The Christmas Killer (28 page)

The protesters were roughly the same bunch as last week, the Monday that everything had started turning to shit. Why did they need so many cops to control this chicken-shit demo? Even the brass were out – Asher was at the head of the gaggle of cops, lips pursed tight, shoulders square and arms gesturing nonsensical directions and instructions. He was posing for the few cameras.

‘There’s the prick,’ shouted a familiar face. Jake didn’t need to look to know it was Guy Makowski. He had seen him at the forefront of the protesters, shouting the loudest. Jake had hung back specifically to avoid a confrontation. So much for that.

Makowski was apparently trying to get at Jake. He was a strong guy, and if his emotions were running as high as he was pretending, he probably could have broken free of the guys holding him back at any time. But that was not his intention. He was using the old schoolboy ploy, issuing a challenge he knew he wouldn’t have to make good on. Asking for a fight he was too much of a coward to actually have – his friends were his cover.

Jake walked away to stand beside Father Ken in the shadow of a withered oak tree. The priest nodded and smiled weakly at Jake. They had exchanged a few words the previous evening when he had dropped Jake’s mom home. She hadn’t seemed much better, despite chatting with the priest.

‘You OK, Father?’ Jake asked.

The priest nodded. ‘I’m going to see if I can talk sense into them. We both know the work isn’t going to stop.’ A multi-billion-dollar development was not going to be derailed by a handful of well-meaning protesters or violent nutcases. The priest strode towards the protesters, who were chanting their slogans.

‘Save our church.’

‘Re-con-struc-tion, not de-struc-tion.’

The crowd fell silent as Father Ken reached them.

‘It’s the Lord’s will,’ the priest said. ‘Christ said the kingdom of heaven is
within
. And he was right. Our church is anywhere we gather in love and fellowship. Our church is not a building.’

‘My church is a building!’ yelled a woman. Dressed severely, she appeared to be in her fifties.

‘Margaret, I know how attached you are to this place. But the diocese has already provided a modern church with modern facilities.’

‘And what about our families?’ shouted another woman.

Jake sighed, knowing that the debate had taken its usual turn. The graveyard was what it really came down
to, not the church building. No matter how carefully it was done, people felt their loved ones’ remains were being desecrated.

‘That’s why I’m here,’ said Father Ken patiently. ‘To ensure that the remains are treated with proper respect. They will be properly reinterred. You have my promise. This is the Lord’s will. He wants it so, and we must acquiesce.’

Just then there was a rumble as the first digger moved into the small graveyard, and a wail went up from the crowd.

This was a waste of Jake’s time. But in a sense it was also a release. He had no leads to follow, but he couldn’t obsess on it, because he wasn’t behind his desk looking at empty files.

I have to get back to it, look at everything with fresh eyes
, he thought.
I’ve been missing something from the beginning, and I’m still missing it now.

He walked over to Asher, whose face showed a mixture of apprehension and annoyance. He may have been a bit of a blowhard, but he knew cops, and he clearly saw on Jake’s face what was coming.

‘You want to keep the FBI out of your jurisdiction, sir?’ said Jake. ‘The best way of doing that is to keep your best people on the hunt.’

Asher’s cheek twitched as if he was biting back an insult. In the end he just turned down the volume a little. ‘After your last few days, you really think you qualify as one of the best?’

Jake hated to admit it, but he had no answer to that. ‘Colonel, we have to keep pressing. It won’t be long before the Feds start looking at Littleton and wondering if they should send some agents over. But they’ll be doing it based on
our
casework. They’ll have a dream of a head start to make a collar that isn’t rightfully theirs.’

Asher was having none of it. ‘If the casework is so good, and the Feds’ job will be so easy, why haven’t you caught this fucker already, Austin? Or is that how things were done in “Chi-town”? You let them kill and kill and kill, just to … What? Make it interesting?’

Jake wondered if the disdain in Asher’s face was aimed at him or the city of Chicago. Maybe it was aimed at all cities in America – the cities that wouldn’t employ him, the cities where he could never make it. Did Asher try and fail to get a city cop job somewhere? Did it eat at him now?

‘No, Austin,’ Asher went on. ‘You will shut up and do as you are told. And you’ll do as you’re told somewhere that isn’t where I am.’

Jake shrugged, biting the inside of his cheek to keep the smile off his face as a moment of clarity hit him. ‘Fine.’ He started walking back to his car.

He didn’t need to turn back to know that Asher was glaring at him as he left, absolutely seething. But after cutting Jake down to size Asher could hardly call after him and ask him where he was going and what he thought he was doing.

As he reached his car, Jake caught the eye of Father
Ken, who was back under the oak tree. In the foreground a digger was clawing slowly at the earth. Elsewhere, protesters spread numbly away from the church grounds, defeated. Even Guy Makowski was nowhere to be seen.

Jake gave Father Ken an upward nod as he opened the door and got into the car. As he pulled away, he saw the priest giving him a gentle half-smile.

Jake almost admired him. He was taking the demise of his church rather well.

Back at the station all was quiet. Jake put a call through to the lab. Ronnie picked up.

‘I need more on that murder weapon report,’ he began.

