The Confession

by Tom Lowe

  Elizabeth said nothing, lowering the phone from her ear, eyes welling. She looked across the room at a framed picture of her daughter. It was Molly’s senior year in college, and she was holding a butterfly on the tip of her finger, the butterfly’s wings deep blue, Molly smiling, her eyes filled with wonder.

  “Elizabeth, are you there?”

  “I’ll go to the cemetery as soon as I can.” She disconnected, lowering herself into a kitchen chair, Wanda’s smile and words echoing in her thoughts. “So, we had a small image of a red rose tattooed on my wrist just to remind me I’m loved. Isn’t that romantic?”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  New Shepherd Baptist Church and cemetery was less than twenty-five miles from Elizabeth’s house. But it felt like a thousand miles as she drove through traffic, glancing at her watch and thinking about what Mike had shared with her. “The man who found the body. He said there is a tattoo on the wrist.”

  She came up to New Shepherd Baptist Church and felt her pulse quicken. The old church looked like it had been on the same spot since Mississippi was officially a state. Two massive oak trees stood on both sides of the church. It was made from chipped red brick, thick mortar the color of old bones, the small white steeple set near the front of the roof. Four steps led to the entrance. But no one was near the entrance. They were in the cemetery behind the church.

  Elizabeth counted three sheriff’s cars, two unmarked detective cars, a dark blue van from the coroners’ office, an ambulance, and a state trooper’s vehicle. No one had emergency lights flashing. It was beyond that. This wasn’t an emergency in the sense of life or death. It was a death. A cold and cruel death because it was a murder. This was a body recovery from a place filled with dead bodies, an old cemetery.

  Elizabeth parked near one of the mammoth oak trees and got out of her car. She stood there for a minute, looking at the scene. There were men and a woman in law enforcement uniforms, a few detectives in plainclothes, two people wearing light windbreaker jackets with the words Medical Examiner on their backs, and three with CSI on their shirts. There was a gravesite cordoned off in yellow crime scene tape. Most of the deputies and others stayed behind that tape until the detectives could thoroughly analyze the scene.

  Elizabeth walked closer, a squirrel scampered up the oak, the whirr of honeybees in rose bushes planted next to the church, the motionless air with the scent of rotting wood. The closer she got, the more she felt her heart race. She could see Mike Bradford and two other detectives standing next to a freshly dug grave. And she could see something protruding out of the soil. From the distance, it looked like a small limb bare of leaves.

  But it wasn’t. It was a human arm.

  The arm extended from the elbow to the hand. Elizabeth stepped closer, breathing through her nostrils, the sound of police radios overriding the birdsong. The repulsion of the scene was like the film set of a horror movie. But this was real. Too real. This was the mark of evil in its purest form. It wasn’t enough just to kill the woman, the killer was compelled to leave a statement—a calling card, by staging a scene—propping the arm through the dark and damp soil.

  She watched as Bradford squatted near the arm, meticulously looking at it. He lowered his eyes to the ground, inspecting, looking for anything that may have been left behind more than what was obvious. A crime scene photographer, a woman, took pictures from various angles. The other two CSI techs searched the nearby graves, woodlands, an adjacent field, and the hard-packed dirt parking lot.

  She watched Bradford stand and speak with his partner, Bill Lee. She couldn’t hear their conversation, but from the expressions on their faces, she could tell that the men—both with many years in law enforcement, looked like someone had hit them in the gut. Lee shook his head, motioned to another detective, and the three of them talked for a few seconds. The detectives stepped over the yellow tape and spoke with the older man wearing a CSI shirt.

  Within half a minute, the two male CSI techs were at the grave with shovels. They carefully began digging, each man with the look of personal loss on his face as more of the body was exposed. It didn’t take them long. One man used a small hand brush to gently sweep the soil from the dead woman’s face. From where she was standing, Elizabeth couldn’t see specifically what the detectives were viewing, but she could see Bradford’s face. And that was enough. She knew by his reaction that it was Wanda Donnelly’s body in the shallow grave.

