Blind Instinct

ONE

Charing Cross Pier, River Thames, London September 5, 2000

“Elderly woman, I warrant fifty if she's a day,” said Inspector Sharpe to his partner Copperwaite. “Looks like someone's mum. Looks local.”

“Then you don't make her out a whore, Sharpe? Killed possibly because she'd gotten too old to draw in enough shillings?”

“I shouldn't assume her a whore, Coppers.”

“Looks like someone's mum actually,” Copperwaite agreed. “Still doesn't rule her out as an old whore. Lots of mums are whores, you know.”

The dead woman's body had no identifying marks, no clothing and so no ID. “Nothing whatever to inform us of a bloody thing,” muttered Sharpe. “And I resent your summing her up as a whore, Stuart.”

Lieutenant Inspector Stuart Copperwaite, working his way up to full inspector status, felt compelled to agree with his superior. “You're right, of course. Sharpie. Just Another-nother.”

Sharpe thought of the sad term law enforcement in the United States used: Jane Doe, and its British equivalent A.N. Other. Murdered, but murdered in an unmistakably brutal and bizarre fashion. “Something altogether unique about this nobody,” said the Scotland Yard inspector. “This poor, wretched woman has died the most horrid death, staked to a tree, Stuart.”

Sharpe stepped away from the body and walked in little circles, ever-widening the breech between himself and the other authorities on hand. “Each time I look on such unconscionable, and despicable acts as this, I begin to believe that no new evil can ever rival what I must deal with before me. Yet… yet some fiend always finds a new twist, a new evil beyond anything you or I might ever have imagined possible, and this certainly proves the case here. Something evil this way comes…”

Sharpe's feet, hands, and lungs ached from the thought of how this elderly woman had died literally crucified. He imagined the hours it had taken for her to suffer this tormenting death. The same agony faced by Christ.

“I've interviewed the bridgeman. He's of no use,” Copperwaite said in Sharpe's ear. “The man called us about the body after sobering up. Discovered it physically 'in his way' as it were. In fact, he… ahh had ran over the body with the Volkswagen Jetta now parked below the bridge. 'An accident,' he called it, believing he had killed the woman. At the same time, an early morning American tourist, using a zoom lens, also spied the bridgeman with the body and reported a murder in progress.”

Oddly, the body lay close but not quite in the River Thames. It appeared to glisten as if washed, yet leaves, grass, and dirt adhered to it due to some sticky substance that it- she-had been bathed in. “Smells awful, doesn't she?” commented Sharpe's younger partner. “Like a salad that's set too long.” He covered his nose with a handkerchief.

As if unsure which element to choose, water or land, the killer had dumped her below the bridge. On a day when the wind proved right, a passerby might be treated to the sound of Bow Bells-the bells of Bow Church on Bow Street in the city of London. Since the location of the body itself proved of interest-so near the tourist circuit, within walking distance of Westminster-no doubt, the press would play it up; but the place also represented Sharpe's home. He'd been born within the sound of Bow Bells himself, and as the locals in London said of anyone actually bom within this geographical area, “You're then born true Cockney.”

Sharpe had worked hard, however, to lose his Cockney accent. He had aspired to a more military and even genteel-sounding professional voice, although he called upon his former speech pattern when occasion warranted.

Now full circle, Inspector Richard Sharpe, Criminal Investigation Division (CID) of the New Scotland Yard, looked over the result of a most horrid crime. He returned from his walkabout to again crouch over the pained face of the dead, squatting and wondering if the victim had also been a true Cockney.

“You think she's from here about?” asked Stuart.

For Sharpe the geography mattered for two reasons. One, he felt a sense of kinship with anyone born in the district. Two, and perhaps more important, it mattered in that if she were local, she'd be easy to identify down the road, perhaps at the first bar or restaurant he came to. However, if she were not from the Bow Bells district, she could prove difficult to name, and the investigation might drag on until he retired and after, perhaps falling into the category of a cold file, a case that relentlessly went on, unsolved forever. And the number of such cases already staggered the imagination.

Sharpe again lifted from his haunches to his full height, rivaling a signpost that warned of no swimming in the Thames. Methodically he stepped away from the body and peered out across the dirty river, taking in what he could amid the fog of Charring Cross Pier where one of the many water buses plied its trade back and forth across the wide, winding way. In the water boat's infrequent wail he heard the victim's voice crying for vengeance and retribution.

