by Jerome Wilde
“Then hightailed it back here to crucify a boy?” I asked, annoyed.
“That’s your department,” he said.
Earl Whitehead’s face stared back at me. The photograph was in black and white, the picture police had taken during his arrest. There was an odd sort of look in his eyes I associated with people who were not quite right. By my calculations, Whitehead would now be thirty-six years old.
“Do we have the case file for the molested boy?” I asked.
“On its way,” McCallin said. “That was in Illinois. We had to put in a request. They FedExed it last night. Should be here any time now.”
“Did you find prints anywhere else? On the two-by-fours?”
“Clean as a whistle. Everything but the statue.”
There was silence.
“Anything else on this?” Harlock asked.
Aside from wanting to suggest to McCallin that he buy a pair of dress shoes and get a completely new outlook on life, I had no further questions or comments.
“Georgina?” Harlock said, nodding to Georgina Durmount.
“Well, James,” she said, “I’ve already sent out copies of the autopsy report. The victim died Friday night, early Saturday morning, as best we can determine. In light of what McCallin has said, I would only point out that I found evidence of homosexual activity.”
“Meaning what, precisely?” I asked. “Semen?”
She shook her head. “Anal scarring. Most likely evidence of rape. Given that our suspect has a record for sexual abuse of boys, I wouldn’t rule it out.”
“Was there any evidence that he had been sodomized prior to death?” I asked.
“Possibly. My examination suggested that the boy was quite active, and would have to have been to account for all the scarring. But I didn’t find any traces of semen. What I did find was evidence that the boy had been subjected to fellatio.”
“Excuse me?” McCallin said.
“For the Neanderthals among us,” Durmount said, rolling her eyes at him, “that means he was given a blow job prior to his death.”
We considered this in silence.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“The penis was much too clean.”
She did not elaborate.
“And you think this happened after he was hung up?”
“Yes,” she said. “There was blood on his belly, legs, and thighs, but none on the penis itself. There was also a bit of his semen left behind.”
There was a long silence as we each thought about this. We could safely assume our killer was gay, perhaps a sexual predator with a thing about Catholicism.
“Anything else?” Harlock asked.
“It’s all in the report,” Durmount replied.
We moved on to the tech guys, whose representative was Lt. Edwards. He was a small, compact man, very self-possessed, very precise. He passed around copies of his report, which we all looked at.
“To long-story-short it,” he said, “it would seem the victim was nailed and propped up first, then beaten. Whoever did the beating was about six feet tall, moderately strong, but not overly so. The weapon used for the beating appears to have been a whip with metal barbs attached to leather thongs, probably about a dozen of them. The whip itself was probably about two feet long, and would not have required much force to do the sort of damage indicated by the autopsy.
“We suspect the barbed-wire crown was put on his head after he was strung up, because the blood from the wounds dripped downward into his hair.
“We did see a depression in the bed of leaves that would be consistent with the crosspiece lying on it, with the boy on top. We found separate pools of blood, corresponding to where the hands would have been, so it would seem he was nailed to the cross while it was lying on the ground. Then it was apparently dragged to the tree and hoisted into position, which left a skid mark in the dirt beneath the leaves, although the leaves themselves had been scattered, as if to try to hide it.
“As for the statue of St. Francis of Assisi, nothing special about it that we can determine. Garden variety. Cheap. We’re trying to track down places where it could have been manufactured, where it might have been sold, but thanks to the Internet, people order these sorts of specialty items and have them shipped all over the world, so that’s probably going to prove useless.
“The scene itself was very controlled. There were blood stains around the immediate area where the body was found, but nowhere else, so we can safely assume that the boy was taken to the scene and then killed there. We recovered some trace evidence, which we are still sorting through. Some hairs—if you come up with a suspect, we might be able to provide a match. A couple of the hairs were blond, if that helps. We found pubic hairs that appear to match those of the victim.
“As for the nails, we’re tracking those down, trying to determine where they were made, where they could be bought. I suspect they’re garden variety and available at most hardware stores, but we might get lucky. We’re doing the same for the barbed wire, the rope that was tied around his arms, and the two-by-four itself, but those are such common items that I would be surprised if anything worthwhile turns up.
“And as of right now, that’s all we have.”
We considered this in silence.
Lt. Jensen was next. His men had combed the neighborhood for witnesses, with no success. They had checked with the traffic department to see if any tickets had been issued to any vehicles along that stretch of road. None had. The body had been found along a disused path.
“We found a footprint from the boy,” he said. “He was barefoot. From what we can determine, the killer must have parked by the side of the road and forced the boy to walk through the woods without shoes.”
“His feet were dirty,” Durmount added, “so that would be consistent with my findings.”
In other words, the boy had most likely been forced to strip and perhaps even to carry his own cross, as Jesus had. And no doubt he had been very much alive when he’d been nailed to that cross.
Next, it was the turn of Lt. Harris, who had a greedy sort of look in his eyes, as if this case was going to be everything a police department spokesman and PR guy could wish for: basking before an endless sea of microphones and watching himself on the evening news.
