by Steven James
“Well,” Calvin remarked. “That’s helpful.”
We both looked at him. “It’s helpful that we ran into a dead end?” I asked.
“Every dead end shows you more clearly the pattern of the labyrinth. You now have one more piece of information that will help you fail your way to success.”
That was an interesting way to put it.
But actually, I kind of liked it.
“I’ve been thinking about Indiana,” Calvin added. “I have some ideas, but I’d like to check on a few things first. Perhaps I can share them with you in the morning?”
“Great.”
“Ring me at eight.”
“Will do.”
It was only after Calvin had left and Ralph and I were on our way to the door ourselves that he brought up the topic of Taci. “How are you doing, man? You okay?”
Truthfully, I’d been so consumed with this case and what’d happened with Griffin that I hadn’t been thinking much about the breakup-at least not as much as I would’ve expected. “Better than I thought,” I told him.
“Yeah, well, you’ll be tempted to do it, but don’t.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Dwell on it. Let pain become your home.”
I hesitated. “Okay. Thanks.”
“I’m saying this because you brood. I can tell.”
“I brood?”
“Yeah. You brood. You’re a brooder.”
“I’m not a brooder.”
“Oh, I’ll bet you are.” We came to the door and he paused, eyed me up. “I’ll bet you’re Mr. Brooder when no one else is around.”
“Really?” I opened the door, led him outside. “And who are you, Captain Sunshine?”
“That the best you can come up with?” He stopped beside me, folded his Herculean arms. “I’ll wait. Go on. Try again. I’m in no hurry.”
I thought hard, but no clever comebacks came to mind and that just annoyed me worse.
“Thought so.” He turned his collar to the wind. “Go get some sleep, man. You and Radar nailed Griffin. That’s a good thing. Tomorrow we go at this again. Be ready. Things are starting to heat up.”
“Right.”
“I’ll see you in the morning.”
“See you tomorrow, Ralph.”
Then I went home to watch the video footage that Browning had left us, and to read the notes Calvin had given me at the pub, and to page through Heather Isle’s-or Detective Browning’s-book: anything to keep me distracted, to keep me from thinking about Taci.
No, I told myself. I wasn’t going to brood.
I was going to solve this case.
DAY 4
Wednesday, November 19
The Hospital Room
70
4:42 a.m.
Joshua’s bedside phone rang.
Sylvia was asleep beside him, her arm draped lovingly across his chest, and she jerked involuntarily when the phone jangled. He was already awake, however, thinking about what would happen at First Capital Bank in just under twelve hours.
Surprised by getting a call at this time of night, he slid out from under Sylvia’s arm to answer the phone. She rolled in the other direction with a soft, sleep-infused sigh.
Joshua spoke into the receiver. “Yes?”
“Someone has not been playing well with others.”
“What?”
“I know what you were doing in that train car, Joshua.”
An initial, almost debilitating chill swept over him, but it dissolved quickly with the revelation that this did not sound like something a cop would say. “Train car?”
“You’ll learn it’s not smart to leave that much evidence behind. Remember, everything you touch is an arrow leading back to you. You have to leave arrows that point somewhere else.”
Words that might have come from the mouth of Joshua’s own father, if he were not dead.
This is the man! This is the one you’ve been trying to get the attention of! The one from Illinois and Ohio!
Joshua stepped as far from the bed as the phone cord would allow, then whispered so Sylvia wouldn’t hear, “You’re the one who killed Hendrich.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“To leave an arrow pointing somewhere else.”
Joshua processed that. “The gate was locked, how’d you get him in there?”
“The hole in the fence. It’s amazing how compliant someone will be when he believes his life is in danger and that it might be spared.”
“And you banged on the track to alert me? Why?”
“You were cutting it too close. One of the detectives was on his way to your boxcar.”
“But how did you find me? How did you-”
“Colleen.”
“Colleen?”
“Let’s just call it luck.”
Joshua’s heart was racing almost as much as it had when he’d listened to Colleen scream in the boxcar. “When can I meet you?”
“Is that what you want? Is that why you’re doing all this?”
“Yes.”
“Auditioning?”
He hadn’t thought of it exactly that way before. “Yes.”
“What you’ve been doing is child’s play-having someone leave a man in an alley? Coercing someone to drop off a corpse at a hardware store? I’m not sure you’re taking this seriously.”
How does he know? How did he find you!
“I can assure you that I am.”
“Why the hands?”
“Colleen’s?”
“Yes, why did you cut off her hands?”
“My father taught me that, except he did it after they were dead.”
“They?”
“The people he brought to the place beneath the barn. He first took me down there when I was eight. He showed me what to do.”
Joshua expected the man to ask him what’d happened there under the barn, or what exactly his father had taught him to do, or maybe, if he’d eaten Colleen’s hands. But the man did not ask any of those things. Instead he said, “What do you have planned next?”
“Something special. It involves a police officer.”