Through the fog, Sharpe could make out Westminster Bridge. To his left he could easily find Waterloo Bridge. He was surrounded by beauty on all sides, near Somerset House and King's College on the Victoria Gardens Embankment and the newly erected replica of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre loomed nearby. It seemed an ill-fit, dumping the tortured, murdered victim's remains here amid the flower gardens, which blanketed the Thames on either side. Sharpe wondered if this said something about the killer, about his relationship to his victim, about his last thoughts for her, or if the bastard simply wanted to be splashy.

The killer must know the businesspeople and the early morning tourists would be going by on the river ferries, and that someone would spot the body lying so near the water's edge. Yes, the body appeared to have been purposefully placed here with loving attention and concern. Always a twist in such strange cases, Sharpe thought, that so brutal a killer could be so gentle with the body afterward-after she could feel no pain. “Bastard,” he muttered aloud to the soft fog overhead. “Perhaps he meant to place her in the river but his plans were spoiled by our drunken bridgeman.”

“You think so, Sharpie?” asked his young partner, but Sharpe ignored the silly question.

When officials had first arrived on scene, everyone expected the usual floater-some poor slob victim of a domestic dispute gone bad, or a whore whose badly beaten body had been thrown into the river and had washed to the embankment. No one could for a moment have suspected the woman to be the victim of crucifixion, least of all Sharpe.

Young Inspector Stuart Copperwaite, Sharpe's assistant, now ruminated over the hideous and grisly wounds they'd found, pleading for some meaning to surface, asking his superior to help him make sense of it all. Copperwaite's pained questions floated out over the nearby river: “Why? Why kill someone in so gruesome and complicated a fashion? Why bloody crucify her?”

Sharpe, his stem gaze having returned to the body, matter-of-factly replied, “Cruelty's really little different than any other vice, Stuart.”

“Say that again, sir?”

“Cruelty requires no motive outside itself. It merely requires opportunity.”

“My God but that's profound. Better put that up over my desk,” Copperwaite said, trying to make light of the heavy moment.

When Sharpe and Copperwaite had first arrived, the London constables stood horrified around the body. Each in turn gaping over the ugly crucifix scars and the wound to the side, like that of a knife or spear. The wounds to hands and feet could only have been caused by three grim and hefty spikes- one to each palm and a third to the crossed feet. The local authorities had eagerly stepped aside for the men of the Criminal Investigation Division. No one truly wanted this case. Sharpe thought it unlikely that there would be any special claims of jurisdictional boundaries or a dispute of any sort over where the deceased's body had fallen, as had been the case in the politically charged murder of a parliamentarian a few weeks before. No such concerns for what appeared to be a woman of simple means.

Inspector Sharpe at fifty-four had seen great cruelty in his thirty-four-year-long career. Police agencies all over England, Scotland, and Wales, who were more than relieved to turn the strangest, most inhumane and bizarre cases over to England's elite detective agency, had no idea the extent of horror the average CID man saw. The sight of a crucified woman certainly qualified.

In the muffled stillness of the fog, somewhere off in the distance, another Thames River ferry blew out its mournful anthem. Both Copperwaite and Sharpe looked across the river for the boat, but the distracting noisemaker remained a phantom. “Likely the only send-off she'll receive, wouldn't you say, Stuart?”

“ 'Less we uncover a relative.”

“Pray we do. Perhaps with more information about the victim, we might start to uncover the kind of animal that she ran into. The kind of animal who could nail another human being to a cross.”

“Where do you suppose it happened? In the forest? Where do you find a cross aside from a church these days?” asked Copperwaite. “Perhaps an old tree grown into the shape of a cross?” Telephone pole perhaps… long way to come from the nearest forest to Bow Bells.”

Charring Cross Pier bustled at daybreak. Again Sharpe thought it an unlikely place for a killer to dump a body, what with the two nearby river bus depots looking on. Unless the killer meant to weigh her down and dispose of the body beneath the surface. Still, why so busy a place as this? Even in the fog, a killer wasn't likely to be so brash, unless he blended in with his surroundings to the point that no one took notice?

Likely having similar thoughts to Sharpe's own, one of the uniformed bobbies had come forward to say, “I wager the body was put in upriver somewhere and floated to this spot.”

“Aye, now that makes all the sense in the world. Makes all the sense that the Thames-rough as she is this morning- could lift this body three feet, or four, up the bank and leave not a trace of water in her hair or mouth.” Sharpe pulled forth a pipe and began chewing on the stem.