“First off,” he said, glaring around the table at all of us, “if I find out who the ‘sources close to the investigation’ were that shot off their big mouths on how the boy was murdered, I’ll be demanding disciplinary action. Nothing about this case should be going out to the media without being authorized by me. All our ‘sources’ have done is create a media frenzy.”
It occurred to me Harris himself had probably let the cat out of the bag, because media frenzies gave him the warm fuzzies.
“Since it’s not likely that anyone in this room has been talking, could we get on with it?” Harlock said. He did not like Harris any more than I did.
“I’m just saying,” Harris replied self-importantly.
“Whatever,” McCallin added. “Can we cut to the chase?”
“Well, the ‘chase’, if you’re going to put it that way, involves a press conference at noon. I’ll confirm that the victim was indeed crucified. I won’t be giving any particulars, especially about things like the barbed-wire crown of thorns or the statue found at the scene. Only the perpetrator is going to know those sorts of details.”
Harris explained that he was going to “position” this as a bizarre, one-off crime, with no need for the public to be unduly worried that one of them might be next.
I rolled my eyes.
Next it was my turn.
“There’s something that struck me as rather odd,” I said.
“What was that?” Harlock asked.
“The hands. Most people don’t know that Jesus, when he was crucified, did not get spikes pounded into the palms of his hands. The spikes were pounded into the wrist bones. If you put one in the middle of the hand, then tried to hang the person from a cross af
terward, the spike would tear the hand apart because of the weight of the person’s body. So our killer knew that and did it correctly. He put spikes through the boy’s wrists, like he was supposed to.”
“That’s interesting,” Harlock said.
“There’s another thing. The boy was naked. Jesus, when he was crucified, was allowed to wear a loincloth, but only because he was Jewish—that was a concession the Romans made on their behalf. Everyone else, though, was stripped naked.”
“What does that suggest to you?” Harlock asked. “That it was a sexual crime?”
“No,” I said. “That it was historically accurate, that’s all. This was done by somebody who knew what they were doing. It smacks very heavily of Catholicism.”
“You’d better not say that too loudly.”
“Well, it does,” I replied. “More specifically, it smacks of Western Catholicism. Rome, Europe, all of that. Eastern Catholics, like the Orthodox, for example, place more emphasis on the resurrection of Christ. Western Catholics place the main emphasis on the crucifixion. Protestants have crosses, but rarely crucifixes. They do not like to see Jesus displayed in that fashion. Some of them think it’s grotesque, which it is. Eastern Catholics generally emphasize the Risen Christ, the Resurrected Christ, the one who overcame death and triumphed. Western Catholics emphasize the death of Jesus, the price he paid for our sins. It’s a bit more morbid, more guilt-inducing. But in general, crucifixion is a very Catholic thing. I would be surprised if a Baptist had carried this out.”
This was considered in silence.
“So you’re saying we’ve got a Catholic serial killer on our hands,” Harris asked, “who’s probably a faggot because he crucified the kid and then gave him a blow job?”
“No, I didn’t say that. I said the crucifixion was historically accurate, suggesting that the perpetrator knew what he was doing. We’ve also got a statue of St. Francis at the scene. That gives me Catholic vibes, but doesn’t mean the killer is a Catholic. More likely someone who doesn’t like Catholics, or maybe an ex-Catholic with an ax to grind.”
“Like an ex-priest?” McCallin suggested, smirking.
“Maybe,” I said, glaring at him.
“Just a suggestion,” he said.
“What bothers me,” I replied, tuning him out, “is that if our perpetrator knew how to accurately carry out a crucifixion, he might also have known something else—that crucifixion was not necessarily fatal. A lot of Biblical scholars point out that Jesus died rather quickly on the cross. Most victims died of exposure or eventual asphyxiation. They were left in the sun, left to vultures and birds, left to die of thirst. The point of crucifixion was to be agonizing. The death was supposed to be slow in coming. This provided the Romans with an example of what would happen if you decided to side against them. According to the Bible, the Romans went around breaking the legs of those they had crucified on the same day as Jesus, wanting to hasten their deaths because the following day was an important religious feast day. When they came to Jesus, they found he was already dead, so they speared him in the side, just to make sure.”
“And all of that means what?” Harlock asked, frowning.
“It means that perhaps our killer didn’t intend to kill the boy. Maybe he was making an example of him. Maybe he was planning to take him down after a day or two, but the boy died instead.”
This was greeted by silence.
“Whatever the case,” Durmount said, “we have a situation where the suspect’s actions led to the death of the victim, so we’re talking murder, whether the perpetrator intended it or not.”
“Even so, I’m just pointing out that the killer may not have intended to kill the boy at all.”
“Whatever,” McCallin said, a bit inanely.
IV
WHEN we returned to the office, there was a FedEx package on my desk—the case file for our new suspect, Earl Whitehead. I opened it and skipped to the summary, a description of the abuse Whitehead was accused of inflicting on his nephew.
