After they arrested Leif, Peter called in a favor with one of his law school buddies at Marquette. He said with all the bad press, and the serial killer coverage, the last thing the Milwaukee PD would want was some press-hungry law student sniffing around the missing-persons unit. He was almost right.
Over breakfast, Peter told Ma and me he had begun to take the matter of Frank into his own hands. He’d gone to the bowling alley where Leif and I had hung out with Frank and Dee. He’d shown the police sketch of Frank’s face to the owner, and mentioned something about the cops, and the guy had given up an address he thought was Frank’s. Apparently, they hadn’t been that good of buddies.
“I think we should go over there and check it out,” Pete said.
Ma shook her head. “That’s a job for a cop,” she said.
“The cops are too busy for us,” he said. “In case you haven’t noticed. Wolski is barely helping as it is. I did this all on my own.”
“Yeah, I don’t know, Pete,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s safe. Or legal?” I was torn. I wanted the chance to find something that might incriminate Frank, but the idea of going to his apartment frightened me.
“I thought you, of all people, would be on board. Where is this damn guy, anyway? It’s getting ridiculous.”
Peter shook with nervous caffeinated energy. None of us slept very well at night, and we all required an unhealthy amount of coffee just to stay upright during the days.
“What did Wolski say?” Ma asked.
“He said absolutely we should not go over there without him. If he has time later today, he’ll check it out.”
I became defiant then. “Fuck that,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Pete looked pleased.
Frank’s apartment was in the Menomonee River Valley, a low-lying post-industrial desert full of abandoned factory buildings, some of which had been converted into posh apartment buildings and some of which had been left to rot. Frank’s building had been converted from an old light fixture factory. I had a memory of the place from when I was a little girl. The building had large, high windows, and from the highway overpass, you could see through these windows to the thousands of lamps strung up to the factory ceiling. They’d kept the lights on so often, and there were so many of them, I wondered if that was part of the reason they’d gone out of business. On one side of Frank’s building was an abandoned lot; I couldn’t remember what, if anything, had been there before. On the other side was a dilapidated warehouse that looked perilously close to falling into the river.
When we got there, Peter and I stayed in his car for a minute, surveying the property. We didn’t talk. I wanted to know if he had a premonition too, if he felt what I was feeling, but I didn’t even know how to say what I was feeling. Is this the last place Dee was alive? Is this my fault? Is Frank in there? Is Dee? And you know how it goes with premonitions: People never believe you anyway.
We were just about to go in when Wolski showed up. I looked at Pete, who frowned.
“Did you tell him we were coming?” I asked him.
“Hell no,” Pete said. A swell of suspicion rose up inside me. We watched Wolski approach our car. I felt compelled to punish him for his incompetency, for his duplicitousness.
“You look like shit,” I said while he shook Peter’s hand. Wolski’s hair was long and uncombed and fell in greasy strips across his unshaven face. His clothes were wrinkled. He needed a shower.
“Long night, kid,” he said to me. He added to Peter, “I told you to wait for me.”
Peter’s face went red. “We’ve been waiting, Gary.”
“Fine,” Wolski said. He tried to soften his tone. “We’re here now, so let’s get this done.”
Wolski outlined our procedure. He handed us gloves. We weren’t supposed to touch anything. And we’d stay behind him as we entered the apartment. If Frank was there, Wolski had a list of questions (as did we), and we’d talk for a bit, survey the apartment to the best of our ability, and leave. If Frank wasn’t there, we’d leave a note on his door relaying our information and our need to speak with him as soon as possible. Wolski’s plan seemed very rational, but even so, I felt nervous as we went inside. Someone had left a jamb under the front door to keep it open: a construction crew, maybe. There was a long list of buzzers but no names next to them. The building was quiet and smelled of fresh paint. It didn’t have a lived-in feel about it. We took an old elevator up to the sixth floor.
