Boy Crucified (2 page)

G
EORGINA
D
URMOUNT
had the boy’s body on her autopsy table when we arrived.

She was a middle-aged black woman, short and petite, very self-possessed. For some strange reason, she reminded me of a lounge singer. I expected her to grab a microphone kept stashed beneath the autopsy table and do a spirited rendition of
Mississippi Goddam
. Something in her eyes suggested she knew precisely what Nina Simone meant. Yet Georgina was so short she would need to jump up on a milk crate for an audience to see her.

Georgina had taken me in, twelve years ago, when I first started at the department. Few cared to be seen with me. Even fewer cared to cooperate. Most made my life hell. But something in her dark, watery eyes told me she knew what it was like, and the big bad world could kiss both our asses, thank you very much. She did not appreciate what it said about her age, but she was like a mother to me, and I had cried on her shoulder on more than a few occasions.

“Anything?” I asked, remaining at a respectful distance. Daniel hung somewhere farther behind, perhaps staring into the sink and trying to pretend there was something interesting in it.

“Not yet,” Durmount said. She was working on removing the boy’s brain. This was accomplished by pulling the skin of the face forward, then cutting through the bone of the skull. It generally meant she was nearly finished. To make the brain easier to work with, she had to wait for the blood to drain, so its removal always came last.

“Any ideas?”

She paused, holding in her right hand a section of skull she had just removed. “This may be a V tach thing.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Well, to be completely honest, I don’t see any wounds here that would have been immediately fatal. Boy got the dickens beat out of him and all the rest of it, but the fact is, having a spike nailed through your hand is not going to kill you. This crown of thorns is mostly show. Probably hurt like hell, of course, but it’s all flesh wounds. The stabbing in the belly? I thought maybe the liver or another vital organ had been hit, but they haven’t. Lost a lot of blood, but not that much, not enough to kill him.”

“And that means what, precisely?” I asked.

“It means that the boy might have been scared to death. Literally. It happens. He could have been in so much pain, and so overwhelmed with fear, that his heart went haywire.”

“V tach,” I said.

She nodded.

“Daniel, you paying attention?” I asked.

“Of course I am.”

“What is V tach?”

“Man, if I didn’t know that, I wouldn’t be your partner.”

That was certainly true.

V tach was shorthand for ventricular tachycardia, a very rapid heart rate. By itself, not usually fatal, but it can lead to ventricular fibrillation, or VF, which causes the heart to “twitch,” rendering it unable to establish a normal beating pattern, which can be fatal if not immediately corrected.

“I don’t get the connection, though,” Daniel said.

Durmount chuckled. “Last year I did an autopsy on an eleven-year-old boy who had been playing baseball. He was the pitcher. Little league team. Threw the ball, batter sent it right back at him, the boy got hit in the chest—and keeled over dead.”

“Just like that?” Daniel asked.

Durmount nodded.

“No shit! Why?” he asked.

“Excellent question,” Durmount replied. “A blow to the chest like that, even a minor one, can interrupt the heartbeat. Then you got a ventricular fibrillation situation. Sometimes you’ve got a grace period to get it sorted out. Other times, you don’t. You just keel over dead and that’s that.”

“And how does that relate to our case?” he asked.

“Well, there’s more than one way to get the heartbeat out of whack. Excessive fear and stress can accomplish it because this can cause the sudden release of too much epinephrine in the body, which can cause VF. You ever hear of voodoo death?”

Daniel made a face. He was interested in facts, not silliness.

“There may be something to it,” Durmount said, “if you believe in it, if you believe that some witch doctor can kill you just by sprinkling chicken blood on the ground and all of that nonsense, you can get yourself so worked up, so full of fear, that your heartbeat gets out of whack and off you go. Some experts attribute voodoo death to no more than that.”

“And your point?” Daniel asked.

“Well, think about it. If you had been crucified, left to hang there out in the dark woods in the cold, if you were in horrible pain, maybe frightened about what was going to happen next, having already lost a lot of blood, well, you could have easily gotten yourself so worked up that your heartbeat got out of whack and it killed you. You could have had all kinds of epinephrine flooding your system.”

“And that big Greek word means what, exactly?” Daniel asked.

