Death By Degrees

by Harrison Drake

  All I could do was hope that he was right.

  “Dr. Heinlen.” The grad students had arrived. Sweaty, exhausted and decorated with scrapes from the brush and branches but alive.

  “Where’s the blue case?”

  The five of them looked at each other, staring at the loads each one carried. There wasn’t a blue case among them. Their eyes moved up, flitting back and forth across each other’s faces, waiting for someone to volunteer to go back to the vehicle. Finally, the holder of the GPS spoke up.

  “I’ll go.” The enthusiasm in her voice was astounding.

  “Lincoln, I’d like you to meet Najat Şentürk. She’s working on her Ph.D.” She smiled faintly. I could tell that she didn’t like being the centre of attention. “Her eagerness to please reminds me a lot of you back in the day.”

  I shook hands with Najat before being introduced to the remainder of Samuel’s assistants.

  “Do you need me to go back?” Najat said once the introductions were over.

  “No,” the doctor said. “There is no blue case.”

  “Still an ass, after all these years,” I said.

  “Some things should never change.”

  The excavation continued and even gave me a chance to get down and dirty with the tools once more. The department could pay the dry cleaning bill for my suit; patches of brown and green clung to the black. I understood the need for suits, it was to promote an air of professionalism. Function on the other hand, would have been better served by running shoes, shorts and a t-shirt.

  Foot pursuits in dress shoes, especially on snow and ice, was not an easy task. Fighting with a tie on was just asking to get strangled, and digging in dress pants was like playing in the sandbox in your Sunday best. It may have been fun, but it usually led to being yelled at.

  “You ever had anything like this?”

  I was on my knees in the dirt, leaning over the near skeletal body. “No, but it’s not uncommon.” I knew she wasn’t asking about the body, Kara knew all too well I’d just dealt with another shallow grave burial. “People do occasionally come clean on their crimes. Just not often. And an e-mail? Seems a little weird.”

  “Wasn’t there one a while ago where someone walked into a detachment to confess to a murder?”

  Like me walking into the Commissioner’s office? It wasn’t what she was getting at, probably hadn’t even come to mind for her.

  I couldn’t think of the exact case she was talking, but it did happen. There were times when it was right after the crime, others where it had been years, even decades. Maybe the killer finally gave into the guilt, maybe they found God – there were many different possibilities.

  But confessing to a crime was a very personal thing, something that most people wouldn’t take light enough to do by e-mail. A theft, maybe. But murder? It was like breaking up by text message. After a couple of dates, maybe acceptable. The day before the wedding? Appalling.

  “I think there’s more to this, Kara. It hasn’t been sitting well since the e-mail came in.”

  “I agree. But what do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Not a clue, to be honest. I guess we need to find Mr. Duncan Crawford and ask him.”

  “Lincoln?”

  I looked from the legs up toward the head where Dr. Heinlen was working.

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve got something here. Kind of concerning.”

  I wasn’t sure I wanted to ask. I shuffled along beside the grave up to where Najat was kneeling.

  “What is it?”

  “Look at the skull,” he said, pointing with the brush he was holding. “There wasn’t much tissue left, and when I brushed it away…”

  “That appeared.”

  He nodded.

  An upside-down cross, carved deep into the bone in the center of the victim’s forehead. It was obvious and deliberate. Our case immediately took on a whole new meaning. There was a ritualistic element to the killing, something I had never dealt with before.

  “We need to find this Duncan Crawford.”

  Chapter Three

  The excavation took a few hours, well into the heat of the afternoon. The trees offered some respite but it wasn’t enough to keep the sweat away on what was turning out to be an unseasonably warm day. The weather never seemed to cooperate when it came to excavations. Either the heat was bearing down on us and the body leading to a terrible mixture of odours, or the skies opened up unleashing a torrential downpour. Those were my experiences as of late, and sincerely I hoped for an easier time for the next one.

  There was always a next one in this line of work.

  Given what we had found already, I knew that this wouldn’t be the only body tied to this case. We had another serial killer on our hands, this time one with a love of the ritualistic. The upside-down cross carved into the skull was the first clue; the second was the thin white robe the victim had been dressed in.

  The ‘robe’, if it could really be called that, was more like a shroud, wrapped around the torso and legs. It was made of fine, white linen; it made me think of what would have been used to wrap mummies in ancient Egypt. The decomposing flesh clung to the linens now, staining them a variety of unpleasant colours.

  The linens conjured up images of piety, a righteous killer erasing the sins of the world. But the cross, it spoke against that. Unless the killer wished to mark his victims for their sins first.

  I didn’t know enough about religious beliefs to have any idea what was going on. All I knew was that whichever belief system the killer was following, he wasn’t following it very well.

  Kara and I stopped on the way back to the detachment for some soup and sandwiches - and coffee and tea of course - from one of the many Tim Horton’s lining the streets of London. We spent little time inside, just enough to get and eat our food, before we were back on the road once more. The station wasn’t far and there was a lot of work to be done.

