by BJ Bourg
“Yeah,” I said. “He’s really disturbed. Of course, this is enough to disturb anyone.”
Abraham, Dawn, and I then set out to scour every inch of the field while waiting for the sheriff to send someone with tools. We didn’t find anything that brought us any closer to finding the killer or identifying our victim. After we’d been at it for nearly two hours, the chopping sound of helicopter blades greeted us like a hot meal on a cold day.
“It’s Ben,” I said when the chopper came into view.
Ben Baxter, our department’s helicopter pilot, landed his bird in the open field several dozen yards away and Detective Rachael Bowler, who was also on my sniper team, jumped out when he stopped. She was followed by Detective Melvin Ford, and each of them carried a large come-along in their hands.
“There’s an extension ladder secured to the helicopter skids,” Melvin said when he reached us. “The sheriff said you needed to get up in a tree. We also have some shovels.”
I nodded gratefully and hurried to retrieve the ladder. I stopped to say a few words to Ben—after all, I owed him my life—and then lugged the ladder to the oak tree. Once I’d scaled up the tree and secured the come-alongs in place, we each grabbed a shovel and began digging out the back of the cross.
The heat from the sun was relentless and it was so humid it felt like we were being water boarded. Thankfully, Ben had also loaded a case of bottled water and a box of chicken, and we stopped often to drink and once to eat.
On any given day at any given crime scene, someone would’ve made a joke about something by now, but we were all numb from the grisly discovery and kept to our own thoughts, speaking only when we had to.
Even with the lunch break, it didn’t take long for us to dig a long trench behind the cross that was a little wider than the treated board, and at least six feet long. When we had all stepped back, I gave the cross a gentle push and it strained against the cable that held it in place. It was ready to fall over. We just needed to provide some slack from the come-alongs.
Rachael climbed the ladder first and crawled out onto a large tree branch. From her perch, she was able to access the come-along on the left side and she gave a nod when she was ready. Abraham climbed the ladder next and shimmied onto a branch on the right side, where the second come-along was located.
Dawn, Melvin, and I stood in front of the cross and—wearing several layers of latex gloves—gave it a gentle push. As we applied constant pressure, Rachael and Abraham began releasing the slack in the come-along cables. The gears clicked loudly in the otherwise stillness of the sweltering afternoon as Rachael and Abraham worked the release switch little by little. With each click, the cross lowered a few inches at a time. It was a painstaking process, but the head of the cross was soon several feet from the ground. The base had stabbed into the earth because of the steep angle and the depth of the hole, so we had to gather around and lift the cross into the air and drag it from the hole.
Although the weight of the body and cross were distributed among four of us, I could feel how heavy it was. Once we had set the cross onto the flat ground, we all took a breath and stepped back.
Rachael was pale. “The sheriff told us what was going on, but this is not what I expected it to look like—it’s much more horrible than anything I could’ve imagined.”
“Yeah,” Melvin acknowledged, averting his eyes. “I thought I was going to lose my breakfast when I first saw her. I just keep imagining it happening to my wife or my mom and it makes me sick.”
I didn’t want to imagine anything bad happening to Dawn again, so I focused on the task at hand. The sooner we solved the case and brought the killer to justice, the safer our parish would be.
I knelt beside the woman and gently pushed her eyelids open. Her eyes were cloudy, but I could tell they were green.
“What’s that?” Dawn asked, pointing to her left cheek.
I leaned close and examined what looked like snail tracks across her face. “It’s saliva!” I said. “Someone spat in her face.”
“It shows contempt, disrespect, or anger,” Dawn said, pulling out a DNA swab kit, “but that one act of raw emotion might help us catch the killer.”
After Dawn swabbed the saliva sample and secured the evidence, we determined the victim’s height to be five-seven and she appeared to be about a hundred and forty-five pounds. Next, I tried to bend one of her toes. It didn’t budge. I checked her hands, as well, but they were also stiff.
“She’s been dead over six hours.” I turned to Abraham. “What time did you get the call?”
“Nine minutes before eight,” he said without hesitation. “I arrived at eight-oh-four.”
I liked how sure he was of his information and how precise. While time of death estimations were not exact, she was most likely dead by seven that morning.
I continued my examination, noting how the holes in her wrists and feet were a jagged mess. I’d played with railroad spikes as a kid and, as I recalled, they weren’t sharp. Whoever nailed these blunt fingers of death into this poor woman had inflicted a heap of pain upon her and she suffered greatly before she died—and death had come slow.
I moved the hair from her face so Dawn could get a good identifying photograph. If no one reported her missing, we might need to get an artist to recreate her image in a less grotesque state for dissemination to the media.
“She looks young, maybe forty-one or forty-two,” I said to Dawn, “but that might be because she’s taken good care of herself. She might be a little older.”
“I’d put her closer to fifty,” Dawn said, pointing to her eyes and neck. “These lines tell a different story to us women.”
I knew better than to argue. I copied all of the identifiable information we had complied onto a separate sheet of paper and handed it to Abraham. “Can you check with dispatch to see if anyone fitting her description has been reported missing?”
