CHAPTER FOUR
“Oh, God damn it.”
Faith became instantly to alert. “What? What is it?”
“Vultures.”
Jessica turned sharply down a side access road that would bring them to the other side of the plot where Hayes had been murdered. Through her passenger window, Faith could see several news vans parked just outside of the locked gate.
“Ah. Those kinds of vultures.”
“Yeah. I was afraid of this. After the Jacob Moss killings, I was worried that the media was going to jump all over another ritualistic killing at the cemetery.”
Jacob Moss was a mentally ill former soldier who had killed former K9 handlers in the military and law enforcement because he felt that their actions had endangered the dogs that worked for them.
He had also deluded himself into believing that Turk was his old working dog and belonged with him, not Faith.
Thankfully, he had come somewhat to his senses by the end, enough to turn himself in quietly and submit to custody and mental health treatment, but not before he had left three viciously exsanguinated bodies at different memorials around Washington, D.C.
, including Arlington Nation al Cemetery.
Faith had no desire to interact with the media. In her best moods, she preferred to keep media appearances, short, professional and focused only on the facts. She was not in her best mood right now.
“I’ll park here,” Jessica said, pulling into an alcove behind the fence surrounding the back lot of the cemetery. “We’ll probably get shit for hopping the fence and not checking in with the security office, but we can deal with that later.”
She parked the car, put her hazards on, and jumped out. Faith and Turk followed, and Turk easily jumped the nine-foot fence, pushing off at the top with a light touch of his paws that looked almost catlike, though Faith would never say that to him.
“How old is he again?” Jessica asked.
Faith smiled slightly and scaled the fence, a lot slower and less gracefully than Turk. Jessica landed somewhere in the middle, alighting easily and without the wince of pain Faith showed when her knees absorbed the impact of the landing.
God, am I getting that old?
“The scene’s on top of that hill over there,” Jessica said. “I guarantee you that the vultures have people watching it, but they won’t be allowed in, and we can get out of here before they find the car.”
“Even with your hazards on?”
Jessica blinked. “Shit. That’s what I get for thinking like a law-abiding citizen.”
Faith smiled and clapped her shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. Practice the phrase ‘no comment.’ We can’t comment on an ongoing investigation anyway, not with no leads and no one in custody. If the FBI wants to issue a statement, it has to go through people above our pay grade.”
“I know. I just hate dealing with the media.”
“You and me both.”
The duo climbed the hill, Turk, as usual, outpacing them easily and waiting every few seconds for them to catch up.
Faith smiled at her dog, despite the other emotions fighting for control of her mind.
He was eleven years old, but that hop over the fence proved he was still spry enough to handle this job.
Meanwhile, Faith was still on the right side of forty and had to think about her knees before doing anything more difficult than getting out of bed in the morning.
Michael would love to hear me grumbling about this right now.
Thoughts of her grumpy ex-partner vanished when she crested the hill. The hill was perfectly manicured and organized now, but only twelve hours ago, a man who had helped Faith find the strength to survive war had been murdered and left in prayer.
“It’s the mockery that gets me,” Faith said, thinking aloud.
“The prayer position?” Jessica guessed.
“Yes. The murderer didn’t just kill him. They ridiculed him. They mocked his beliefs.”
“Where’s your God now?”
“Exactly. That’s personal. Whoever did this was angry. I just can’t understand why they’d be angry with Hayes.”
“Maybe they’re angry with God.”
Faith nodded. She looked around and frowned. “No police to meet us, huh? They’re really not happy that we’re here.”
“They might just not want to deal with the press. I have pictures, though. The detective assigned to the case sent them to me.”
She pulled her phone out and showed Faith the pictures she’d received.
The first one showed the body from the back.
Hayes was on his knees, his shoulders sagging, his head invisible from lolling forward on his chest. He wore a windbreaker, a pair of faded jeans and a pair of scuffed work boots.
Not combat boots, just run of the mill boots.
“What gravestone is he kneeling in front of?” Faith asked.
Jessica switched to a picture of the gravestone. Msgt. Annette Winslow. Faith didn’t recognize the name.
“Someone he lost in combat, maybe?”
“Or someone he performed last rites for,” Faith replied. “He was a Catholic chaplain. He might have felt obligated to pray for her soul.”
“From what you told me about him he sounds like the type to do that out of genuine care rather than obligation. We should still figure out what the connection is.”
She switched to another picture. This one showed Hayes from the side. He was sitting on his heels; his legs folded neatly in half. His head sagged forward, and his face seemed to have melted over his chest.
“I thought you said he was given something to stiffen his muscles,” Faith said.
“Well… That’s not exactly true.”
Faith looked more closely and saw something leaking out of the corner of Hayes’s mouth. It was a thick, grayish green fluid that looked somewhat like putty. Her stomach turned.
“He was injected in several different places with a quick hardening epoxy,” Jessica said.
“According to the coroner’s report, this happened after death.
The epoxy held him in an upright position and also prevented rigor from setting in.
So, it didn’t stiffen his muscles. It prevented muscle stiffening from changing the position of the body.
Something about interrupting the natural chemical changes in the muscle after death.
It only prevented rigor in some of the skeletal muscles, but…
Well, you can read the full report later. ”
Faith stared at the picture, struck by Hayes’s appearance.
Not just his death but his age. He hadn’t been a young man when Faith knew him, but he had aged noticeably in the years since.
His gray-brown hair was now silver white and thinning badly in the front.
