Opening Moves pbf-6

by Steven James

  And finally, at dusk, everything would culminate with Joshua’s final ransom demand being met, live on national TV.

  With traffic, the trip to headquarters was slower than it should have been and it was 5:42 p.m. before I finally pulled into my parking spot in the underground garage.

  “Hey, listen,” I said to Radar, “I think I’m going to meet up with Ralph later tonight, have a couple beers, process things. You’re welcome to join us.”

  “Yeah, I think I’ll pass. I just need to get home.”

  “Right, well, listen, you did good out there.”

  He opened his door to leave, but then stopped short and looked at me, his eyes intense, searching. “Would you have done it?”

  “Done it?”

  “Fired. If you were standing where I was. If you saw what I did.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that; I didn’t know what he’d seen. “Of course.”

  “Thanks.”

  “For?”

  “Finding that knife on his belt.”

  Again I wasn’t sure how to respond. “Yeah.”

  Then he exited the car and walked silently across the parking garage toward his Jeep.

  When I reached my desk, I found a voice message from Dr. Werjonic that he was hoping we might be able to meet for dinner. Ralph had also left me a note asking me to call him so he could take me out for that beer he’d promised me this morning.

  I was still digesting the sub, but my hunger wasn’t completely satiated and I figured I could manage eating again in an hour or so. Make up for that missed lunch.

  Ralph left a number. I called it and found out it was the Overnite Motel, one of the cheapest motels on this side of the city. A federal employee who was actually saving taxpayers’ money. Imagine that.

  He wasn’t there, but I left a message with the front desk for him to call me. Then I dialed Dr. Werjonic, who picked up immediately. Before we could get to discussing any dinner plans, I asked him about his meeting with Slate.

  “Oh, it was quite interesting as a matter of fact. I’m anxious to tell you about it. But over dinner. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m afraid, however, that I’m not too familiar with your city. Everywhere I turn, I see another bar serving beer, burgers, and bratwurst. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly my cuisine of choice.”

  “I know just the place to go-Tanner’s Pub. It has one of the largest selections of single malt whiskey outside of Britain.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “And fish and chips like you wouldn’t believe. It used to be a speakeasy.”

  “Hmm…like the Safe House?”

  The Safe House is a famous restaurant in downtown Milwaukee, situated halfway down a dingy alley across the street from the Pabst Theater. You have to know where it is because there’s a secret entrance and you need to tell them the password to get in. The place is themed around spy memorabilia. If it has anything to do with espionage, it’ll be on the walls of the Safe House.

  “Atmosphere is completely different,” I told Calvin. “Instead of a 007 motif, Tanner’s is more like…well, I guess, more like a corner pub in London.”

  “Brilliant.”

  I was telling him the location when Ralph returned my call on the other line. “Hang on a second, Calvin.”

  A little phone shuffling and it was all set up-the three of us would meet at Tanner’s. They’d get together in thirty minutes and, since I’d been gone most of the day and needed to catch up a little here at my desk, I’d join them as soon as I could, hopefully within the hour.

  When we spoke, Ralph told me to check his workspace, that there was a pile of manila folders there. “The Oswald case files you wanted from Detective Browning over at the Waukesha county sheriff’s department. And you’re not gonna believe this: they were hand delivered by Browning himself.”

  Well, that was unexpected.

  “There’s a video too,” he went on, “of footage from archived news coverage of the case. Some interesting stuff in there. We’ll talk.”

  On my desk, Thorne had left me a copy of Heather Isle’s (or Slate Seagirt’s, as the case might’ve been) true crime book about the Oswalds, entitled The Spawn.

  I hung up the phone, and, after calling Ellen to ask her to find the sanitation workers Dane Strickland and Roger Kennedy and ask them about their relationship with Timothy Griffin, I found the files Ralph had told me about, flipped open the top folder, and began to read.

  67

  During the day the Maneater had been busy with other obligations at work and hadn’t been able to spend time with Celeste, but now at last he returned to her.

  She was still alive.

  That pleased him.

  Last night, before any of this, as they walked through the door to her apartment, she’d offered to give him, as she put it, “Perfumed whispers and sweet laughter, a night wrapped in melodies and dreams and fantasies finally coming true.”

  “It’s from a poem,” she explained with a half-inebriated smile. “I learned it for this one class in college and never forgot it. Not even once.”

  “That’s impressive,” he’d told her.

  As it turned out, fantasies really had come true last night. And now, as he took her to the pen where the cattle used to be slaughtered back when Brantner Meats was still in business, he was confident they were about to come true all over again.

  But not with perfumed whispers and sweet laughter.

  No. Other sounds altogether.

  68

  Bizarre.

  That was the best way to describe the Oswalds’ crimes.

  From an early age James had indoctrinated Ted to kill.

  During the trial, Ted’s defense attorney pointed out that James Oswald would often threaten to shoot his son, sometimes aiming a rifle at his head. When Ted was five years old, his father apparently killed puppies in front of him and mocked him if he showed any form of emotional response.

