A private little torture chamber.
That’s what our guy had constructed.
Ten mattresses lined the walls, evidently to serve as makeshift baffles to absorb the sound of his victims’ screams.
I recalled that the kidnapper hadn’t gagged Colleen last night when he maimed her, so he must have trusted that the mattresses really did do their job.
There was a half-used roll of duct tape on the floor next to a length of leftover rope. Beside them lay the antique-looking amputation saw I’d noticed when we first came in. Blood stained the floor beneath the sturdy chair in the middle of the boxcar, probably from Colleen last night, as well as from the injuries of the woman we’d found here just a few minutes ago.
Maybe from others too.
True. Considering the brutality of these crimes and the setup the guy had in here, there was no compelling reason to think that the two women were the only ones he had ever brought to this boxcar.
The only other things I noticed were a light-now turned off-on the wall, the shredded ropes, tape, the plastic ties left from when Ralph had cut the woman free, some sheets of butcher paper, and two plastic garbage bags in the northeast corner, one neatly folded up, the other crumpled on top of it.
When you process a crime scene, you follow a pretty well-established set of five procedures: orientation, observation, examination, analysis, and evaluation. I quickly, almost instinctively, ran through what needed to be done:
1. Orientation: look at the big picture, including the place and timing of the crime, whether it’s indoors or outdoors, what the location might tell you about the offender’s familiarity with the area, if the crime appeared to be related to other crimes, and so on.
2. Observation: note both the unusual and the obvious, remembering that the obvious is often the easiest thing to miss.
3. Examination: collect and scrutinize physical evidence, such as fingerprints, DNA, hair samples, and so on-the things that come to mind for most people when they hear about police officers processing a crime scene.
4. Analysis: take into account everything you know and probe deeper into the pertinence each fact or clue might have to the case. This should happen at the scene while everything is fresh in your mind, as well as later during a briefing when you recap the investigation.
5. Evaluation: form a working hypothesis that you don’t try to prove, but rather try to disprove. Too many times initial hypotheses aren’t correct and trying to find ways to make the facts fit them only throws a monkey wrench into the works. This was the main problem I see with too many of the officers I work with, including, perhaps especially, Detective Corsica.
Five steps.
So, right now, number one-orientation.
The big picture.
I spoke my thoughts aloud to Ralph. “Track with me here. Last night Colleen is abducted and an unusual and disturbing ransom demand is left behind for her husband. Then, even though Vincent does as he was told, the kidnapper saws off her hands.”
“And it looks like he was about to do that again here tonight, but this time to cut off both her hands and her feet.”
I nodded. “Escalation.”
“So,” he said, tracking with me, “we have another ‘ransom’ demand tonight?”
“Very likely. Yes.”
Another pastiche?
“Ralph, we need to get a car over to the alley where Radar and I found Lionel last night-and one to the pier where the guy left Colleen.” I thought about it, then added, “And let’s get someone to the bar too, where Vincent abducted Lionel.”
He called it in while I studied the inside of the boxcar and compared it to what Colleen had told me this morning about the place her abductor had taken her.
When Ralph got off the radio I said, “This boxcar fits the description Colleen gave us. I think we should proceed with the theory that she was brought here too.”
“Agreed.”
I took a minute to mentally review the Dahmer connection, the locations, the information we had about the previous homicides, then noted the obvious: “The Taurus was inside the gate, so whoever drove it in there-whether that was Hendrich or someone else-must have had access to a key to that gate.”
And keys to the two boxcars.
It struck me that we still hadn’t heard back from the station about the sedan’s plates and whether the car was registered to Hendrich. When I mentioned that, Gabriele, who was lingering near the entrance to the boxcar and had apparently been listening in on our conversation, offered to follow up on it.
“Good,” I told her. She left to make the call, I turned to Ralph. “Chaining the gate shut, parking in that particular place, choosing this line of boxcars, once again speaks to our guy’s familiarity with the area. With the forest paralleling the tracks, he would have been hidden from view from every nearby road, and from where the car is parked, he would have had to carry the victim, or lead her, more than sixty meters to the boxcar…”
“By the way, what’s with you and the metric system? You never heard of yards before?”
“Science, medicine, forensics, they all use the metric system,” I defended myself. “That’s why they measure things in milliliters, millimeters, and so on. Metric is the measuring system of the world. Even track and field events use the metric system.”
“Yeah, well football doesn’t. It’s a game of inches, not centimeters. It doesn’t even sound American to talk like that. From now on, convert so I know what you’re talking about.”
“Um…a meter is just a little longer than a-”
“Yard. Yeah, I know that one. Everyone knows that one. But everything else-how many millimeters are in a foot? How many kilometers are in a mile? I don’t know that stuff. No more of this metric nonsense. It’s too European-reminds me of France.”
“You really don’t like France.”
“No, I do not.”
“What happened in France, Ralph?”
“I’ll tell you someday.” He eyed the ten old and mismatched mattresses, then left the topic of the metric system behind. “It’d be tough for one person to carry those in by himself, don’t you think? A lot easier with two people.”
And a lot of trips driving in-unless you have a U-Haul.
Hmm…a moving truck…
“And he obviously got ’em from somewhere,” I muttered. “I mean, who would have ten used mattresses just lying around? A hotel? A used furniture store? A Goodwill store?”
“We should have some officers follow up on that.”
“There’s a Salvation Army thrift store about half a mile from here.” It was Gabriele again. She’d returned and was lingering by the door.
“Try them,” I told her. “See if they’re still open, if they might’ve sold some guy ten used mattresses.”
A nod. She left.
“Okay, step two,” I told Ralph. “We try to notice the obvious.”