I parked on Wells Street, walked from there, and found Calvin in the graduate office, bent over the highest-end laptop computer I’d ever seen, meticulously entering data.
He didn’t look up. “Good morning, Detective.”
I knew he was expecting me, but it could have been someone else walking in-yet there was certainty in his voice when he identified who I was.
“Everyone’s gait is distinctive,” I surmised. “You remembered mine.”
“Quite right.” He pointed at his computer screen. “I’ve taken the liberty of entering the information that you mapped out yesterday on the corkboard. First, we’ll treat the homicides from Ohio and Illinois as if they’re separate from the abduction/demand crimes here this week, and then recalculate the data as if the crimes were all linked. Agreed?”
I liked that he was diving right in. “Agreed.”
“So…” But instead of turning his attention to the computer screen, he directed me to an AAA map of the Midwest. With red Magic Marker he’d identified Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the sites of the homicides in Champaign, Illinois, and White Oak, Ohio. “Entrance and exit routes…drive times. What do you think they would be?”
The sites formed a lopsided triangle. “I don’t know. Let’s see, from Milwaukee to White Oak … I’d say almost seven hours. From there to Champaign, four or so. From Champaign back to Milwaukee, another four hours.”
“Very good.” He traced the highways with his finger as he told me the mileage: “Three hundred seventy-seven miles. Two hundred twenty-seven. Two twenty-five. Who would drive that far to commit his crimes?”
I didn’t want to assume too much. “Ralph and Agent Parker, she’s another FBI agent on the case, they already looked into traveling salesmen, that sort of thing, before getting up here. Distribution centers for food service, trucking routes, all that-didn’t come up with anything. No companies that have routes or shipping centers in those cities or the surrounding small towns.”
He looked thoughtful for a moment. “I was not aware of that.” He eyed the map more carefully, then muttered something about awareness space and distance decay, but it was hard to hear what he was saying.
Then all at once his eyes lit up. “My boy, I think perhaps we’ve been looking at the wrong roads.”
“Which ones should we be looking at?”
“The ones you can’t see.”
“The ones you can’t see?”
He grinned and pointed at the ceiling.
“Um…” Then it hit me. “What? You mean in the air? Flying?”
“That could explain why he skipped over Indiana. He wasn’t driving through it.”
“He was flying over it,” I said reflectively.
“The missing persons cases you mentioned yesterday. Were they spread out or clustered?”
“Clustered.” I picked up one of his markers. “May I?”
“Of course.”
Using the marker, I placed dots on the map where the sixteen women lived or were last seen.
He studied the distribution.
The clusters were grouped vaguely around Milwaukee, Madison, and Green Bay, Wisconsin; Rockford and Champaign, Illinois; and Cincinnati, Ohio.
He pointed to the cities. “We’ll want to see if General Mitchell International Airport has direct flights from Milwaukee to these cities.”
It took us only a few minutes on the phone to find out that you could get to all the cities, but not all of the flights were direct, not all were daily. However, Rockford, Madison, and Green Bay would all be within a couple hours’ drive. The killer could’ve easily taken the roads you can see to get to them.
“Maybe we shouldn’t look at shipping centers or distribution centers per se,” Calvin said, “but at businesses that do business with other businesses.”
“Consulting firms?”
“Along those lines, yes. A firm that might be flying people throughout this tri-state region. Have your task force check the flight manifests from perhaps a week before and a week after the crimes in those locations. See if the same name shows up.” He paused. “That will, admittedly, take some time, however.”
I was ready to get started on it right away. “Did you come up with anything on your computer?”
“Yes, yes, of course.” He positioned himself in front of the keyboard. “So let’s look at the specific abduction/demand cases.” A few keystrokes later, a map of Milwaukee with a myriad of lines and circles of different colors appeared.
Lines and nodes.
The awareness spaces of the victims.
“You’ve been busy,” I said.
“Indeed.” He tapped the screen. “Here. The boxcar as the anchor point. Then the sites you noted on your corkboard map yesterday. Plus, I’ve taken the liberty of adding the victimology information your team came up with-the typical travel routes and activity nodes for Colleen Hayes and Adele Westin.”
“How did you get those?”
“After you rang me at eight, I contacted Agent Hawkins, told him that Lieutenant Thorne had agreed to let me consult on the case, and he shared with me what Agent Parker and he had come up with yesterday in their research into the lives of the victims. Incidentally, the two women’s lives did intersect at one point, only not at the same time.”
“Where is that?”
“The Milwaukee Regional Medical Center. It seems Adele was in a small fender bender last summer and spent the night there. Colleen, of course, was taken there this week.”
But Colleen was taken there after the crime, so the link wouldn’t involve the initial encounters with their abductor. “That’s stretching it a bit. Do you think it matters?”
“Everything matters.”
Hmm. I kind of liked that line.
I might just add it to my repertoire.
“Of course,” he acknowledged, “it’s also possible that the abductor chose Adele simply because of the availability of the recently buried corpse of her fiance’s grandmother.”
“Or he might have killed Miriam Flandry himself to provide the necessary corpse for his plan.”
“The timing would favor that,” he said quietly.
“I’ll have the team look into the circumstances surrounding her death.”
He typed, the map morphed. “As you can see, the centroid spatial distribution helps us identify the most likely location for the abductor’s residential address…Here.” He paused, then gestured toward the screen. “Near Franklin Heights. On the north side of the city. You’ll want to have your task force focus on people on the tip list and suspect list who live in this sixteen-block radius.”
Amazing.
If it really was accurate, that is.
Even though there was a clock on the wall, he consulted his pocket watch just as he had yesterday. “I’m sorry, this afternoon’s lecture is a new one and, with the time I spent on this research this morning, well, let’s just say I have some long hours of preparation in front of me.”
He slid me a packet of photocopied pages. “I took the liberty. You never know what the day might bring.”
“Notes for today’s lecture.”
“What I have so far.”
“Thanks.”
“Ring me if your team finds out anything.”
“I will.”
“And we’ll reconnect again, perhaps after lunch. If I can, I’ll swing by police headquarters before the seminar.”
“Great.”
Notes in hand, and feeling like we might have an avenue of inquiry that could take us someplace productive, I left for police headquarters.