Steven James - Opening Moves

Even though the original owners had sold the business long ago, amazingly, the place was still operating as a hardware store. Maybe the stories that surrounded it, the aura of death, actually attracted attention-and attention is almost always good for business.

In any case, Ed had taken Bernice’s body to his home, hung it in his garage, and gutted her like a deer. That was how the police found her the next day when they paid Gein a visit. He’d also decapitated her.

Gein and Dahmer.

For some reason, Wisconsin had more than its share of anthropophagous psychopaths.

The Vanderveld interview ended and Joshua went to the basement’s chest freezer, rooted around beneath the bags of frozen vegetables, the TV dinners and the venison steaks from the four-point buck he got bowhunting a few weeks ago, until he found the two packages wrapped in butcher paper.

He placed them in the small cooler he was taking with him on his trip, but he didn’t add any ice. He wanted the contents of the packages to thaw on the way to Plainfield.

Even from the basement he could smell the sizzling sausage frying in the pan, just waiting for him in the kitchen, cooked up lovingly for him by his faithful wife, the woman he’d been married to for nearly five years.

He headed upstairs to join Sylvia for brunch.

Ralph and I worked all morning and even into the early afternoon, but we couldn’t find any solid, incontrovertible connections between the cases in Ohio and Illinois and the one here in Wisconsin-all just circumstantial.

Though it was frustrating, admittedly, it wasn’t all that unexpected. Investigations in real life aren’t like the ones you see on TV. You don’t find a clue every eight minutes and solve cases every forty-two. I’ve often thought of how great it would be if it worked that way, but it’s just not the real world.

Now we were seated at the Skillet, a restaurant just down the street from HQ, looking over the menu. We needed to be back in forty-five minutes for the one-thirty briefing.

The national media outlets had already jumped on this case and with the reports of Hayes abandoning Lionel naked and cuffed in the same alley where Konerak Sinthasomphone had been found, and then the amputation of Colleen Hayes’s hands, Dahmer and his cannibalistic crimes were already making their way through the news cycle.

An unholy resurrection of a man who-

“They have Hungarian beef goulash.” Ralph jarred me out of my thoughts. He was pointing at the menu. “I’ve never been to a restaurant before that actually serves Hungarian beef goulash.”

“Yeah.” It took me a second to refocus, to be present here again. “I’ve heard it’s good here.”

“Really?”

“That’s what they say.”

“Huh.” He set down the menu authoritatively. “Well, that’s what I’m gonna get. Goulash. It just sounds like a man dish. I mean, can you imagine a one-hundred-five-pound supermodel ordering that? I’d say you gotta be at least two hundred pounds and have hair on your chest to truly enjoy a good bowl of Hungarian beef goulash.”

Honestly, he was right; I couldn’t picture a runway model working her way through a plate of goulash.

Ralph rapped his knuckle against the table. “Some things just sound tough. Like ‘Bulgaria.’ I’m a big boy, but I wouldn’t want to mess with someone from Bulgaria. The word alone makes me think of meat cleavers and dark forests. Werewolves too.”

“All that from ‘Bulgaria’?”

“Yeah. Unlike ‘France,’ which makes me think of lattes and poetry about feet.” He downed his coffee in one gulp. “Know what I mean?”

“Did you just say ‘lattes and poetry about feet’?”

He shrugged. “It just came to me.” He gestured toward my cup. “You sure you don’t want any java?”

“Naw, I’ve never been able to get past the taste.”

“Well, you gotta add sugar and cream.”

“To kill the taste.”

He considered that. “To calm it.”

“Ah. Well, why would I want to develop a habit of drinking something that I need to…um…calm the taste of?”

“Because caffeine is a beautiful thing.” He drew out the word “beautiful,” turning it into its own paragraph, then snapped his fingers toward our server and ordered the goulash. I went for a medium-rare cheeseburger-one of my weaknesses-and while we waited for our food, we reviewed some of the details of the case.

Although documentation and collection of physical evidence are important, interpretation of that evidence in relationship to the nature of the crime is just as vital. All crimes occur in a specific place at a specific time by a specific individual and, though some people believe in “random acts of violence,” I don’t buy that. Crimes always have a context in time and space and in the life of that individual offender. The search for clues is essentially the search for context.

And that’s what we were trying to do.

And failing at.

So far.

Ralph leaned across the table, his hefty forearms causing it to wobble. “So, seriously, Pat, what are you thinking here?”

“I’m not really one to venture hypotheses this early in an investigation.”

“Motive and all that?”

“Well, like I said at the department, I try not to read too much into-”

He waved that off. “No, I get it: you don’t trust your instincts. Motive. Whatever. Okay. But if you did?”

I was about to try staving off the topic again, but I changed my mind when I realized he was being persistent because he respected me and I wanted to show him just as much respect. I deliberated on his question carefully. “Ralph, do you ever read novels?”

“More of a movie guy myself.” Then he added nonchalantly, “The two kinds of action movies.”

“Two kinds?”

“Yeah, the Bruce Willis kind, and the chick flick kind.”

“How are chick flicks action movies?”

He looked a little embarrassed. “Well, you watch one with your wife, and that night you get some…”

“Ah. Action.”

A sly smile and a nod.

“Well, sometimes an author, or maybe a painter, will produce a piece of work to honor a previous artist, one who has passed away. Let’s say, write a new Philip Marlowe crime novel, or a new Sherlock Holmes story or copy the strokes of Picasso. Or, I suppose, possibly film a movie in the style of Hitchcock. It’s called a pastiche.”

“A way to pay homage to ’em.”

“Exactly.”

He considered that. “And what-you think that’s what our guy’s doing here? A pastiche to Dahmer?”

“There’s no way to know for sure, but it’s something to think about, especially with the amputation and the location of…” I considered something that hadn’t occurred to me before. “That pier where Colleen was found. It’s just down the street from the chocolate factory where Dahmer worked. They might very well have shipped goods from there. I’d say it wasn’t a mistake our guy left her at that pier. I don’t believe in coincidences.”

He eyed me. “Really?” To my surprise he sounded skeptical.

“Course not. Coincidences are just facts looked at out of context. You study a case from the right perspective and you’ll see that they don’t exist.”

“But…” He tapped a thoughtful finger against the air. Obviously we were not on the same page here. “Coincidences happen all the time. You think of someone you haven’t thought of in years, then ten minutes later you get a phone call from him. You dream of an event and then two days later it happens. What about deja vu? Life is full of coincidences.”

“I would say there has to be a scientific explanation for those things.”

“Why?”

“Because…well…” As I debated how to answer, I found myself at a loss for words. His question really was a sweeping one, encompassing the breadth of a person’s beliefs about the nature of reality, God, miracles, the supernatural-a lot more than I felt ready to delve into at the moment. “Well…”