  After the CSI techs scraped away the remailing soil and took more pictures, they carefully lifted the corpse from the grave to a gurney that had been rolled up near it. As much as Elizabeth wanted to look away, she couldn’t. She needed to confirm what she felt. She thought about the time police removed Molly’s and Mark’s bodies from a grave in the Ocala National Forest. The sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach, the horrendous numbness of loss, was here—right in front of her … again.

  When they lifted the body from the hole, Elizabeth recognized the server’s uniform, the blue jean fabric dress and the apron with the words Front Porch Café stitched on the right side.

  And she recognized the hair. The once warm and friendly face, now ashen.

  When they set Wanda Donnelly’s body on the gurney, Elizabeth could see the silver pendant of the necklace reflect the dappled sunlight. She felt a weakness in her legs, her heart pounding, eyes burning, remembering what Wanda had said about sand dollars. “It’s five petals. Sort of like God used a starfish for inspiration. No real dollar on earth is nearly as wonderful. My mom gave this to me for my birthday.”

  “Ma’am, are you okay?” asked a young male deputy near her.

  Elizabeth nodded.

  He studied her for a second and said, “Aren’t you Doctor Monroe?”

  “Yes.”

  “I saw you at the last crime scene where that young couple was murdered. Any idea what kind of crazy person does this? Do you think it could be the same person who killed this woman?”

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Elizabeth said, walking to an area with less people. She looked back at the grave as they pulled a white sheet over the body and began rolling the gurney in the direction of a blue cargo van. She saw Bradford spot her from where he stood next to the yellow tape. He turned and spoke with two other detectives and then stepped over the tape and started walking in her direction.

  And then he looked beyond where Elizabeth stood, something catching his eye. He paused and called for two deputies. He told them something, one deputy nodded and picked up a spool of crime scene tape from the open truck of his cruiser. He and the other deputy began stringing the tape further from the gravesite.

  Elizabeth looked toward the entrance of the church. She saw two TV news trucks coming toward the cemetery. She knew the extended new boundary, established by the yellow tape, would keep them at bay temporarily—a paper fence in front of wolves eyeing a quarry in the distance.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  It didn’t take the news media long to descend on the historic church and its 161 year-old-cemetery. Most of the graves, some dating back to the Civil War, were of generations of families that had connections to the church. However, the latest burial, Elizabeth thought, most likely had nothing to do with the families or their ancestors in these graves.

  But it did have something to do with the church.

  Maybe not this particular church under the long shadows of the oaks, although considering what the suspect had said to Brian Woods and Olivia Curtis—what he probably said to Wanda before he killed her, there was a fanatical link to some form of organized religion.

  Where and exactly how, Elizabeth thought. She remembered what Wanda had said about the man who’d sat in her serving section at the restaurant, in the booth with the morning sun coming up over the parking lot angled at his shoulders. “He quoted some passage in the Bible from Leviticus, that says something like … you shall not make any cuttings in your flesh or tattoo marks on you.”

  Elizabeth watched the coroner’s staff wheel the body up to the blue va
n, the news media confined behind the extended new boundaries of the yellow crime-scene tape, their cameras rolling. Reporters and crew from three television stations, and reporters from newspapers and radio stations. Cameras clicking. Notepads out.

  The coroner secured the gurney and body in the van and slammed the door shut, the hollow noise reverberating across the grounds, like the iron bars of a jail cell closing in the face of a first-time prisoner. The shock of the noise, the reality of an exposed toilet, obscene graffiti on the walls, and a six by eight cage, was sobering.

  So was the death of a young mother. Elizabeth played back what Wanda had said about the man in the booth. “Then the creep said something in a foreign language I didn’t recognize. I was so mad I just walked away.”

  Elizabeth mumbled quietly to herself, “Et roborabitur fortitudo eius in hora mortis. Is that what he said to her?”

