Joshua went out there for another week after that, listening to the enduring stretches of silence, then he left the house for good and never went back.
You were brave to stop him. You were right to leave.
But another voice inside his head convicted him of his sins and would not stop recounting them, naming them, would not let him rest, never rest, for sealing his father in that earthen tomb with the man he’d just killed.
Thinking of what it would have been like for his father down there made Joshua remember an article he’d read so many times.
He replaced the keys in the crate, closed up the bookcase, and then removed from the shelf his well-worn copy of Wisconsin Death Trip, Michael Lesy’s cult classic first published in 1973.
The entire book was a collection of reproduced newspaper clippings from the 1890s and obscure, somewhat troubling turn-of-the-century black-and-white photographs.
Nearly all of the articles were reports of pestilence, suicide, murder, arson, and announcements of people being declared insane and committed to a nearby asylum. It seemed there’d been an inexplicable outbreak of madness in that area of the state around the turn of the century.
No one knew why, but it was well documented.
Black River Falls, Wisconsin.
The 1890s.
The photographs showed life in Wisconsin at the time. Some photos were the typical tired-looking nineteenth-century women in somber dresses, scowling ministers, and stern, thickly mustached men in work clothes. But most of the photos skewed toward the bizarre-a woman with a malicious grin holding two snakes with a third draped around her neck, lithographs of dwarfs and deer heads and a one-legged man, and young children who’d died and were lying in small tragic caskets laid out in a neat row on the wooden floor of a funeral home.
The book had no page numbers, but Joshua had dog-eared the page that contained a copy of the newspaper article from the Badger State Banner on April 14, 1898:
A horrifying discovery was made at the Rosedale Cemetery in Pardeeville. The grave of Mrs. Sarah Smith was unearthed for the purpose of removing the remains and, on opening the coffin, it was discovered that she had been buried while in a trance.
The body was partly turned over and the right hand was drawn up to the face. The fingers indicated that they had been bitten by the woman on finding herself buried alive.
The fingers had been bitten-not the fingernails.
That was the line Joshua had always found the most intriguing.
How much of her fingers did Sarah Smith chew off after she woke up in that coffin?
How much meat did she swallow?
You are a lost and evil man, Joshua. A man beyond redemption!
Beyond atonement!
You did that to your own father!
That thought jarred him back to the present. He closed the book. Put it back on the shelf.
And went to pray.
Perhaps he would find a way not to go scout out the bank today. Perhaps he would find a way not to go rent the moving truck he would need when he took the children tomorrow. Perhaps he would find a way to stop all this before it went too far.
It’s already gone too far, Joshua. There’s no turning back. You’re going to finish this. It’s who you’ve become.
Yes. He had to pray first, see if he could find the strength to change.
Then he had to go to work.
In the normal world, where no one knew what he really was.
53
Indiana.
Why had he skipped over Indiana?
If Dr. Werjonic’s theories were right, it would most likely be because the killer lacked familiarity with the area.
But when I reviewed the tip list and suspect list as I’d decided to do while I was at the climbing gym, I found that in most cases there simply wasn’t enough information about the people’s backgrounds to make any real headway in that direction.
Slightly frustrated, I reviewed the other case files that the task force members had left on my desk. Based on Ellen’s interviews with Vincent, it was looking more and more like he couldn’t possibly be complicit in his wife’s abduction. Additionally, only the guys at work knew he would be staying late.
Ellen had cross-referenced the names on the evidence room forms from the Waukesha County Sheriff Department but found no clues as to who might have gotten the cuffs to Griffin.
After I had a good grasp on where we were with the case, I figured I should probably prepare as much as possible for my call to Dr. Werjonic following our briefing. I wouldn’t have much time to look over his notes later, so I turned my attention to the photocopied pages he’d left for me.
It took a few minutes, but eventually I started to get used to his cryptic scribbles and was able to make out most of his writing.
As I did so, I was struck by how his theories meshed with what I’d already learned hands-on doing my job, the information that was hardly ever emphasized at all to new cops and often seemed so inscrutable to my peers: the primacy of the timing and location of a crime, the understanding that people are motivated to commit crimes for reasons they themselves might not even understand and that spending time speculating about what those reasons might be stalls out an investigation.
But Dr. Werjonic took things even further.
He scrapped the whole notion of looking for means, motive, and opportunity in lieu of searching for context, patterns, and cues.
Three interrelated concepts wove through all that he taught: activity nodes, distance decay, and victimology: “When investigating serial crimes, the key lies not in asking what the victims have in common, but where they have in common.”
An activity node is simply a place where we spend time. So, when identifying activity nodes, you look for the eight “nodes” of a person’s life activities: the places he would normally eat, sleep, work, shop, study, worship, exercise, and relax.
Each activity node has specific attraction factors that lead people to spend time there-that might be saving time, money, or effort, a balance of risk versus rewards, or participating in pleasurable or necessary activities.
Then you can map out the person’s travel routes in terms of those activity nodes (circles) and the routes or roads between them (lines). Those circles and lines cover only a fraction of the geographic area of a city and help shape the person’s cognitive map of his surroundings. Almost all crimes occur within this awareness space-both with respect to victims and to offenders.
In an investigation, you establish someone’s awareness space by pulling up his club memberships and frequent-buyer club cards, going through his credit card receipts, and analyzing where he typically purchases his gasoline and groceries and at what time of day, and so on. Also, by interviewing family and friends about his routines. Basically, doing all you can to examine the eight nodes of his life.
Distance decay is simply the decrease in likelihood of a crime occurring as the distance from a person’s awareness space increases. That’s it.
I thought again of Indiana.
He skipped over it because it wasn’t part of his cognitive map.
All of this made sense to me. People are creatures of habit. Basically, costs in terms of time, energy, and effort increase as the distance from their awareness spaces increases. So we avoid that. And killers are just as influenced by this “least amount of effort” principle as the rest of us are. Taking that into account, you get one of the primary reasons why eighty percent of murders occur within one mile of the killer’s home.