The officer, taking the sting of his superior's remarks, bit back a reply and found himself relieved when Sharpe added, “What say we hold judgment till we've scanned the ground around here. All you men! Have a search. The body does look… washed in oils, not in the waters of the Thames.”

Everyone joined in the grounds search while Sharpe again stepped away. At odds with young Copperwaite and perhaps his colleague's entire generation, Sharpe thought of the irony of having been born and raised not too far from where they stood. Copperwaite by comparison hailed from Harrogate, a seaport city in Yorkshire summed up by Copperwaite as a place where “They've nothing but bails of quaint.”

This time Stuart Copperwaite pursued his superior and walked about the embankment beside him, saying, “The victim could be difficult to identify, having no distinguishing marks and nothing whatever to pinpoint her identity.”

“You state the obvious, Stuart. “Hie fact of it weighs heavily,” agreed Sharpe, who had seen his share of faceless, nameless victims, their killings going unresolved here in London. He resignedly muttered, “Stuart, get a sketch artist on hand at the morgue to make a likeness of Mum. Make the bloody Sun's morning edition. See what comes of it. Perhaps someone will recognize her. Have a run at Missing Persons, all that.”

“Yes, of course… Perhaps someone's looking for Mum as we speak.” Copperwaite took studious notes and added, “Consider it done, Richard.”

Both men felt the cold, nibbling presence of death as it hovered about the body like some primordial creature living just beyond sight, deep in the fog, a creature in search of more souls to take.

“She really isn't your usual age for a streetwalker,” Copperwaite said, breaking the stillness between them.

“Three or four I've known have lived to the ripe old age of fifty, even sixty, Stuart, so we won't completely discount the possibility. It's possible she was plying the trade, being smeared all over with oil, being nude as she is. Hard to say really. We won't know anything for certain until someone steps forward with some information about her.”

“As for now?”

Sharpe returned to the body. He again removed the sheet to stare at the naked body, drained of all color save her purple, puckering wounds. The dead woman's feet remained stiff and overlying one another where they'd been nailed together, rigor mortis having set in, telling Sharpe that she had not been lying here long before her discovery, since rigor released its grip after four or five hours. Yes, indeed, something evil this way had come.

The trinity of nail wounds told the story of how some madman had pinned her to his idea of a cross at some other, remote location-possibly a forest somewhere as Stuart surmised. Now the gashes resembled three dead eyes. The viscosity of the flesh having been thoroughly compromised, the holes puckered in on themselves like oversized, gaping, purple gunshot wounds.

“Doesn't require Karl Schuller or any autopsiest to tell us- nor any man here-that this woman's death began with the slow, agonizing torture of having her hands and feet nailed to somebody's idea of a resurrection cross. Likely some religious fanatic,” Sharpe guessed aloud but did not speculate further. “Is that what you make of it, Sharpie?” asked Copperwaite, a look of intense pain fluttering on and off his countenance where he stood in the glow of a streetlamp. Nearby on the recently completed London to Essex motorway, automobiles whined and zipped and occasionally called out with their horns like mewing, mildly annoyed cattle.

Sharpe said no more, keeping silent counsel for as long as he might possibly do so.

Copperwaite, an exasperated breath of air flowing from him, bit back an urge to again verbally prod his senior partner for words. He felt a powerful need to hear something-anything-from the worldly, former army colonel.

Finally, Sharpe turned and shouted at them all, his voice sounding like a drill sergeant who'd missed a meal. “Anyone locate a scintilla of information, evidence, identifying item about the ground? Anyone? Anything?”

“ 'Fraid not, Inspector,” replied one of the Charring Cross district bobbies.

“Aye and not aught of ye've seen the like of her before today?” Sharpe blurted out in his native Cockney, raising the eyebrows of several of the uniformed men milling about.

“Sorry, sir… She's a stone cold mystery, this one. Not from the district so far as we know,” came the answer.

“Perhaps new to the area then? Have a check with housing authority and what-do-you-call-them? Housewarming people. D'ya know any Warm Welcoming groups in the area?”

Sharpe then snorted into a handkerchief, bent down over the prone dead and once more examined her features with the care of a man preparing to paint in oil. With a gentle, gloved hand, he turned her cheek from side to side, studying the hard-etched, weary, worn features, his pipe still dangling, unlit.

Sharpe finally asked, “What do you really make of her, Coppers?”