“Go on.”
Joshua was beginning to get the sense that he’d already shared too much with this man. He didn’t recognize the voice, but he wondered if it might possibly be a law enforcement officer after all. “That’s all I can tell you.”
“I need to know you’re serious.”
“I am. Quite serious.”
“When will it happen? With the officer?”
“Today at twilight.”
Sundown.
Dusk.
The gloaming.
“Four twenty-five. To be exact.”
“Four twenty-five.”
“Yes.”
“If I’m impressed, I’ll contact you and we’ll meet. If I’m not impressed, you’ll never hear from me again.”
“We’re the same,” Joshua said, sensing that the man was about to hang up. “You know that. You and I.”
“If I thought you were the same as me, I’d never agree to meet with you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’d be afraid you were going to kill and eat me. But not necessarily in that order.”
And then the line went dead.
71
7:25 a.m.
9 hours until the gloaming
Life is paradox.
That’s what I was thinking when I woke up, sat up in bed, and stared at the phone, trying to decide if I should call Taci.
Paradox.
We want joy, but we read novels that make us cry. We’re desperate to be truly known by others; yet we go to incredible lengths to hide who we really are. We say we want truth, then rationalize it away when it gets too personal.
We want the paradoxical extremes of security and adventure, of independence and intimacy, and if we have neither, or only one or the other, we’re in psychological trouble: anyone who wants only intimacy is clingy and dependent; anyone
who wants only independence is self-centered and dangerous.
We want to be free, but not too free; loved but not too tied down.
Paradox.
In essence, to be emotionally healthy, to be well-rounded, somehow we need to find a way to live in the constant tension of our desires; only people in perpetual conflict with themselves come the closest to finding peace.
Or love.
So.
Taci.
I knew her schedule for today, knew she would be leaving for the hospital at eight to work a twenty-four-hour rotation. So, she would still be home right now.
But then gone for twenty-four hours.
Call her.
No, no, no. Don’t call her.
I was caught in the middle of human nature’s greatest paradox of all: only when you love someone enough to let her walk away and not hold it against her have you finally found the truest form of love.
But then, it’s too late.
With that thought hovering around me, I didn’t call her, but left for the bathroom to shower and get dressed.
A quick recap.
I ran it through in my mind.
Griffin was dead, Mallory recovering. We hadn’t learned yet if Browning knew about Griffin’s crimes, but this morning Ralph was going to find out.
I was waiting to hear back from Ellen whether Roger Kennedy and Dane Strickland, the men responsible for dumping Dahmer’s possessions in the Fort Atkinson landfill, had known Griffin.
The person who’d killed Bruce Hendrich was still at large. We didn’t know yet if he was also the man who’d abducted Adele Westin and Colleen Hayes. Additionally, the man who’d killed the women in Ohio and Illinois was still at large. We didn’t know whether he was the same man either. One man, or two, or three, we still didn’t know.
After reviewing the notes Calvin had given me last night, as well as the last three pages of the stack he’d provided earlier, I realized I didn’t have the mathematical background to do the geographic-profiling calculations in any reasonable amount of time. I would definitely need a computer and his software to analyze this data properly.
At the pub he’d said to call him at eight, just ten minutes from now. We could set up a time to go over the numbers then.
Last night I’d stayed up late, going through the Oswald video footage and case files, and there were papers strewn all across my living room floor.
But Radar was on my mind and, instead of picking up the papers, I phoned Reverend Padilla, the police chaplain. “I think maybe you should talk with Radar.”
“About the shooting?”
“Yes. He seemed, well…I’m a little worried about how it might be affecting him.”
“I’ll give him a call.”
Then I got in touch with Thorne. He had no problem with us consulting with Calvin about the case.
“Just fill out the paperwork when you get to the department,” he told me.
“Great.”
At last I scooped up the papers and popped the video out of the VCR.
By a fluke, WISN Channel 12 News had a cameraman stationed in the area during the Oswalds’ apprehension. The station had gotten the dispatch call and sent out a camera crew since they thought it was going to be a hostage situation.
As it turned out, the cameraman had gotten live footage of the Oswalds driving through a police barricade, trying to escape, and then crashing into a tree. I remembered seeing a minute or two of the footage back in 1994 after their arrest-it was played repeatedly for the next few weeks as the daily news reports followed the story.
But last night I’d watched the complete footage, as well as parts of the news shows, and now I gathered together the notes I’d jotted down:
• Van: Blue. Stolen from 46-year-old Judy Opat. They made her drive it when they abducted her. After she jumped out, they tried to escape but within thirty seconds crashed into a tree.
• SWAT surrounded them, but they refused to throw their guns out of the van. The standoff lasted three hours (thankfully the footage didn’t).
• Earlier that morning, the Oswalds had robbed a bank in Wales at 9:30. At 9:36 a.m., the officers received a call and dispatched vehicles to apprehend the suspects.