“Adrenaline,” Durmount said. “Epinephrine is like adrenaline. Too much can cause all kinds of trouble. Now can I do my job, or are you guys going to harass me with questions for the rest of the goddamn day?”

“What about asphyxiation?” I asked.

“You gonna harass me the rest of the day?”

“I’m just curious.”

“I found some increased CO
₂
levels, but not enough to account for his death.”

I asked because crucifixion normally led to death by asphyxiation. The victim got to the point where they simply couldn’t expel breaths any longer, leading to a build-up of CO
₂
in the body.

“Any idea about the time?” I asked.

She shrugged noncommittally. “Friday night, maybe. I’ll have a better idea when I can do my job properly.”

I could take a hint.

IV

I
T
was past 6:00 p.m. when we decided to call it a day. In the morning, the reports would be ready: the autopsy report, as well as the reports from the tech guys about the murder scene, the barbed wire and nails, the fingerprinting, and so on. A sketch artist would create a sketch of the victim to be broadcast on the evening news and in the morning newspapers, in the hopes that someone, somewhere could identify the deceased. With the sketch, we could also start digging through the missing persons reports.

“What now?” Daniel asked.

“We wait,” I said.

I was just about ready to go back to what was left of my Sunday when the receptionist, Mary Beth, paged me over the intercom.

“Lieutenant Noel, your mother’s here to see you.”

My mother?

I thought about the letter in my desk drawer and frowned. There were some sorts of trouble you could hide from, and some you could not, and this was apparently going to be the latter.

“Mary Beth, do you remember what I told you a couple of weeks ago?”

I had told her that if my mother ever showed up at the station, she was to be told that I was not in and that the restraining order I had against her was still valid. Of course, Mary Beth could never remember anything.

“I, like, forgot. Anyway, she seems like such a nice person.”

“That’s what they said about Stalin,” I replied. “And most serial killers too, for that matter.”

“Really? Are you, like, going to come talk to her?”

“I told you that if my mother ever comes to see me, you’re to tell her I’m not in.”

“But she’s, like, so nice! And she’s been calling and calling, wanting to know whether you were here or not.”

“Did you tell her?”

“What was I supposed to tell her? Do you want me to, like, lie?”

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

I hung up the phone and made a face.

“You don’t like talking to your mother?” Daniel asked, giving me an odd look. “What kind of shit is that?”

“Technically, she’s not my mother. She lost custody of me when I was fourteen. Apparently beating your kid with a frying pan is a crime in the state of Missouri. Especially when you break a few bones. Who knew?”

He made an uncertain face, as if not sure how or even whether to respond. Eventually, he said, “Wow.”

I took a deep breath to steady my nerves and marched out of my office and down the hall to the reception desk. Mary Beth, chomping on her gum like a cow, offered a sheepish, apologetic smile.

My mother was sitting in the waiting room, and when she saw me, she stood and came to the desk. She looked the same as the last time I’d seen her: deceptively small but incredibly strong, with long stringy hair I’m not sure she bothered to wash with any sort of regularity.

“Tommy, I’ve been calling. Why don’t you answer my calls?”

“You know better than to bother me.”

“I need money.”

“You know you’re not supposed to come to my job. You’re not supposed to bother me. Is that so hard to understand?”

“But I need money. I just got out.”

“Like I give a shit.”

“Tommy!”

“Why don’t you leave?”

“It’s been six years and you ain’t even gonna fucking talk to me? You ungrateful piece of shit! All they gave me was a lousy fifty bucks! What am I supposed to do with fifty bucks? Huh? You tell me!”

How about buying some razor blades and killing yourself
, I thought, but held my tongue.

“Would you please leave?” I asked. “Stay out of my life. Is that so hard to understand? I mean, haven’t I made my feelings completely clear to you? What else do I have to do?”

Mary Beth was watching us and making horrified faces at me, as if I was the scumbag of the universe. Daniel had come down the hall and was now standing behind me, the look on his Asian features impossible to decipher.

They must have thought me rather frightful.

I had my reasons.

“I’ve got nowhere to live, goddammit!” she snapped. “They gave me a lousy fifty bucks! You want your own mother out on the street?”

“I have a restraining order against you, and you could be arrested for coming here.”

