Leif: I don’t know. I think so.
Peter: You think so.
Leif: I was tripping.
Peter: What about your brother?
Leif: What about him?
Peter: Peg says he’s missing?
Leif: Seems that way.
Peter: And? Dee too? Doesn’t that seem odd to you? Were they spending a lot of time together?
Leif: Look. The shit Erik’s going through . . . It’s got nothing to do with Dee.
Peter: Why do you say that?
Leif: Erik’s . . . a troubled kid, okay? Dee’s got none of those kind of problems.
Peter: Where is he?
Leif: Like I said, I don’t know. I wish I did. But I’m telling you. This is normal behavior for him. He runs away. Disappears all the time. He always shows up again.
Peter: When he does, you let him know we need to talk to him.
Leif: Sure. He doesn’t know anything about this stuff with Dee, though. I guarantee you.
Peter: Who, in your best estimation, might know?
Leif: I’d be knocking down Frank’s door if I were you guys. I met the guy, and he is a real piece of work.
Peter: We can’t find him either.
Leif: Jesus, everybody’s got the idea to disappear except me, I guess.
Federal Rules of Evidence
Article VII. Opinions and Expert Testimony
Rule 702. Testimony by Expert Witnesses
A witness who is qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education may testify in the form of an opinion or otherwise if: (a) the expert’s scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will help the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue.
June 2019
Wolski said that according to state law, if we wanted to excavate the spot the psychic had identified, we’d need to hire an archaeologist. He found a woman who had led the excavation of the largest cemetery on the county grounds. The Wisconsin Historical Society confirmed: There was no other archaeologist in the state who knew these cemeteries better. Wolski contacted her, gave her a brief overview of our situation, and she wrote back immediately and asked us to come in.
Pete asked if I’d go with Wolski to meet this archaeologist at UWM. I don’t know what I expected—someone in a pith helmet and a khaki vest?—but the woman we met was fashionably dressed in knee-high leather boots, leggings, and a floral-print dress. She had a streak of blue in her curly black hair. I stared at it and she smiled. She said we could call her Dr. P.
She ushered us into her office, a bright, sunny room with potted plants cluttered on the windowsills, dusty books, and pictures of children. There was an odd sculpture on one of her bookshelves: a brass pelvis through which a tiny brass human head was peeking out. The head was attached to a metal chain so one could pull the head all the way through the pelvis. Outside her office, young people stood on rubber mats, bending over skeletons—people, actual people—and taking tiny notes on pieces of paper.
She sat down and motioned for us to do the same.
“What can I do for you folks?” she asked us.
Wolski pulled out a map of the county grounds. He handed it to her. “We have reason to believe that Candace McBride might be buried here,” he told her. “I understand this land is in development.”
She nodded. “The Medical College of Wisconsin leases it from Milwaukee County. They have plans to build a cardiac hospital. But they knew what they were getting into.” She pointed at the map behind her, which had the outlines of hundreds of coffins spread in acres across the Milwaukee County Grounds. There was an empty white space, and she took the map from Wolski and pointed from the place where he’d showed her the X on his map to the empty place on her map. “See this?” she asked us. “Graves. Known graves all around this swatch. Every indication would suggest there are people buried there too.”
“So what will the Medical College do?” Wolski asked her.
“We’re going to excavate some of these graves so they can build their hospital. But they’re not breaking ground for another couple of months.”
Wolski shook his head. “We want to dig here,” he said. “Can you help us?”
She paused. I looked at her desk, where there was a Ball jar filled with dust. When I looked closer, I thought I saw the glint of bone fragments floating in the dust.
“Can I ask why you have reason to believe she’s there?”
I felt my face flush. “A psychic,” I told her. At first she thought I was joking, and then when she realized I wasn’t, she straightened her face. I immediately respected her.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
When I got back to my apartment, Leif was waiting outside. When you don’t see someone for a long time, it’s easy for them to become frozen in your memory. When I remembered Dee, or Leif, or Erik, I thought of the way they were that summer, young and beautiful, sure, but also smug. I had been like that too once, wasting days carelessly, because I believed I had an endless supply of them ahead. But Leif had shed his smugness and taken on a humility in his carriage, which was almost as shocking to see as his gray hair or his green eyes faded to pale moss.
“I thought you said you weren’t coming back,” I said to him.
“I changed my mind,” he said. “I didn’t want you to be alone.”
“I’ve been alone. How did you find me?”
“Are you going to let me up or no?”
I unlocked the door and he followed me inside.
After Dee disappeared, something odd happened to my relationship with the city of Milwaukee. As a young woman, I believed I knew the city quite well—all its east-west arteries, and the borders of the neighborhoods through which these arteries ran, each neighborhood’s quirks, and, importantly, all of the underage bars. But after my family had pored over many maps of Milwaukee in an attempt to plot Dee’s disappearance, the city became strange and ugly to me. After I’d looked at the city on the maps, the place took on an odd, unfamiliar persona in which every shape carried some previously unforeseen potential for danger: the jaggedness of the shoreline along Lake Michigan, the crooked rectangles of the neighborhoods, the tannic rivers bleeding their way through the city to the swamps in the suburbs, the highways built up like militaristic border walls between the rich and the poor.
