The touch of murder, p.7
The Touch of Murder, page 7
“Any idea what was used to do that to the ribs?”
“Can’t be certain, but if I had to guess, I’m thinking lock or bolt cutters.”
Freddie cleared his throat.
“Dr. Thorpe, would this sort of mutilation require medical knowledge?”
“You’re asking if I think a doctor did this?”
“Sure.”
“No,” Dr. Thorpe said simply. “The damage to the primary bronchi is severe. The left primary bronchi is almost completely severed. The aorta is stretched nearly to the point of tearing, as well.”
“Meaning?”
Dr. Thorpe sighed as if this was all boring her.
“Meaning if I were to do this, it would have been much neater.”
Veronica pursed her lips.
“Good to know.” She was suddenly reminded of Dr. Patel’s comment. “Either of you know what a blood eagle is?”
Dr. Thorpe cocked her head and Veronica could have sworn the woman smiled.
“Show them.”
Kristin waved Freddie and Veronica over to a computer while Dr. Thorpe replaced the lung and covered the body.
“Check this out.” Kristin pressed a few keys and a terrible image appeared on the screen.
“Shit,” Freddie cursed.
The image was similar to the display in the alley, but there were significant differences. For one, the victims’ skin and lungs were pulled back and out using thin ropes. The man’s face was also twisted in agony. It didn’t appear that his throat had been slit. If anything, it looked like the man was screaming.
“The thing is,” Kristin said, “with a blood eagle, the victim is usually alive. It’s a torture method.”
“And our guy was dead because his throat was slit before his lungs were removed?” Veronica asked.
“That’s right,” Dr. Thorpe confirmed from behind them.
Kristin closed the image and opened a photograph from their crime scene.
“So, not a blood eagle, then?” Veronica asked, scratching the back of her head. They were missing something.
“I don’t know about that, but it almost looks like an angel, doesn’t it?” Freddie remarked. He tapped the word SINNER above Jake’s head. “Like whoever did this wanted to punish Jake for his sins?”
Veronica was surprised.
“That’s… that’s what I said.”
“It’s not my first rodeo,” Freddie remarked. “No ring rust, either, apparently.”
“Right. What if… what if this was personal against Jake? Maybe we’re reading too much into this and it’s just a creative way to settle a score. What about next of kin?”
“Doesn’t have any,” Kristin said. “Not that I could find, anyway.”
Veronica sighed.
“So, we might just have a vigilante on the loose, punishing sinners in the most sinful place in all of Greenham. And our unsub might be a Viking.” She reconsidered. “A Viking monster. What the actual fuck?”
Veronica’s final curse landed softly and went unchallenged.
“Well, thanks for your help. Dr. Thorpe, if the mold from the knife wound turns out to be anything special, please let us know. And hopefully,” she looked at Dr. Thorpe then Kristin, “hopefully I don’t see either of you two again anytime soon about angels or eagles or anything else that doesn’t have at least two feet planted on the ground at all times.”
***
There were few places that made Veronica feel as uncomfortable as the Matheson Public Library.
Both librarians—Gina Braden and Maggie Cernak—were dead because of her.
She felt like an imposter. And guilty.
She felt incredibly guilty.
Gina’s replacement was a woman with raven-black hair and severe features who didn’t look up from the book she was reading when they entered. Even when Veronica asked her to direct them toward reference material pertaining to angels and Viking rituals, the woman just grunted and pointed, her eyes never leaving the page.
They split up, with Veronica adamant that she look at the Viking material. She had enough of churches, orphanages, priests, and nuns to last a lifetime. Freddie didn’t seem to mind either way.
It took Veronica a while to find any reference to a blood eagle and when she did, it was more of a history lesson than anything else.
One of the more famous uses of this method of torture involved King Aella of Northumbria who was murdered by the Viking warrior Ivar the Boneless. According to the story, Ivar wanted revenge for the death of his father, Ragnar Lodbrok, and had Aella captured and subjected to the blood eagle before killing him.
The traditional method involved tying a person down, spreading their arms and legs, then slicing along the spine with either a knife or a sword. Next, the ribs were broken with an ax, pulled back, and the lungs yanked out.
All while the victim was still alive.
They usually didn’t survive for more than a few minutes.
But no matter how hard Veronica looked, she could not find any reference to sinners. Like Dr. Patel had told her, Vikings had their own complex belief systems, but there didn’t seem to be anything analogous to Christian ‘Sinners’.
Veronica spent the better part of the afternoon reading but felt as if she were wasting her time. Before she knew it, it was close to 6:30, and despite previous claims that she wouldn’t eat again today, she was getting hungry.
“Any luck?” Freddie asked as he groaned and stretched.
Veronica closed the large reference book in front of her.
“Nothing. How about you?”
“Well, I learned more about angels than I ever wanted to. Did you know that the word comes from a Greek word that means messenger?”
Veronica did not and said as much.
