Steven James - Opening Moves

Once we were back in the car I said to Ralph, “Mini-weenies?”

“They’re good with mustard and ranch dressing. What did you see in the hall?”

“The Albert Fish letter, but it’s what I found in the bedroom that really caught my attention.”

“And that was?”

I started the car. “Griffin sold Hayes the handcuffs. Colleen Hayes.”

“Colleen?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting. And how do we know that?”

I told him about the receipts. Ralph wasn’t familiar with the Oswald case. I filled him in on what I knew.

Then, since there wasn’t a car phone in this vehicle, I radioed the local dispatcher and asked her to put a call through to my adviser at Marquette and let him know I wouldn’t be at the lecture this afternoon and to see if he could request that Dr. Werjonic leave a photocopy of his lecture notes in the Criminology and Law Studies graduate office. I could pick them up later this evening and hopefully carve out some time to review them before tomorrow’s class. I gave her the number.

When I got off the radio I had an idea. “Ralph, the Waukesha County Sheriff Department is just a couple miles off the interstate. What do you say we swing by and see who the arresting officers were in the Oswald case?”

“Yeah, and maybe check the chain of custody for the evidence. Whoever had access to the Oswald evidence might have had access to the cuffs.”

I aimed the car for the highway. “I like the way you think, Agent Hawkins. For a fed, that is.”

“You’re doing alright yourself, for a detective. At least so far.”

“So far?”

“Yeah, but just don’t get in my way.”

It sounded like he was joking, I knew he was joking, but when I glanced at him, I realized I couldn’t quite tell. Not for sure.

Plainfield, Wisconsin

It wasn’t even a choice for Carl Kowalski. Not after finding that note in his kitchen. Not after seeing the horrible, horrible thing that Adele’s kidnapper had left for him in the refrigerator.

At first when he walked through the front door and saw the note on the table, he’d thought it might be some kind of sick joke from one of his poker buddies.

But then he’d done what the note told him to do and looked in the refrigerator’s meat/cheese drawer and found Adele’s ring finger with the engagement ring he’d given her four months earlier still encircling the base of it. No. This was not a joke. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Now he carefully positioned his van on the cemetery’s access road to hide his activity from people who might happen to drive past on the nearby but infrequently used county highway. Then, shielded from view, he removed the shovel from the back of the vehicle.

It wasn’t a large graveyard and wasn’t visited often. He knew this since he was the one who mowed it on weekends. There was really very little chance that he would be interrupted, but if someone did happen to visit, he figured that since he worked the grounds, he’d at least be able to come up with an explanation for why he had the shovel.

But why he was digging up the grave of Miriam Flandry, that was another story entirely. No reasonable explanation for that came to mind.

Well, just get it over with quickly and you won’t have to worry about it.

Carl walked to the fresh grave.

The note had been clear: Dig up Miriam’s corpse. Skin it. Then leave it outside the hardware store where Gein had killed Bernice Worden back in 1957. Even though Carl hadn’t been born at the time, he knew the story, knew what had happened there. Everyone in Plainfield knew the story.

According to the note, if he didn’t do as requested, the person who’d taken Adele was going to skin her alive and leave her corpse on Carl’s porch. Whoever was doing this-or why anyone would dream up something so gruesome-was a mystery to Carl. A dark, blank, terrible mystery.

But he could try to figure that out later. Right now he had to get to work.

He drove the shovel into the loose soil, dumped it to the side.

If only it didn’t have to be Miriam. But that’s what the note said-it had to be her.

She’d been eighty-one years old when she passed away two days ago. Carl, of course, had been at the funeral. And yes, he knew that now he was desecrating her final resting place, but he told himself that the dead were dead, that you couldn’t really desecrate them, not really. Their souls had gone on to another place. Bones and hair and decaying meat were all that was left.

It sounded crass and unsympathetic, but skinning a corpse was essentially no different than skinning a squirrel, gutting a deer, or carving a turkey. Embalmers and medical examiners did that kind of work on human cadavers all the time.

That’s what Carl told himself.

But still, the thought of peeling the skin off a body that used to be a living, breathing human being with dreams and hopes and heartaches just like him was gut-wrenching. Especially considering who Miriam was, what she had meant to him over the years.

However, the thought of someone doing that to Adele while she was alive was even more horrifying and Carl vowed he was not going to let that happen.

The shoveling was going quickly, faster than he would’ve ever expected, which was good because according to the note, he had until five o’clock-exactly-to dig up the corpse, remove its skin, deliver it to the hardware store and call the kidnapper.

That didn’t give him a lot of time, but the dirt wasn’t packed down yet and, after working on a construction crew for the last ten years, he was used to hard physical labor. He would work as furiously as he had to in order to save Adele.

He threw another shovelful of dirt aside.

Then another.

It shouldn’t be too long before he had her, and after he did, it wasn’t far to the hardware store, so the only thing that might really slow him down was the skinning part. He needed to come up with a way to do that quickly.

So that’s what he thought about as he dug up his recently deceased grandmother’s body.

Ralph and I entered the Waukesha County Sheriff Department, which was located in an imposing, interconnected set of buildings that also housed the county courthouse and jail.

We were directed to a graying, portly detective in his early fifties who had a noticeable crescent-shaped birthmark on the right side of his neck. The photos on his desk showed him serving in several different police departments around Wisconsin over the years.

After taking a seat in front of his desk, we told him what we were looking for and why.

“So you think one of our deputies stole those cuffs and then sold them to Griffin?” Detective Browning said to me coolly.

“No, I don’t. We’re just trying to investigate how the cuffs, if they are legitimate, ended up in the hands of a man who sells memorabilia of serial killers.”

“Uh-huh.” But Browning still seemed antagonistic. It took Ralph’s telling him that we would get the information one way or another, with his help or without it, before he grudgingly produced the paperwork showing who was involved in the Oswalds’ arrest.

When I thanked him, he made it clear once again that he thought we were being out of line.

His hostile attitude surprised me. In the end I chalked it up to the fact that I had an FBI agent with me. To say there can be tension over interagency information requests is, unfortunately, a gross understatement.

Before Ralph and I left the building, we also picked up a copy of the chain of custody forms and evidence room visitation records for the Oswald case. There was so much evidence gathered against the father and son team-including parts of the van they were driving when they tried to flee, the cache of rifles they’d collected, thousands of rounds of ammunition, reams of paperwork and James’s voluminous journals-that the number of items listed on the forms was substantial.