“Who else would be up at such an ungodly hour besides public servants and derelicts,” he said wryly to no one in particular.
The lower downtown or “LoDo” as the locals called it, had seen better days. Urban renewal had and gentrification yet to make a full impact on the area, the metamorphosis was just beginning.
He got a cup of coffee from a uniformed officer slumped against a cruiser and made his way into the old abandoned warehouse where the body had been found. There was nothing special about the building, just one more rusting hulk waiting for the demolition ball. Speaking to no one in particular, he asked several men milling inside the entrance, “Who found the body?”
An anonymous voice from a dark corner responded, “Some junkie, looking for a place to get out of the wind.”
“A junkie? Hell they never report anything. What’s the deal?” he asked trying to see who was talking to him.
“Go look at the body,” the voice replied, “you’ll see.”
Walking further into the warehouse, stepping over debris and trash, glad it was January for once and the freezing weather kept the smells down, he followed the sound of voices to the interior of the building. A group of forensic personnel, a smattering of uniformed cops and a couple of detectives stood in a circle, the fog of their breathing in the cold air stood out in the glare of the halogen work lamps. Their focus was on something in the middle of the room. As they stepped aside at his approach, he was not prepared for what their passage revealed.
As if struck by a sledgehammer, he snapped back at the sight of the woman tied to a support post. Her body was covered in frozen blood. Even though she had been beaten with a whip, which had caused most of the bloodshed, it wasn’t the lash marks he saw. Like everyone else, the first thing he looked at was the circle of nails protruding from around her skull. He had seen a lot in his time on the force, but never had he seen anything like this. The brutality of it was nearly too much to bear.
Carly turned away to catch his breath.
“Pretty grisly, eh?”
It was Charlie from forensics.
“Damn right it’s grisly. What kind of sick bastard does stuff like that?”
“He’s sicker than you think Carly. Looking at the blood flow patterns, I can tell you she was very much alive when he hammered those nails into her head.”
It was twenty-four hours later before Carly went back to bed. Even then he had a hard time sleeping.
In that long day following his journey to LoDo the night before, Carly had interviewed the junkie who had found the body. A nervous little man, who only wanted to get as high as he could to forget what he had seen, he didn’t have much to add beyond what everyone else saw in the warehouse. The first cop to see the woman’s body had been on the job only a few weeks when the junkie led him back to the warehouse. The young officer was smart enough to not touch a thing. He had told Carly he didn’t even bother to check for a pulse, he knew the woman was dead the moment he saw the victim. The forensic people reported more clues of such a novel nature it made the puzzle pieces float around Carly like apparitions. If this crime was not solved it wasn’t because the murderer had not left his signature at the scene.
The woman had been sodomized and raped, in that order. It was a pattern Carly would see more and more in weeks to come. She had been beaten with a knotted cord. Fiber strands revealed the cord to be made of true hemp, the kind of rope found in naval yards and around livestock, unlike the cotton or nylon type commonly sold in retail chain stores. Not knowing the significance at the time, Carly read in the report the knots in the cord had left marks. The measurements between each, indicated the knots were exactly three inches apart. The nails were not common either, but rather ‘city-head’ nails, the kind used in shoeing horses. As the pieces came together, Carly figured it might have been a cowboy or rancher who had killed the woman.
After all it was Denver, the ‘Cowboy Capital of the Rockies’. The Western Stockman Show was due in town in a few weeks, thus an errant cowhand might have come in early to play around a bit.
Despite all the injuries, the cause of death had been a broken neck rendered manually by a hammerlock style hold. Carly surmised that someone very powerful had killed her. Someone who used their hands and upper body regularly in hard labor. Someone like a rancher or cowboy. This line of thought would fuel his investigative efforts for the next few weeks.
The woman was not identified until later the next day. A forty-year old housewife, she had gone out to the store for a few groceries around eight o’clock on Friday night. She was dead by eleven o’clock that night, almost before her husband had begun to get worried. By the time he was calling her cell phone for the third time, she was being tied to the post. By the time he called the police, she was being raped. As a victim she was non-descript. Nothing about her indicated she was destined for such demise. She had no link to the sex industry, as she was not a hooker or an exotic dancer. She wasn’t even from the LoDo area. She had been abducted from a suburban shopping center as she loaded her groceries into the family mini-van.
From the forensic reports Carly had read, the assailant had been a white male, type O blood. He had not worn a condom so they had DNA samples. The DNA wasn’t in any data base so this was new territory for him. The killer might have been shorter than his victim. The woman had been five foot nine inches. The reports showed the lash marks were made in a slight upward fashion, as if the killer were shorter than five foot nine. The evidence was abundant as to what and how, but nothing was obvious as to the 'who' and 'why'.