“I also learned that the physical description of angels in the Bible is not the way we traditionally think of them. And they’re nothing like that ‘angel’ we saw today. Apparently, they have human-like bodies, with wings, and four faces—a lion, an ox, an eagle, and a man.”
“What?”
Freddie shrugged. Veronica had seen her partner do this a million times before, but now it was different, and it took a few seconds to realize how. Normally, this would send a shock wave down his many chins and into his belly. A dramatic, oversized gesture by an oversized man. Not anymore.
Now it was subtle.
And strange.
“Yep. Four faces.”
“And one is an eagle?”
“Apparently. But that’s where the similarities end. Could just be a coincidence… I dunno.”
Veronica used the heel of her hand to rub both eye sockets and then her forehead.
“So, we’ve got a man who knows nothing about Viking mythology, limited knowledge of Catholic studies—”
“—who is so obsessed with cleaning up Needle Point that he’s willing to kill for it—”
“—and our only witness saw a monster… but he can only manage a handful of words. I’m telling you, this is all messed up. It’s like our unsub is deliberately trying to send us in different directions.”
“Or he just doesn’t know what he wants.”
“What he wants is to kill people,” Veronica corrected. “And we both know he’s going to do it again.”
“Yeah.” Freddie paused. “You hungry? Wanna grab a bite to eat? I’d love to go to Daphne’s, but the old ticker doesn’t agree with it. I’m game for anywhere that has a healthy salad, though.”
Veronica wasn’t sure what was more unbelievable, the fact that her partner would turn down Daphne’s or that he wanted a salad.
Even though she was hungry, Veronica still wasn’t there yet with Freddie.
She declined.
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Veronica didn’t want to go to dinner with Freddie, but she didn’t want to go home to Cole, either. She wasn’t in the mood to listen to him gripe about his shitty job.
After returning the books—the librarian still didn’t look up—she went to a bar. An empty bar where she could be alone.
The first drink numbed her brain a little. The second numbed it even further.
The third she consumed while thinking about Steve.
What the hell was he doing there? What did he see?
Why did he run?
As was the usual case when she started to drink, eventually Veronica reached into her wallet and pulled out the photograph that she’d stolen from the orphanage. The worn, faded image of Dante and her brother, their arms over each other’s shoulders. Neither boy smiling.
Forgive.
Veronica quickly swallowed two more drinks.
Fuck forgiveness.
When she eventually made it home, Cole was already asleep.
Veronica dreamed of neither angel nor demon that night. The nightmares were reserved for daytime now, apparently.
Chapter 16
The man stumbled through the streets, shuffling, and nearly falling with every step.
But, somehow, he managed to stay upright.
His breathing came in shallow blasts as if he was wearing a mask, and it was all he could hear in his ears. He could barely see, his eyelids felt coated in cement.
But he kept going.
A jogger passed on his left, and he lowered his head. This caused sweat to drip into his eyes, but he made no move to wipe it away. He didn’t want to touch himself—his face… it wasn’t his.
It was a monster’s.
And it wouldn’t matter anyway. His entire body was coated in sweat. Wipe some away, it just came back.
Eventually, he came to a large multi-story office building set back behind a parking lot.
This was it. This was the place.
Keeping his chin to his chest, he slid behind a small set of shrubs and waited.
Time passed. A thousand breaths, maybe more. Then the front door opened and a man in a suit stepped out. He was heavy-set and when he looked at his watch, he cursed, then picked up his pace as he crossed the parking lot. The man in the bushes rose and started after him.
Just as the businessman struggled to pull his keys from his pocket, he heard the man in the hoodie’s breathing.
He turned.
“The fuck do you—”
The man pulled the hoodie back and the suit dropped his keys.
“What the fuck? Get the—get the fuck away from me!”
All the man in the sweatshirt saw was red—blooms and blossoms of blood everywhere. The businessman backed up but soon bumped up against his car. He tried to get his phone out but was even less successful at this than he’d been with his keys.
“Please, just—”
The man in the black hoodie jumped. His hands were swollen, but it took very little coordination to pull the knife from the center pocket of his sweatshirt.
Even less to plunge it into the man’s throat.
It slid effortlessly through skin, fat, and sinew. The businessman’s eyes went wide, and he tried to say something but managed nothing more than a wet gurgle on account of his windpipe having been severed.
But the man in the hoodie had no such problem.
He leaned in close and whispered in the businessman’s ear, “Sinner.”
And then he got to work.
PART II - Demon
Chapter 17
“Jesus,” Detective Freddie Furlow muttered, “I’m so glad I don’t eat breakfast anymore.”
Veronica shared the sentiment. In her case, she had skipped breakfast not because she was on a diet, but because she was hungover and couldn’t stomach the idea of eating. But she did appreciate the coffee. That was one of the things she missed most: Freddie smiling and greeting her with a coffee outside the station every morning. Sadly, today didn’t involve the station. It didn’t even involve a full night’s sleep. Veronica’s phone started ringing around five and continued doing so until she answered at just after five-thirty. Cole, being the deep sleeper that he was, didn’t even wake.
