One of them pushed me aside, knocking me to the ground, but before they could fire at Teddy, Merrill had come up behind him and wrestled him to the ground, relieving him of the revolver in the process.
“You keep saying you don’t remember what happened,” Special Agent Fred Scott was saying.
He was a middle-aged white man with a toughness about him. He hadn’t spent his career in a classroom or behind a desk, but on the street. His balding head reflected the dull light of the florescent bulbs and his cold gray eyes were in a state of perpetual squint.
“I don’t,” I said.
“But you had the presence of mind to bring her into your dad’s jurisdiction before you finished her off.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but he was right. The fact that we wound up in Potter County made me look all the more like a cold-hearted, calculating bastard who had committed premeditated murder.
“You were smart to bring her here,” he said. “And if we hadn’t gotten involved in the case, who knows, you might have gotten away with it. But we are involved and we’re gonna fuckin’ fry your fuckin’ ass if you don’t come clean and admit what you did.”
We were in an interview room in the Potter County Sheriff ’s office. We appeared to be alone, but I knew we weren’t. I wasn’t sure who was beyond the plate glass mirrored window, but I knew we were being observed and recorded.
“Come on,” he said. “We got your blood and cum and prints. The evidence is overwhelming. We’ll get a conviction. Piece-a-cake, but be a man and tell us in your own words what happened. Don’t make her family suffer through a long, drawn-out trial. At least give them that.”
“I wish I could,” I said.
After letting me sit in a holding cell for a couple of hours, they had dumped me in here where I sat for a while longer. My head throbbed. My eyes stung. I was weak and weary, and felt like I might fall over any moment.
“I want you to see what you did to her,” he said, stepping over to the door. Opening it, he yelled, “Why’s it taking so long to get the goddam crime scene photos down here… ? What… ? Why the hell not…? Who the fuck—?”
Slamming the door, he took three quick steps and bent down in my face.
“Why’d you take your dad’s copies of the crime scene photos?” he asked. “Couldn’t stand for him to see what his son had done to a sweet, innocent, kind, vulnerable, beautiful young woman?”
“I didn’t—”
“She wasn’t beautiful when you finished with her, was she?” he asked.
I didn’t say anything, images of Laura’s bruised and beaten face flashing in my mind.
“After you strangled and sodomized her,” he continued. “And beat her until her own mother couldn’t recognize her. Hell, she’s still hoping her little girl’s gonna come home to her, but she’s not, is she? Her parents and her little sister are gonna have to have a closed casket funeral for her, aren’t they? You made good and goddam sure of that, didn’t you? You piece of shit. How could you do such a thing? What’d she do to you? Tell me. I want to know. She make fun of your little pecker? She tell you she was fuckin’ other men? She tell you’ No’ when you told her you wanted to fuck her up the ass?”
I took a very deep breath and let it out slowly, reminding myself to remain calm. “I honestly don’t know what happened,” I said.
“Bullshit.”
“Give me a polygraph,” I said. “If it proves I’m not lying, then hypnotize me to see if what happened is locked inside my head somehow. I want to know as much as you do.”
Before he could respond, there was a tap on the door and it was opened by another FDLE agent who asked to speak with him.
He was gone a while, and as I sat there in the small cold room alone, I became overwhelmed and began to cry.
It was embarrassing. I knew people were watching, but I couldn’t stop. When I thought about what I had done, I just couldn’t imagine it. How could I live with myself? How could I not do to myself what Laura’s father had failed to do? My life was over. Everything was gone. Nothing would ever be the same again.
The pressure bearing down on me was crushing. Until this moment, I had hoped I might find out that I hadn’t done it after all, that I really wasn’t capable, but now I knew. Now, confronted with the man I was, I just couldn’t take it.
I thought about Anna, about Mom. What must they think of me?
I couldn’t blame this on alcohol. This was me—who I was.
The door opened, and Scott walked back in.
“I’m very sorry, Mr. Jordan,” he said. “I was just doing my job. I hope you can understand.”
I didn’t say anything, just wiped the tears from my eyes and sniffed.
“You’re free to go,” he said.
“What?” I asked. “Why?”
“Think I’ll let your friend tell you about that,” he said. “And again, I’m very sorry.”
When I stepped out of the interview room and started down the hall, I saw Merrill standing at the end of it in a dark suit and tie, a detective shield on his belt, a .45 clipped on the side.
I walked toward him.
“What’s going on?” I asked when I reached him.