  The files contained transcripts of the trial proceedings between Ted and the prosecuting attorney:

  OSWALD

  : I thought the only way I could say no to him was to prepare to fight to the end. He didn’t say “I will kill you.” It was the implication.

  BENEDICT:

  What made you actually believe it?

  OSWALD

  : His details, the expression on his face. He’d show papers with lists of people he was going to kill. I can give you an example.

  BENEDICT

  : Please do.

  OSWALD

  : My physics teacher. I had gotten an A first semester, a B+ second semester. He [James Oswald] was irate. He described how he was going to have me get this guy. He was going to have me build a silencer in front of him and then shoot him in the belly and watch him barf…He [James Oswald] would as easily do it to me as to anyone else.

  I scanned the next few lines of testimony and came to Ted’s account of the one time he’d actually attempted to leave: “The dark side became a reality in the barn. Once you entered, there was no going back. The only way out was death. I couldn’t go to the refrigerator and get a glass of milk, go to the bathroom, go outside, pick up a pencil, watch TV without asking permission. I packed my clothes in a bag, attempted to go through the glass door. He caught me and stripped me down to my underwear. He had me kneel down, basically recite that he was the commander of the barn, the only way out was through him.”

  One piece of information I already knew: Eventually the father and son were tied to a string of bank robberies spread throughout southeastern Wisconsin. Each time they would arrive heavily armed, wearing clear plastic masks, and threaten the lives of bank employees if they called the police.

  After they were caught, it took the officers all day to go through the Oswalds’ Dodge County farm. Law enforcement had been told the barn was rigged to explode, and the bomb squad spent hours searching the area around the barn and the house with metal detectors looking for traps, before they actually entered a
nd found the Oswalds’ extensive arsenal of ammunition and weapons, including.50 caliber rifles. In the end, no bombs or booby traps were found.

  In one news conference, it was brought out that the FBI had obtained a photograph of James standing next to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City Bomber. When the reporters asked James what he thought of the Oklahoma City bombing, he said simply, “I think it was the wrong target.”

  The case files Browning had dropped off were comprehensive and, in some cases, inexplicably so. Not only did they include Ted Oswald’s Waukesha County criminal court records (case #1994CF000227), the records of the civil suit filed by Diane Lutz, the widow of the officer they’d killed (#1995CV001632), but also strangely enough, Ted’s Watertown Public Library card (number WT 50934), his USA wrestling competitor’s membership card from 1990 to 1991, and the freshman picture from his high school yearbook (page 116).

  It’s sometimes baffling what people consider evidence.

  Perhaps most troubling were the pages from Ted’s journal.

  The diary contained drawings of swastikas, swords, assault rifles, and an often-repeated saying, “freedom for the strong.” He detailed his father’s and his plan to carry out raids in Indiana and Michigan, to kill the “pigs” and to start “Jajauna,” the code word they used to describe the crime spree they were precipitating. According to Ted’s journal, he was planning to “conquer world by 39 instead of 38.”

  He had disturbing, chilling, but remarkably puerile plans for more crimes:

  Day 1

  Do one pig in morning and one in afternoon.

  Make sure all heros are killed.

  Get birth certificate of real dead person.

  Day 2

  8am-wake up

  10am-hit 1st taget

  — Get away

  1pm-look for new target

  4pm-hit 2nd target

  — Get away

  10 pm-Bed in AC at big Hotel

  Day 3

  Same as Day 2

  March 4, 1995, an article in the Milwaukee Journal reported that in his testimony, Ted claimed that his father “believed he [James] was a different species born out of humanity, a mutant. His goal of humanity was to become a superman…that’s what I was supposed to become. I was nothing but his spawn…his property.”

  The Spawn, the title of the true crime book.

  In the end, the jury didn’t believe that Ted was afraid for his life when he committed the crimes, and convicted him to two life sentences plus more than four hundred fifty years.

  Ted had recently turned eighteen when he and his father killed Captain Lutz. The sentencing of minors is almost never as severe as adults and I couldn’t imagine he would have gotten as harsh of a sentence like he did if he’d been seventeen.

  Quite an eye-opening birthday present.

  I lost myself in reviewing the files and when I looked up, I saw that more than an hour had passed and I was already late for meeting up with Ralph and Calvin at Tanner’s Pub.

  69

  Dr. Werjonic flagged me from a booth against the back wall.

  Ralph had a pint of beer in front of him, Calvin a shot glass of whiskey. Both of their plates had already been cleared away.

  On the way over I took in the place.

  Hundreds of bottles of liquor rested on shelves above the bar and a variety of British memorabilia decorated the walls-pictures, postcards, photos of soccer matches. The bathroom doors halfway down a short hallway were labeled LADIES and GENTS. Darts to the right, bagpipe music overhead, the smell of fish and chips all around. Just like I remembered from the time Taci and I came here a couple months ago. Right now that was not an easy memory to contend with.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I told them as I took a seat. “I was reading over the Oswald files. Kind of lost track of time.”

  “It’s a crazy case, isn’t it?” Ralph said.

  “Sure is.”

  He pounded the table with his fist. “Well, let me get you something to drink. You want some food too?”

  “I could eat something.”

