by JE Gurley
Organic waste. I had no clue what that might mean. “Excited, huh? Maybe we got a break. We could certainly use one.”
“If we did he’s not talking about it.”
I nodded. Munson always played it close to his chest. Getting information out of him was like collecting on a bet from a deadbeat brother-in-law, but when Munson finished a report, you could count on it being accurate. I opened the folder lying on top of a pile of scattered papers on my desk. Its two thin pages and a few photos of the crime scene contained the total sum of what we knew about the Stewart girl’s disappearance so far. The two folders beneath it of the previous cases were just as woefully thin. I glanced over at the white marker board resting on its easel against the wall. On it were three photos – Nadia Travers, Elise Dewhurst and Patricia Stewart – three photos of what they looked like when they had lived happy carefree lives. All the others were photos of a bloody bathroom, a bloody bedroom, and in the first case, a bloody fourth floor balcony. Under the heading ‘Connections’, I had written ‘young females between the ages of 18 and 22’. Under ‘Suspects’, I drew a big zero. I read the addresses.
“The only connection I can see,” I said, “other than our perp, is that they all lived within a five block radius of each other.”
Lew held out a sheet of paper. “I checked with Sex Crimes Division. They have only one registered sex offender within two miles of the area and he prefers little boys. I doubt he’s our man. Besides, his alibi checks out. He works the late shift as a security guard at the hospital.”
“Great background check,” I comment sarcastically. “I hope he doesn’t work the children’s ward.”
I had a gut feeling that whoever was doing this would not be in any of our files. It had all the earmarks of a new criminal, new but experienced. “Send out some feelers cross country to see if there have been any similar missing girl cases will you?”
Lew cocked his head and looked at me. “You think he’s new to the area?”
I shook my head uncertainly. “Maybe new to the area, but I’d bet my retirement that he’s killed before. He’s too thorough. I’m betting he’s had lots of practice.”
Lew chuckled. “At the rate the economy’s going, your retirement won’t get you a grass hut in Costa Rica.”
“Ha. Ha. Our boy has to have some place to dispose of the bodies and I suspect it’s nearby. What do we have in the area?”
I turned at the sudden silence behind me. Lew was staring at the photos. “You know they’re dead, don’t you?”
I looked at Lew. I hadn’t realized he still held out hope for the girls. I nodded. “Yeah.”
After a moment, he looked down at his list. “Three warehouses, all of which have been checked thoroughly, numerous empty lots likewise checked and a few abandoned houses that are still being searched. Oh, here’s one. An old monastery, abandoned about fifty, sixty years ago. I don’t think anyone’s been there yet. And of course, there’s the bay, but if he’s dumping them there, none have surfaced yet. Want to check out the monastery?”
A monastery, I thought. It would take a real perverted bastard to desecrate a monastery – like someone who kills young girls and carts off their bodies over roofs. “Yeah, let’s give it a look. My ex-wife always said I needed to go to church more often.”
“Oh? The one who left you for the butcher or the one who’s shacking up with your ex-girlfriend?”
I threw Lew a dirty look. “The first one. I don’t speak to my last ex. I’ve never forgiven her for coming between me and my girlfriend.”
This drew a chuckle from Lew. My esteemed partner never knew when I was telling the truth or lying through my teeth. I enjoyed embellishing tales of my failed marriages for his entertainment. This miniscule amount of joy was more than my short-lived marriages produced, the reason I remain a devout bachelor. I can’t place all the blame on my two exes, but they certainly didn’t make life any easier.
I grabbed my coat and filled my travel mug with coffee from the unending pot just outside the captain’s office. I think he placed it there deliberately so he could see who was goofing off. I waved my mug at his scowling face as I left. He motioned to me but I pretended I didn’t see him and rushed out.
Lew drove. It was his turn and I had more thinking to do. I sat back in the passenger seat of his Ford Explorer, noticing the radical change of viewpoint from my Acura. Now, I knew why Lew drove so aggressively. It was like riding high up in a piece of heavy equipment, looking down on all the other drivers. It gives the driver a sense of aloofness.