“So arrest me, you fucking faggot!”

“Get out,” I said. “Don’t be coming to my office.”

I tried to sound brave, to talk tough.

“You’re going to talk to your mother like that?”

“You’re lucky that’s all I do,” I said.

“Well, where am I supposed to stay?”

“That isn’t my problem.”

“Why don’t you let me stay with you? It’ll be all right, you’ll see. It won’t be like it was before.”

“Why don’t you leave?” I suggested again, knowing it would be exactly like it was before.

There was a hurt look in her eyes. She was desperate. But then, she always was.

“But I’m clean now, baby,” she said.

“Are you taking your meds?”

“Where am I going to get the money?” she demanded.

“The same place you get money to buy drugs.”

“You think you know so much!”

“I know enough.”

“Come on, Tommy, let me stay with you for a few days. Just till I get something sorted out. Jesus! Is that so much to ask? You’re a fucking priest, for Christ’s sake.”

“No,” I said.

“What?”

“No. N-O. No. And I’m not a priest anymore, but then again, how would you know since you’ve been in the slammer most of my life? So, the answer is no. N-O. Am I perfectly clear now?”

“No?” she said, raising her eyebrows in a gesture I remembered only too well. “No? You’re going to tell me no? Well, we’ll see about that, won’t we, Tommy? We’ll see about that, you and your little smart mouth. We’ll just see, won’t we?”

I did not like the tone of her voice. It made me feel like a helpless twelve-year-old.

She turned to the waiting room. “My son, the queer!” she announced loudly. “My son, the big queer! The dick-sucking faggot! Won’t even talk to his goddamn mother! Some kind of son, ain’t he? And he’s a fucking priest too. Can you believe that? What a fucking hypocrite! Too busy having those altar boys suck his little dick for him. That’s what I think!”

“You get out!” I shouted at her.

“What are you going to do, Tommy? Arrest your mommy? Hide behind your police friends because you don’t have half the balls your father did? You make me sick, you little faggot! Do you hear me? You make me want to puke! Fucking hypocrite!”

I turned to Mary Beth. “This woman is violating a restraining order. Would you page someone to come and arrest her?”

Mary Beth’s eyes went wide and she stopped chewing her gum. She looked at the phone as if it was a live reptile that might bite her.

“Jesus!” Daniel exclaimed behind me, a look of surprise on his face.

I looked around in sudden worry. Now what?

Daniel was already in motion, trying to swerve past me, but he was not fast enough.

I turned just in time to see my mother stab me in the upper part of my arm with a syringe she must have grabbed out of her purse. She grinned a mad, insane grin that I was, unfortunately, all too familiar with.

Chaos ensued.

I sank to the base of the receptionist’s desk. Mary Beth screamed, a high-pitched, panicky sound. Daniel jumped over me and tackled my mother, who was laughing and cursing. The people in the waiting room jumped up, muttering, backing away from my mother.

She had left the syringe buried in my right arm, and I yanked on it, tossed it aside, and tried very hard to ignore the desperate, angry pain. Like a little boy in front of his friends, I struggled not to cry, not to show how much it hurt.

Mary Beth flew around the desk. “Oh Jesus! Lieutenant! Are you, like, all right? Oh Jesus!”

She was a stupid cow, I thought.

I clutched my injured arm, ignoring her. I wondered if the needle had hit the bone because that’s what it felt like. I was also wondering—trying not to, but unsuccessfully—if the needle was one she’d shared with her junkie friends. I hoped to God it wasn’t, but why would she waste a perfectly good new needle on me?

“Lieutenant?” Mary Beth exclaimed. “Are you, like, okay? Should I, like, call someone?”

I closed my eyes and began to cry. I was in pain, yes, but I was also embarrassed. Humiliated, in fact. One thing you didn’t do with my mother was tell her no. The word “no” was not permitted in her world. Tell her no and you could watch her grab the nearest thing at hand that could serve as a weapon. She was completely fearless. She had taken on men much bigger than I was and had come out none the worse for wear. And since she was mentally ill and not quite aware of what she was doing, she very often left a trail of destruction in her wake that she did not even have enough presence of mind to be sorry for. Or to remember afterward.