Steven James - Opening Moves

2. Kowalski had not only desecrated his grandmother’s grave, he had also skinned the corpse and left it at the same hardware store where Gein had committed one of his murders four decades ago.

3. During the day, Ellen and Corsica had come up with sixteen unsolved missing persons cases in Ohio, Illinois, and Wisconsin spanning the last two years involving women who fit the general description (race, age, build, hair color, socioeconomic status) of the women killed in Illinois and Ohio.

4. Thompson reported that no Champaign officers had ever worked in the Waukesha area and the chain of custody forms didn’t raise any red flags.

5. When Ellen and Corsica had delivered the search warrant and picked up Griffin’s receipts and subscription list, Corsica had asked him for a physical description of Hendrich, hoping to find out if he really was the guy who’d dealt with him, or if someone else had impersonated him, but Griffin said they’d only communicated by mail or by phone. She’d also asked about amputation saws, but he claimed he’d never sold one-though he would like to get his hands on one if she had a contact.

I reviewed: Dahmer and Gein.

Two cannibals.

Two days.

And bad things come in threes.

Wonderful.

As both Radar and I had observed earlier, most killers escalate. I couldn’t imagine what our guy had in mind for later this week, not if he was moving up the ladder from Dahmer and Gein.

After going through the case files and filling out my police report concerning the events of the evening, I came to the place where I needed to tip my thoughts in a less visceral, less disturbing direction, take a break from all the grisly images-both the ones on the pages before me and the ones in my head.

It was late, but I tried calling Taci.

She didn’t pick up.

You’ll just have to sort things out in the morning during breakfast.

Maybe I could get some emotional distance from all of this by looking not at the specifics of the cases, but at the theories concerning how to investigate them instead.

I opened up the manila folder Dr. Werjonic had left for me and slid the papers out.

There was a note on top of the stack of papers:

Ring me in the morning, Detective Bowers, between 11:00 and 11:05. I’m at the downtown Sheraton. I think I may be able to help you with this case.

Cheers.

— C.W.

I slowly set down the papers.

Dr. Calvin Werjonic PhD, JD, eminent professor, world-renowned criminologist, was offering to help me with this case? Sure, the news media had released information regarding it, but how did he know I was the one working it?

Curious to see if any of his lecture notes might be applicable to what we were looking at here, I spread the photocopied pages across the table.

To my disappointment, his notes weren’t typed or organized in any clearly discernible manner, but they were handwritten scribbles that were, in most cases, almost indecipherable.

He’d probably been teaching the material for so long that he didn’t need many prompts to get him started on each topic. That might have been good if I were sitting in a lecture hall listening to him, but it wasn’t good for me sitting here in my apartment tonight.

However, he did include photocopied pages from one of his articles that appeared last year in the Journal of the International Association of Crime Analysts , a succinct summary of his two-pronged approach:

Geospatial investigation involves the evaluation of locations related to a crime to deduce the most statistically probable region out of which the offender bases his criminal activity. The complementary field of environmental criminology focuses on understanding the way offenders cognitively map their environments and rationally choose to act within their awareness space while committing their crimes.

The two approaches work in conjunction with each other to provide a vigorous and robust new paradigm for analyzing linked serial offenses and tracking those who commit them.

Unlike profilers, who deal with the psychological reasons that might have motivated a crime, environmental criminologists look for the significance of the location of the crime to both the offender and the victim. Instead of asking what the offender might have been thinking while he committed the crime, we ask why he was there at that specific place at that specific time:

(1) What do the choice of the crime’s location and the timing of the crime tell us about the offender and the victim?

(2) What purpose do these locations serve for him? Expediency? Opportunity? Isolation?

(3) What do the locations of the crimes tell us about how he’s choosing his victims?

(4) What led him to this specific victim and location? How and when did his life intersect with the victim’s to create the encounter that precipitated this crime?

These were four lines of inquiry worth thinking about, in depth, in regard to this case.

The article went on to discuss victimology, that is, the study of the victim and inferences that could be drawn from his or her cognitive maps. Fascinated, I read the rest of it carefully with a highlighter in hand.

When I was done, I shuffled through the rest of the notes and realized that I wasn’t going to be able to decode them all tonight, not when I was so tired, but that I might be able to make my way through them better in the morning when I was fresh.

Today had become one of those days when it seemed like the morning couldn’t possibly have occurred within the same twenty-four-hour span of time. Too much had happened, too much had filled in the spaces between the moments.

Tomorrow never looked so good.

At last, I crawled into bed with thoughts of the case and of Taci and of the nightmares I’d had last evening all vying for my attention, all wrestling to be the thing that followed me into my dreams.

And when I closed my eyes, I had no idea which of them would win.

DAY 3

Tuesday, November 18

The Landfill

6:02 a.m.

The nightmares left me alone.

I dreamt of Taci instead, and woke up thinking about our weekend getaway to Tennessee the first weekend of October. We’d been close as a couple when we headed down there and when we returned, we were even closer, with shared memories of day hikes in the Smoky Mountains and evenings in front of the fireplace at a bed-and-breakfast nestled up in the hills.

It was a nice note to start the day on and when I got out of bed I felt much more rested than I had yesterday morning, which was a relief because I had the feeling this might shape up to be another long day.

I wasn’t scheduled to meet Taci until seven thirty, nearly an hour and a half from now. Anthony’s Cafe was downtown, which gave me an idea.

When you’re working cases like this, the odd hours, the long hours, it’s easy to eat poorly-admittedly one of my weaknesses. And, for me at least, it’s easy to miss workouts. Getting motivated to exercise wasn’t usually the issue for me because I loved to trail run, climb, hike, anything outdoors. But finding the time to get out and play when you’re in the middle of a case can be tricky.

My climbing buddy, Reinhold Draeger, operated the South Wall Climbing Gym, which wasn’t too far from Anthony’s Cafe. The morning’s agenda seemed to lay itself out neatly for me: slip in a workout at the gym, grab breakfast with Taci, review Werjonic’s notes and the case files, meet with the task force at HQ, then call Dr. Werjonic at eleven.

Even though I climb with ropes when I’m at the crags, working out close to the ground without them is a great way to develop finger strength, leg work, and breathing. It’s called bouldering and an hour of that would be more than enough of a workout for this morning.