Aloofness – I could safely pin on our perpetrator this one characteristic. He held other people, especially the authorities, in contempt. He did not fear capture; therefore, he didn’t feel the need to curb his lust for killing. He was an intelligent person, arrogant, agile and strong with a penchant for helpless young women. This made him doubly dangerous.
I had investigated far too many young girls’ deaths to let one case get under my skin, but it was. I guess it was because I couldn’t place myself inside the killer’s mind. What was his motive – perverted sexual pleasure? That didn’t fit the evidence. Sure, the girls were all pretty, but there were prettier girls much easier to abduct. The city was full of them. No, I didn’t see the sex angle here nor was he the collector type, a trophy killer. If so, why take the entire body? Trophy killers usually took small souvenirs, body parts or articles of clothing.
Then there was the problem of the blood? A clever murderer would clean up after himself. Girls go missing every day. No one would even be certain there had been a crime committed. It was as if he wanted us to know about the crime, or, what was worse didn’t care that we knew. This last bothered me deeply. A killer with contempt for the law had no remorse, no conscience. He could be a very dangerous man. He would strike again under our very noses just to play his perverted games. Such killers drew their own boundaries and played by their own set of rules. This one seemed to have decided to work within a confined area of the city. This went against most criminal thinking that widening the crime area increased the search area. Even so, we had had no luck with either neighborhood stakeouts or walking patrols. A bit of old-fashioned luck would come in handy.
“We’re here,” Lew announced, interrupting my thoughts.
I looked up expecting to see an old church like the Catholic cathedral downtown. Instead, we parked in front of a massive walled compound. A gaping wound where enormous wooden gates had once hung provided the only entrance into the compound. Rusty metal hinges with shards of weathered wood, all that remained of the gates, dangled from rotting frames.
I turned to Lew. “I thought you said monastery. This looks like a fort.”
“It’s an old Jesuit monastery built in the late 1700’s… 1780s, I think. They liked their privacy. The Jesuits abandoned it in the late 1800s. The Catholic Diocese built a church here around 1940 but closed it down in the 50s when the neighborhood changed.”
I looked at my partner with more respect. “You’re a veritable fount of knowledge.”
He shrugged. “I did some research on the internet. You could too if you knew how to turn on a computer.”
“That’s why I’ve got you,” I retorted.
I exited the SUV and stood looking at the monastery. Its blank stone walls and massive gate only reinforced my first impression of an old fortress. It sat apart from the surrounding neighborhood, across a bridge that spanned a dried up river bed, almost as if intentionally removed from the neighborhood. Through the gaping wound of the entrance, the newer attached Catholic church had that majestic façade of churches of that era – plastered concrete block construction, bell tower thrusting heavenward topped by a weathered leaning cross. Large arched, stained glass windows framed a wide, wooden double-door entrance fronted by broad stone steps. Empty niches in the pockmarked wall once held marble statues of saints but were now the resting spots for beer cans, a pathetic Columbarium wall for dead dreams. Grotesque stone gargoyles heaped with decades of bird
droppings squatted on the roof, doubling as rainspouts, returning my gaze with cold, patient eyes.
Over the centuries, the monastery adjoining the church had fallen into wretched disrepair. Many of the outbuildings were now mounds of weed-grown rubble. The newer structure added by the Diocese during WWII attached to the older stonework of the monastery by some Frankensteinian surgical procedure. The crumbling, faded plaster walls clashed with the weathered, native gray stone of the monastery. The newer structure bore none of the architectural details of the old monastery, its box-like design a paean to the speed of modern construction rather than finesse of earlier times. At that time, the neighborhood had been predominately middle-class Irish, but over the years, it had fallen on bad times. Waves of Eastern European immigrants, displaced Russians and Greeks after WWII gave way to latecomer Latinos, Koreans and Somalis who now comprised the majority of the population. Attendance had dropped and the Diocese had reassigned the priest and closed the doors about sixty years ago. Vandals had mercilessly riddled the windows and walls with bullet holes. A chain and padlock secured the front doors of the church and the main building of the monastery and local gangs had tagged the steps of both structures with colorful graffiti and gang signs. The entire compound looked dark and uninviting, much like the surrounding neighborhood.