  I ordered a pint of lager from a local microbrewery that had just opened, and a platter of fish and chips.

  Second supper.

  “Good choice of a restaurant, my boy,” Calvin exclaimed. “I feel like I’m back home.”

  “Glad to hear that.”

  He slid me a manila folder-they were everywhere today. “Notes from today’s lecture. I thought you might be interested.”

  “You read my mind.”

  The two of them had heard about what’d happened with Griffin and they peppered me with questions, so even though I was anxious to hear about Slate, I took some time to fill them in on Griffin’s death.

  Considering that Dr. Werjonic had consulted with law enforcement agencies all over the world, on the way here I’d decided that tomorrow morning I would ask Thorne if we could bring him in on the case as a consultant. In the meantime, considering Calvin wasn’t yet working with the department, I shared as much as I could.

  “And Mallory?” Ralph asked concernedly. “How’s she doing?”

  “Hard to say. I couldn’t really tell if she was sad or relieved that Griffin was dead.” My food arrived. I waited until the server had walked away. “Just before they wheeled her onto the ambulance, she told me something pretty unnerving: the woman in the photo-you remember, Ralph, the one Griffin was-”

  “Stroking a little too fondly.”

  “Yeah. Well, Mallory told me that was her mother, Griffin’s wife.”

  A stony kind of silence followed my words, then Ralph gave a long, low whistle. “That’s one”-he glanced at Dr. Werjonic and perhaps thought he was too distinguished to appreciate a little cussing, and appeared to alter course right in the middle of his thought-“screwed-up family.”

  “Indeed,” Calvin agreed.

  “So…” I was ready to move past Griffin and his crimes. “Slate,” I said to Calvin. “Let’s hear about him.”

  “Caucasian. Mid-fifties. Slightly graying hair. Brown eyes. Attached earlobes. Approximately eighty-five kilos.”

  At the mention of kilos Ralph glanced at me grumpily.

  “Um, about a hundred eighty-five pounds,” I whispered to him.

  “Based on his height and approximate body mass index, that would put him”-Calvin did a quick calculation in his head-“I would say about forty-five pounds overweight. Married. Right-handed. Bites his fingernails rather than clipping them. He was dressed casually in khakis and an inexpensive oxford that he hadn’t taken the care to tuck in all the way. On the right side of his neck he had a distinctive birthmark in the shape of a crescent.”

  Ralph glanced at me and it was clear he was thinking the same thing I was. He said, “Sounds like Detective Browning from the Waukesha Sheriff’s Department.”

  Yup, he was thinking the same thing.

  The birthmark was the clincher.

  Calvin eyed us curiously. “A detective, you say?”

  “He wasn’t too happy about having us look into the Oswald records,” Ralph answered. “And this could explain why.”

  I thought things through. “Well, if he really is the author and used Griffin as his source, then their association could explain how Griffin got his hands on the Oswald cuffs. And it could explain why Browning hand-delivered the Oswald files today. He was coming to town anyway.”

  “To meet with me,” Calvin said.

  “To meet with you.”

  “A tit for a tat,” he mused. “Browning obtains the information he needs for his books, then in exchange, he gives Griffin access to evidence. Criminal symbiosis.”

  It was becoming clearer to me that even though all the threads weren’t ostensibly visible, everything in this investigation was linked, inextricably, beneath the surface. My kind of case.

  I recalled the photos Browning had on his desk of him serving at different police departments in the state throughout the years. “Browning’s been around a long time. He could probably get acces
s to other evidence rooms without too much trouble.”

  I wondered if he knew anything about Griffin’s involvement in Mindy’s and Jenna’s murders. It seemed like a stretch that he would’ve known and not done anything to apprehend him, but if he was relying on Griffin for information for his books, he had a dog in the hunt and it was possible.

  Motives.

  You just can’t untangle people’s motives.

  “He only gave me the name Slate,” Calvin noted. “I didn’t actually ask to see his driver’s license, so I can’t confirm if he really is this detective.”

  I asked, “What exactly did he say?”

  Calvin filled us in about their meal. Slate-or Browning, if it really was him-was researching Mindy’s case and wanted to apply some of Calvin’s geographic-profiling theories to try to postulate where the killer might live.

  “I told him that he would need more locations for the calculations to be effective. He had certainly done his research-his knowledge of the intricacies of the case was impressive. Patrick, you mentioned the jacket just now in your account of what happened at the Griffin home. Slate mentioned it too.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Just that it was found with the child, but he had a crime scene photo of the inside of the tree house.” Calvin evaluated that for a moment, then tapped the table lightly. “I’ve been thinking, the timing of his contacting me might not have been because of your connection to the case, but because of my visit to Milwaukee for the lecture series. It would make sense that he would try to speak to me while I’m here.”

  “Well,” I said, “if Browning really is Slate, we need to have a little talk with him.”

  “I’ll take care of that first thing in the morning.” Ralph’s words were iron and I knew I would not want to be in Browning’s shoes during that little exchange.

  Ralph finished off his pint. “By the way, Pat, Griffin’s subscription list didn’t yield anything. So it looks like that’s another dead end.”