“Told you,” he said. “You didn’t do it.”
He turned and began to walk toward the door, and I fell in step with him.
“You impersonating an officer?” I asked.
“I made an arrest,” he said.
I nodded.
“At the time, it was false arrest and imprisonment and I’s impersonating an officer, but your dad backed me up and even deputized me eventually—which was good of him considerin’ I stole his crime scene photos.”
“You solved the case?”
“And got a confession,” he said.
“How?”
“It was easy,” he said. “All I did was WWJJD. What Would John Jordan Do?”
I smiled.
“I thought about how obsessed Laura was with you,” he said. “By the way, found out some more about that. You really was the prey, not the predator. She never was followed or harassed. Only thing Taylor did was break up with her.”
I nodded.
We reached the door and walked outside into the darkness and over toward his truck, but didn’t get in.
“In my WWJJD mode I realized that Laura wasn’t the only one obsessed,” he said.
“There are other women obsessed with me?”
He shook his head. “All other women obsessed with me,” he said. “But there was a cat obsessed with Laura.”
“Fritz,” I said.
“You good at WWJJD,” he said.
I laughed.
“He killed her?”
“Looped back around after we chased his ass,” he said. “He’s hoping for a little gratitude, maybe he finally get to tap that ass like she been hinting and what does he see but you two back together. He follows the two of you, his rage building. At the landing he finds you passed out and her asleep and decides to collect on what she owes him. Says he didn’t mean to kill her, that she hit her head on a cypress knee, but I ain’t buying that.”
“You’re truly amazing,” I said. “I know I don’t mention it too much.”
“Can’t mention it too much,” he said.
“I’ll step it up,” I said.
“I remember him saying he was her best friend,” he said. “He covered by saying he meant he was until you came along, but he already knew she was dead ’cause it was his fast ass self that killed her.”
I thought about Merrill being in his CO uniform the first time we met with Fritz. “Did he really think you were a detective?”
He nodded. “Told him my CO uniform was a deputy uniform,” he said. “And that I had just been promoted to plainclothes detective.”
“He confess to you?”
“I brought him into one of the conference rooms, made sure it was being recorded,” he said. “Acted like I knew just what the fuck I was doin’. Felt like Denzel playin�
� a cop—’cept I look better. Told him we had his DNA—blood, semen, saliva—then I laid all the crime scene photos out on the table in front of him and sympathized with him about what a faithless slut she was and how she had no taste in men and pretty soon I couldn’t get him to shut up. Hell, I thought he was gonna confess to being the gunman on the grassy knoll.”
I smiled. “You’re a good cop,” I said. “Dad could partner you and Jake up and—”
“I just saved your life,” he said.
“You really did,” I said.
“You’ve done it for me a time or two in the past,” he said.
“Did he say how I got the scratches on my neck and the blood on my hands?”
“Say she was grabbing for you as he pullin’ her out the car,” he said.
My heart ached, my stomach sank as I thought about Laura reaching out to me for help. I had been unable to help her only because I had gotten drunk.
“When he put her back in the car he grabbed your arms rubbed your hands in her blood,” he continued. “Tryin’ to set you up.”
We were quiet a moment as I thought about everything.
“Thank you,” I said. “I’m really—”
“Once is enough,” he said. “Don’t mention it again.”
“That’ll be difficult,” I said.
“Your dad said to tell you he’ll come by your place later,” he said. “He’s booking Fritz and givin’ Scott hell for messin’ with his son.”
We got in his truck.
“Come on,” he said. “I’m droppin’ your ass off at a meeting while I go get some WWJJD bracelets printed up.”
Image of Blood
My mother had drunk herself to death. She just wasn’t dead yet.
As if a metaphor of her life, the room Mom was spending her final days in was dark and depressingly empty, and she had resisted all attempts on my part to change it.
“There’s something I need you to do for me,” she said.
Her pale, once beautiful face flickered in the light from a cable channel on an old television at the end of her bed.
“Anything,” I said.
“I want you to solve a mystery for me,” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“I just watched a special on the Shroud of Turin,” she said. “I’ve got to know if it’s real. I want you to investigate it for me.”
For a moment, I didn’t say anything, her request so bizarre as to render me speechless. “What?” I asked. “Why?”
“A woman in Turin was healed as she gazed upon it,” she said.
“The Shroud?”
“Yeah.”
I shook my head.