‘And a hello to you too. I’m typing it up now. I’ll email it when it’s done.’

‘Want to tell me now?’

‘It’s a medieval device called a head crusher. It gradually pulverizes the skull.’

‘Jesus …’ whispered Jake.

‘It was used during the Inquisition and also by English witchfinders. It was perfect for extracting confessions because you could put on the pressure, then ease it and prolong the torture over several hours.’

The instant he heard the description, Jake knew they had it.

‘First the jaw cracks …’

You wince at the noise of the jaw cracking.

‘Then the lower teeth grind into the ones above …’

There’s no more talking after that.

‘The intracranial pressure causes the eyeballs to pop out of the skull …’

You pretend not to, but you like that part.

‘Some of the devices had pockets to collect the eyeballs, but—’

‘He doesn’t harvest the eyeballs,’ Jake interrupted her.

Jake googled ‘head crusher’ as he listened and studied the images that came up. They all showed a wooden or metal frame with a helmet and a large turnscrew above it. They looked infernal.

Ronnie continued: ‘Eventually the pressure builds to the point where the skull itself cracks and the brain contents are squeezed out.’

You watch that part. You watch and make sure your work is done.

‘Death occurs only at that stage. In the early stages, once the skull has been secured, the torturer would often beat on the helmet with a pipe, and the pain would vibrate through the …’ Ronnie took a second to search for the word ‘… uh,
subject’s
whole body. Some people were released after torture, but they were never the same again.’

Jake nodded even though Ronnie couldn’t see him. Which was a good thing, in a way, because she wasn’t there to see what he could feel was a blank, unemotional look on his face. She had described almost unimaginable human suffering, and by the end of it her analytical tones were weighed down with a kind of
basic human horror, at once empathetic to those who suffered the torture and astonished that members of her own species could devise such methods of pain-infliction. One look at Jake’s face, and she would have questions. Questions that he could not answer.

Starting with
How can you listen to such a tale and not be affected?
Weird thing was, he could never empathize with victims as well as he could with a killer. It wasn’t that he didn’t care, it was just that he couldn’t feel them so clearly. He was closer to the killer.

Jake found himself suddenly very glad that Gail Greene wasn’t listening in.

He tried to affect a tone that mirrored Ronnie’s as he asked, ‘What sort of a mind would invent a head crusher?’

‘I hate to think,’ she said.

Jake was silent for a moment, then said, ‘It fits the MO. And he could carry one in a car. The profile we built up has the killer owning his own car. But where would you get a head crusher these days? Should I run checks for recent burglaries at museums?’

‘Believe it or not,’ said Ronnie, ‘people buy and sell that kind of stuff all the time – there’s quite a market for it. I did some searching online. They appear to be quite a thing on the S & M scene, but the ones they use wouldn’t have the power to do the damage we’re seeing on the victims. I suspect our guy is using an old one bought through a specialist antique dealer. Either that, or he made it himself to the, uh, traditional specifications.’

‘Well, that’s something,’ Jake said. ‘We’ll start phoning round these dealers and see if anyone sold one to someone in the area.’

Jake’s other phone began to ring.

‘I got to go, Ronnie,’ he told her. ‘Thanks for this.’

He hung up and took the other call.

‘Detective Austin?’ said the voice on the other end. ‘This is Special Agent Colin Reader, FBI. Do you have a minute?’

Fuck!
The Feds were going to step in and claim jurisdiction.

‘What’s it about, Agent Reader?’ He decided to play it friendly and informal but respectful. Equal to equal. Showing deference at this stage would be a mistake.

‘You have our leg.’

‘Excuse me?’

The agent chuckled a little, then went on: ‘I’m working the Springfield asylum thing, and we’ve found a third body. And this one is missing his femur. We heard you guys found a femur yesterday near the Christmas Killer dump site.’

‘We found a bone – it’s with the lab now,’ said Jake.

‘Ours was old and an adult.’

‘Yeah,’ said Jake. ‘Call Dr Zatkin in the forensics lab in Indianapolis. Tell her I said to give you everything.’

‘Thanks, bud. I owe you one.’ But the agent didn’t hang up. ‘Think there’s any connection between our cases?’

Jake paused. It may have been an out-of-the-blue
call, and Reader didn’t
sound
like an asshole, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a possibility that the guy was working a scam, digging for scraps of info on their case. ‘I doubt it,’ said Jake, aiming for a tone that was neither too friendly or too stand-offish. ‘Your guy is probably long dead.’

‘Yeah … But still. One heck of a coincidence.’

Jake was wondering how a bone from a town miles away had ended up in Littleton – and been dumped deliberately so near their crime scenes. Now he knew where the bone came from, he had to rule out pranksters and highway protesters. Though he wouldn’t admit it to the FBI, this latest development troubled him.

Just as Jake ended the call with Reader, Mills burst into the detective bureau. He was actually running, a panicked look on his face.

‘Adult skeleton found,’ he said to Jake, grabbing some stuff from his drawer.

‘I know,’ said Jake. ‘I’ve just been talking to the Springfield team—’

‘Not in Springfield,’ said Mills. ‘At Christ the Redeemer.’

What the fuck?
Jake got up and ran out after Mills.