Before He Sins

“Seen the body yet?” Mackenzie asked as they headed for the front door just behind the CSI team.

“Yeah. From a few feet away. It’s identical to the others.”

Within a few steps, Mackenzie was able to see this for herself. She stayed back a bit, letting the CSI and Forensics guys do their job. Sensing that they had two agents behind them waiting, the teams worked quickly yet efficiently, making sure to leave the two agents some room to take in their own observations.

Yardley was right. The scene was the same, right down to the elongated mark across the brow. The only difference was that this man’s underwear had apparently slipped down – or had been yanked down to his ankles on purpose.

One of the guys from the CSI team looked back at them. He looked a little out of sorts, maybe even a little sad.

“The deceased is Robert Woodall. He’s the head pastor here.”

“You’re sure?” Mackenzie asked.

“Positive. My family attends this church. I’ve heard this man preach at least fifty times.”

Mackenzie stepped closer to the body. The doors to Living Word were not ornate and decorative like the ones at Cornerstone Presbyterian and Blessed Heart. These were more modern, made of a heavy-duty wood that was designed and distressed to look like something akin to a barn door.

Like the others, Pastor Woodall had been nailed through the hands and his ankles had been bound with bailing wire. She studied his exposed genitalia, wondering if his stark nakedness had been a decision made by the killer who had staged the body. She could see nothing out of the ordinary and decided that the underwear must have slid down by itself, perhaps due to the weight of the blood it had collected. The wounds that had shed that blood were numerous. There were a few scratches on his chest. And while his back could not be seen, the trails of blood that smeared along his waist and ventured down his legs indicated that there would be a few back there.

Mackenzie then saw another wound – a thin one that brought back the hellish imagery of her nightmare.

There was a slit in Woodall’s right side. It was slight but clearly visible. There was something precise about it, almost pristine. She leaned in closer and pointed. “What’s this look like to you?” she asked the CSI team.

“I noticed that, too,” said the man who had recognized Pastor Woodall. “Looks like some sort of incision. Maybe made by some sort of crafting blade – an X-Acto knife or something.”

“But these other cuts and stab wounds,” Mackenzie said. “They’re made with a standard blade, right? The angles and edges…”

“Yeah. You a religious woman?” the man asked.

“That seems to be a recurring question over the last day or so,” she said. “Despite the answer, though, I understand the relevance of a cut to the side. It’s where Christ was speared while he was hanging on the cross.”

“Yeah,” Yardley said from behind her. “But there was no blood, right?”

“Right,” Mackenzie said. “According to scripture, water came out of this wound.”

So why did the killer decide to make this wound stand out? she wondered. And why was it not on the others?

She stood back and observed the scene while Yardley chatted with a few of the CSI and Forensics members. The case had already unnerved her a bit but this random wound in Woodall’s side made her worry that something deeper might be going on. There was symbolism but then there was layered symbolism.

The killer has obviously thought things out, she thought. He has a plan and he’s being methodical about it. More than that, the addition of this very precise cut in the side shows that he’s not just killing to kill – he’s trying to convey a message.

“But what message?” she asked herself quietly.

In the darkest hours of night, she stood in the entryway to Living Word Community Church and tried to find that message on the canvas of the dead pastor’s body.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In the time it had taken Mackenzie to leave Living Word and drive to the J. Edgar Hoover building, the media had somehow found out about the newest murder. While the murder of Father Costas had made the news, the death of Ned Tuttle had not. But with the lead pastor of a church with the status of Living Word, the case was going to blow up the headlines. It was 4:10 when Mackenzie arrived at the FBI offices, headed up to see McGrath. She figured that the details of Pastor Woodall and the case as a whole would be the main point of interest on local morning news programs – and all over the nation by noon.

She could feel the mounting pressure of it all as she stepped into McGrath’s office. He was sitting at his little conference table, on the phone with someone. Agent Harrison was there with him, reading something from a laptop. Yardley was also there, having arrived a scant few minutes before Mackenzie. She was sitting, listening to McGrath on the phone, apparently awaiting instruction.

