by Jerome Wilde
CHAPTER ONE
In the beginning
I
THE body of a young man had been found along a scenic route overlooking the Missouri River in the northeast area of Kansas City. The two-lane road was a popular drive, sparsely inhabited, and wound its way among small, densely forested cliffs with the river below in the distance. It was the sort of road driven on autumn afternoons as the leaves changed colors—as they were doing now, with Halloween just around the corner.
I found the scene thanks to the half-dozen police vehicles already parked on the road.
“He’s down there,” Lieutenant Jensen said, catching my eye and waving a large, bony hand toward a place farther down in the woods. Jensen was the patrol supervisor. He was a tall, gaunt man, more used to having his people respond to burglaries and domestic disturbances than murder scenes. He had a faint resemblance to Lurch on The Addams Family, and could sometimes speak just as slowly.
“Well?” I asked, starting off down the path.
“A teenager,” Jensen replied, following behind me. “You probably heard the particulars.”
“That the victim was nailed to a tree?”
“What will they think of next?”
That was not a matter on which I cared to speculate.
I could smell death in the air. The breeze coming up from the river seemed chillier than it had a right to be. We came to the yellow police tape marking off the scene, and Jensen went no farther. He had kept his men away so as not to mess with the evidence, and now gave me time to survey the scene on my own, knowing I did not like to be disturbed during an initial assessment—I did not like people standing around, asking questions, making small talk, getting in the way.
A young man had been crucified, after a fashion. I came up from behind him, and the first thing I saw was the back of the two-by-four crosspiece his hands had been both tied and nailed to. The board had been nailed up between two trees, leaving the boy to hang with his feet just touching the ground. His feet were nailed to another, smaller board lying in the dead leaves. This second board was not attached to the first.
The youth had very pale white skin and had obviously been whipped—some parts of his back looked like hamburger. There was blood on his back, buttocks, and legs. Droplets littered the dead leaves at his feet. His calves and ankles were extremely dark and bruised, suggesting that whatever blood hadn’t been beaten out of him had settled there, a condition called livor mortis. His death had probably been more than a day or two previous. It was Sunday afternoon, so that would have been Friday night or perhaps sometime Saturday.
I walked slowly around to the front. The boy was scrawny to the point of undernourishment—possibly a kid off the street. I could see the lines of his ribcage, the curves of his pelvic bones, the knobs of his knees, which, oddly enough, had scabs on them as if he had done too much kneeling.
I used to be a Catholic priest. I knew a thing or two about long hours spent on your knees in prayer.
The boy had not only been whipped from behind, but from the front as well. There were marks and gashes up and down his body, even on his face. He had not simply been whipped; he had been savaged.
Large nails had been hammered into his wrists. Rope circled his arms and wrists, binding him to the crosspiece. A “crown of thorns” made from barbed wire had been fastened to his head. There appeared to be a gash in the boy’s side—reminiscent of how Jesus had been speared after his crucifixion to make sure he was dead—but this was difficult to determine because of the blood and numerous welts and gashes all over the boy’s body. Duct tape covered his lips, and in the dead leaves at his bloodied, darkened feet lay a small statue of St. Francis of Assisi.
I pegged the boy’s weight at maybe 120 pounds or thereabouts. He was a full head shorter than me—small, the sort of kid who made a perfect target for perps and wackos because he wasn’t strong enough to put up much of a fight.
I knew a thing or two about that too.
Flies had already discovered the body. The only noise to be heard was their incessant buzzing.
His legs were twisted at an unnatural angle, as if he had been trying to relieve the pain of the large spike pounded through the tops of his feet. Putting his weight on them must have been torturous. The boy’s eyes were open, staring upward at the heavens as if beseeching divine intervention that had not come.
Whoever this kid was, he had died in horrible pain. I did not need to see the agony frozen on his bloodied features to know that. I took my eyes away from the boy and put a hand to my face, feeling rather unnerved.
I had been working in the homicide division of the KCPD for the past twelve years. Much had happened since 1985. It was starting to get to me. One can’t very well deal with murder and mayhem day after day without somehow being affected. Most allow themselves to become callous, hard-hearted. It reflects in the depersonalized language we use to talk about our jobs: the “body,” the “scene,” the “suspect,” the “evidence.” They were impersonal words, nonemotional words, words designed to keep us at a distance from the reality they represented.
The other option was to crash and burn—which was what I was doing. Getting too emotionally involved, thinking too much, asking too many questions about justice, fairness, kindness, compassion, what sort of world it was we lived in, how we were capable of inflicting such horror on each other. And would it ever end?
The Lord Buddha advocated the Middle Way, the path between extremes, and I was struggling to find that path, to put my feet on it. Easier said than done.
The first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths had always struck me as profoundly insightful: “There is suffering.” A simple statement, no doubt, but enormously true, so largely and enormously true that it was possible to miss it altogether. In this thing we called life, “there is suffering.” To be alive was not all fun and games. We suffer. We agonize. We experience distress and unhappiness. We are “united with that which is unpleasant.” We crave for that which cannot be. Sometimes we crave life. Sometimes we crave death and total annihilation. Somehow there is an unsatisfactoriness about the whole business. No matter what we get or what we have, we always want something more, something just beyond our reach.
