Boy Crucified (4 page)

In front of the room’s one window, I had erected a shrine that featured a large statue of the Lord Buddha, standing up, with his right hand held out in the “stop fighting” position, along with a variety of candles and an incense holder.

As I did every morning, I lit three incense sticks to offer homage to the Triple Gem: The Lord Buddha, his teachings, and the community of monks and nuns he had left behind, the Sangha. After offering homage, I put the sticks in the holder, watching their smoky plumes rise in the faint light coming in from the street outside, the small room immediately filled with the smell of jasmine.

I looked at the Buddha and he looked back at me. As always, there was nothing but silence.

After leaving the priesthood, I had tried hard to be an atheist, but couldn’t manage it. Instead, I drifted from one religion to the next, exploring, experimenting. Islam, Buddhism, the Quakers, Zen, the Tibetans, the Sufis—I hadn’t been able to find a spiritual home. I even spent time going to a Hare Krishna temple and reading the
Bhagavad-Gītā As It Is,
and had come very close to shaving my head and becoming an initiated devotee.

In the end, I had retreated into Buddhism, the only “religion” that had actually proved helpful to me, the only one whose teachings I was free to question and experiment with until I could see for myself the truth of them.

I stared at the Buddha’s serene face and wondered, not for the first time, if he was really as happy as he claimed to be. He’d found the end of suffering. How would it feel to not suffer anymore? To not feel the stirrings of craving and desire and lust? To be serenely indifferent to the world and its charms and terrors?

If there were any answers to those questions, the Buddha was not about to reveal them to me, not this morning. He only stared at me, his hand out:
Stop fighting!

I had been struggling my whole life to do that.

“Easier said than done, big guy,” I said softly.

II

“Y
OU
feeling better, man?” Daniel asked.

I nodded.

He looked sexy in my pajama bottoms, his hair messed up. He had heard me in the kitchen and gotten up to join me.

“You get the paper?” he asked, a bundle of energy.

I nodded again. I was not exactly communicative in the early morning—I preferred grunting.

“I’ll get it for you,” he said. He was up and out of his chair in a flash and I watched him go, feeling something tug at my heart. Lust? Longing? Loneliness?

What you crave makes you a slave.

It had been a long time since Billy, five years and counting. After his death, I preferred to be alone. I didn’t go out. I didn’t date. I was just not interested in starting over. I did not see how it would be possible to ever love someone again, not the way I had loved him. In comparison, the bars-and-boys thing seemed exceedingly dull. What was sex compared to love?

I sat down at the table, sighing, feeling my age. Sometimes I thought I had retreated into Buddhism because I couldn’t deal with the pain of accepting reality as it really was.

Daniel returned, flashing a smile as he spread the newspaper on the table, displaying the headline. Before looking at it, I looked at him, again feeling something tugging at my heart.

“Read it,” he said. “Oh man!”

I looked at the paper, at the screaming headline:

“Boy Found Crucified”

“How’d they find out so fast?” he wanted to know.

“Mac Harris is going to be pissed.”

“Who’s he?”

“The department spokesman. If you read the article, no doubt you’ll come across the old ‘sources close to the investigation’ said ‘blah blah blah’ routine. He really hates that.”

He read the article, out loud, excited. For his first, it was a rather large case, and his enthusiasm was obvious.

“You hungry?” he asked.

I didn’t usually eat breakfast and said so.

“Oh, come on, man,” he said. “I can do pancakes, eggs, bacon, whatever you got.”

“Surprise me,” I said.

He did, giving me a nice view of the tops of his underwear, not to mention his flat belly and chest and strong, beautiful back. Staring at him, I wondered how it would feel with my cock in his mouth. But of course I knew how that felt. This thought made me hard, and my business throbbed with a life of its own, as if it had experienced a resurrection after last night’s goings-on. When Daniel bent over to fetch a pan from the oven, I wanted to get up and have my way with him.

