Steven James - Opening Moves

The square cardboard box they’d found was about half a meter tall, deep, and wide. It held a clutch of toys, some children’s clothes beneath them, and, apparently, something bulky that I couldn’t make out beneath the toys and clothing.

The toys in the box that caught my attention right off the bat were a plastic horse about the right size for a Barbie doll to ride on and a stuffed goat. As well as two small plastic pushcarts.

Beside them, tucked into the side of the box, was a carefully folded-up page torn from a coloring book with a sketchily colored-in bull.

Fire rose inside me.

I wondered if Griffin had colored in the picture himself or if an abducted child had done so.

Despite myself, I felt something inside of me slipping, something that’d been rooted firmly for a long time in what I believed about right and wrong, about justice and mercy: I wanted Timothy Griffin out of the way for good and I wanted to be the one to take him out. And if things played out like that, I knew that afterward I wouldn’t regret it at all.

But honestly, thinking those things frightened me.

Keep the demons at bay.

Keep them at bay.

Yeah, well maybe not this time.

As I removed the toys and then the children’s clothes-outfits that looked like they would’ve fit someone Jenna’s size-I saw what was bunched up beneath them.

A jacket.

Even though the arms of the coat weren’t visible, I said quietly, “There’s a small rip on the left sleeve, about halfway down.”

Radar was on one knee beside me, looking into the box as well. “How do you know that?”

“Because it used to be mine.”

I took the jacket out of the box.

The rip was right where I remembered it.

In a voice that I couldn’t help from being hushed, I explained to Radar and the other officers how I’d left this jacket in the tree house to cover Mindy Wells’s naked corpse. “I don’t know what happened to it after the investigation. I never saw it again.”

How did Griffin get this? From the evidence room? But he was never a cop…

I laid the jacket down softly, gentleness at this moment seemed to be a way of honoring the memory of Mindy Wells, then I stood and faced the four officers who’d been here when Radar and I arrived. “We need to find Griffin and Mallory. Now. Do any of you have any idea where they might be?”

They all shook their heads.

“He wasn’t here when he fled,” I said. “Yet somehow he knew we were coming to his house.”

“Why do you say that?” Carver asked.

Radar answered for me, pointing at the box. “If he was taking off for good, he wouldn’t have left that behind, especially if he knew you were coming with a search warrant.”

So, where was he?

The obvious: he and Mallory were just out running errands.

Maybe.

But we couldn’t afford to assume that right now.

“Did you put out an APB on his car yet?” I asked Carver.

“Yeah. So far no word.”

The only people who knew we were going to be here were Ralph, Radar, me, the judge whom Ralph contacted…

And the Fort Atkinson police.

Did someone warn Griffin that the police were on their way?

I asked Carver, “Who received the fax of the search warrant?”

“I did.”

“Who else besides the people in this room knew about it? Knew you were coming here?”

He gestured toward the three other men. “I grabbed these guys while we were at the station, but when we got here we radioed dispatch our location. So it could have been anyone.”

“No, not if you radioed in your position after you arrived. Griffin was already gone when you got here.”

There was always the possibility that Griffin had been at a neighbor’s house or something, saw the squads arrive, and just didn’t come home.

No, his car is missing from the driveway.

Okay. How to do this and not end up accusing one of them of warning Griffin…

“Do any of you know Griffin?”

All four men shook their heads.

I glanced at Radar, who was eyeing them, one after another. “Officer Webb,” he said to a stout young officer with short bristly hair and pale blue eyes. “You knew him, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“But you’ve seen him, right? It’s a small town. You see people around.”

“I don’t know, I-”

He looked rattled and Radar didn’t let up. “Officer Webb, did you call him? Tell him you were on the way over here?”

“No, of course not!” But he didn’t look Radar in the eye, and when he said the words he was tapping the forefinger and thumb of his right hand rapidly together.

I was about to push the issue, but Radar spoke up first. “You know something and you’re holding out. Right now you need to tell us what it is. We have-”

Surprisingly, that’s all it took. Webb held up a hand in quick surrender. “Listen, listen, all I did was call my sister. That’s it. That’s all. I just told her Griffin might be involved in something.”

“Your sister?” I said. “Why your sister?”

“She’s friends with Mallory. Cuts her hair. I was, you know, worried Griffin might…well, do something to her if he got scared. Desperate.”

Carver was glaring at his man, obviously ticked, but if Webb was telling the truth, I could at least understand where he was coming from. “How did she warn Mallory?” I asked him. “Where were they when your sister called her?”

“I don’t even know if she called her. I just-”

“Listen to me,” Radar interrupted him. “Do you have any idea where they might have gone?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know they might-”

“Can you think of anywhere at all Griffin might have taken her?” Radar repeated, even more emphatically.

Webb was visibly shaken, but I could tell he was really thinking about it. “Okay, there’s this place, a couple miles outside of town. I don’t know, maybe…My sister went there with them a couple times to party. It’s near the dump. This abandoned farmhouse. No one lives out there, but it’s-”

I cut him off. “You say it’s near the landfill?”

“Yeah.”

An unsettling set of dark possibilities wound its way, like a snake slithering from a forgotten hole, into my thoughts. In 1996, Dahmer’s belongings had been taken to an undisclosed landfill. According to what Radar had read me earlier, Griffin worked for three years as a garbage collector in Milwaukee. The timing didn’t fit for him to have been one of the people who drove the dump truck to dispose of Dahmer’s possessions, but he might easily know the person who did.

But the Fort Atkinson landfill?

Yeah, just far enough from Milwaukee to discourage souvenir hounds.

Griffin moved to Fort Atkinson in June 1996-the same month the city of Milwaukee disposed of Dahmer’s things.

I don’t believe in coincidences.

I started for the stairs, gestured toward Radar, and said to Webb, “You’re riding with us. We’re going to that farmhouse.”

On the way to the house we radioed the dispatcher here in Fort Atkinson and told him to call Lieutenant Thorne to find out the name of the two city workers who’d delivered Dahmer’s possessions to the landfill. “And we need to know if the landfill they used was the one here in Fort Atkinson.”

We also called for backup to be sent to the farmhouse-an ambulance too. I didn’t say so, but I wanted it there because I knew if I was left alone with Griffin, he would be needing it.

The town of Fort Atkinson didn’t have a SWAT team, but Webb told us they’d call in the one for Jefferson County.

We were only two or three minutes from the landfill. “How long till they get here?”