Steven James - Opening Moves

She thought about it for a long time. “I smelled yeast. That I remember. It was a little faint, so I’m thinking we were somewhere near the breweries, but not too close.”

Wind, temperature, and humidity as well as production schedule would all affect how far the smell of the breweries would have spread. Things to look into.

“That’s good,” I told her. “Very good. That helps. Anything else?”

“It was cold when he did it, like we might have been out in a garage or something. He carried me there from the car. When I screamed I could hear it echo a little, but it was sort of muted too. I don’t know. I can’t think of anything else.”

“Do you think you could recognize his voice?” Radar asked. She shook her head again.

And then she was quiet and we didn’t want to press her, but we also didn’t want to leave her alone, so we sat with her for a while even though it meant being late for the briefing at police headquarters. But Thorne wasn’t exactly famous for starting his meetings on time and there are some things that are more important than punctuality.

Finally, our police chaplain, Reverend Padilla, who served the force but also comforted the victims of violent crimes, came in. We excused ourselves, left the room, and silently passed down the hallway.

Although we needed to get to the department, before leaving the medical center I called Taci’s wing to see if she could meet me by my car. She was in the next building over and by the time I’d made it outside, she was already on the sidewalk that led to the parking lot.

“Hey, Pat.” She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, the kind you might give when greeting a friend. Just a friend.

“Hey.”

Radar went on ahead to give us a chance to talk.

Today Taci, a brunette with striking dark brown eyes and a kind smile, wore a cream-colored double-breasted peacoat, cerulean skirt, white tights and modest heels. She looked as charming and attractive as ever.

“I got your message last night,” I told her as we started for the car. “But I didn’t get in until after one. It was too late to call.”

“Our schedules make this hard, don’t they?”

“It’s been a little rough lately, sure, but things will settle down once your residency is over.”

She was quiet. “I heard about everything that’s going on. About Mrs. Hayes. All the doctors are talking about it. That poor woman.” Her words were marked with deep compassion, one of the qualities that had caught my attention the first time we met. “It’s horrifying what happened.”

“Yes.”

“How are you? Through all this?”

“Focused.”

“You’re going to catch this guy, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I am.”

A moment passed. “Pat, I’d hate to be the person you’re after.”

I hadn’t really wanted our conversation to be about the case or about Ms. Hayes, so I tried to lighten things up a little. “You are the person I’m after.”

I was sort of hoping she’d say, “You too” or “You already have me” or something along those lines, but instead she looked a little uncomfortable. “Thanks.”

This whole conversation was becoming slightly discomfiting.

“Listen,” she said. “About tonight. Dinner.”

“Yes. Pasta. My place.”

“I’m…Well, it’ll be good. Give us a chance to talk.”

With the briefing at the department coming up, I really didn’t have a lot of time, but I offered anyway. “We can talk right now.” A few flecks of snow began to meander around us. We were almost to my car.

“No. Not in the parking lot.”

“There’s something we need to talk about in private?”

“No.” But then she hesitated and backpedaled a little. “I mean…Well. No. Anyway…” She gave me another peck on the cheek. Friendly once again. “I’ll see you tonight. At seven.”

“See you at seven.”

Then she returned to the building, leaving me to wonder what exactly she wanted to discuss with me privately tonight on the one-year anniversary of the day we first met.

I climbed into my car.

When I radioed the department to tell Thorne I might be a little late, I found out the meeting was postponed until nine thirty, which gave me a few extra minutes. The alley where we’d found Lionel wasn’t too far out of the way, so I decided to swing by and have a look at it in the daylight.

I parked beside the alley.

The fenced-in lot bordering it contained the place where Dahmer’s apartment building used to stand. Inside the fence, the ground was covered with dry, brown grass and a dusting of gritty snow. The lot looked unremarkable and anonymous, which was exactly what the city of Milwaukee wanted. Bulldozing the building and clearing the rubble had been a way of trying to erase from the city’s collective memory what had happened here.

I got out of the car, walked to the chain-link fence, and peered through to the other side.

The cloud-dampened light and flecks of restless snow accentuated the lonely, foreboding mood of this place.

After working as many cases as I have, you realize that you can scrub a floor clean of blood, you can tear out a wall or knock down a building, but tragedies all too often seem to stain the air of these places of death, to rip open space and time and root themselves stubbornly to a specific location.

The invisible, tormented geography of pain.

My thoughts traveled back to hearing about what’d happened just on the other side of this fence, back to the stories about the sixteen young men who’d died at Dahmer’s hand so close to where I was standing, and I couldn’t help but feel a chill.

The wind was picking up and bit into my face. But that’s not what was giving me shivers. My thoughts of Dahmer were.

Even now, three years after he was beaten to death in prison, the shock was still there, fresh and painful in my city.

It was like those stages of grief that psychologists talk about-denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Milwaukee hadn’t reached the acceptance stage yet. I have my own theory about grief-you get angry, and then you repress it or it swallows you whole. Either it disappears or you do.

But that was just me.

And so, Jeffrey Dahmer.

A psychopath like none in a generation.

He would pick up young men from the bars in this neighborhood on Milwaukee’s west end-usually they were African-American, but he wasn’t picky when it came to race. He was more interested in looks and physique.

His MO: drug their drinks, get them back to his apartment, handcuff them, overpower them, kill them, eat them. Sometimes he would stuff their corpses into vats. Sometimes he would sleep with the bodies or chop them up and keep the body parts in the fridge and the skulls beside a candlelit altar to Satan in his closet. Sometimes he drilled holes in the heads of his victims while they were still alive and poured acid into their brains, hoping to turn the men into zombie love slaves.

During his trial he pled insanity. And lost.

In the end, he was convicted of fifteen homicides, but he admitted to two more, including one in Ohio. The city of Milwaukee later purchased his estate and all of his possessions were buried in a landfill, the location of which only five people knew-Captain Domyslawski, Lieutenant Thorne, Detective Annise Corsica (who’d led the investigation), and two city sanitation workers I hadn’t met who drove the garbage truck and dumped out its contents.

The location was kept secret so the site wouldn’t be visited by curiosity seekers or scavenged by souvenir hounds. It was grisly just to think about, but a certain segment of society collects memorabilia from killers like Dahmer and, inevitably, the site where his belongings were dumped would’ve become a Mecca for people interested in collecting keepsakes of cannibals.