Opening Moves pbf-6

by Steven James

  Calculating when Colleen had been found at the pier this morning and the time of a round-trip drive during the day, I said, “The warm hood on the Taurus…There might be more than one missing woman within a six-hour drive of here, but I doubt there’d be more than one whose left ring finger was left behind.”

  “I thought you don’t like working with the media?”

  “Well, right now time is what matters most. Stopping the woman’s spouse or lover from carrying out the kidnapper’s demands, whatever those might be, and maybe getting us something we can use to actually find this woman’s attacker trumps everything. Get a physical description of her out now and as soon as she regains consciousness, release her photo to the press.”

  “I’ll call it in.”

  He left and I quickly moved on in my mind to step five: evaluation.

  Everyone is tempted to prove what he believes, and that affects not only conscious decision-making but the way our minds subconsciously process information. There’s even a name for it: confirmation bias. Most of the time we’re not even aware of it happening. Naturally, no one likes to be wrong, but the best investigators step back and actually try to find holes in their own theories. This moves you toward objectivity, and that always brings you closer to the truth.

  However, the CSIU arrived just as I was beginning to form a working hypothesis that I could try to disprove.

  “I want the different spots of blood spatter on the floor checked separately,” I told them. “I don’t care how many favors we have to pull in to get the DNA results back fast. We have no idea how many people this guy may have brought to this train yard. Until further notice, this whole area-everything inside this fence-is a crime scene.”

  “That’s a big crime scene,” one of them objected.

  A thought: “Let’s make it even bigger. We also need to include the woods.”

  “The woods?”

  “He knew where the fence was pulled loose, which path to take through the forest. That makes the fence part of the scene.”

  “And the woods.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, “and the woods. Because he might have tossed evidence-his phone, a knife, his gun. Possibly a set of clothes.”

  They looked at me wearily, no doubt thinking about how long all this might take, but they said nothing more.

  Then, even if they weren’t as skilled at their jobs as I might’ve liked, I needed to respect them enough to let them do what Thorne had sent them here to do.

  Two things were on my immediate agenda: (1) call Taci; (2) get back to the boxcar I’d been standing on when the suspect fired at me and take a look at Bruce Hendrich’s body.

  43

  Joshua didn’t know exactly why he hadn’t killed Adele Westin.

  He could have stabbed her with the necrotome, shot her with the Glock, taken the amputation saw to her neck-any of a number of things.

  No murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.

  He protested against the thought, turned away from it.

  However, in this case, killing Adele would probably have been the best idea. Not to take any chances. After all, he’d already let Colleen live, and look where that’d led.

  Was that how law enforcement had found him at the train yard? He’d been careful with her, careful to make sure there was no way for her to tell where they were, but theoretically it was still possible.

  The deadline had come and long since gone, and Carl had not called.

  That bothered Joshua. It wasn’t going to make any difference anymore in the way he treated Adele, but still, the man’s fiancee had been abducted, her finger amputated and left behind, and he wasn’t even committed to her enough to call at the appointed time?

  If anyone ever took Sylvia away from him, Joshua wouldn’t have taken any chance whatsoever that she would be killed. He would have called the number no matter what. He would have gone to the ends of the earth to save his wife and he couldn’t imagine how Carl had not made a simple phone call to save his fiancee.

  Joshua needed to sort out a few things before going home, before returning to his normal life.

  So that’s what he thought about as the search for him went on in the train yard and the neighboring woods.

  One of the squads in the parking lot had a car phone, so I tapped in Taci’s number.

  I caught her just as she was about to leave her apartment to run some errands before coming over for dinner. Though I felt bad about having to cancel, the homicide investigation obviously took precedence over our supper plans and I trusted that she would understand.

  It wasn’t my place to tell her details about the case, but I was able to notify her that there’d been a homicide. “I’m not sure when I’ll be done here, but maybe we could grab a late supper, or dessert, whatever you feel up to.”

  “No. That’s okay. That’s where you need to be. We can connect at breakfast tomorrow. I have some reading to do tonight anyway.”

  “There was something important you wanted to discuss,” I said. “Maybe I should call you? When I get home?”

  She reiterated that it was something she wanted to discuss in person, so we agreed to meet at seven thirty tomorrow morning for breakfast at Anthony’s Cafe, then we said our “I love yous” and hung up. It was only when I was walking back to the boxcar to have a look at Hendrich’s body that I realized I’d hung up without wishing her a happy anniversary.

  And she had done the same with me.

  44

  As I approached the car, Ralph caught up with me and told me that the search warrant had gone through and that Ellen and Corsica were on their way to Fort Atkinson to pick up Griffin’s sales receipts and a copy of his subscription list.

  “Perfect.”

  He went on: “We’ll have the team look over the receipts in the morning.” Then he informed me that Lyrie had radioed in that he was still in Hendrich’s neighborhood. Apparently, Thompson was checking the names of officers in Champaign to see if any had ever lived in Waukesha. Lieutenant Thorne was at some sort of meeting with the captain. “The lieutenant scheduled a briefing tomorrow morning at ten in order to give the CSIU a little time to process some of the evidence first.”