Neither Carly nor any of the others in his department had put the puzzle pieces together by the time the second killing had occurred. A twenty-eight year old secretary, single and unattached had been kidnapped from the parking lot of the office building where she worked or the first Thursday of February. She died shortly after midnight. By morning Carly had gotten the call to go to an abandoned storefront, again in the LoDo area. The dispatch told him it looked like a repeat of the January killing. Girded for almost anything after the first murder, Carly was relieved not to see a complete repeat of the first crime. The victim had been killed using the same technique to break her neck, but there were no nails, no brutal whipping, no ‘x’ carved into the forehead like the first woman. The sexual assault was the same, first she was sodomized then raped. The blood type of the murderer was the same as in the first killing. DNA tested proved that fact. The police had a “two-timer” on their hands. Carly was afraid the killer might move to “serial” status, as it would mean a third killing would have to happen.
The oddities that did present themselves to him were many and unique to the murder however. The woman had been tied to a huge wooden beam, with the same cord as used in the first killing. There were no marks on this victim. However, Carly noted the condition of the woman’s feet. They were blistered and bloodied, as if she had been made to walk endlessly. In time the forensics report would tell him she had walked a circular pattern around the warehouse. From the aging of the bloodstains on the floor, they could report she had been made to parade about for a least a couple of hours carrying the beam across her shoulders.
Carly found new puzzle pieces to examine, along with the old ones. With the second murder the only conclusion he could come up with, was the ‘potential’ of a serial killer on his watch. It was too early to make that call, but the press might not wait. He hated to think it was a possibility. The media frenzy alone would get in the way of solving the puzzle, the fear among the people could cripple the process.
The potential became a reality by the first Friday of March.
Nearly identical to the second murder, the third killing differed only slightly. It was the same killer, the hard facts were too obvious. The differences were relatively minor, and then perhaps related to some sadistic scenario the killer enacted with each victim. The cause of death was not a broken neck, as the woman had been thrown from the roof of a LoDo building, a beam tied across her shoulders. Again, the poo
r woman had no indication in her life she was going to die in such fashion. Thirty-five years old of Philippine descent, she had been a mother of three. She disappeared on the Friday morning she died, from a hospital parking lot she where she worked as a nurse. She had just gotten off shift and was headed home to ready her kids for school. She never made it into her car, let alone home to her babies.
As Carly sat at his desk sipping coffee and thinking about the Filipino mother, he wondered aloud, “Amazing! No one ever seems to see this bastard take these poor women. He nabs them in busy parking lots at all hours of the day, yet we have nothing.” His amazement would move to near shock, when two more women died on the first Friday of April.
The facts were brutal as Carly gathered up the puzzle pieces. The fourth and fifth victims were linked together in death and were part of the same macabre scenario it seemed. The fourth woman’s death replicated the second victim’s, except she had been killed in the presence of another woman, who was then killed in turn immediately after the other was slain. Victim number four was an eighteen-year-old waitress, abducted on a Friday evening from in front of her apartment building as she walked home from work. She was stripped, sodomized, raped and forced to march with a beam on her shoulders in front of another woman. When the killer was satisfied, however that might be defined, he had broken her neck. Her head lay in the lap of the other woman. The fifth victim, a forty-three year old secretary, had not been beaten, sodomized or raped like any of the others. She was bound to a chair with common duct tape. Whatever her significance was, it was clear she had been an observer first and foremost.
From statements he had gotten from the secretary’s employer and friends, she had come up missing much earlier in the day. Her car was found at a convenience store parking lot, where she had stopped to get coffee. No one there had really remembered her, let alone saw what had happened to her. Unfortunately, as usual, the store’s video camera was not operable. Carly was stunned by the brazenness of the killer. He kidnapped the victim in broad daylight, then kept her until such time as he could snatch another woman.
The puzzle had spun out of control.
On the first Friday in May, Carly received yet another call to LoDo, this time to a working warehouse.
“What do we have?” he asked the all too familiar uniformed officer who met him at the scene.
The young cop’s voice was somber as it said, “Unfortunately detective, we have a repeat of last month, a double homicide.” Carly gave the man a pat on the shoulder and meager words of encouragement, as the rookie’s sojourn into police work had become a complete nightmare.
They were in an area of the warehouse not currently in use, although much of the building was still active. Carly viewed two more victims of this “Friday Killer” as the press had taken to calling him, since all the victims had died on a Friday. One victim was white, a computer programmer in her early twenties. He eventually learned she had been taken from a mall parking lot much earlier in the day and from the appearance of her body, she had been subdued at the warehouse for several hours. Using duct tape to bind her and gag her, the killer left her alone with her fear as he went trolling for her partner in death. The second woman in this double murder was a thirty-year-old black woman, a junior partner for a downtown law firm. She was the first victim who was not white. While the press made much ado about this change, Carly did not see a link or even significance in the break in the racial pattern, although he was sure there was a point. There was a point…the killer was telling a story. Carly knew it, but he just couldn’t see the words yet.
There had to be a motive though, Carly knew it. The psychology of what was happening was there for everyone to see.
The white woman had been sodomized and raped, then forced to carry the beam before her neck was broken. The black woman had not been sodomized or raped. She had however been forced to carry the beam around before her death. Like the other woman her neck had been snapped, apparently once her role in the brutal tableau was fulfilled.
