“Hey,” he exclaimed, “I just heard-the doctors are saying they’re hopeful about saving her hands and feet. The circulation had been cut off for a while, but you two did good. The cut on her ankle is pretty deep, but they expect she’ll walk again too. Oh, and it’s not Hendrich’s car.”
“It’s not?”
“No. It’s stolen. Reported a couple days ago by a guy named Norman Darr. Lives in Pewaukee. The VIN number led us to him, but the plates on the Taurus are from a second car that was in the same parking lot. That’s why it took a while to figure out what we were looking at. Our guy switched the plates with it before driving off.”
“To avoid being tracked down by an APB. Clever.”
This was the first time I’d seen Radar since our morning briefing. Thorne had mentioned earlier that he’d gone to look into the names of one of the felons he’d been investigating and I asked him if he’d found anything.
He shook his head.
Back on topic: “The car is one thing,” I said, “but we really need to find out who this woman is.”
“Well, based on what I heard, either she’s married or engaged. That’s something to start with.”
I looked at him quizzically. “Where’d you hear that?”
“I mean, I didn’t hear it exactly, but-the missing finger. Think about it-why would he remove her ring finger? That specific one?” This was classic Radar-inferences, hunches, intuition, gut instincts.
Yeah, but they almost always end up being right on the money.
“Could be symbolic.” I didn’t really believe that, but for some reason I felt obliged to play devil’s advocate. “He sees himself as marrying her? Having some sort of relationship with her?”
Radar shook his head. “I doubt it. Think about it-escalation, Pat. He left it behind to prove to her husband or fiance that he had her and that he was serious about carrying out whatever threat he’d made in his note. He didn’t leave Colleen’s finger for Vincent last night. He might have thought he needed something a little more persuasive this time around to make sure his demands were carried out.”
“But they were carried out last night.”
Yeah, except you caught Vincent.
I tried to work all this through in my head, see where it might be leading.
Even though it wasn’t verifiable yet, what Radar was saying made sense. I accepted it for now, and moved on. “So…if you’re right, he made a demand of the woman’s lover. And that would be persuasive. I mean, finding my fiancee’s or wife’s finger would certainly be enough to convince me that a kidnapper was deadly serious.”
Over the past few months, Taci and I had discussed getting married and when I mentioned wives and fiancees, my thoughts naturally jumped to her. I glanced at my watch and saw that it was nearly six. Undoubtedly I’d need to stick around here for at least a couple hours. I was never going to make it back home in time to cook dinner for her by seven.
Earlier, she’d mentioned that she had something she wanted to talk with me about privately and I hadn’t gotten the best vibe from her when she said that. I knew something was up, and I had the sense that canceling might not be the best idea.
Meet her later for dessert. That should work.
Radar eyed me. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Sorry.” Wrap this up in here, thenfind a phone and call her.
“Anyway,” he said, “I’m thinking the guy might not have gone to the police. As you said, he knew the kidnapper was deadly serious.”
“Right.”
Just thinking about what sort of demand the suspect might have made of the woman’s lover was disturbing-especially if he was escalating as it appeared he was.
“Alright,” I said, “we need to get word out about this woman. I want to make sure we stop her husband or fiance or whoever from doing whatever her abductor demanded. We can release word about her condition to the media, about the severed finger, emphasizing that she’s okay, safe, and under police protection.”
Calculating when Colleen had been found at the pier this morning and the time of a round-trip drive during the day, I said, “The warm hood on the Taurus…There might be more than one missing woman within a six-hour drive of here, but I doubt there’d be more than one whose left ring finger was left behind.”
“I thought you don’t like working with the media?”
“Well, right now time is what matters most. Stopping the woman’s spouse or lover from carrying out the kidnapper’s demands, whatever those might be, and maybe getting us something we can use to actually find this woman’s attacker trumps everything. Get a physical description of her out now and as soon as she regains consciousness, release her photo to the press.”
“I’ll call it in.”
He left and I quickly moved on in my mind to step five: evaluation.
Everyone is tempted to prove what he believes, and that affects not only conscious decision-making but the way our minds subconsciously process information. There’s even a name for it: confirmation bias. Most of the time we’re not even aware of it happening. Naturally, no one likes to be wrong, but the best investigators step back and actually try to find holes in their own theories. This moves you toward objectivity, and that always brings you closer to the truth.
However, the CSIU arrived just as I was beginning to form a working hypothesis that I could try to disprove.
“I want the different spots of blood spatter on the floor checked separately,” I told them. “I don’t care how many favors we have to pull in to get the DNA results back fast. We have no idea how many people this guy may have brought to this train yard. Until further notice, this whole area-everything inside this fence-is a crime scene.”
“That’s a big crime scene,” one of them objected.
A thought: “Let’s make it even bigger. We also need to include the woods.”
“The woods?”
“He knew where the fence was pulled loose, which path to take through the forest. That makes the fence part of the scene.”
“And the woods.”
“Yeah,” I replied, “and the woods. Because he might have tossed evidence-his phone, a knife, his gun. Possibly a set of clothes.”
They looked at me wearily, no doubt thinking about how long all this might take, but they said nothing more.
Then, even if they weren’t as skilled at their jobs as I might’ve liked, I needed to respect them enough to let them do what Thorne had sent them here to do.
Two things were on my immediate agenda: (1) call Taci; (2) get back to the boxcar I’d been standing on when the suspect fired at me and take a look at Bruce Hendrich’s body.