Opening Moves (16 page)

When Griffin didn’t reply, Ralph reflectively patted the top of one of the overstuffed chairs. “I may show up too. Bring the mini-weenies. I always like a good party.”

“Okay,” Timothy grumbled. “Alright. I’ll call you if I hear anything.”

“I appreciate that very much, Mr. Griffin.”

Ralph nodded toward Mallory. “Good day, ma’am.”

Once we were back in the car I said to Ralph, “Mini-weenies?”

“They’re good with mustard and ranch dressing. What did you see in the hall?”

“The Albert Fish letter, but it’s what I found in the bedroom that really caught my attention.”

“And that was?”

I started the car. “Griffin sold Hayes the handcuffs. Colleen Hayes.”

“Colleen?”

“Yes.”

“Interesting. And how do we know that?”

I told him about the receipts. Ralph wasn’t familiar with the Oswald case. I filled him in on what I knew.

Then, since there wasn’t a car phone in this vehicle, I radioed the local dispatcher and asked her to put a call through to my adviser at Marquette and let him know I wouldn’t be at the lecture this afternoon and to see if he could request that Dr. Werjonic leave a photocopy of his lecture notes in the Criminology and Law Studies graduate office. I could pick them up later this evening and hopefully carve out some time to review them before tomorrow’s class. I gave her the number.

When I got off the radio I had an idea. “Ralph, the Waukesha County Sheriff Department is just a couple miles off the interstate. What do you say we swing by and see who the arresting officers were in the Oswald case?”

“Yeah, and maybe check the chain of custody for the evidence. Whoever had access to the Oswald evidence might have had access to the cuffs.”

I aimed the car for the highway. “I like the way you think, Agent Hawkins. For a fed, that is.”

“You’re doing alright yourself, for a detective. At least so far.”

“So far?”

“Yeah, but just don’t get in my way.”

It sounded like he was joking, I knew he was joking, but when I glanced at him, I realized I couldn’t quite tell. Not for sure.

25

Plainfield, Wisconsin

It wasn’t even a choice for Carl Kowalski. Not after finding that note in his kitchen. Not after seeing the horrible, horrible thing that Adele’s kidnapper had left for him in the refrigerator.

At first when he walked through the front door and saw the note on the table, he’d thought it might be some kind of sick joke from one of his poker buddies.

But then he’d done what the note told him to do and looked in the refrigerator’s meat/cheese drawer and found Adele’s ring finger with the engagement ring he’d given her four months earlier still encircling the base of it. No. This was not a joke. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Now he carefully positioned his van on the cemetery’s access road to hide his activity from people who might happen to drive past on the nearby but infrequently used county highway. Then, shielded from view, he removed the shovel from the back of the vehicle.

It wasn’t a large graveyard and wasn’t visited often. He knew this since he was the one who mowed it on weekends. There was really very little chance that he would be interrupted, but if someone did happen to visit, he figured that since he worked the grounds, he’d at least be able to come up with an explanation for why he had the shovel.

But why he was digging up the grave of Miriam Flandry, that was another story entirely. No reasonable explanation for that came to mind.

Well, just get it over with quickly and you won’t have to worry about it.

Carl walked to the fresh grave.

The note had been clear: Dig up Miriam’s corpse. Skin it. Then leave it outside the hardware store where Gein had killed Bernice Worden back in 1957. Even though Carl hadn’t been born at the time, he knew the story, knew what had happened there. Everyone in Plainfield knew the story.

According to the note, if he didn’t do as requested, the person who’d taken Adele was going to skin
her
alive and leave her corpse on Carl’s porch. Whoever was doing this—or why anyone would dream up something so gruesome—was a mystery to Carl. A dark, blank, terrible mystery.

But he could try to figure that out later. Right now he had to get to work.

He drove the shovel into the loose soil, dumped it to the side.

If only it didn’t have to be Miriam. But that’s what the note said—it had to be her.

She’d been eighty-one years old when she passed away two days ago. Carl, of course, had been at the funeral. And yes, he knew that now he was desecrating her final resting place, but he told himself that the dead were dead, that you couldn’t really desecrate them, not really. Their souls had gone on to another place. Bones and hair and decaying meat were all that was left.

It sounded crass and unsympathetic, but skinning a corpse was essentially no different than skinning a squirrel, gutting a deer, or carving a turkey. Embalmers and medical examiners did that kind of work on human cadavers all the time.

That’s what Carl told himself.

But still, the thought of peeling the skin off a body that used to be a living, breathing human being with dreams and hopes and heartaches just like him was gut-wrenching. Especially considering who Miriam was, what she had meant to him over the years.

However, the thought of someone doing that to Adele while she was alive was even more horrifying and Carl vowed he was not going to let that happen.

The shoveling was going quickly, faster than he would’ve ever expected, which was good because according to the note, he had until five o’clock—exactly—to dig up the corpse, remove its skin, deliver it to the hardware store and call the kidnapper.

That didn’t give him a lot of time, but the dirt wasn’t packed down yet and, after working on a construction crew for the last ten years, he was used to hard physical labor. He would work as furiously as he had to in order to save Adele.

He threw another shovelful of dirt aside.

Then another.

It shouldn’t be too long before he had her, and after he did, it wasn’t far to the hardware store, so the only thing that might really slow him down was the skinning part. He needed to come up with a way to do that quickly.

So that’s what he thought about as he dug up his recently deceased grandmother’s body.

26

Ralph and I entered the Waukesha County Sheriff Department, which was located in an imposing, interconnected set of buildings that also housed the county courthouse and jail.

