Steven James - Opening Moves

There weren’t any trains running through there these days, so it made sense that Colleen wouldn’t have heard one pass by. The location was isolated enough so that, if her abductor had taken her to one of the freight cars or boxcars, no one would’ve heard her scream. Colleen had mentioned that it was cold, as though he might have taken her to a garage or something. A boxcar fit that too.

If he took her to the train yards, he would have plenty of privacy to do just about anything he wanted with her. And even if, by some chance, someone did happen to hear her scream, the yards weren’t in a part of town where people were particularly inclined to call the authorities.

Before she ended the transmission, Corsica mentioned that Hendrich hadn’t been home when Lyrie arrived to speak with him and it’d taken him a while to find out from a neighbor where Hendrich worked. Apparently, he was new to the area and wasn’t that well-known by his neighbors. She mentioned that the team was looking more carefully into his background.

I resaddled the radio. “Ralph, let’s stop by the train yards. Have a look around before it gets dark.”

“Now you’re talking my language.”

To cover our bases, we called in to have Lyrie remain parked at Hendrich’s house in case he returned home, then I turned our car around.

Sundown was almost here and I felt as if I were stepping into the zone again, the thing I live for, and I admit I didn’t quite observe the speed limit as I drove toward the train yards.

Joshua slid the unconscious woman into the boxcar, then promptly clicked on the battery-operated light, shut the door, and locked it from the inside.

He tied Adele to the chair.

Blond hair, a sea green sweater, black jeans. He decided to leave her clothes on while he worked on her. That way, when they found her without her hands or feet, the blood-drenched clothes would add to the dramatic effect. Increase the shock value.

Or maybe not. Maybe leaving her nude would shock them more.

Well, that was certainly something to consider.

Earlier he’d propped ten mattresses against the walls of the boxcar to absorb the sounds. Now, every time he took a step, there was only a tiny muffled echo from the wooden floorboards, an echo that was quickly devoured by the improvised baffling.

Adele was beginning to stir, but it would still take her a few minutes to wake up.

Next order of business, his clothes.

He knew it would be shockingly cold if he were to stand here naked himself, but he’d found out last night with Colleen Hayes that, even with the plastic ties around her wrists, there was still a lot of blood. Tonight he didn’t want any of it getting on his clothes, so after one more moment of mental preparation, he removed his shoes, stripped off his clothes and placed them in one of the plastic bags, then tucked the bag in the corner of the boxcar.

Actually, he thought the chilled air might add to the excitement of what he was doing. Sharpen his awareness. Heighten the experience.

Adele was blindfolded and that was important to Joshua. No woman other than his wife had ever seen him naked and he didn’t want that to change tonight.

Barefoot now, and unclothed, he walked to the mattress he’d left the amputation saw on top of yesterday. Caught up in his thoughts, he absentmindedly stroked the blade for a moment. Yes, he was anxious to get started, but he wanted Adele to be fully awake and aware, like Colleen had been last night, before he cut off any of her extremities.

At last, leaving the saw there for the moment, he faced Adele, and naked, apart from the latex gloves he wore on his hands, he watched her as she slowly began to awaken.

I parked beside the train yard.

Somewhere nearby there was supposed to be an access road to the yard’s parking lot, but I wasn’t familiar with the labyrinthine roads in this neighborhood, nor was I in the mood to drive around trying to figure out where to go. I decided Ralph and I could find a quicker way past the fence.

Looking at the rusted condition of most of the train cars, I was struck by a thought: this wasn’t just a train yard, it was a train graveyard.

I put that thought out of my mind: “graveyard” was not a term I wanted bouncing around inside my head at the moment.

The sun had dipped to the skyline, leaving the whole yard draped in one long sweeping shadow. Though the snow had stopped, the wind was picking up and scraped at my face as we exited the undercover car. I zipped up my leather jacket.

Ralph stood beside me, scrutinizing the area. The wind caught hold of his jacket and pressed it against his hulking chest, making it look like a dark, rippling second skin.

“How do you want to do this?” he asked me.

“How about I take the south side, you take the north?”

“So,” he said, “besides Hendrich, what exactly are we looking for again?”

“Bad guys. Bodies. Clues.”

“The usual.”

“Right.”

I dug through the contents of the sedan’s trunk and came up with a hefty, heavy-duty Maglite flashlight. If I needed to take a closer look inside any of the train cars, this puppy would definitely do the trick.

Ralph eyed it. “You think that thing’s big enough?”

I passed it from hand to hand, gauged the weight. “It can double as a club if I need it to.”

“It could double as a baseball bat,” he muttered, “if you cut a few inches off the end.”

Actually, I kind of liked it. “It’s not that bad.”

He showed me his Mini Maglite, not much larger than a Magic Marker. “You gotta get one of these Bad Boys.”

“That’s not exactly what I would call a ‘Bad Boy.’”

He grunted slightly, then studied the razor wire fence that enclosed the train yard. “So how do we get in?”

When I took a closer look at the formidable security fence, I realized that was actually a pretty good question.

We could walk along the fence that skirted a field on the side of the yard and eventually get to the parking area, but it was likely that the gate was locked and there wasn’t any less razor wire there than there was on the rest of the fence. It wasn’t going to be easy to climb over that no matter where we went.

It seemed that, with all the graffiti on the train cars, there must be an easier way in, somewhere local gang members would use to access the yard to mark their territory.

Quickly, I evaluated what I knew of the neighborhood, then pointed. “The woods. It’s relatively close to the Crips’ territory.” I was about to tell him who the Crips were but then realized he’d already be familiar with the gang from his NCAVC work. “Sections of it wouldn’t be visible from the road.”

“It’d help hide the access point.”

“Right. If there’s a hole in the fence, I’m guessing it would be over there somewhere. That’s where they’d come through. The kids who spray-paint all the train cars.”

He nodded and, flashlights in hand, we crossed the road to look for a way in.

Carl arrived at Main Street.

Plainfield hadn’t grown much since the 1950s when Ed Gein lived here-it still had fewer than a thousand residents, and the street still consisted of only a small family-owned diner, an antique shop, two taverns, a church, and, of course, the hardware store. It was like an idyllic little midwestern Mayberry with a nightmare hiding in its closet.

Carl parked his van just down the street from Magnus’s Hardware Store.

Even though he wanted to get that body out of his van, he still had a little time before he needed to make the call to the kidnapper and he wanted to stick as close as he could to the time frame the note had laid out for him.

Down the block, a few people stepped out of Schroeder’s Diner. He recognized them all and he wondered what they would think of him if they knew what he’d just done, what he had in the back of his van.