Opening Moves (12 page)

The den of the damned.

He shifted his thoughts back to Colleen. After cutting off her left hand, he’d faced a choice—drug her before doing the other one, or leave her awake during the process.

Of course he might have gagged her as well, but where he’d taken her, it wasn’t as if they were going to be discovered. The screams hadn’t posed much of a problem. And he kind of liked hearing the strangely muted, yet metallic sounds as they echoed all around him in that place and then disappeared into the thin night air.

While he’d tried to decide whether or not to leave her conscious before sawing off her right hand, he’d tightened the heavy-duty plastic tie around that wrist to stop the bleeding once he got started.

He thought she might pass out from the pain of losing that left hand, but she must have been a fighter because she didn’t. In between her screams she’d struggled to pull free from the chair, begged him to stop, to let her go.

That ended up being distracting and with all of that going on, it took him a while to decide which direction to take things.

Finally, he chose to let her remain conscious while he laid the edge of the saw blade against her other wrist.

And then drew it firmly toward him.

Forward and back.

Forward and backward as the night became rich and thick with her screams and her blood.

His father had taught him all about that: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” Third book of the Bible. Seventeenth chapter. Eleventh verse.

Atonement. And the blood.

He thought of Colleen now as he unwrapped the two packages and, sitting where Ed Gein might have sat, he did what Ed Gein might have done and ate the meat he had brought along with him from Milwaukee.

In a few minutes he would head to the house and pay a visit to Adele Westin. Joshua had researched more than just the location of Ed’s house and the graveyard, and he knew that Adele, who was living with her fiancé, worked out of their home.

She was a woman who followed a very strict schedule, but a quick phone call could confirm that she was there this afternoon. Otherwise, if need be, he would wait as long as necessary until she returned.

Her fiancé wouldn’t be arriving home from his shift until after two. Joshua figured that would give him plenty of time to get to Adele and then leave the token of his intentions toward her, as well as a note with his demands. All of this would, of course, initiate the
next chapter
in the story he was telling.

One that would be enough to attract the attention of the person he was hoping to meet.

And if not, what he had planned for Wednesday would most certainly do so, without a doubt.

On Wednesday, when the cop was dead, Joshua’s point would be unmistakable and he would finally be able to get the one thing he wanted most—a partner.

18

Back at HQ, Ralph and I began reviewing the notes everyone else had left on my desk, sorting through what we would be discussing at the meeting that was scheduled to start in less than five minutes.

As far as sedan-owning, six-foot-tall, brown-eyed male Caucasians, we had thousands in the greater Milwaukee area. If you added an inch or two to either side of that and included men whose family members had sedans as well, the number rose exponentially. Gabriele Holdren, the officer who’d gotten the coffee for Vincent last night when I was with him in the interrogation room, was still comparing that list with the tip list—which hadn’t produced anything so far either.

As expected, the four confessions had all been false. Ellen and Annise were still looking into missing persons cases, and Lyrie was on his way back from canvassing the Hayeses’ neighborhood again to see if anyone could tell us the color of the sedan.

Radar had dug up the names of fourteen felons in the area who’d been convicted of violent crimes against women and he’d apparently left the department to follow up on one of them.

A lot of things were in play.

“I’m still curious about the handcuffs,” I told Ralph. “Why didn’t Colleen’s abductor leave a pair for Vincent to use?”

“He had to know Vincent already had a pair.”

“I can’t really come up with any other compelling reason—unless Vincent’s involved somehow.” I evaluated the possibilities. “Vincent had planned to come home just after seven, but at the last minute he called Colleen to let her know he would be late, wouldn’t be getting home until after ten. However, she was abducted just after nine. If the offender had known Vincent’s schedule and been hoping to find Colleen alone—”

Ralph rubbed his chin roughly. “The guy would have taken her before seven, while Vincent was at work, before he was supposed to come home, not after nine.”

I tried to steer myself away from making unfounded assumptions, but I found it hard to keep my thoughts from leaning in the direction of suspecting that Vincent was somehow involved in arranging his wife’s abduction.

“I suppose her abductor could have been in the house already,” Ralph mused. “Found the handcuffs, decided not to leave a pair, not to take the chance that the cuffs could lead us back to him.”

“Yes,” I said. “But that still doesn’t explain how he would have known about Vincent’s last-minute change of plans.”

“After the briefing, let’s have Thompson go back and see if any of the neighbors remember the sedan driving around earlier.”

“And we should have someone interview Vincent again. Find out who might’ve known he owned that pair of handcuffs and who else knew he was going to be working late. Maybe Ellen could go.”

“Or Corsica?” he said.

“Ellen. Not that I don’t trust Corsica’s competence in these sorts of things, but—”

“You don’t trust Corsica’s competence in these sorts of things.”

“That’s one way to put it.”

“So, what is it between you two, anyway?”

“She has a tendency to jump to conclusions. More than once I’ve had to redirect an investigation before more innocent people got hurt.”

“I’m sure she took well to that. The redirecting part.”

“Oh, it was just peachy.”

Ralph nodded. Jotted something on a notepad.

As we were finishing collecting our papers, I saw Lieutenant Thorne picking his way toward us through the labyrinth of desks, file cabinets, and business dividers that made up most of this floor of the department. He was carrying a magazine or catalog of some kind.

“We might have something,” he announced. “A connection to the homicide in Illinois.”

“What’s that?”

He flopped the catalog onto the desk in front of me.

“Police tape.”

19

“Your car down in the parking garage?” Thorne asked me.

“Yes.” I picked up the catalog. “What do you mean ‘police tape’?”

“Let’s go. I’ll walk with you. I want you two to look into this.”

Okay, so either our second briefing of the day had been postponed or Thorne was giving us permission to miss it. In either case that was fine by me. I’d rather be out in the field any day investigating something than sitting in a meeting talking about it.

