The Christmas Killer

by Jim Gallows

  Jake hesitated. ‘Are you sure?’

  The priest smiled. ‘I have nothing else to fill my day. It’s not a problem.’

  Jake felt relieved. Ten minutes, he’d be back on the case. He could do without the hassle and drama of returning to the house and having to deal with Leigh and Jakey on top of his mother.

  ‘Thanks, Padre.’

  He could hear his mother talking behind him as he turned away: ‘Father, I think I’m ready to unburden myself now.’

  As he walked briskly to his car, Jake wondered what, exactly, his mother needed to unburden herself of.

  68

  Wednesday, noon

  This is too good. Simply perfect. A kind of divine destiny. Austin and his mama both dropped into my lap. Your guiding light led them to me. You really do work in surprising ways.

  He did his best to look sympathetic as Jeanette Austin began to open her wicked, sinful heart to him.

  ‘I feel my mind is slipping, Father. There are days when I don’t remember things that everyone thinks I should remember.’

  He smiled and nodded.

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if this is my punishment.’

  ‘Do you feel you need to be punished?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘For all my sinning.’

  ‘I know,’ he muttered. Of course he knew.

  ‘There’s no need to upset yourself by going through it all again. I understand,’ he said.

  He understood, but at the same time his hand, under the table, gripped the cosh tightly. For a moment he considered killing her right away, but that would have created problems. Her son – a detective, no less – would wonder why he hadn’t driven her home, and within a very short time Father Ken’s work would come crashing down on him, unfinished.

  ‘Jake has forgotten everything,’ she went on. ‘He’s completely blanked it out, as if it never happened.’

  His hand relaxed on the cosh. Maybe not today … If Austin had really forgotten everything, then that meant his guard was down about it. He was vulnerable to a sucker punch from the past. That was good, very good.

  You have taken away his memory, and now my pieces are in place. It shows the righteousness of my work. Soon it will be checkmate.

  ‘And did you have any other children?’ he asked her, even though he knew the answer.

  ‘Never,’ she said with a wistful smile. He noted that she answered without hesitation, as she would have answered any question he asked. She seemed to be in his thrall still, even after so many years. If he asked her to take up a knife and plunge it into her own chest, he believed she would do it without question.

  ‘Jake has a daughter,’ she went on. ‘In some ways she reminds me of Jake when he was a boy. It frightens me. Maybe you could talk to her?’

  It’s an intriguing idea – to put my head in the lion’s mouth.

  His decision was definite. He would not kill her today. That would be rash. He had been smart up to now, and he was not prepared to let that desert him. Besides, he hadn’t helped Jeanette and her son escape their troubles all those years ago only to kill them now. That would be cruel.

  And I am not a cruel man.

  It would make no sense to undo the good deed I did back then, unless I have to. I’ll let her go. But the Lord has delivered Jake Austin to me. That is no accident. I know what it means … I see it all now. The beautiful design of his master plan for us.

  The three of us … connected by that place.

  Father Ken stood up calmly, feigning a stiffness in his hips that wasn’t there.

  Raising his arm he made the sign of the cross over Jeanette, muttering a blessing. Then he smiled.

  ‘Jeanette, let me take you home.’

  She followed him out of the house and to his car like a woman in a trance.

  69

  Thursday, 22 December, 8 a.m.

  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 g
ood, 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.

  70

  Thursday, 10 a.m.

  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.

  71

  Thursday, 2 p.m.

  At the church Jake ran up to the first uniform he saw. ‘What happened?’ he said.

  The uniformed cop – young but not a rookie – was all business even though his eyes suggested he was a littl
e freaked out. ‘They lifted out a coffin, and there was a skeleton underneath it. One that wasn’t on the foreman’s list. So he called us over. Foreman thinks it’s probably just some unrecorded burial from a hundred years back. But I don’t like to speculate.’

  Jake nodded at him, appreciating his demeanour and attitude. He followed the cop through to the graveyard. It was quieter than this morning, with the machines silenced. Workers stood around idly, a sight Jake was getting used to seeing.

  The foreman ambled over. ‘Detective,’ he said. ‘We were using the crane to take out the coffin when someone noticed something underneath. We realized—’

  Jake held up his hand to the foreman. ‘Thanks, the officer already filled me in.’ He went closer to the hole in the ground. ‘We’ll need to take a statement, sir.’

  ‘Er … is it suspicious?’ he asked.

  ‘We have to treat it that way until the lab tells us otherwise,’ said Jake.

  ‘OK.’ The foreman shuffled a little bit. ‘So what do I do? Do I send the guys home? We’re really behind schedule as it is.’

  ‘Tell you what, you move to the other side of the graveyard and get to work over there. We’ll seal this grave and do our thing. You weren’t going to finish the job today anyway.’

  ‘No, that’s true, conceded the foreman. ‘With all the formalities and paperwork and everything …’ He eyed the protesters in the distance. ‘I can live with that.’

  As the foreman went off to get work restarted in another spot, Jake took a moment to look at the grave. It was a narrow one, a single rather than a family plot. A small earthmover was at the head of the excavation. There was a mound of mud on one side. Perched on the other side of the hole was the old wooden coffin, its brass handles heavily corroded.

  ‘The unaccounted-for skeleton is still in the hole,’ said the cop.

  Jake walked over and looked down. The skeleton was lying in the earth about six foot below him. In the deep shadows it was impossible to make out anything. He turned to the cop.