Fairstein, Linda - Silent Mercy

“A regular Quasimodo,” Mike said. “Hunchback of Mount Neboh. Why don’t you go check the bell tower, Sarge?”

I had noticed two towers on the church as I approached it earlier. Its neo-Gothic design looked squarely out of a London landscape. The cops would obviously have to sweep the entire building before any determination could be made about whether this distinguished house of worship had harbored a killer.

“Where’s the preacher man?” Grayson asked. “He’s a good guy. He’ll help.”

“Lieutenant Peterson reached him on his cell. He’s in Atlanta, at a church retreat. The custodian is supposed to be coming over to let us in.”

A red-and-white station wagon was guided around the parked vehicles by one of the cops. Two men got out and were admitted through the gates, quickly mounting the steps to introduce themselves as fire marshals, Dan Daniels and Frank Russo. Both of them knew Mike.

“Who’s the deceased?” Russo asked.

“Don’t know,” Mike said.

“Any kind of ID?”

Bixby tore his eyes away from his BlackBerry and introduced himself. “I didn’t do a full exam. Didn’t want to turn her over until you gentlemen arrived. Have you got a camera?”

Daniels put his heavy case on the ground and opened it to get his equipment out. A camera and large flash attachment were on top. As he set up, I checked the progress of the uniformed cops, who were hanging yellow crime-scene tape to establish a wider perimeter on the sidewalk in front of the church, pushing back the ever-growing group of gawkers.

“Looks like they used straight-stream to put out the fire,” Russo said.

Mike had talked to the men on the truck that had first responded to the 911 calls of a blaze at Mount Neboh. “Said they had no choice. They didn’t know when they got here if whoever was under that blanket was dead or alive.”

The straight-stream nozzle was effective in dousing the flames quickly, but more destructive in dispersing the evidence.

“She must have been decapitated first, don’t you think?” I asked Bixby while Daniels finished dressing himself to move in and work on the body.

“I assume so.”

Something more interesting than my questions caught Bixby’s attention as his BlackBerry vibrated in his hand. His lack of focus was annoying.

Mike caught it too. “Hey, Doc, you with us, or do you plan to tweet your way through the autopsy?”

“Sorry. Trying to advise one of my colleagues.”

“She appears to be badly burned,” I said. “Can you tell how long the fire was going?”

“The body itself is part of the fuel load, Ms. Cooper. The clothing — or blanket, in this case — provides fuel; so does the body fat, and even the skin and muscle.”

A lanky black man, dressed in a pea jacket and jeans, was escorted through the gate and up to where the group of us was standing. “One of you, Detective Chapman?”

“You got me.”

“Amos Audley. This here’s my church. I’m the caretaker.”

He opened the jacket to reveal a large brass ring with more than a dozen keys on it. He sniffed at the strong odor while he sorted his stock to produce the two that would unlock the building.

“Go ahead, please,” Mike said. “I’ll follow you in.”

Audley turned the large dead bolt and unlocked the knob below it. “Not like the days you could leave a church open for the poor souls what needs it in the dead of night.”

“You’re not old enough to know those days.”

“I’ve been knowing this place since I was a boy, Detective. Be sixty-seven years come November. Used to be, whether the Lord’s lions or lambs came calling, doors was wide open and all was welcome twenty-four hours of the day.”

“This was a lamb, all right. To the slaughter, Amos. We’re going to have to bring her in now, if you don’t mind,” Mike said. “C’mon, Coop. Step inside.”

I paused at the entrance as Audley marched in the dark to the panel of light switches that illuminated the vestibule and this part of the church. When he came back to us to explain that he’d be going to the far end to turn on the rest of the lights, I extended my hand to introduce myself.

“I’m Alexandra Cooper. I’m an assistant district attorney. Sorry to bring you here for such an unpleasant mission.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said, head down as he walked up the nave. “You need to set yourself down and have a little prayer, young lady. That’s what you all be needing.”

“If you don’t mind, Mr. Audley,” Mike said, “I’ll have to ask you to stay close. We’ve got to look around the church before you touch anything, just in case the killer was in here.”

Audley narrowed his eyes and stared at Mike as though he was crazy. “Not likely, Detective. I won’t cause you any grief, but not likely. Not a fit place for a killer.”