His rugged good looks had receded, leaving deep wrinkles around his eyes and thin, sagging flesh around his jaw.
His hands, frozen stiffly over his lap, were spotted and leathery, and the hair that poked up from the knuckles was as silver as the hair that grew on his head.
Faith couldn’t believe that this was the same man she knew in the Corps. He looked like his own father.
What sixteen years will do to someone.
She looked at Jessica and compared her smooth, flawless skin to her own harder, looser skin.
The crow’s feet at the corners of Faith’s eyes now remained even when she wasn’t laughing, and new lines were forming at the corners of her mouth.
She still looked far from old, but she definitely didn’t look young anymore.
She forced her thoughts away from this odd and disturbing intrusion and focused on the image as a professional. “Any information on the dog tags hanging around his neck?”
“Arlington PD is obviously very interested. They’re cataloguing the names, getting what info they can, and looking for any connection between them, Hayes, and Winslow. We’ll see what comes up.”
“Our killer is probably connected to them regardless of any connection to Hayes and Winslow,” Faith said.
“All of them? That’s a lot of people.”
Faith looked at the tags hanging around Hayes’s neck. There were twenty of them, piling on his chest like an ostentatious collection of jewelry. “Could be the killer’s platoon, or one to which Hayes was assigned. Not all the names have to be equally important, but at least one of them is.”
“Right,” Jessica said. “Yeah, you’re right. Oh, by the way, I noticed something interesting in the medical examiner’s report. It appears that Hayes was strangled from the front.”
“The front? They’re sure?”
A garrote was any handheld wire or cord used to strangle someone to death.
While it could work anywhere so long as a person’s blood or air was cut off, it was most effective when used from behind where physics naturally allowed greater leverage and where the victim couldn’t defend themselves.
Not that the sixty-nine-year-old Hayes was going to be able to put up much of a fight.
“That’s what they said.”
“What exactly did he use?”
“They think it was a thick, waxed cord of some sort.”
“A waxed cord? What’s that?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. A cord covered in wax. I guess it’s common for jewelry making. This one was thick, though, like I said. Three millimeters, they believe. With the wax, that’s thick enough to explain why it didn’t cut through his neck despite the force applied.”
Faith shivered slightly, imagining the hate someone must have had for Hayes to watch his face while they used considerable force to strangle him to death with a wire. “Defensive wounds?”
“None.”
Faith took a deep breath and pushed it through her nose. “Figures. Hayes took God’s command to turn the other cheek seriously.”
Jessica shifted her feet a little. “He was probably unconscious in less than five seconds. The strangulation was rapid enough to burst blood vessels. You can’t see the bruising in these pictures, but… Well, you can look at them if you want, but—”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Faith said.
She looked up from the pictures at the gravestone ahead. Turk was trotting back and forth, sniffing, but with the scene already cleaned and trampled on by a bunch of other people, there was little for him to find.
Faith tried to imagine the murder. Hayes kneeling in front of Annette Winslow’s grave, praying for her and her family, perhaps remembering the tragedy.
The killer approaches, and instead of killing him from behind as they easily could have, they call out to him.
They want to see his face as he dies. Hayes turns around and…
And then Hayes dies. But how, exactly? Does the killer just attack? Maybe, but Faith didn’t think so. Hayes believed in turning the other cheek, but despite Faith’s emotional outburst earlier, she didn’t really thing that Hayes would just take his death lying down.
Unless he knew his attacker. Unless maybe, in some way, he felt responsible. Or he felt it was better for the killer’s soul that he didn’t fight back.
So, they talk first. The killer reminds Hayes of something, tells him why he’s doing this.
Hayes doesn’t resist. The killer murders him, then stages his body, injecting him with something that will keep him in that prayer position so that whoever finds him will see the dead man praying to the false God.
“This guy was angry,” she said. “He wasn’t just killing Hayes. He was punishing him for some perceived wrongdoing. He wanted Hayes to know who was killing him and why. I think he might have talked to Hayes for a moment before attacking him.”
“Then why didn’t Hayes run?”
“When someone approaches you to talk, do you immediately think about the possibility that they’ll strangle you to death?”
“I mean… kinda.”
Faith smirked briefly. “Fair enough. Most people don’t make a living out of investigating serial killers, though. This level of violence is unfathomable to most people.”
“Even people who fought in war?”
That was a good point, and Faith acknowledged it. “Noted. So maybe Hayes didn’t believe the killer was a threat. Maybe he had some sort of past relationship with the killer that made him reasonably sure the killer wasn’t going to attack him.”
“Last mistake he ever made.” Faith’s face fell, and Jessica winced. “Sorry. That was insensitive.”
Faith shrugged it off. “You’re not wrong. He was the type to always see the best in people. Only people like us are trained to see the worst.”
Jessica shifted her posture uncomfortably before moving the conversation away from the victim and back to the killer. “What do you think the killer was angry about?”
“There are too many possible answers to that question for me to feel comfortable speculating,” Faith replied. “Let’s talk to some people who knew him—recently, that is—and see if any names pop up.”
Jessica nodded. “Fair enough. It might be a little late to get a hold of anyone tonight, but we can get names, at least. And who knows? Maybe there are some night owls who can give us a jump start before the sun goes down.”
“We’ll need that jump start,” Faith said. “Our killer just fulfilled a personal fantasy murdering Hayes up close and personal like this. People who successfully experience a fantasy always want to experience it again.”
“Meaning Hayes was only the first.”
Faith’s jaw tightened. “Let’s make sure he’s the last.”