The Body and the Blood (3 page)

As the service continued, I looked around the quad, bowing my head periodically as Father James prayed, preparing to serve the Holy Eucharist.

“Pray, brothers, that our sacrifice may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father,” he said.

His small congregation responded more or less in unison, “May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands, for the praise and glory of his name, for our good, and the good of all his Church.”

“Lord Jesus Christ, you said to your apostles, ‘I leave you peace, my peace I give you.’ Look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church, and grant us the peace and unity of your kingdom where you live for ever and ever.”

When I looked up again, Potter was shaking his head, but he stopped when Father James held up the elements.

“This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper.”

I looked around the dorm some more, and though I was prepared for what came next, I still shuddered slightly when Father James said, “The body and the blood.”

I glanced over at Daniels and Potter. They both looked pale.

When nothing happened, it was as if the collective breath being held was exhaled, though what followed was only a slight release of tension, not a complete exorcism of our uneasiness.

As Father James came around the table and presented the sacraments, the inmates stood and began filing down the center aisle to receive Holy Communion.

Father James held the bread in one hand, a chalice filled with grape juice (wine wasn’t allowed) in the other, and in an atypical, unorthodox manner, each inmate would tear a small piece of bread from the loaf, dip it into the chalice, and drop it into his mouth.

“The body that was broken for you. The blood that was shed for you.”

This continued for a long time under the scrutiny of Daniels and Potter, both of whom had moved closer to get a better view.

“The body of Christ. The blood of Christ.”

Since Daniels was watching the Holy Eucharist so closely, I decided to concentrate on the rest of the quad. I looked down each wall, pausing at every cell, beginning where I stood and scanning slowly to the other end.

“The body that was broken for you. The blood that was shed for you.”

I looked down the wall closest to me first. Nothing was out of order. There was no movement. No sound, but echoes of the priest’s haunting words.

“The body of Christ. The blood of Christ.”

I examined the wall opposite us. First the upper level, and then the bottom. Moving across each cell, beginning with the end closest to us and working my way back down to the far end near the door.

And that’s when I saw it.

“The body that was broken for you,” the priest was saying. “The blood that was shed for you.”

I began moving toward it, but before I reached it, I knew what it was.

“The body of Christ. The blood of Christ.”

It can’t be
, I thought, but knew it was.

There on the bare concrete floor, seeping from beneath Justin Menge’s cell door as if from an open wound, was an expanding pool of blood.

Chapter Four

“How the hell did this happen?” Daniels yelled.

I didn’t respond.

“We saw him come in just a few minutes ago,” he said. “We’ve been here the whole time. Watching.”

We were standing in front of Justin Menge’s cell, carefully avoiding the blood puddle at our feet. Every inmate at the Catholic service and the few that were in their cells had been strip-searched by Potter and Pitts and then escorted to the empty quad on the other side of the dorm where they would stay locked down until the investigation was completed.

“How the
hell
did this happen?” Daniels said again, each time emphasizing a different word, as he continued to look around every visible inch of the quad.

Satisfied the crime-scene was secure, he withdrew latex gloves from his coat pocket and handed me a pair. After we put the gloves on, the first thing we both did was pull on the cell door.

It was locked.

This massive metal door fronting the 6 x 9 foot cinder block cell was the only possible entrance or exit.

“Shit,” he said.

“I know.”

He shook his head. “It’s locked and he’s alone inside.”

Like a coach yelling at his players during practice in an empty gymnasium, Daniels’s voice echoed through the cement quad, bouncing around the room like an overinflated basketball.

I reached down and pulled on the food tray slot. It was also locked.

He took a step back and motioned up to the officer in the wicker to unlock the cell door.

Then he looked back over at me. “I asked you a question.”

“You did?”

“How the hell did this happen? We just saw him come in. He’s in a locked cell. Alone. And he’s only been in—What? Twenty, twenty-five minutes?”

I shrugged. “Maybe less.”

“Could it be suicide? It’s got to be, right? I mean, of course. That flyer’s got me thinkin’ crazy, but it can’t be murder. He had to do it to himself. No one else was in here.”

As the electronic lock on the cell door clicked, Daniels pulled it open and the smell of wet copper rushed out and filled our nostrils. Taking a step inside the cell, he reached over to his left and reconnected the disabled light.

The lights inside the cells in G-dorm consisted of small halogen tubes with white plexiglass covers. The covers were held in place by four recessed screws—the heads of which were round and had a small flange hanging down. Using part of the cylinder of a large ink pen that had been cut to fit the opening, inmates often unscrewed the covers to disable the lights or hide contraband behind them.

There was no contraband in Justin’s. The concealment in this instance had been the cell itself—the cover simply removed, the light merely disabled.

“Picked a hell of a time to be sober,” he said.