  Bradford removed his plastic gloves and the white booties around his shoes and walked across the lawn to where Elizabeth stood alone. He said, “I’m so sorry. I know you were close to Wanda.”

  Elizabeth folded her arm across her breasts, brown purse hanging from her left shoulder. She looked up at Bradford, her eyes wet and face flushed. “We’ve got to find this perp. I can only imagine the horror Wanda must have felt looking into his face before he killed her. Do you think it was Boyd Baxter?”

  “It’s a good possibility. And I hope we can find one single piece of forensic evidence that’s linked to him. I’d like nothing better than to arrest him.”

  “Why out here? Why bury her in this old cemetery? I wonder if Boyd Baxter is or was a member of the church.”

  “We’ll find out shortly. I don’t think Wanda was killed here. I think she was killed somewhere else and her body was brought here, buried in that shallow grave, the killer taking great effort to position her arm through the soil as if he wanted her reaching up to heaven. Damn sick.”

  Elizabeth watched the coroner’s van pull away; news media cameras trained on the departure. She said, “The killer left Wanda’s right hand sticking up out of the grave because the rose tattoo on her wrist had some significance to him. He staged the scene to put her tattooed arm on a macabre display.”

  “The groundskeeper was the one who found her here. Said he was at the cemetery to dig a new grave and spotted the makeshift grave when he was unloading his truck.”

  “Where is he?”

  Bradford pointed to an older man in coveralls standing to the far right of the deputies speaking with a detective. “His name is Al Benson. Said he’s dug all the graves in this cemetery in the last twenty years. He was pretty shaken up by what he found.”

  “Could he be a suspect?”

  “Of course, he could be a suspect, but he comes across as very credible.” Bradford watched the news media, reporters anxious, some pacing. “In a little while, remind me to tell you what he thought when he saw the way the arm and hand were positioned.”

  Elizabeth said nothing for a moment, the sound of an acorn falling through the limbs of an oak tree. “Could you tell how she died?”

  “We’ll wait for the autopsy, of course, but on first look it appeared like she may have been strangled. There were purple ligature marks around her neck.”

  Elizabeth closed her eyes for a second and exhaled. “That’s a horrible way to die. Mike, I keep thinking of what Wanda told us about the man you interviewed, Boyd Baxter. She said he said something to her in a language she didn’t recognize. I wonder if it was Latin, and what he told her in Latin he told her in English just before he killed her.”

  “Or it could have been German.”

  “German?”

  “When Bill and I were questioning him about the Nazi propaganda in his house, he said he memorized two quotes attributed to Hitler. He said he could recite them in English and German. He spoke his favorite in German, and then in English he said it meant, ‘As a Christian, I have no duty to allow myself to be cheated, but I have the duty to be a fighter for truth and justice.’ ”

  “So, Baxter believes Adolf Hitler was a Christian?” Elizabeth glanced at the coroner’s van, now in the distance.

  “How sick is that? We’ll see how close the medical examiner can pinpoint the day and time of death. And then we’ll see if Boyd Baxter has an alibi.”

  “What intrigues me about that statement is the word Christian and how it may or may not play into what we have before us right now in the verse … you shall be strengthened by His presence in the hour of your death.”

  “It’s like a bizarre jigsaw puzzle. The missing pieces might have Baxter’s face on them. That line the killer whispered on the recording … you shall be strengthened by His presence in the hour of your death—if this turns out to be Baxter, I hope that is what the executioner for the state of Mississippi says to him right before they administer a lethal injection into a bloodstream where ice cold blood flows now.”

  “Mike, you said Baxter memorized two quotes from Hitler. Did he recite the second one?”

  “No.”

  “I wonder if the second was something along the lines of you shall be strengthened by His presence in the hour of your death.”

