Ralph and I found a woman, unconscious, bound to a chair, plastic ties tightly cinched around her wrists and ankles. The door to this boxcar had been chained shut and Ralph had used the pipe for the second time today to wrench off the handle.
Her pulse was weak and thready, and she didn’t respond when we called to her or slapped her cheek, but she was breathing. She was alive.
Thank God she was alive.
Ralph slipped out an automatic knife from his pocket, an Ox Forge Black Knife, and cut her free from the ropes and tape binding her to the chair. He quickly slit the plastic ties as well, then we eased her to the floor.
Blood seeped from a deep cut in her ankle, most likely from the bloody, discarded amputation saw on the floor next to the chair. I applied pressure to her bleeding ankle while Ralph supported her neck to keep her airway open.
It looked like we’d interrupted the guy just as he was getting started on her.
During our trip back here through the woods, the dispatcher had assured me that four paramedics were on their way, and now the echoing sirens told me they were close. Actually, it sounded like the emergency vehicles were probably stuck behind the locked gate. Hopefully they’d brought the bolt cutters and Jaws of Life as I’d ordered.
My attention went back to the woman.
Caucasian. Mid-twenties. Medium build. Shoulder-length, blond hair. Aquamarine eyes, no contact lenses. Smeared mascara-she’d been crying-no other makeup. Fair skin, attractive features. No visible piercings, scars, tattoos or identifying marks. When we checked for an ID, we found none. The ring finger of her left hand had been cut off, the hand carefully bandaged to stop the bleeding.
Her abductor had removed her shoes and I could see that her feet, which had been bluish from the lack of oxygenated blood when we arrived, were regaining their color now that the plastic ties were gone. Her hands were doing better as well. All good signs.
Both Ralph and I were quiet as we waited for the EMTs to get here. I didn’t know what he was thinking, but I was trying to decompress, to process what had happened this afternoon.
I couldn’t stop images of the day from whipping like cyclone winds through my mind: the visit to Griffin’s nightmarish home, the inexplicably terse conversation with Detective Browning in Waukesha, arriving at the train yards.
Wriggling under the fence.
Locating the sedan.
Finding Hendrich’s body.
Getting shot at.
Scaling the fence and chasing the shooter through the forest.
Losing him.
Ending up here, with this unidentified woman who was evidently our guy’s next intended victim.
And with the memories came a swirl of emotions: rage, confusion, grief over Hendrich’s death, hope that this woman would be able to identify her attacker.
None of this whiplash of tumultuous emotions was unusual for my job, but this afternoon had been unusually intense and I suspected it would take some time to work through all the feelings.
“What are you thinking?” Ralph asked me, drawing me back to the present.
“A lot of things, I guess.” I indicated toward the woman. “Mostly, that I’m thankful we got here when we did for her, but I’m angry we didn’t get here-”
“Soon enough to save Hendrich.”
“Yeah.”
“His body was still warm,” Ralph said. “I’m not sure how long he might have been dead. Hopefully the forensics guys can figure all that out, but we didn’t see anyone else leave the train yard, so I have to think he was killed right before we got here, right before the suspect fled.”
“Unless the killer didn’t escape at all.”
“You think he’s still here? A second guy?”
“It’s possible.” Thankfully, the sirens had drawn closer, and I could tell by the sound that they’d made it past the parking lot gate. I was anxious to scour the train yards more carefully, but we would need a team of people to do that thoroughly, and they were going to be here any moment. “I’ll get some more officers out there searching in a sec.”
Considering the number of train cars and tracks, the EMTs probably wouldn’t be able to drive all the way to this boxcar, but I imagined they should at least be able to make it as far as the Ford Taurus. Rolling a gurney from there might pose a bit of a problem, but carrying a stretcher would be manageable.
We radioed in our exact position and a bevy of officers beat the paramedics to our car. I had one of them take my place beside the woman and then directed the others where to look in the train yard and woods for other victims, suspects, accomplices or witnesses.
While I was giving instructions, the paramedics came jogging up carrying a stretcher.
No drugs were visible in the boxcar, but I told the EMTs to start with the working assumption that the woman had been given Propotol, the same pharmaceutical that’d been left at the Hayes house last night for Vincent to knock out the African-American man he’d been directed to abduct.
Three more officers showed up and I sent them to help the others.
With impressive speed and proficiency the paramedics got the woman ready, and I helped them carry the stretcher to one of the two waiting ambulances.
As they loaded her, one of the EMTs saw the cuts on my hands from grabbing the razor wire through the inadequate protection of my jacket. She offered to treat them, but I decided that bandaging my hands in gauze would slow me down too much; however, in the end, I let her clean the wounds and wrap some first aid tape around them so I could work without leaving my blood everywhere.
The night wind was biting and cold, so on my way back to the train car where we’d found the woman, I retrieved the flashlight, and then my jacket, which was still snagged on the top of the fence. It was sliced up some, but overall it was in reasonably good shape.
I didn’t even want to think about how my hands would have looked if the jacket hadn’t been there to protect them.
When the officer who’d brought the bolt cutters arrived, Ralph took them from him and the three of us left to search the other boxcars for more victims. Ralph made short work of the rusted chains on the remaining cars, but we didn’t find anyone else in the yard. Neither did any of the other officers.
No victims.
No suspects.
No witnesses.
Except that little boy you saw through the window, out past the woods.
No, he’d only looked out when I kicked the garbage can.
It’s possible he might have seen something before you got there and that’s why he was at the window in the first place.
I sent an officer to go and talk with him. Other officers were already canvassing the neighborhood. Before sending them out, I’d noted that our guy was Caucasian and knew where to go to disappear in this nearly one hundred percent African-American neighborhood. “See if anyone saw a white guy running through here, someone who didn’t belong.”
By the time Ralph and I returned to the boxcar where we’d found the woman, Officer Gabriele Holdren had arrived and now informed us that the crime scene investigative unit, or CSIU, was on its way.
“ETA?” I asked her.
“Should be here in the next four or five minutes.”
I’m not the biggest fan of our force’s CSIU. Captain Domyslawski didn’t budget nearly enough money to purchase the kind of resources or attract the kind of personnel he should’ve, and it showed through all too often in the form of lost or mislabeled evidence, contaminated crime scenes, and inadequate case documentation.
Four or five minutes, huh?
Well, at least that gave me a little time to look around before they started in.
I’ll take what I can get.
I asked Gabriele to wait outside, then climbed into the boxcar. “Ralph, I want your eyes in here.”
He heaved himself up and stood beside me.
Both of us had our flashlights on and they illuminated, in a somewhat eerie fashion, the macabre contents of the boxcar.
“Alright, Mr. I-Notice-Things,” Ralph said bluntly, but softly enough for only me to hear, “you’re on.”
I snapped on a pair of latex gloves over my taped-up hands. “Yes, I am.”
Carefully, I began to study the contents of the boxcar.