EXTRACT FOR
The Bronx Cross Murders
(Author Unknown)

Chapter 1

   

   In twenty-seven years on the NYPD, Stan Goldman had seen bodies shot, stabbed, battered, strangled, crushed, drowned, thrown off buildings and otherwise killed in any of a dozen other ways, but this was his first crucifixion.  In fact, as far as he knew, it was a first for the entire NYPD.

   When the call came in to the Major Crimes Unit around 2 AM, he had to ask the patrolman to repeat it three times to be sure he had heard right.  "A crucifixion? Like Jesus?"

   "Yeah, except it's a woman.  And she's naked," the disembodied voice replied.

   "You been drinking, Gonzalez?" he asked.

   "No, sir, Detective Goldman," the patrolman answered.  "How soon can you be here to see for yourself?"

   "We'll be there in ten," Stan said, hanging up the phone and turning to his partner, Richard Leary, who was looking at him oddly.  "Guess you heard, Dick, a crucifixion.  You ever hear of anything like that?"

   "Only in church," Dick replied, getting out of his chair a bit reluctantly.  "But I guess you wouldn't know about that, right Stan?"

   "I'll ask my rabbi, but I have a feeling I'm going to learn a lot more about crucifixion than I ever wanted to know."

   The crime scene was, as Stan had assured the patrolman, less than ten minutes from the station house, in an abandoned warehouse on the Bronx side of the Harlem River, near Yankee Stadium.  Despite the late hour, the heat of the day had barely diminished as Stan made his way towards the decaying brick structure across a lot littered with garbage and rubble.  

   Inside was a large, high-ceilinged open space, which had obviously been abandoned for many years.  Most of the windows had been broken and the floor was dotted with puddles left over from the brief storm that evening, which had done little to cool the air.

   Stan could see Gonzalez's flashlight illuminating the center of the space as he and Dick made their way towards him, treading carefully over the uneven dirt floor.  "See for yourself, guys," Gonzalez said, lifting his department-issued flashlight to reveal a solid wooden pole, about nine feet high, planted in the ground, with a crossbar towards the top, just like the crosses you could buy in any religious bookstore.

   But the cross wasn't the main thing that struck Stan.  No, that would be the naked woman attached to it by the large nails driven through each of her widespread wrists into the wood of the crossbar and the one driven through both of her feet into the upright.  "Jesus!" Dick muttered.

   "No, I don't think so," Stan replied, "Though I can see why you would say that."  For though it was clearly a woman, well-proportioned, blond, likely early 20s and probably nice looking at least before her ordeal, the pose was exactly that of Jesus on any crucifix that you could see in any Catholic church in the city.  

   Stan took out his cell phone.  "I better call the medical examiner's office.  This will make their day."

   "Shit, it'll make their year," Dick added.

   It wasn't long before a team arrived at the site, bringing floodlights that illuminated the scene, which looked even stranger in the full light.  After the woman and the cross had been photographed from every possible angle, they had a crew from the Transportation Department shovel out the base of the cross so they could lower it carefully to the ground and the technicians could remove the nails and examine the body.

   Stan gave them space to work.  Soon, the team leader, a middle aged Korean woman he knew fairly well from other crime scenes approached the detectives.  "She's been dead probably twelve hours or so, but how long she's been up there is hard to say right now.  From the blood around the nails and on her hands and feet, it's clear they nailed her alive.  There are serious wounds on her back.  She was whipped and not lightly before they put her up there.  Anything more will have to wait for a detailed examination in the lab.  Given the unusual nature of this, I suspect this will move to the head of the line.  I called Dr. Yang at home and he's coming down to the lab right away,"

   "Thanks, Jen," Stan told her.  "And I know this won't be easy, but let's try and keep a lid on this.  I'd like not to have to face the media until we know something.  I have a feeling this won't just be a local story, but will go national and all over the world before tomorrow is over." 

   "This is just what I fuckin' needed when I am leaving on vacation tomorrow," Dick said.

   "Don't worry, bro, you go and enjoy.  You need it and I can handle things here by myself," Stan reassured him, though how exactly he was going to do that wasn't at all clear to him right now.  What was clear is that this was likely to be the biggest case in his entire career and the pressure from the brass to solve it would be enormous.  And all he had wanted to do before tonight was quietly make it to the thirty-year mark and retire with a full pension.  That didn't look very likely right now with this case of a lifetime dropped in his lap.

