Playing Saint

by Zachary Bartels

  He chuckled. “I suppose it’s a little juvenile. I just don’t want this to be any more uncomfortable than it has to be.”

  “Well, I can’t help you with that, but I have come through on another front. I found the number for Dr. Geoffrey Graham.”

  “Who?”

  “The professor you wanted me to track down. The class was called Contemporary Occultism. You must not have been as excited about it as you remember; you took all of three pages of notes for the whole semester.”

  “I hadn’t found my focus yet during my undergrad years.”

  “That’s normal, I guess. There was a phone number on the syllabus, so I tried giving it a call. It’s current.”

  “Does he remember me?”

  “No idea. I got his voice mail, saying he’s on a mission trip until Wednesday. I left your number and asked him to call you.”

  “Rats. I was hoping he might give me some pointers on dealing with all of this.”

  “You’ll do fine. Just turn up the charm.”

  “You like the charm, eh?”

  She giggled. “It’s all right in small doses.”

  “How’s Sunday’s show shaping up?”

  “The service is coming together well. Tony Rex is lined up to preach. He offered to do next week too, if need be.”

  “Try and string him along on that until we’re absolutely sure we need him.”

  “Already on it.”

  “You’re a doll. I have to go. Don’t want to be late on my first day.”

  Parker swallowed hard as he approached One Monroe Center, the recently revamped headquarters of the Grand Rapids Police Department. He loved the modern feel and open floor layout of the atrium—not at all what he expected, having watched dozens of eighties crime movies full of grim, ill-lit rooms and packed with jaded cops and dirty bureaucrats.

  A pretty, young uniformed officer greeted him from behind a circular information kiosk as soon as he walked in.

  “Good morning,” she said pleasantly.

  He wasn’t quite sure how to begin.

  “Hi there. I’m, um, here to see Detective Ketcham. My name is—”

  “Pastor Parker!” She smiled brightly.

  “Yes, that’s right. Have we met?”

  Her eyes dropped to the sign-in sheet on her desk. “I’ve, uh, gone to your church for five years.”

  “Oh! Yes. I didn’t recognize you in your uniform.”

  Suddenly cold and businesslike, she reached under the counter and handed him a small manila envelope with his name on it. “The detective unit is on the second floor. There’s an ID card in here. It will give you access to the second floor only and only between the hours of seven and five.”

  He hovered by the desk, wanting to smooth over his gaffe. “I guess I’m going to be here quite a bit for a while. I’m helping the homicide detectives with the serial killer case.”

  “That’s great,” she said curtly. Then, looking past him, “May I help you?”

  Not a great start to my first day, he thought.

  He entered a glass elevator with a GRPD logo emblazoned on it and pushed the button for the second floor. Nothing happened. He fished the ID card from the envelope. It bore his name, an ID number, and the words “Consultant—MCT.” In the upper corner was a publicity shot from his ministry’s website, which looked more than a little odd on a government ID. He swiped the card through a reader strip and pushed the second-floor button again. He was moving up.

  When he got off the elevator, everyone seemed to know who he was and where he needed to be. He guessed that at least fifty people were working on the floor, and all greeted him with a smile, a nod, and directions to Detective Ketcham’s desk.

  When he found it, a hand-scrawled note instructed him to report to Room 8B, where he found Ketcham and Troy Ellis gazing at a map full of dots and overlapping circles, spread out over a conference table. The room’s walls were covered with crime scene photos, more maps, and other documents—each of three walls dedicated to one of the three incidents. But the first thing Parker noticed was that neither man was wearing cuff links. How Parker wished he had just one button-down shirt that did not require cuff links.

  “He’s on time!” Troy announced.

  “Good morning,” Parker said, his eyes drifting from photo to map to photo.

  “Get a cup of coffee if you like,” Ketcham said. “It’s behind you on your right.”

  “No thanks.”

  Ketcham furrowed his brow. “Don’t tell me you drink tea.”

