The Turin Shroud Secret

by Sam Christer

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

It is the most controversial religious icon in the world.

No one knows where it came from.

No one knows when it was made.

But now, the greatest mystery in religious history holds the key to a present-day serial killer who devises savage, bizarre deaths for his victims.

And only two American cops, following a trail that stretches from California to the Vatican, can expose the secret of the Shroud.

Release date: February 2, 2012

Publisher: Sphere

Print pages: 417

Sample

WEDNESDAY EVENING BEVERLY HILLS, LOS ANGELES

There are many reasons why he kills. Why, right at this moment, he is about to kill again.

It is a need. A craving. An aching, gnawing compulsion. Like sex. When he’s not doing it, he’s thinking about it. Fantasising.
Planning. Rehearsing. Killing to him is as necessary and inevitable as drawing breath. Only more pleasurable. Memorable.


This one is going to be easy. Perfect. The best yet. The unkilled always are. That’s what he calls them. Not the living. Not
the next victim.


The unkilled.

A quiet neighbourhood. A woman living alone. One not even aware that while she busied herself in that pretty rear garden he
slipped into her life and home.


He’s been lying in wait for hours, unnoticed like a dog in a favourite hiding place, his ears twitching as he follows her sounds around the darkening house, his furtive mind imagining her every movement.


There’s a thin clattering noise – she’s tidying up after her dinner for one.

A soft thump – shutting the dishwasher.


Tumbling clunks. Ice from the dispenser on the tall fridge by the kitchen door. A glass of water to take to bed.


Click, click, click. Turning out the lights. Closing doors.


Bump, bump. Bump, bump. Footsteps. Coming upstairs. Heavy footed. Desperate to lie down on her big soft bed and sleep.


A soft click. A bedside lamp warms the big bedroom with a buttercup glow.


Running water. A shower. Nice and hot. A warm soak to make her clean for bed.

Fresh for death.

He waits. Counts off the seconds and minutes. Seven hundred and twenty seconds. Twelve long minutes. Now the whirr of a hairdryer.
Best not to go to sleep with wet hair. Most unhealthy. The television mutters. Music. A film. News. She’s zapping. Searching
for something to distract her from the rigours of the day. The Tonight Show. Conan. House.

Click. The crackle of static on the plasma screen.


Silence.

A final click. The lamp.


Darkness.

He lies there. Beneath the bed. Savouring the floating echo of the last sounds – like a sliver of communion wafer dissolving on the tongue.


Soon he hears the whisper of her breathing, faint sighs rising like soft light breaking the dawn sky. Sleep is gently preparing
her for God and for him. He rolls out from his shelter. Slow. Graceful. Careful. A deadly animal emerging from cover. Exposed
in the wild. Closing on its prey. Tingling with anticipation.


He puts one hand around her throat and places the other across her mouth. Her eyes flash open with shock. He smiles down at
her and whispers, ‘Dominus vobiscum – the Lord be with you.’


THURSDAY MORNING MANHATTAN BEACH, LOS ANGELES

It’s November but still ninety out on the dunes. California does that sometimes. A golden fall to make up for a poor summer.
Thirty-year-old homicide detective Nic Karakandez makes a visor out of his right hand and strains his blue-grey eyes at the
sparkling diamond swirl of the Pacific. Dressed in faded blue jeans and a black leather bomber jacket, the big cop stands
out on top of the sands.


He’s staring hard and seeing more than anyone else. Certainly more than the sand-crusted stiff that the ME and CSIs are bent over. Way more than the bobbing heads of swimmers
gawping from the waves.


Nic sees the future.

A month from now to be precise. His boat heading out to sea, wind billowing in the sails, a reel or two hanging over the back
and a time when jobs like this sorry floater are nothing but distant memories.


‘Nic! Get your ass down here.’


There’s only one woman in the world who speaks to him like that. He drops his hand and squints at his colleague and boss,
Lieutenant Mitzi Fallon. ‘I’m coming – give me a chance.’


The thirty-nine-year-old mom of two is twenty yards ahead of him, down a dip in the soft Californian sand. ‘Hey Big Foot –
are you the fast-moving murder police I taught you to be or have I got you mixed up with some pale-throated sloth?’


He can’t help but laugh. ‘I’m the fast-moving murder police, ma’am. What exactly is a sloth?’

