Everything dies.
Yes, everything dies.
Joshua approached him.
“You can do it.” His father reassured him, but when Joshua didn’t raise the knife, his father wrapped his hand around Joshua’s and bent over. “Here. This is your first time. I’ll help you.”
There was a lot of blood.
And nothing in the cellar smelled right when they were done.
It was hard, looking at the man hanging by his wrists and not moving. Not even a little bit. Not even breathing. Joshua kept expecting him to move. He couldn’t believe that anyone could ever be that still. The hood was off now and the fat man was staring at Joshua, but he wasn’t blinking at all, not once, and that was scary too.
Finally, his father noticed and reached down and closed the man’s eyes. Then he put a hand on Joshua’s shoulder. “You did well, Son, but I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you, shouldn’t have tried to make you do it all by yourself.”
All Joshua could think was, “The life is in the blood.”
“From now on you can help me, okay? I’ll show you how, and when you’re ready you can do it by yourself. But only when you’re ready. It’ll get easier each time. There’s no hurry. Don’t worry. I’ll teach you.”
Then his father took the knife again and showed Joshua what to do when the person who’d been brought to the special place beneath the barn wasn’t moving anymore.
Now, nearly three decades later, Joshua sat in his basement and watched the CNN coverage of the story about the ongoing homicide investigation in Champaign, Illinois, concerning the death of twenty-three-year-old Juanita Worthy.
On the newscast they were interviewing an expert on violent crimes against women, someone named Jake Vanderveld, and he was speculating that the lungs of the victim had not just been removed, but had also been consumed by the killer.
“Anthropophagy,” he said soberly. “Cannibalistic behavior.”
Joshua knew the term “anthropophagy” already. He’d learned it long ago from his father, and now he was understandably intrigued by what the man had to say about the crime. Joshua watched and listened and thought of Dahmer.
Back before the city of Milwaukee had raised nearly half a million dollars to buy Jeffrey’s old apartment building just so that they could level it, Joshua had snuck in with a video camera and walked through the place room by room, taking careful footage of the living room where Jeffrey cuffed and overpowered his victims, the bedroom where he killed them and slept with their corpses, the kitchen where he sat at the table and ate their skin and meat and viscera and brains.
Visiting Jeffrey’s apartment had made the connection between them more real, more concrete, more intimate.
Joshua heard his wife, Sylvia, calling from upstairs, “What are you doing down there, honey?”
“Nothing. Just watching the news.”
“Are you coming up? It’s almost ten o’clock. I made you some brunch.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
“I need to leave, remember? I have two houses to show before noon.”
“I’ll be right up.” He turned the volume down a little so he could watch the last few minutes of the interview without Sylvia hearing it.
Joshua’s job allowed him a somewhat flexible work schedule. He’d taken the rest of the day off because he had something to take care of in Plainfield, a couple hours northwest of his home on the outskirts of Milwaukee.
He figured that if he left in the next half hour there would be just enough time to make it there and back by dusk, or the gloaming, as it used to be called. That was the term he preferred, the one he’d first heard in the Celtic folk song “Loch Lomond,” a song of death and the pining but ultimately futile hope of a soldier to return home to his sweetheart.
’Twas there that we parted in yon shady glen,
On the steep, steep side o’ Ben Lomon’,
Where in purple hue the Hieland hills we view,
An’ the moon comin’ out in the gloamin’.
The moon coming out in the gloaming.
Tonight at dusk.
But until then, Plainfield.
He’d been to the small town numerous times and knew exactly where he was going. And, of course, since he was visiting Plainfield, he didn’t just think of Jeffrey Dahmer, but also of Ed Gein, the cannibal and necrophile who’d made the small Wisconsin town famous in the 1950s.
Over the years most people had forgotten about Gein, but they hadn’t forgotten about the novels and movies his life and crimes inspired: Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even the Buffalo Bill character in Silence of the Lambs. One quiet Wisconsin handyman inspired the villains of three of the most iconoclastic horror movies of all time.
Ed had been in the habit of digging up graves and taking the bodies of the women back to his home where he would make lampshades and clothes out of their skin. He sewed together belts from their nipples.
At first Ed was just a grave robber, but eventually that wasn’t enough for him. He killed Mary Hogan on December 8, 1954, managed to suppress his urges for a few years, and then murdered Bernice Worden almost exactly forty years ago on November 16, 1957, at the hardware store on Main Street.
Even though the original owners had sold the business long ago, amazingly, the place was still operating as a hardware store. Maybe the stories that surrounded it, the aura of death, actually attracted attention-and attention is almost always good for business.
In any case, Ed had taken Bernice’s body to his home, hung it in his garage, and gutted her like a deer. That was how the police found her the next day when they paid Gein a visit. He’d also decapitated her.
Gein and Dahmer.
For some reason, Wisconsin had more than its share of anthropophagous psychopaths.
The Vanderveld interview ended and Joshua went to the basement’s chest freezer, rooted around beneath the bags of frozen vegetables, the TV dinners and the venison steaks from the four-point buck he got bowhunting a few weeks ago, until he found the two packages wrapped in butcher paper.
He placed them in the small cooler he was taking with him on his trip, but he didn’t add any ice. He wanted the contents of the packages to thaw on the way to Plainfield.
Even from the basement he could smell the sizzling sausage frying in the pan, just waiting for him in the kitchen, cooked up lovingly for him by his faithful wife, the woman he’d been married to for nearly five years.
He headed upstairs to join Sylvia for brunch.
15
Ralph and I worked all morning and even into the early afternoon, but we couldn’t find any solid, incontrovertible connections between the cases in Ohio and Illinois and the one here in Wisconsin-all just circumstantial.
Though it was frustrating, admittedly, it wasn’t all that unexpected. Investigations in real life aren’t like the ones you see on TV. You don’t find a clue every eight minutes and solve cases every forty-two. I’ve often thought of how great it would be if it worked that way, but it’s just not the real world.
Now we were seated at the Skillet, a restaurant just down the street from HQ, looking over the menu. We needed to be back in forty-five minutes for the one-thirty briefing.
The national media outlets had already jumped on this case and with the reports of Hayes abandoning Lionel naked and cuffed in the same alley where Konerak Sinthasomphone had been found, and then the amputation of Colleen Hayes’s hands, Dahmer and his cannibalistic crimes were already making their way through the news cycle.
An unholy resurrection of a man who-
“They have Hungarian beef goulash.” Ralph jarred me out of my thoughts. He was pointing at the menu. “I’ve never been to a restaurant before that actually serves Hungarian beef goulash.”
“Yeah.” It took me a second to refocus, to be present here again. “I’ve heard it’s good here.”