Precious Blood

by Jonathan Hayes

  Jenner nodded. He presented the cases in detail, as deli-Precious Blood

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  cately as he could. Whatever carnage Sheehan had witnessed on the Repose, it had been in the context of military conflict, where historic momentum strips away the moral implications of the actions of individuals. The crime scene photos were something inherently more horrific, more intuitively repugnant: brutal acts of torture and dehumanization, committed by one man not in the name of country or survival, but in the name of personal pleasure. As he spoke, he tried to gauge the priest’s reaction, trying to spare him the full horror of the case, yet not wanting to omit anything that might be important.

  The priest’s white head remained bowed, his fingers steepled in front of his forehead in concentration. There was no display of emotion, just an occasional nod as Jenner described the three victims, and the violent, ritualistic aspects of their deaths.

  “In the Smith and Wexler murders, the heads had deliberately been positioned to shock whoever discovered them. In one instance, the killer poured milk on a countertop, then set the head into the milk.”

  At this, the priest’s head jerked upward. Jenner immediately regretted having mentioned it, but when he looked at Sheehan, he saw that his expression was more grim than shocked. He nodded for Jenner to continue, lowering his head again.

  Jenner told him what they knew of the killer’s appearance from Ana’s description, and his theories about the physical branding process.

  “Which brings us to you . . .” Jenner trailed off.

  “Which brings you to me.” The priest sat forward. “May I see the texts, gentlemen?”

  Roggetti produced a large folder from his briefcase. He stood portentously, aware it was his moment, and walked to the desk, followed by Jenner and Sheehan.

  The detective removed the photographs, eight-by-tens on glossy stock, and set them out: a couple for Delore, several 160

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  for Smith, and a slippery stack of more than two dozen for Wexler.

  Roggetti said, “I also brought Doc’s tracing of the first two, if that’ll help.”

  The priest put on a pair of half-moon glasses, then leaned over the pictures.

  After a few seconds, he switched on the desk lamp and wordlessly pulled a chair over to the edge of the desk, tuning out Jenner and the detective.

  He squinted at the Delore photos for a second, then put them aside.

  “Khi ro.”

  Roggetti and Jenner looked at each other. Sheehan turned to scrutinize a 1:1 close-up of Smith’s markings. He picked up a legal pad and uncapped a fountain pen; without looking at the pad, he began to scribble.

  “Fascinating . . . ,” he murmured.

  Jenner peered at the legal pad, but the priest’s scrawl was as illegible as the killer’s texts. The room was silent except for the crackle and hiss of the fire and the scratch of Sheehan’s pen.

  Outside, it had turned dark. Through the window, Jenner caught glimpses of students carrying lit candles, a soft stream of golden lights.

  It was Roggetti who broke the silence.

  “So, Father, is it Coptic?”

  Sheehan ignored the question. He jotted a little more, murmuring words under his breath in a halting, arrhythmic manner.

  He turned back to them.

  “Yes, it’s Coptic, but it’s very unusual. The letters are poorly formed—skin would be a tricky surface, of course, but the shapes of the letter are uneven in a way that I don’t think can be explained just by the challenge of writing on skin.”

  He tapped the first photo with his pen.

  “It’s hard for me to make these out. The first one, the single Precious Blood

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  letter, seems straightforward. He’s made a box, and written a single character in it; I think it’s a khi ro, a Coptic method of referring to dates, specifically the Diocletian era.”

  Roggetti bobbed his head firmly, as if the Diocletian era was standard watercooler talk at the precinct.

  Sheehan turned to reexamine the Smith photographs.

  Jenner knew that the characters would be hard to make out; abrasion from the neck wound, drying, and suturing had all disrupted and deformed the text.

  Sheehan gestured to a walnut case on one of the bookshelves. “Detective, if you wouldn’t mind, please pass me the magnifying glass that’s in the wooden box there.”

  With the hand lens, he pored over the photograph for a long while, occasionally tilting it to lessen the glare from the glossy surface.

