Mallory was okay.
Griffin had hit her on the side of the head with the tire iron. I only had a bruised arm from where he’d smacked me, but the blow he’d delivered to her had knocked the girl out. Apparently, he’d left her unconscious in the house to make his escape. He must have assaulted her just before we arrived at the farmhouse, maybe when he saw our cars approaching.
A Grade III concussion, but she would be alright.
An ambulance had arrived at the scene while Radar and I were busy in the landfill looking for Griffin. The EMTs had already placed Mallory on a gurney and now they were wheeling her toward the ambulance. She was crying tiny childlike tears, and I didn’t know if it was because of grief over Timothy’s death or relief that he was finally out of her life for good.
I said to the paramedics, “I need to speak with her for a moment.”
At first they were resistant, but then Carver saw what was going on and waved for them to let me through. I would’ve gone anyway, but I appreciated his support.
I leaned over Mallory, spoke as gently as I could. “Do you remember me? I was at your house yesterday, I’m Detective Bowers.”
She nodded.
“Did they tell you what happened to Timothy out here today?”
She nodded again and this time sniffed back a tear, but I still couldn’t tell what emotion or state of mind was causing her to cry.
“Mallory, do you know who Timothy got the police tape from? The tape from the murder in Illinois?”
“The Maneater. He said the Maneater got it for him.”
So Griffin did have information about his identity after all.
“Do you know who that is? The Maneater?”
She shook her head.
I wasn’t sure how to put this, but finally just said it plainly: “Do you know what Timothy did to the girls?” She looked at me with a curious expression that was somehow also devoid of emotion. “He killed some little girls, Mallory.”
She nodded slowly. Didn’t seem surprised.
“Did you know that? Did you know anything about that?”
She shook her head and I believed she was telling the truth.
The EMTs looked at me impatiently. I held up a hand: just a few more seconds.
Griffin had said there were more. That there are always more.
“Mallory, can I ask you, when Agent Hawkins and I were at your house, Timothy touched a photograph on the wall. A picture of a woman. Do you remember that?”
She gazed at me for a moment, then looked away as she nodded.
“Who is that woman? Do you know her?”
Mallory stopped crying. There was a long pause and it came to the point where I thought she might not answer at all. Finally, she said softly, “She was my mother. She was his wife.”
And then she brushed off the last remaining tear and stared into space as they wheeled her into the ambulance.
Mallory was not just Griffin’s lover.
She was also his daughter.
It was very possible that he had called her “baby” for more than one reason after all.
I took a look in the farmhouse.
Though the walls were charred and half of the roof was missing, there was still furniture inside. I’d seen photos of the interior of Dahmer’s apartment and I could tell where the furniture in this house had come from: these were the very things that were supposed to have been destroyed and dumped in an undisclosed landfill.
Come to think of it, they may very well have been delivered as scheduled, only to be retrieved by Griffin and brought to this farmhouse down the road.
It wasn’t just furniture. Griffin had set up the entire place to look as much as possible like the inside of Dahmer’s apartment, even down to the detail of having an altar with a skull and candles around it in the closet, just like the one Dahmer had built.
And in the kitchen was the refrigerator where Jeffrey Dahmer had kept his meals.
The coup de grace for any demented collector of serial killer memorabilia.
It was dusk before Radar and I were finally able to take off.
He’d been involved in a lethal shooting in another jurisdiction, and it took several hours for us to fill out the paperwork and finish our debriefing with the chief of police and district attorney. However, honestly, no one was giving Radar a hard time. On the contrary, by the pats on the back and nods of encouragement from the other officers, it was clear they were glad he’d taken Griffin out.
“Sergeant Walker fired just before you could?” the DA asked me in our interview.
“Yes.”
“And he had that knife with him, Griffin did?”
“Yes. If Walker hadn’t taken the shot…” I let my voice trail off.
“Griffin might have come at you with that knife.”
“Yes.”
“And your firearm? You had it unholstered? You were covering the suspect?”
“That’s right, but Sergeant Walker responded before I was able to.”
“It’s a good thing he was here, then.”
“Yes. It is.”
I showed him where I was standing when Griffin died, he noted it on his form and that was that.
When I gazed again at the place Radar had been when he fired, I still couldn’t tell if the angle would have been right for him to see Griffin reaching for his pocket. Truthfully, I just couldn’t tell.
At first, I thought I might ask him about it.
But then, after a moment, I decided I would not.
Finally, we left and jumped onto I-94 toward Milwaukee.
There were still a number of things on my mind to take care of tonight: (1) find out if the other task force members had made any progress on the case of the man who’d fled the boxcar; (2) send someone to interview the city workers, Roger Kennedy and Dane Strickland, and find out if they were connected in any way to Griffin; (3) get an update from Dr. Werjonic on Slate Seagirt and what the true crime writer might know about the murder of Mindy Wells.