There is suffering.
That truth was reflected in the scene before me. What had this boy done to deserve such a painful death? What sense could be made of it? Was he just unlucky, or was he paying for some sin he’d committed in a previous life? Was this part of the price to “work out his karma?” And how could I ever bring myself to believe that?
I rubbed nervously at my face.
Jensen approached now, having waited patiently for more than ten minutes. The look in his eyes reminded me that other people had work to do, were waiting for me to get on with it.
“Just in time for Halloween,” he said, neither smiling nor frowning. “Getting an early start, though, ain’t they?”
They certainly were.
II
I DROVE to the office, frowning all the way, wishing my Sunday hadn’t been interrupted in this unpleasant fashion.
The letter I’d received from the Missouri State Correctional Facility was still lying on my desk where I’d left it. I picked it up, thought about opening it, put it down. Did I really want to know what the Missouri State Correctional Facility wanted Lt. Thomas Noel, Homicide/KCPD, to be informed of? At nearly forty, I had learned not to look for trouble. Lying low had its advantages. Que sera sera, blah blah blah, and all of that. I put the letter in my desk drawer, putting that particular piece of business out of my mind.
There was a knock on the door, and a young Asian man rather breathlessly presented himself.
“Lt. Noel?”
I frowned at him.
“I’m Daniel Qo. You
r new partner?”
I stood, accepted his handshake, continued to frown. Why hadn’t anyone said anything to me about a new partner? After what I’d put the last one through, I was hoping they’d give up.
“I just graduated. Got a PhD in criminology. University of Missouri, Class of 1997,” he said in a nervous rush of words. “Top of my class. Just thought you should know. Did they send you my resume?”
“Why don’t you sit?” I suggested.
He sat in the chair opposite my desk, regarding me with eyes that were brown, almost black, filled with the hint of a smile. His dark suit was carefully fitted over a tall, spare frame. Jet-black hair fell down to his collar. He looked to be twenty-eight or so.
The sight of him stirred up the sort of lustful feelings I had started to think were a thing of the past. I was pushing forty, after all, and an avowed Buddhist, and lusting after young guys was no longer quite so interesting to me. In fact, the whole business of lusting seemed incredibly tiresome.
“So you’re the one, huh?” he asked.
“The one?”
“You know.”
“Do I?”
“Of course you do. The famous Lt. Thomas Noel. I saw you on Good Morning Kansas City last month, back when I was applying for this job. I never thought they’d actually assign me as the partner to the ‘Trailblazing Thomas Noel, the Kansas City Police Department’s Most Famous Fag.’ I asked them to, you know. You were pretty sexy on the TV, by the way.”
“Sexy?”
“Yeah. You got this older man thing going on. You know?”
“Older man thing?”
“Oh yeah,” he said, beaming.
Confronted with this charm offensive, I could do little more than fidget nervously. Daniel Qo was one of those young people bursting with self-confidence and charm, the two things I lacked the most. And he was not one whit embarrassed by or concerned about his sexuality, unlike us older queens who grew up in a day and age when one kept one’s mouth shut because one’s survival depended on it.
“Where are you from?” I asked, trying to change the subject, to stop feeling so self-conscious and on the spot and so wretchedly old.
“Right here in the big KC,” he replied. “Kansas City homeboy, through and through.”
“So you know the city?”
“Shit yeah.”
“And what brings you to our wonderful homicide division?” I asked.
“Well, you know,” he said, offering an aw-shucks shrug of his shoulders.
I knew.
“You used to be a Catholic priest?” he asked, as if the question had been burning a hole in the back of his mouth. “That’s some pretty heavy shit.”
“Yes, it is,” I said, somewhat tiredly. People had to ask, as if they wouldn’t believe it unless I confessed to it personally.
“Wow.”
Wow, indeed.
“So why’d you leave?” he asked.
“Is it any of your business?”
He offered a perfectly harmless smile, not seeming at all embarrassed about overstepping. “So, you’re a sensitive little bugger, eh?” he asked, still beaming. “Captain Harlock said working with you was like walking on eggshells—good practice for me, you know? I’m a Chinese guy. We’re not exactly known for being sensitive.”
If he was anything to go by, that was probably true.
“So why’d you leave, man?” he asked again, leaning forward, an eager look in his eyes. “Let me guess: You fell in love? Ran off with the altar boy? Something like that?”
“Is this your first assignment?” I asked, ignoring his questions.
He nodded.
“And you specifically asked to be assigned to me?”
“I did, sir,” he said.
“Well, I’m glad you’re fascinated by my personal life, but we’ve got work to do, and I’m not in the mood for a trip down memory lane.”
“Okay,” he said agreeably, as if he hadn’t just been rebuffed. “That’s cool. Maybe we can get some beers sometime, you know, relax, shoot the shit, male bonding, all of that.”
