Carl took Miriam’s corpse to the maintenance building to skin it.
He laid it on the concrete floor and, as disturbing as this act was, started his work.
Almost immediately however, he discovered that it was too difficult to keep a firm grip on the body while he maneuvered his knife to strip off the flesh. In the 1950s, Gein had hung the corpse of his victim to do it, and that made a certain amount of macabre sense.
If he could use gravity to his advantage, it’d be a lot easier, go a lot quicker. He searched the shelves, found a chain, looped it over one of the rafters, and then under the arms and around the chest of the corpse, hoisted it into the air, and set to work.
As Joshua stood beside the trunk of the sedan, he thought about last night and how it related to what was going to happen here in the train yards tonight.
Last evening he’d slipped in the back door of Vincent and Colleen’s home even while Colleen was inside the house. He was in the kitchen closet, in fact, watching her through the slightly cracked-open door when she got the call from her husband telling her he was going to be late.
Joshua had heard her side of the conversation and that’d offered him both a problem and an opportunity.
“So, I’ll see you about ten, then?” Colleen had said. Then, “Love you too. Bye.”
Just knowing that he was there alone with Colleen was, admittedly, exhilarating. There was no longer any urgency to move on her.
Joshua had decided to wait and watch her and take her at nine.
His day job called for him to have a police scanner, so last night after he had Colleen, he’d used it to listen to the chatter regarding the chase for Vincent. Amidst the confusion, an officer had reported that he had the suspect in custody, but not long after that he announced that he was still at large.
So then, when Joshua’s portable phone rang, he hadn’t been sure if the person on the other end who was assuring him that he’d left a black man in the alley was Vincent or not. With all the sirens and all the chatter on the dispatch radio, he’d suspected it might be a cop.
Today he wasn’t going to take any chances. He was going to get started on Adele before five, before Carl was scheduled to make the call.
He lifted her, still unconscious, from the trunk, then nudged the hatch closed with his elbow.
Last night, Colleen Hayes.
Tonight, Adele Westin.
And it was going to be even better than it had been with Colleen.
Trudging across the gravel, he carried his captive toward the boxcar.