The Turin Shroud Secret

by Sam Christer

  ‘You’re welcome.’ He gives her a respectful head tilt and follows his partner to the front door. ‘We’ll sure take good care of your husband, ma’am.’

  ‘Hey! I don’t want anyone going Tyson on him. Please just get him downtown and book him. You’ve got my statement. I’ll be in Homicide in the morning if anyone needs anything else.’

  ‘Understood.’ He looks at the swelling to her ear. ‘Might be worth having if you had the doctor examine you and photograph any injuries.’ He sees her open her mouth and prepare to bawl him out. ‘I know you know your job, ma’am, and I’m not trying to be smart. It’s just if we are to press charges, every bit of evidence helps.’

  She knows he’s right. These cases are messy. ‘Thanks. I’ll think about it. She eases him outside. ‘Please don’t let anyone cut up rough on him.’

  ‘You got it.’ He nods and heads to the squad car.

  Mitzi shuts the door. Whatever Alfie’s done in the past she doesn’t want him roughed up now. She needs a clean conscience over whatever’s going to happen next.

  Prosecution.

  If she goes through with things, he’s going to get processed, land a criminal record and have what remains of his life ripped up. Can she really do that to him?

  She climbs the stairs and goes into the kids’ room.

  Jade is red-eyed and angry.

  ‘Honey—’

  ‘Leave me alone.’

  Mitzi’s heart sinks. The kid needs space. The apple of her father’s eye, she’s going to take some time to get used to things. It’ll take everyone some time. This certainly isn’t the moment to bawl her out about letting Alfie in the house. Amber is sat silent on the end of her bed, looking blitzed by the whole affair. Mitzi sits down and puts an arm around her. ‘We’ll be okay, baby. Everything will be fine in the end. We just have to get through this bit.’

  The thirteen-year-old snuggles tight and relaxes a little as her mom finger-brushes hair from her face.

  ‘I love you, sweetheart.’ She kisses the girl’s forehead. ‘And I’m always going to be there for you and your sister, you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I know, Mom – I know.’

  47

  BOYLE HEIGHTS, LOS ANGELES

  Kim Bass has drunk too much vodka and smoked too much weed. But hell, a girl has to have some fun. She’s thinking about the laughs she’s had and the extra money she’s made, as she fishes for the apartment door key in her purse. She wants to get inside, take a leak, shower and sleep. Grab a little rest before life starts all over again.

  She pushes open the front door then stumbles over the mat as she steps inside. The door slams behind her and she sprawls face down in the dark. A sharp pain erupts in the back of her head. Her hair is yanked violently and a terrific force presses painfully into the middle of her back and bends her upwards. If she could scream, she would bring the place down. But something tight is around her throat choking her. She grabs at her neck. Her head smashes into the floor. An even more horrific weight crushes her back. She can’t breathe now, let alone scream.

  Blood pounds in her heart. Someone is choking her. Panic churns in her chest. For a split second the agony stops. She can breathe. Cool air fills her lungs. Whatever is around her neck has gone slack.

  Unseen hands turn her over. She pants for breath. He’s above her, in the darkness of her own home, she can sense him. A heavy weight hits her chest. His knees are on her. She can smell him now.

  Fish Face.

  The boss at work who always smells of his fish lunches.

  ‘Em sends her love.’

  One of his hands is tight around her throat. The other is across her mouth. He bends low and whispers so close his breath mists her skin. He says, ‘Dominus vobiscum.’

  PART THREE

  Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and clever in their own sight.

  Isaiah 5:21

  48

  THURSDAY

  TURIN

  No one knows how old he is. Not even the man himself. All he is certain of is the name he’s been given. His parents didn’t choose it. It was passed down from generations of monks. A name men have grown to fear.

  Ephrem has never celebrated a birthday. Ephrem has never celebrated anything. He has no social security number, mortgage, bank loan, or any manner of insurance, assurance or medical or legal agreements. As far as the world is concerned, he doesn’t exist.