  With any luck some of that work would be done for us. Once we found the body and confirmed the e-mail, I had our resident computer genius start to work on tracing the source of the e-mail. Warrants were needed for IP addresses and we had homicide detectives ready to go in that regard; the original detectives on the Plimpton case were called in and were happy to help. It was their chance to settle the case and to put not only the victim’s family at ease, but their own demons to rest. These cases weren’t easy and the longer it went on, the more you felt like a failure.

  The more the case haunted you.

  Classical music poured out of the forensics lab, audible down the hall. The new technician, Eduard Fromm, was a bit of an odd one. Not that I didn’t like classical music, but I got a bit of an A Clockwork Orange vibe whenever I heard the music playing in the lab. He seemed normal enough at most times, but then he would lose himself as he rambled on about whatever technology he was using or what computer magic he was working. He had only been with us for a year, with any luck he’d calm down as he became more comfortable in the job.

  I wasn’t surprised to find him staring into a computer screen; his fingers blurred as they moved across the keys. There wasn’t a cop alive who could type like that; most might as well have been typing with their elbows. The Danse Macabre was beginning to reach a crescendo in the background as I tapped on his shoulder.

  “Oh, sh…” he said, almost knocking the keyboard off of the desk as he whirled about. “Detective, sorry. Didn’t hear you two come in.”

  Kara stayed back a bit and let me do the talking.

  “Music might be a little loud, Eddie, could hear it down the hall.” I had to speak loudly, or he probably never would have heard me. He turned back to the computer and turned off the music.

  “Better?” he said, a smile on his face.

  “Yeah, not sure how you can think with
it that loud. And apparently you’re a Buffy fan.”

  Eddie looked surprised. “How did you guess that?”

  “You’re younger than I am, and most people our age know nothing about classical music outside of Beethoven or Mozart. If I hear Camille Saint-Saëns, it usually means someone’s seen Hush.”

  Hush was an Emmy-nominated Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode where everyone lost their voices. While writing out their plans on whiteboards, the Danse Macabre was playing in the background.

  “No wonder you’re a detective. Must mean you’re a fan as well.”

  “Of anything Joss Whedon puts out. Back to it, though. Please tell me you have something.”

  He nodded and turned back to the computer. “He didn’t try to hide where it was coming from, that’s for sure. IP traced right back to his home.” He looked at the document. “Bell is the provider.”

  And?

  “Not important, right. Okay so I got records that show recent e-mails and that. Here’s the thing, and this is pretty big, so if you want to sit down or something, maybe you should do that. I don’t have another chair nearby though, umm, want me to get you one?”

  And the weirdness commenced. He rambled when he was nervous, and it didn’t take much to get him in that state. And he had a tendency to stare. I knew Kara found him a little unnerving so I wasn’t surprised when she found an empty desk to sit at on the other side of the lab.

  He definitely stood out in the detachment. He was younger than even the greenest constables and his scruffy appearance didn’t mesh with the clean shaven, brush cut wearing majority. His nearly black hair reached almost to his shoulders and his facial hair consisted of a lot of scruff – at least a few weeks of growth. He looked a bit like he could audition for an eighties rock band. But he dressed well and maintained himself, even if he did look far more relaxed than everyone else.

  “Just tell me what you found, Eddie. Please.”

  “Okay, so that e-mail was sent at precisely eight in the morning, Winnipeg time. You got it at nine our time, then, right? Winnipeg is an hour behind, so….”

  “Eddie,” I said, staring at him. “Focus. What are you getting at?” The kid, who couldn’t have been more than in his early twenties, was brilliant. A genius. They say there’s a fine line between genius and insanity; in his case it was more eccentricity.

  “Sixty-four.”

  “Sixty-four what?”

  “He had an e-mail scheduler plug-in or something, and at the same time, sixty-four e-mails were sent out. We’ll need warrants on the internet service providers, but that may be difficult. I’ve been running ‘whois’ searches on them… a lot are international.”

  “Where international?”

  “So far Australia, Austria, China, England, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, South Africa, the States, and Uruguay. Three in the States, two here, two in Australia and England. And I still have more IP addresses to check.”

  The IP (internet protocol) addresses he needed to check were those of the recipients computers. It would take a lot more work to be able to narrow down the exact recipient. I’d served cross-border production orders (more or less a warrant that required a company to produce documents regarding a client account or similar) on American internet providers before, but never outside of North America.

  This was not going to be easy.

  I noticed something else, but didn’t want to bring it up. Eddie was sensitive at times about his eccentricities, and providing all of the countries in alphabetical order, followed by the number of killings per country in a descending list were definitely part of his… uniqueness.

  “So sixty-four e-mails, all sent at the same time, to places all over the world? Are we to assume that there’s a body for each one?”

  Eddie shrugged. He was actually silent for once.

