Steven James - Opening Moves

Five steps.

So, right now, number one-orientation.

The big picture.

I spoke my thoughts aloud to Ralph. “Track with me here. Last night Colleen is abducted and an unusual and disturbing ransom demand is left behind for her husband. Then, even though Vincent does as he was told, the kidnapper saws off her hands.”

“And it looks like he was about to do that again here tonight, but this time to cut off both her hands and her feet.”

I nodded. “Escalation.”

“So,” he said, tracking with me, “we have another ‘ransom’ demand tonight?”

“Very likely. Yes.”

Another pastiche?

“Ralph, we need to get a car over to the alley where Radar and I found Lionel last night-and one to the pier where the guy left Colleen.” I thought about it, then added, “And let’s get someone to the bar too, where Vincent abducted Lionel.”

He called it in while I studied the inside of the boxcar and compared it to what Colleen had told me this morning about the place her abductor had taken her.

When Ralph got off the radio I said, “This boxcar fits the description Colleen gave us. I think we should proceed with the theory that she was brought here too.”

“Agreed.”

I took a minute to mentally review the Dahmer connection, the locations, the information we had about the previous homicides, then noted the obvious: “The Taurus was inside the gate, so whoever drove it in there-whether that was Hendrich or someone else-must have had access to a key to that gate.”

And keys to the two boxcars.

It struck me that we still hadn’t heard back from the station about the sedan’s plates and whether the car was registered to Hendrich. When I mentioned that, Gabriele, who was lingering near the entrance to the boxcar and had apparently been listening in on our conversation, offered to follow up on it.

“Good,” I told her. She left to make the call, I turned to Ralph. “Chaining the gate shut, parking in that particular place, choosing this line of boxcars, once again speaks to our guy’s familiarity with the area. With the forest paralleling the tracks, he would have been hidden from view from every nearby road, and from where the car is parked, he would have had to carry the victim, or lead her, more than sixty meters to the boxcar…”

“By the way, what’s with you and the metric system? You never heard of yards before?”

“Science, medicine, forensics, they all use the metric system,” I defended myself. “That’s why they measure things in milliliters, millimeters, and so on. Metric is the measuring system of the world. Even track and field events use the metric system.”

“Yeah, well football doesn’t. It’s a game of inches, not centimeters. It doesn’t even sound American to talk like that. From now on, convert so I know what you’re talking about.”

“Um…a meter is just a little longer than a-”

“Yard. Yeah, I know that one. Everyone knows that one. But everything else-how many millimeters are in a foot? How many kilometers are in a mile? I don’t know that stuff. No more of this metric nonsense. It’s too European-reminds me of France.”

“You really don’t like France.”

“No, I do not.”

“What happened in France, Ralph?”

“I’ll tell you someday.” He eyed the ten old and mismatched mattresses, then left the topic of the metric system behind. “It’d be tough for one person to carry those in by himself, don’t you think? A lot easier with two people.”

And a lot of trips driving in-unless you have a U-Haul.

Hmm…a moving truck…

“And he obviously got ’em from somewhere,” I muttered. “I mean, who would have ten used mattresses just lying around? A hotel? A used furniture store? A Goodwill store?”

“We should have some officers follow up on that.”

“There’s a Salvation Army thrift store about half a mile from here.” It was Gabriele again. She’d returned and was lingering by the door.

“Try them,” I told her. “See if they’re still open, if they might’ve sold some guy ten used mattresses.”

A nod. She left.

“Okay, step two,” I told Ralph. “We try to notice the obvious.”

“Notice the obvious?”

“Yeah, it’s often the hardest thing to see. It’s like Pascal wrote in Les Pensees , ‘For we always find the thing obscure which we wish to prove and that clear which we use for the proof; for, when a thing is put forward to be proved, we first fill ourselves with the imagination that it is, therefore, obscure and, on the contrary, that what is to prove it is clear, and so we understand it easily.’”

“I’m not sure I quite followed that.”

“We start with the preconception that what we want to find out is obscure, but it might not be. It might be clear, but our preconceptions blind us.”

“Oh. Why didn’t he just say that?”

“He was a philosopher.”

“And you memorized that?”

“Seemed like a good idea at the time.” I inspected the chair. It was bolted to the floor to keep the struggling victims from tipping it over. “We have three new locks…” I said softly. “The boxcar with Hendrich, the one with the woman, the front gate. They’re the only new locks in the yard. But they’re not all the same type of padlock. The brand of the one on the front gate and this boxcar match; the other doesn’t and it was on a rusty chain while the other two had new chains.”

“Maybe he had to come in here a bunch of times to deliver those mattresses and that chair, brought different locks on each trip.”

“Yeah.” I mulled that over. “Maybe.”

A swarm of questions buzzed through my mind.

How many people did he bring here? Just these two victims, or have there been more? If this is the same guy who was committing the cannibalistic homicides elsewhere in the Midwest, is this his base of operation? If so, why is it so far from the other two locations?

And why are there two different styles of locks?

Two different offenders?

I heard someone outside mention that the CSIU had arrived in the parking lot.

Just a couple more minutes.

I knew that the crime scene unit would search for DNA and prints and would compare the blood samples to find out whatever they could about the offender. They had the instruments and materials for all that, Ralph and I didn’t. But DNA and prints help you only if you have something to compare them to. If the guy wasn’t in the system, his name wasn’t going to pop up.

Tonight the CSIU had a lot of evidence to process: the Taurus, two boxcars and their contents, the locks and chains, the fence material around that opening, the gate…and I had a sense that this guy was smart. Careful. That he wasn’t going to leave behind anything that he didn’t want to.

I’m no expert on blood spatter analysis, but when I scrutinized the stains on the wooden floor, I could tell that some were darker, had seeped in more. The fresh blood from the woman tonight had sprayed across the floor when her left ankle was cut. The other stains were just below where Colleen’s wrists would have been if she’d been sitting in the chair.

I bent beside it. “Ralph, look at the blood spatter on the floor here: the pattern of the darker stains.”

He studied them with me. “Dried. Soaked in more. From Colleen.”

“So it would seem.”

He could tell I was looking at something else. “What is it?”

“Well, at first it sprayed a little, you can see that, but then it stops abruptly.” I pointed. “Almost in a straight line.”

“So, the blood hit him. His arm maybe. Or his leg.”

“Yeah, I’m not sure, but…”