  “There’s one way to find out … I ask him to recount it.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Two deputies were walking quickly toward Elizabeth and Bradford. The taller of the two said, “Detective Bradford, I know you’re the lead on this investigation. The news media are clamoring for information. Detective Lee said to funnel it all through you, sir. Would you like to speak with the reporters before one of ‘em ducks under the yellow tape?”

  “Sure. I’ll talk with them.”

  The deputies nodded and walked away. He turned to Elizabeth and said, “This is the second part of my job I hate the most.”

  “I think I know the other one.”

  “No doubt. It’s the fact that I have to go to the home of Wanda Donnelly and tell her family that she’s never coming back.” Bradford took a deep breath and walked across the church lawn to where the reporters waited behind the yellow tape that read POLICE LINE – DO NOT CROSS.

  “What can you tell us about the crime scene?” asked one female reporter in a white blouse, dark jacket and pants to match. She held her microphone toward Bradford, the lanky cameraman looking through the small monitor mounted to his camera.

  “Not a lot at this time,” Bradford said. “The victim was female. Medium height and build. Age estimated in the mid-thirties.”

  “Do you know the cause of death?” asked another reporter.

  “That’s pending the results of an autopsy,” Bradford responded.

  “We heard that the killer left the victim’s arm exposed or sticking out of that shallow grave. Was this the case, and if so, what would be the reason for doing that?”

  “You’re asking me to speculate on the killer’s rationale, which I won’t do. To answer the other part of your question, yes, the victim’s arm was exposed.”

  “How long do you think she had been dead before the body was found?”

  “I don’t know for sure. The medical examiner will give a more definitive estimate when the autopsy is completed.”

  A tall reporter in a blue sports coat, denim shirt and faded jeans, asked, “Detective Bradford, do you think this murder is connected to the killings of Olivia Curtis and Brian Woods?”

  “We don’t know at this time.”

  The reporter fired back. “With this victim’s arm protruding from a grave, compared to the staging of Olivia Curtis’ body, do you see any similar circumstances between this crime scene and the one in the De Soto National Forest?”

  “We’re not sure this cemetery is where the victim was killed. It may have been somewhere else, and the body brought here for burial, or at least partial burial. As for any correlation between what we found in the national forest and here, we haven’t seen any physical evidence to make a decisive connection. We’ll keep everyone posted as soon as we get more information. We’re not releasing t
he name of the victim until we can notify the family. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to the investigation.”

  “Can we get closer to the grave?” asked a middle-aged, male newspaper reporter, wrinkled blue shirt under his corduroy sports coat. “We can’t get much from back here.”

  Bradford shook his head. “Sorry, but we can’t compromise the immediate area with people stomping around here with tripods and cameras trying to get better angles of the gravesite. We’ll let you know when you can come across this police line. Thank you for your patience.”

  • • •

  Elizabeth watched Bradford field the questions with professionalism. His statements appeared succinct, answering at least a half-dozen questions before she saw him hold both hands up, palms out. He shook his head, nodded, and then turned around leaving them asking more questions. She watched Bradford reunite the other detectives near the gravesite. They spoke, exchanged notes and talked with the CSI techs who were still combing the area for any physical evidence they could find.

  Elizabeth walked toward the rear of the church, away from the members of law enforcement who were working the immediate area in the perimeter of where the body was found. She spotted an older man, the gravedigger, standing next to his twenty-year-old pickup truck, one blue-side panel scratched and dented. He folded his arms and watched the investigation, looking at his watch and lighting a cigarette.

  Elizabeth recalled what Bradford had said about the older man. “Of course, he could be a suspect, but he comes across as very credible. In a little while, remind me to tell you what he thought when he saw the way the arm and hand were positioned.”

  Elizabeth started walking toward the gravedigger.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Al Benson wanted to leave the one place he found complete serenity, the old cemetery. But he was told by detectives to “stick around” in case they needed to ask him something else. He looked across the church grounds and spotted a woman approaching. He assumed that she was a detective, too.