J King: Angel of Death

“Can’t you read? ‘Police Line, Do Not Cross!’” Banks growled through gold-capped teeth.

Blake, a gaunt and shaggy young artiste, did not answer, snapping off a couple more shots as he was propelled back toward the road.

The investigator reached the pair, slipped one of her own arms into Blake’s and helped to speed him on his way.

“We’re going to confiscate that film,” Banks warned as two more flashes went off.

“You can’t,” Blake yodeled. “Freedom of the press!”

“We can and will,” Investigator Leland said, “unless you cooperate.”

“I’m going! I’m going,” the bewhiskered man said, trying to break free.

Leland leaned toward him and whispered, “Not that. I want you to take pictures of the crowd. Get everybody you can – faces – but don’t be obvious about it.”

“What do I want with-” he began loudly, but she broke in.

“Get me the crowd, and we’ll let you print what you’ve got. Otherwise, I’m taking your camera now.”

“All right, all right,” he said as they muscled him to the police line and bundled him over. He regained his balance just beyond the tape but rebelliously lingered against it as he checked his camera rig for damage. Leland turned to Sergeant Banks, poised there like a wolverine ready to strike. She touched his shoulder, meaning to appease, but got a startled jump from him.

“Banks,” she said with quiet urgency, “you’d better get back to the scene. They’ll be wanting you on hand.”

The muscle nodded, not even recognizing the flattery. He trotted back to the scene.

Leland turned to the photographer. “Listen, Blake, we’ve got to work together on this.”

“What are you talking about?” the man asked, coddling his camera as though it were an injured baby.

“You’re not going to dictate what the Gazette prints-”

“It’s a lot easier than that,” responded Leland in a hushed voice. “You need good footage to sell papers. We need good footage to catch this guy. Work with us, and I’ll keep you close, on the inside. Fight us, and all your shots will be through fence holes.”

He seemed ready to make a rebuke but blinked it away in uncertainty.

“You get us a shot of the killer, and we’ll tell you. That’s called an exclusive. And a byline.”

Blake nodded, tight-lipped.

“And it’s not just that. I’ll have to talk to McHenry, but if he agrees, we can do some proactive strategies with the paper to flush this guy out. I’m sure the Gazette wouldn’t mind being credited with helping to catch this guy.”

Again, he nodded. A small smile crept onto his face.

“Good,” she said. “Now get at it.”

He loped away among the crowd.

Men knew so little about working with each other. Or, perhaps, they thought it beneath them to play to bruised egos. Better to bruise them some more until it comes to broken noses and black eyes.

No wonder there are no female serial killers, Leland thought.

That was not actually true, but the number of women who committed such crimes was almost statistically insignificant.

Of course, this was a serial crime. The last murder in the Burlington area, five years back, was a similar decapitation and amputation in Bohner’s Lake. After closing down the crime scene, Investigator Leland returned home, showered, dressed in PJs, and leaned back in her favorite chair. It was a worn and low-slung piece of furniture, what she had considered a couch when she was a kid. Her mother had reupholstered it in bristly curtain fabric and set it in front of the upstairs TV. Then, it had room enough for Kerry and herself, a calico cat, and a Tupperware bowl of popcorn. Now, it was not quite even a love seat, and, crowded in a drafty bay window, was only just big enough for Donna and her books.

She pulled one of the books from the stack, a true crime expose about criminal profiling. Though modern mythology had made FBI profilers into supermen – divining the state of a killer’s underwear and his taste in movies from the position of a shell casing – the science of profiling was still largely unknown in small-town police work. What Donna knew of it was second-hand, pieced together from books by former members of the Quantico Behavioral Science Unit.

By dismembering victims and burying hands and heads separately, organized offenders can make identification difficult. A victim’s identity is a critical piece of evidence for narrowing the field of suspects, determining motive and opportunity, and rallying community assistance in tracking down the killer. The removal of these parts takes time and effort and produces large quantities of blood. It is a technique used almost exclusively by psychopathic personalities. Donna paused. The dark bay window behind her breathed coldly and she drew up the tattered afghan she kept on the chair arm. Out of old habit, she crossed herself. How could a person think of heads and hands merely as forms of identification? She glanced up at the crucifix hanging above her twenty-four inch TV and reflexively imagined Christ dismembered. She crossed herself again.

By contrast, psychotic personalities engage in dismemberment not to eliminate clues, but for symbolic reasons and to fulfill personal fantasies. Their mutilations tend to center more on genitalia, viscera, hearts, and eyes.

Sickened, Donna closed the book. Sociopaths did what they did by design. Psychotics did what they did by instinct. One group were humans who thought they were gods. The other were humans who thought they were animals. Both were monsters.

Donna stopped that thought. Her hand strayed to a picture on an unvarnished end table. He was a boy. Only a boy. Her twin, Kerry, at fourteen – bright-eyed, hopeful, and human. In her mind, he would never be older than fourteen.

By their fifteenth birthday, Kerry had lost all his friends, dropped out of school, and never came out of his room in the basement. Father John, principal of St Mary’s, joked about getting an exorcist. By their sixteenth birthday, Kerry was so sedated that he never spoke or even smiled. By their seventeenth birthday, he was institutionalized in Elgin. He didn’t reach his eighteenth, hanged by a noose he had made from his own torn-up shirt.

Kerry had not been a monster. A bipolar schizophrenic, they said, with homicidal fantasies. A manic-depressive with multiple personality disorder. A cyclops. A Grendel. A steppenwolf…

No, Kerry was not a monster. He was a sick boy. Sighing sadly, Donna set the picture atop her pile of books and leaned back on the seat. Road to Utopia was on tonight. Kerry had loved the Road pictures. Donna got up, turned on the set, and moved the rabbit ears to pick up WGN. Then she went to the kitchen.

“I’ve got a bag of popcorn around here somewhere.”

Assuming after the third ring that the doorbell didn’t work, Investigator Leland knocked. She stood in the lee of a storm door held together by duct tape. The cool gray winds of a December 7th morning breezed past her. It had been standard police work. Lots of dead-end leads. Lots of waiting for someone to file a missing persons report. Lots of phone conversations assuring cottagers and farmers that everything that could be done was being done. After two days of office work, Leland had at last been asked by Detective McHenry to help him knock on doors and canvas the Bohner’s Lake area to find out the identity of the body. She looked down at the crime scene photo in her hand. In it, Sergeant Banks squatted gravely beside a dark pine tree and propped up a stiff collie mutt. At the zenith of a washed-out foreground, the dog looked spectral. Its frozen legs were poised in a flat line on tiptoe. The effect made the collie appear to be dashing pell-mell through the picture, past Banks’s stern, downturned face. The dog’s eye glowed with the flash, as if Banks held a light to the blown-open back of its skull.