Copperwaite pushed closer, kneeling in over the other side of the body, pleased that his senior had used his nickname. He and Sharpe now formed a kind of human arboretum about the deceased, their eyes intent on the dark results of the morning's find. “She's likely in the wrong place at the wrong time… Like, as I assumed, out here hooking, I suppose, when this madman with spikes and a cross grabbed her up?”

“Then you suppose too much, but tell me why.”

“I don't know…”

“Exactly. You do not know, so you rush in with words to fill empty space, Coppers. CID men can't work that way. Now tell me why you suspect her to be a common whore? Certainly not the way she dresses? Come on, man! Why do you make her out a whore?”

“I can't righdy say“

“Yes, you bloody well can. Go on.” Sharpe's frustration gave way to a flood of anger. “It's because of the district we're in, and perhaps the killer knew full well we'd take her for a whore, dumping her here.”

Copperwaite, some ten years Sharpe's junior, looked more closely at the body and announced, “Look at her veins. Recently popped. They're not exactly shot, but she's done drugs. Not the most beautiful creature I've ever seen,” he added with a grim shrug. “Most all of your street tramps're real hags, wouldn't you agree?”

“Virtual witches, but this woman, she's hardly a hag, Coppers. Somethin' overweight, surely, but hardly more than what, in Bow Bells, you'd call wholesome and-”

Copperwaite laughed at the use of Bow Bells' “wholesome”-another word for a fat woman.

Sharpe thundered on, adding, “And as for her features, she might be the picture of a British maiden in her youth: comely, rather proper and staid, if you're asking me. Like we earlier agreed, someone's mum or a bloody librarian, perhaps, but I see no whore before me. And one thing I've learned to trust on this job is my first impressions, my first instinct.”

“Aye, I suppose you might say so, something pleasant about her demeanor. Maybe she's more Irish than English…”

“Now you be looking for a fight! How would you be tellin' that?” Sharpe put on an Irish accent.

“I'm just supposing.”

“Suppose? Suppose her age for me then.”

“I'd say somewhere 'bout in her early to mid-fifties.”

“Agreed. And that fact is-while not average for your typical girl working the Bow Bells as a hooker-making her easy prey for the bloody bastard who's done her up this way, or so you're supposing?”

“Exactly.”

“Christ, man, you'll never make full inspector if you think like… like one of those bobbies over there,” Sharpe muttered under his breath. “You're a Scotland Yard lieutenant now, Coppers. No ordinary bobby.” Sharpe gave a quick glance to the men and women in uniform, and the few detectives that'd come on scene from nearby district boroughs.

Copperwaite gritted his teeth, his young eyes flashing over the body once again. “She's no prostitute in your estimation, Colonel Sharpe?”

“I'll not be mocked with my own hard-won military rank, Copperwaite,” returned Sharpe, edgy now.

“I meant no disrespect, Richard.”

“Look here… The moment we place her”-he stopped for emphasis, pointing to the corpse-”in that ill line of business. Indeed, the moment we place her in any category of people, without evidence, we are merely labeling her-”

“But Richard-”

“-and thinking less of her as a human being with a right to life like any other. We start in on the typical and useless procedures that ultimately lead to yet another unsolved case, of which I've had my bloody fill.”

“Still, we only have what our eyes tell us, and we've got to go by what our eyes tell us,” Copperwaite weakly countered.

Sharpe managed not to laugh, suppressing all but the smile. “The eye alone will be your downfall, Stuart. All right, suppose the needle marks you've perceived are there because the woman was, in life, diabetic?”

“I see, of course… Then we locate her doctor.”

“We can't assume a bloody thing. If we do, we're lost from the start. We can know or not know, but we cannot assume and work from assumptions.”

“Well, I should think we can assume she died of being nailed to a cross.”

“Perhaps… but it will take an autopsy to be certain even of that, and I suspect there's far more to this singular death than meets the eye, Stuart.” Sharpe fell silent once more while Copperwaite tightened his own jaw, his body stiffening.

Sharpe, having seen enough of the victim's vacant, pained eyes, gently closed the lids, and then he looked into his partner's fervid eyes where a deep and youthful fire burned. “Suppose the killer is himself a priest?”

“Shall we begin our inquiries with priests then?”

“No, of course not.”

“But why not if-”

“It's assuming too bloody much, Stuart.”

“But now you… just now yourself, you just now said-” the younger man sputtered.