  Ten o’clock should give me enough time to have breakfast with Taci, and then a chance to review the team’s findings before the briefing.

  “Sounds good.”

  My attention shifted to the homicide scene.

  Three CSIU members were already working the boxcar where Hendrich’s body had been found. One was dusting for prints, another was photographing the body, the third was searching for trace evidence on the east end of the car. They’d set up floodlights and the inside of the boxcar was such a bright contrast to the darkness outside that it was almost jarring.

  The photographer mumbled something about how this guy had not died in a very desirable way. The words floated toward me and then disappeared into a narrow, shy spot in the air above the corpse, but I wasn’t really listening to her. I was looking at Hendrich’s body.

  He was in his late thirties, Caucasian, slight build, with salt-and-pepper hair and a goatee. A frenzy of blood was spread across his abdomen.

  And he was now and forever dead.

  At the scene of a homicide, evil isn’t airbrushed or sanitized as it is on the evening news. Out here it gets right in your face and you can’t turn the channel or look away. Newscasters must know that if they dwell too long on the realities of death it’ll be too depressing and people will flip the channel to watch Seinfeld. Evil is either sensationalized or muted. On the air it’s almost never shown to be honestly, fully, what it is.

  If you believe in eternity, Bruce’s soul was either in paradise or the inferno. If you don’t believe in eternity, you’d have to accept that he had entered oblivion and all that he had been was now and would forever be no more.

  I couldn’t help but think about how paper-thin the fabric of life is. I once worked a case in which a man slipped in the shower and the broken glass from the stall
gouged into his throat and he bled to death in less than a minute-just that quick.

  It might be a screech of tires as someone swerves into your lane. Or a heart attack or stroke. Or something as harmless as dropping a bar of soap in the shower. And that’s it. Most people live their whole lives without ever realizing that every moment is a near-death experience.

  Truthfully, when I think about it, it’s baffling and astonishing to me that I’m here, in this place at this time, breathing, thinking, dreaming, believing. Aware of being aware of being alive.

  And it’s mind-boggling that we die, every one of us, that all of humanity’s hopes and dreams come to an end, one person, one tragic death at a time.

  Without heaven to spend eternity in, or another go-around here on earth to try to make things right, what could possibly, ultimately matter?

  No wonder so many people believe in reincarnation.

  And in heaven.

  I wasn’t exactly sure what I believed about those things, but doing this job I’ve learned three things for certain, three things I do know for sure: life is a mystery, death is a tragedy, and hope-when it exists-is always a gift.

  Hendrich was wearing civilian clothes, no security guard uniform. There was blood on the floor of the boxcar, but none leading to it, which told me he was killed in here.

  I wondered how long he might have been kept in this train car before he was killed.

  Evidence and evident both come from the same root word meaning “obvious,” but all too often the two concepts-what is evident and what is evidence-don’t mesh very well in an investigation. Evidence isn’t always evident and what’s evident doesn’t always end up being evidence.

  I wanted the walls and the wounds and the clues to speak to me; wanted everything in the boxcar to bring a collective voice together and whisper to me the name of the killer, but for the moment I noticed nothing else that seemed in any way pertinent. All the evidence was silent.

  As I looked around the boxcar, I ran through the five investigative steps but came up with nothing revelatory.

  “Did you go through his pockets?” I asked the head of the CSIU team.

  “Not yet.”

  “Now would be good.”

  After a small pause, he did, and produced $14.73, a well-used, much-stained handkerchief, a set of keys, a wallet, and a pocketknife. I knew that the CSIU team would follow up on all these things later. I wanted to follow up on one of them now.

  The keys.

  45

  I still had on the same pair of latex gloves from earlier, and now, so that I wouldn’t cross-contaminate the two scenes, I donned a new pair. My hands were sore and tender and, to say the least, it didn’t exactly feel good tugging gloves off and on.

  First, I took the keys to the lock on this boxcar, then to the gate, then jogged back to the boxcar where we’d found the woman.

  None of the keys opened any of the locks. Hendrich didn’t have a Ford Taurus key on the ring.

  All of which intrigued me.

  I returned the keys to be logged in as evidence, and Ralph and Radar ran into me outside the boxcar. “Nothing from the neighborhood,” Ralph announced. “No one saw anything, not even that little kid.”

  “Okay…” The wind still hadn’t let up and I caught myself muttering, “I wonder if he heard me…”

  “Heard you?” Radar said.

  “I shouted into the boxcar when I first saw Hendrich’s body,” I explained, “but considering the distance to the car where we found the woman, also the mattresses and the wind…” I started for the boxcar door. “I’ll yell at you two.”

  Ralph looked confused. “What do you mean, you’ll yell at us?”

  I indicated toward the car where we’d found the woman. “Go down there. I’ll stay here and yell like I did when I was trying to see if there was anyone in this boxcar. We’ll try it a couple times, door open, closed. You get the idea.”

  He caught on. “See if it was possible for the guy who attacked her to hear you shouting.”

  “Right.”

