Opening Moves (7 page)

At last she took a deep breath. “He wore a black ski mask. But I saw his skin. He was white. Had brown eyes. I saw that too, before he blindfolded me. After that I only heard his voice.”

“Could you tell how tall he was?”

“Big. I’d say over six feet tall.” She looked at me. “Kinda like you. And strong too.”

“Was there any indication that there was more than one person?”

“No. I mean, nothing that I could tell.”

Radar cut in, “Colleen, do you have any idea where he took you?”

“No. I was in his trunk.”

Good. That was something. The car had a trunk. The man drove a sedan of some type.

“He never took off the blindfold. My arms were tied up when he did it. I was in a chair. He didn’t knock me out when he cut off my hands. I screamed, I just kept screaming. Then he gave me a shot and I fell asleep. I woke up in the hospital like…” She let her voice trail off, then stared down at the blanket covering her arms.

I leaned close. “Think about the drive there, Colleen, the time you were alone with him. Could you tell how long you were in the car or how many times he stopped at traffic lights or stop signs?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know how many times we stopped or how long we drove. I was too scared. It seemed like forever.”

“Did you hear anything unusual—sirens, trains, whistles, alarms, anything? Or notice any odd smells that might help us narrow down our search? Cologne, body odor, anything like that? Maybe he was a smoker?”

She thought about it for a long time. “I smelled yeast. That I remember. It was a little faint, so I’m thinking we were somewhere near the breweries, but not too close.”

Wind, temperature, and humidity as well as production schedule would all affect how far the smell of the breweries would have spread. Things to look into.

“That’s good,” I told her. “Very good. That helps. Anything else?”

“It was cold when he did it, like we might have been out in a garage or something. He carried me there from the car. When I screamed I could hear it echo a little, but it was sort of muted too. I don’t know. I can’t think of anything else.”

“Do you think you could recognize his voice?” Radar asked. She shook her head again.

And then she was quiet and we didn’t want to press her, but we also didn’t want to leave her alone, so we sat with her for a while even though it meant being late for the briefing at police headquarters. But Thorne wasn’t exactly famous for starting his meetings on time and there are some things that are more important than punctuality.

Finally, our police chaplain, Reverend Padilla, who served the force but also comforted the victims of violent crimes, came in. We excused ourselves, left the room, and silently passed down the hallway.

Although we needed to get to the department, before leaving the medical center I called Taci’s wing to see if she could meet me by my car. She was in the next building over and by the time I’d made it outside, she was already on the sidewalk that led to the parking lot.

“Hey, Pat.” She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, the kind you might give when greeting a friend. Just a friend.

“Hey.”

Radar went on ahead to give us a chance to talk.

Today Taci, a brunette with striking dark brown eyes and a kind smile, wore a cream-colored double-breasted peacoat, cerulean skirt, white tights and modest heels. She looked as charming and attractive as ever.

“I got your message last night,” I told her as we started for the car. “But I didn’t get in until after one. It was too late to call.”

“Our schedules make this hard, don’t they?”

“It’s been a little rough lately, sure, but things will settle down once your residency is over.”

She was quiet. “I heard about everything that’s going on. About Mrs. Hayes. All the doctors are talking about it. That poor woman.” Her words were marked with deep compassion, one of the qualities that had caught my attention the first time we met. “It’s horrifying what happened.”

“Yes.”

“How are you? Through all this?”

“Focused.”

“You’re going to catch this guy, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I am.”

A moment passed. “Pat, I’d hate to be the person you’re after.”

I hadn’t really wanted our conversation to be about the case or about Ms. Hayes, so I tried to lighten things up a little. “You are the person I’m after.”

I was sort of hoping she’d say, “You too” or “You already have me” or something along those lines, but instead she looked a little uncomfortable. “Thanks.”

This whole conversation was becoming slightly discomfiting.

“Listen,” she said. “About tonight. Dinner.”

“Yes. Pasta. My place.”

“I’m…Well, it’ll be good. Give us a chance to talk.”