Wolski knocked, as he had on Leif’s apartment door, and we waited. There was a faint noise inside the apartment, but it didn’t sound like someone coming to the door. Wolski knocked again, and again, and when the noise on the other side kept up but no one came, he shouted, “Milwaukee PD. Open up.” I smelled something like shit wafting from under the apartment door. Wolski knocked again, but still there was nothing. Peter had a frightened, desperate look on his face; it was like looking into a mirror. Before Wolski could stop him, Peter grabbed the doorknob and then kicked the door, which was unlocked, wide open on its hinges. The smell of shit hit all three of us, and Wolski put a wrinkled sleeve up against his nose. “Dammit,” he shouted. “Not part of the plan.”
Inside, there was dog shit everywhere. The apartment was relatively bare, but the few pieces of furniture left had been destroyed, chewed to bits, covered in fur, and saturated with dog piss. There was a noise from the bedroom, a throaty bark, and then a massive blur of fur lunged at all three of us. But before the dog was halfway to us, Wolski had shot it twice in the head. The animal fell in a starved, writhing heap of fur on the floor.
“Jesus,” Peter said. “Why didn’t you just close the door?”
“Why the hell did you open the door?” Wolski asked. “You’re welcome, by the way.”
The dog was still twitching. I almost wished Wolski would shoot it again, but I didn’t know if I could stomach the sight of another shot. The blood leaking from its head was beginning to spread across the floorboards. The smell of the place was awful. Why hadn’t anyone called about the animal? About the smell? Did no one else live in the building?
Wolski was breathing heavy. His gun resting against his kneecap, he was doubled over, trying to catch his breath. “Dammit,” he said. “Last night,” he offered cryptically.
This seemed like an invitation to ask, but neither Peter nor I wanted to know anything about his night.
“We’re here now, so we might as well look around,” Wolski said after he’d finally caught his breath. “Like I said, just don’t fucking touch anything.”
I wanted to leave. I couldn’t take my eyes off the dead dog, whose muscles had finally stopped but whose eyes were open and rolling up and down. Its thick pink tongue lolled. It had on a choke collar that had become embedded. I tried to think of the dog as a puppy, but this thought paralyzed me. Peter had begun his search, and I tried to move but found that the prospect nauseated me.
Wolski came up beside me. “In the city, they train the dogs to attack men in uniforms—it’s targeted toward police officers, obviously, but it gives everyone hell. Mailmen, firefighters, paramedics, mechanics in jumpsuits,” he offered.
“We’re not wearing uniforms,” I said.
“We’re used to them charging, I guess, is what I’m saying. Come on, let’s get to work.”
I followed Pete and Wolski around the apartment, eyeing the bloodstain blooming in the center of the place, and barely seeing anything except the dog. I went through the motions, but I wouldn’t have seen something important if it had hit me over the head. According to Pete and Wolski, the most interesting thing was that there was hardly anything of interest. The place looked like it had been swept of personal effects. Frank’s things (beside his mad dog) were gone, and it wasn’t like he’d left in a rush and grabbed only a few things, he’d taken everything. It looked calmly, methodically cleansed of his belongings. It was like he’d been warned.
In the car on the way home, I smelled Peter; sweat stains were spreading beneath his armpits like large, dark bodies of water. He clenched and unclenched his jaw, and I worried he’d file his teeth to grit. He slammed his fist into the steering wheel, the horn blared, and people changed out of our lane, sped past us, or held way back.
“We’ll get a ticket if you keep this speed up,” I said.
Peter eyed the speedometer. “In case you haven’t noticed, the fucking police are hog-tied in this city.”
“Still,” I said. “You’re scaring me.”
Peter’s face softened, and he eased off the accelerator. Sweat dripped from his temples. I wiped a drop from his chin with my thumb.
“I should kill him,” Peter said.
I watched the city shift into suburbs behind the highway fence. Kids on bikes chased one another in the cul-de-sacs next to the freeway.
“Then you’d be him, Pete.”
He shook his head, spraying the windshield with sweat, and he pounded the steering wheel again. “Will you stop being such a fucking hippie?”
“Fuck you,” I said. I put my head between my knees, and Peter punched the accelerator.