And upon seeing Leif for the first time in thirty years, I was reminded of this unsettling experience: the way something or someone you once loved can become frightening and strange to you. It can happen faster than you think.
Leif walked around my apartment like it was a museum. He kept a respectful distance between his body and my belongings as he wound his way around the stacks of shit spread across my living room floor. The stacks reminded me suddenly of the pictures I’d seen of those sad islands of plastic floating in the ocean: People said they grow larger every day. I had no doubt it was true. He considered the place much as Dana had the first time she visited; I could tell he didn’t want to appear too disturbed for fear of spooking me or for fear of being thrown out. But I didn’t really mind; I knew how the place looked. I understood that over the year (probably since I’d split with Henry for the final time), my living conditions had tipped perhaps irrevocably into the realm of the insane. Leif stared at a stack of library books reaching toward the ceiling; their plastic covers shone down incriminatingly at me.
“Why are you here?” I asked him.
“You asked me to come back,” he said.
“I didn’t mean it.”
“You did.”
“You can’t stay,” I said.
“I see that.” He eyed the apartment crammed with junk. “Look, we want the same thing, right? We don’t want that story to be the story.”
“I don’t think I even care anymore.” I tried out my mother’s language, but it felt wrong in my mouth, in my body.
Leif could sense that. “You know I don’t believe that,” he said.
He tried at a l
augh, but it came out as a grunt. I thought of my mother. Were none of us, anymore, capable of expressing the appropriate emotion? Perhaps we had all been inflicted with a kind of emotional lability. It occurred to me that of course we had. I shrugged at him and then I became irate. I didn’t like people using my own pathetic capacity for hope against me. Not even my family was allowed this transgression. There was too much at stake. There was always so much at stake.
“He’s dead, you know,” Leif said. “Erik.”
“I know,” I said.
“I wasn’t sure you’d heard me,” he said. “I tried to call . . .”
“I . . . had a hard time with those calls.”
“Yeah. Anyway, I did enough damage when he was a kid. So this is the least I can do—I’m not gonna let this fraud tell a bunch of lies about my brother.”
Leif reached for my stolen copy of Edith Hamilton’s book (perhaps it reminded him too of Erik or of Dee), which was wedged at the bottom of a precarious stack. I turned away before the entire thing toppled to the floor. I only heard the thud of the books as they hit the hardwood.
August 1991
After they arrested Leif, Peter called in a favor with one of his law school buddies at Marquette. He said with all the bad press, and the serial killer coverage, the last thing the Milwaukee PD would want was some press-hungry law student sniffing around the missing-persons unit. He was almost right.
Over breakfast, Peter told Ma and me he had begun to take the matter of Frank into his own hands. He’d gone to the bowling alley where Leif and I had hung out with Frank and Dee. He’d shown the police sketch of Frank’s face to the owner, and mentioned something about the cops, and the guy had given up an address he thought was Frank’s. Apparently, they hadn’t been that good of buddies.
“I think we should go over there and check it out,” Pete said.
Ma shook her head. “That’s a job for a cop,” she said.
“The cops are too busy for us,” he said. “In case you haven’t noticed. Wolski is barely helping as it is. I did this all on my own.”
“Yeah, I don’t know, Pete,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s safe. Or legal?” I was torn. I wanted the chance to find something that might incriminate Frank, but the idea of going to his apartment frightened me.
“I thought you, of all people, would be on board. Where is this damn guy, anyway? It’s getting ridiculous.”
Peter shook with nervous caffeinated energy. None of us slept very well at night, and we all required an unhealthy amount of coffee just to stay upright during the days.
“What did Wolski say?” Ma asked.
“He said absolutely we should not go over there without him. If he has time later today, he’ll check it out.”
I became defiant then. “Fuck that,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Pete looked pleased.
Frank’s apartment was in the Menomonee River Valley, a low-lying post-industrial desert full of abandoned factory buildings, some of which had been converted into posh apartment buildings and some of which had been left to rot. Frank’s building had been converted from an old light fixture factory. I had a memory of the place from when I was a little girl. The building had large, high windows, and from the highway overpass, you could see through these windows to the thousands of lamps strung up to the factory ceiling. They’d kept the lights on so often, and there were so many of them, I wondered if that was part of the reason they’d gone out of business. On one side of Frank’s building was an abandoned lot; I couldn’t remember what, if anything, had been there before. On the other side was a dilapidated warehouse that looked perilously close to falling into the river.
When we got there, Peter and I stayed in his car for a minute, surveying the property. We didn’t talk. I wanted to know if he had a premonition too, if he felt what I was feeling, but I didn’t even know how to say what I was feeling. Is this the last place Dee was alive? Is this my fault? Is Frank in there? Is Dee? And you know how it goes with premonitions: People never believe you anyway.
We were just about to go in when Wolski showed up. I looked at Pete, who frowned.
“Did you tell him we were coming?” I asked him.
“Hell no,” Pete said. A swell of suspicion rose up inside me. We watched Wolski approach our car. I felt compelled to punish him for his incompetency, for his duplicitousness.