It was Officer Furnelli letting her know that there was another and that Freddie was already on his way.
By six, she was standing in front of the large parking lot of a multi-story office building in Meadowbrook, about three miles north-east of the location of the first victim. The setting was different, but the MO was almost identical.
There was no chair this time—the victim was lying flat on his stomach on the pavement in a pool of his own blood. As with Jake, his lungs had been removed and the shriveled organs were exposed on his back.
SINNER had been written in blood on the side of a black BMW, which, based on the proximity to the body and the set of keys on the ground near his outstretched hand, probably belonged to their vic.
Kristin, Dr. Thorpe, Freddie, and Court were already on the scene when Veronica arrived.
“Throat slit, just like the junkie,” Kristin informed her.
“Do we have a name yet?” Freddie asked.
Kristin nodded.
“His wallet was on his person, cash still inside. Cooper Mills, forty-two, lives not too far from here.”
Cooper’s corpse was surrounded by fading embers—Veronica’s synesthesia was firing, but not as intensely as it had been at Jake’s murder scene. Maybe it was the booze or maybe it was because this murder had taken place in the open that muted her condition.
She didn’t know.
As Kristin said more about Cooper, something about him being an accountant and working in the building behind them, Veronica bent down low.
What did you do? She wondered. What the hell did you do?
“Any idea on time of death?” Veronica asked, not taking her eyes off the body.
“Won’t know for sure until we get him back to the morgue, but liver temp suggests four, maybe five hours ago. Somewhere around midnight,” Dr. Thorpe replied.
Veronica finally looked away from Cooper and glanced around the parking lot, her gaze eventually settling on the building itself. It looked fairly upscale, which to Veronica meant that the people who worked there probably worked long hours.
“What are the odds that Cooper was the last person to leave this morning?”
“Not great,” Freddie said.
“What are the odds that he was captured leaving on that security camera?” she asked, pointing at the device nestled just under the awning.
“Better.”
“Let’s go have a chat with security then, shall we?”
Court accompanied them to the front doors, telling them along the way that the security guard had found the body at around four forty-five and called it in.
“He still in there?”
“I don’t think he goes very far,” Court replied.
Veronica understood when she met the security guard in his office. He was ancient to the point of desiccation. Veronica was tempted to question the value of a security guard this old, but then she remembered that, up until recently, her partner had been a 350-pound man who got winded taking a piss.
But whereas the previous iteration of Freddie had been slow, he’d at least been competent. The same could not be said of the guard. It took the man so long just to boot up the computer that Veronica worried the two-week window before old footage was overwritten by new might expire.
“Do you mind?” she asked, leaning toward the keyboard.
“Company policy states that only security employees can touch the computer.” He even spoke slowly.
“Right, well, we’re going to have to make an exception this time.”
As Freddie gently guided the man aside, Veronica attacked the keyboard. Within minutes, she found footage from earlier that morning, both from the foyer and outside the building. Cooper Mills was on both. He looked tired and in a hurry.
The camera beneath the awning was designed to capture people coming and going, not film the parking lot. Cooper left the building and then disappeared out of the frame before being attacked or making it to his car.
Veronica watched a little while longer, but the next person to appear was the guard at four thirty-nine ‘rushing’ inside the building, presumably to call the cops.
“Damn, there’s nothing here.”
“Maybe… go back to the outside camera for a second?” Freddie asked.
Veronica obliged and just before Cooper Mills exited the frame, her partner told her to pause the footage.
He leaned forward and pointed at the lower left-hand corner of the screen.
“Do you see that? Can you go frame by frame?”
Veronica could and did. And sure enough, she saw it.
It appeared to be the outline of a shoulder and a head, both covered in a black sweatshirt.
“Where did he come from?” Veronica asked.
“There are some bushes over there. Could he have been hiding in them?” Court asked. “You know what, I’m going to check it out. Gimme a second.”
As they waited for Court to return, Veronica ran the footage forwards and backward trying to pick up any more clues.
“Looks like a man’s build, no? Medium stature? Smaller than Cooper, that’s for sure,” Veronica remarked.
“I’d say so. And look at how he moves. Awkward, like he’s drunk.”
“High? He could be high. I’m—”
“So, yeah, I think he was hiding in those bushes. Grass is crushed there,” Court said, returning to the security room. He was out of breath. “Was he waiting for him? Was our unsub waiting for Cooper, I mean? Like, was Cooper the intended target?”
Veronica looked at Freddie, who shrugged.
“Probably,” she conceded. “If this was just a random attack, it would have been easier to stick to Needle Point. And Cooper is a big man. There had to be easier targets out there.”
“But he was also distracted and in a hurry,” Freddie countered.
“Yeah, maybe.”
Veronica used her phone to make a copy of the recordings. Then she thanked the elderly security guard, who continued to mumble that they had broken company policy, and went back outside.
“I think I’m done here,” Dr. Thorpe exclaimed. “If you’re done, I’ll get CSU to help me get the body back to the morgue.”
