Steven James - Opening Moves

“A lot of things, I guess.” I indicated toward the woman. “Mostly, that I’m thankful we got here when we did for her, but I’m angry we didn’t get here-”

“Soon enough to save Hendrich.”

“Yeah.”

“His body was still warm,” Ralph said. “I’m not sure how long he might have been dead. Hopefully the forensics guys can figure all that out, but we didn’t see anyone else leave the train yard, so I have to think he was killed right before we got here, right before the suspect fled.”

“Unless the killer didn’t escape at all.”

“You think he’s still here? A second guy?”

“It’s possible.” Thankfully, the sirens had drawn closer, and I could tell by the sound that they’d made it past the parking lot gate. I was anxious to scour the train yards more carefully, but we would need a team of people to do that thoroughly, and they were going to be here any moment. “I’ll get some more officers out there searching in a sec.”

Considering the number of train cars and tracks, the EMTs probably wouldn’t be able to drive all the way to this boxcar, but I imagined they should at least be able to make it as far as the Ford Taurus. Rolling a gurney from there might pose a bit of a problem, but carrying a stretcher would be manageable.

We radioed in our exact position and a bevy of officers beat the paramedics to our car. I had one of them take my place beside the woman and then directed the others where to look in the train yard and woods for other victims, suspects, accomplices or witnesses.

While I was giving instructions, the paramedics came jogging up carrying a stretcher.

No drugs were visible in the boxcar, but I told the EMTs to start with the working assumption that the woman had been given Propotol, the same pharmaceutical that’d been left at the Hayes house last night for Vincent to knock out the African-American man he’d been directed to abduct.

Three more officers showed up and I sent them to help the others.

With impressive speed and proficiency the paramedics got the woman ready, and I helped them carry the stretcher to one of the two waiting ambulances.

As they loaded her, one of the EMTs saw the cuts on my hands from grabbing the razor wire through the inadequate protection of my jacket. She offered to treat them, but I decided that bandaging my hands in gauze would slow me down too much; however, in the end, I let her clean the wounds and wrap some first aid tape around them so I could work without leaving my blood everywhere.

The night wind was biting and cold, so on my way back to the train car where we’d found the woman, I retrieved the flashlight, and then my jacket, which was still snagged on the top of the fence. It was sliced up some, but overall it was in reasonably good shape.

I didn’t even want to think about how my hands would have looked if the jacket hadn’t been there to protect them.

When the officer who’d brought the bolt cutters arrived, Ralph took them from him and the three of us left to search the other boxcars for more victims. Ralph made short work of the rusted chains on the remaining cars, but we didn’t find anyone else in the yard. Neither did any of the other officers.

No victims.

No suspects.

No witnesses.

Except that little boy you saw through the window, out past the woods.

No, he’d only looked out when I kicked the garbage can.

It’s possible he might have seen something before you got there and that’s why he was at the window in the first place.

I sent an officer to go and talk with him. Other officers were already canvassing the neighborhood. Before sending them out, I’d noted that our guy was Caucasian and knew where to go to disappear in this nearly one hundred percent African-American neighborhood. “See if anyone saw a white guy running through here, someone who didn’t belong.”

By the time Ralph and I returned to the boxcar where we’d found the woman, Officer Gabriele Holdren had arrived and now informed us that the crime scene investigative unit, or CSIU, was on its way.

“ETA?” I asked her.

“Should be here in the next four or five minutes.”

I’m not the biggest fan of our force’s CSIU. Captain Domyslawski didn’t budget nearly enough money to purchase the kind of resources or attract the kind of personnel he should’ve, and it showed through all too often in the form of lost or mislabeled evidence, contaminated crime scenes, and inadequate case documentation.

Four or five minutes, huh?

Well, at least that gave me a little time to look around before they started in.

I’ll take what I can get.

I asked Gabriele to wait outside, then climbed into the boxcar. “Ralph, I want your eyes in here.”

He heaved himself up and stood beside me.

Both of us had our flashlights on and they illuminated, in a somewhat eerie fashion, the macabre contents of the boxcar.

“Alright, Mr. I-Notice-Things,” Ralph said bluntly, but softly enough for only me to hear, “you’re on.”

I snapped on a pair of latex gloves over my taped-up hands. “Yes, I am.”

Carefully, I began to study the contents of the boxcar.

A private little torture chamber.

That’s what our guy had constructed.

Ten mattresses lined the walls, evidently to serve as makeshift baffles to absorb the sound of his victims’ screams.

I recalled that the kidnapper hadn’t gagged Colleen last night when he maimed her, so he must have trusted that the mattresses really did do their job.

There was a half-used roll of duct tape on the floor next to a length of leftover rope. Beside them lay the antique-looking amputation saw I’d noticed when we first came in. Blood stained the floor beneath the sturdy chair in the middle of the boxcar, probably from Colleen last night, as well as from the injuries of the woman we’d found here just a few minutes ago.

Maybe from others too.

True. Considering the brutality of these crimes and the setup the guy had in here, there was no compelling reason to think that the two women were the only ones he had ever brought to this boxcar.

The only other things I noticed were a light-now turned off-on the wall, the shredded ropes, tape, the plastic ties left from when Ralph had cut the woman free, some sheets of butcher paper, and two plastic garbage bags in the northeast corner, one neatly folded up, the other crumpled on top of it.

When you process a crime scene, you follow a pretty well-established set of five procedures: orientation, observation, examination, analysis, and evaluation. I quickly, almost instinctively, ran through what needed to be done:

1. Orientation: look at the big picture, including the place and timing of the crime, whether it’s indoors or outdoors, what the location might tell you about the offender’s familiarity with the area, if the crime appeared to be related to other crimes, and so on.

2. Observation: note both the unusual and the obvious, remembering that the obvious is often the easiest thing to miss.

3. Examination: collect and scrutinize physical evidence, such as fingerprints, DNA, hair samples, and so on-the things that come to mind for most people when they hear about police officers processing a crime scene.

4. Analysis: take into account everything you know and probe deeper into the pertinence each fact or clue might have to the case. This should happen at the scene while everything is fresh in your mind, as well as later during a briefing when you recap the investigation.

5. Evaluation: form a working hypothesis that you don’t try to prove, but rather try to disprove. Too many times initial hypotheses aren’t correct and trying to find ways to make the facts fit them only throws a monkey wrench into the works. This was the main problem I see with too many of the officers I work with, including, perhaps especially, Detective Corsica.