He nodded and hurried to the helicopter, where Ben was sitting with the doors open, and used one of the satellite phones in the chopper. Even from that distance I could see how wet the front of Ben’s shirt was, but he just sat there, patiently waiting for us to finish processing the scene. Since we couldn’t get a coroner’s wagon back where we were, we would have to transport the body by helicopter, so he was stuck there until we were done.
While Dawn collected blood swabs and recovered the handwritten note from above the victim’s head, I retrieved some tools from the helicopter and prepared to remove the spikes from the woman’s feet and hands. I would’ve preferred to cut away the portion of the board that was attached to the nail, but we couldn’t do it without risking damage to the woman’s limbs.
When Dawn was done with her duties, she helped me spread white butcher’s paper under the cross in the area of the hands and feet, so it could catch any microscopic evidence that would break away once we removed the spikes.
I then grabbed a crowbar and a block of wood and set out to remove the large spikes from our victim’s hands and feet.
CHAPTER 9
I loaded the last of our crime scene boxes into the back of my truck and watched as Dawn signed the release paperwork for the coroner’s investigator. Ben had made several trips from the crime scene to the complainant’s home, transporting the body, the large treated boards, and then our gear. After waving his goodbyes, he disappeared into the afternoon sky, where the sun was lazily dipping to the west.
It was six o’clock and, while our counterparts had knocked off of work an hour ago, Dawn and I were just getting started. Abraham had notified us that there were no missing person cases filed within the last few days in Magnolia or any of the surrounding parishes, so we would have to pound the pavement.
After securing all of the evidence we’d recovered into the evidence cage at the detective bureau in Payneville, we worked late into the night canvassing the neighborhoods in Plymouth East that were within a few miles of the scene. We began with the landowner upon whose property the body had been found, but they
hadn’t heard or seen anything suspicious. The man who owned the property hadn’t gone to the back of his property in several days, but when he was there everything had been normal.
The neighbors who lived along the highway to the east and west also didn’t see or hear anything, nor did they know of anyone who was missing. When we ran out of people to interview, we headed home for the night. The autopsy had been scheduled for first thing the next morning and we both planned on attending, so we needed to get some sleep.
Our clothes were stiff from grime and sweat and we disrobed in the laundry room and dropped everything straight into the washer, slipping extra detergent pods with the load. Next, we showered together, but we didn’t fool around and we didn’t talk much. After we’d eaten and crawled into bed, Dawn leaned into me and placed her cool hand on my chest.
“I can’t get the image of that woman out of my head,” she whispered hoarsely. “She’s all I see now. I see her when my eyes are open and I see her when they’re closed.”
I stared up into the darkness and nodded. Everything I was thinking had already been spoken throughout the day out at the scene, so I just said we needed to catch the evil person or persons who did it before they struck again.
“And if we don’t?”
“Then I hope this was a one-time incident.” I sighed. “If not, God help his next victim.”
CHAPTER 10
3:10 a.m., Sunday, August 17
I quietly rolled out of bed, careful not to stir Dawn from her sleep. I’d lain wide awake for the last few hours just staring into the darkness, so I figured I’d get up and move around. I grabbed my laptop and sat on the sofa to research death by crucifixion. What I already knew about it wasn’t good—it was a slow and excruciating death, often taking several days, and the cause of death was usually exhaustion or asphyxiation.
Our victim had been dead since at least seven o’clock Saturday morning, but she had been hanging on that cross for much longer. The temperatures had reached the triple digits every day for the past three weeks, and this weekend was no exception. The cross had been erected in the direct sunlight and that might have contributed to an accelerated death, but it wouldn’t have been any less painful.
I searched through some old historic articles and even turned to the Bible to see what it had to say about the method of punishment, and everything I read confirmed it was a form of humiliation killing that was often used to dissuade others from behaving in the same manner as the one crucified.
I leaned back against the sofa and pondered this nugget of information. Someone had affixed a sign calling the victim a sinner, but what was her alleged sin? If she had committed some sort of sin, was it possible someone was trying to use her as an example to dissuade others from committing that same sin?
“We need to find her sin,” I said out loud.
“Whose sin?”
I turned to see Dawn standing in the doorway to the living room, wearing nothing but one of my long T-shirts. Her eyes were half closed and she leaned heavily against the doorframe.
“What’re you doing up?” I asked, placing my laptop on the sofa and hurrying to her side. She fell into my arms and held up her phone.
“We’re getting called out again,” she mumbled, her moist lips dancing against my neck as she spoke. “It seems they found an abandoned car shoved between some cane field rows on the shortcut road to Plymouth East.”
That got my attention. “Who’s it registered to?”
“I don’t know. I just got the text message and started reading it when I realized you weren’t in bed.” She rubbed her eyes and held her phone a few inches from her face, squinting to read the entire thing. “Some woman named Kathleen Bertrand—”
Dawn’s eyes widened and she was suddenly wide awake. “This might be our victim!”
“How so?”