In contrast to the depressing, dilapidated structures, a tangle of rose bushes grown wild from lack of pruning fronted the monastery wall, their rampant vines awash with delicate pink and crimson blooms. Their strong fragrance masked a host of more disagreeable odors emanating from piles of feces, both human and animal, and the decaying corpse of a small animal, possibly a large dog.
Inside the wall, signs of the monastery’s hasty abandonment remained in spite of an effort by the church to clean up the compound. Broken statues and stone benches unceremoniously piled against the inside wall for later removal had been forgotten. Waist-high weeds sprouted through the gravel pathway leading from the gaping entrance to the church steps. A second path broke off directing parishioners to a side door of the building. A low brick curb lined both walkways in an effort to discourage worshippers from wandering the compound grounds. Someone had forced the side door. Judging from the graffiti, one of the local Latino gangs bore responsibility. The rusty doorknob lay discarded beside the path. The door opened onto an antechamber or sitting room stinking of urine, vomit and feces, some disgustingly human. There was no furniture, but there was plenty of evidence of partying. Needles, syringes and broken beer bottles littered the filthy floor. A few grimy, stained mattresses leaned against the wall.
“Lovely spot,” Lew said with undisguised rancor.
I kicked an empty quart beer bottle across the floor. “Yeah, one of the finer clubs.”
A second door opened onto a long corridor that in turn led to the sanctuary. Sun filtered in through a dozen gaping holes in the roof and through the broken stained glass windows in the front and along the side of the building. Our friendly neighborhood vandals had been hard at work. The pews, the altar and the statuary were missing, long ago transferred to some other church, but oddly, a large crucifix of Christ remained, leaning against the rear of the apse rather than hanging from the wall. Dirt and litter formed small piles across the room. It looked as if someone had attempted to clean up the place but had stopped, as if daunted by the enormity of the task. The stink of pigeon crap only added to the oppressive smell of stale, musty air.
“I was a choirboy once,” Lew confided, staring around the empty space.
“Really?” I was surprised at this bit of information. He rarely spoke of his childhood.
“Yeah, wore a white robe and everything.” He pointed to a spot along one wall. “That would have been the chancel where I sang.”
I knew Lew did not attend church now. In fact, he never spoke about religion. It was one of the subjects we avoided. “What happened?”
“Choirmaster tried to get a little too chummy with me. I kicked him in the balls and ran home. Never went back.”
I laughed at the image of an eight or nine-year old Lew kicking the Choirmaster in the nuts as I walked toward the rear of the church. He wore a size 12 shoe now. I bet he could deliver a good solid blow even back then. The sound of my footsteps echoed eerily, sounding out of place, like laughing in a cemetery. I stopped. Doors on each side of the apse at the rear of the nave were ajar.
“Check out that door,” I told Lew, pointing to the one on the left, “and I’ll take this one.”
A foul stench pervaded the church growing stronger the deeper we ventured. It rode on the motes of dust we kicked up with our footsteps like a bad memory. It went beyond stale, musty old building smell and old feces and urine odor. It reminded me of a petting zoo or a barnyard, an animal smell. Just beneath that smell, I detected a second, more subtle odor. It took me a minute to recognize it – ammonia, like on the roof. Not the ammonia smell of old urine, but purer, like ammonia out of the bottle or from one of those turn-of-the-century iceboxes I once saw on exhibit at a home show back when I was married to one or the other of my exes. It had leaked ammonia so badly they had to shut it down.
