“How can you be so sure?” I ask. “Do you have any idea what he would’ve done if he got his hands on you?”
Rape and torture come to mind. He’s got a hideout in Lawndale, a house on South Homan where I’ve been once or twice. This is where I figure he’d keep the girl, a brick home with busted steps leading up to the front door. Stained carpet. Appliances ripped out of the wall when the last owner foreclosed. Water damage and mold creeping along the ceiling, down the walls. Broken windows covered with plastic wrap. Her, in the middle of a room, on a folding chair, bound and gagged. Waiting. Just waiting. While Dalmar and his guys had a little fun. And even after the judge paid the ransom, I figure Dalmar would tell one of the guys to shoot her. To get rid of the evidence. Ditch her in a Dumpster somewhere, or maybe the river. I tell her this and then I say, “Once you get into this kind of mess, there’s no getting out.”
She doesn’t say a thing. Not about Dalmar, though I know she’s thinking about him. Know she’s got that image of Dalmar shooting a nine-year-old kid glued to her mind.
Gabe
Before
The sergeant gives me the green light to air John Doe’s face on the news Friday night. The tips start rolling in. People begin calling the hotline to say that they’ve seen our John Doe. Except to some people he’s Steve and others he’s Tom. Some lady says she thinks she rode the “L” with him last night, but can’t be entirely sure (Was there a lady with him? No, he was alone). Some guy thinks he saw John Doe working as a janitor in his office building on State Street, but he’s sure the man is Hispanic, which I assure him he’s not. I have a couple of rookies answering the hotline, trying to differentiate real leads from the dead ends. By morning, the gist of the calls is this: either no one has a damn clue who he is, or he’s known by enough aliases to send every rookie on wild-goose chases for the remainder of the year. This realization pains me. Our John Doe might be more experienced than I’d like to think.
I spend a lot of time thinking about him. I could guess a lot about him without having ever met him, without even knowing his name. There isn’t any one factor in a person that causes violent or antisocial behavior. It’s an accumulation of things. I could guess that his socioeconomic level doesn’t place him in the same neighborhood as the Dennetts. I could guess that he never went to college, or had trouble finding and keeping a job. I can guess that, as a child, he didn’t have meaningful relationships with many adults. He may not have had meaningful relationships at all. He may have felt alienated. There may have been a lack of parental involvement. There may have been marital problems. He may have been abused. There was probably little emphasis placed on education, and not a whole lot of affection in his family. His parents probably didn’t tuck him into bed at night; they didn’t read him books before bed. They probably didn’t go to church.
He didn’t have to be abusive to animals as a child. Maybe he was hyperactive. Maybe he had trouble concentrating. Maybe he was depressed or delinquent or antisocial.
He probably never felt like he was quite in control. He didn’t learn to be flexible. He doesn’t know what empathy is. He doesn’t know how to solve a conflict without throwing a punch or pointing his gun.
I’ve taken sociology classes. I’ve run across enough convicts in my lifetime, headed down the very same line.
He didn’t have to take drugs, but he might have. He didn’t have to grow up in a housing project, but he might have. He didn’t have to be in a gang, but I wouldn’t put that past him, either. His parents didn’t have to own a gun.