Inside the department again, the task force reconvened.
Before we launched into examining the background information on Basque, Ralph, who’d just returned from Fort Atkinson, filled us in on Browning.
“I’ll make this quick,” he said, “’cause I know we gotta get to Basque: Browning denied knowing anything about Griffin’s involvement. Might have been telling the truth, but when I took a careful look at his employment record, I saw-well, guess where he used to work?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Horicon. At the time of Mindy Wells’s death. He was the officer assigned to signing items into and out of the evidence room.”
Just thinking about Mindy’s death cut into me, and the fact that a police officer might have known something about her killer and done nothing about it, leaving him free to kill again, cut into me even more.
“He’s being questioned about it by the DA as we speak. Oh, and this might be a bit of good news. Sergeant Carver and his team over in Fort Atkinson found a journal hidden beneath a loose board in the kitchen of that farmhouse near the landfill.” Ralph held up two fingers. “Jenna and Mindy, that’s it, the only two homicides written about in the journal.”
“Griffin told me there were others,” I said. “That there are always others.”
“Bragging?” Ellen suggested. “Narcissism? According to what you told us, it fits right in with his personality.”
I hoped she was right. It sounded strange to say in reference to the death of anyone, but if those were the only two girls whom he’d killed, that would at least be one thing to be thankful for.
In either case I was confident that the Fort Atkinson PD wouldn’t let this thing rest until they’d found out the true extent of Griffin’s crimes.
We turned our attention to Basque.
“Alright,” I said to the team. “Tell me everything we know about him.”
We went through the peripheral stuff first-where he’d lived, worked, gone to school, all in the Greater Milwaukee area. He had an off-the-charts IQ. He was single, never married, no known children. He had a gym membership downtown, paid his taxes on time, donated regularly to three different charities.
Thorne shook his head. “This guy’s something else. A perfect record, not even a parking ticket.”
“And he’s never lived in the Franklin Heights area?” I said, trying to tie all the investigative threads together.
Lyrie answered. “No.”
Ellen looked anxious to share what she’d found. “When I was calling around checking on his work, I learned who his temp had been for a couple weeks in September. Filled in for his secretary.” Whether she intended to or not, she gave a dramatic pause. “Colleen Hayes.”
Okay, now that was interesting.
I recalled what we’d learned earlier. “She said she found Griffin’s catalog in a trash can at work.” I looked around. “Who has that copy of Griffin’s subscription list?”
Gabriele jogged to the other room and returned with it, scanned it, and said, “Yeah, Basque’s on the list. He’s a subscriber.”
That was it. “We need to have another chat with this guy.”
But when we tried his office we found out he’d left for the day. The receptionist didn’t know where he’d gone.
“Let’s get a car to his house,” I told Thorne. “I’m not sure if we have enough to bring him in for questioning, but we can give it a shot. Maybe find out something before he lawyers up. We might have rattled him when we visited his office. He could have taken off.”
“I’ll put out an APB,” Thorne said. That could create a legal mess to mop up later if this ended up being a dead end, but I trusted Thorne to handle it and I was glad he was ready to make the call.
Earlier, Corsica and I had set up a one-fifteen appointment to have a talk with Janelle Warner, the other Hathaway amp; Erikson employee who’d flown with Basque and Demell. However, right now I didn’t want to leave headquarters. Ellen offered to go over there with Corsica and talk with Ms. Warner, hoping she might be able to tell us something about Basque’s behavior on their trips.
As they were getting ready to go, we received word that Calvin had arrived and was in the lobby. “Call him in,” I said. “I want to get his take on this too.”