  A doctor or dentist would look at his skin, eyes, bones and teeth, and hazard educated guesses that he’s in his forties. But Ephrem has never been to a doctor or dentist and never will. Nor has he ever been to school, university or any other institution that might have entangled him in the mechanical record-keeping of growing up. No official papers bear his name despite his four decades on earth.

  It is for all these reasons that the tall, youthful and Arabic-looking man is a little anxious as he presents the passport at border control, then from an ATM in the airport terminal withdraws three hundred euros from an international bank account set up to serve his purposes.

  Ephrem’s true vocation is even stranger than the mysteries surrounding him. He is an anchorite. A hermit. Part of an orthodox sect, withdrawn from secular society. He lives without trace in a monastery hidden on the slopes of Mount Lebanon. Isolated. Barely consuming anything.

  Ephrem is the most trusted member of a highly secretive and revered order inside the Maronite Church and is the one devotee who the Patriarch and esteemed advisers like Nabih Hayek can trust.

  It’s on Hayek’s orders that he has come to Turin. Mixing in society is painful for him. He would rather be bricked in his cell in the Lebanon, his only link to life the hagioscope, the shuttered slot through which he receives his food. But this is a necessary sacrifice. As night falls he sits cross-legged on the floor of the cheap room he has rented near Turin and thinks about who he is, where he came from and what his duties are.

  His DNA is half-monk, half-warrior. His blood courses with that of the Brothers slain by the Monophysites of Antioch and with that of the Crusaders who slaughtered the sons of Islam on the borders of the Byzantine Empire. He remembers well standing in the crowds when the Holy Father visited his homeland and declared, ‘Lebanon is more than a country, it is a message.’

  Ephrem has learned he is more than a man, he is the hand of God.

  A hand that is clenched.

  One that will deliver divine retribution.

  49

  WALNUT PARK, LOS ANGELES

  It’s something o’clock.

  An indeterminate time in the dead of night when you should be asleep but you’re not. A time so horrible it doesn’t deserve digits. Mitzi hasn’t been to sleep. She’s been lying in the dark for hours churning things over in her head. The bed is big and cold and empty. Alfie was a pig and a bully but he was a warm one. She’s been reminding herself that despite the tears of Jade and Amber, she’s done the right thing – should have done it years ago. He didn’t hit her until the second year of their marriage. A backhand slap when they’d both been drinking and she’d been busting his balls because he’d lost his job. The next morning she got round to thinking it had been her fault. Maybe she’d been too physically confrontational and had pushed him into it. She’d grown so used to fighting hard-asses in the street that a scrap at home didn’t seem so off the scale to her.

  Then he hit her when he was sober. A full-blooded blow in the stomach that knocked the wind right out of her. She left for a week after that. Made him crawl through broken glass to get her back.

  The beatings stopped when the babies were born. Or at least they did for a while. Then, because she was too tired to do anything but sleep at night, rows over sex, or more accurately the lack of it, often ended with fists flying. Then they made up. Made up and swore it would never happen again. Made up like the world was going to end and only the greatest sex ever might save the planet.

  She knows now how foolish she’s been.

  At way past something o’clo
ck she climbs out of bed, finds her robe and checks on the girls. They’re sleeping like angels. Maybe they’ll get through this all okay. Maybe she will too.

  50

  CARSON, LOS ANGELES

  JJ sits in the chilled dark of his bedroom trying to compose himself. The kill is only an hour old and his adrenalin is still pumping.

  He breathes in slowly, the sweet smoky smell of burning candles a balm for his raw emotions. This one felt different. Less spiritual. More visceral. More human than divine.

  He looks at his hands. Marvels at them and their power of life and death. Until tonight God had always controlled them, guided them to the mouths and throats of the unkilled. But not tonight. Tonight he made the choices. He was God. The thought troubles him. A tiny speck of doubt, like a tear in the corner of a baby angel’s eye. Perfect, but somehow wrong.

  The sight of Em lying before him, just as he left her, shakes him out of his reflective moment. She looks so beautiful. Lovingly covered from head to toe in the long, clean sheet of expensive linen he stole from work. He touches the cool, soft cloth. Em’s shroud. He unwraps it, like an archaeologist discovering an Egyptian queen.