As Carly and the others in the department worked feverishly to solve the murders, the world about them was in a panic. The killer had murdered seven women in five scenarios. He was brazen in his methods, striking everywhere and anywhere to get his victims. The press had called the police, “Powerless” in a recent editorial. The politicians were doing spin control while exerting extreme amounts of pressure on the police department as a whole.
As Lead Homicide Detective, Carly felt it all.
As the first of June approached, the sense of hysteria increased. Carly tried desperately to separate the murders from his own life, but it was nearly impossible. Sitting in church on a Sunday late in May, Carly felt the threads of the case all about him in an inexplicable way. It was as if he were trying to remember a dream, it seemed familiar but just as he got a detail, an image, the entire scenario drifted away. He heard the priest droning on with a sermon, and in a daze he began to drift, his eyes wandering aimlessly about the church.
And there on a Sunday morning, he finally understood.
The dream came to life. All about this simple Catholic Church where he had attended a mass a couple of hundred Sundays, he began to see as if for the first time, really see and study the pictures circling the walls of the church. There hung, as they had for years were the ‘Stations of the Cross’, the pictorial study of the final trials and tribulations of Christ. Fervently he paged through a prayer book, until he found the story of the ‘Stations’. As he read, he finally understood all the macabre tableaus the killer had left to tell his own story.
Startling Joy and everyone seated around him, he hissed, “The demented bastard! He is acting out the Crucifixion of Christ!”
As if mad like Ichabod Crane who he resembled, he jumped out of his pew clutching the prayer book and raced down the center aisle accompanied by the stares of the other parishioners and the amazement of his abandoned wife. By the time he hit the massive oak doors of the church, he had his cell phone on and was calling his team members from homicide. By the time he was in his car, he had the group on their way to the office. By the time they assembled in the conference room, he had from a sheets flip chart drawn and taped to the walls.
On each piece of news print he had sketched a ‘Station of the Cross’ and next to it, he wrote a number corresponding to the murder the individual Station represented. As the detectives wandered into the room, they did not understand exactly what Carly was trying to tell them, but as he went through his drawing, reading passages from the prayer book he has taken from mass, they began to see, just as he had sitting in the church.
Murder number one represented the first Station, mirroring the stripping of the Christ to the waist, the scourging at the pillar with a knotted cord, just as the murdered woman had been stripped and whipped. A crown of nails replaced the crown of thorns. As Christ was condemned to death, so was the woman marked for death with a simple ‘x’ on her forehead. Then for whatever reason, he sexually assaulted her and killed her.
The second murder paralleled the second Station. Christ carried the cross, so the woman had been forced to carry a makeshift cross, a beam. Once satisfied she had re-enacted the Station, he sodomized, raped and killed her. Murder number three was the same carrying of the cross, with one deviation. Like Jesus falling, the woman fell as well, but off the building roof.
The April killings were confusing for most of the detectives at first, but as Carly said, “…buy the premise, buy the methods…”. Those who bought the premise understood how the fourth and fifth murders were the key to understanding the link between the ‘Stations’ and the killings. The station represented Christ meeting his mother on his way to Golgotha as he carried the cross. In relation to the murders, the fourth victim carried the cross via the beam, while the other woman, representing Mary, watched.
Finally, the fifth station was the May killings which again had two women, one representing Jesus, the other representing Simon of Cyrene. Simon a black man was selected from th
e throngs watching Christ’s struggle, to carry the cross for a portion of the time. The logic was to save Jesus from dying on the road, rather than rob the citizens the spectacle of a crucifixion. The killer using two women, one white woman representing Christ was made to carry the beam, then assaulted and murdered. The black woman representing Simon was forced to carry the beam as well before she was murdered.
As Carly finished his presentation, the crowd of detectives at looking at him in complete silence. They were stunned by the complex, yet simple logic to it all. Every murder was done on a Friday; the same day Christ was said to have been crucified. As the reality and the logic of the ‘Stations’ motif sank in, all hell broke loose in the room. Some thought he was crazy and told him so, in quite graphic terms. Others sat in stunned silence. A couple walked out, thinking Carly was one more detective who had spent way too much time on a case.
The lone person who didn’t react was Chief Inspector Fontaine. He bought the premise, thus he bought the methods. Raised Catholic as well, Fontaine had received the same indoctrination as a child that Carly had…he knew the religion inside and out. He knew the story of Good Friday. He knew the importance of First Friday as a special day for Catholics to earn extra grace by going to confession, then communion on the first Friday of every month. It showed special reverence for Christ by revering the very day of the week he died.
With the Chief Inspector’s support, Carly wasn’t laughed out of the room and into meter maid duty. Over the next four or five hours, as they poured over some hastily rounded up Catholic missiles, or prayer books, Carly slowly went through his presentation again. Station by Station, point by point, Carly made his case. At the end, most of the detectives were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
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