‘Short-necked, fat-assed mammal. Sixty million years old and spends most of its time sleeping.’

‘I wish.’

Mitzi’s been breaking his balls since his first day in the department more than five years ago. He pads alongside her as they
head towards the fluttering tape ten yards from the ocean’s edge. Pretty soon the crime scene will be gone. Washed away by
Lady Tide, that ancient accomplice to so many murders.


They badge the uniforms guarding the area, slip on shoe covers and join the ME, Amy Chang, a second-generation Chinese medic
with a brain as big as the state deficit.


‘Afternoon, doc,’ breezes Mitzi. ‘Any chance your poor lady there died of natural causes? I gotta be at a soccer game tonight.’

The pathologist doesn’t look up. She knows them both well. Too well. ‘Not a chance. Not unless it’s considered normal to go swimming fully dressed after you’ve just had two teeth pulled
out, an eye removed and your throat slit.’


‘Man, that’s some careless dentist.’ Nic leans over the body.

‘Obama’s got a lot to answer for,’ adds Mitzi. ‘He never should have messed with the health care.’

‘He got Bin Laden, though – that gives him a Get Out of Jail Card as far as I’m concerned.’

Amy looks up and shakes her head in mock disgust. ‘You two jokers got a single ounce of respect for what’s going on here?’

Nic catches her eye. There’s a spark between them. Small but it’s there. He blows it out before she can even blink. ‘Tons,’
he says. ‘We just hide it well. Black humour is the only way we know to protect our fragile constitutions.’


Amy stares him down. ‘Sick minds are more like it.’


The lieutenant rounds a CSI sifting sand for anything that might have come off the body and got buried or trodden on. She
circles the corpse, staring at it from different angles, like it’s a piece of modern art that doesn’t yet make sense. ‘Any
ID on her?’


‘None,’ says Amy. ‘Surely you knew you weren’t going to get that lucky?’


‘Just hoping.’ She circles again. Slower this time, stooping to study the vic’s hands and feet. ‘Any idea how long she’d been
in the water?’


Amy looks up again. ‘C’mon, Mitzi, I need to check body temperature and tides – you’re way too early to get a polite answer.’

Amy forces a thermometer through the eye socket into the brain. It will give her a window of about three hours on the time
of death. She glances up at the pull and push of the waves beside her. Once she’s consulted a tidal expert, she’ll have a
good idea of where and when the vic met her end. She notes the body temperature then uses scissors to cut off the fingernails
and bags the clippings.


Mitzi is still hanging over her and she feels obliged to give the cop something. ‘We’re talking hours in the water, less than
a day. That’s all you’re getting for the moment.’ She straightens up, brushes off sand and beckons two orderlies who’ve been
waiting with a marine body bag, the type that lets water out but keeps any evidence in. ‘Okay, parcel her up.’


‘What kinda freak could have done this?’ Nic’s eyes are scanning the raw, mutilated flesh.

‘No mystery there.’ Amy pulls off purple rubber gloves and snaps her metal case shut. ‘Some bad son-of-a-bitch kind of freak
– you know, the type that’s done it before and will soon be doing it all over again.’


MIDDAY DOWNTOWN, LOS ANGELES

The food corner in the mall is a free-for-all. Shoppers and office workers jostle like cattle at feeding troughs. Stressed-out
servers bark orders in the soupy air and pound labelled till keys.


An olive-skinned young man in his mid-twenties with dark hair and even darker eyes waits patiently in the thick of it all.
An island of calm caught in a raging river of inhuman rudeness. Indifferently, he waits his turn, then pays for miso soup,
a box of sushi and black coffee. It’s a diet that renders him more slim than muscular – lean, if you want to be kind in your
description – too small and skinny for women who like big broad-shouldered guys to hang on to. It’s also landed him with the
nickname ‘Fish Face’ at the factory where he works.


‘Let me help you.’ He moves quickly to clear chairs and tables so an old man can push his wife’s wheelchair through the dining
jungle and lay their food tray at a free table.


‘Very kind of you.’ The senior nods a thank you as they settle.

‘No problem, you’re welcome.’ He takes his lunch to a table a few yards away. He smiles at the couple as he mixes fiery wasabi paste with soy sauce, stirs it with chopsticks and dips a tuna roll, then turns his attention to the tide of
people flowing past. They fascinate him. All of them. No exceptions.