   Stan guessed the first thing to do was to talk to Gonzalez.  He motioned the patrolman over.  "So how did you come upon this historical curiosity?" Stan asked him.

   "I was driving by and thought I heard sounds coming from here.  I don't think I would have heard anything except that the AC in my patrol car is useless, so I had the windows open.  I thought maybe it was copper thieves looking to see if there was anything left to strip.  Not much chance there is any left, given how long this pile of rubble has been vacant.  And when I came in, that was what greeted me." He waved in the direction of the corpse which now lay on a stretched, shrouded in white, being carried to a waiting ambulance to take it to the morgue.

   "So what made the sound?" Dick asked.  "It wasn't her."

   Gonzalez shook his head.  "Turned out it was coming from down by the river, some kids playing music.  They took off when they saw the lights of the cop car."

   "So you didn't see or hear anyone in here?" Stan asked him.

   "Nope. The only one here was her and she didn't make a sound."

   "OK, Gonzalez, you can take off.  I want to see a copy of your report as soon as you have it written."  Stan handed him a card with his email on it.

   "No problem, Detective.  You got any thoughts on this?"  He looked as bewildered as Stan felt.

   "Must be a sign from God that retirement can't come soon enough, Gonzalez.  That's about all I can come up with at the moment.  And I have a feeling that I may need all the help I can get to solve this case."

   



Chapter 2

   

   When he had rented this apartment, Stan hadn't considered that the large window in the bedroom faced east and caught the full strength of the morning sun in the summer.  Of course, a cop's salary didn't allow a wide choice of housing in the heavily inflated New York market where you were competing for space with bankers, media celebrities and international robber barons.

   By the time Stan got home, the sun was already poking above the horizon.  The slat blinds Stan had installed in the window let enough light through to make sleep difficult even without the image right smack there in the front of his brain of that naked girl nailed to the cross.  Who was she?  How did she get there?  It was Stan Goldman's job to answer those questions and he had no clue how he would do that.

   After a few hours spent tossing and turning, perhaps dozing for a few minutes here and there, Stan gave up the doomed attempt to sleep and dragged himself down to the kitchen to make a pot of strong coffee.  The caffeine set his neurons tingling as he waited for his sesame bagel to pop out of the toaster so he could garnish it with a schmear of cream cheese and a couple of slices of lox. 

   First priority was to ID the victim.  With that you could look at boyfriends, current and ex, friends and family, people she owed money to, people she had wronged or that thought she had wronged them.  Without that, you had bupkis.  Stan rummaged under last Sunday's mostly unread Times, which covered most of his kitchen table, and found his laptop.  He fired it up and entered the password that logged him into the Department's missing persons files.

   There were plenty of females around the age of the victim, none of whom really looked like her.  But of course, nothing said the victim was local.  He'd need to tap into FBI databases and probably Interpol as well, since a tourist or foreign student with no local ties to watch over them might be the perfect prey for whatever sick predator had done this.  And that he could only do from the station.

   So, Stan took a shower, letting the cool water wash the last of the exhaustion from his body, then dressed and descended the elevator to his car which was parked in the garage under the building.  The traffic was light this morning for some reason, and soon, he was pulling into the lot behind the station.

   As he draped his jacket over his chair, Stan glanced over at Dick's desk.  Nothing had been touched since last night.  Then he remembered.  Dick was probably on the Thruway heading up to his camp in the mountains for two weeks of fishing and tromping around in the woods.  Stan wondered if telling Dick he could handle things by himself had really been such a good idea. 

   Before he could settle into his chair, the phone rang.  "Goldman, Major Crimes," he barked into the receiver.

   "Stan, it's Charlie Yang.  Can you come down here?" The Morgue where the ME worked was fifteen minutes away.

   "Can't you tell me over the phone, Doc?"

   "No, it's better that you see for yourself."

   "OK, Doc, I'll be there ASAP," Stan replied, putting the phone down and sliding on the jacket he had just taken off two minutes ago.

   The ME's sanctum was in the basement of the hospital, kept cool year round to slow the decay of the bodies as they were worked on, unpleasant in winter, but a relief on a day like this that was already hot even before noon.  

   Dr. Charlie Yang was around 40, medium height, with the trace of an accent in his voice-not Chinese, but Flushing, where he had been born and raised.  Stan had worked with him on more cases than he could count and had tremendous respect for his competence and honesty.  If he said something, you could take it to the bank.

