Boy Crucified Read Free

immediately corrected.
    “I don’t get the connection, though,” Daniel said.
    Durmount chuckled. “Last year I did an autopsy on an eleven-year-old boy who had been playing baseball. He was the pitcher. Little league team. Threw the ball, batter sent it right back at him, the boy got hit in the chest—and keeled over dead.”
    “Just like that?” Daniel asked.
    Durmount nodded.
    “No shit! Why?” he asked.
    “Excellent question,” Durmount replied. “A blow to the chest like that, even a minor one, can interrupt the heartbeat. Then you got a ventricular fibrillation situation. Sometimes you’ve got a grace period to get it sorted out. Other times, you don’t. You just keel over dead and that’s that.”
    “And how does that relate to our case?” he asked.
    “Well, there’s more than one way to get the heartbeat out of whack. Excessive fear and stress can accomplish it because this can cause the sudden release of too much epinephrine in the body, which can cause VF. You ever hear of voodoo death?”
    Daniel made a face. He was interested in facts, not silliness.
    “There may be something to it,” Durmount said, “if you believe in it, if you believe that some witch doctor can kill you just by sprinkling chicken blood on the ground and all of that nonsense, you can get yourself so worked up, so full of fear, that your heartbeat gets out of whack and off you go. Some experts attribute voodoo death to no more than that.”
    “And your point?” Daniel asked.
    “Well, think about it. If you had been crucified, left to hang there out in the dark woods in the cold, if you were in horrible pain, maybe frightened about what was going to happen next, having already lost a lot of blood, well, you could have easily gotten yourself so worked up that your heartbeat got out of whack and it killed you. You could have had all kinds of epinephrine flooding your system.”
    “And that big Greek word means what, exactly?” Daniel asked.
    “Adrenaline,” Durmount said. “Epinephrine is like adrenaline. Too much can cause all kinds of trouble. Now can I do my job, or are you guys going to harass me with questions for the rest of the goddamn day?”
    “What about asphyxiation?” I asked.
    “You gonna harass me the rest of the day?”
    “I’m just curious.”
    “I found some increased CO 2 levels, but not enough to account for his death.”
    I asked because crucifixion normally led to death by asphyxiation. The victim got to the point where they simply couldn’t expel breaths any longer, leading to a build-up of CO 2 in the body.
    “Any idea about the time?” I asked.
    She shrugged noncommittally. “Friday night, maybe. I’ll have a better idea when I can do my job properly.”
    I could take a hint.
     
     
    IV
     
    I T was past 6:00 p.m. when we decided to call it a day. In the morning, the reports would be ready: the autopsy report, as well as the reports from the tech guys about the murder scene, the barbed wire and nails, the fingerprinting, and so on. A sketch artist would create a sketch of the victim to be broadcast on the evening news and in the morning newspapers, in the hopes that someone, somewhere could identify the deceased. With the sketch, we could also start digging through the missing persons reports.
    “What now?” Daniel asked.
    “We wait,” I said.
    I was just about ready to go back to what was left of my Sunday when the receptionist, Mary Beth, paged me over the intercom.
    “Lieutenant Noel, your mother’s here to see you.”
    My mother?
    I thought about the letter in my desk drawer and frowned. There were some sorts of trouble you could hide from, and some you could not, and this was apparently going to be the latter.
    “Mary Beth, do you remember what I told you a couple of weeks ago?”
    I had told her that if my mother ever showed up at the station, she was to be told that I was not in and that the restraining order I had against her was still valid. Of course, Mary Beth could