My door led to a small alcove with steps to the left ascending to the sacristy, a closet for the storage of religious artifacts. I doubted anything remained but out of curiosity, a necessary element of my occupation, I opened the door and peered inside. I found nothing but a thick layer of dust and a crushed beer can. A rustle startled me until I spotted a large rat staring at me from a shelf above my head. It seemed he was curious as well. He sniffed once and slowly crawled away as if he owned the small closet and I was an unwelcome guest. I admired his insouciance with visitors. The corridor continued straight back to the original part of the monastery. The wooden floor bore a thin veneer of fine dust liming old footprints, themselves dust covered. No one had disturbed this dust in long years. Small rooms branched off the corridor, all empty except for their share of accumulated trash and dust. Cobwebs woven by generations of busy spiders draped the windows and the dark corners of the rooms. Relatively clean rectangular areas on the wall outlined former positions of missing pictures and crucifixes. As we walked, I felt a low rumble in my chest as the floor and walls began to vibrate. Dust and paint chips plummeted from the ceiling, joining similar piles on the floor.
“Subway,” Lew whispered in answer to my confused look. He jerked his head back toward the door he had investigated. “Nothing there.”
I nodded as I wondered if the subway was one of the reasons for the church's abandonment. Its effect on the building would certainly interfere with a religious ceremony and was probably the cause of the many cracks in the ceiling and wall plaster. Some first-time worshipers might attribute the shaking and rumble to the End of Days. The corridor ended at a wall much older than the church. The builders had simply abutted the newer walls of the church to the outside walls of the monastery’s main building. They had left a weathered wooden exterior door in place. I tried the handle. The door was unlocked but I had to lean my shoulder into it to force it open. Moldy plaster broke away from the doorframe and crashed to the floor. So much for stealth, I thought. I managed to force open the door just wide enough to squeeze through into a large room in very bad disrepair, the original nave of the monastery chapel. The nave was extraordinarily large for a Jesuit monastery, nearly as large as that of the adjoining church. I had mistaken its vaulted ceiling for the building’s second story from outside. I wondered at the need for such a large place of worship. From its size, the monastery looked as if it had housed no more than fifty monks. Perhaps the commanding size and attention to detail had been an act of devotion, making it a tribute to God rather than simply a place of worship.
Sunlight dappled the broken-tiled floor through large holes in the roof. Birds roosted within the carved stone leaves of heavily scrolled capitals atop twin rows of fluted columns. Faded wall murals bore macabre scenes depicting the grisly deaths of martyred saints. The odor of ammonia was much stronger here than in the res
t of the building. Equal to and unmasked by the ammonia was a second odor, one with which I was all too familiar in to my line of work – the cloying stench of death.
I followed the odor to the apse beyond a stone altar. Barely visible through the gloom and shadows was a pale, blood-splattered leg. I pressed my handkerchief to my nose and moved closer. The sound of my steps frightened a pair of rats that had been busy munching on the foot attached to the leg. Two toes had already disappeared, tidbits for a rat feast. I moved closer and saw the lower edge of a nude body, a female, probably one of our missing girls. It was not a pleasant sight. A slight sound caught my attention. Thinking it might be Lew, I turned to look. Nobody was there, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw a shadow descending on me. Before I could react, something or someone hit me in the back with sufficient force to send me hurtling through the air like a punted football. I landed ten feet away, skidding painfully face down across the filthy stone tile floor. I felt the weight of someone heavy standing over me, pressing me into the floor; then a sharp pain exploded in my right shoulder. The pressure mounted, crushing my chest into the floor until I thought I would pass out.
“Tack!”
When Lew yelled out my name, the pressure lessened, and then disappeared. I rolled over quickly, clumsily trying to draw my weapon with my injured arm but my assailant was gone, vanished. Dimly, out of my watering eyes, I saw Lew rushing down the nave with gun in hand, sweeping it back and forth across the empty nave searching for my assailant.
“Are you all right?” he yelled out still scanning the room for intruders.
I considered his question for a moment to decide how best to answer as my burning lungs gulped down ragged gasps of breath. My shoulder was on fire, my bruised ribs screamed for attention and my chin and forehead were bloody and scraped from the slide across the floor.
“I’ll live,” I answered truthfully. “Did you see the bastard?”
He shook his head. “I glimpsed a shadow but it was gone before I could see anything. What the hell happened?”