From this point in the entryway, I could see enormous stained-glass windows in the ceiling of the sanctuary. It was streaks of moonlight from above that made me conscious of them, although it was still too dark for me to make out any of the images.

“You heard Mr. Audley,” Mike said. “Take a seat.”

“Well, since everybody’s here now, and both Bixby and Russo have done a visual and taken photos, why don’t you just take her straight to the ME’s office?” I asked.

“No can do.”

“Why not?”

“Her body’s going to be pretty brittle because of the fire.”

A blast of cold air blew in the doors that Audley had opened. I looked over my shoulder at Russo and some of the cops who were spreading another clean white sheet on the ground beside the victim.

“Brittle?” I said, shivering against the chill of the night and my thoughts of the deceased.

“Just the ambulance ride downtown could jostle things. Change the way she presents at autopsy. That sheet will capture any trace evidence that falls off the body. Keep her as intact as possible.”

Mike watched, too, and inched a few steps closer to the doors as the team took direction from Russo and moved in to lift the woman. I stood beside him. When he walked back out onto the portico to oversee the change in positioning to the sheet, I went along.

“Jeez, Coop. In or out,” he said, stooping as Bixby raised the woman’s left arm several inches away from her body. “Something there, Doc.”

I leaned over his shoulder as Mike used a pair of tweezers to lift what looked like a piece of blue silk fabric from the fold beneath the woman’s right arm. I gagged at the sight of her body and neck — closer up this time than I was before — and from the smell that intensified with the cold wind.

“Man up, Coop,” Mike said. “This is as ugly as it gets.”

He stood and offered the material around for the others to see.

Mercer motioned to me but I wasn’t moving. “I’m okay.”

“May be as close as we come to figuring what she was wearing before she was set on fire,” Mike said.

Dr. Bixby talked to me as he explained. “Even on the most badly charred bodies, fragments are protected in the flexures of the armpits or groins. Might help you later on.”

Russo asked everyone to step away from the sheet as he ran his flashlight across the section of the portico where the body had been. There was a glint of something sparkling on the ground.

“Mike,” I said, “see that?”

The men who were tending to the deceased looked around, too, as Russo’s beam fixed on the tiny object that caught the light.

“Coop could find a freaking nugget in a pile of manure, as long as it’s gold,” Mike said to Russo. “Take a picture of that, will you?”

“What is it?” I asked.

The flash went off several times before Mike lifted the paperthin object with the tips of his tweezers.

“It’s a star. A six-pointed gold star. One of yours, Coop,” he said. “A Jewish star.”

Bixby ordered the cops to hold up before folding the sheet over the deceased. He rolled her body gently to one side, examining the skin on her back.

“You can see the form of it here, Detective. And even the suggestion of a chain extending up from the star. The heat almost embedded it in her back. It may prove to be a chain she was wearing when — uh, before she was killed.”

When she had a neck, is what he started to say.

Russo photographed the faint outline of the tiny symbol that was etched in the skin of our victim. Then she was finally ready to be wrapped in the sheet and lifted into the church vestibule so the rest of the scene could be examined for evidence.

“Go ahead, Coop,” Mike said. “Wrong church, wrong pew. Got to be something in this. More than your average murder-and-dump job.”

Sergeant Grayson didn’t agree. “Some local kills a girl. Maybe it’s a rape, maybe not. What else is he gonna do but toss the body? Maybe he’s a parishioner here. Could be he’s looking for salvation.”

“Aren’t we all?” Mike said. “The star might have belonged to the killer.”

“Too feminine a piece,” I said. “It’s tiny. And wafer-thin.”

“You still can’t assume it was hers. She could have ripped it off the guy’s neck during a struggle.”

I walked ahead of him, past Amos Audley, who was standing watch over the entrance to his beloved sanctuary. “I realize how unusual a decapitation is. What else did you mean about this not being an average murder, Mike?”

“Somebody went to a lot of trouble to make a statement. Kill a woman, decapitate her, get up and over that tall fence or come from within this place. Could have dumped his prey somewhere a lot more remote and make a much easier escape than climb to the front steps of Mount Neboh, get away clean. If the murder happened inside the church — and I guess we’ll know that shortly — he could have just left the body here. And if she’s Jewish, then what’s the point of bringing her to a Baptist church?”

Amos Audley mumbled something, but I couldn’t hear him.