He cooked breakfast: eggs, sunny-side up; toast, lightly browned; potatoes, fried without oil and topped with ketchup; all of which was served with orange juice, jam, and all the trimmings he could find in my pathetic excuse for a pantry.

All this was done in less than fifteen minutes.

“I’m surprised,” I said as he sat down opposite me, telling me to “tuck in.”

“Man, you need to learn how to do some grocery shopping,” he pointed out. “Get some groceries in this whorehouse. These cupboards look like they belong to an old widower who forgot how to cook.”

“Maybe that’s what I am,” I said.

He looked up at me, frowning.

“What makes you think I’m
not
an old widower who forgot how to cook?”

“Are you? I mean, were you married?”

“As much as two people could ever be,” I said.

“What happened?”

“He died.”

He lowered his eyes.

Why was I doing this? What the hell did he care about my past? What was wrong with me?

“Man, I’m sorry,” he said.

“Well, it was a long time ago.”

“What happened? He die of AIDS?”

“Because I’m gay, my partner has to die of AIDS?”

“No, man. Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

I did my best to pick at the food, since he had been kind enough to make it.

“So what happened?” he asked.

“That’s a long story,” I said. “Maybe some other day.”

“About last night,” he said quietly.

“I’m sorry about that,” I said, suddenly nervous. “I was kinda out of it.”

“I enjoyed it,” he replied with a smile. “Thought you could use a little love. But I don’t want you to think I’m a slut. I just… I don’t know, it seemed like the right thing to do. Won’t happen again.”

When he saw my frown, he added, “Unless, of course, you want it to.”

III

W
HEN
we got to the station, I was surrounded by reporters who had been waiting for me. They knew me, knew my beat, knew I had been assigned to investigate the boy’s death.

Could I comment on the “crucified kid”?

No, I could not.

Did I know who did it?

No, I did not. What sort of stupid question was that?

When would I know?

How the hell should I know?

“You need to speak to Lt. Mac Harris,” I said, annoyed. “He’s the spokesman. You guys know that.”

Yes, but was I making progress? Did I think this was the work of a serial killer? Was he targeting young men? Shouldn’t the city be warned? Was it a real crown of thorns? Where did they get the thorns? From rosebushes? Couldn’t I at least give them the victim’s name?

I answered none of these questions, merely pushed past the reporters with Daniel following me, a bewildered look on his face. I suggested they make themselves available for the noon press briefing to be given by Lt. Harris. Of course, I didn’t tell them Harris was very touchy about lowly detectives daring to give statements to the media that he had not personally authorized, and which he had not had a chance to put his own personal spin on. But there were always “sources close to the investigation” who were willing to bypass him, as I did myself, on occasion, when it suited my needs.

On my desk was the autopsy for the “crucified kid.”

It was a small catalog of horrors, one description after the next of each wound and the effect they’d had on the boy. His manner of death was described with the general phrase “shock and trauma.” Added to this was the suggestion that VF may have played a part, as indicated by the increased levels of epinephrine in the boy’s blood. As for his general appearance, he was rather on the scrawny side, had a lot of cavities, and had not been taking proper care of his teeth.

“When’s the meeting?” I asked.

“Seven thirty,” Daniel replied.

I switched on my computer and waited for it to boot. I looked through my in-boxes—electronic and otherwise—ignoring everything not directly related to the case. Georgina had sent over a copy of the boy’s death certificate. There were precisely thirteen requests for interviews from various media outlets, along with a message from Mac Harris that I was not to say anything about this case to anyone until he had decided how to “present” it. Harris struck me as a complete moron, and I had, from time to time, suggested as much to his face. We were not friends and never would be. Doubtless he would be at the meeting and would have something completely inane to say.

“Man, we’d better go,” Daniel said.

The briefing room was a small theater. There was a podium up front, theater-style seats, audio/visual equipment for showing slides and videos, with an assortment of maps on the walls—Jackson County, but also Kansas City and its outlying areas, the state of Missouri, plus the state of Kansas, since we were located on the state line and our cases often involved dealing with the Kansas City, Kansas, Police Department and the State of Kansas highway patrol.