A teacher leads a crocodile of foreign schoolchildren, Chinese he thinks, in a two-by-two line, little cherubs all holding
each other’s hands. All wearing the same orange tops and caps and looking like dolls fresh off a production line. He remembers
seeing a poster somewhere proclaiming that there are five times as many people in China learning to speak English as there
are people in England. The world is changing. So is he. He can feel it. Sense it.


His eyes swing to a mature blonde in a business suit scrambling for a ringing cell phone in her small black leather bag. A
cougar past her prime. Smart clothes and a good diet can’t hide what age and the Californian weather do to your hair and skin.
She finds the iPhone in the nick of time but doesn’t look pleased. Not a call from her husband or lover, he guesses. More
likely a wail of despair from a colleague – a cry for help from the workplace she’s just left behind.


The young man smiles as she passes him. There’s something familiar in her eyes. He snaps his fingers as he realises what it
is. She reminds him of the woman he was with last night.


The one he murdered.

MANHATTAN BEACH, LOS ANGELES

The ME’s heavy morgue wagon, a white Dodge van with shaded windows, ploughs ruts in the litter-free sand as it disappears
with its sad cargo. Crowds of rubbernecking bathers return zombie-like to towels and loungers as though nothing had happened.
Life goes on – even after death.


Nic Karakandez steps out of the taped-off crime scene and walks the amphibious tightrope between sand and sea, the line where
the dark water washes onto the white sand then mysteriously vaporises in a fizz of outgoing wave. A north-easterly wind is
kicking up as he looks to the glittering horizon.


He’s done with being a murder police.

Done with being any kind of police for that matter. His notice is in. The well-muscled six-footer made the decision years
back, following an incident he doesn’t talk about – the kind that would make most good cops quit. Since then he’s been treading
water, going through the motions, marking time until he got enough money together, nailed down his skipper’s licence and finished
the repairs on his little sloop. Thirty days from now he’ll be sailing into the sunset to start a whole new life.


Mitzi looks back towards the disappearing tape and the uniforms she’s just briefed to start canvassing the gawping zombies. ‘How d’you think Mr Freak dumped her? I mean, I didn’t see any tyre marks back there and the sand’s as soft as my
gut.’


Nic points east to a band of black running from the coast road across the beach and out to a squat building some way off in
the sea. ‘Over there’s the Roundhouse. I guess he drove down the pier as far as he could then popped his trunk and simply
slid her body over the side.’


‘I can see how that would work. From the looks of her, she didn’t weigh more than eighty pounds. It’d be an easy drop.’ Mitzi
gazes out towards the end of the pier with its marine lab and aquarium, a big draw for the rich locals and their kids. Not
hers, though. Her twin daughters are allergic to anything academic. They’d rather chase a soccer ball, play video games or
bait the boys next door.


As she and Nic trudge towards the jetty, Mitzi gets a mental flash of the dead woman. ‘You notice our Jane Doe was still wearing
jewellery?’ She twists the tiny wedding ring that’s been on her finger for close to two decades and waggles it for Nic to
see. ‘She was carrying a rock big enough for boy scouts to camp on.’


‘Certainly wasn’t a robbery,’ observes Nic. ‘Given the brutality of the other injuries, our perp wouldn’t hesitate to cut
off her finger if he wanted that sparkler.’


‘So what then? A kidnapping gone wrong?’

‘Maybe, but I would have expected a ransom demand. Even if the husband – presuming there still is one – had been frightened
into keeping us out of it.’


Mitzi thinks back to the corpse. ‘Yeah, it doesn’t follow. Kidnappers stiff their victim when the money talks are over, not
before. By then the family’s jumpier than Mexican beans and always come running to us. So if it was an abduction, we’d have
heard something.’


As they climb the last stretch of beach to the pier Nic’s thinking the kill bears the mark of a professional – albeit a crazy
one. ‘Last time I saw anything like this, it was Italians out in the valley,’ he says. ‘They cut up one of their own after
he crossed them. Revenge, pure and simple.’


Mitzi frowns. ‘You think she was mixing with organised crime?’

‘Could be. Imagine, for a minute, that she’s a mob wife and her old man finds out she’s cheating on him.’ He puts out his
hand and pulls Mitzi up. ‘At first she refuses to name the guy banging her, then, finally when she gives it up, said lothario
turns out to be hubby’s brother or best friend. Boom.’ Nic slaps his hand. ‘The boss gets all emotional. He feels he has no
choice but to have someone mess her up and finish her off.’


