Steven James - Opening Moves

Material in hand, we cruised back to the interstate and headed for HQ.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Joshua parked in the overgrown, empty lot just west of the deserted train yard.

Milwaukee used to be a major industrial railway shipping hub. To some extent it still was, but times change and trains weren’t being used nearly as much as they had been twenty or thirty years ago.

A metal chain-link fence with wickedly sharp razor wire curling across the top of it ran along the entire perimeter of the train yard. However, there was a swinging gate here in the parking lot that was large enough for a car to pass through. Two sets of railroad tracks also entered beneath the fence, and then branched off in the yard into the nineteen dead-end tracks that held the abandoned cars.

Apart from a small crawl-hole in the fence that bordered the woods, this gate was the only way to access the yard.

Two days ago Joshua had cut through the chain that held the gate shut, then padlocked it closed again with his own lock and chain. His lock was still there, so obviously, no one had noticed, and that hadn’t surprised him. This was not exactly a tourist hotspot.

The tracks that terminated in the yard were rusted and overgrown with scraggly weeds that broke through the thin, sporadic layer of snow. Dozens of boxcars, coal cars, tankers, and a few engines and cabooses that’d been retired from service sat languishing in the yard. With the rails in such disrepair, these cars weren’t going anywhere any time soon.

Apparently, when a train car gets retired, there aren’t a whole lot of places to leave it, and over the last twenty years, more and more cars from the Milwaukee Road, Wisconsin Central, and Soo Line railways had been abandoned here and left to the mercy of weather and time.

Wearing gloves so that he wouldn’t leave any fingerprints, Joshua unlocked the gate, swung it open, drove toward the tracks containing the abandoned boxcars, then closed and padlocked the gate behind him.

He wouldn’t be able to drive all the way to the boxcar that he would be using today, but he could get partway there, and then park out of sight behind a line of tankers.

Which was what he did.

Carrying Adele to the train car he’d prepared for this afternoon wouldn’t be a problem. A forest nudged up against the razor wire fence on the south end of the train yard and there was only a narrow channel between that fence and the line of boxcars stretching alongside it.

When he’d been scouting out locations, Joshua had driven around the neighborhood and confirmed that-even from the highway, the bridge just west of here, and the parking lot itself-a person walking along the edge of the fence would be hidden from view by the boxcars on one side and the woods on the other. Especially if they stayed in the drainage ditch that followed one section of the fence.

Of all the times Joshua had been in the yard, he’d seen only five people in here: two teen punks with spray cans, a wino, and a college-aged couple making out. But all of them had been on the other side of the yard near the coal cars.

Still, this was not the time to be careless, and before taking Adele to the boxcar, he wanted to make sure the coast was clear. So, leaving her locked in the trunk for the moment, he took his pistol, a 9mm Glock 19, from the glove box and walked along the edge of the ditch paralleling the razor wire fence.

Most of the cars in the yard had gang-related graffiti spray-painted on the sides and nearly all of them were ravaged with rust. The boxcars had large sliding doors, many of which were padlocked shut, a few were left open, some were missing entirely.

He went to a light gray Soo Line boxcar with a chained-shut door, slipped a key into the lock, which he’d made sure was the same kind he’d used on the front gate, and clicked it open.

Gloves still on, he cranked the door open, peered inside.

His materials were all there waiting for Adele. The rope and duct tape. The chair. The plastic bags, butcher paper, and heavy-duty plastic ties. The battery-operated light on the wall to the left. And the Civil War-era Gemrig amputation saw that he had used to cut through Colleen Hayes’s wrists last night.

He already had the necrotome with him in a sheath on his belt. The word meant “cutting instrument of the dead” and it was an Egyptian knife popular between 1500 and 1000 BC.

Necrotomes are, of course, extremely rare, but he’d managed to get this one at an auction in San Francisco five years ago. It was one of the actual knives used by the priests of ancient Egypt to slit open the abdomens of the people they were about to mummify in order to remove their inner organs. They did so by hand, pulling out all the organs except for the heart. Then they stored those organs in jars-all of them except for the brain, which they considered useless, and simply discarded.

Joshua kept the necrotome with him at all times.

He’d used it last Friday on Petey Schwartz when the homeless man followed him, then grabbed his jacket collar. Joshua had met Petey before, knew him in an informal way, and knew that he had violent tendencies. In an instant he’d whipped out the necrotome and buried it into Petey’s stomach, just as his father had taught him to do with that hunting knife in the special place beneath the barn.

It’d all happened so fast that it was hard to differentiate one action from the next. It’d been impulse, pure and simple. Instinct. And now a man was dead.

He knew the verse, knew what killing would mean: “No murderer hath eternal life abiding in him.” First John, chapter three, verse fifteen.

No eternal life.

But yet he desired eternal life. Believed in grace, in forgiveness, in atonement.

His life was a throbbing contradiction. Just like St. Paul, who wrote in Romans, chapter seven, “What I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I. For to will is present with me; but how to perform that which is good I find not. For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do.”

The evil which I would not.

That I do.

I do.

After making sure the coast was clear, Joshua returned to the car to retrieve the unconscious woman from the trunk.

The afternoon was stretching thin.

As I drove, Ralph scribbled notes on his pad and collected his thoughts. “So, Griffin could have known that the Hayes couple had their own cuffs. That puts him on our short list.”

“Yes, but according to Colleen’s description, her abductor was a large man; Griffin has a slight build.”

He processed that. “True.”

“Also, when I brought up Hayes’s name, Griffin didn’t seem familiar with it.”

Ralph certainly knew, as I did, that killers are often accomplished liars, but even for them, first impressions are hard to fake. Often, our faces betray us before our minds can start coming up with ways to hide what our bodies have already subconsciously expressed.

“But, Pat, he has to be related to this somehow. He might not be at the center of it, but his connection with the crime scene tape and the cuffs is too much of a coincidence. They tie him to both the murder in Illinois and Colleen’s abduction last night. Besides, he called Hendrich ‘a source,’ and mentioned he’d shipped ‘stuff’ to him. Is that how you’d phrase things if you’d only worked with the guy once?”

“I see what you mean,” I admitted, “but both the cuffs and police tape could have come from a cop-there’s no saying the police tape came from the killer.”

“We need to find out more about Hendrich.”

“Yes, we do,” I said. “And cross-reference the names on the evidence room forms and the chain of custody list against the officers who worked the case in Illinois. An officer may have moved from-”