  Queen Em.

  He kneels alongside and whispers proudly in her ear, ‘One of them is dead, my sweetheart. That piece of trash Kim Bass – her Day of Judgement came and went.’ He moves the candles on the floor around her. There are odd smudges on the inside of the shroud. Marks so clear that he can see the outline of her face. Maybe the smudges have come from the last of her make-up, sweat, or even speckles of blood.

  Darker stains follow – leakage of urine and faeces. He’s not shocked. Nor revolted. No more so than a parent in the first days of handling a newborn.

  JJ leaves her on the floor and wets a flannel in the bathroom. He wipes her gently then pats the skin with a towel. Just like a baby. Now he’s done they’ll sit together and hold each other in the first light of a new day. He and his love. His queen. Together for ever.

  51

  77TH STREET STATION, LOS ANGELES

  Lock-up is not the place you want to have spent the night.

  From a whole corridor away Mitzi can smell the drunks and the down-and-outs who’ve passed the hours of darkness sweating off their addictions and stewing in the fear-soaked, overheated, overcrowded bullpens. There’s no denying it, she’s feeling guilty as hell as she heads into the hole to see what kind of hell Alfie Fallon endured following his arrest.

  ‘Morning, Bobby,’ Mitzi’s smile masks her embarrassment. ‘Guess you know why I’m here?’

  ‘Whole station knows, Mitz. Come here.’ Custody Sergeant Bobby Sheen opens his big arms to hug her.

  Mitzi gladly gives herself up to the bear hug. ‘Thanks.’

  He answers her unasked question. ‘Been a model lodger. Not a peep out of him since they shut the cage door.’

  ‘Was he …’ She just can’t say it. ‘I mean, you know … did any of the guys …’

  ‘No. They would have liked to, but none of them laid a finger on him. Logan Connor put out the word – wasn’t gonna be anyone crossing him on that.’

  She nods as she remembers the big black beefcake who turned out to her house.

  Sheen reaches over the reception desk and presses a button. ‘Look at screen four.’

  A black-and-white feed of Alfie’s cell fizzes up on one of six video surveillance monitors. It breaks her heart. Despite everything he’s done and said, the sight of him bent forward on the edge of a bolted-down bunk with his head in his hands rips her apart.

  ‘Hey, now don’t you dare go feeling sorry for him,’ says Sheen, putting a hand on her shoulder. He’s close to retirement and has seen every drama of life acted out in his cell blocks. ‘A night in the pokey never harmed no one.’

  ‘Jeez, Bobby, just look at him.’

  He clicks off the monitor so she can’t. ‘You want a cup of Joe?’

  She nods. ‘Just black.’

  ‘You got it. Watch the shop for me.’ He pads down the corridor, keys on his belt jangling until he turns a corner to find the hotplate where the coffee bubbles all day.

  Mitzi wonders what happened to her life. How come she let things slip so much that Alfie ended up in the bullpen?

  Sheen returns with coffee in mugs so chipped and dirty they’d get a restaurant closed down.

  ‘Thanks.’

  He clunks his pot against hers and gives a reassuring wink, as he’s done a hundred times before when they’ve worked together. ‘So what do you want to do?’

  Mitzi puts her hands around the mug and is comforted by its warmth. ‘You didn’t charge him yet?’

  ‘He thinks we did, but no.’ The custody sergeant points to the admin book on the countertop and the ugly black pen dangling on a steel chain. ‘Logan and I didn’t write him up. Far as we’re concerned, there was a call-out but your man ain’t never been in here.’

  ‘Appreciate that.’ She knows the risks they’ve taken. If there’d been an incident – if Alfie had got physical, hurt himself or someone else, then the proverbial shit and fan would have come together.

  ‘If you want him in court, I need to get someone go through your statement with you and have you examined and photographed.’ He stares into her eyes. It’s the concerned look of a friend as much as a colleague. ‘Did he mark you, Mitzi? Have you still got bruises that’ll show?’

