Plainfield, Wisconsin
Joshua parked the car in the pull-off at the end of the dirt road.
Barren, leafless trees ready for winter bordered him on both sides.
A sign on a leaning wooden pole beside a small clearing announced NO TRESPASSING.
The house that used to stand here was long gone.
Joshua wasn’t sure exactly when it’d burned down, but he knew it was within a couple months of Ed Gein’s arrest in November of 1957, and he was pretty sure the fire hadn’t been accidental. Just like the people of Milwaukee who tried to purge the memory of Dahmer from their consciousness by razing his apartment building, the good people of Plainfield had undoubtedly hoped to sear the memory of their most infamous inhabitant by getting rid of the place he’d called home.
Joshua stepped out of the car and stretched his legs, then removed the cooler from the backseat.
It’d taken a fair amount of research, but eventually he’d been able to locate the precise spot where the house had stood.
Ironically, or at least conveniently as far as Gein would have been concerned, it was less than five miles from the nearest graveyard-the same graveyard where things would happen this afternoon, during the next chapter of the saga Joshua had recently been putting into play.
Honestly, it’d never been his intention to kill Colleen Hayes. Cutting off her hands had been all he was planning to do to her, even from the start.
In fact, murdering her might actually have been counterproductive to what he was hoping to accomplish.
Well then, what about Petey Schwartz back on Friday?
No, nobody would connect the two crimes.
Besides, that wasn’t planned. It was spontaneous and had nothing to do with the Hayes kidnapping or what he had in mind for Adele today.
Still, you remember what you did, remember how you-
Enough with those kinds of thoughts.
Joshua walked to the place where Ed Gein’s kitchen used to be, set down the cooler, and took a seat beside it.
The view before him was the same one Ed Gein would have had if he were looking out his kitchen window.
Joshua pulled a bottle of cream soda out of the cooler, uncapped it, and took a long refreshing swallow.
Last night it hadn’t been easy, doing to Colleen what he’d done. And, unquestionably, it would have been easier on her if he’d knocked her out beforehand, but somehow, though the deed itself was disturbing, her screams had brought him a degree of pleasure that’d surprised him.
It was a bit disconcerting.
That hadn’t happened before, but then again, he’d never done something like that to someone and let the person live.
It’d led him to acknowledge a certain yearning rising to the surface, one that’d been birthed in him long ago in the cellar beneath the barn.
While he was listening to Colleen cry out, enjoying watching her suffer, he’d had a revelation of sorts, an epiphany about who he truly was, what he was becoming.
A voice of reason, of conscience: Go to God for forgiveness, Joshua. Turn yourself in! Don’t live in the den of the damned!
More cream soda.
The den of the damned.
He shifted his thoughts back to Colleen. After cutting off her left hand, he’d faced a choice-drug her before doing the other one, or leave her awake during the process.
Of course he might have gagged her as well, but where he’d taken her, it wasn’t as if they were going to be discovered. The screams hadn’t posed much of a problem. And he kind of liked hearing the strangely muted, yet metallic sounds as they echoed all around him in that place and then disappeared into the thin night air.
While he’d tried to decide whether or not to leave her conscious before sawing off her right hand, he’d tightened the heavy-duty plastic tie around that wrist to stop the bleeding once he got started.
He thought she might pass out from the pain of losing that left hand, but she must have been a fighter because she didn’t. In between her screams she’d struggled to pull free from the chair, begged him to stop, to let her go.
That ended up being distracting and with all of that going on, it took him a while to decide which direction to take things.
Finally, he chose to let her remain conscious while he laid the edge of the saw blade against her other wrist.
And then drew it firmly toward him.
Forward and back.
Forward and backward as the night became rich and thick with her screams and her blood.
His father had taught him all about that: “For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.” Third book of the Bible. Seventeenth chapter. Eleventh verse.
Atonement. And the blood.
He thought of Colleen now as he unwrapped the two packages and, sitting where Ed Gein might have sat, he did what Ed Gein might have done and ate the meat he had brought along with him from Milwaukee.
In a few minutes he would head to the house and pay a visit to Adele Westin. Joshua had researched more than just the location of Ed’s house and the graveyard, and he knew that Adele, who was living with her fiance, worked out of their home.
She was a woman who followed a very strict schedule, but a quick phone call could confirm that she was there this afternoon. Otherwise, if need be, he would wait as long as necessary until she returned.
Her fiance wouldn’t be arriving home from his shift until after two. Joshua figured that would give him plenty of time to get to Adele and then leave the token of his intentions toward her, as well as a note with his demands. All of this would, of course, initiate the next chapter in the story he was telling.
One that would be enough to attract the attention of the person he was hoping to meet.
And if not, what he had planned for Wednesday would most certainly do so, without a doubt.
On Wednesday, when the cop was dead, Joshua’s point would be unmistakable and he would finally be able to get the one thing he wanted most-a partner.