of the place he’d called home.
Joshua stepped out of the car and stretched his legs, then removed the cooler from the backseat.
It’d taken a fair amount of research, but eventually he’d been able to locate the precise spot where the house had stood.
Ironically, or at least conveniently as far as Gein would have been concerned, it was less than five miles from the nearest graveyard-the same graveyard where things would happen this afternoon, during the next chapter of the saga Joshua had recently been putting into play.
Honestly, it’d never been his intention to kill Colleen Hayes. Cutting off her hands had been all he was planning to do to her, even from the start.
In fact, murdering her might actually have been counterproductive to what he was hoping to accomplish.
No, nobody would connect the two crimes.
Besides, that wasn’t planned. It was spontaneous and had nothing to do with the Hayes kidnapping or what he had in mind for Adele today.
Enough with those kinds of thoughts.
Joshua walked to the place where Ed Gein’s kitchen used to be, set down the cooler, and took a seat beside it.
The view before him was the same one Ed Gein would have had if he were looking out his kitchen window.
Joshua pulled a bottle of cream soda out of the cooler, uncapped it, and took a long refreshing swallow.
Last night it hadn’t been easy, doing to Colleen what he’d done. And, unquestionably, it would have been easier on her if he’d knocked her out beforehand, but somehow, though the deed itself was disturbing, her screams had brought him a degree of pleasure that’d surprised him.
It was a bit disconcerting.
That hadn’t happened before, but then again, he’d never done something like that to someone and let the person live.
It’d led him to acknowledge a certain yearning rising to the surface, one that’d been birthed in him long ago in the cellar beneath the barn.
While he was listening to Colleen cry out, enjoying watching her suffer, he’d had a revelation of sorts, an epiphany about who he truly was, what he was becoming.
A voice of reason, of conscience:
More cream soda.
The den of the damned.
He shifted his thoughts back to Colleen. After cutting off her left hand, he’d faced a choice-drug her before doing the other one, or leave her awake during the process.
Of course he might have gagged her as well, but where he’d taken her, it wasn’t as if they were going to be discovered. The screams hadn’t posed much of a problem. And he kind of liked hearing the strangely muted, yet metallic sounds as they echoed all around him in that place and then disappeared into the thin night air.
While he’d tried to decide whether or not to leave her conscious before sawing off her right hand, he’d tightened the heavy-duty plastic tie around that wrist to stop the bleeding once he got started.
He thought she might pass out from the pain of losing that left hand, but she must have been a fighter because she didn’t. In between her screams she’d struggled to pull free from the chair, begged him to stop, to let her go.
That ended up being distracting and with all of that going on, it took him a while to decide which direction to take things.
Finally, he chose to let her remain conscious while he laid the edge of the saw blade against her other wrist.
And then drew it firmly toward him.
Forward and back.
Forward and backward as the night became rich and thick with her screams and her blood.
His father had taught him all about that: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” Third book of the Bible. Seventeenth chapter. Eleventh verse.
Atonement. And the blood.
He thought of Colleen now as he unwrapped the two packages and, sitting where Ed Gein might have sat, he did what Ed Gein might have done and ate the meat he had brought along with him from Milwaukee.
In a few minutes he would head to the house and pay a visit to Adele Westin. Joshua had researched more than just the location of Ed’s house and the graveyard, and he knew that Adele, who was living with her fiance, worked out of their home.
She was a woman who followed a very strict schedule, but a quick phone call could confirm that she was there this afternoon. Otherwise, if need be, he would wait as long as necessary until she returned.
Her fiance wouldn’t be arriving home from his shift until after two. Joshua figured that would give him plenty of time to get to Adele and then leave the token of his intentions toward her, as well as a note with his demands. All of this would, of course, initiate the next chapter in the story he was telling.
One that would be enough to attract the attention of the person he was hoping to meet.
And if not, what he had planned for Wednesday would most certainly do so, without a doubt.
On Wednesday, when the cop was dead, Joshua’s point would be unmistakable and he would finally be able to get the one thing he wanted most-a partner.
18
Back at HQ, Ralph and I began reviewing the notes everyone else had left on my desk, sorting through what we would be discussing at the meeting that was scheduled to start in less than five minutes.
As far as sedan-owning, six-foot-tall, brown-eyed male Caucasians, we had thousands in the greater Milwaukee area. If you added an inch or two to either side of that and included men whose family members had sedans as well, the number rose exponentially. Gabriele Holdren, the officer who’d gotten the coffee for Vincent last night when I was with him in the interrogation room, was still comparing that list with the tip list-which hadn’t produced anything so far either.
As expected, the four confessions had all been false. Ellen and Annise were still looking into missing persons cases, and Lyrie was on his way back from canvassing the Hayeses’ neighborhood again to see if anyone could tell us the color of the sedan.
Radar had dug up the names of fourteen felons in the area who’d been convicted of violent crimes against women and he’d apparently left the department to follow up on one of them.
A lot of things were in play.
“I’m still curious about the handcuffs,” I told Ralph. “Why didn’t Colleen’s abductor leave a pair for Vincent to use?”
“He had to know Vincent already had a pair.”
“I can’t really come up with any other compelling reason-unless Vincent’s involved somehow.” I evaluated the possibilities. “Vincent had planned to come home just after seven, but at the last minute he called Colleen to let her know he would be late, wouldn’t be getting home until after ten. However, she was abducted just after nine. If the offender had known Vincent’s schedule and been hoping to find Colleen alone-”
Ralph rubbed his chin roughly. “The guy would have taken her before seven, while Vincent was at work, before he was supposed to come home, not after nine.”
I tried to steer myself away from making unfounded assumptions, but I found it hard to keep my thoughts
