Steven James - Opening Moves

“His server already picked them up.”

He looked at me incredulously. “You’re saying she came by before I even asked you to prove that you notice things?”

“Yes.

“And you calculated all that then-the tip, everything?”

“Yes.”

“How did you know any of that would be pertinent to anything?”

“I didn’t.”

“Then how-”

I notice things.

I shrugged. “Luck, I guess.”

He opened his mouth as if he were going to reply, then closed it again and chose to go for some beef goulash instead.

Moving past the topic of the guy at the table and following along with our discussion from earlier, I asked Ralph what he did before joining the FBI.

“I was in the Army for a while. Rangers. Bunch of missions in the Middle East.” He was wolfing down his goulash in between words. “Man, I can’t believe you counted up what bills he laid on the table.”

Earlier, he’d referred to a guy watching a chick flick with his wife, and he wore a wedding ring. “So, married?”

“Yeah. Three years.”

“Kids?”

“No. You?”

“No kids, no wife. I am seeing someone though. Actually, today is the one-year anniversary of when we first met.”

He raised his coffee cup. “In that case, lunch is on me.”

I thought again about how I would be having dinner with Taci tonight, discussing something that she wanted to talk about in private, but I didn’t mention that, simply accepted Ralph’s toast. “Thanks.”

We were both well into our meals now and I brought up the topic I’d been curious about since we first met in the police headquarters lobby. “Ralph, I gotta ask you something.”

“Shoot.” He was in the middle of a bite of goulash.

I indicated toward his turtleneck. “No overstarched oxford. No tie.” I figured maybe he didn’t wear one because of the thickness of his neck and his broad chest-that any tie he wore would’ve ended up looking like a clown tie and his supervisors didn’t want that. “Isn’t it pretty much a uniform for guys who are Feds?”

“Got an exemption. I can’t stand the idea of wearing a giant arrow pointing to my groin all day.”

“Oh.”

He looked at me slightly suspiciously. “I mean, can you?”

“Um, no. Of course not.” Man, was I glad I didn’t have a tie on today either. “And when you put it that way, I don’t think I’ll ever look at ties the same way again.”

He took a giant mouthful of food. “It seems kind of desperate to me, a pretty blatant invitation to draw people’s attention to…Well, it’s kind of like-” He was talking with his mouth full of goulash again. “So, my wife, her best friend has this teenage daughter.”

“Right.”

“The kid is always wearing shorts with words written on the butt. What is that about? ‘Syracuse’? Are you serious? I could never respect a college that’s so desperate for students that it needs to advertise itself on the butts of teenage girls.”

Hmm. That was actually a pretty good point.

“And then she wears these sweatpants with ‘Cute’ back there. Is that supposed to be referring to…?”

“Um…Probably. Yeah.” I thought of a time I’d seen a girl wearing shorts with ALL-STAR imprinted on the rump and I realized I didn’t even want to know what she was trying to tell the world.

He shook his head. “I’ll just say this: I’d be at a loss with a teenage daughter. They’re a complete mystery to me. I’d be clueless.”

“You and me both.”

Ralph finished inhaling the goulash and I polished off my cheeseburger. We ate quickly so we could get back to the department, then headed out the door, past the Ford Explorer by the curb.

There was a parking ticket tucked beneath the windshield wiper.

Plainfield, Wisconsin

Joshua parked the car in the pull-off at the end of the dirt road.

Barren, leafless trees ready for winter bordered him on both sides.

A sign on a leaning wooden pole beside a small clearing announced NO TRESPASSING.

The house that used to stand here was long gone.

Joshua wasn’t sure exactly when it’d burned down, but he knew it was within a couple months of Ed Gein’s arrest in November of 1957, and he was pretty sure the fire hadn’t been accidental. Just like the people of Milwaukee who tried to purge the memory of Dahmer from their consciousness by razing his apartment building, the good people of Plainfield had undoubtedly hoped to sear the memory of their most infamous inhabitant by getting rid of the place he’d called home.

Joshua stepped out of the car and stretched his legs, then removed the cooler from the backseat.

It’d taken a fair amount of research, but eventually he’d been able to locate the precise spot where the house had stood.

Ironically, or at least conveniently as far as Gein would have been concerned, it was less than five miles from the nearest graveyard-the same graveyard where things would happen this afternoon, during the next chapter of the saga Joshua had recently been putting into play.

Honestly, it’d never been his intention to kill Colleen Hayes. Cutting off her hands had been all he was planning to do to her, even from the start.

In fact, murdering her might actually have been counterproductive to what he was hoping to accomplish.

Well then, what about Petey Schwartz back on Friday?

No, nobody would connect the two crimes.

Besides, that wasn’t planned. It was spontaneous and had nothing to do with the Hayes kidnapping or what he had in mind for Adele today.

Still, you remember what you did, remember how you-

Enough with those kinds of thoughts.

Joshua walked to the place where Ed Gein’s kitchen used to be, set down the cooler, and took a seat beside it.

The view before him was the same one Ed Gein would have had if he were looking out his kitchen window.

Joshua pulled a bottle of cream soda out of the cooler, uncapped it, and took a long refreshing swallow.

Last night it hadn’t been easy, doing to Colleen what he’d done. And, unquestionably, it would have been easier on her if he’d knocked her out beforehand, but somehow, though the deed itself was disturbing, her screams had brought him a degree of pleasure that’d surprised him.

It was a bit disconcerting.

That hadn’t happened before, but then again, he’d never done something like that to someone and let the person live.

It’d led him to acknowledge a certain yearning rising to the surface, one that’d been birthed in him long ago in the cellar beneath the barn.

While he was listening to Colleen cry out, enjoying watching her suffer, he’d had a revelation of sorts, an epiphany about who he truly was, what he was becoming.

A voice of reason, of conscience: Go to God for forgiveness, Joshua. Turn yourself in! Don’t live in the den of the damned!

More cream soda.

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.