  “No, I love coffee, it’s just . . . it stains your teeth.”

  “And your teeth are your livelihood, right?”

  “I don’t know. What’s all this?” He gestured around him.

  “We call this the Command Center. It’s our temporary workstation for the Blackjack Killings. We’ve got this setup so we can focus entirely on getting this nutcase off the streets and behind bars. Feel free to look around.”

  “Are you sure the same person killed all four victims?”

  “No, we’re not sure, but that’s our working assumption.”

  “Assumption?” Parker mumbled to himself, surveying a large flowchart of Melanie Candor’s friends, family, and acquaintances.

  “I’m sorry, what was that?” Ketcham asked.

  “Nothing. Talking to myself.”

  “Look, Parker, I know you’ve got years of experience solving crimes, but let me explain something to you. Grand Rapids usually has about a dozen murders per year. Of those, a good number are open-and-shut domestic disputes gone bad. A few are random, mostly gang-related, and more or less unsolvable. Until last week, none of them were Satan-inspired voodoo killings. Now we’ve got four victims in three days with devil-doodles all over them. If we keep piling up bodies at that rate, we’re pretty quick going to run out of manpower. We’re treating these murders as a single investigation out of necessity.”

  “I understand,” Parker said.

  “And you tell any of that to the press, I’ll see you in jail. In fact, anything you might learn in the course of working as my consultant is to be kept in absolute confidence. You understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Troy snickered. “I’m gonna tell Corrinne you said ‘manpower.’ She’ll let you have it.”

  “Oh, shut up, Troy.”

  A uniformed officer knocked on the open door and poked his head in.

  “Detective Ketcham? Jason Dykstra. You wanted to see me?”

  Ketcham folded the map in half, concealing its contents. “Yes, Jason, have a seat. You too, Parker.” He turned his attention to Troy. “Detective Ellis, can you do me a favor and try and locate Isabella Escalanté’s next-door neighbor. She has to be somewhere.”

  “Not a problem, Ketch.”

  “And maybe you could get me an actual time when Ben Ludema’s mother will be home. I need to follow up on this scant statement from Sunday”—he tapped a sheet of paper—“but I can’t pin her down. Her kid dies, there’s a lot of planning and running around to do, I get that, but I want to sit down with her personally. Today.” He turned to Parker and clarified, “Ludema was the kid we found in the red-tagged house yesterday morning.”

  Troy nodded. “I’ll send a cruiser to wait at her place and see if I can track down a cell phone number.”

  “Thanks, Troy. You’re the walrus.”

  Troy grabbed his coat and clicked the door shut on his way out.

  Ketcham’s attention returned to the man across from him. “Officer Dykstra, I’d like to introduce Parker Saint. He’s working as a special consultant during this investigation.”

  “Hello,” Parker said feebly.

  “You’re the TV preacher I heard about?” The young cop squelched a laugh.

  Ketcham ignored the comment. “Jason, I understand that you were the responding officer to two complaints recently—one Sunday and one yesterday—in which you discovered victims related to this investigation.”

  “Yes, that is correct.
”

  “Why?”

  “I’m sorry, sir?”

  “Why you? Two times in a row—that’s just weird.”

  “I—I don’t know. I guess he likes the South Service Area.”

  “You think he lives nearby?”

  “It’s possible. How should I know?”

  “Watch your tone, Officer.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “Jason, I called you up here because, although we spoke briefly at both crime scenes, I need more information from you. I want to encourage you to take some time to think about the two scenes together as a unit. Think about common elements to the calls, what you found when you responded, and how you found it. Look for patterns.”

  Jason chewed his lip for a moment. “I can’t think of any, sir.”

  “You don’t have to put it all together this second. Just roll it around in your head a little. Sleep on it. Then I want you to write up a report for me on any common threads you discover, no matter how insignificant they might seem. I’d like it tomorrow morning if possible, but no later than Thursday.”

  “Will do, sir.”

  “Thank you. Please shut the door behind you.”

