.
27
The afternoon was stretching thin.
As I drove, Ralph scribbled notes on his pad and collected his thoughts. “So, Griffin could have known that the Hayes couple had their own cuffs. That puts him on our short list.”
“Yes, but according to Colleen’s description, her abductor was a large man; Griffin has a slight build.”
He processed that. “True.”
“Also, when I brought up Hayes’s name, Griffin didn’t seem familiar with it.”
Ralph certainly knew, as I did, that killers are often accomplished liars, but even for them, first impressions are hard to fake. Often, our faces betray us before our minds can start coming up with ways to hide what our bodies have already subconsciously expressed.
“But, Pat, he has to be related to this somehow. He might not be at the center of it, but his connection with the crime scene tape and the cuffs is too much of a coincidence. They tie him to both the murder in Illinois and Colleen’s abduction last night. Besides, he called Hendrich ‘a source,’ and mentioned he’d shipped ‘stuff’ to him. Is that how you’d phrase things if you’d only worked with the guy once?”
“I see what you mean,” I admitted, “but both the cuffs and police tape could have come from a cop-there’s no saying the police tape came from the killer.”
“We need to find out more about Hendrich.”
“Yes, we do,” I said. “And cross-reference the names on the evidence room forms and the chain of custody list against the officers who worked the case in Illinois. An officer may have moved from-”
“Waukesha to Champaign.”
“Yes.”
While we’d been driving, Thorne had sent Lyrie to Hendrich’s home address, but we hadn’t heard from him yet whether he’d found out anything from him.
I said to Ralph, “It looks like we have a few things to follow up on.” I ticked them off on my fingers as I exited the highway to get to HQ: “Check that police tape for prints, locate Bruce Hendrich, look into the people at the Waukesha sheriff’s department who had access to the Oswald handcuffs, and find out how Colleen Hayes came to contact Timothy Griffin in the first place. Oh yeah, it’d be good to check the nearest video store to see if Timothy and Mallory rented The Fugitive and When Harry Met Sally.”
“You think they made that up?”
“Those two videos weren’t among the twelve in their living room, not by the TV or on the shelves. That points to renting them. People like to save time, money, and effort, so they most often shop, get gas, and rent videos from the grocery stores, service stations, and video stores closest to their homes. We should start there, see if they’re customers.”
“Good call.”
“I think we have enough to get a warrant to look through Griffin’s receipts, see what else Hendrich might have sold him.”
“Or bought from him.”
I nodded. “Also, we should get the warrant to cover Griffin’s subscription list so we can cross-check the people who get his catalog against our suspect list and tip list.”
“Nice.” He jotted a few more notes.
I gave him an inventory of the items that were in the living room and included the photo that had a price tag on it in the bedroom. “Have them compare that list to the items on the receipts that he hasn’t sold yet. And to the catalog.”
“Did you write down that stuff when you were in the bedroom?”
“No.”
“You just listed like four dozen different things. You’re saying you remembered them?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“Yes. Why?”
He blinked. “Just checking.”
I felt the juices flowing. Admittedly, we still had more questions than answers, but a slowly emerging web of interrelationships was beginning to form. I mentally unwound and then rewound them, exploring the possibilities, evaluating the implications. Even though I couldn’t pin down anything solid yet, it felt good to have enough facts to be able to start sorting through them, searching for a pattern.
“How many do you think are women?” Ralph said, drawing me out of my thoughts.
“Who?”
“The people who buy that stuff from Griffin, you know, like Colleen. I mean, on the one hand you’ve got the revulsion most women feel toward violence, but on the other hand some ladies get off on that kind of stuff, on killers, you know, the lost boys-want to be their pen pals in prison, marry them when they get out, that sort of thing.”
Since males are generally more interested in crime and, in fact, much more inclined to commit violent acts than women, I expected that most of Griffin’s customers would be men. After all, ninety-five percent of the people in the prisons of the world are men-closer to ninety-eight percent if you look just at violent ac
ts. Blame it on genetics, trace it back to upbringing, whatever it is, there’s no arguing that men corner the market on crime, especially cruel and brutal ones. “It’ll be interesting to see how it breaks down,” I acknowledged.
“How far to the department?”
“A couple minutes.”
Ralph turned to the dispatch radio. “I’ll call this stuff in, get Ellen on the search warrant. If there’s one thing the Bureau is good at, it’s expediting search warrant requests.”
At least that’s one thing, I thought.
“I could make some sort of smart comment about that,” I said, “but I’ll refrain.”
“I’m counting that as a smart comment, Tonto.”
“Wasn’t Tonto just the sidekick?”
“Yeah.” A tiny smile. “He was.”
28
Carl took Miriam’s corpse to the maintenance building to skin it.
He laid it on the concrete floor and, as disturbing as this act was, started his work.
Almost immediately however, he discovered that it was too difficult to keep a firm grip on the body while he maneuvered his knife to strip off the flesh. In the 1950s, Gein had hung the corpse of his victim to do it, and that made a certain amount of macabre sense.
If he could use gravity to his advantage, it’d be a lot easier, go a lot quicker. He searched the shelves, found a chain, looped it over one of the rafters, and then under the arms and around the chest of the corpse, hoisted it into the air, and set to work.
As Joshua stood beside the trunk of the sedan, he thought about last night and how it related to what was going to happen here in the train yards tonight.
Last evening he’d slipped in the back door of Vincent and Colleen’s home even while Colleen was inside the house. He was in the kitchen closet, in fact, watching her through the slightly cracked-open door when she got the call from her husband telling her he was going to be late.
Joshua had heard her side of the conversation and that’d offered him both a problem and an opportunity.