   The doctor ushered Stan to a table where two of his assistants, Harold, a tall black man and Tina, a petite Asian woman were bent over a body.  As they stood up to greet him, Stan saw it was the girl from the cross.  She looked awfully young and vulnerable stretched out there face up on the table, naked as she had been on the wooden structure.

   "We have a white female, obviously, young, probably around 20, not a virgin as you might guess." Yang smiled at Stan.  "Fingerprints don't show up in the FBI database, nor in the ICE database of recent arrivals.  So she's likely American with no arrest record."

   "Any semen?" Stan asked.

   "Not by the testing we've completed so far, but that doesn't mean they didn't rape her, because we don't know how long they held her.  But if they did, they stopped a few days before she was found." Stan nodded.

   "Time of death was some time yesterday afternoon or evening, maybe 12 hours or so before Officer Gonzalez found her.  Cause of death is asphyxiation," Yang said.

   "Asphyxiation?" Stan asked puzzled, "They choked her?"

   "No," Dr. Yang replied, "Asphyxiation is how death generally occurs from crucifixion.  The posture is such that the victim needs to push themselves up in order to breathe and that causes terrible pain from the nails in the feet.  Eventually they tire to the point where they can't do it anymore and they expire from lack of oxygen."

   Stan felt sick.  "Jesus, what an awful way to die."  Then, realizing his mistake, he apologized.

   "That's alright," Yang replied.  "I should say that I am hardly an expert.  Obviously I've never seen a crucifixion nor examined a victim, but there's a fair amount of material on the internet.  Some was research for that Mel Gibson movie about Jesus."

   "Shit, I never saw that one.  Never wanted to either, but maybe I should have a look now."

   "Well he was one of yours," Yang replied, smiling.  Stan laughed.  "Anyway, she was definitely alive when they nailed her up.  I assume she struggled as hard as she could, so it seems hard to imagine that one person could have held her down and driven the nails in at the same time.  If I had to guess, I'd say at least two people were involved and maybe more."

   That threw Stan for a loop.  Something this weird, your working assumption was a lone lunatic.  If there were more than one, that changed the whole course of the investigation.  A group meant a plan, perhaps some twisted purpose, maybe a drug gang sending a message to scare someone.  That girl on the cross certainly would accomplish that.  But who were they trying to scare?  Her boyfriend?  Her family?  He had nothing to go on except guesses right now.

   "Could she have been drugged and then nailed?" Stan asked.

   "That's possible," Dr. Yang replied.  "We got blood samples being screened, though if it happened several days ago, we may not find anything.  Still, my guess is there were more than one.  But you need to entertain both scenarios."

   "Can you estimate how long she was on the cross before she died?" Stan asked hopeful of getting some idea of when she might have been kidnapped, if that's what happened.

   Dr. Yang thought for a moment.  "It's hard to say, since I know so little about this.  From what I found on-line victims could live for up to a few days, depending on how strong they were.  And she was certainly young and healthy.  So, I really don't know for sure."

    "One more thing," Yang added.  He turned to his assistants, "Would you mind turning her over?" Harold grasped the dead girl under her arms and Tina grasped her feet.  On the count of three they flipped her onto her stomach.  Stan's eyes were immediately caught by the wounds on her back that he had seen last night.  They looked worse under the harsh light of the coroner's lab.

   "She was whipped, scourged if you want to use the term," Yang said.  "It's something the Romans did before crucifying someone.  There a horrible scene of them doing that to Jesus in the Gibson movie.  They even used whips with pieces of bone or stones to tear the flesh."  

   Stan felt sick.  "Why?"

   "I don't know.  As I told you, I'm not an expert on crucifixion," Yang replied.

   Stan glanced at the wounds on the girl's flesh.  "So they did that to her?" he asked.

   "I don't think the wounds are severe enough that they would have used a whip with bone chips.  More like a multi-tailed leather whip.  But it would have hurt plenty.  And there are enough wounds that they must have hit her at least twenty or thirty lashes."  Stan shuddered.  The monsters who had done this had first whipped this poor young girl then nailed her to a cross.

   "Geez," Stan said, "What a horrible way to die.  She must have suffered a lot."

   "That is beyond a doubt," the doctor replied.

   "I have to catch these creeps," Stan told him.  "If it's the last thing I do."  Stan was afraid it might be.