Opening Moves (28 page)

The fingers had been bitten—not the fingernails.

That was the line Joshua had always found the most intriguing.

How much of her fingers did Sarah Smith chew off after she woke up in that coffin?

How much meat did she swallow?

You are a lost and evil man, Joshua. A man beyond redemption!

Beyond atonement!

You did that to your own father!

That thought jarred him back to the present. He closed the book. Put it back on the shelf.

And went to pray.

Perhaps he would find a way not to go scout out the bank today. Perhaps he would find a way not to go rent the moving truck he would need when he took the children tomorrow. Perhaps he would find a way to stop all this before it went too far.

It’s already gone too far, Joshua. There’s no turning back. You’re going to finish this. It’s who you’ve become.

Yes. He had to pray first, see if he could find the strength to change.

Then he had to go to work.

In the normal world, where no one knew what he really was.

53

Indiana.

Why had he skipped over Indiana?

If Dr. Werjonic’s theories were right, it would most likely be because the killer lacked familiarity with the area.

But when I reviewed the tip list and suspect list as I’d decided to do while I was at the climbing gym, I found that in most cases there simply wasn’t enough information about the people’s backgrounds to make any real headway in that direction.

Slightly frustrated, I reviewed the other case files that the task force members had left on my desk. Based on Ellen’s interviews with Vincent, it was looking more and more like he couldn’t possibly be complicit in his wife’s abduction. Additionally, only the guys at work knew he would be staying late.

Ellen had cross-referenced the names on the evidence room forms from the Waukesha County Sheriff Department but found no clues as to who might have gotten the cuffs to Griffin.

After I had a good grasp on where we were with the case, I figured I should probably prepare as much as possible for my call to Dr. Werjonic following our briefing. I wouldn’t have much time to look over his notes later, so I turned my attention to the photocopied pages he’d left for me.

It took a few minutes, but eventually I started to get used to his cryptic scribbles and was able to make out most of his writing.

As I did so, I was struck by how his theories meshed with what I’d already learned hands-on doing my job, the information that was hardly ever emphasized at all to new cops and often seemed so inscrutable to my peers: the primacy of the timing and location of a crime, the understanding that people are motivated to commit crimes for reasons they themselves might not even understand and that spending time speculating about what those reasons might be stalls out an investigation.

But Dr. Werjonic took things even further.

He scrapped the whole notion of looking for means, motive, and opportunity in lieu of searching for context, patterns, and cues.

Three interrelated concepts wove through all that he taught: activity nodes, distance decay, and victimology: “When investigating serial crimes, the key lies not in asking what the victims have in common, but
where
they have in common.”

An activity node is simply a place where we spend time. So, when identifying activity nodes, you look for the eight “nodes” of a person’s life activities: the places he would normally eat, sleep, work, shop, study, worship, exercise, and relax.

Each activity node has specific attraction factors that lead people to spend time there—that might be saving time, money, or effort, a balance of risk versus rewards, or participating in pleasurable or necessary activities.

Then you can map out the person’s travel routes in terms of those activity nodes (circles) and the routes or roads between them (lines). Those circles and lines cover only a fraction of the geographic area of a city and help shape the person’s cognitive map of his surroundings. Almost all crimes occur within this awareness space—both with respect to victims and to offenders.

In an investigation, you establish someone’s awareness space by pulling up his club memberships and frequent-buyer club cards, going through his credit card receipts, and analyzing where he typically purchases his gasoline and groceries and at what time of day, and so on. Also, by interviewing family and friends about his routines. Basically, doing all you can to examine the eight nodes of his life.

Distance decay is simply the decrease in likelihood of a crime occurring as the distance from a person’s awareness space increases. That’s it.

I thought again of Indiana.

He skipped over it because it wasn’t part of his cognitive map.

All of this made sense to me. People are creatures of habit. Basically, costs in terms of time, energy, and effort increase as the distance from their awareness spaces increases. So we avoid that. And killers are just as influenced by this “least amount of effort” principle as the rest of us are. Taking that into account, you get one of the primary reasons why eighty percent of murders occur within one mile of the killer’s home.

As Dr. Werjonic wrote:

In crime sprees, the distribution, timing, and progression of the crimes show us how the criminal understands his environment and interacts with the locations. The offender makes a choice to act at that time and in that place. It’s a rational decision that’s affected by cues from his environment and his social interactions.

In homicide investigations, it’s possible, of course, for the initial encounter between the victim and the offender, the abduction, the murder, and the body disposal to all occur in the same general area, even in the same room, but often, especially in cases of serial homicide, several of those acts occur in different places.

Dr. Werjonic postulated that the site of the initial encounter was perhaps the most important one in the analysis of serial offenses, something I’d never heard before.

Contrariwise, law enforcement officers usually consider the site of the murder or the place where the body is disposed of as the most important location, but Werjonic was theorizing that in the specific cases of tracking serial offenders, by locating the place where the life of the offender and the life of the victims first intersected, you can begin to look for connections between them. That’ll help you more accurately zero in on the travel routes, the nodes, the awareness space of the killer, and then you can work backward to find his anchor point, or home base.

Interesting.

I pulled out a map of Milwaukee and one of Wisconsin so I could analyze what happened both here and in Plainfield. I tacked them to a corkboard easel, which I rolled to my desk. Since it looked like there might be two offenders, for now I focused on the crimes this week rather than on the previous homicides.