The three of us maneuvered past the desks and made our way to the hall that led to the elevators. I was flipping through the catalog. “What do we have?”

“A guy who sells souvenirs. Thompson managed to locate the most recent issue. He came across it while cross-checking tips from Illinois.”

We filed into the elevator and he punched the button for the lower-level parking garage. “The guy who puts out this catalog has all his orders sent to a PO box, but we tracked down his name: Timothy Griffin. He lives in Fort Atkinson. Check out the back.”

On the catalog’s back cover, just below the return address, was a sticker advertising that a fifty-foot-long length of police tape was for sale:

“Just in! Maneater of The Midwest Police Tape!
Soon to be A Collector’s Item!! $350!”

It listed the date and location of the crime. The tape was purportedly from the Illinois homicide in which the woman’s lungs had been removed and evidently consumed.

“Unbelievable,” Ralph muttered.

As the elevator descended, I studied the catalog carefully.

The items were cross-referenced so you could search by killer, type of crime (pedophilia, homicide), postmortem activity (vampirism, cannibalism, rape), state, years, or price.

There were decks of trading cards of fifty-two of the most famous criminals in U.S. history, Christmas letters Dahmer had written to his mother, Gacy’s clown makeup, Manson’s Bible with his name scribbled on the inside front cover. Knickknacks, drill bits, pliers, saws, memorabilia, clothes and more. Hundreds of items. Even, supposedly, the original 1934 Albert Fish letter to Grace Budd’s parents. It was one of the most infamous and disturbing writings of any sexual predator or serial killer of the last hundred years and the guy who’d sent out this catalog, Timothy Griffin, claimed to have the original copy.

Just thinking about the letter made my stomach turn.

Fish, who was put to death in New York back in 1936, was perhaps the most depraved sadomasochistic pedophile and cannibal ever captured in the U.S. The authorities never found out how many people he killed, but he claimed to “have had children in every state.” Whether that meant molesting them or killing them was never established, but from what I’d read about the case, it wouldn’t have surprised me if it were both. In 1928 he abducted a ten-year-old girl named Grace Budd, murdered her, cooked her, and then ate her. Six years later he wrote a letter to her parents about how much he’d enjoyed it.

That was the letter advertised in Griffin’s catalog.

Sickening.

We reached the parking garage level. Exited the elevator.

“How would you ever verify that the stuff’s legit?” Ralph, who’d been looking at the pages with me, asked Thorne. “I mean the signed letters, okay, I get that. Those might be available from relatives. But Gacy’s clown makeup? Couldn’t you buy makeup like that at dozens of stores here in Wisconsin alone? Just claim it was Gacy’s?”

Gacy.

A man responsible for one of the biggest body counts of any serial killer in U.S. history.

Remembering what all these guys had done was somewhat overwhelming. It was hard not to find myself just getting numb to it all.

Gacy, of course, was the civic leader in the Chicago area who was convicted of killing thirty-three young men back in the 1970s. He dressed up as a clown and volunteered on weekends cheering up children in local hospitals. Three times he was named the local Jaycees chapter’s Man of the Year and had been personally congratulated for his public service and contributions to the causes of the Democratic party by First Lady Rosalynn Carter. The police found a photo of her standing beside him when they were removing more than two dozen corpses buried in the crawl space beneath his house.

He claimed he’d been set up for the crimes.

Thorne shrugged. “You got me, but look at the price tags—people are shelling out big bucks for that garbage. Somebody believes it’s authentic.”

“And he knows about the lungs,” I said. “Griffin does, that they were eaten. He calls the guy a ‘maneater,’ not just a killer. That information hasn’t been released to the press.”

Thorne nodded thoughtfully. “True.”

Ralph let out a few choice words about what he thought of Griffin and his little business enterprise. Even though I was used to the rough language of cops, Ralph managed to phrase things in ways I’d never even heard before, but I found myself agreeing with the sentiment of everything he said.

I was glad to follow up on this, but Fort Atkinson was an hour away. I asked Thorne, “If Griffin lives in Fort Atkinson, will that be a jurisdictional problem?”

He deferred to Ralph who gave a knowing half grin. “That’s one of the advantages of having me here, bro. If Griffin’s selling crime scene tape from a homicide in Illinois, we have an interstate connection. And that means it’s under my jurisdiction.”

He might have been stretching things a bit, but it worked for me.

In the garage we found out that Radar had taken our cruiser, but Thorne signed off for Ralph and me to use an undercover sedan that was typically used on drug busts. Ralph asked him, “Has this guy Griffin ever surfaced before? Any priors?”

“No. Thompson checked his record right off the bat. Apparently, he’s a celebrity in his own right in certain circles, though. An author named Heather Isle—she writes those true crime books—anyway, she uses him as one of her ‘expert’ sources.” Thorne turned to me. “You know her, right? The true crime writer?”

“No, Saundra Weathers. A novelist. Writes mysteries. She lived in my hometown, back when we were kids.”

“It was…” I could see him struggling to find the right words. “The Weathers’ tree house, right? Where you found—”

“Not theirs, exactly. No. But it was next to their property.”

Thorne knew this was a touchy subject for me and he let it go at that. “Well, go have a talk with Griffin. See what he can tell us about the police tape and how he knows it was from the scene of a ‘maneater.’”

We briefly discussed the observations Ralph and I had come up with while we were at the restaurant and at my desk a few minutes ago. Thorne promised to assign the projects to the task force and contact us if they came up with anything, then he left, and Ralph and I climbed into the UC car. I called in to check Griffin’s DMV records and got his address.

“So I’m curious,” Ralph said when I got off the radio. “What did you find in the tree house?”

“I’ll tell you on the way.”