There was also, up in front and to the left, a boardroom-style table with seating for ten persons. Captain Harlock was sitting at the head of this table when Daniel and I arrived. Next to him was Lt. Harris, whom I did not bother to look at. Georgina was also present, plus Lt. Edwards from the tech division, McCallin, the print guy, and Lt. Jensen.

We sat down, ready to get started.

A meeting such as this was always held about a day after a major murder. All the involved participants had a chance to present their findings and to answer any questions the homicide detectives working the case wanted to ask. Follow-up meetings would be held as and when new evidence presented itself, if it did. But after this meeting, Daniel and I would be mostly on our own.

Captain James T. Harlock, my boss, cleared his throat.

He was a bulldog of a man, basically falling apart now that five decades of his life had come and gone. He was paying for all his sins—smoking, drinking, working overtime, too much stress, too many bills, too many disappointments, chasing too many young women. He was going bald, and had about thirty-eight strands of ridiculously long hair he used to try to conceal his baldness. Everyone in the office wanted to grab a pair of scissors and chop off those strands of hair. When he got agitated and upset, those lone strands would fall down on his forehead, making him look even more ridiculous than he already looked. He usually kept the hair in place with far too much hair spray, which gave his exposed scalp an unnatural shine.

“McCallin, why don’t you start?” he suggested.

McCallin was wearing polyester dress slacks with high-top sneakers and a faintly green shirt with a red tie, all of which I did my best not to notice. “We’ve got prints off the statue,” he said. “They turned up this.” He very proudly produced copies of a rap sheet for a man named Earl Whitehead, which were passed around the table. I looked at my copy. Earl Whitehead was from Illinois and had been arrested for child sexual abuse after his nephew’s parents had filed a complaint with the police.

“Man was dipping his pen in the family ink,” McCallin said.

“Do you have to put it that way?” I asked. “Do you have to trivialize every goddamned thing?”

McCallin rolled his eyes. I received an exasperated look from Captain Harlock. Sitting beside me, Daniel stiffened.

“These are people we’re talking about,” I said.

“
Whatever
,” McCallin said. “If the Mad Fag is through interrupting me, you should also note that our guy was charged eight years ago. Put on probation since it was his first offense. Quickly went missing, hasn’t been seen or heard from for seven years now. No tax records, no phone records, no utility bills, no credit card purchases. Maybe he hightailed it to Canada or something.”

“Then hightailed it back here to crucify a boy?” I asked, annoyed.

“That’s your department,” he said.

Earl Whitehead’s face stared back at me. The photograph was in black and white, the picture police had taken during his arrest. There was an odd sort of look in his eyes I associated with people who were not quite right. By my calculations, Whitehead would now be thirty-six years old.

“Do we have the case file for the molested boy?” I asked.

“On its way,” McCallin said. “That was in Illinois. We had to put in a request. They FedExed it last night. Should be here any time now.”

“Did you find prints anywhere else? On the two-by-fours?”

“Clean as a whistle. Everything but the statue.”

There was silence.

“Anything else on this?” Harlock asked.

Aside from wanting to suggest to McCallin that he buy a pair of dress shoes and get a completely new outlook on life, I had no further questions or comments.

“Georgina?” Harlock said, nodding to Georgina Durmount.

“Well,
James
,” she said, “I’ve already sent out copies of the autopsy report. The victim died Friday night, early Saturday morning, as best we can determine. In light of what McCallin has said, I would only point out that I found evidence of homosexual activity.”

“Meaning what, precisely?” I asked. “Semen?”

She shook her head. “Anal scarring. Most likely evidence of rape. Given that our suspect has a record for sexual abuse of boys, I wouldn’t rule it out.”

“Was there any evidence that he had been sodomized prior to death?” I asked.

“Possibly. My examination suggested that the boy was quite active, and would have to have been to account for all the scarring. But I didn’t find any traces of semen. What I did find was evidence that the boy had been subjected to fellatio.”