“Notice the obvious?”
“Yeah, it’s often the hardest thing to see. It’s like Pascal wrote in Les Pensees, ‘For we always find the thing obscure which we wish to prove and that clear which we use for the proof; for, when a thing is put forward to be proved, we first fill ourselves with the imagination that it is, therefore, obscure and, on the contrary, that what is to prove it is clear, and so we understand it easily.’”
“I’m not sure I quite followed that.”
“We start with the preconception that what we want to find out is obscure, but it might not be. It might be clear, but our preconceptions blind us.”
“Oh. Why didn’t he just say that?”
“He was a philosopher.”
“And you memorized that?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.” I inspected the chair. It was bolted to the floor to keep the struggling victims from tipping it over. “We have three new locks…” I said softly. “The boxcar with Hendrich, the one with the woman, the front gate. They’re the only new locks in the yard. But they’re not all the same type of padlock. The brand of the one on the front gate and this boxcar match; the other doesn’t and it was on a rusty chain while the other two had new chains.”
“Maybe he had to come in here a bunch of times to deliver those mattresses and that chair, brought different locks on each trip.”
“Yeah.” I mulled that over. “Maybe.”
A swarm of questions buzzed through my mind.
How many people did he bring here? Just these two victims, or have there been more? If this is the same guy who was committing the cannibalistic homicides elsewhere in the Midwest, is this his base of operation? If so, why is it so far from the other two locations?
And why are there two different styles of locks?
Two different offenders?
I heard someone outside mention that the CSIU had arrived in the parking lot.
Just a couple more minutes.
I knew that the crime scene unit would search for DNA and prints and would compare the blood samples to find out whatever they could about the offender. They had the instruments and materials for all that, Ralph and I didn’t. But DNA and prints help you only if you have something to compare them to. If the guy wasn’t in the system, his name wasn’t going to pop up.
Tonight the CSIU had a lot of evidence to process: the Taurus, two boxcars and their contents, the locks and chains, the fence material around that opening, the gate…and I had a sense that this guy was smart. Careful. That he wasn’t going to leave behind anything that he didn’t want to.
I’m no expert on blood spatter analysis, but when I scrutinized the stains on the wooden floor, I could tell that some were darker, had seeped in more. The fresh blood from the woman tonight had sprayed across the floor when her left ankle was cut. The other stains were just below where Colleen’s wrists would have been if she’d been sitting in the chair.
I bent beside it. “Ralph, look at the blood spatter on the floor here: the pattern of the darker stains.”
He studied them with me. “Dried. Soaked in more. From Colleen.”
“So it would seem.”
He could tell I was looking at something else. “What is it?”
“Well, at first it sprayed a little, you can see that, but then it stops abruptly.” I pointed. “Almost in a straight line.”
“So, the blood hit him. His arm maybe. Or his leg.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure, but…”
Ralph saw me glance toward the plastic bags. “Ah. He learned his lesson. Bagged up a set of clothes tonight.”
“He didn’t have a bag of clothes with him when he fled, so he might have stashed one somewhere or slipped a pair of clothes back on.” I pointed to the bags. “If he did stick some clothes in there, even momentarily, he might have inadvertently left us a little present.”
“His DNA. From his clothes.”
“Yes.” The CSIU would have undoubtedly checked the outside of the bags for prints; the inside was another story, something they might easily have missed.
“Nice.”
I finished looking at the blood spatter while Ralph examined the amputation saw. “There’s a date engraved on the handle-1864.”
Often, killers will choose a very specific and unique weapon that holds some sort of special meaning to them. But that’s not smart. The more unique your weapon, the easier it is to trace. An amputation saw that old had to be rare. There are experts in just about every obscure field, and I expected we could find someone who specialized in Civil War-era surgical instruments. He or she would be able to tell us more about the saw, maybe where our guy might have purchased it, or even who he might be.
“That’s good,” I said. “That’ll help.”
“You think our guy got it from Griffin?”
“It’s worth checking out. Did you hear if the search warrant went through?”
“No, actually. Let me go call Ellen.” He stepped away to radio Agent Parker.
As I moved on to analysis, I played out in my mind the way I would put things in my report later tonight:
We searched the train yards, saw no one. I discovered the Ford Taurus inside the gate near the parking lot on the west side. After I found Hendrich’s body in one of the boxcars, I located a man fleeing along the fence line. The suspect engaged me with his firearm, I returned fire but did not hit him. He fled. A chase ensued. He was able to avoid apprehension.
Okay, yes. But how did he know when to leave?
That really was the question.
If the shooter was in the boxcar with the woman, why did he leave when he did, right as he was getting started with her?
He had to have known that you and Ralph were in the train yard.
So did he have the door open? Possibly, but that didn’t really make sense, not if he was torturing a woman inside the car and not if he trusted the mattresses to absorb her screams. Did he hear us? Maybe, but how? We weren’t making any noise except speaking quietly into our radios. So, if he were-
I heard someone climbing into the boxcar behind me. I figured it would be one of the CSIU members, but when I turned around, I saw it was Radar instead.