“She’s five-seven, a hundred forty-eight pounds, short dirty blonde hair, green eyes, and dark complexion.” Dawn looked at me and nodded her head slowly. “This has got to be her.”
“Well, let’s go.”
Dawn and I dressed as quickly as we could—pulling on jeans and collared T-shirts—and raced to the Plymouth East shortcut road. Although it was formally named Plymouth East Access Road and many people referred to it as a “shortcut”, it didn’t come close to reaching Plymouth East. Instead, it was simply a loop between Highway Eighty and Plymouth Highway and was mostly used by the cane farmers who worked the fields in that area.
When we turned off of Plymouth Highway onto the shortcut road, we saw the deputy’s strobe lights flashing brilliantly up ahead.
“I still can’t believe no one’s reported her missing,” Dawn said when I pulled my truck to a stop behind the patrol cruiser.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I asked.
She nodded. “Where in the hell’s her husband or children and why haven’t they missed her yet?”
We dropped from the truck and walked around to the front of the patrol cruiser, where Abraham Wilson was standing near a four-by-four truck speaking with a young boy and girl. They looked to be high school age and both had dark hair. The girl was standing with her hands wrapped around her shoulders and, although it had to be in the low eighties, she was shivering. The mud on the tires and the time of morning told the rest of the story—these kids had been sneaking off for a romp in the fields.
Abraham instructed the young couple to wait in their truck and he turned to Dawn and me.
“Why are you out so early?” I asked, wondering if he was also having problems sleeping. I didn’t have to wonder for long.
“I couldn’t sleep, so I came on shift early.” He shot his thumb toward the truck. “These lovebirds were trying to find a place to practice procreation and stumbled upon an abandoned vehicle.” He reached into the open window of his cruiser and handed me a printout from his onboard computer. “This is the DL photo of the registered owner. I think she’s the victim from yesterday.”
I pursed my lips and held the picture so Dawn could see. The woman was smiling and she’d worn makeup for her driver’s license photo, but there was no doubt it was our victim. Dawn took the printout from me and stood staring at it in the flashing lights, her face expressionless.
I turned back to Abraham. “Can you show us the vehicle?”
After telling the two kids to stay put, Abraham led us down a wet and muddy cane field road. It had rained during the night and, while it didn’t help cool off the place, it sopped up the ground and gave the mosquitoes something to cheer about.
There were two sets of tire tracks leading to and from the heart of the road. I shined my light on the ground and compared the tracks. They were the same. “Did you check the tires on the couple’s truck?”
I saw Abraham’s head move up and down as he walked. “They appear to match. I’m guessing the victim’s car was driven here some time before the rain, because there’s no sign of tracks matching her tires.”
As we continued walking, we stayed to the right side of the road where clumps of grass formed small islands of semi-solid ground, but it wasn’t long before warm water seeped into my boots and saturated my socks. I heard Dawn silently curse in front of me, and I knew her feet were wet, too.
The cane was tall—at least nine feet high—and it was so dark in the shadows along the road that the moonlight didn’t dare reach that low. Even our tactical flashlights seemed weak against the sheer depth of blackness that surrounded us.
“It’s right up ahead,” Abraham called after a few minutes of trudging along.
Sweat dripped down my face, but it was nothing compared to the tiny needles from the mosquitoes drilling for blood along my exposed neck, arms, and face. I didn’t even bother swatting them away, because legions more would take their places.
Even after Abraham pointed it out, I had to look hard to see where the car was hidden. Someone had driven it right between two rows of cane, but there wasn’t as much damage to the ground as I would’ve expected. U
pon closer inspection, I saw deep ruts and damaged cane along both rows, but stalks of cane had been propped up to conceal the damage.
“How in the hell did those kids find this?” I asked, beginning to wonder if they had some knowledge of the case.
Abraham shook his flashlight and it reflected off the taillights. “When the fellow turned his truck around right here it caught the taillights.”
Dawn nodded. “That makes sense.”
I examined the ground between the rows. The mud was wet and there was standing water along the packed earth between the rows, but there were no shoe impressions. I aimed my light deep between the rows and shook my head. Whoever drove it must’ve hit the gap at a nice clip, because the car had plunged at least twenty feet into the field.
Abraham showed us the route he took to get to the car—between the rows to the left—and we followed him through the narrow opening. The sharp leaves of the cane sliced at our arms and necks as we walked, leaving behind an annoying burning sensation, but we didn’t pay it much attention. We were all focused on finding out what had happened to our victim and we were hoping this vehicle would offer some clues.
I stepped through a spider’s web just as we reached the driver’s door. I tried to wipe all of it from my face, but to no avail. I finally gave up and, along with Abraham and Dawn, shined my light into the windows. It was a little black SUV and it was fully loaded. The seats were leather and everything was power-activated, even the rearview mirror.
“I didn’t touch anything,” Abraham explained. “I used my light to search through the windows to make sure there were no other victims. Once I realized it was clear, I backed out and called for y’all.”
I thanked him and told him he had done a great job. He seemed pleased, but even more so when Dawn added that his dad, who was a former Magnolia Parish detective, would be proud.