  He put the Smith photographs down and shifted to the Wexler stack. When he saw the first image—a wide shot, taken in the autopsy room, of the decedent’s back, the whole surface crowded with dense lines of text—he sat back in his chair and murmured, “My God.”

  He tipped his glasses up onto the top of his head and squinted at the text for a few seconds. Then he put the photograph back on the table, stood, stretched, and rubbed his eyes.

  “Gentlemen, I’m going to need some time. The writing on the second girl is very hard to make out, but it looks like the first symbol is the khi ro again. I don’t know how much of the rest I can decipher, but I’ll do my best. The final victim

  . . . well, I’m hoping that text will be the most legible.”

  He picked his sherry up from the side table and took a sip, then put the glass down on the desk next to the photographs and turned to face them.

  “When you study ancient manuscripts, you spend most of your time alone. I’m afraid I’ve become accustomed to that solitude—I’ll work better without distraction. No offense, gentlemen.”

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  “Oh, none taken, Father!” Roggetti said.

  “If you could leave a cell phone number, I’ll call you when I have something. I’m going to take a little nap, then a shower, then I’ll get down to work.”

  Jenner passed the priest a CD of his photos of Wexler, the tracing of her back, and a printout of a spreadsheet he’d made to compare the murders, bloody nightmares sanitized into a neat grid. Three columns for the victims’ names, then row upon row of specific data—date of discovery, estimated date of death, injury pattern, family history, academic record, everything Jenner had been able to think of. The priest raised an eyebrow: it ran almost five pages.

  As they shook hands, Jenner said, “As soon as you have anything for us, even if it’s only a vague feeling, please call.

  I know you understand how urgent this is.”

  He waited in the doorway for Roggetti to say his fare-well.

  The detective clasped Sheehan’s hand firmly and said,

  “Thank you on behalf of the New York City Police Department, Father.”

  Roggetti shook the priest’s hand, but didn’t release it.

  “Father, I’d appreciate it if you could offer up a prayer for us, for God to give us help in catching this perpetrator.”

  Jenner paused, uncertain as to whether the priest would say the prayer at that moment, on the doorstep. But Sheehan was already closing the door, saying, “I’ll do that, Detective.

  And may God watch over you and guide your steps.”

  Before Sheehan could close the door completely, Roggetti slipped his other hand in to clasp Sheehan’s, uttering a final, earnest “Thank you, Father . . . Thank you,” the mist of his breath hanging in the light from the lamp overhead.

  In the dark of Pyke’s loft, Ana lay in bed, staring at the pitch-black void of the ceiling somewhere overhead. She concentrated on not blinking, letting the tears well up and Precious Blood

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  slip out by themselves, feeling them trickle over her cheek and down onto the pillow.

  She snuffled and turned to reach out for her drink, but her grasping fingers knocked the tumbler off the bedside table, and it fell to the ground with a dull thud.

  The tears coming faster, she slipped out of the bed, feeling the whisky-sodden carpet underneath her feet as she scram
bled to find the cup.

  Empty.

  She cradled it in her palm, sank back against the mattress, and cried hard, her shoulders heaving as if invisible wings were struggling to lift her up.

  It had really happened, all of it. She wasn’t going to pass out and wake up hungover in their Cancun hotel room, and she would never again flop down on Andie’s bed to howl about a date. Andie was dead, cut into pieces, buried in the ground. She was dead, dead forever, and all the whisky in the world couldn’t change that.

  And the man in the window, the man who hacked apart her best friend just for fun, the man who smiled down at her as Andie’s blood dried on his skin: that man had said that he would find her, and he would hurt her.

  And no matter what Jenner and Roggetti and Garcia said or did, she knew that he would act. He would find her, and make her scream and make her bleed. He would hack her apart, and she would be dead, and they would bury her, and all the whisky in the world couldn’t change that.

  tuesday,

  december 10

  Alittle after 1:00 p.m., they broke for lunch, gathering in Pyke’s kitchen to wait for the delivery from the cuchifritos joint on Rivington—a salad for the prosecutor, roast pork and black beans and plantains for the rest of them.

