Steven James - Opening Moves

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 fiance, 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 fiance 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.

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.”

“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.