Before He Sins

A chill crept through her. She repressed it by turning to the forensics team. With a slight wave, she got the attention of a member of their team. He came over, clearly a little distraught over what he and the rest of the team had seen. “Agent White,” he said. “This your case now?”

“Seems like it. I was wondering if you guys still had the nails that were used to put him up there.”

“Sure do,” he said. He waved over another of his team members and then looked back to the door. “And the guy who did this…he was either strong as hell or had all the time in the world to do this.”

“That’s doubtful,” Mackenzie said. She nodded back out toward the church parking lot and the street beyond. “Even if the killer did this around two or three in the morning, the chances of a vehicle not traveling down Browning Street and seeing him are slim to none.”

“Unless the killer canvassed the area beforehand and knew the dead-times for traffic after midnight,” Ellington offered.

“Any chance of video footage?” she asked.

“None. We checked. Agent Yardley even called some people – owners of the buildings closest by. But only one has security cameras and they are facing away from the church. So there’s no dice there.”

The other forensics member came over. He was carrying a medium-sized plastic bag that contained two large iron spikes and what looked like a thread of bailing wire. The spikes were coated in blood, which had also smeared itself along the clear interior of the bag.

“Are those railroad spikes?” Mackenzie asked.

“Probably,” the forensics guy said. “But if they are, they’re miniaturized ones. Maybe the kind people use to put up chicken coops or pasture fences.”

“How long before you’ll have any sort of results from these?” she asked.

The man shrugged. “Half a day, maybe? Let me know what you’re looking for specifically and I’ll try to get the results to you sooner.”

“See if you can find out what the killer used to drive the spikes in. Can you tell that sort of thing by the recent wear on the spike heads?”

“Yeah, we should be able to do that. Everything has pretty much been handled on our end. The body is still with us; it won’t get to the coroner until we say so. The doors and stoop have been dusted for prints. We’ll let you know if we find anything.”

“Thanks,” Mackenzie said.

“Sorry to have already moved the body. But the sun was coming up and we really didn’t want this in today’s papers. Or tomorrow’s for that matter.”

“No, that’s fine. I totally understand.”

With that, Mackenzie turned back to the double doors, nonverbally dismissing the forensics team. She tried to picture someone lugging a body across the small lawn and up the stairs in the dead of night. The positioning of security lights on the street would make the front of the church dark. There were no lights of any kind along the front of the church, so it would have been cast in almost absolute darkness.

Maybe it would have been more possible than I originally thought for the killer to take all the time he needed to get this done, she thought.

“That seemed like a weird request,” Ellington said. “What are you thinking?”

“I don’t know yet. But I do know that it would take a hell of a lot of strength and determination to work by yourself in order to haul someone off of the ground just to nail their hands to these doors. If a sledgehammer was used to knock the nails in, it might denote more than one killer – one to hold the victim off the ground and extend the arm, and another to drive the nails in.”

“Paints a hell of a picture, doesn’t it?” Ellington said.

Mackenzie nodded as she started snapping pictures of the scene with her cell phone. As she did, the idea of crucifixion again crept up on her. It made her think of the first case she’d ever worked where themes of crucifixion had been utilized – a case back in Nebraska that had eventually led her to rub elbows with the bureau.

The Scarecrow Killer, she thought. God, am I ever going to be able to leave that in the dust of my memory?

Behind her, the sun started to rise, casting the first rays of light on the day. As her shadow was slowly cast upon the church steps, she tried to ignore the fact that it looked almost like a cross.

Again, memories of the Scarecrow Killer fogged her mind.

Maybe this will be it, she thought hopefully. Maybe when I close this case, memories of those people crucified in the cornfields will stop haunting my memory.

But as she looked back at those bloodstained doors of Cornerstone Presbyterian, she was afraid this was nothing more than wishful thinking.

CHAPTER THREE

Mackenzie learned a great deal about Reverend Ned Tuttle in the next half an hour. For starters, he had left behind two sons and a sister. His wife had walked out on him eight years ago, moving to Austin, Texas, with a man she had been having an affair with for over a year before it had come to light. Both sons lived in the Georgetown area, leading Mackenzie and Ellington to their first stop of the day. It was just after 6:30 when Mackenzie parked her car along the curb outside of Brian Tuttle’s apartment. According to the agent who had broken the news, both brothers were there, waiting to do what they could to answer questions about their father’s death.

When Mackenzie stepped into Brian Tuttle’s apartment, she was a little surprised. She had expected to see two sons deep in grief, torn apart by the loss of their devout father. Instead, she saw them sitting at a small dining room table in the kitchen. They were both drinking coffee. Brian Tuttle, twenty-two years of age, was eating a bowl of cereal while Eddie Tuttle, nineteen, was absently dabbing an Eggo waffle into a pool of syrup.

“I don’t exactly know what you’re thinking we can offer you,” Brian said. “We weren’t exactly on the best terms with Dad.”

“Can I ask why?” Mackenzie asked.

“Because we stopped associating with him when he went full-tilt into the church.”

“Are you not believers?” Ellington asked.

“I don’t know,” Brian said. “I guess I’m an agnostic.”

“I’m a believer,” Eddie said. “But Dad…he took it to a whole different level. Like, when he found out Mom was cheating on him, he didn’t do anything. After about two days of dealing with it, he forgave her and the guy she was cheating on him with. He said he forgave them because it was the Christian thing to do. And he refused to even talk about a divorce.”

“Yeah,” Brian said. “And Mom saw that as Dad not giving a shit about her – not caring that she had cheated. So she left. And he didn’t do much of anything to stop her.”

“Did your Dad ever try to reach out to the two of you since your mom left?”

“Oh yeah,” Brian said. “Just about every Saturday evening, begging us to come to church.”

“And besides that,” Eddie added, “he was too busy during the week even if we did want to see him. He was always at the church or out on charity drives or sick visits at hospitals.”

“When was the last time either of you spoke to him at length?” Mackenzie asked.

The brothers looked at each other for a moment, calculating. “Not sure,” Brian said. “Maybe a month. And it wasn’t much of anything. He was asking the same questions: how was work going, if I was dating anyone yet, stuff like that.”

“So it’s safe to say you both have an estranged relationship with your father?”

“Yeah,” Eddie said.

He looked down to the table for a moment as regret started to sink in. Mackenzie had seen this sort of reaction before; if she’d been forced to bet, she was pretty sure at least one of these boys would be a sobbing mess within an hour, realizing all that had been lost in terms of the father they’d never gotten to know.

“Do you know who would have known him well?” Mackenzie asked. “Did he have any close friends?”

“Just that priest or pastor or whatever at the church,” Eddie said. “The one that runs the place.”

“Your father wasn’t the lead reverend?” Mackenzie asked.

“No. He was like an associate pastor or something,” Brian said. “There was another guy over him. Jerry Levins, I think.”