I frowned at him.
“So what’s up with this kid who got whacked?” he asked.
Whacked?
“You know,” he said. “The kid who got nailed up.”
“I assume you have some idea of how to investigate a crime?”
“Of course.”
“Where would you like to start, then?”
“I’d prefer to follow your lead,” he said diplomatically.
“Well, let’s start with the statue. Why would someone leave something like that at the scene if they had just killed someone?”
He hemmed and hawed and didn’t know.
“Do you know anything about Catholicism?” I asked.
He did not.
“The statue was of St. Francis of Assisi. Does that ring any bells?”
He shook his head.
“St. Francis was famous for his stigmata. He carried the wounds of Christ on his hands and feet,” I said. “Given that the victim was sort of crucified, in a half-assed way, isn’t that rather significant?”
Daniel Qo was not Christian, had never heard of stigmata, knew nothing about crucifixion.
“I thought St. Francis was an elementary school,” he said.
Not a promising start.
III
GEORGINA DURMOUNT had the boy’s body on her autopsy table when we arrived.
She was a middle-aged black woman, short and petite, very self-possessed. For some strange reason, she reminded me of a lounge singer. I expected her to grab a microphone kept stashed beneath the autopsy table and do a spirited rendition of Mississippi Goddam. Something in her eyes suggested she knew precisely what Nina Simone meant. Yet Georgina was so short she would need to jump up on a milk crate for an audience to see her.
Georgina had taken me in, twelve years ago, when I first started at the department. Few cared to be seen with me. Even fewer cared to cooperate. Most made my life hell. But something in her dark, watery eyes told me she knew what it was like, and the big bad world could kiss both our asses, thank you very much. She did not appreciate what it said about her age, but she was like a mother to me, and I had cried on her shoulder on more than a few occasions.
“Anything?” I asked, remaining at a respectful distance. Daniel hung somewhere farther behind, perhaps staring into the sink and trying to pretend there was something interesting in it.
“Not yet,” Durmount said. She was working on removing the boy’s brain. This was accomplished by pulling the skin of the face forward, then cutting through the bone of the skull. It generally meant she was nearly finished. To make the brain easier to work with, she had to wait for the blood to drain, so its removal always came last.
“Any ideas?”
She paused, holding in her right hand a section of skull she had just removed. “This may be a V tach thing.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Well, to be completely honest, I don’t see any wounds here that would have been immediately fatal. Boy got the dickens beat out of him and all the rest of it, but the fact is, having a spike nailed through your hand is not going to kill you. This crown of thorns is mostly show. Probably hurt like hell, of course, but it’s all flesh wounds. The stabbing in the belly? I thought maybe the liver or another vital organ had been hit, but they haven’t. Lost a lot of blood, but not that much, not enough to kill him.”
“And that means what, precisely?” I asked.
“It means that the boy might have been scared to death. Literally. It happens. He could have been in so much pain, and so overwhelmed with fear, that his heart went haywire.”
“V tach,” I said.
She nodded.
“Daniel, you paying attention?” I asked.
“Of course I am.”
“What is V tach?”
“Man, if I didn’t know that, I wouldn’t be your partner.”
That was certainly true.
V tach wa
s shorthand for ventricular tachycardia, a very rapid heart rate. By itself, not usually fatal, but it can lead to ventricular fibrillation, or VF, which causes the heart to “twitch,” rendering it unable to establish a normal beating pattern, which can be fatal if not immediately corrected.
“I don’t get the connection, though,” Daniel said.
Durmount chuckled. “Last year I did an autopsy on an eleven-year-old boy who had been playing baseball. He was the pitcher. Little league team. Threw the ball, batter sent it right back at him, the boy got hit in the chest—and keeled over dead.”
“Just like that?” Daniel asked.
Durmount nodded.
“No shit! Why?” he asked.
“Excellent question,” Durmount replied. “A blow to the chest like that, even a minor one, can interrupt the heartbeat. Then you got a ventricular fibrillation situation. Sometimes you’ve got a grace period to get it sorted out. Other times, you don’t. You just keel over dead and that’s that.”
“And how does that relate to our case?” he asked.
“Well, there’s more than one way to get the heartbeat out of whack. Excessive fear and stress can accomplish it because this can cause the sudden release of too much epinephrine in the body, which can cause VF. You ever hear of voodoo death?”
Daniel made a face. He was interested in facts, not silliness.
“There may be something to it,” Durmount said, “if you believe in it, if you believe that some witch doctor can kill you just by sprinkling chicken blood on the ground and all of that nonsense, you can get yourself so worked up, so full of fear, that your heartbeat gets out of whack and off you go. Some experts attribute voodoo death to no more than that.”
“And your point?” Daniel asked.
“Well, think about it. If you had been crucified, left to hang there out in the dark woods in the cold, if you were in horrible pain, maybe frightened about what was going to happen next, having already lost a lot of blood, well, you could have easily gotten yourself so worked up that your heartbeat got out of whack and it killed you. You could have had all kinds of epinephrine flooding your system.”
