“This is fucked…” Ben spat, shaking his head in a display of disbelief and looking upward as he spoke. “This S.O. B is just plain sick.”
It was just after four a.m. by the time we arrived, and we found ourselves standing in the middle of Locust Street downtown. We had signed in on the scene log with Felicity and me listed as consultants and allowed in only by Ben’s graces.
Stepping onto the active participant side of the bright yellow strip of barrier tape that cordoned off the street was akin to entering another world. I glanced around, feeling both out of place and right at home in the same instant. In the past two years, I’d visited more active homicide crime scenes than many cops see in their entire careers, and I didn’t even have a badge. Something seemed very wrong about that, but it was a fact I simply could not change. I didn’t find it reassuring at all that I was becoming so accustomed to it.
Cold wind sliced in a linear gust down the thoroughfare, flaring the band of plastic tape as if to highlight the repeated imprint of block letters along its length. Bold strokes formed words that had become all too familiar to me-CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS. The temperature was settled for the moment at an even thirty-six degrees, but the computed wind chill pushed the overall feeling downward into the range of the mid-twenties.
There were a half dozen crime scene technicians milling about on the ground, while another handful could occasionally be spotted working on the roof of the building that was before us. The medical examiner’s hearse had already arrived, and the area was illuminated by the visual insanity of flickering light bars on idling emergency vehicles.
When the street-level scene was taken as a whole, my friend’s candid observation simply became a commentary that mirrored my own feelings. Unfortunately, he was talking about something far worse, for what was taking place on the tableau of the cold asphalt was only a supporting backdrop for the spectacle above.
My gaze followed Ben’s, coming to rest between the second and third floor windows of the four-story, brick building. There, carefully directed spotlights illuminated the centerpiece of this nightmare. Garish shadows molded themselves in a shroud about the nude and blood streaked corpse of a man. Suspended by a rope tied about his ankles, he was hanging upside down. His head was obscured by an executioner’s hood, and his arms were splayed out to the sides, perpendicular to the rest of his body, as if to form an inverted cross. The appendages were held stiffly in place by what looked like a two-by-four across his shoulders. At this distance, I couldn’t be positive, but the piece of wood appeared to be held fast by something encircling his wrists and neck.
This, in and of itself, was macabre enough to make anyone believe that it could only be a Hollywood “slasher flick” in the making. If only that were true, for it didn’t end there. From the victim’s groin, downward to a point in his mid-torso, his abdomen was split open. There, protruding from the ragged tear like a grey-white serpent, his intestines cascaded across his chest to hang in a pendulum-like loop several feet beneath. Each time the wind would pick up, the sash of organ tissue would move with the breeze, undulating like heavy drapes next to an air vent. Blood still dripped at protracted intervals from the exposed viscera to plop wetly onto the dark stain that now graced the sidewalk below.
Behind us, a loud and very wet sounding splatter tore our attention away from the scene as a patrol officer involuntarily launched the contents of his own stomach onto the pavement.
I looked back over my shoulder in response to the sound and then glanced over at Felicity. She was clutching my arm tightly and staring upward while absently chewing at her lower lip. She had been to a few crime scenes before but had not been subjected to anywhere near as much of this grisly scenery as I had. Still, she looked stable for the moment, so I returned my stare to the three-dimensional horror show that was playing out in front of me. I swallowed hard, because to be honest, I was only a half step away from heaving myself.
“Ya’know, Doc Sanders told me once that the average adult has about thirty feet of intestines.” Ben paused for a moment after reciting the fact. “Man, I’ve seen a lotta crap in autopsies, but I never really expected to see anybody’s guts stretched out like that.”
“Disembowelment was not uncommon during the Inquisition.” I spoke quietly, struggling to keep my voice even. “Actually, it was a favored form of punishment and torture.”
“You mean he did that to ‘im while he was still alive?” Ben asked with a thin strain of disbelief in his voice.
“Oh, yes,” I nodded as I spoke, then swallowed hard again. “Probably rather slowly…”
As I’d known it would, my headache was starting to get worse. The stark chill of fear climbed up my vertebrae and began clawing at the base of my neck. There was something unseen here that was begging my attention, and I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to give it.
“Jeezus…” He shook his head. “Guess I shoulda suspected that, considering…”
I knew full well what his unspoken words implied. Eldon Porter made a habit of torturing his victims mercilessly before finally bringing about their end. During his last spree, he had even burned two of them alive.
I allowed my gaze to fall away from the corpse as I turned my head, but I didn’t have to let it fall far. I was of average height, but I still had to crane my neck back to look up at Ben’s face; average in stature he definitely was not. His particular pencil mark on the doorjamb had hit six feet when he was in junior high school, and he had still proceeded to grow another six inches after that. He was no stranger to the weight room either, and the rest of his physique made a perfect match for his elevated height.
Formidable was a word that came to mind at first glance; when he had still been a uniformed officer, just plain scary tended to be the more accurate description.
He was looking back at me with dark, questioning eyes that peered out of angularly defined features and natural reddish-tanned skin-unmistakable visual evidence of his full-blooded Native American heritage. His large hand was tucked beneath a shank of collar length, jet-black hair, and he was slowly massaging the back of his neck. This was a common mannerism of his, and it told me that his mind was doing far more behind those eyes than simply waiting for me to say something.
I said something anyway. “Was there a Bible?”
While an outside observer might have found the question somewhat odd, it was something I was certain he had expected me to ask.
“Yeah, that’s what they said when they called,” he told me, giving a short nod to the affirmative as he spoke. “Bookmarked and highlighted.”
“Passage?”
My friend stopped massaging his neck long enough to thumb through a small notebook then read his shorthand back to me, “At the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death. Deuteronomy seventeen, six.”
“He’s working from his list again…” I muttered. “When you ID this guy, he’ll be someone that one of the original victims knew.”
“Yeah,” Ben agreed. “That’s kinda what we figured.”
The “he” I referred to was, of course, Eldon Andrew Porter. The list was exactly that, a list. It comprised the names of Witches, Wiccans, and various other Pagan individuals living in the Saint Louis metropolitan area. It was, of course, by no means a comprehensive census of persons engaging in what is often collectively referred to as alternative spirituality; however, the odds were that it wasn’t terribly short either. Porter had compiled it himself by way of various sadistic tortures, such as the one displayed above us now.
A bookmarked Bible was his calling card and the highlighted passage, a message. What we were being told was the reason this particular victim had been chosen. His crime was that of being a Witch. We’d been here before, so that much was a given. And, just like the Bible verse said, he had been accused by more than one witness. There was never much reading between the lines necessary, for Eldon was nothing if not precise about the messages he left behind.
Basically, Porter was a single-minded killer. What made him unique was his highly particular criterion for committing murder. Put very simply, he executed Witches.
That was the short answer. The long answer went something like this: Porter was a highly suggestible sociopath with a mild paranoid psychosis. Several years ago he committed a crime, was caught, convicted, and sent to prison. That should have been the end of the story, but society simply wasn’t that lucky. While incarcerated he had been deeply affected by a fire-and-brimstone prison ministry. Something called a “God Pod.” Unfortunately, he completely missed the allegorical sense of biblical text and took much of it literally. In the end, what should have been a tool for rehabilitation had, in his case, created a serial spree killer.
