by Steven James
“That’s right,” he said. “Just live it through. It’ll all work out. You’re good at what you do.”
A welcome smile. “Thank you, dear.”
He looked over the meat loaf, baked potatoes, and carrots she’d prepared. “Supper looks great.”
A pause. “Where were you all day?” she asked. “I tried calling.”
“Running errands. Taking care of a few things.”
After they’d said grace and started eating, his thoughts wandered back to the train yard.
Was it possible that it was all a coincidence?
Possible, perhaps, but how likely was that?
There was only one other explanation.
Someone knew. Someone knew he was going to be in the yard, knew he was going to have a woman there tonight.
It was unfathomable to think that, but Joshua let himself think it anyway. Because he had to.
And if that was the case, if someone knew, that might explain why law enforcement showed up when they did-the person could have contacted them, called in a tip.
But then why leave Hendrich dead? And locked in a train car?
Someone out there is trying to set you up, trying to frame you for Hendrich’s murder.
But why?
As Sylvia ate, she told Joshua all about her day and he listened, not just because it was something a good husband should do, but because he was genuinely interested in her life. But despite that, admittedly, his attention did drift at times to what had happened tonight, to what was going to happen in the next two days.
Tonight he would watch the news, find out what he could about how it might have been that Hendrich happened to show up dead when he did at the train yard. It was important to make sure everything was set for Wednesday, for what was going to happen with the cop, so tomorrow, he would return briefly to look over the best places to park near the bank on Highway 83 in Wales-the same bank the Oswalds held up the day they were arrested.
The scripture verse was not just true for him, it would be true for the cop as well: “The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”
That.
I.
Do.
Yes, the officer he had in mind would find out the true meaning of those words.
47
Two years ago the Maneater of the Midwest began to call himself, in his own mind, what he truly was.
A ghoul.
Of course he’d heard of ghouls before that. He knew what they were, that they liked to consume human corpses, often those dug up from graveyards, but the day when he finally began to think of himself in terms of being one, of placing himself in that category, was freeing and, in a way, like coming home.
When you’re this way, you can’t help but want to find someone else like you. It’s inevitable. So, over the years he’d always hoped to meet another actual ghoul. Curiosity mostly-though he hadn’t been sure how he would respond if he truly found one. He had not always worked alone, but he had not yet found anyone else who shared his particular interests.
However, there were a few times when he had met people who gave off hints that perhaps, yes, just perhaps, they would understand, so those were the times when he’d tested the waters, put out feelers, so to speak, to see if he’d found a kindred spirit.
After a few beers, or on a long car ride, or during a period of marijuana-induced honesty, he would say something like, “Did you ever wonder about those soccer players back in the seventies? Up in the Andes Mountains? Remember hearing about that?” And maybe his friend would say yes she had, or maybe she would give him a blank look and shake her head no.
“Yeah,” he would say, “when their plane crashed. Twenty-nine out of the forty-five survived. The mountain was isolated, snow-covered. The survivors had nothing to eat and when some of them started dying, they knew they needed to find something fast. They were all starving.”
And at that point he would pause and study the face of the person he was talking to, study it to see if she was able to jump ahead to the inevitable conclusion.
Finally, it would come. “You don’t mean they…that they ate each other?”
“Well, only the dead ones,” he might joke, depending on the situation. In either case, it was a critical point, the telling moment. “Yes, they had to,” he would say. “If they were going to survive.”
And here came the reaction that would either end the conversation for good, or give him hope that perhaps he’d finally found someone who could understand.
Usually, the reaction was the same: “Ew. That’s horrible!” or “That’s disgusting” or “I’d rather die myself! I would never do that!” or the like, and what could he do? The Maneater wasn’t the type of person to argue. So he would agree with her about how unthinkable such a thing was. “You’re right. It’s disgusting. I can’t imagine how civilized people could ever do that.”
He would say things like that, and then take a long draft of beer or a drag of his joint and never bring up the subject to that person again.
However, there was one woman he’d met who seemed to contemplate the situation a little more clearheadedly. They’d gone out for supper and were walking through downtown Milwaukee when he’d brought up the question. She’d thought about it and said, “The thing is, those guys had to survive, right? I mean, why should all of them die when some of them could live? Why, when there was fresh meat lying there preserved for them in the snow? Should they starve to death, just because of a social stigma, the cultural conventions of Western society?”
“Good point.” He decided to step out on a limb. “In some cultures it’s perfectly acceptable to eat other people. Cannibalism isn’t frowned on in other places as much as it is in America, or, say, Britain. There was a group of Indians who ate their parents’ dead bodies.”
“As a show of respect,” she said. “Yes, I’ve heard of that.”
He stopped walking. Took her hand. “You have?”
“We studied it in this anthropology class I had last year. Herodotus, right? He wrote about it?”