My eyes darted around the room, unable to find focus, my mind rejecting the images they were sending. I had seen my share of crime scenes, but I had never gotten used to them, and I had never seen anything like this. I took a step back and looked away for a moment. And that’s when what I had just seen finally registered.

On the floor inside the cell looked to be most of the blood from Justin Menge’s body. It was dark maroon and black with pale yellow around the edges. But it was just his blood. His body was beneath the covers on the lower of the two metal bunks that hung from the pale gray cinder block wall, the gaping wound on his neck partially visible.

The sheet and blanket surrounding the body had very little blood on them compared to everything else—not soaked in blood like I expected them to be. Most of the blood was on the floor.

“The body and the blood,” I said.

Daniels’s eyes grew wide as he looked over at me. “Just like the fuckin’ flyer. His body’s in one place and his blood’s in another.”

We were both quiet a moment, the fact that the horror we were witnessing had been foretold sinking in more forcefully, and I wondered what I was going to tell Paula.

“The flyer,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Doesn’t strike me as a suicide note.”

“Oh,” he said, nodding absently. “You’re right.” He shook his head, the lines in his face and forehead deepening. “
Fuck
.”

I looked around the cell again. There were faint sprays and splatters, but none were heavy or concentrated on anything. “There’s no real arterial spray.”

He quickly looked at all four walls. “It’s as if he was just drained.”

“This much blood,” I said, “you’d think something’s got to have arterial spray on it. I bet the murderer’s shirt is covered with it.”

He glanced down for a moment and took a deep breath.

I followed his gaze. The outline of Menge’s body was faint, but visible in the blood covering the cell floor. And there was something else.

“Look at that,” he said, nodding toward two shoe prints in the blood. “You’re right. Not suicide after all.”

Looking at the nearly perfect set of boot prints before the outline of the body in the tacky substance, I realized that some of the blood had already begun to clot. Yet a lot of it had not. It didn’t make sense.

“What if his throat was cut while he was laying face down on the floor?” Daniels said. “All the subsequent blood could be covering the bulk of the spray and splatter patterns.”

I raised my eyebrows at him and nodded. “That could be it.”

“How the hell did he get from the floor to the bed?”

I looked at him, wondering if I had misunderstood what he meant. It seemed so obvious to me. “The murderer must have moved him.”

He was distracted, genuinely perplexed, and didn’t answer right away. “Huh? Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“Though it was risky as hell to wait here while most of the blood drained from his body,” I added.

He nodded, still staring down, his eyes shifting back and forth between the body and the blood.

“We’ve got to get FDLE in here to process this as quickly as we can,” I said, thinking that the rate at which the blood was drying would help them to establish time of death more accurately.

“I’ve already called them. They’re on the way,” he said, “but it’ll be at least another hour.”

I shook my head and frowned.

“How can the blanket only have smears on it?”

Stepping over the blood and pulling back the covers with his gloved hand, he exposed the pale, purplish body of Justin Menge.

Except for a few patches of blood, the sheets were clean.

He ran his glove along the sheet beside the body. “Just smears.”

Unlike the sheets, Justin’s shirt was saturated with blood.

“Lift his shirt up a little, would you?” I asked.

He did.

Beneath the smears of blood on his skin, the front of Justin’s body was deep purple. Daniels then rolled him over. In contrast to his stomach, his back was nearly the color of the sheet.

“Lividity,” I noted aloud.

“Yeah,” Daniels said. “Killed face down on the floor, then left there a while before being placed on his back on the bed.”

I nodded. “But how was there enough time?”

Daniels then made another noise that sounded like a distressed grunt.

“What is it?”

“No weapon,” Daniels said.

I quickly took in the rest of the cell.

“What’s that?”

I moved over to the right side of the cell and carefully lifted the blood-stained inmate uniform wadded up in the front corner. Stretching it out revealed that it was smeared, not soaked with blood, and that it belonged to Menge.

“No arterial spray on it,” he said. “Killer must’ve used it to clean up—maybe to dry off after he washed up in the sink.”

I nodded, and returned the uniform to its original spot.

When I glanced back at Menge, I noticed that the label on the shirt he was wearing had been ripped off, leaving a blue square with far less blood on it than the rest of the uniform. It looked like a small rectangular stencil that had been spray painted with blood.

“His name tag’s been ripped off,” I said. “After he was killed.”

A white label with the inmate’s name, DC number, and bunk assignment was sewn on every inmate uniform at the institution.

“It’s right there.” He pointed to Menge’s plastic ID badge lying on the bed beside him.

In addition to the label sewn onto their uniform, inmates were required to wear a photo ID badge through a loop in their shirt or on the lapel of their jacket.

“Not the ID badge, but the name label sewn on his uniform. It’s missing. But the ID badge is strange, too.”