“To bait you, ol' boy, to bait you, and you took it like a mouse on the scent. Shame on you.” Sharpe laughed loudly, sending his voice sluicing through the fog and upsetting the silent crowd of local officials who saw no humor whatsoever in this most grotesque, fantastic, eccentric, and bizarre of killings. “Let's turn the body,” suggested Copperwaite. “Why? What for?”

“But we always turn the body, Richard, always. It's part of the protocol.”

“But it's already been turned by men who found her earlier, some of these men standing about.”

“How can you know that? Now you're assuming, Sharpie!”

“Look at the grass beside her, Stuart. Use your eyes, man, and again, quit assuming that all things are as they appear. They seldom are.

“We know the bridgeman ran her over, yet we see no tire marks. The marks are on her backside then. The first bobbies on scene turned her over to have a look at her front side, her features, but no one wants to own up to that, Stuart.”

Copperwaite looked at the men standing nearby, nodding appreciatively to his wise mentor. Sharpe stared up at the recently completed bridge spanning the Thames.

Copperwaite pointed to the bridge and said, “The motorist who called it in was looking through a camera lens, a zoom camera, when he saw the bridgeman trying to right things after hitting the body. I'm told.”

“Saw it from up there, while crossing over the bridge. Actually, only after he stopped illegally to snap a photograph,” Richard calmly agreed. “He and his family were gaining an early start out toward Sussex, to see a bit o' the countryside, I understand. Anyway, after taking the name, they sent 'em all on their way. Or so I was told, Stuart.”

Sharpe now stared down the high-fashioned, fieldstone wall, which held the Thames in check. For a moment, his eyes fell on nearby Jubilee Gardens and Queen Elizabeth Hall. For some years now, the city had been attempting to run out the vagrants from this area of the embankment. Officialdom threw money at it, hoping to improve it as a tourist walkway, but efforts had gone wanting. Wise city officials had actually thought that it might help if they planted new, exotic trees. Rather, it had added lush locations for the homeless to curl up by night and from which to fend for shillings by day.

Sharpe stood and stepped away, shouting, his order sounding more harsh than he'd wanted. “You men standing about with nothing to do, scour the area for homeless who might have seen something.”

The body had been deposited in a busy area. Someone had taken a dreadful chance at discovery. Had the killer hoped for discovery? Perhaps unconsciously so?

From here it was some distance to the motorway from which the body presumably had been spotted by the American motorist. The roadway overhead, which the killer must turn off from to get down here, led north and south. By now, the killer might be anywhere in the enormous maw of the city or the London suburbs.

Sharpe stepped back from the embankment and returned to where Copperwaite remained kneeling beside the body. Seeing Sharpe, Copperwaite muttered, “Bloody awful hell, this. Can you imagine the depth of suffering this woman endured? Jesus…”

Both men pictured the torturous image in their minds once again. “Yes, well, that's one item you can assume, Stuart,” said Sharpe.

Stuart replied, a hint of confusion in his voice, “What one item can I assume. Sharpie?”

“That the killer knew she'd die like Christ if he did her up this way…”

“Why the oil? It's still sticky to the touch.”

“I haven't a clue, but I know the bastard knew she'd die an agonizing death.”

Sharpe again kneeled beside his junior partner and pointed to the water's edge, saying, “Wonder why the body wasn't thrown in for 'cleansing of the wounds' before the killer disappeared. Perhaps caught in the act of preparing to dispose of the body in the river.”

“The bridgeman unknowingly startled him, run him off prematurely.”

“It would appear so, Stuart. But they tell us the bridgeman saw no one?” The chief bobby, overhearing this, stepped closer to be discreet. “The man had been at his bottle early, sir. Saw no one, sir, not even the dead woman until he… Well, sir, he run the dead woman over.”

“Yes, ran over the body, so we've heard.”

“His first thought was it was him what killed her, sir.”

“Of course. In his dfunken state, he would.”

“She was facedown when he hit her with the car, sir. We… some of us took liberty to turn her faceup,” the man confessed, fearful not to do so.

Copperwaite found his voice. “Shall we roll her and have a look, Richard?”

They rolled the body to the sound of Richard Sharpe's curses. “Gore… Gore blime!” Sharpe muttered the Cockney vulgarism for God blind me, while staring at the unmistakable blistering of tire treads from a lightweight vehicle running the length of Mum's back and buttocks. “Yes, of course,” began Sharpe, “add to the indignity of having been tormented to death and having to lie out here in the elements, the rummy bridgeman must find a way to thump over her body in the dark with his Jetta!” Copperwaite gnashed his teeth over the gruesome image. Sharpe in turn released some of the pent up emotion he felt in a small explosion of exhaled air. “We'll have to examine the car,” he told Copperwaite.

