by Rachel Ford
Without Sin
An Owen Day Thriller, Book 1
By Rachel Ford
Chapter One
They found the first one on a warm April day. She was a young woman, dead for at least two weeks, and in a bad state due to the heat, rain and creatures. She’d been found off Kennington Way, about forty miles south of the city.
She had a rope around her neck. Her eyelids had been cut off. The medical examiner was clear about that: it hadn’t been the work of rodents. And she had a note in a plastic zipper baggie, affixed to her chest:
Mary Ann Cotton, she’s dead and she’s rotten
Lying in bed with her eyes wide open.
Sing, sing, oh what should I sing?
Mary Ann Cotton, she’s tied up with string
The girl’s name wasn’t Mary, or Ann, or Cotton either. Her name was Angela Martinez, and they identified her by her dental records. There was no recognizing the body. Not in the state it had been found.
The handwriting on the note was her own. Her apartment provided a hundred similar samples. Her killer had made her write her own death note. That bit played well in the papers. It put a sensational spin on things, even before the contents of the note were made public.
Angela’s friends and family were the immediate persons of interest. The cops hauled in her boyfriend, who had been the last to see her alive.
Which made sense, initially anyway. The most recent statistics on the business of murder showed that over a third of female homicide victims died at the hands of a domestic partner, and nearly a quarter died by some other family member. Statistically speaking, the boyfriend was the most likely candidate, then the rest of her family.
Then they found the second body, four days after they ID’ed the first vic. This one was male. He looked to be about forty years old, with no identification, bad dental hygiene – and all his arms and legs cut off.
The killer had left a note written in a shaky hand, stuffed in a Ziploc baggie and affixed to the headless torso:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the King's horses
And all the King's men,
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
He took longer to identify, but the forensic pathologist’s work helped. Humpty Dumpty wasn’t really in his forties. He looked it, but that was the result of extensive drug use. Primarily methamphetamine, of which there was plenty in his system. But they found trace elements of pain killers and THC in his bloodwork too. He’d used both some time before his death – recently, but not too recently.
His real name was Mason Anderson, and he was twenty-six years old. He’d disappeared six months earlier, but according to his family, that was normal. He would vanish and reappear as part of his addiction cycle.
Except, he wouldn’t be doing either again. Mason’s head, arms and legs had been severed from his body with a large cutting instrument. Some kind of axe, presumably. But that hadn’t been what killed him.
Mason had died from head trauma and internal bleeding consistent with a fall from a significant height. In other words, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
The statistics on dismemberment weren’t really there. Once, it had been a standard form of execution all over the world, from Delhi to London. Oftentimes, it had been reserved for the most despised of criminals: traitors and murderers.
And sometimes, not. Roman emperor Aurelian had used it to dissuade soldiers from seducing the wives of their hosts, and Persian shahs had found it effective in eradicating highway robbery. Nowadays, of course, dismemberment was an outlier.
Death by falling, though? Not so much. There were plenty of statistics on falling deaths. They were the second leading cause of unintentional deaths in the world. Which may or may not have applied to Humpty.
The only damage that had certainly been inflicted – the dismemberment – had occurred postmortem. So maybe Mason Anderson, his judgment impaired by all the stimulants in his system, really had tumbled to his death. Maybe the nursery rhyme killer had happened upon him after that.
Unlikely, probably, but not outside the realm of possibility. And on paper, the alternative looked less likely.
Murder by falling was so rare it barely merited mentioning. CDC data put the number under ten most years – ten out of fifteen to twenty thousand yearly homicides in the US.
And those were the stories that made headlines: “Woman arrested for pushing husband off cliff.” “Father throws baby down stairs,” and so on.
But they didn’t make up any kind of statistically significant chunk of data.
So was it less likely for a murderer to pull off a rare means of execution than it was to happen upon a fall victim?
Probably not. If nothing else, gut feeling ruled out coincidence. Especially when they found the third body.
The third victim was a man, thirty-five years old, five feet, eleven inches tall, two hundred and thirty-some pounds, with sandy brown hair and blue eyes. His name was Andrew Welch, and he was the head minister of Kennington Church of the Faithful Savior.
He’d been married twice, and divorced once. He had a fourteen-year-old son he didn’t see much from his first marriage. He had three kids under the age of ten from his second. He lived in the city of Kennington with his second wife and their kids.
He was a good man, and an asshole; a self-righteous prig sometimes, but the kind of guy who would give you the shirt off his back without a second thought. He was the first to admit he’d made mistakes in life, and the last to accept praise because he didn’t think he deserved it.
Not him. He’d let too many people down early in his life. He’d failed himself too many times. He’d learned the hard way what it was like to pick himself up and get back on his feet. That’s what he’d tell you.
But it wasn’t the whole story. The whole story was, he was a good man.
He was my kid brother.