“I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“The dead girl, she a Jew?” he asked.

“It’s possible. We don’t know who she is yet.”

“Well, maybe the Lord just brought her on home,” Audley said.

“Home?” I didn’t get where he was going.

“Take a look, Ms. Cooper.” Audley favored his left leg as he limped out of the vestibule.

I continued on after him, and saw that there must have been more than a thousand seats in the barrel-vaulted sanctuary of the church. A great organ with towering pipes filled most of the wall at the opposite end.

“Overhead,” he said.

I stretched my neck for a better view of the trio of splendid stained-glass windows that arched above me, forming a triptych of gigantic skylights.

“You see that?” Audley asked. “Those letters in the glass?”

“It — it looks like the writing is in Hebrew. Is that possible?”

“Indeed it is.”

I couldn’t read the ancient language, but the lettering was clear, as were the various symbols of the Jewish faith etched into the amber, emerald, and cobalt-blue glass. In the middle frame were the two tablets displaying the Ten Commandments, topped by a sixsided Star of David.

“Mercer — Mike,” I called out to them, “you’ve got to see this.”

“A hundred years ago, Ms. Cooper,” Audley said, proudly showing off the church he’d been associated with since his birth, “this here was built to be a synagogue.”

Mike rested his hands on my shoulders as he leaned back to look up.

“What kind of detective you be, Mr. Chapman?” Audley asked. “In that pediment up over the columns, above the front door, didn’t you see those tablets with the Ten Commandments?”

Mike didn’t have a ready answer.

“Didn’t you even notice those numbers carved in the cornerstone as you walked past? Big as you are? Says 5668. That’s the Hebrew calendar, year she was built. Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t miss no clue like that. Means 1908, when Harlem’s population was mostly Jewish. Rich and powerful ones, merchants and such. This girl just come home.”

“That’s one view of it,” Mike said. “I’d like you to show us all these things in daylight. I’ll bring Dr. Watson along. Make sure we don’t miss anything.”

“Just you come back with Ms. Cooper. I think she gets it.”

Maybe it was a hate crime after all. If the Star of David was in fact the victim’s, maybe it was no coincidence that her body was deposited on the steps of this particular church.

“The Lord moves in mysterious ways, Mr. Audley,” Mike said. “Strange and mysterious ways.”

“Amen, Mr. Chapman. The Lord be making these mysteries, He can help you solve them too. Just you figure it out before anybody else get dead.”

“MY name is Wilbur Gaskin, Detective. I’m a member of this congregation. Our pastor is out of town and I’m hoping to be of some assistance to you in his place.”

It was shortly after three a.m. The body had been bagged and removed from the church, and the remaining uniformed cops had ushered in this gentleman when he appeared at the gates in response to a call from Amos Audley.

“Mr. Audley said you could help us with whatever we need.” Mike made the introductions, and Gaskin gave each of us his business card. I guessed him to be in his midfifties, and the title on the card identified him as an executive in private banking at Chase.

“Do you know the name of the deceased?” Gaskin asked. He was about Mike’s height, and lighter-skinned than Mercer, dressed in gray slacks and a crewneck sweater that he must have thrown on when Audley awakened him.

“Not a clue.”

“Do you think she worshipped here?”

Audley bowed his head. I thought he wanted to speak, but he deferred to Wilbur Gaskin.

“She’s Caucasian, Mr. Gaskin,” Mike said. “You tell me.”

The banker bristled. “You may not be familiar with our church, Mr. Chapman. In addition to a long, fine reputation in the religious community, we’ve got one of the best gospel choirs in the world. You’d be surprised what a service looks like here. Perhaps you’ll come. You won’t be the only white man. And you certainly won’t be the only cop.”

“I’ll do that,” Mike said. “And I apologize for my rudeness. Is there someplace we can go to talk?”

Gaskin glanced around at the four detectives who were making their way through the sanctuary of the church, fanned out between the rows of seats as they looked for any evidence of an intrusion or violent crime. “Is all this necessary, Detective?”

“It is, Mr. Gaskin. One way or another, a dead body wound up on your front steps.”

“She could have come from anywhere,” he said, gesturing with both hands as if in protest to Mike’s suggestion.

“I’d say her mobility was limited, sir. Just like her access. But we can rule out the inside of your church pretty quickly, if you’d let us.”