  “That would make him one of the most prolific serial killers in history. And international? Shit.”

  “What, detective?”

  “It’s bad enough dealing with jurisdiction lines within Ontario. Is there any way you can find out what these e-mails said, or who they were sent to?”

  “Legally?”

  I just stared at him. “It’s a homicide investigation, Eddie. We need to do this by the books.”

  “It’s going to take a while. I mean, we’ll need to verify the provider for all of the IP addresses, find out the country it’s in, work it out with whatever agency is there, get them to get us a copy of the e-mail, and if there’s GPS coordinates we’d have to check those, too. Unless they did, I’d figure they would…”

  My phone started to ring, a welcome interruption.

  “Munroe,” I said.

  “Detective Lincoln Munroe. A pleasure.”

  It had come in from a blocked number, and I didn’t recognize the voice. But this number wasn’t made public. It was for police use only.

  “Who is this?”

  “You already know, Lincoln.”

  I couldn’t believe it. But there was no other answer coming to mind.

  “Duncan Crawford,” I said, using every ounce of strength to hide the confusion and fear in my voice.

  Chapter Four

  “Precisely,” he said. The way he spoke sent shivers down my spine. Was it his voice? Or just that I knew what this man had done?

  “How did you get this number?”

  He laughed. I wished that I could show the same level of calmness he was displaying. “Is that really the most important question right now?”

  He was right. There were far bigger things to be worrying about.

  “The e-mails,” I said. “All sixty-four of them. Is there a body associated to each?”

  “Yes.”

  I knew better than that. Closed questions got yes or no answers.

  “Where did you send them to?”

  “All over the world, Lincoln. But you already know that. You want specifics. Would you like me to forward them all to you?”

  I couldn’t even begin to understand what was going on. I just had to go with it. And I had to appear as relaxed as he did.

  “Please. Why are you doing this now, after so long?”

  “Boredom. And as a test. I’ve been at this for years with no one ever so much as making me a person-of-interest. I’ve never been spoken to by the police, never even suspected as far as I know.”

  “A test?”

  “That is something for another day. I’ll forward you those e-mails, Lincoln. And I have time for one more question.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I had no other choice. Goodbye, Lincoln. We’ll talk again soon.”

  My jaw hung low and my eyes remained open wide long after the call had ended.

  “What in the fuck was that?”

  “It was him,” I said. Kara was staring at me; I could see in her eyes she was trying to process what had just happened. I hadn’t even begun to process it.

  “I gathered that, Lincoln. But what the… there really are sixty-four bodies?”

  “Sounds like it. He didn’t sound like he was lying. He didn’t really sound like anything at all. Just… normal. And calm, like he’d made that call a thousand times. He said he’d forward all the e-mails to me.”

  “But that many?”

  “I know. It’s a lot, but it still falls far short of the record. Only about a quarter of the way, actually?”

  Kara looked surprised. The most famous serial killers in history were by no means the most prolific. Not when there were a large number who had exceeded a hundred kills.

  I went into my e-mail and refreshed. There they were, sixty new e-mails all sent to me by Duncan Crawford. I opened them one by one and they were all the same: form letters, with only the victim’s name and coordinate
s changed from e-mail to e-mail.

  That wasn’t the only difference though. None of the other e-mails were addressed to anyone, they all were addressed “To whom it may concern,” whereas mine, it was sent to my attention.

  “They’re there?”

  “Yeah,” I said, my eyes meeting Kara’s. “They are.” She looked as concerned as I imagined I did. The usual brightness in her eyes was gone, all that remained was a glassiness that covered the emerald green.

  “I need to call Kat. I don’t think we’ll be going home anytime soon.”

  The look on Kara’s face, the slumped shoulders, it felt like I was looking in a mirror. Sleep was going to be a rarity for some time.

  The moment I grasped the scope of the case, the moment everything had finally sunk in, I put the call in to Headquarters. This was going to be a bureaucratic nightmare as every police force in every city, province, state, country and continent tried to catch the killer, and we were going to need all the help we could get. The approval for more manpower came in and with that, the calls went out. An hour later we had four more detectives in the office, all of them at my beck and call.

  The first step was for someone to find me a world map. The stores were closed and I couldn’t think of anywhere in the detachment where we might find one. Then someone remembered that the Superintendent had one in his office. I gave the order to commandeer the map and prepared to take the flack if need be.

  I had printed out several copies of each of the e-mails. One detective was going through the e-mails and putting a push pin into the map at the coordinates of each suspected burial site. The other three were contacting the agencies that had received the e-mails in order to try and confirm whether or not a body had been found. They had to contend with language barriers and jurisdictional issues with every phone call, but with each call we came one step closer. Most of the agencies had investigated and already found the bodies. Some had dismissed the e-mails as pranks, something I couldn’t comprehend, and in other cases the bodies had been found previously, and they were now trying to confirm that the locations they had been found in matched those listed in the e-mails.