Jo Robertson - The Avenger

Slater waited for them in the conference room where they'd met previously. He'd transferred the case data onto the large white board that covered the narrow end of the room. Jack could tell from his disheveled look that he'd been up all night. His first words confirmed it.

"The Sheriff in Tuolumne County called around two this morning," he said, yawning and stretching his arms high over his head. "I just got back from Grantsville. About an hour and a half south of Sacramento." He added the latter for Jack's benefit.

He handed Jack a copy of the police report. "Victim's a twenty-year-old male student at Bigler Junior College, name of Carl Bender. Body was found at 12:45 this morning by some high school kids camping out at an abandoned church located off Highway 99. Teens go there to fool around, make out, do dope."

Slater looked from Jack to Olivia and back again, and if he wondered why Olivia had come along, he was wise enough not to ask. "The murder occurred out of my jurisdiction, and I had no way of knowing it'd be related to this case until I got there."

Jack nodded but remained silent, merely stared at the report of Carl Bender's death, thinking another dead body, another mistake.

"This incident looks a hell of a lot like the murder of the Walker man in your original case," Slater said, spreading an array of crime scene photos across the conference table and tapping one of the pictures. "The body was naked, hung upside down in the basement of the church."

Jack picked up the top photo. Although the scene wasn't anything more than he'd expected, the effect still jarred him. The macabre display showed the victim splayed and hung on a makeshift cross with ugly holes through the wrists and ankles. Only the inverted position was different.

"COD the same?" he asked routinely.

"He bled out at the scene," Slater replied. "Lots of blood evidence. Some of it could be the UNSUB's."

"If we're lucky."

He handed the photos to Olivia who blanched at the grisly displays before she held one close to her face, eyeing the enlarged image of the wrist piercings.

Then Slater dropped the bombshell. "The thing is Carl Bender's been dead for at least a week."

"That means he was killed before the girl at the zoo," Jack said.

"So he hasn't gone out of order in the killings," Olivia murmured. "Just added a new method."

"Something else," Slater added. "The coroner recovered a note stuffed inside the Bender kid's mouth."

Olivia looked from Jack to Slater. "That's good, isn't it?"

"Hope so," Jack mumbled, taking the dry erase pen and moving toward the board.

The burial deaths were circled in black and a number one written beside them. The beatings, number two, circled in blue. He drew another line around the crucifixion deaths with a red pen and wrote number three beside them.

"And the death at the zoo." He circled the words unknown female with a green pen.

"What did the note say?" Olivia asked.

Slater handed the paper to Jack who wrote the words on the board: PONTIFEXMAGNACUMCURAVICTIMAMOBTULIT.

Olivia stared at the letters for a moment, then taking the pen from Jack, drew vertical lines, separating them into what he assumed were different words.

"Why caps on this one?" He frowned and jabbed at the letters on the board. "That's different."

"It's the correct way to write Latin. The Romans wrote in capital letters," Olivia explained. "No spaces between the words either. This note actually is more authentic than the previous ones."

"Clever bastard," Jack mused. "He's using a more sophisticated language."

"But why?" she asked.

"Hell if I know." He smarted under the question. "Because he's intelligent enough. Because he wants to toy with us. Because the son of a bitch can."

Olivia examined the letters again. "It translates to 'The priest offered the sacrifice with great care.'"

"What does this mean for the case?" Slater asked.

"He's evolving and will be harder to figure out." God damn it all to hell!

Olivia's office mate, Dr. Howard Randolph, entered the university office that afternoon with a dramatic bang, a large caffè latte, and a nod her way. Olivia looked up from her computer screen where she sifted through her email, answering the urgent messages and deleting the spam. After a cursory glance at his desk, Howard stood at his office window, sipped his coffee, and gazed out the office window where students bumped and jostled their way across the quad's concrete sidewalks to their classes.

Olivia continued to scroll her email. The university's policy of furnishing students with professors' email addresses was a good idea except when the teacher ran into a needy student who used every minor problem as an excuse to contact his teacher. She sighed and continued the task, something she noticed wryly, that Howard never bothered with.

Fifteen years Olivia's senior, Howard stood for a few minutes like a captain surveying his crew. Then he finally riffled through the stack of snail mail on his desk in the opposite corner of their shared office. The desk squatted beneath the single window in the room and offered the gorgeous view that Howard had appropriated. A lopsided smile hovered at the edge of his lips.

"Good weekend, Howard?"

"Fair to middling," he answered coyly.

She remembered his teaching assistant. "Ted Burrows dropped off some papers."

Howard grimaced. "Oh, I forgot he was coming by. Bet he wasn't happy to miss me."

A year-round tan, remarkable even in California, gave Howard's face and forearms a golden sheen. His short, blond hair spiked fashionably over a high, intelligent forehead below eyes so blue Olivia suspected tinted contact lenses.

"He seemed okay," she said. "But he did say he'd stayed up all night to finish them."

Howard rolled his eyes as Olivia glanced up to take in the vigorous look of him. Bermuda shorts, which he wore year round, showed off well-developed calves that glinted with fine, sun-bleached hairs. "More likely he got one of his minions to do it for him," he said.

She gaped at him. "What do you mean?"

"You know his reputation, don't you?"

"I've heard he's quite a ladies' man."

Howard crossed the short distance between them and planted his hip on the edge of Olivia's desk. He leaned forward confidentially. "I'd say Teddy-boy is more than a ladies' man."

"Oh?" She shifted uncomfortably in her chair, regretting her comment. She didn't want to get caught up in university gossip.

"Let's just say Theodore Burrows isn't very discriminating in whom he chooses to… ah, date."

She instinctively eased away. Sometimes Howard's familiarity made her cringe. Something smarmy lurked beneath the surface of his affability. He lived extremely well in spite of a professor's salary and had once mentioned a grandmother who lived in one of those old and very expensive homes overlooking San Francisco Bay. Olivia had the impression that he came from an old moneyed family used to living by their own rules.

Howard's smirk evolved into a wide grin. "I suspect one or two of Ted's… amours are more than willing to relieve him of his onerous paper load."

She didn't consider herself naïve, but the implication astonished her. "He wouldn't."

"He does." He examined his manicured nails. "I have it straight from the horse's mouth."

"What are you going to do about it?"

"Absolutely nothing. Why should I care who scores my papers as long as the work gets done?"

Olivia tried to mask her shock. Ted Burrows exchanging sexual favors for the price of a good score on Howard's student papers? Surely not.

After he returned to his desk, she observed Howard discreetly as she looked through a stack of student essays. He threw himself into a fine-grained leather chair which he'd purchased himself. Definitely not standard university issue. The chair made an excellent complement to the cherry wood desk, also an import, and the matching bookcases that flanked the wall on either side of the window.