  Madeleine Silver was on the phone to the DA’s office, hand over her other ear to block out the kitchen noise. Garcia was disassembling Pyke’s Italian stovetop espresso pot, determined to show him how to make a perfect Cuban coffee, a cafecito.

  Pyke was still frosty, but when the chief of detectives had Garcia interview Ana a second time, he didn’t stop Jenner from sitting in. She was sitting blearily across from Jenner, reading the manual to her new cell phone, a gift from Pyke.

  Garcia’s old partner claimed Rad could talk the juice out of an orange; twice a year he taught interrogation at the FBI Academy in Quantico. Every time Garcia went to Quantico, he came back making the same Children of the Corn jokes, swearing to God that every single student at Quantico was a blue-eyed blond from Des Moines or Salt Lake City. Jenner, too, had lectured at the academy—it was a little Children of the Corn there .

  The delivery man’s buzzer interrupted a debate over coffee grinding. They ate at the table, Ana wordlessly moving to sit next to Jenner. She spilled her plantains out of their paper cup into the bag, watched it turn chestnut brown as it soaked with oil, then hungrily ate the maduros piece by piece, spearing them with a plastic fork and blotting them on some napkins, to the evident horror of ADA Silver.

  The questions started up again, Rad promising they’d finish at 3:00 p.m. Ana’s answers were unchanged; perhaps there was nothing more to get. As far as study habits, the task force had found no overlap between the victims (sub-168

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  jects, timetables, facilities, professors). Now Garcia was asking Ana about drugs.

  She shook her head firmly. “Andie just wasn’t into drugs.

  I always had pot, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen her take more than two hits in the time I’ve known her. I mean, she could be kind of wild, and you’d think that with her dad she would’ve acted out more, but she wasn’t like that. She didn’t go on about it or anything, it was just her personal choice.”

  She watched the detective scrawling his notes.

  “Seriously, Rad. She didn’t touch anything, not even for a headache. She used to get really bad cramps, and she wouldn’t take anything for them. The only time I’ve ever seen her take any drug was last summer, when she was doing the Lupron shots.”

  Madeleine Silver leaned forward and asked, “Lupron?

  What is that? Steroids?”

  Ana leaned forward, tapping her pencil against the table.

  Then she gave a little shrug and said, “It’s a fertility drug.

  Andie’s dad wanted her to take some responsibility for her life, but she didn’t want to get a job—she figured she’d fall behind in school. She tried to make a little extra money here and there. For a couple of summers, she was an egg donor.

  Like, for infertile couples?”

  “Where did she do that?”

  ”I don’t know, some clinic in SoHo, I think. A couple of them advertise on campus—they pay you seven thousand dollars. It’s a lot of money, and it’s not really that hard, just kind of gross. She had to inject herself in the stomach every morning for a few weeks to release the eggs. She got hot flashes from the Lupron, but she was basically okay.”

  “She did it twice?”

  “Yeah, maybe three times, I think. The money made a difference, but for her, it was more than that, y’know? She liked helping the couples—they can be really desperate. I heard this pre-med student at Columbia, really beautiful and a major athlete, got thirty thousand for her eggs. The egg Precious Blood

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  donor people just love the colleges—good gene pool. A lot of girls do it. Who doesn’t need money?”

  “Can you find out the name of the clinic where she went?

  I assume it wasn’t one of the university clinics.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I mean, maybe it’s in her diary. I don’t think they do it in a university clinic, I just think the egg donor people advertise on campus.”

  Jenner interrupted. “Are any of those medications still around? The bottle would have the pharmacy address, and maybe the prescribing doctor.”

  She shook her head. “I doubt it. I’m pretty sure they only give you exactly enough.”

  Rad stretched and pushed away from the table. “I’ll see if Barb Wexler was a donor. We’ll go have another look in the apartment—I doubt she’d have told Mom and Dad.”

