after letting his eyes linger one more time on the maps on the corkboard.
“Who was that?” Radar asked.
“That was Dr. Calvin Werjonic.”
“The guy you mentioned at the briefing?”
“Yes.”
For a moment Radar seemed distracted, then caught himself, returned abruptly to the conversation: “Sorry, as I was saying, we might have something.”
“What is it?”
“The receipts. We found a discrepancy.”
Oh yeah, I liked discrepancies. Discrepancies are always a good thing.
“What discrepancy?
“Well, it might be just an accounting error, but-”
“What discrepancy?”
“It seems there was one item that, well…” He said nothing more, just handed me a receipt. Ralph, who’d been walking past the open door, saw us and joined us in the conference room.
“It seems there was one item that what?” I asked Radar.
“There was one item that Griffin sold that he didn’t buy.”
57
A chill.
I gazed unbelievingly at the receipt.
The item Griffin had sold but didn’t buy was a book of nursery rhymes with one specific page missing.
Oh.
No.
I snatched my things off my desk. “Ralph, we’re going to need another search warrant. There’s more in Griffin’s house.”
“How do you know?”
“‘Hush, little baby, don’t say a word.’ The nursery rhyme. There was a copy of the song under Jenna’s pillow-she’s the seven-year-old we found dead three years ago. She’d been raped, then buried alive in a shallow grave. The song had been ripped out of a book. We identified which nursery rhyme book it was from but we never found the book itself.” I slapped the receipt down on the table. “Griffin sold it. But he never bought it.”
I expected an expletive but got only shocked silence instead.
“I’m going to Fort Atkinson.” I pulled out my car keys. “Have the local authorities get to his house now and hold him on something, I don’t care what, and get me a search warrant for the rest of the house by the time I get up there. Fax it to the Fort Atkinson Police Department.”
“Got it.”
“I’m coming with you, Pat,” Radar said.
“We’ll take my car.”
We hurried to the parking garage, my thoughts running through everything once again, tying threads together into one dark, terrible fabric.
I recalled the items in Griffin and Mallory’s bedroom that weren’t for sale.
A handheld mirror on Mallory’s dresser. A nice mirror. Ornate.
A diamond ring in her jewelry box.
A stuffed dog on the bed.
In my head, I ran through the complete lyrics to the song:
We had the diamond ring, the looking glass (the mirror), and, if I was right about the stuffed dog, we had “the dog named Rover.”
What else?
Oh. Yes.
There’d been a ceramic bird resting next to the Manson Bible in the living room. No price tag on it. I’m no expert on birds, but I had a distinct feeling I knew what kind of bird that was.
A mockingbird.
Which meant that if Griffin really was collecting the items from the song, we needed a billy goat, a cart and bull, a horse and cart. I doubted that he would have live animals sequestered somewhere, but if that dog really did signify “the dog named Rover,” then it was likely he had other ways of representing the other animals too-perhaps more stuffed animals, toys, or maybe photographs or pictures of some type. Who knows.
A looking glass.
A mockingbird.
I wondered what the items represented to him.
Victims? Could each relate to another victim?
He’d called Mallory “baby” twice while we were at the house. A harmless term of endearment, yes, unless it meant something a lot deeper to him.
Radar and I jumped into my car and took off.
58
As I drove, Radar read me the file that Ralph had put together last night on Griffin.
“Okay, so Timothy went to high school in Deerfield, dropped out when he was a sophomore, eventually got his GED and worked for a decade in a series of odd jobs in Milwaukee-three years delivering garbage, McDonald’s burger flipper, construction. Then a plumber’s apprentice in Beaver Dam. Looks like none of them was a good fit for him. Attended one year of tech school, dropped out. Evidently, he started collecting and selling this paraphernalia soon after that.”
“Beaver Dam’s just twelve miles from Horicon. He could easily have known the area.” I remembered the