“You look like shit,” I said while he shook Peter’s hand. Wolski’s hair was long and uncombed and fell in greasy strips across his unshaven face. His clothes were wrinkled. He needed a shower.
“Long night, kid,” he said to me. He added to Peter, “I told you to wait for me.”
Peter’s face went red. “We’ve been waiting, Gary.”
“Fine,” Wolski said. He tried to soften his tone. “We’re here now, so let’s get this done.”
Wolski outlined our procedure. He handed us gloves. We weren’t supposed to touch anything. And we’d stay behind him as we entered the apartment. If Frank was there, Wolski had a list of questions (as did we), and we’d talk for a bit, survey the apartment to the best of our ability, and leave. If Frank wasn’t there, we’d leave a note on his door relaying our information and our need to speak with him as soon as possible. Wolski’s plan seemed very rational, but even so, I felt nervous as we went inside. Someone had left a jamb under the front door to keep it open: a construction crew, maybe. There was a long list of buzzers but no names next to them. The building was quiet and smelled of fresh paint. It didn’t have a lived-in feel about it. We took an old elevator up to the sixth floor.
Wolski knocked, as he had on Leif’s apartment door, and we waited. There was a faint noise inside the apartment, but it didn’t sound like someone coming to the door. Wolski knocked again, and again, and when the noise on the other side kept up but no one came, he shouted, “Milwaukee PD. Open up.” I smelled something like shit wafting from under the apartment door. Wolski knocked again, but still there was nothing. Peter had a frightened, desperate look on his face; it was like looking into a mirror. Before Wolski could stop him, Peter grabbed the doorknob and then kicked the door, which was unlocked, wide open on its hinges. The smell of shit hit all three of us, and Wolski put a wrinkled sleeve up against his nose. “Dammit,” he shouted. “Not part of the plan.”
Inside, there was dog shit everywhere. The apartment was relatively bare, but the few pieces of furniture left had been destroyed, chewed to bits, covered in fur, and saturated with dog piss. There was a noise from the bedroom, a throaty bark, and then a massive blur of fur lunged at all three of us. But before the dog was halfway to us, Wolski had shot it twice in the head. The animal fell in a starved, writhing heap of fur on the floor.
“Jesus,” Peter said. “Why didn’t you just close the door?”
“Why the hell did you open the door?” Wolski asked. “You’re welcome, by the way.”
The dog was still twitching. I almost wished Wolski would shoot it again, but I didn’t know if I could stomach the sight of another shot. The blood leaking from its head was beginning to spread across the floorboards. The smell of the place was awful. Why hadn’t anyone called about the animal? About the smell? Did no one else live in the building?
Wolski was breathing heavy. His gun resting against his kneecap, he was doubled over, trying to catch his breath. “Dammit,” he said. “Last night,” he offered cryptically.
This seemed like an invitation to ask, but neither Peter nor I wanted to know anything about his night.
“We’re here now, so we might as well look around,” Wolski said after he’d finally caught his breath. “Like I said, just don’t fucking touch anything.”
I wanted to leave. I couldn’t take my eyes off the dead dog, whose muscles had finally stopped but whose eyes were open and rolling up and down. Its thick pink tongue lolled. It had on a choke collar that had become embedded. I tried to think of the dog as a puppy, but this thought paralyzed me. Peter had begun his search, and I tried to move but found that the p
rospect nauseated me.
Wolski came up beside me. “In the city, they train the dogs to attack men in uniforms—it’s targeted toward police officers, obviously, but it gives everyone hell. Mailmen, firefighters, paramedics, mechanics in jumpsuits,” he offered.
“We’re not wearing uniforms,” I said.
“We’re used to them charging, I guess, is what I’m saying. Come on, let’s get to work.”
I followed Pete and Wolski around the apartment, eyeing the bloodstain blooming in the center of the place, and barely seeing anything except the dog. I went through the motions, but I wouldn’t have seen something important if it had hit me over the head. According to Pete and Wolski, the most interesting thing was that there was hardly anything of interest. The place looked like it had been swept of personal effects. Frank’s things (beside his mad dog) were gone, and it wasn’t like he’d left in a rush and grabbed only a few things, he’d taken everything. It looked calmly, methodically cleansed of his belongings. It was like he’d been warned.
In the car on the way home, I smelled Peter; sweat stains were spreading beneath his armpits like large, dark bodies of water. He clenched and unclenched his jaw, and I worried he’d file his teeth to grit. He slammed his fist into the steering wheel, the horn blared, and people changed out of our lane, sped past us, or held way back.
“We’ll get a ticket if you keep this speed up,” I said.
Peter eyed the speedometer. “In case you haven’t noticed, the fucking police are hog-tied in this city.”
“Still,” I said. “You’re scaring me.”
Peter’s face softened, and he eased off the accelerator. Sweat dripped from his temples. I wiped a drop from his chin with my thumb.
“I should kill him,” Peter said.
I watched the city shift into suburbs behind the highway fence. Kids on bikes chased one another in the cul-de-sacs next to the freeway.
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