As I approached the car, Ralph caught up with me and told me that the search warrant had gone through and that Ellen and Corsica were on their way to Fort Atkinson to pick up Griffin’s sales receipts and a copy of his subscription list.
“Perfect.”
He went on: “We’ll have the team look over the receipts in the morning.” Then he informed me that Lyrie had radioed in that he was still in Hendrich’s neighborhood. Apparently, Thompson was checking the names of officers in Champaign to see if any had ever lived in Waukesha. Lieutenant Thorne was at some sort of meeting with the captain. “The lieutenant scheduled a briefing tomorrow morning at ten in order to give the CSIU a little time to process some of the evidence first.”
Ten o’clock should give me enough time to have breakfast with Taci, and then a chance to review the team’s findings before the briefing.
“Sounds good.”
My attention shifted to the homicide scene.
Three CSIU members were already working the boxcar where Hendrich’s body had been found. One was dusting for prints, another was photographing the body, the third was searching for trace evidence on the east end of the car. They’d set up floodlights and the inside of the boxcar was such a bright contrast to the darkness outside that it was almost jarring.
The photographer mumbled something about how this guy had not died in a very desirable way. The words floated toward me and then disappeared into a narrow, shy spot in the air above the corpse, but I wasn’t really listening to her. I was looking at Hendrich’s body.
He was in his late thirties, Caucasian, slight build, with salt-and-pepper hair and a goatee. A frenzy of blood was spread across his abdomen.
And he was now and forever dead.
At the scene of a homicide, evil isn’t airbrushed or sanitized as it is on the evening news. Out here it gets right in your face and you can’t turn the channel or look away. Newscasters must know that if they dwell too long on the realities of death it’ll be too depressing and people will flip the channel to watch Seinfeld. Evil is either sensationalized or muted. On the air it’s almost never shown to be honestly, fully, what it is.
If you believe in eternity, Bruce’s soul was either in paradise or the inferno. If you don’t believe in eternity, you’d have to accept that he had entered oblivion and all that he had been was now and would forever be no more.
I couldn’t help but think about how paper-thin the fabric of life is. I once worked a case in which a man slipped in the shower and the broken glass from the stall gouged into his throat and he bled to death in less than a minute-just that quick.
It might be a screech of tires as someone swerves into your lane. Or a heart attack or stroke. Or something as harmless as dropping a bar of soap in the shower. And that’s it. Most people live their whole lives without ever realizing that every moment is a near-death experience.
Truthfully, when I think about it, it’s baffling and astonishing to me that I’m here, in this place at this time, breathing, thinking, dreaming, believing. Aware of being aware of being alive.
And it’s mind-boggling that we die, every one of us, that all of humanity’s hopes and dreams come to an end, one person, one tragic death at a time.
Without heaven to spend eternity in, or another go-around here on earth to try to make things right, what could possibly, ultimately matter?
No wonder so many people believe in reincarnation.
And in heaven.
I wasn’t exactly sure what I believed about those things, but doing this job I’ve learned three things for certain, three things I do know for sure: life is a mystery, death is a tragedy, and hope-when it exists-is always a gift.
Hendrich was wearing civilian clothes, no security guard uniform. There was blood on the floor of the boxcar, but none leading to it, which told me he was killed in here.
I wondered how long he might have been kept in this train car before he was killed.
Evidence and evident both come from the same root word meaning “obvious,” but all too often the two concepts-what is evident and what is evidence-don’t mesh very well in an investigation. Evidence isn’t always evident and what’s evident doesn’t always end up being evidence.
I wanted the walls and the wounds and the clues to speak to me; wanted everything in the boxcar to bring a collective voice together and whisper to me the name of the killer, but for the moment I noticed nothing else that seemed in any way pertinent. All the evidence was silent.
As I looked around the boxcar, I ran through the five investigative steps but came up with nothing revelatory.
“Did you go through his pockets?” I asked the head of the CSIU team.
“Not yet.”
“Now would be good.”
After a small pause, he did, and produced $14.73, a well-used, much-stained handkerchief, a set of keys, a wallet, and a pocketknife. I knew that the CSIU team would follow up on all these things later. I wanted to follow up on one of them now.
The keys.