Copperwaite, pointing, replied, “Parked over there, at the base of the bridge.”

Sharpe had seen the vehicle below a stone ladder that wound its way to the man's stone turret high overhead, from which perch he currently looked down on the scene, no doubt trembling still.

While staring at the damage done, two clear tire tread marks well tattooed onto the woman's back and backside for her to take to eternity along with the wounds inflicted by the killer, Sharpe groused, “Likely the only useful forensic evidence and it's from the wrong source.”

Copperwaite and the others watched as Sharpe found a matchbox and finally lit his pipe tobacco.

“Can we assume that, Colonel Sharpe?” asked Copperwaite, using Sharpe's military salutation for the men all round to hear.

“Will you stop calling me 'Colonel.' Makes me out to be an old fart in front of the chaps.”

“Sure, Sharpie, sorry.”

“Not so sorry as that bridgeman when I get my hooks into him.” Sharpe stormed off to climb the spiraling ladder that would take him to the only so-called eyewitness left to deal with. He snatched his now-lit pipe from his mouth and shouted from the third rung of the ladder, “Stuart, see what you can do to locate that bloody American tourist. We must question him.” He silently cursed the bobbie beside Stuart for having allowed the tourist to continue on his merry way. Then he concentrated on what remained of the ladder, grateful that he had worked out at the gym the day before.

FBI Headquarters, Quantico, Virginia Two days later

Dr. Jessica Coran, FBI forensic pathologist for the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Virginia, paced her office, staring at the crime-scene photos of a particularly gruesome murder in which a man had been literally torn to death by rabid dogs. Police in New Jersey believed that the man was a murder victim, that the dogs had been the weapon. She and her team awaited shipment of the body, a man with full-body tattoos but not a trace of identification, having been stripped of wallet and clothing after the attack. The victim had no pockets, as the street cops would say.

Jessica, her hazel eyes dancing with the soft office light, had loosened her auburn hair to let it flow. She now studied the photos of the dead man, holding them up to the light when her phone beeped. Her secretary's voice followed. “Dr. Coran, I have a call that you really must-”

“I left word I wasn't to be disturbed, Gloria!” Jessica firmly replied. “I need a couple of hours.”

“But… but this is a call from New Scotland Yard, an Inspector Sharpe, something to do with a… a crucifixion murder over there?”

“A crucifixion murder?” Jessica flashed on a newspaper account of a body discovered in some park in England, a woman whose body had shown the unmistakable signs of having been literally crucified. She realized the call must have something to do with that. “All right, put it through,” she relented.

Inspector Richard Sharpe introduced himself, asking if she might inform him what she knew of murder by crucifixion. “We're still waiting on a final autopsy protocol on the murder, and as yet the victim has not been identified, you see.”

Jessica loved the accented words, and his voice. “I see, and how might… What do you wish from me?”

“I am seeking your expertise and any information you can share on death by crucifixion.”

“Ahhh, I see, now it's come to this, Dial-an-Autopsy.”

“I've read that you are an extraordinary medical examiner. I'm fishing, as you Yanks would say. At this point all we know is that the woman died of her wounds, sustained from what appears a ritualistic killing.”

“Then you are already wrong.”

“Pardon? But that much is obvious,” railed Sharpe. Jessica Coran countered, saying, “If she hung from a cross for any length of time, and from the sound of her wounds- I've heard talk over the Internet about the case and the gaps where gravity did its work around the spikes-then I must assume she died of asphyxiation, not her crucifixion wounds.”

Sharpe, taken so much aback that he now fumbled for words, finally replied, “Asphyxia? How do you bloody get that from her wounds?”

“Any postmortem man worth his salt will tell you that crucifixion means great stress placed on the breathing apparatus.”

“Breathing apparatus?”

Jessica allowed a short, annoyed breath to escape into the receiver. “It has to do with the weight placed against the lungs until the victim can no longer support the effort it takes to breathe.”

“Is that so? I never knew it.”

“It has to do with the arms having been extended over the head for so long a period, and gravity's downward pull on the body, until the chest literally crushes in on its own vital organs.”

“My God, then it's worse still than we've believed.”