Victim said first incident took place on fishing trip during the month of July. Victim was ten years old at the time. Victim and suspect went alone, camped outdoors by Lake Keokuk. In the evening, suspect gave the victim a beer then some whiskey. Victim said he felt sick and confused. Suspect forced victim to remove clothes and sodomized him. Victim said he was sodomized again the next morning and that he was afraid suspect was trying to kill him. Suspect informed victim to remain silent about the sodomy; threatened to tell victim’s parents that boy was drinking alcohol. Told victim he would not be allowed to go on any other fishing trips if anyone found out what they had done. Victim said suspect apologized for hurting victim, promising not to do it again.
Victim said next encounter came approximately two weeks later, when suspect picked up victim from school to drive him home. Suspect stopped off in the woods and forced victim to perform oral sex on him while still in pick-up. Victim was then driven home.
Victim said such incidents occurred “a lot” and that suspect often picked him up from school and stopped in the woods, demanding sexual favors in return for cash, candy bars, cigarettes, and similar items. Sexual activity included oral sex and sodomy.
The victim, now fourteen, said last incident occurred this past Saturday evening. Suspect had been asked by victim’s parents to babysit while they went out of town to attend a wedding in Chicago that evening. Victim said suspect brought beer to the house and invited victim to drink some. Victim said he drank three cans, suspect drank “a lot” and was drunk. Suspect demanded victim remove his clothes, but victim refused. Suspect then punched and slapped victim, taking victim by the shoulders and slamming him against a wall, demanding victim comply. Victim said he ran upstairs and tried to lock himself in the bathroom, but suspect broke the chain-lock on the bathroom door and dragged victim to victim’s bedroom, forcing victim to disrobe. Suspect used a belt to whip victim. Suspect then sodomized victim. Suspect eventually passed out. Victim ran out of the house unclothed and went to next-door neighbor’s house, begging for assistance. Next-door neighbor called police, who responded to the scene at 11:38 p.m. Paramedics said victim appeared to be in shock and was also somewhat inebriated and incoherent. Victim was taken to Margret Hospital where PERK was performed. PERK confirmed evidence of molestation.
PERK stood for Physical Evidence Recovery Kit, and it was used in cases involving rape or sexual assault to document that assault. It was performed by a physician in the presence of a police officer, if this didn’t cause undue stress to the victim, and involved taking samples of pubic hair and swabs of genital areas among various other things. The PERK samples were immediately sealed in the small bags supplied with the PERK kit itself and handed over to the police officer, who logged it as evidence.
Included with the report were pictures of the victim taken after the assault, showing one black eye and a busted lip, with several pictures of the welts on his bare back and buttocks.
Although the suspect, Earl Whitehead, was charged with multiple counts of sexual abuse of a minor, he was merely given probation since he had no prior record and was not deemed a “threat to the community.” He had been vouched for, before the court, by his father, a local police officer. I could smell “good old boys” a mile away.
Without comment, I handed the case file to Daniel, who sat down at his own desk to flip through it.
The Whiteheads lived in Quincy, Illinois, and I dug out my dogged-ear atlas, searching for it. Missouri shares borders with Kansas on the west and Illinois on the east, and right across the border in Illinois, near the upper northeast corner of Missouri, was the city of Quincy. It was about a four-hour drive from Kansas City.
I picked up the phone and dialed Jensen’s extension.
“Did we get anyone to go see Whitehead’s parents?” I asked.
“Do you read your mail?” he asked, a bit of exasperation in his voice.
He hung up before I could answer.
I looked at my e-mail. Jen
sen had contacted the Illinois State Police, who had visited the Whiteheads that morning. They had no idea where their son was, hadn’t heard from him “in years.” The son had left no forwarding address, and the parents had no way to contact him.
I picked up the phone and dialed the parents’ number.
A woman answered.
“Mrs. Whitehead?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“May I speak to your husband?”
“Who’s calling?”
“Lt. Thomas Noel. Kansas City Police Department. Is your husband home?”
“He’s at work. I could give you the number.”
I took down the number. “Since you’re on the phone, Mrs. Whitehead, I suppose I ought to tell you that your son Earl is a suspect in a murder investigation. Are you sure you don’t know where he is?”
“I told the officers this morning,” she replied.
“You told them what, exactly?”
“I don’t know where that boy is,” she said.
“He hasn’t called you recently?”
“He hasn’t called in years. We don’t know where he is. We told them that.”
“Mrs. Whitehead, are you aware that it’s a crime to interfere with police work?”
“My husband’s a police officer,” she said, rather snippily. “You don’t need to tell me which end is up.”
“That’s good,” I said, “because if I find out that you’re covering up for your son, you’ll probably wish I hadn’t.”
There was silence.
“You sure you don’t know where you son is, ma’am?”
“I already told you I don’t,” she said.
“Well, I’ve got a dead body up here, ma’am. A boy. So if Earl shows up or contacts you, I want you to think about that.”
I hung up, feeling agitated and angry, and immediately punched in the number for her husband.
“Is this Frank Whitehead?”
“Yup, it sure is,” a male voice answered in a heavy drawl.
“This is Lt. Thomas Noel, Kansas City Police Department. I work with the homicide division. We’re investigating the murder of a boy, and I’ve got your son’s fingerprints all over the place. Do you know where your son is?”