I thought we were past this. Over the last several months, I had witnessed my mom, in nearly textbook fashion, pass from denial to anger to bargaining to depression to what I thought was a place of acceptance. Either I had been wrong about where she was, or she was reverting to an earlier stage.
“If it’s real,” she said. “I mean really the burial cloth of Christ, then I believe I can be healed by gazing into Jesus’ face at the moment of his resurrection. It’s being displayed next month. If you find out it’s real, I want you to take me to see it.”
I found myself still unable to respond.
Never particularly religious before, lately Mom had become increasingly and desperately superstitious. It depressed me to think that I had failed to help her, finding myself awkward and impotent with her where I was usually confident and helpful with others.
“Do you know anything about it?” she asked.
“Just what makes the headlines.”
“Don’t you want to know?” she said. “Why haven’t you ever studied it?”
I shrugged.
“Really,” she said. “I want to know.”
“I’m not sure,” I said, though I was. “I guess I’ve just always assumed it wasn’t real, but even if it is, it’s not really relevant to my faith.”
She shook her head in incomprehension. “What does that mean?”
“I’m always very leery of anything that claims to prove— especially scientifically—matters of faith. Matters that by their very nature cannot be proven.”
“But still,” she said. “I don’t understand why you wouldn’t want to know if it’s real.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to know,” I said. “It’s—I guess I really think we can’t know. But like I said, either way, it’s not relevant to what I believe. If it’s real, it won’t increase my faith. If it’s not, it won’t decrease it.”
Talking about faith reminded me of just how much I had been questioning mine lately—not from a belief or doctrinal perspective, but from one of meaning and usefulness. I was finding it increasingly difficult to feel fulfilled in my work as a prison chaplain and wondered if I might make a greater contribution by doing something else with my life.
“Not everyone has faith as strong as yours, John,” she said.
I laughed. “Nothing about me is strong,” I said. “Especially my faith.”
“You can’t really believe that,” she said. “You’re so strong. So … you help so many people.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but you’re obviously looking through the eyes of love.”
“They’re the only ones I have,” she said.
We were silent a moment, I, wondering if I could really do what she was asking of me.
“Will you investigate the Shroud for me?”
I nodded. “I’m not sure what I can do,” I said, “but I’ll look into it and let you know.”
“And if it’s authentic, will you take me to Italy to see it?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said, believing I was merely making an empty promise to a desperate and dying woman.
On my way home, I stopped by the public library and checked out the only three books they had on the Shroud of Turin. When I got home, I looked it up on the Internet as I ate the pizza I had ordered from Sal’s.
I was surprised to find so much information and interest about the Shroud online, but I guess I shouldn’t have been. It seemed that in the last several years, interest in the Shroud had increased and intensified. There were hundreds of books, journals, and articles, many of them new, and thousands of web sites. There would be no lack of evidence in this case, no shortage of clues.
As I read, I was surprised and a little amused to find that I was almost immediately caught up in the mystery of the most studied relic in human history, and the more I learned, the more the enigmatic image on the shroud began to haunt me.
Was I looking into the face of God?
Was I a fool even to ask such a question?
When I finished my preliminary reading, I knew a lot more about the world’s most famous textile.
The Shroud of Turin is a well-preserved oblong linen cloth over fourteen feet long and nearly four feet wide. One side of the cloth bears the front and back images of a man appearing to be laid out in death. The fact that there are two views, both front and back, seems to indicate that the man of the Shroud was laid upon it, his head coming roughly to the center. Then it was folded to cover the front of his body. The faint sepia image appears to be scorched or lightly burned onto the surface of the off-white linen.
In addition to the scorched images, brownish and carmine-colored marks throughout, said to be blood stains, are heaviest at the wrists, feet, and a wound on the right side of the body. There are also many smaller stains covering the front and back of the image believed by many to be evidence of blood resulting from the beating, whipping, and thorn-piercing of the body.
According to the gospels, Jesus was removed from the cross and placed in a tomb, where he was wrapped in cloth in accordance with Jewish custom. But few, if any, records exist from that time to detail the burial cloth’s whereabouts.
The Shroud of Turin became public in 1349, when a French knight named Geoffrey de Charny was said to have acquired it in Constantinople and brought it to the attention of Pope Clement VI. The Shroud
was held in a church in Lirey, France, and was first shown publicly in 1355.
Since that first exhibition, many have questioned the Shroud’s authenticity since forging religious artifacts was big business during medieval times.
After reading a description of the shroud, I carefully examined the best picture I could find of it.
Flesh and Blood Page 22