  She feels ashamed. It’s not her fault but she feels like crying because of what she’s let him do to her. Their dirty secret. ‘Yeah. I got stuff to show.’

  He nods. This isn’t the time to push it. One word from this angel and he’ll personally see the bum behind bars gets every one of his no-good bones broken.

  She sips her coffee and weighs up the dilemma. Alfie gets charged then he sure as hell stays away from her and the girls. If she cuts him a break, he could get the wrong idea and think their marriage is still alive.

  ‘I don’t know what to do, Bobby.’

  He wants to help but knows the dangers. ‘Got to be your decision, Mitz. Way I see it, you’re damned whatever you do. We process this guy, he gets a record, then, shit, you know how hard it is to get a job after that.’

  She nods.

  ‘We don’t put him through the system, then he’s coming right back at you.’

  The old-timer bangs a fist against his heart. ‘Go with this, Mitz. If your brain’s run out on you, then go with whatever you feel in here.’

  ‘Emptiness, Bobby. That’s all I feel right now. Emptiness.’

  52

  DOWNTOWN, LOS ANGELES

  It’s worth it just for the look on her face.

  JJ has to fight back a smile as all of the women settle at their machines and Jenny Harrison looks around for her friend. He can see her glancing repeatedly at the empty seat, wondering if the absence is due to oversleeping, overindulgence or overdosing.

  ‘Anyone seen Kim?’

  She’s asking the silly bitches either side of her. How sweet. How nice to be concerned about her co-worker – her co-bully. What a shock she’s going to get when she finds out the truth.

  Harrison puts a hand in her jeans and pulls out a pink cell phone.

  ‘No phones,’ he shouts across the room, walking towards her. ‘You should have left that in your locker.’

  ‘I won’t be a minute.’

  ‘You won’t even be that. You know the rules – no phones in the machine room. Give it to me. You can have it at the end of the day.’

  Her mouth is open. A white worm of chewing gum lies on a pink floor. ‘Did Kim call in, Mr James?’

  Mr James. How quickly they learn. Amazing what the fear of God can do to mannerless little whores like this one. ‘No, she didn’t. Phone, please.’ He holds out his hand.

  She gives it to him. ‘I think she’s sick. She was coming down with something last night. Said she thought she had a dose of flu.’

  Liar. She’s just covering for her. ‘No show, no pay. You all know that.’ He’s only said what they’d expec
t him to say. No reason for him to treat Bass’s absence with anything but annoyance. He’s one down. Productivity is falling.

  JJ takes the phone to his office. Sits at his desk with the door shut and scrolls through her messages. Most are to Bass. The ones that aren’t are to a guy called Marlon. Probably her pimp. They’re short and not at all sweet.

  MARLON WEN U DUN?

  JENNY: 20

  MARLON: U GOT LESS THAN 2 AN U GET CUT UP BITCH

  Seems that given time Marlon might well carry out JJ’s wishes for him. But he has no intention of waiting. He turns off the phone and puts it on the edge of the desk.

  Jenny Harrison won’t be missing her friend for long.

  53

  77TH STREET STATION, LOS ANGELES

  Alfie Fallon sits alone in the holding cage like an abandoned mongrel dog. Life as he knew it is over. That much he gets. The motley mob he’s spent the night with have all been processed through the system and like an unwanted stray he’s the last one waiting for his name to be called.

  The air is sharp with the sting of industrial-strength disinfectant, the floor freshly mopped after hours of people vomiting and relieving themselves. He’d give anything for a hot shower, a walk outside and a decent breakfast.

  A distant noise makes him look up. When you’re in the pen you know someone is coming long before you see them. The lack of carpets, curtains or anything soft for that matter, means sounds from far away skim down the hard corridors until they hit your ears. After an hour or so you’re an expert on identifying everything from a lock opening to a van of new arrivals backing up in the yard outside.

  Someone’s coming. And they can only be coming for him.

  Buzzers sound. Metal doors slide open then clunk closed again. Feet slap on hard floors. His time is up. Alfie puts his hands on his knees and rolls his head side to side until it cracks the stiffness out of his neck.