With the briefing at the department coming up, I really didn’t have a lot of time, but I offered anyway. “We can talk right now.” A few flecks of snow began to meander around us. We were almost to my car.

“No. Not in the parking lot.”

“There’s something we need to talk about in private?”

“No.” But then she hesitated and backpedaled a little. “I mean…Well. No. Anyway…” She gave me another peck on the cheek. Friendly once again. “I’ll see you tonight. At seven.”

“See you at seven.”

Then she returned to the building, leaving me to wonder what exactly she wanted to discuss with me privately tonight on the one-year anniversary of the day we first met.

I climbed into my car.

When I radioed the department to tell Thorne I might be a little late, I found out the meeting was postponed until nine thirty, which gave me a few extra minutes. The alley where we’d found Lionel wasn’t too far out of the way, so I decided to swing by and have a look at it in the daylight.

10

I parked beside the alley.

The fenced-in lot bordering it contained the place where Dahmer’s apartment building used to stand. Inside the fence, the ground was covered with dry, brown grass and a dusting of gritty snow. The lot looked unremarkable and anonymous, which was exactly what the city of Milwaukee wanted. Bulldozing the building and clearing the rubble had been a way of trying to erase from the city’s collective memory what had happened here.

I got out of the car, walked to the chain-link fence, and peered through to the other side.

The cloud-dampened light and flecks of restless snow accentuated the lonely, foreboding mood of this place.

After working as many cases as I have, you realize that you can scrub a floor clean of blood, you can tear out a wall or knock down a building, but tragedies all too often seem to stain the air of these places of death, to rip open space and time and root themselves stubbornly to a specific location.

The invisible, tormented geography of pain.

My thoughts traveled back to hearing about what’d happened just on the other side of this fence, back to the stories about the sixteen young men who’d died at Dahmer’s hand so close to where I was standing, and I couldn’t help but feel a chill.

The wind was picking up and bit into my face. But that’s not what was giving me shivers. My thoughts of Dahmer were.

Even now, three years after he was beaten to death in prison, the shock was still there, fresh and painful in my city.

It was like those stages of grief that psychologists talk about—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Milwaukee hadn’t reached the acceptance stage yet. I have my own theory about grief—you get angry, and then you repress it or it swallows you whole. Either it disappears or you do.

But that was just me.

And so, Jeffrey Dahmer.

A psychopath like none in a generation.

He would pick up young men from the bars in this neighborhood on Milwaukee’s west end—usually they were African-American, but he wasn’t picky when it came to race. He was more interested in looks and physique.

His MO: drug their drinks, get them back to his apartment, handcuff them, overpower them, kill them, eat them. Sometimes he would stuff their corpses into vats. Sometimes he would sleep with the bodies or chop them up and keep the body parts in the fridge and the skulls beside a candlelit altar to Satan in his closet. Sometimes he drilled holes in the heads of his victims while they were still alive and poured acid into their brains, hoping to turn the men into zombie love slaves.

During his trial he pled insanity. And lost.

In the end, he was convicted of fifteen homicides, but he admitted to two more, including one in Ohio. The city of Milwaukee later purchased his estate and all of his possessions were buried in a landfill, the location of which only five people knew—Captain Domyslawski, Lieutenant Thorne, Detective Annise Corsica (who’d led the investigation), and two city sanitation workers I hadn’t met who drove the garbage truck and dumped out its contents.

The location was kept secret so the site wouldn’t be visited by curiosity seekers or scavenged by souvenir hounds. It was grisly just to think about, but a certain segment of society collects memorabilia from killers like Dahmer and, inevitably, the site where his belongings were dumped would’ve become a Mecca for people interested in collecting keepsakes of cannibals.

Though by now Dahmer’s belongings were certainly covered by a mountain of other trash, I was still thankful that no one had discovered which landfill had been used. Keeping people away would have been an endless, disturbing ordeal for local law enforcement.

I walked to the telephone pole where we’d found Lionel Shannon.