  When he had left, Ketcham motioned at the door with his head. “What’d you think of that man?”

  “Seems nice enough, I guess.”

  “Yes, he does. But think about this: there are 225 patrol officers in our department. Seventy of them are in the South Service Area. What are the odds that the same officer would respond to two random killings by the same perp during two different shifts?”

  “Math was never my thing, but I’d guess the odds are pretty slim.”

  “Yeah. Slim.”

  Troy and Corrinne returned a little after one o’clock. Ketcham ordered in pizza—a working lunch for the four of them, barricaded in the Command Center. Parker listened as Corrinne recounted her interviews with Ben Ludema’s teachers and two school administrators. For his part, Troy had been successful in locating Isabella’s neighbor and in setting an appointment for Ketcham to meet with Ben’s mother at three. The detective deemed his colleagues’ morning exploits a success. Only then did he allow the pizza boxes and two-liters to be opened.

  While they ate, Troy asked Parker, “What do you think of the place so far?”

  “It’s not quite what I expected,” he admitted. “I thought you guys would be going over the crime scenes inch by inch, looking for drops of saliva and that sort of thing.”

  Troy nodded. “You’re thinking of crime scene technicians, not detectives. They showed up after you left yesterday. Our job is to talk to people and sort through all their BS.”

  Ketcham choked on some soda. “Did you just say BS? Wow, we bring in a TV preacher and this guy’s language suddenly goes PG.”

  Troy plopped two more slices on his grease-stained paper plate. “Don’t listen to them, Parker. I’m as pure as the wind-driven snow.”

  Ketcham dumped his plate and paper cup, wiped his hands, and announced, “All right, geniuses, let’s hear some mind-blowing insights.”

  Before he had time to think it through, Parker raised his hand.

  “The pastor’s having a vision. Let’s hear it.”

  He cleared his throat. “Last night, I was at home thinking about all of this. And it occurred to me that there’s been quite a bit of church vandalism lately. And some of the graffiti has been along the same lines as our murders.” He took the pictures Father Michael had given him from his back pocket and laid them side by side on the table. “Seems like maybe too much of a coincidence.”

  Ketcham perused the pictures. “Where did you get these?”

  “Um, a colleague in ministry gave them to me. I think they came from the newspaper’s website.”

  Corrinne was around the table in a moment, inspecting the pictures as well. “You might have something here, Preacher,” she said.

  Parker smiled proudly. “Yeah, it sort of seemed like the killer’s MO.”

  “MO?” Corrinne asked amusedly.

  “You know. Modus operandi.”

  “I know what it means.”

  Ketcham shook his head. “First BS and now MO? Somebody shoot me.”

  “Sorry, I was trying to use the . . . lingo.” Parker tried to recover his momentum. “Anyway, in addition to the graffiti, there have also been two church fires lately.”

  “Both of those were electrical problems,” Troy said.

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  Ketcham was engrossed in the pictures. “You’re way ahead for your first day in the inner sanctum, Parker. Don’t push your luck. The fires were accidental.” He quickly gathered the photos into a stack and set them aside. “Let’s keep this in mind going forward. I’ll dig up statements and incident reports on each of these.

  “But for now, I want to move on to what I’ve learned about Mr. Leon Price.” He walked over to a wall where two photos of Leon were pinned up side by side, one smiling, holding a drink, and full of life; the other, very dead.

  “I think we can all agree that, even with the bloody symbols and the Latin word, the strangest part of the scene yesterday was this guy lying there dead, holding a gun. I couldn’t make sense of it myself.

  “I mean, think about it: our subject is either in the process of killing, or has already killed, Isabella Escalanté, and in barges this set of six-pack abs with legs—former star running back and salutatorian for Grand Rapids Central—gun in hand, and he winds up killed with the same knife that killed his girlfriend.”

  “Medical examiner confirmed it was the same knife?” Troy asked.