“I guess. I don’t know; I’m not sure.” But it wasn’t a guess and he did know. For sure.
He was nervous to ask the next question, but he had to find out the answer. “And what did you think of that? When you heard about it?”
“What’s wrong in one country might not be wrong in another. That’s the way the world is. I think a person’s morality, her set of values, is determined by what culture she grows up in. We shouldn’t judge other people’s values.”
The politically correct answer, but an obviously untenable moral position.
After all, in the 1940s it was culturally acceptable in Germany to kill Jews by the millions. In some tribes in Africa, raping women is considered normal and acceptable-at least by the men. But nobody who’s being raped or tortured to death just shrugs it off and accepts that the person doing it to him is simply following his or her cultural values, so, oh well, what’s right for him is right for him, no big deal.
No. Nobody who’s on the short end of justice wants to be treated subjectively. Relativism and equity just don’t go hand in hand.
The Maneater had an extraordinary memory. He didn’t like to call attention to it to others and he didn’t take any pride in it himself, but it was there and he couldn’t help but make use of it. And that night he’d thought of the passage this woman had just referred to: Godley’s 1921 translation of The Histories by Herodotus, Book 3:38, an excerpt he’d read twice and remembered word for word:
When Darius was king, he summoned the Greeks who were with him and asked them for what price they would eat their fathers’ dead bodies. They answered that there was no price for which they would do it. Then Darius summoned those Indians who are called Callatiae, who eat their parents, and asked them (the Greeks being present and understanding through interpreters what was said) what would make them willing to burn their fathers at death. The Indians cried aloud, that he should not speak of so horrid an act. So
firmly rooted are these beliefs; and it is, I think, rightly said in Pindar’s poem that custom is lord of all.
Custom is lord of all.
Morality is not etched in stone but written, as it were, on a rubber band.
Simply the result of cultural mores.
What an attractive, attractive idea for those wielding power.
But this wasn’t the time to debate the determinants of ethical action with his date, it was actually his chance to agree with her. “You’re right about that,” he said, “and, well, those dead people up on the slopes of that mountain in the Andes weren’t really people anymore actually. They were only meat that was going to rot eventually or just freeze and lie there indefinitely. I mean, right? And in a situation like that, what choice did the survivors really have? I mean what else could they be expected to do?”
He watched her carefully, searched her eyes to gauge her reaction, to look for hints of what she might say, what she might be thinking. “So, what do you think? Could you have done it?”
“Done it?”
“Yes.”
“You mean eaten someone?”
“To survive. Yes.”
“Well, I suppose, if I was on the brink of death, I guess I might have.”
But really, that begged the question. How close to the brink of death does a person have to be, really, before it would be okay? How much desperation would justify cannibalism? Do you really need to be starving to death? What about famished? What about simply hungry? Or just sitting down for supper? How many hours away from death by starvation do you need to be to justify chewing off the skin or sucking the marrow out of another primate’s bones?
Cultures disagree.
So, really, it was a matter of societal preference.
Pindar’s poem is right: custom is lord of all.
Perhaps morally untenable, but still, a philosophical position that suited the Maneater.
The one wielding power.
He liked this woman and decided on the spot that he would cut out and eat her intestines.
She was the first one, the one he still remembered the most fondly to this day.
Now, tonight he was at a club. Trance music. Psychedelic cycling lights. Sweaty, pumping bodies. He was seated at the bar next to a woman who’d been flirting with him for the last twenty minutes. Even though it was just after ten o’clock, she’d made it clear what she wanted to do, but he hadn’t even gotten her name yet.
He decided to just go ahead, see where that might lead. “I don’t sleep with women I don’t know.”
“Well, then”-there was a breezy, alcohol-induced smile in her voice-“my name is Celeste.”
“Hello, Celeste.”
“And you are?”
He made up a name. “Ashton.”
“Well, Ashton”-she really was too tipsy for her own good, already, at this time of night-“do you need a last name, or is Celeste enough for you?”
“Celeste is plenty.” He smiled and with one hand he took hold of her barstool and pulled it closer to him.
“Mmm,” she cooed. “I like a man who’s got some strength. Do you have endurance too?”
“Oh yes,” he said. “I can make things last for a long, long time.”
“Ooh. I like the sound of that.”
She finished her shot, turned the glass upside down and, somewhat unevenly, set it on the bar. “I also like a man who’s not all talk. Are you all talk?”
“I’m not all talk, no.”
She stood and swayed a bit. He rose as well and she put her arm in his.
He led her out of the club.
They went to her apartment. He enjoyed himself with her for a while, and as he did, the Maneater thought back to the events of the night, to the train yards, to killing Hendrich, a man whose identity he and Griffin had decided to use if there was ever a need.
And he thought of why he’d led Hendrich to that car and then killed him there, because of what he’d found in that other train car. Because of the man he’d followed and then identified and because of the phone call from Griffin warning him that the police were following up on Hendrich.
