Steven James - Opening Moves

And in heaven.

I wasn’t exactly sure what I believed about those things, but doing this job I’ve learned three things for certain, three things I do know for sure: life is a mystery, death is a tragedy, and hope-when it exists-is always a gift.

Hendrich was wearing civilian clothes, no security guard uniform. There was blood on the floor of the boxcar, but none leading to it, which told me he was killed in here.

I wondered how long he might have been kept in this train car before he was killed.

Evidence and evident both come from the same root word meaning “obvious,” but all too often the two concepts-what is evident and what is evidence-don’t mesh very well in an investigation. Evidence isn’t always evident and what’s evident doesn’t always end up being evidence.

I wanted the walls and the wounds and the clues to speak to me; wanted everything in the boxcar to bring a collective voice together and whisper to me the name of the killer, but for the moment I noticed nothing else that seemed in any way pertinent. All the evidence was silent.

As I looked around the boxcar, I ran through the five investigative steps but came up with nothing revelatory.

“Did you go through his pockets?” I asked the head of the CSIU team.

“Not yet.”

“Now would be good.”

After a small pause, he did, and produced $14.73, a well-used, much-stained handkerchief, a set of keys, a wallet, and a pocketknife. I knew that the CSIU team would follow up on all these things later. I wanted to follow up on one of them now.

The keys.

I still had on the same pair of latex gloves from earlier, and now, so that I wouldn’t cross-contaminate the two scenes, I donned a new pair. My hands were sore and tender and, to say the least, it didn’t exactly feel good tugging gloves off and on.

First, I took the keys to the lock on this boxcar, then to the gate, then jogged back to the boxcar where we’d found the woman.

None of the keys opened any of the locks. Hendrich didn’t have a Ford Taurus key on the ring.

All of which intrigued me.

I returned the keys to be logged in as evidence, and Ralph and Radar ran into me outside the boxcar. “Nothing from the neighborhood,” Ralph announced. “No one saw anything, not even that little kid.”

“Okay…” The wind still hadn’t let up and I caught myself muttering, “I wonder if he heard me…”

“Heard you?” Radar said.

“I shouted into the boxcar when I first saw Hendrich’s body,” I explained, “but considering the distance to the car where we found the woman, also the mattresses and the wind…” I started for the boxcar door. “I’ll yell at you two.”

Ralph looked confused. “What do you mean, you’ll yell at us?”

I indicated toward the car where we’d found the woman. “Go down there. I’ll stay here and yell like I did when I was trying to see if there was anyone in this boxcar. We’ll try it a couple times, door open, closed. You get the idea.”

He caught on. “See if it was possible for the guy who attacked her to hear you shouting.”

“Right.”

It only took a few minutes to do the reenactment and when we reconvened, Radar shook his head. “Nothing.”

But you heard the muted cries, Pat…

How?

Well, if it was the woman, she would have been screaming as loudly as she could.

I’m not sure that explained what I’d heard, but the reenactment did tell us one thing. “So,” I said, “it’s unlikely the shooter heard us; and if his door was closed, he didn’t see us either, unless someone else-”

“Warned him,” Radar said, concluding what I’d been finding myself inclining toward. “A sentry? A scout? Is that what you’re thinking?”

“We need to stay open to the possibility.”

“But where did he go?”

“It’s possible to get over the fence.” I held up my gloved, bandaged hands. “I improvised, but someone could have certainly planned better than I did. When our attention was focused on the shooter, the other person-if there really was another person-could’ve fled in another direction.”

This line of reasoning opened up a whole range of interesting possibilities.

If there were two offenders, were they working together? If not, how do you explain the timing?

Ralph must have been thinking the same thing. “Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that there were two separate crimes right here, at the same time?”

I tried to process what we had going on here. Two victims. One shooter. Even though the proximity of the crimes favored the possibility that the victims were attacked by the same offender, the MO really was completely different: the woman had been restrained in a chair just as Colleen Hayes had been last night, the man had not. He had no ligature marks and had been stabbed numerous times in his stomach, unlike any of the other victims, not even from the homicides in Illinois and Ohio. No lungs removed here. No intestines eaten. No limbs sawed off. All the other victims had been women, this guy wasn’t.

“It’s true,” I admitted. “There are a lot of things that don’t measure up here.”

“Unless we really are talking about two different offenders,” Radar offered.

“Or three.”

They looked at me curiously. “Three?” Ralph said.

“The out-of-state homicides, the kidnappings, and Hendrich’s murder.”

He shook his head. “But they’re not entirely unrelated. Griffin’s merchandise sales to Colleen Hayes, the police tape from the murder in Illinois, tie them all together.”

I said, “The two homicides in Ohio and Illinois bear no semblance to the pattern of abduction, coercion, and mutilation that we saw with the Hayes family and now, evidently, with this woman tonight. There was no ransom note in the previous deaths and the victims of the last two days were left alive, even though they could have easily been killed.”

“And here, there’s no cannibali-” Ralph caught himself short. “The hands.”

We were quiet. We didn’t know what Colleen’s abductor had done with her hands, but we could imagine, and by the looks on Ralph’s and Radar’s faces, I think we all were.

Backpedaling a little, I stated the obvious: “Hendrich was a part-time security guard here. Maybe he just came upon our guy and got taken out.”

Don’t assume too much in any direction.

Radar offered to dig up a list of Caucasians fitting our suspect’s description who might visit this neighborhood regularly enough to become familiar with the woods, invisible to the neighbors. “You were right, Pat. We’ve got a white guy who knows how to evaporate into a neighborhood of gangbangers of another race. I’ll look at social workers, youth coaches, parole officers, pizza delivery guys. Everyone. I don’t care. Including cops.”

Even though I didn’t like to even consider the idea that a cop could be involved, I agreed that it was worth pursuing.

Ralph said to me, “I’ll stick with you. Coordinate the searches. I’ll stay as late as I need to.”

My eyes were on the flashlight beams from the officers who were working their way through the forest. “Good to hear, Tonto.”

Joshua’s wife had supper waiting for him when he came through the door, but she looked at him with concern as he dropped his keys onto the counter. “What is it, hon?”

“What?”

“You look pale. Like you just saw a ghost.”

“No, it’s just…traffic. It’s nothing.” He kissed her. “I’ll be back in a sec. Let me kick off my shoes.”

As he crossed the hallway to the bedroom, he tried to piece together what had happened out there tonight.