  “Yep. Killer wiped the blade on the tablecloth before he left, and the victims’ blood was intermingled. But the real question on my mind was: who’s fast enough to kill a guy with that kind of reflexes and that much strength without his so much as squeezing off a round?” He let the question hang in the air for a minute. “Are you ready for this? The knife was thrown.”

  Troy and Corrinne both groaned their skepticism.

  “Forensics is certain about this. It happened,” Ketcham insisted. “The knife used was something like this one.” He pulled a five-inch-long knife from a cardboard box on the table. It was shiny and black with four holes down the handle. “Doesn’t look like anything special, but it’s perfectly balanced for throwing.”

  Corrinne was smirking. “Let me get this straight, Paul. Our killer threw a knife across the room, directly into this man’s jugular? So we’re looking for some sort of ninja, then? Why don’t we put out an APB on anyone in black pajamas in the greater Grand Rapids area?”

  “It’s not that uncommon a skill. Sure, your average schlump can’t just chuck a throwing knife with no practice and expect to hit a target, but with a little work it’s not unheard of. A specialized skill, sure, but not as rare as you might think.” He paced off seven feet. “This is how far away forensics is guessing our subject was when he made the throw. We stand farther away playing darts at the bar. Trust me, there are plenty of people out there who could hit a small target at this distance.”

  Troy nodded. “Yeah, my roommate at the academy had a wooden target up in our room and five or six knives, a lot like that one. He’d come back to the room after an exam or a bad date and throw those things for an hour at a stretch. He hit the bull’s-eye four out of five times—and from farther away than your seven feet. It was really annoying. Thud! Thud! Thud! I wanted to cut his throa . . .”

  “Lovely,” Corrinne said. “So the point is that knives are easy to throw.”

  “Not at all,” Ketcham said. “It takes dexterity and practice.” He held the knife out to Parker by the blade. “Give it a shot, Preacher,” he said. “Try and stick it in the bulletin board.”

  Parker wound up and sent the knife spinning in the direction of the wall. It went high, and the handle collided with a wall clock, cracking the glass.

  “See?” Ketcham said. “It’s hard to master, but for certain people it makes sense to put in the time. Just th
ink about it: someone with a handful of these knives and the ability to throw them accurately can kill from a distance without alerting everyone in the vicinity with the sound of a gunshot. And knives never run out of bullets, don’t leave casings behind, and can be reused indefinitely. I’ll have to double-check, but I’m pretty sure Special Forces learn knife-throwing as part of their training.”

  “So our guy could be ex-military,” Troy offered.

  “Maybe. Or he could be your old roommate from the academy. Or he could just be some guy who bought a set of knives and a DVD on the Internet and taught himself in his basement.” He studied the photo of Leon’s dead body for a moment. “Still, this looks pretty professional. It wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye out for military backgrounds. Whatever the case, the second the door swung open, that knife went into Leon’s throat and that’s all she wrote.”

  Ketcham put the knife back in the box and replaced the lid. “Let’s move on to the artwork. Parker, this is your area. You already came through yesterday. Let’s see if you can wow us all again.”

  Parker’s hands started to sweat.

  Ketcham pointed to a series of close-ups of the victims. “The common element at all three scenes is that our subject has painted detailed images onto his victims with their own blood. You don’t see that every day. Seems to be a fairly skilled artist too. The subject matter on victims two, three, and four is pretty vanilla, pop-culture, devil-worship stuff, but what do we make of the first one?” He dropped a color photo of Melanie Candor’s lifeless body on the table in front of Parker.

  “The first victim was decorated with two images,” he continued, “which appear to be a spade and a snake, the spade being more prominent. As you know, this led the press to dub our subject ‘The Blackjack Killer.’ And you could almost feel their collective disappointment when the second victim didn’t sport a heart, diamond, or club.

  “Before victim two was dropped on us, we exhausted several gang-crime databases for any connection with a spade or a spade-snake combination and came up empty. So, Parker, we’re all ears. What are we looking at?”