Seeing the two of them hovering around McGrath made her wish Ellington was here. It reminded her that she was still in the dark about where McGrath had sent him. She wondered if it had something to do with this case – but if it did, why had she not been informed of his whereabouts?

When McGrath finally got off the phone, he looked to the three gathered agents and let out a sigh. “That was Assistant Director Kirsch,” he said. “He’s assembling three more agents to spearhead this case on his end. The moment the media caught wind of this, we were fucked. This is going to go big and it’s going to go big quickly.”

“Any particular reason?” Harrison asked.

“Living Word is a hugely popular church. The President goes there. A few other politicians are regulars, too. Their podcast gets around five hundred thousand listens a week. Woodall wasn’t like a celebrity or anything, but he was well known. And if it’s a church the President attends…”

“Got it,” Harrison said.

McGrath looked at Mackenzie and Yardley. “Anything of note at the scene?”

“Yeah, maybe,” Mackenzie said. She then went into detail about the peculiar and precise incision in Woodall’s right side. She did not, however, go into what sort of symbolic gesture she was trying to decipher from its meaning. She had no real solid theories just yet and did not want to waste time with speculation.

McGrath, however, was in panic mode. He spread his hands out on the table and nodded to the chairs around the table. “Take a seat. Let’s go over what we have. I want to be able to give Kirsch the same information we have. Including you three, we now have six agents dedicated to this case. If we work together, armed with the same details, we might be able to nab this guy before he strikes again.”

“Well,” Yardley said, “he’s not sticking to one denomination. We know that for sure. If anything, it seems like he’s trying to avoid that. So far we’ve got a Catholic church, a Presbyterian church, and now a nondenominational community church.”

“And another thing to consider,” Mackenzie said, “is that we can’t know for certain if he’s using the position of crucifixion as his preferred use of punishment and symbolism, or if he’s doing it as a mockery.”

“What’s the difference, really?” Harrison asked.

“Until we know which reason is behind it, we can’t narrow down the motive,” Mackenzie said. “If he’s doing it as a mockery, then he’s likely not a believer – maybe even some sort of very angry atheist or former believer. But if he’s doing it as a preferred means of symbolism, then he could be a very devout believer, albeit with some pretty strange ways to profess his faith.”

“And this thin cut along Woodall’s side,” McGrath said. “It wasn’t on any of the other bodies?”

“No,” Mackenzie said. “It was new. Which makes me think it has some meaning to it. Like the killer might even be trying to communicate something to us. Or just going further off the rails.”

McGrath pushed himself away from the table and looked to the ceiling, as if searching for answers up there. “I’m not blind to all of this,” he said. “I know there are zero clues and no real avenues to pursue. But if I don’t have something resembling a lead by the time this shit is splashed all over national news programs within a few hours, things are going to get bad around here. Kirsch says he’s already gotten a call from a congresswoman who attends Living Word asking why we weren’t able to crack this one as soon as Costas was killed. So I need the three of you to get me something. If I have nothing new to go on by this afternoon, I have to open it open wider…more resources, more manpower, And I really don’t want to do that.”

“I can check in with Forensics,” Yardley offered.

“Work alongside them for all I care,’ McGrath said. “I’ll make a call and okay it. I want you there the moment they discover anything from those bodies.”

“It might be a needle-in-a-haystack scenario,” Harrison said, “but I can start looking at local hardware stores to get records and receipts about anyone who has purchased the nails this guy is using in the last few months. From what I understand, they aren’t particularly common.”

McGrath nodded. It was an idea, sure, but the look on his face made it clear how much time that would take.

“And you, White?” he asked.

“I’ll go the families and co-workers,” she said. “In a church the size of Living Word, there’s got to be someone with some insight as to why this happened to Woodall.”

McGrath clapped his hands together loudly and sat forward. “Sounds good,” he said. “So get to it. And check in with me every hour on the hour. Got it?”

Yardley and Harrison nodded. Harrison closed his laptop as he stood up from the table. As they made their exit, Mackenzie hung back. When Yardley had closed the door behind them, leaving only Mackenzie and McGrath in the room, she turned back to him.

“Ah hell, what is it?” McGrath asked.