Why was Joshua doing this? Setting up these elaborate schemes? Dahmer? Now Gein?
To get your attention?
Well, if that was the reason, it had worked.
The Maneater thought about what to do about that as he spent time with Celeste who, as it turned out, wasn’t so thankful that he could make things last for a long, long time.
Not thankful about that at all.
48
I stayed at the train yards until almost eleven. We had a dozen officers comb the woods. I even helped them, but we found nothing.
Everyone was focused, sharp. This was no longer just the case of a kidnapper’s twisted demands; with Hendrich’s murder, it was a full-fledged homicide investigation.
But then at last, just as in all investigations, it was time to go home.
But I had two stops to make first.
Many of the criminology students in my grad program at Marquette have other jobs-some work in law enforcement, others are city officials. I’ve even had two people from the District Attorney’s Office in some of my classes. Because of the diverse schedules of the students, the graduate office has a work area that’s open late, and it’s not unusual to find people studying at all hours of the night hunched over a computer or a criminology textbook.
On the way to my apartment I swung by to pick up a copy of Dr. Werjonic’s lecture notes, then snagged an extra-large fried potato and steak burrito from Henry’s Burrito Heaven, and headed to my apartment.
I spread out the paperwork on the kitchen table and as I dug into my late supper, I reviewed five pieces of information we’d come up with over the last few hours.
1. Adele Westin was the name of the woman we’d found in the boxcar. I hated to admit that the media had helped us out, but this time around the press had done an admirable job of getting the word out quickly. A man from Plainfield named Carl Kowalski, a man who’d been arrested for grave robbery while we were at the train yards, told the police about the finger. One of the officers in Plainfield had heard about it on the news and made the connection. A little serendipitous, but often that’s just the way things work in cases. Which led to #2:
2. Kowalski had not only desecrated his grandmother’s grave, he had also skinned the corpse and left it at the same hardware store where Gein had committed one of his murders four decades ago.
3. During the day, Ellen and Corsica had come up with sixteen unsolved missing persons cases in Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin spanning the last two years involving women who fit the general description (race, age, build, hair color, socioeconomic status) of the women killed in Illinois and Ohio.
4. Thompson reported that no Champaign officers had ever worked in the Waukesha area and the chain of custody forms didn’t raise any red flags.
5. When Ellen and Corsica had delivered the search warrant and picked up Griffin’s receipts and subscription list, Corsica had asked him for a physical description of Hendrich, hoping to find out if he really was the guy who’d dealt with him, or if someone else had impersonated him, but Griffin said they’d only communicated by mail or by phone. She’d also asked about amputation saws, but he claimed he’d never sold one-though he would like to get his hands on one if she had a contact.
I reviewed: Dahmer and Gein.
Two cannibals.
Two days.
And bad things come in threes.
Wonderful.
As both Radar and I had observed earlier, most killers escalate. I couldn’t imagine what our guy had in mind for later this week, not if he was moving up the ladder from Dahmer and Gein.
After going through the case files and filling out my police report concerning the events of the evening, I came to the place where I needed to tip my thoughts in a less visceral, less disturbing direction, take a break from all the grisly images-both the ones on the pages before me and the ones in my hea
d.
It was late, but I tried calling Taci.
She didn’t pick up.
You’ll just have to sort things out in the morning during breakfast.
Maybe I could get some emotional distance from all of this by looking not at the specifics of the cases, but at the theories concerning how to investigate them instead.
I opened up the manila folder Dr. Werjonic had left for me and slid the papers out.
There was a note on top of the stack of papers:
Ring me in the morning, Detective Bowers, between 11:00 and 11:05. I’m at the downtown Sheraton. I think I may be able to help you with this case.
Cheers.
— C.W.
I slowly set down the papers.
Dr. Calvin Werjonic PhD, JD, eminent professor, world-renowned criminologist, was offering to help me with this case? Sure, the news media had released information regarding it, but how did he know I was the one working it?
Curious to see if any of his lecture notes might be applicable to what we were looking at here, I spread the photocopied pages across the table.
To my disappointment, his notes weren’t typed or organized in any clearly discernible manner, but they were handwritten scribbles that were, in most cases, almost indecipherable.
He’d probably been teaching the material for so long that he didn’t need many prompts to get him started on each topic. That might have been good if I were sitting in a lecture hall listening to him, but it wasn’t good for me sitting here in my apartment tonight.
However, he did include photocopied pages from one of his articles that appeared last year in the Journal of the International Association of Crime Analysts, a succinct summary of his two-pronged approach:
Geospatial investigation involves the evaluation of locations related to a crime to deduce the most statistically probable region out of which the offender bases his criminal activity. The complementary field of environmental criminology focuses on understanding the way offenders cognitively map their environments and rationally choose to act within their awareness space while committing their crimes.