And someone had cut his throat, ear to ear.
Chapter Two
NRK, the Nursery Rhyme Killer – as the internet dubbed him – left a note, the same as before. But this time, it hadn’t been written by hand. This time, it was stamped in big blocky ink stamp letters, the kind you could get at any craft supplier store. The kind that had been all the rage, back when card making was the hobby de jour among middleclass women.
The paper was no cardstock, or heavy duty anything. It was common laser printer paper, which explained why some of the letters had smeared as much as they had.
The detective investigating Andrew’s case told me all of this as I stared at a copy of the note. It was a black and white high gloss photo of a black and white page.
It read:
When I went up sandy hill,
I met a sandy boy;
I cut his throat, I sucked his blood,
And left his skin a hanging-o.
I sat there for ten seconds in absolute silence. Maybe twenty.
Andy was dead. Someone had cut his throat and let him bleed out to match a nursery rhyme. Those were the bare facts of the case, I understood them.
The rational part of my brain comprehended and accepted the facts. This was no bad dream. Andy, my brother, was dead.
It was the emotional part that struggled to keep up. But it always did.
“Why is this one different?” I asked.
“Mr. Day?” she asked.
“This note: why use ink stamps this time?”
She shook her head. “We’re not entirely sure. We think there was a struggle, that Andrew fought back and so the killer wasn’t able to make him comply. That would be consistent with the bruising we found. But we’re waiting on the medical examiner for
confirmation.”
“He can confirm why my brother didn’t write a note?”
“No. But he can confirm if the bruising happened before or after death.”
The bruising.
“What kind of bruising?”
“The autopsy will tell us more.”
The autopsy. Andy’s autopsy.
I nodded, still staring at the picture of the note. “Is that a real nursery rhyme?”
“It is,” she said.
“I’ve never heard it before.”
“No. It’s apparently fairly obscure.”
“Is it about a vampire?”
“To be honest, Mr. Day, I don’t know.”
She hadn’t called me there to talk about nursery rhymes, though. She wanted to know about Andy – and anyone who might have borne him a grudge. “Did your brother have enemies, Mr. Day?”
“Owen,” I said. “And my brother believed you weren’t doing something right in life if you didn’t have enemies. So yes: he had enemies.”
“Do you know who they might have been?”
I snorted. “How long do you have?”
She apparently decided to try a different tact. “Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to kill your brother?”
“Only anyone who ever met him.”
She stared at me, frank surprise in her face. I guess I didn’t fit the grieving relative model she was used to.
“My brother was an abrasive man, Detective Clark. Not deliberately. He just didn’t know how to be anything else. When he found a cause, he embraced it – to the point that he drove people nuts.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he was a true believer. About everything. He was an evangelizer.”
“He was a minister, wasn’t he?” she said, conversationally, as if she didn’t already know my brother’s entire biography.
“I’m not talking about religion. Not just religion, anyway.” I shook my head, saying again, “About everything. It didn’t matter what. If he thought it was important, he needed to convince you, too.”
“Can you give an example?” she asked.
I closed my eyes, and thought back, as far back as I could remember. To our first big fight. “Okay. When he was six, we saw a program on TV. I don’t remember half of it, but it was about animal rights. About meat and fur. He decided he was a vegan.”
“At six?” She glanced at a scribble in her notebook – illegible to me, and not only because of the angle, though that didn’t help.
She was sitting next to me at an angle of fifty or sixty degrees. Not quite beside, and not quite across from me. One part sympathetic listener, one part interrogator.
She was in interrogator mode now, her ears having detected what she took to be some kind of incongruity. “You were in foster care growing up, weren’t you?”
I nodded. “That’s right. Most of the time, anyway. Sometimes they placed us together, and sometimes not.”
“So you were together then?”
“Until we slugged it out over chicken nuggets, yeah.”
Detective Clark went on watching, waiting for me to elaborate.
“Our foster mother at the time, Mrs. Maassen: she was strict, but alright. When Andy went vegan, she didn’t really care. She didn’t adjust her meal planning or anything. She just made more of whatever wasn’t meat. Or she gave him a cup of yogurt in place of the meat.”
“That’s not really vegan, is it?”
I smiled. “No. But my brother was six, Detective. He didn’t know the nuances of veganism vs vegetarianism. To be fair to Mrs. Maassen, I don’t think she did either.”
“So why did you guys end up fighting?”
“Because Andy was an evangelizer, almost to the point of being a crusader. He decided it wasn’t enough that he didn’t eat meat: I couldn’t either.”
“What happened?”
“Mrs. Maassen made us chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes and peas. Andy had a yogurt cup, peas and extra potatoes. He tried to convince me not to eat my dinner. When ‘meat is murder’ failed, he grabbed my plate and flung it to the ground. I punched him in the nose.”
“What did Mrs. Maassen do?”
