CHAPTER THREE
It was a short hop from Portland to Philadelphia, so it was only mid-afternoon when Kate and Marcus landed. Marcus got them a car while Kate texted Winters to let her know they had arrived. It was a good idea to check in with the boss frequently, so she knew Kate wasn’t losing herself out there.
The car secured and the boss texted, the two of them drove to the inner-city neighborhood where their victim awaited.
Traffic was as close to awful as Kate had ever seen.
The snow carpeting the road didn’t help, nor did the three accidents they passed.
It took almost an hour to make the twelve-mile journey from the airport to the rowhouse.
By the time they arrived, mid-afternoon was hovering close to late afternoon.
Philadelphia was the rowhouse capital of the nation, with over half of their residential homes consisting of the tightly packed, uniform homes.
Marcus had mentioned to Kate once that rowhouses came about during the industrial revolution when factories needed housing for the glut of workers rushing to their cities.
Now, in the information age, the houses lingered as either a quaint reminder of times past, a chic statement of urban lifestyle, or the place you stayed in because it was where you ended up and you couldn’t afford to leave.
The street where their victim lived was definitely one of the latter.
The houses here were faded and dirty, not quite rundown but very close to it.
The cars crowding the street were equally faded, mostly old Toyota and Nissan sedans or Dodge minivans, at least one out of every five with peeling paint or dented bumpers.
Philadelphia in general didn’t have the same poverty problems that other major cities had, but there was a bottom of the barrel in every locale where those who couldn’t rise to the top through some combination of bad luck and bad decisions sank to the bottom.
“Thought there’d be more of a crowd,” Marcus mentioned, pulling the vehicle to a stop.
Sure enough, despite the presence of an FBI cruiser in front of the residence and an imposing and serious-looking agent in uniform standing on the porch, none of the neighbors felt a need to stop and stare.
The one person who was outside—a bald man with a prodigious beer gut and a stained wifebeater—only spared Kate a callous glance as he waited for his dog to do its business in his compact front yard.
“A neighborhood like this sees cops every day,” Kate said.
“Yeah, but we’re not the cops.”
“Same difference. We’re the fuzz. Seeing us here is no big deal for them.”
“If you say so,” Marcus replied.
“Also, they’ve been here for several hours already. The novelty’s worn off.”
“Ah. That makes sense.”
The serious-looking, imposing agent was a tall, well-built African American man with intense brown eyes and an almost ostentatiously masculine frame.
He extended a hand. “Special Agent Darnell Okoye, Philadelphia Field Office.”
“Kate Valentine,” Kate replied, taking his hand.
“Marcus Reid,” Marcus added.
Darnell’s grip was firm but brief, almost perfunctory with both of them. Thus greeted, he thrust his head toward the door. “The body’s in the kitchen. Watch your step. There’s some blood.”
A man of few pleasantries was Darnell Okoye.
They stepped inside, and Kate decided that Darnell was also a man of understatement. There was a pool of blood three feet past the door, enough that the edges congealed. A trail led across the linoleum toward the kitchen where another puddle lay in front of the kitchen table.
The victim sat in a chair at the head of the table, hands dangling at his sides, head lolled to the left, so he faced the agents. His eyes stared dully at them, as though accusing them of letting this happen to him.
He was elderly, with thin white hair, pasty, liver-spotted skin, and the Pillsbury Dough-Boy fat that men seemed to accumulate as they transitioned from middle age to true age.
He wore a loose-fitting t-shirt, sweatpants, and a stained apron that hung below his sternum.
His accusing eyes would have been a striking green in life, especially as a younger man.
They were now a rather dull color the shade of agave leaves.
His mouth was sewn shut with a thin, brown thread that gleamed a little in the light of the overhead ceiling fan. Kate pulled on a glove and rubbed the edge of the suture in between her thumb and index finger. It felt waxy.
“Gerald Mace,” Darnell said. “Seventy-one. Former court clerk. Retired thirty years ago and lived off of his savings.”
“Did you say thirty years ago?” Marcus asked.
“Yes. His most recent employment record was for 1997.”
“Damn. He wins the lotto or something?”
“We haven’t gone through his financial records yet,” Darnell said. “Do you think they’re important?”
“Probably not,” Kate said, stepping around the body and the blood. “But the timing is. The ninth commandment is ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness.’ I want to find out what happened thirty years ago that made Gerald decide to retire.”
“We’ll look into that,” Darnell agreed.
Kate regarded the cipher on the table. Cuneiform, Akkadian, not Sumerian.
Sumerian cuneiform was comparatively simple, each logogram representing a single word.
Akkadian was a root-and-pattern language that used triconsonantal roots modified by internal vowel changes and prefixes.
While the language borrowed cuneiform script from Sumerian, its writing was far more complex and varied.
This was definitely a commandment killer.
She couldn’t be sure it was Cox, though.
“What do you think?” Marcus asked.
She took a deep breath. “It’s definitely Cox or one of his disciples. The writing style is different from what we’ve seen of Cox before. See how the cuts are deeper at the end of each stroke?”
“I’ll take your word for it,” he said. “I honestly can’t tell where the letters end and begin.”