“You know how the infamous Elephant Man died when they found him in bed, unable any longer to support the weight of his own enormous head? He could not lift the weight from his chest as he slept, so he died of asphyxiation.”

“Yes, of course every schoolchild in London knows the story.”

“Then imagine crucifixion as infinitely worse and infinitely slower in killing the victim.”

“And the killer… Whoever did this to her? You suppose he knows precisely… how she… that is, what killed her… How much distress she must have experienced?”

“I should think he knows all there is to know about crucifixion. Why else choose such an unusual and torturous method of disposing of your Jane Doe?”

“Out of some sense of outrage, perhaps? Perhaps she cheated on him with… a priest?”

“Yes, well there is that possibility. There are all manner of possibilities.”

“Would you, Dr. Coran, be interested in consulting on the case?”

“Absolutely. Anything I can do, don't hesitate. I'll give you my E-mail address. Obviously you have my phone number.”

“That would be superb, and look for me to contact you again soon. Thank you, Dr. Coran, for the information. I've already gleaned more from you than our own death investigator here.”

“Karl Schuller,” she said.

“You know Dr. Schuller?”

“Only by reputation.”

“Aye, he has that.”

Jessica sensed a touch of sarcasm in the inspector's final remarks. She hung up, giving thought to New Scotland Yard's strange case of the crucified woman. However, she had a lab full of problems and issues this side of the Atlantic to deal with, and she promptly returned to them.

London underground Same day

Through the crucifixion and the resurrection, he and the collective would come to find Christ on His return in the year 2001 during the true millennium, which hovered over all of life, time, and space now. Poised now, the coming end of life on Earth as mankind had come to know it, accept it, and to generally assume it.

The crucifixion lived vividly in their collective mind. They were all of one mind now and forever. This pleased the mind they shared, and it pleased him, their leader.

They found-and rightly so-that even with failed resurrections, after each new crucifixion, they had grown in strength, resolve, and a sense of power and well-being, and so the collective marched onward as if to war in the battle as Christ's good and stalwart soldiers, shoulder to shoulder, hand to hand, will to will.

“In the name of the Father,” they chanted their mantra, “and in the name of the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

They longed to complete what they'd begun, realizing that all must step cautiously; but when the time came, all would be revealed to everyone, indeed to the world.

After all, the true millennium cometh… The year 2001 loomed before all of mankind, and with it the Second Coming as prophesied by the Bible itself and by God Himself. Soon they would be among Them-Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. For He and His Son would return to smite the insidious evil of the species.

The collective meant to be part of the glorious Second Coming. They had been told-a whisper from God and His legion of saints-to do His bidding. They need only to find the Chosen One, see to His crucifixion, and watch for the dead to rise. Again the Kingdom of Heaven would be proved to be the mightiest of all powers in the universe, and thus the blood of the world would fuse into a single, great ocean from which new life would come-reborn, rejuvenated, revitalized, all sin at ground zero. It meant the Rapture and the end of the world as mankind knew it. But first they must find Him, the Son of God, in whatever guise He chose. Of one thing the collective mind was certain, that however He came-whether it be in the form of a woman, a man, or a child-He would make Himself known to the Chosen few who worshipped Him as none other on Earth had ever worshipped Him before. He would show Himself by once again ascending the cross and rising again in a glorious new resurrection.

God had told their leader so, and their leader exuded purity, piety, honesty, accuracy, correctness, and absolute power- so much so that he could not be questioned in his motives. Nor could he ever be denied, nor ever be accused of wrongdoing or unjust or unholy thoughts.

His thoughts, channeled as they were from God the Father, could not be denied. His thoughts were pure, his motive was to combat evil as he found it, where he found it.

This life stood for something. This man lived the exemplary life of pure goodness.

The fact that the first choice for crucifixion hadn't resulted in resurrection did not deter either him or his followers. They together stood in the shadow of God, and God made it clear that, while they could not fully comprehend or fathom His plan, a plan for Katherine O'Donahue and a plan for them all did indeed exist. He promised that Katherine's sacrifice must lead to more such sacrifices until the purest of heart stepped forward to accept the cross as reward and redemption for all mankind.

Their leader reminded them that what they'd done to Katherine O'Donahue was preordained, that despite the fact that her resurrection hadn't come about, they had succeeded in following the wishes and whispers of the Supreme Being. Katherine remained part of a larger plan. They were told they mustn't for a moment think that they worked for God out of primordial fear but rather from a timeless, ageless, and untainted faith.