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.”
“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.
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
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.
After the search warrant was issued for Timothy Griffin’s receipts, Ralph had done a background check on Griffin and now distributed his findings. “Nothing striking,” he noted. “You can read it over when we’re done in here.”
Gabriele had spoken with the people at the Salvation Army thrift store and found out the director was out of town at a fundraising dinner and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. However, she was going to continue to follow up on hotels, used-furniture stores, and thrift stores in that part of town to see if we could track down where the offender got the mattresses from, in the hopes that someone at the store would be able to identify him.
Thorne told us he’d looked up the other true crime books Heather Isle had written and one was about Ted and James Oswald. “No address for Ms. Isle that I can find. No photo on the book. I’m working at tracking her down to have a chat. Ask her a few questions about her sources.”
The Oswalds again. They just kept popping up on the periphery of this case.
Looking for a connection between this week’s victims, Ellen reported that she’d spoken with Adele, Colleen, Vincent and, on the phone, with Carl, who was still in custody in Plainfield. The couples had never met, never lived near each other. There were no areas of their lives that appeared to overlap. “I’m going to follow up on that more. There’s got to be something there.”
The CSIU didn’t come up with much either. Based on the temperature of Hendrich’s body and the temperature in the boxcar, they estimated time of death to be between two and four p.m., which didn’t really narrow things down too much for us. No incriminating prints were found in the stolen Ford Taurus, the locks, the