  It only took a few minutes to do the reenactment and when we reconvened, Radar shook his head. “Nothing.”

  But you heard the muted cries, Pat…

  How?

  Well, if it was the woman, she would have been screaming as loudly as she could.

  I’m not sure that explained what I’d heard, but the reenactment did tell us one thing. “So,” I said, “it’s unlikely the shooter heard us; and if his door was closed, he didn’t see us either, unless someone else-”

  “Warned him,” Radar said, concluding what I’d been finding myself inclining toward. “A sentry? A scout? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “We need to stay open to the possibility.”

  “But where did he go?”

  “It’s possible to get over the fence.” I held up my gloved, bandaged hands. “I improvised, but someone could have certainly planned better than I did. When our attention was focused on the shooter, the other person-if there really was another person-could’ve fled in another direction.”

  This line of reasoning opened up a whole range of interesting possibilities.

  If there were two offenders, were they working together? If not, how do you explain the timing?

  Ralph must have been thinking the same thing. “Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that there were two separate crimes right here, at the same time?”

  I tried to process what we had going on here. Two victims. One shooter. Even though the proximity of the crimes favored the possibility that the victims were attacked by the same offender, the MO really was completely different: the woman had been restrained in a chair just as Colleen Hayes had been last night, the man had not. He had no ligature marks and had been stabbed numerous times in his stomach, unlike any of the other victims, not even from the homicides in Illinois and Ohio. No lungs removed here. No intestines eaten. No limbs sawed off. All the other victims had been women, this guy wasn’t.

  “It’s true,” I admitted. “There are a lot of things that don’t measure up here.”

  “Unless we really are talking about two different offenders,” Radar offered.

  “Or three.”

  They looked at me curiously. “Three?” Ralph said.

  “The out-of-state homicides, the kidnappings, and Hendrich’s murder.”

  He shook his head. “But they’re not entirely unrelated. Griffin’s merchandise sales to Colleen Hayes, the police tape from the murder in Illinois, tie them all together.”

  I said, “The two homicides in Ohio and Illinois bear no semblance to the pattern of abduction, coercion, and mutilation that we saw with the Hayes family and now, evidently, with this woman tonight. There was no ransom note in the previous deaths and the victims of the last two days were left alive, even though they could have easily been killed.”

  “And here, there’s no cannibali-” Ralph caught himself short. “The hands.”

  We were quiet. We didn’t know what Colleen’s abductor had done with her hands, but we could imagine, and by the looks on Ralph’s and Radar’s faces, I think we all were.

  Backpedaling a little, I stated the obvious: “Hendrich was a part-time security guard here. Maybe he just came upon our guy and got taken out.”

  Don’t assume too much in any direction.

  Radar offered to dig up a list of Caucasians fitting our suspect’s description who might visit this neighborhood regularly enough to become familiar with the woods, invisible to the neighbors. “You were right, Pat. We’ve got a white guy who knows how to evaporate into a neighborhood of gangbangers of another race. I’ll look at social workers, youth coaches, parole officers, pizza delivery guys. Everyone. I don’t care. Including cops.”

  Even though I didn’t like to even consider the idea that a cop could be involved, I agreed that it was worth pursuing.

  Ralph said to me, “I’ll stick with you. Coordinate the searches. I’ll stay as late as I need to.”

  My eyes wer
e on the flashlight beams from the officers who were working their way through the forest. “Good to hear, Tonto.”

  46

  Joshua’s wife had supper waiting for him when he came through the door, but she looked at him with concern as he dropped his keys onto the counter. “What is it, hon?”

  “What?”

  “You look pale. Like you just saw a ghost.”

  “No, it’s just…traffic. It’s nothing.” He kissed her. “I’ll be back in a sec. Let me kick off my shoes.”

  As he crossed the hallway to the bedroom, he tried to piece together what had happened out there tonight.

  Just before coming into the house, he’d heard through the police scanner that law enforcement had made the connection to Carl Kowalski, which explained why he hadn’t called at five-he was in custody. But at least he’d done as asked and Miriam Flandry’s skinned corpse had been found. The media would undoubtedly be jumping all over the story tonight.

  Joshua put his gun away.

  And of course, when law enforcement made the connection to Carl, they’d also discovered that the woman who’d been found in the train yards, the woman who was missing a finger, was Carl’s fiancee, Adele Westin.

  But.

  They’d also found Bruce Hendrich. He was the part-time security guard whose hours Joshua had researched so thoroughly, been so careful to avoid whenever he entered the train yard. And now he was found dead there. Stabbed. Locked in another boxcar.

  Why then? Why there?

  From Hendrich’s schedule, Joshua knew he hadn’t been on the docket to work today.

  Questions chasing him, Joshua returned to the kitchen and helped Sylvia set the table.

  “Did you have a good afternoon?” she asked him.

  “Yes.” He tried to concentrate on her, to not let the events of the day come between them. “How did the house showings go?”

  “Didn’t sell any, but you know what they say…” She smiled, but Joshua could see that it was a bit forced, that she wasn’t exactly optimistic but was trying hard to be. “Just live it through.”