No clues jumped out at me. No sudden revelations came to me.

The snow picked up. The minutes ticked by.

Finally, with the thoughts of what’d happened last night and the things Colleen Hayes had told us this morning circling through my head, I left the alley and drove to HQ for the briefing.

11

The public entrance to police headquarters is on North James Lovell Street. I used the department one on West State Street, just around the corner.

And found the two FBI agents from the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime waiting for me just inside the door.

The man: hulking and thickly muscled—bigger even than Thorne, and nearly my height. He had a presence about him that commanded respect and it seemed to affect everyone around us, almost as if he’d brought his own weather system with him into the building.

The woman: petite, with stylish glasses, her light brown hair pulled back into a sensible ponytail. The guy looked about thirty; she looked fresh out of the academy. Both were dressed neatly and conservatively. Most male FBI agents who aren’t working undercover seem to be into ties, but not this guy. Black turtleneck all the way. He held a half-finished two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew in one hand, a leather briefcase in the other.

He introduced himself: “Ralph Hawkins, FBI.” The words came out in a low rumble, a voice you’d expect from a guy who could bench-press a pickup. “This is Special Agent Ellen Parker.”

I greeted them. He passed the bottle of soda to his other arm, then enveloped my hand in his as we shook. “Detective Patrick Bowers,” I said. “Homicide. Just call me Pat.”

“Ralph.”

“And Ellen is fine,” Agent Parker told me.

“Good.”

A couple of moments later, as we passed down the hallway, she unexpectedly excused herself and walked off alone toward the elevator.

Ralph paused. “Gives us a chance to chat.”

Ah. So. Here we go.

I gestured toward the stairs and led the way.

“I understand you’re in charge of this case?” he said.

“Yes.” I could only imagine what a logistical and bureaucratic nightmare this was going to be if he tried to pull rank and take over. It would have been audacious, but I wasn’t ready to put anything past the FBI.

We entered the stairwell. Thorne’s office was on the fourth floor. We started up the steps.

Despite his size Ralph was quick and light on the stairs. “There are two ways we can do this. We can either waste time dicking around trying to figure out who’s calling the shots, or we can work together to catch this psycho. Your call.”

So, he had an attitude and got straight to the point.

My kind of guy.

“Agent Hawkins—Ralph…” We reached the second floor. “I have every reason to believe that you’re experienced and well qualified at what you do, but I need you to know that I’m going to find this guy and bring him in or take him down and if you get in my way I’ll do whatever is necessary to move you aside so I can do my job.”

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t the ideal thing to say to kick off our working relationship, but I’ve never been especially known for my tact.

He paused as we reached the third-floor landing. He wasn’t out of breath. Neither was I.

I waited for his response. Tried to read him. Couldn’t.

Then he took a long, unhurried swallow of his Mountain Dew, finished most of it, and smacked his lips. “Glad to hear we’re on the same page. But…” I caught the hint of a smile. “How am I gonna get in your way, Detective, when I’m going to be the one way out in front of you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I can be a bit determined at times.”

“I’m counting on that.” We started for the fourth floor. “Besides, you couldn’t move me aside.”

“I’m stronger than I look.”

He cracked his neck and cords of muscle strained beneath his skin. “So am I.” He downed the rest of his soda and tossed the empty bottle into a trash can as we entered the hallway and passed the elevator bay.

And as he strode beside me on the way to Lieutenant Thorne’s office, I couldn’t help but wonder—if he really was stronger than he looked—just how tough this guy, who was obviously not a desk jockey, actually was.

12

We met in Thorne’s office, all of us crammed around his desk on folding chairs.

Six of us were at the briefing: Ellen, Ralph, Radar, Lieutenant Thorne, me, and Detective Annise Corsica, a severe-looking woman in her forties with short, choppy hair, thin lips, and probing, astucious eyes. Annise had been on the force more than twenty years and, to put it mildly, had not been happy when I’d been promoted to homicide detective seven years earlier in my career than she’d been.