“Well, she stopped his bleeding first. Then she got on the phone. The next day, social workers showed up and took me to a new place. A group place for a bit, and then a different family.”
Clark nodded slowly. “That was harsh.”
“Mrs. Maassen had ten kids. Three of her own, and seven fosters. It was harsh. But if fighting broke out among the ranks, she would have had chaos on her hands.”
“You’re very forgiving.”
“I didn’t say I forgave her. I said I understood her reasoning.”
“What about Andrew? When did you guys see each other again?”
“We had visits. Then Mrs. Maassen’s husband took a job in another state. They ended up moving, so all the kids went back into the system. Except her own, of course.” I thought back for a moment to that time and our reunion. “Andy and I ended up together about two years later, with the Erickson’s.”
“You got along better then?”
“Not really. We didn’t throw punches, if that’s what you mean. But I don’t know that we ever got along well.”
“Was Andy still a vegan?”
“Oh yes. He was vegan for the rest of his life.”
“Based on a decision he made at six?”
“That was my brother, Detective. Stubborn as hell.”
She nodded and moved the questions back to the present. Did I know anyone whose disagreements with my brother had stood out in any way? Maybe someone who had not been quite as understanding about Andrew’s stubborn streak as I was?
I didn’t think she was trying to patronize me, but the questioned sounded vaguely patronizing all the same. But I answered honestly, “No. To be frank with you, Detective, Andy and I didn’t talk much.”
“Why was that, Mr. Day?”
“Owen. Because we didn’t have much in common. Because we argued more than anything else when we did talk. Because we both had too much going on. Take your pick.”
She studied me for a long moment. I figured she probably had my bio, the same as she had Andy’s. And if she did, she’d know something of my social calendar.
No wife, no girlfriend, no kids, and a remote job that I worked after normal business hours, mainly so I didn’t have to talk to people. Not the most happening life. Not on paper anyway.
But I had my own interests. I had plenty to keep me busy. And none of it involved babysitting, or petsitting, or politely – or not – declining invitations to whatever church, support group or cause du jour occupied my brother’s every waking hour at that particular point in time.
“Would you say you guys drifted apart then?”
“No.”
She watched me, as if waiting for me to elaborate on the seeming incongruity.
“We didn’t drift apart, Detective, because we were never that close to begin with. Not the way you’re thinking, anyway,” I explained. “We were the only family we had for most of our lives. I loved my brother. He loved me. But we were about as unalike as any two human beings could ever be.”
Which was still, somehow, an understatement. Andy had been a pacifist. I joined the army as soon as I could enlist. He’d been vegan most of his life. I wasn’t. He was a family man. I couldn’t even manage pet ownership. He loved being doted on by his kids. Cats were too clingy for me. He loved noise and light and laughter. I kept my blinds drawn and avoided crowds.
He was normal. I was – well, a goddamned freak. Or so I’d been told.
“Mr. Day?” Detective Clark said, like she was repeating herself.
“Sorry. What?”
“I asked if you had any other living relatives?”
I considered, then shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“I believe your mother passed away at the same time Andrew’s father did? Some kind of accident?”
“Drunk d
river.”
“And your father?”
I glanced down at the laces of my sneakers. Not because I was sad, or embarrassed. But because I’d learned a long time ago that people expected some sign of one or the other. “Suicide.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I never met the man… Well, I suppose that’s probably not technically true. But I don’t remember him, anyway.”
She smiled softly, comfortingly, and nodded. “What about your grandmother? Your mother’s mother, I mean.”
“What about her?”
“She cared for you boys for a while, didn’t she? Do you know if she’s still alive?”
“That’s what the state called it, yes. And, I hope not.”
She didn’t seem surprised by that, which told me she knew more than she was letting on. I decided the time was right to balance the scales a little, and ask a few questions of my own.
I gestured to the photograph. “Andy’s killer: he’s the same one who killed those other people, right? The one they’re calling the Nursery Rhyme Killer?”
She hesitated, like committing to anything might be a mistake. “We think so, yes. So far, the pattern seems to fit.”
“Except for the stamps instead of handwriting.”
“Yes. But it would be more difficult to convince someone to write a note like that now, after all the news coverage.”
“When they know it’s a death note, you mean?”
She nodded and said nothing.
“Andy wouldn’t have done it. He wouldn’t have made it easy on them. He was too damned stubborn for that.”
She smiled again, the same soft, comforting smile she’d used earlier. The kind people like her were trained to use on people like me, in situations like this one.
The kind of smile that would convey empathy. That could help her connect with the victim’s family.
Or maybe it was real. Maybe she really was sorry for me, and I was just cynical.
But either way, it hadn’t come from any place of sentimentality or brotherly fondness. It was just the truth. Andy had fought too long and too hard to get to where he was in life. He wouldn’t have given it up without a fight. Not his family. Not his crusades.