• The chase ensued from the corner of 18 and 83.
• As they fled, they were approached by Captain James Lutz on Meadowbrook Road. They shot him six times, fatally wounding him.
• After Lutz’s murder, the chase re-ensued at the intersection of SS and G near the Rocky Point subdivision on the west side of Pewaukee Lake. The shoot-out occurred when the suspects were hemmed in by a roadblock on the corner of SS and Oak Street.
• Other injuries from the shoot-out-Judy was hit by a bullet that entered her right shoulder and exited her armpit, two other officers were shot and treated, one suffered minor abrasions. The officers, hostage, and subsequently, the suspects, were all treated at Waukesha Memorial Hospital.
After cleaning up the living room, I called Calvin and told him he was in as a consultant.
“Splendid. Then I think there are some things we should discuss this morning.”
We agreed to meet at eight forty-five at Marquette in the Criminology and Law Studies grad office where he was heading to prepare his lecture for this afternoon’s seminar. “I’ll bring my computer,” he offered. “Then we can plug in the data, try to find out where our offender might actually live.”
That gave me just under half an hour before I needed to leave.
Figuring I’d make the best of it, I set about reviewing Werjonic’s algorithms so I could at least try to understand what we would be discussing at eight forty-five.
72
8:25 a.m.
8 hours until the gloaming
An infected and barbarous heart.
The words seemed almost audible to Joshua, who tried to tune them out, tried to bury them beneath the memory of killing Petey Schwartz last Friday, the man whose funeral he was going to attend today at noon.
You have an infected and barbarous heart.
He chose a tie and slung it around his neck.
Attending the funeral of a man you’ve killed contains a sad and tragic irony. Perhaps even a touch of sadism. But killing Petey had not been something Joshua had been planning to do at all. They both just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Still, when the moment came, when the homeless man came at him, Joshua had, without hesitation, plunged the necrotome into his belly just the way his father had taught him to do in the barn when he was a boy.
And he had moved it back and forth.
Just like his father had taught him.
Petey had looked at him strangely as Joshua hugged him closer, held him until the man had no more strength to stand on his own. Then he helped him to the ground so he could finish bleeding to death on the sidewalk.
After he had, Joshua stared at the body.
No one will even miss him.
No one will ever know.
This is the perfect time to do it.
But eating Petey Schwartz’s diseased, unbathed flesh was not something Joshua was ready to do. He’d learned long ago, when his father was still alive, that you have to use discernment. You have to exhibit self-control.
He finished with the tie.
The city paid to bury vagrants, but the West Reagan Street Mission was the one to arrange memorial services for the homeless people in the neighborhood who died.
There was no way they could afford a service at an actual funeral home and there was no practical way for the homeless people who would be attending to get there anyway, so the service would be held right there at the mission, just three blocks from the train yards.
As Joshua headed out the door, he ran through his plan for the day one last time. He would head to work for a few hours, attend Petey Schwartz’s funeral at noon, then stop by Kohl’s department store to get the box he would be sending the police officer.
Then he could pick up the children, deliv
er the package, and wait for the cop to die.
Finally, this evening when it was all said and done, he would meet the man who’d called him earlier this morning. The man who was going to become his partner.
73
I parked on Wells Street, walked from there, and found Calvin in the graduate office, bent over the highest-end laptop computer I’d ever seen, meticulously entering data.
He didn’t look up. “Good morning, Detective.”
I knew he was expecting me, but it could have been someone else walking in-yet there was certainty in his voice when he identified who I was.
“Everyone’s gait is distinctive,” I surmised. “You remembered mine.”
“Quite right.” He pointed at his computer screen. “I’ve taken the liberty of entering the information that you mapped out yesterday on the corkboard. First, we’ll treat the homicides from Ohio and Illinois as if they’re separate from the abduction/demand crimes here this week, and then recalculate the data as if the crimes were all linked. Agreed?”
I liked that he was diving right in. “Agreed.”
“So…” But instead of turning his attention to the computer screen, he directed me to an AAA map of the Midwest. With red Magic Marker he’d identified Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the sites of the homicides in Champaign, Illinois, and White Oak, Ohio. “Entrance and exit routes…drive times. What do you think they would be?”
The sites formed a lopsided triangle. “I don’t know. Let’s see, from Milwaukee to White Oak … I’d say almost seven hours. From there to Champaign, four or so. From Champaign back to Milwaukee, another four hours.”
“Very good.” He traced the highways with his finger as he told me the mileage: “Three hundred seventy-seven miles. Two hundred twenty-seven. Two twenty-five. Who would drive that far to commit his crimes?”
I didn’t want to assume too much. “Ralph and Agent Parker, she’s another FBI agent on the case, they already looked into traveling salesmen, that sort of thing, before getting up here. Distribution centers for food service, trucking routes, all that-didn’t come up with anything. No companies that have routes or shipping centers in those cities or the surrounding small towns.”