Page 7 of Go Under

He was elderly, with thin white hair, pasty, liver-spotted skin, and the Pillsbury Dough-Boy fat that men seemed to accumulate as they transitioned from middle age to true age. He wore a loose-fitting t-shirt, sweatpants, and a stained apron that hung below his sternum. His accusing eyes would have been a striking green in life, especially as a younger man. They were now a rather dull color the shade of agave leaves.

His mouth was sewn shut with a thin, brown thread that gleamed a little in the light of the overhead ceiling fan. Kate pulled on a glove and rubbed the edge of the suture in between her thumb and index finger. It felt waxy.

“Gerald Mace,” Darnell said. “Seventy-one. Former court clerk. Retired thirty years ago and lived off of his savings.”

“Did you say thirty years ago?” Marcus asked.

“Yes. His most recent employment record was for 1997.”

“Damn. He wins the lotto or something?”

“We haven’t gone through his financial records yet,” Darnell said. “Do you think they’re important?”

“Probably not,” Kate said, stepping around the body and the blood. “But the timing is. The ninth commandment is ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness.’ I want to find out what happened thirty years ago that made Gerald decide to retire.”

“We’ll look into that,” Darnell agreed.

Kate regarded the cipher on the table. Cuneiform, Akkadian, not Sumerian. Sumerian cuneiform was comparatively simple, each logogram representing a single word. Akkadian was a root-and-pattern language that used triconsonantal roots modified by internal vowel changes and prefixes. While the language borrowed cuneiform script from Sumerian, its writing was far more complex and varied.

This was definitely a commandment killer.

She couldn’t be sure it was Cox, though.

“What do you think?” Marcus asked.

She took a deep breath. “It’s definitely Cox or one of his disciples. The writing style is different from what we’ve seen of Cox before. See how the cuts are deeper at the end of each stroke?”

“I’ll take your word for it,” he said. “I honestly can’t tell where the letters end and begin.”

“Well, what it looks like is the killer was angry. It appears rushed, but not because of fear. If that was the case, the cuts would be shallow and the symbols incomplete. This is more like the killer was forcefully applying each symbol.”

“Would I be an asshole if I said stabbing a guy to death in his own home and sewing his mouth shut was evidence enough of anger?”

“No,” Kate said. “I’m only saying…” She took a deep breath. “I don’t think this is Cox. I think this is one of his disciples. Cox is always careful and precise when he leaves a cipher. His ‘handwriting’ is excellent, if that makes sense.”

“Counterpoint,” Marcus said. “He’s slipping. His behavior last time showed that he’s losing his grip on his sanity. He might not be as well put-together as he was early in his career.”

“That’s fair,” Kate said, “and it’s the only reason I’m not completely certain it’s not him.”

“Counterpoint two: what if it’s another copycat like Rosalyn Pierce in Pittsburgh?”

Rosalyn Pierce was a woman who had murdered her husband after catching him cheating. She’d scrawled thou shalt not commit adultery in his blood on the wall of their kitchen.

Kate shook her head. “No, Rosalyn’s case was clearly a crime of passion. She stabbed her husband with a kitchen knife thirteen times, then wrote a single commandment on the wall with her fingers. She wrote said commandment in plain English with no other cipher. She took no steps to hide the evidence or conceal her guilt. She might have thrown the commandment up because of Cox, but it wasn’t a premeditated mission on the Lawgiver’s behalf.”

She reached down and carefully stretched apart the fabric of Gerald’s t-shirt, revealing a single stab wound to his heart. “This killer was precise. They stabbed him once in the heart, then waited for him to die.”

“He made it all the way to the kitchen table from the door after being stabbed in the heart?”

“Heart wounds don’t kill instantly,” Kate said. “This is a short house. His cell phone’s on the table. I’m thinking he was stabbed in the doorway and turned and ran to the table to call the police. He collapsed in front of the table, and the killer propped him up on this chair and sewed his mouth shut.”

“Damn,” Marcus said. “Poor guy.”

Kate chuckled wryly. “Yeah, you could say that.”

She took her gloves off and pulled her phone out to take pictures of the cipher and the body. As she did, Marcus grilled Darnell for information.

“Have we pulled security footage yet?”