Steven James - Opening Moves

The closet was beside the window.

I left the catalog on the bed for the moment, glanced beneath it, peeked in the drawers, and then in the jewelry box, where I found nothing particularly unusual, except an enigmatic diamond ring that, based on the condition of the house, I could hardly believe they could afford to own.

Crossing the room, I opened the closet door and tugged the string hanging from the ceiling to turn on the overhead bulb.

On the right, eleven shirts hung from wire hangers. Griffin was into flannel. Based on the size of the shirts, I anticipated that he would be small-framed, shorter than I was, maybe five feet six to five feet eight. No dress shirts or slacks. Nothing stylish. A blaze orange jacket for rifle season, a camo one for bow season.

On the left side of the closet, Mallory’s four dresses looked like hand-me-downs or thrift store ware. Just four dresses. That was it. No shirts. No skirts. No dress pants.

I had no idea what Griffin’s profit margin was on his merchandise, but taking into account the price tags of some of the items, I couldn’t help but wonder where all the money was going. Definitely not into his or Mallory’s wardrobe or home improvements. Maybe that ring.

Six pairs of shoes on the floor-four of his, two of hers. I checked. He was size nine. She was size six and a half.

Next to the shoes was a stack of three shoeboxes. I opened the top one and found that it was filled with sales receipts. Hundreds of them. I checked the other two boxes and found more of the same, some of them dating back eighteen years.

As I shuffled through the receipts, I found that they were carefully categorized, not by the date of sale, but by the first letter of the last name of the person who’d purchased the merchandise.

To make it easier to keep track of repeat customers?

Possibly.

I processed what we knew, the gossamer threads of facts and clues, the disquieting questions before us.

Vincent Hayes. The timing of his wife’s abduction.

The homicide in Illinois and the police tape.

Griffin’s catalog.

The handcuffs.

The abductor knew they owned a pair.

Everything in this case was somehow woven together.

Griffin referred to the guy as a Maneater.

Someone had provided this guy with the police tape from the crime in Illinois.

Someone is-

There’s no such thing as a coincidence.

I had a thought and flipped to the H ’s.

And found what I was looking for.

The name on the receipt: Hayes.

The merchandise: a pair of handcuffs.

But it wasn’t Vincent Hayes’s name on the top of the receipt. It was his wife, Colleen’s.

I stared at the receipt.

Colleen Hayes had bought the handcuffs two months ago and, according to the receipt, they were the ones used on Ted Oswald when he and his father were arrested back in April 1994.

Ted, who was eighteen at the time, and his father, James, were responsible for a string of bank robberies in southeastern Wisconsin. When they were confronted by James Lutz, a Waukesha police captain, they killed him, took a hostage, and after a shoot-out with authorities during which the hostage managed to escape, they tried to flee by motor vehicle but were pursued by the Waukesha County Sheriff Department deputies. After crashing into a tree, they were apprehended, tried, found guilty.

During the trial, details emerged about their conspiratorial plans to kill law enforcement officers and initiate some sort of private war against the authorities. Ever since Ted had been five years old, his mentally disturbed father, who called him his “spawn,” had threatened to kill him if he didn’t do exactly as he said. During the trial, Ted claimed he’d committed the crimes only because he was afraid for his life, but the jury didn’t go for it. Currently both men were serving two life sentences plus more than four hundred fifty years.

Jeffrey Dahmer tried for the insanity defense, didn’t convince the jury.

Ted Oswald pled coercion, didn’t convince the jury.

I processed that. Even if it was only tangential, both of those killers had a connection to this case. Both had admitted to their crimes during their respective trials but had claimed mitigating circumstances-Dahmer, mental instability; Oswald, fear for his life.

Neither had been successful.

Insanity is a legal term, not a medical one, and I knew that if it can be determined that you could understand the difference between right and wrong at the time of your crime, legally, you can’t be found to be insane.

This was actually why Dahmer lost his case-he took an action to cover up his crimes; namely, he lied to the police when they brought Konerak Sinthasomphone back to his apartment. The jury believed that this showed Dahmer knew he’d acted in ways that needed to be concealed.

Strange as it may seem, if he would’ve led the police right up to the body on his bed he might have been found insane and never gone to prison at all.

Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what, if any, circumstances remove your responsibility for criminal behavior. At what point are you so mentally ill that you’re no longer responsible for your actions? Are you ever justified in committing murder to avoid being murdered yourself, as Ted Oswald claimed he’d been? Are you vindicated of kidnapping someone in order to save your wife, as Vincent Hayes had evidently done?

All pertinent questions, but I didn’t have a lot of time here to contemplate them.

Address them later.

On the receipt, I noticed that Griffin had acquired the cuffs from an unnamed source; however, if they were legit, only someone from the Waukesha County Sheriff Department would’ve had access to them.

Definitely worth checking out.

This was the only purchase made by Colleen or Vincent Hayes.

Down the hall, I heard the front door bang open and a high-pitched nasally voice calling out, “Whose car is that out-” He cut himself off in the middle. He must have seen Ralph. “Who are you? What are you doing in my house!”

I memorized the information on the receipt and replaced it in the shoebox.

“Ralph Hawkins. I’m with the FBI. Are you Timothy Griffin?”

Taking the catalog with me, I returned to the living room.

Griffin was just shy of five feet eight. Caucasian with some Latino heritage. He had slate gray eyes and a harsh scar on his neck that tightened the skin of his face, tugging the left side of his lip down into a rather imposing sneer. He was holding a handful of mail.

“FBI?” he said. “What’s going on?”

“I’m Detective Bowers,” I told Griffin, before he could ask. “We have a couple questions we’d like to ask you.”

Griffin licked his lips, then said with fake gentility, “Well, are you here on business…” His gaze landed on the Manson Bible. Now I saw that after picking it up earlier I hadn’t placed it in exactly the same position on the coffee table and he seemed to notice that as well. “Or pleasure? Here to make a few purchases? I get a lot of cops as customers.”

I held up the catalog, back cover toward him, and pointed to the sticker. “We’re here concerning this.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The crime scene tape. I’d like to see it,” Ralph said.

Griffin looked like he might object to that, but then walked into the kitchen and returned with a roll of yellow caution tape. Without a word he handed it to Ralph. “Three hundred fifty dollars. Like it says in the catalog.”

“‘The Maneater of the Midwest,’” Ralph said. “That a description you came up with?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Helps with sales, does it? Using a name like that?”