We were directed to a graying, portly detective in his early fifties who had a noticeable crescent-shaped birthmark on the right side of his neck. The photos on his desk showed him serving in several different police departments around Wisconsin over the years.

After taking a seat in front of his desk, we told him what we were looking for and why.

“So you think one of our deputies stole those cuffs and then sold them to Griffin?” Detective Browning said to me coolly.

“No, I don’t. We’re just trying to investigate how the cuffs, if they are legitimate, ended up in the hands of a man who sells memorabilia of serial killers.”

“Uh-huh.” But Browning still seemed antagonistic. It took Ralph’s telling him that we would get the information one way or another, with his help or without it, before he grudgingly produced the paperwork showing who was involved in the Oswalds’ arrest.

When I thanked him, he made it clear once again that he thought we were being out of line.

His hostile attitude surprised me. In the end I chalked it up to the fact that I had an FBI agent with me. To say there can be tension over interagency information requests is, unfortunately, a gross understatement.

Before Ralph and I left the building, we also picked up a copy of the chain of custody forms and evidence room visitation records for the Oswald case. There was so much evidence gathered against the father and son team—including parts of the van they were driving when they tried to flee, the cache of rifles they’d collected, thousands of rounds of ammunition, reams of paperwork and James’s voluminous journals—that the number of items listed on the forms was substantial.

Material in hand, we cruised back to the interstate and headed for HQ.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Joshua parked in the overgrown, empty lot just west of the deserted train yard.

Milwaukee used to be a major industrial railway shipping hub. To some extent it still was, but times change and trains weren’t being used nearly as much as they had been twenty or thirty years ago.

A metal chain-link fence with wickedly sharp razor wire curling across the top of it ran along the entire perimeter of the train yard. However, there was a swinging gate here in the parking lot that was large enough for a car to pass through. Two sets of railroad tracks also entered beneath the fence, and then branched off in the yard into the nineteen dead-end tracks that held the abandoned cars.

Apart from a small crawl-hole in the fence that bordered the woods, this gate was the only way to access the yard.

Two days ago Joshua had cut through the chain that held the gate shut, then padlocked it closed again with his own lock and chain. His lock was still there, so obviously, no one had noticed, and that hadn’t surprised him. This was not exactly a tourist hotspot.

The tracks that terminated in the yard were rusted and overgrown with scraggly weeds that broke through the thin, sporadic layer of snow. Dozens of boxcars, coal cars, tankers, and a few engines and cabooses that’d been retired from service sat languishing in the yard. With the rails in such disrepair, these cars weren’t going anywhere any time soon.

Apparently, when a train car gets retired, there aren’t a whole lot of places to leave it, and over the last twenty years, more and more cars from the Milwaukee Road, Wisconsin Central, and Soo Line railways had been abandoned here and left to the mercy of weather and time.

Wearing gloves so that he wouldn’t leave any fingerprints, Joshua unlocked the gate, swung it open, drove toward the tracks containing the abandoned boxcars, then closed and padlocked the gate behind him.

He wouldn’t be able to drive all the way to the boxcar that he would be using today, but he could get partway there, and then park out of sight behind a line of tankers.

Which was what he did.

Carrying Adele to the train car he’d prepared for this afternoon wouldn’t be a problem. A forest nudged up against the razor wire fence on the south end of the train yard and there was only a narrow channel between that fence and the line of boxcars stretching alongside it.

When he’d been scouting out locations, Joshua had driven around the neighborhood and confirmed that—even from the highway, the bridge just west of here, and the parking lot itself—a person walking along the edge of the fence would be hidden from view by the boxcars on one side and the woods on the other. Especially if they stayed in the drainage ditch that followed one section of the fence.

Of all the times Joshua had been in the yard, he’d seen only five people in here: two teen punks with spray cans, a wino, and a college-aged couple making out. But all of them had been on the other side of the yard near the coal cars.

Still, this was not the time to be careless, and before taking Adele to the boxcar, he wanted to make sure the coast was clear. So, leaving her locked in the trunk for the moment, he took his pistol, a 9mm Glock 19, from the glove box and walked along the edge of the ditch paralleling the razor wire fence.

Most of the cars in the yard had gang-related graffiti spray-painted on the sides and nearly all of them were ravaged with rust. The boxcars had large sliding doors, many of which were padlocked shut, a few were left open, some were missing entirely.

He went to a light gray Soo Line boxcar with a chained-shut door, slipped a key into the lock, which he’d made sure was the same kind he’d used on the front gate, and clicked it open.

Gloves still on, he cranked the door open, peered inside.

His materials were all there waiting for Adele. The rope and duct tape. The chair. The plastic bags, butcher paper, and heavy-duty plastic ties. The battery-operated light on the wall to the left. And the Civil War–era Gemrig amputation saw that he had used to cut through Colleen Hayes’s wrists last night.

He already had the necrotome with him in a sheath on his belt. The word meant “cutting instrument of the dead” and it was an Egyptian knife popular between 1500 and 1000 BC.

Necrotomes are, of course, extremely rare, but he’d managed to get this one at an auction in San Francisco five years ago. It was one of the actual knives used by the priests of ancient Egypt to slit open the abdomens of the people they were about to mummify in order to remove their inner organs. They did so by hand, pulling out all the organs except for the heart. Then they stored those organs in jars—all of them except for the brain, which they considered useless, and simply discarded.

Joshua kept the necrotome with him at all times.

He’d used it last Friday on Petey Schwartz when the homeless man followed him, then grabbed his jacket collar. Joshua had met Petey before, knew him in an informal way, and knew that he had violent tendencies. In an instant he’d whipped out the necrotome and buried it into Petey’s stomach, just as his father had taught him to do with that hunting knife in the special place beneath the barn.