  There was an urgent knocking at the door. Pyke let Jun in.

  “Hey, Jenner. There’s some guy trying to call you. He’s been phoning every five minutes or so—I just missed the last call. You’ve got at least ten messages on your machine.”

  Joey and Rad came upstairs with him. He was about to hit the Play button when his phone rang again.

  “Dr. Jenner, thank God! It’s Patrick Sheehan. I think I have something.”

  Jenner said, “Hold on, Father—I’m going to put you on speaker. I’m here with Joey Roggetti and Lieutenant Rad Garcia—okay, go ahead.”

  “Hey, Father,” said Roggetti.

  “I’m pretty sure I have it. Almost positive . . .” He paused.

  “One thing. Sunday Smith—is that her real name? If it is her real name, does she have a middle or confirmation name?

  Specifically, is she a Katherine?”

  “Father, it’s Joseph Roggetti. I’m dialing the Pennsylvania State Police right now. Please go ahead.”

  Roggetti walked away from Jenner and Garcia, cell pressed to his ear.

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  “Jenner, can you get on the Internet?”

  “Sure. Where should I go to?” He sat at his computer.

  The priest spelled out the Web address for a Catholic church in Chicago.

  “Okay,” said Jenner. “I’m there now.”

  “Can you see the calendar? Click on that.”

  The screen filled with a grid listing church events and feast days.

  “Are you on? I’m kicking myself for not seeing this right away. When you told me about the murder of Sunday Smith, I knew there was something there. I just didn’t make the connection until this afternoon. The milk, you see? Go to November twenty-fifth.”

  Jenner tabbed back a month and read out loud. “November twenty-fifth, canned goods drive collection one p.m. to five p.m., five thirty p.m. mass Father Wulstan, feast of Saint Katherine.”

  “Yes. Also the day Miss Smith was murdered.”

  “As best we can tell, yes.”

  “Okay, click on the link to the feast day.”

  The linked Web page was in German— Katherine von Alexandria—and came up slowly: the image of a woman in stained glass, a sword held up in her right hand and what appeared to be a broken cartwheel tucked under her lef
t arm.

  “You see the picture? This is Saint Katherine of Alexandria, a fourth-century martyr. She converted the emperor’s wife to Christianity, so the emperor first had his wife killed, then Katherine. He ordered that Katherine should be crushed between two cogged wheels, but when the wheels touched her body, a bolt of lightning from heaven destroyed them, and killed her executioners. Then Maximus ordered that she be decapitated, but when her head was cleaved from her body, milk spouted from her neck.”

  And there it was. Jenner imagined the sunlight streaming into the Smiths’ kitchen, illuminating the girl’s head on the countertop, the milk clotting around it. He remembered her Precious Blood

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  body on the embalming table, violated by the gaping X from the toothed weapon—the cogged wheel.

  Jenner asked, “What about Andie Delore, Father?”

  “Yes. November thirtieth, the feast of Saint Andrew.

  Andrew was scourged with seven whips, then crucified on a saltire cross—an X-shaped cross.”

  Jenner sat back in the chair and breathed out.

  “And Barbara Wexler?”

  “Saint Barbara’s feast day is December fourth. Like Saint Andrew, she was whipped, but when the lashes touched her skin, they were divinely transformed into peacock feathers.

  Then she was decapitated.”

  Jenner imagined their bound hands, their praying hands, their martyred hands.

  Rad leaned forward, closer to the speaker.

  “Father, this is Lieutenant Garcia. Could you tell us what you learned from the writing? What did it say?”

  “Lieutenant, the writing is from a hagiography, a text describing the lives of the saints. I’m afraid I made a mistake when I looked at it earlier; the text I had translated as a reference to the Diocletian era, the term khi ro? It is indeed used colloquially to refer to that time period, but its direct translation, the literal meaning of the letters, is ‘in this time of martyrs.’ I believe that that first symbol, which is repeated in all three texts, is a simple declaration of intent.”

  “He’s initiating a new era of martyrdom,” Jenner murmured.