“I don’t follow.”

“It only has traces of blood on it.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Presumably the label is covered with it,” I continued, “and it’s missing.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I thought you meant something else. I’ve already noted that.”

He sounded defensive, as if he didn’t know what I meant, but wasn’t willing to ask, and for a moment the old Tom Daniels was back.

“The yell we heard when we were talkin’ to Potter,” he said, “think that’s when it happened?”

I shrugged. “It didn’t sound like that kind of yell—not a scream or a cry for help. We were so on edge about the flyer, we’d’ve come running if it were a scream.”

“You’re right. It was definitely a yell, not a scream. At the time I thought it was just the usual inmate outburst.”

“Still,” I said, “we should’ve checked it out.”

He frowned and nodded.

Closing my eyes for a moment, I took in a shallow breath through my mouth, trying not to smell the blood any more than I had to. I wasn’t sure why, but I was finding this more difficult than I usually did. It was probably a complex mixture of things—like the shock and horror of the excessive violence and bloodletting, the fact that Justin, every bit the sensitive, talented artist, seemed far more vulnerable than most inmates, that I had told his sister I would check on him, and the fact that I had been warned, had been so close when it happened, and was still unable to prevent it.

“It doesn’t make sense,” I said.

“None of this does.”

“Good point.”

Carefully turning Menge’s head, Daniels examined the enormous gash in his neck. As he moved the head, what had to be the last of Menge’s blood oozed out of the gaping red and black wound.

“Doesn’t look self-inflicted,” I said.

We fell silent a moment, the raw violence of the situation resting heavily upon us, and I realized I had not said a prayer for Justin Menge nor mourned his death. I closed my eyes and briefly prayed for him and his family, especially Paula. The mourning would have to come later.

When I opened my eyes, Daniels was shaking his head, and I could tell something awful was dawning on him.

“What is it?”

“My case. There goes my whole fruckin’ case against Martinez.” He looked over at me, eyes blazing. “I know you’re thinking about Menge and I should be too, but, dammit, I was so close.”

“I understand. I’m sorry.”

The more he seemed to think about it, the more it registered, the more disconsolate he became.

“I can’t catch my breath,” he said, his voice trembling, his hands shaking. “Do you know how many hours I’ve put in on this thing? How bad I wanted to get the bastard?”

I nodded. “You’ll find another way.”

He waved it off with a blood-covered gloved hand and looked away. He stood there quietly for a moment, staring at nothing, while I moved over and began looking through Menge’s things.

Next to a black plastic comb on the stainless steel sink sat a small travel-size tube of toothpaste with the cap off, a blob of white oozing out of it. Next to it was a new bar of PRIDE soap.

The top bunk didn’t have a mattress, and several books and notepads were stacked on it. Among the books was
Catechism of the Catholic Church
,
Ceremonies of the Modern Roman Rite
,
The Road Less Traveled
,
A History of Art
, a
Bible
, and a few paperback mystery and romance novels. Next to the notepads, several dozen drawings Justin had done were in small stacks grouped by periods: impressionists, post-impressionists, cubists, post-modernists, abstract expressionists.

Daniels moved over beside me and began thumbing through the notepads.

Lifting the lid of his footlocker, I squatted down beside it, and began carefully sifting through its contents. There wasn’t much to see—a couple of bags of chips, two Butterfingers, socks, underwear, some personal hygiene products, some family photographs, and the colored pencils and sketch pads he used in lieu of the paints and canvases that were considered contraband. One thing I couldn’t be sure about was his uniforms. One was on him, one wadded up in the corner, but I’d expect to see at least one more folded with his other things. He may just have had two. Some inmates did. Others had several. It’d be difficult to find out how many he actually had.

“There a notebook in there?”

I shook my head.

“It’s not up here either.”

“What?”

“Pad he used for his journal and statement against Martinez. It’s gone. It was here earlier. I saw it.” He shook his head. “Dammit. That fuckin’ little . . .”

“You think Martinez…”

“Who else? I don’t know
how
he did it. Still can’t figure out how it was done, but yeah, I’d say he should top our suspect list.”

Our
? Was that just habit? Was he referring to the department? Or was he saying I would be involved in his investigation?

We were silent a moment, while I looked around one last time and thought about how it might have been done. Daniels continued to shake his head, seemingly on the verge of tears.

On the pale gray cinder block wall between the bunks, each dangling by a small strip of stolen Scotch tape, hung two different drawings of
La
Grenouillere
.

In 1868, Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir had set up their easels side by side and painted the frog pond or
La Grenouillere
with quite disparate results. Justin Menge had recreated them both with amazing accuracy, especially considering he was limited to a medium-size pack of colored pencils. He had lavished such care on them, risked so much to display them.