“Well, what it looks like is the killer was angry. It appears rushed, but not because of fear. If that was the case, the cuts would be shallow and the symbols incomplete. This is more like the killer was forcefully applying each symbol.”
“Would I be an asshole if I said stabbing a guy to death in his own home and sewing his mouth shut was evidence enough of anger?”
“No,” Kate said. “I’m only saying…” She took a deep breath. “I don’t think this is Cox. I think this is one of his disciples. Cox is always careful and precise when he leaves a cipher. His ‘handwriting’ is excellent, if that makes sense.”
“Counterpoint,” Marcus said. “He’s slipping. His behavior last time showed that he’s losing his grip on his sanity. He might not be as well put-together as he was early in his career.”
“That’s fair,” Kate said, “and it’s the only reason I’m not completely certain it’s not him.”
“Counterpoint two: what if it’s another copycat like Rosalyn Pierce in Pittsburgh?”
Rosalyn Pierce was a woman who had murdered her husband after catching him cheating. She’d scrawled thou shalt not commit adultery in his blood on the wall of their kitchen.
Kate shook her head. “No, Rosalyn’s case was clearly a crime of passion.
She stabbed her husband with a kitchen knife thirteen times, then wrote a single commandment on the wall with her fingers.
She wrote said commandment in plain English with no other cipher.
She took no steps to hide the evidence or conceal her guilt.
She might have thrown the commandment up because of Cox, but it wasn’t a premeditated mission on the Lawgiver’s behalf. ”
She reached down and carefully stretched apart the fabric of Gerald’s t-shirt, revealing a single stab wound to his heart. “This killer was precise. They stabbed him once in the heart, then waited for him to die.”
“He made it all the way to the kitchen table from the door after being stabbed in the heart?”
“Heart wounds don’t kill instantly,” Kate said.
“This is a short house. His cell phone’s on the table.
I’m thinking he was stabbed in the doorway and turned and ran to the table to call the police.
He collapsed in front of the table, and the killer propped him up on this chair and sewed his mouth shut. ”
“Damn,” Marcus said. “Poor guy.”
Kate chuckled wryly. “Yeah, you could say that.”
She took her gloves off and pulled her phone out to take pictures of the cipher and the body. As she did, Marcus grilled Darnell for information.
“Have we pulled security footage yet?”
Darnell’s upper lip curled. “This is what the city considers a low-priority neighborhood. The street cameras haven’t worked in months. No one here can afford such luxuries as home security.”
“The neighborhood with high crime is a low-priority neighborhood?”
“Obviously, they would say differently. Their actions, unfortunately, speak louder than their words.”
Marcus shook his head. “Have you talked to the neighbors yet?”
Darnell nodded. “No one heard anything suspicious. This is a troubled neighborhood. Violence is common. It doesn’t often end in bloodshed, but fights happen all the time. Last night, there was an altercation between two young men that resulted in police being called.”
“So, what you mean is that the neighbor’s heard a lot of suspicious stuff and dismissed it as ordinary urban background noise,” Marcus said.
Darnell cracked a smile. “I suppose so.”
Kate didn’t see what was so funny. They were standing next to a brutally murdered elderly man. “Who called it in?” she asked, her voice terse.
Darnell’s smile vanished, and he had the decency to look ashamed of his smile. “The mail carrier delivered a package and slipped on the ice. She reached for the door to steady herself, and it flew open. That was about eleven this morning.”
Kate’s lips thinned. “Time of death was?”
“Since rigor is already dissipating, CSI believes time of death was well before midnight.”
Kate looked back at Gerald. “So, someone walked through Gerald Mace’s front door, stabbed him to death, sewed his mouth shut, and carved a cipher on his kitchen table, all while the front door hung ajar, and no one noticed and thought they should call the police.
” She remembered the story about the fight and said, “The police were here in the neighborhood, and no one saw anything amiss.”
Darnell smiled, but it was a bitter smile. “Welcome to the jungle.”
Kate took a deep breath and released it in a huff.
“Get CSI back out here. I want details on the murder weapon and the tool used to make this cipher along with any assumptions that gives us about the killer. I want written statements from the neighbors and the police officers who were here last night. If they saw anyone who doesn’t live here—suspicious or not—I want a description including any vehicles they were driving, traffic cams, ring cams, et cetera.
“And I want every ounce of data there is about Gerald Mace’s history as a court clerk. Someone punished him for breaking the ninth commandment. I want to know who might have a reason to believe that he bore false witness.”
“I’ll get statements from the neighbors and officers involved,” Marcus said. “Maybe they’ll remember more the second time around.”
“I’ll look into Mr. Mace’s employment history,” Darnell offered. “It’s going to be a challenge getting access to thirty-year-old court records. I have connections in the Court of Common Pleas that can smooth that process.”
“Good,” Kate replied. “I’ll get to work on the cipher.”
“Take the car,” Marcus said. “I’ll Uber to the hotel. Just give me the address when you select one.”
Kate gave him a thumbs up. Before she left the house, she took one final look at Gerald Mace. The killer’s sewn mouth gazed at her; his lips doubly sealed in death. What had he said that this killer wished he hadn’t been able to say?
And who else had lost their right to speak?