has-”
“A close relationship with her and he expected her right away.”
“So it seems.”
“And the Ford Explorer…Let me guess, his keys there next to the newspaper. You saw the vehicle parked out front when we came in. Guessed it was his?”
“Didn’t have to guess. You can tell by the key fob that he’s driving a rental. The Explorer out front has Maine plates and an Enterprise agreement form lying on the passenger seat.”
He blinked. “You saw that when we passed by?”
“Yes. He’s tanned; it’s November in Wisconsin.”
“And in Maine. So he’s not from either state.”
I shrugged. “Can’t tell for sure, but it helps give context.”
“And why’s he about to get a ticket?”
“Parking is strictly enforced in the blocks surrounding police headquarters.”
“Okay, I get that.” We both ate for a moment, then he stopped and lowered his heaping spoonful of goulash. “You said he had fish and chips and a Pepsi. There’s an empty tartar sauce packet on his plate, that’s easy enough. And now that I think about it, the menu lists only Pepsi products and there’s a little dark-colored pop left in his glass, so-”
“Soda.”
“What?”
“We don’t call it pop here; that’s more of a Michigan deal. We call it soda. You should also know we call drinking fountains ‘bubblers.’”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Nope. It’s a Milwaukee thing. And yes, Pepsi is the only dark-colored soda being served today. Nowhere near as good as Cherry Coke.”
“You still haven’t explained how you know he isn’t a big tipper.”
“The cost of that meal, drink, and a coffee plus tax compared to the bills he set on the table. Only an eight percent tip.”
Ralph examined the man’s table once again, this time even more closely. “But there aren’t any bills there.”
“His server already picked them up.”
He looked at me incredulously. “You’re saying she came by before I even asked you to prove that you notice things?”
“Yes.
“And you calculated all that then-the tip, everything?”
“Yes.”
“How did you know any of that would be pertinent to anything?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then how-”
I shrugged. “Luck, I guess.”
He opened his mouth as if he were going to reply, then closed it again and chose to go for some beef goulash instead.
Moving past the topic of the guy at the table and following along with our discussion from earlier, I asked Ralph what he did before joining the FBI.
“I was in the Army for a while. Rangers. Bunch of missions in the Middle East.” He was wolfing down his goulash in between words. “Man, I can’t believe you counted up what bills he laid on the table.”
Earlier, he’d referred to a guy watching a chick flick with his wife, and he wore a wedding ring. “So, married?”
“Yeah. Three years.”
“Kids?”
“No. You?”
“No kids, no wife. I am seeing someone though. Actually, today is the one-year anniversary of when we first met.”
He raised his coffee cup. “In that case, lunch is on me.”
I thought again about how I would be having dinner with Taci tonight, discussing something that she wanted to talk about in private, but I didn’t mention that, simply accepted Ralph’s toast. “Thanks.”
We were both well into our meals now and I brought up the topic I’d been curious about since we first met in the police headquarters lobby. “Ralph, I gotta ask you something.”
“Shoot.” He was in the middle of a bite of goulash.
I indicated toward his turtleneck. “No overstarched oxford. No tie.” I figured maybe he didn’t wear one because of the thickness of his neck and his broad chest-that any tie he wore would’ve ended up looking like a clown tie and his supervisors didn’t want that. “Isn’t it pretty much a uniform for guys who are Feds?”
“Got an exemption. I can’t stand the idea of wearing a giant arrow pointing to my groin all day.”
“Oh.”
He looked at me slightly suspiciously. “I mean, can you?”
“Um, no. Of course not.” Man, was I glad I didn’t have a tie on today either. “And when you put it that way, I don’t think I’ll ever look at ties the same way again.”
He took a giant mouthful of food. “It seems kind of desperate to me, a pretty blatant invitation to draw people’s attention to…Well, it’s kind of like-” He was talking with his mouth full of goulash again. “So, my wife, her best friend has this teenage daughter.”
“Right.”
“The kid is always wearing shorts with words written on the butt. What is that about? ‘Syracuse’? Are you serious? I could never respect a college that’s so desperate for students that it needs to advertise itself on the butts of teenage girls.”
Hmm. That was actually a pretty good point.
“And then she wears these sweatpants with ‘Cute’ back there. Is that supposed to be referring to…?”
“Um…Probably. Yeah.” I thought of a time I’d seen a girl wearing shorts with ALL-STAR imprinted on the rump and I realized I didn’t even want to know what she was trying to tell the world.
He shook his head. “I’ll just say this: I’d be at a loss with a teenage daughter. They’re a complete mystery to me. I’d be clueless.”
“You and me both.”
Ralph finished inhaling the goulash and I polished off my cheeseburger. We ate quickly so we could get back to the department, then headed out the door, past the Ford Explorer by the curb.
There was a parking ticket tucked beneath the windshield wiper.
17
Plainfield, Wisconsin
Joshua parked the car in the pull-off at the end of the dirt road.
Barren, leafless trees ready for winter bordered him on both sides.
A sign on a leaning wooden pole beside a small clearing announced NO TRESPASSING.
The house that used to stand here was long gone.
Joshua wasn’t sure exactly when it’d burned down, but he knew it was within a couple months of Ed Gein’s arrest in November of 1957, and he was pretty sure the fire hadn’t been accidental. Just like the people of Milwaukee who tried to purge the memory of Dahmer from their consciousness by razing his apartment building, the good people of Plainfield had undoubtedly hoped to sear the memory of their most infamous inhabitant by getting rid
