Oliver Stark: 88 Killer

‘That’s some cruel work,’ he said to Eddie. ‘And the body’s been rolled about, by the look of things.’ He snapped the latex glove on his right hand and crouched by the corpse. He touched the barbed wire, its metallic surface hard against the softness of flesh. He spanned his hand between the barbs. ‘Galvanized steel. The barbs are approximately seven and a half centimeters apart; each barb is two centimeters long. Nasty. He’s got to be full of hundreds of holes.’

Through the gaps in the wire, Harper could see how the barbs had gone in deep and torn the flesh. The ground was covered in blood, seeping in every direction, smeared as the body was rolled or moved. The victim had clearly been alive for most of this ordeal, while his poor heart kept pumping fresh blood to the wounds. Someone was pushing this body around, possibly enjoying hearing the victim’s cries of pain.

Harper tried to understand. He searched Eddie’s face. ‘This is some mean bastard. Are we sure that no one heard this? This victim must have been in excruciating pain. Eddie, I want a ground team talking to every person in these blocks. Someone heard this man dying. Probably lots of them heard it. Shake these people and shake them hard. I don’t want any of the usual shit. Someone heard this man and I need to know about it.’

Eddie nodded and walked across to a heap of trash sacks. ‘I’ll set it up. Hey, Harper, have a look at these trash bags. Might just be some hobo, but it looks like someone’s been sitting here.’

Harper looked around. ‘Sitting and watching, maybe. Why? Torture? Punishment?’ He let the thoughts move around his mind. Felt something come to the surface. ‘It’s like a body-cage, isn’t it? Close containment, right?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Once the vic is wrapped in wire, he’s absolutely powerless. Our killer or killers might have enjoyed the complete control. Enjoyed watching the victim suffer. Sitting there, shining a light, maybe, waiting until he bled out.’

Harper found a patch of skin close to the temple that was not covered with blood. ‘Whoever it is, they’re Caucasian,’ he said. ‘I can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman.’

Harper’s sight wasn’t great, with his bruised eye, but he slowly moved his good eye over the barbed wire, seeing if there was anything more he could detect. He was looking for the gunshot. At the forehead, he stopped.

‘The wire’s broken here. It’s pretty blackened but I think I’ve found an entrance wound. Small caliber. Maybe nine millimeters.’ Harper looked at the hole. Something wasn’t quite right about it. ‘Very clean wound,’ he said. ‘Lots of gas burn. The barrel was pretty tight to his head.’

Eddie came across and leaned over Harper’s shoulder. ‘What’s your story so far?’

Harper thought for a moment. ‘No question about whether the vic was killed here. The killer rolled the body, kicked it about, watched the vic die slowly, waited for the blood loss to take him to the very edge, then shot him to make sure. That’s how it looks to me.’

Harper looked around. The ground was marked with the scrapings of metal on asphalt. ‘We could probably get some sense of what happened if we tracked these scratches and blood smears. Looks like he rolled the body the whole way down the alley. He starts bleeding about a third of the way in and with each roll, more of the barbs dig in.’

As Harper knelt again and cast his eyes up the alleyway, Swanson walked across. ‘Never seen nothing like this before, Harper.’

‘Me neither. He might have taken the victim out of the trunk of a car, but he rolled him in the alley. You can see the marks left by the barbs. Some business, that.’

‘Soles of his shoes will be cut up, right? He can’t have been using his hands, can he?’

‘Right. Eddie also thinks that he was sitting on the trash bags.’

‘Cold bastards,’ said Swanson. ‘One guy couldn’t do this. This is a two- or three-man job.’

Harper thought for a moment. ‘Could be, but I got a single gunshot wound to the forehead. My take is that the killer sat waiting, watching his victim cry out in pain, then, at some point, executed him.’

‘ Killers , don’t you mean?’

‘I don’t see any evidence of multiple killers but I’m not ruling anything out.’

‘To roll a man in barbed wire would take a team of men.’

Harper scanned the scene. ‘You could be right. Let’s see what Crime Scene can tell us.’

‘Shit,’ said Eddie. ‘I hate it when you get all mystical. Is Swanson right or not?’

‘This is the thing,’ said Harper. He took a moment, as if allowing his thoughts to settle into some kind of order. ‘It could be a hit, it could be a drug shooting or it could be some political revenge. There’s a lot of overkill. There’s passion and hatred here.’ He tried to imagine the killer, working at night, a roll of barbed wire at his side, a man screaming in pain, a maniac sitting on some wet sacks watching.

‘Drug wars? Some kind of revenge gang kill? Trying to make out they’re fearless?’ asked Swanson. ‘You know how it goes, building a reputation.’

‘Maybe, but the body’s white, there’s drugs left all over the ground, and look at those hands, too. Not someone who’s done much manual work.’ Harper leaned further down and looked at the four fingers of the right hand. He lifted them and then looked up. ‘Index finger shorter than the ring finger. Probably a male victim. Whoever did it is a sadist, for one thing. He’s theatrical, for another. And this isn’t his first kill.’ Harper sniffed. ‘I don’t think he or they are finished, do you?’

He put his hand under the corpse. The ground was dry. Harper started to calculate. The dry ground and wet clothes gave them a timeframe. It depended on when the rain started. ‘We need to officially ID this body,’ he said. ‘Check that Crime Scene have finished, Eddie, and get some wire cutters.’ Eddie moved off down the alleyway, leaving Harper and Swanson.

Harper kept re-telling the story from different angles. But every time, there was something missing. It was Harper’s way — you tell the best story you can, then you pull the story to pieces. Then you start again. Over and over until some threads remained.

Eddie reappeared with wire cutters, the Deputy Coroner with him. The latter shook his head. ‘Some business.’ He knelt down. ‘CSU have cleared the scene. If you want to find out his ID, we need to cut this wire.’

‘We’d appreciate it,’ said Harper. ‘Press have already been given a name.’

They watched as the DC snapped at the wire around the head of the corpse. With each cut, he carefully pulled back the wire. After a few minutes he’d exposed a blackened and bloody face. ‘It’s a guy,’ he said.

The men stared in silence, an acknowledgment of the pain etched on the young man’s face. The DC cut a line down to the chest. He pulled back the wires and reached into the jacket pocket. He fished out a wallet. ‘We’ve got something here,’ he said and passed it to Harper.

Harper opened up the wallet, which held one thousand dollars in fifties. He picked out a driver’s license. The photograph showed a cheerful face surrounded by a mop of black curly hair. Then he saw the name.

‘Okay,’ said Harper. ‘It’s David Capske, which means that we have got to work fast. This has been labeled political so the Feds and Counter-Terrorism will already be applying pressure at Headquarters trying to pull this from us. Everyone’s going to want to know what happened here and why.’

‘What do you need from me?’ asked the DC.

‘Can you give this top priority for me? I want the autopsy within the next few hours. I need that bullet and anything else you can tell me.’