It felt a little old-school to be doing this, to be sticking pins on a map, but I didn’t care. Anything that would help move this case forward.

I used different-colored tacks—blue for the sites where we’d found Colleen, Adele, and Hendrich (the pier and the train yards), red for their homes, green for the site where Vincent had left Lionel and where Carl had left his grandmother’s corpse.

Actually, since we knew two of the abduction sites (the Hayes and Kowalski homes), and we had the site where their abductor had taken the women to mutilate them (the boxcar), I was optimistic. We didn’t know if Hendrich’s murder was actually connected, however, so for now, I set him mentally in a different category and focused on the women.

Unfortunately, we didn’t know where or how the initial encounter between either of them and their abductor occurred. How did he choose those two families who, at least on the surface, seemed to have nothing in common and lived in different parts of the state?

This was shaping up to be one of the central questions in this case.

Because of the pastiches we were looking at, or whatever you called them, I thought we should perhaps analyze the sites of Dahmer’s and Gein’s crimes as well—the graveyard, the bars Dahmer frequented, the hardware store, their residences…

With these sites added to the mix, the number of data points would grow exponentially—even before I added in the victims’ travel patterns.

No wonder Dr. Werjonic used computers to analyze his data. Looking for and prioritizing the importance of each of these locations in my head, or even on paper, would be terrifically difficult, especially since I wasn’t very familiar with the algorithms he used to account for distance decay.

As I was thinking about all that, Thompson came in, smiling, carrying a Daily Donuts box. He was a burly, fun-loving guy in his late thirties. Happily married. Volunteered as a youth group leader at his church. He was also the most diehard Packers fan I knew—and around here, that was saying something. I’d never seen him without some kind of Packers paraphernalia on—a hat, shirt, belt buckle. Today, it was a lapel pin.

He set down the box.

A cop bringing in doughnuts. I felt like I was in the lead-up to a punch line. “Doughnuts?” I said. “Really?”

“Not quite.” He reached into the box and brought out his prize. “Cherry turnovers.”

Oh. Well, in that case.

He took a substantial bite. “Want one?” As he spoke, he didn’t seem too concerned with closing his mouth to hide the half-chewed cherry turnover he was eating, and despite myself, the images of cannibalism from this case flashed through my mind and all I could think of was that he was chewing…

Well.

I didn’t even want to go there.

I turned away.

“Um, no thanks.”

“Suit yourself. But they’re good.” He finished the turnover, then fished around in the box again and produced another one. He leaned closer and stared over my shoulder at the board as he bit into it. “Trying to map it out, huh?”

“Something like that.”

Crumbs from the turnover inadvertently dropped onto my desk. “Oops,” he mumbled. “Sorry about that.”

I tipped the papers to the side over the garbage can to get rid of the crumbs. “No big deal.” Down the hall, Ellen, Corsica, and Lieutenant Thorne were heading toward the conference room and I invited Thompson to follow me.

“Don’t worry.” He picked up his box of cherry turnovers. “I brought enough for everyone.”

Not at the rate you’re eating them,
I thought.

“Good thinking,” I said.

The praying hadn’t helped.

Even swinging by the hospital fifteen minutes ago on his way to work to walk past Adele’s and Colleen’s rooms hadn’t helped. Whispering prayers for them as he strode past their doorways, past the officers assigned to guard their rooms, had been good but hadn’t been enough to change Joshua’s mind about tomorrow.

“Men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil.”

Your deeds.

Are.

Evil.

Joshua felt compelled to act, drawn, as it were, toward the darkness by a force more powerful than his will.

During his lunch break he planned to drive to the bank under the pretense of making a withdrawal, but he would really be estimating where SWAT would set up their barricades, deciding where he would be able to park to still see the bank entrance. Then he would rent the moving truck.

Despite his misgivings and conflicted feelings, he was beginning to understand who he truly was.

He was going ahead with everything.

Yes, he would see this through to the end.

It would end tomorrow afternoon at four twenty-five.

Sundown.

The gloaming.

54

The briefing went surprisingly quickly, with everyone summarizing what he or she had been working on: Radar had dug up a list of Caucasian public health workers, social workers, coaches, paramedics, and cops who worked in the West Reagan Street neighborhood. So far no leads. He was still working on getting in touch with an expert on Civil War–era medical instruments to see if we might be able to trace that amputation saw we’d found in the boxcar. It turned out it was harder to find an expert than we’d thought it would be.

Corsica was looking over Griffin’s receipts. Nothing yet to report.

Thompson found out that Movie Flicks Video Store, which was only six blocks from the Griffin house, had a record of Griffin renting both
The Fugitive
and
When Harry Met Sally
on Sunday evening. While it wasn’t possible to know if, or when, Griffin and Mallory actually watched the movies, at least, so far, their story was checking out. Thompson was also evaluating U-Haul and moving truck rentals to see if he could find something that might lead us to someone using one to transport ten mattresses.

Lyrie had come up dry yesterday trying to find a neighbor or work associate who’d seen a sedan that they didn’t recognize in the area preceding Vincent’s call home at around seven o’clock. He’d spoken with Adele Westin and she wasn’t able to give a physical description of her abductor.