again in an hour or so. Make up for that missed lunch.
Ralph left a number. I called it and found out it was the Overnite Motel, one of the cheapest motels on this side of the city. A federal employee who was actually saving taxpayers’ money. Imagine that.
He wasn’t there, but I left a message with the front desk for him to call me. Then I dialed Dr. Werjonic, who picked up immediately. Before we could get to discussing any dinner plans, I asked him about his meeting with Slate.
“Oh, it was quite interesting as a matter of fact. I’m anxious to tell you about it. But over dinner. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“I’m afraid, however, that I’m not too familiar with your city. Everywhere I turn, I see another bar serving beer, burgers, and bratwurst. Unfortunately, that’s not exactly my cuisine of choice.”
“I know just the place to go-Tanner’s Pub. It has one of the largest selections of single malt whiskey outside of Britain.”
“You don’t say?”
“And fish and chips like you wouldn’t believe. It used to be a speakeasy.”
“Hmm…like the Safe House?”
The Safe House is a famous restaurant in downtown Milwaukee, situated halfway down a dingy alley across the street from the Pabst Theater. You have to know where it is because there’s a secret entrance and you need to tell them the password to get in. The place is themed around spy memorabilia. If it has anything to do with espionage, it’ll be on the walls of the Safe House.
“Atmosphere is completely different,” I told Calvin. “Instead of a 007 motif, Tanner’s is more like…well, I guess, more like a corner pub in London.”
“Brilliant.”
I was telling him the location when Ralph returned my call on the other line. “Hang on a second, Calvin.”
A little phone shuffling and it was all set up-the three of us would meet at Tanner’s. They’d get together in thirty minutes and, since I’d been gone most of the day and needed to catch up a little here at my desk, I’d join them as soon as I could, hopefully within the hour.
When we spoke, Ralph told me to check his workspace, that there was a pile of manila folders there. “The Oswald case files you wanted from Detective Browning over at the Waukesha county sheriff’s department. And you’re not gonna believe this: they were hand delivered by Browning himself.”
Well, that was unexpected.
“There’s a video too,” he went on, “of footage from archived news coverage of the case. Some interesting stuff in there. We’ll talk.”
On my desk, Thorne had left me a copy of Heather Isle’s (or Slate Seagirt’s, as the case might’ve been) true crime book about the Oswalds, entitled
I hung up the phone, and, after calling Ellen to ask her to find the sanitation workers Dane Strickland and Roger Kennedy and ask them about their relationship with Timothy Griffin, I found the files Ralph had told me about, flipped open the top folder, and began to read.
67
During the day the Maneater had been busy with other obligations at work and hadn’t been able to spend time with Celeste, but now at last he returned to her.
She was still alive.
That pleased him.
Last night, before any of this, as they walked through the door to her apartment, she’d offered to give him, as she put it, “Perfumed whispers and sweet laughter, a night wrapped in melodies and dreams and fantasies finally coming true.”
“It’s from a poem,” she explained with a half-inebriated smile. “I learned it for this one class in college and never forgot it. Not even
“That’s impressive,” he’d told her.
As it turned out, fantasies really had come true last night. And now, as he took her to the pen where the cattle used to be slaughtered back when Brantner Meats was still in business, he was confident they were about to come true all over again.
But not with perfumed whispers and sweet laughter.
No. Other sounds altogether.
68
Bizarre.
That was the best way to describe the Oswalds’ crimes.
From an early age James had indoctrinated Ted to kill.
During the trial, Ted’s defense attorney pointed out that James Oswald would often threaten to shoot his son, sometimes aiming a rifle at his head. When Ted was five years old, his father apparently killed puppies in front of him and mocked him if he showed any form of emotional response.
The files contained transcripts of the trial proceedings between Ted and the prosecuting attorney:
OSWALD
: I thought the only way I could say no to him was to prepare to fight to the end. He didn’t say “I will kill you.” It was the implication.
BENEDICT:
What made you actually believe it?
OSWALD
: His details, the expression on his face. He’d show papers with lists of people he was going to kill. I can give you an example.
BENEDICT
: Please do.
OSWALD
: My physics teacher. I had gotten an A first semester, a B+ second semester. He [James Oswald] was irate. He described how he was going to have me get this guy. He was going to have me build a silencer in front of him and then shoot him in the belly and watch him barf…He [James Oswald] would as easily do it to me as to anyone else.
I scanned the next few lines of testimony and came to Ted’s account of the one time he’d actually attempted to leave: “The dark side became a reality in the barn. Once you entered, there was no going back. The only way out was death. I couldn’t go to the refrigerator and get a glass of milk, go to the bathroom, go outside, pick up a pencil, watch TV without asking permission. I packed my clothes in a bag, attempted to go through the glass door. He caught me and stripped me down to my underwear. He had me kneel down, basically recite that he was the commander of the barn, the only way out was through him.”
One piece of information I already knew: Eventually the father and son were tied to a string of bank robberies spread throughout southeastern Wisconsin. Each time they would arrive heavily armed, wearing clear plastic masks, and threaten the lives of bank employees if they called the police.
After they were caught, it took the officers all day to go through the Oswalds’ Dodge County farm. Law enforcement had been told the barn was rigged to explode, and the bomb squad spent hours searching the area around the barn and the house with metal detectors looking for traps, before they actually entered and found the Oswalds’ extensive arsenal of ammunition and weapons, including.50 caliber rifles. In the end, no bombs or booby traps were found.
In one news conference, it was brought out that the FBI had obtained a photograph of James standing next