‘You’ve got one sick imagination.’

‘It’s how you taught me.’ He looks beyond her, down the wide pier leading to the red-tiled angular building at the end. A
four-bar metal rail runs either side, out over the water. It comes up to his chest. He was right. Drive a car out here, it’d
be easy enough to tip a body over the side.


Mitzi drops into a squat. ‘Lots of tyre treads down here.’ She sweeps an indicative hand over the area just in front of her. ‘And, thank you God, a nice layer of sand that’s printed just about everything that’s recently come and gone.’


‘I’ll get uniforms to tape off the pier and have CSI do the treads.’ He pulls a cell phone and sits up on the rail while he
makes the call.


Mitzi takes out the small camera she always carries and snaps off some shots. Sometimes the techies turn up too late and the
evidence has gone. Better safe than sorry.


Ten minutes later a red-faced, overweight cop in a sweat-stained uniform arrives with a young crime scene photographer. While
Mitzi briefs them, Nic wanders a few yards away to watch the surf breaking around the legs of the pier. There are pictures
in the bubbling white froth. Abstract images, open to interpretation. Some people see galloping horses or Vikings or sea gods.


Nic sees the wife and baby son he lost.

They’re lying in a sea of their own blood. Eyes rolled back like rancid scallops.

And every time he sees them – when their unexpected appearance breaks his heart – he does nothing to block them out, nothing
to divert the blame from himself.


Carolina had wanted him to leave the apartment and push the pram a while. Max was crying and a stroll around the block always
seemed to settle him. But Nic got stuck on the phone – a work call on his day off. She’d grown bored waiting and finally gone
without him. Two blocks later she stopped at a grocery store. Had Nic been there it would have been different. He’d have known
right away what was going down – the crackhead robbing the register, jittery and paranoid, a human timebomb bound to explode; the dope of a store
owner playing hero by grabbing a gun taped beneath the counter and the shoppers panicking and screaming, ratcheting up the
mayhem.


It had been Armageddon.

After the weapon came up from behind the counter, the junkie slaughtered everyone. Then he just stood there in a daze. He
was still staring at the carnage when the cops came. One lowlife’s moment of madness ended a dozen good people’s lives and
created a lifetime of misery for their families.


‘If this was the killer’s drop spot, he’s not a local.’ Mitzi is pacing again.

‘What?’ Nic’s thoughts are still three years back.

‘The ocean.’ She points over the rail to get his attention. ‘The water here is too shallow. The perp probably thought it was deeper. When
he dumped her over the side, he must have believed the body would be gone for ever.’


‘The tide might have been in,’ says Nic, his brain and body finally reunited in the same time zone. ‘Or else the guy didn’t
care. Could be he was only bothered about her being hidden long enough for him to skip town.’


‘You’re good,’ she says with a smile that hints at why ten years ago every cop in the precinct made time to walk by her desk.
‘I’m going to miss you when you’re working as a crabber on Deadliest Catch.’

He laughs. ‘Does the Discovery Channel have any other shows than that damned thing?’

‘Not worth watching.’


They walk single file down the edge of the pier, close to the rails, so as not to disturb any more tyre tracks. He makes a
slow circuit of the aquarium and marine lab, shielding his eyes and looking skyward. Eventually he finds what he’s looking
for.


‘Surf cams.’ He points out two small cameras at the tip of long poles. ‘You can watch shots from these things online in real
time.’


‘Kill me before my life becomes so boring that I would even think about doing that.’

‘Each to their own, Mitz.’ He points to another steel pole, one topped with a security camera. ‘Now this is more your taste.’
He palm-gestures like a teleshopping host showing off some pile of crap that can only be bought in the next ten minutes. ‘A
channel exclusively available to good-looking and talented LAPD cops, featuring – hopefully – all the once-in-a-lifetime footage of Big Rock Lady’s killer.’


LATE AFTERNOON

Amy Chang suits up, snaps on latex gloves and enters the newly equipped morgue. It’s a cold vault of stainless steel, illuminated
by pools of limpid green and blue lights. Steel body-fridges, sinks, carts, tables and tools crowd the central autopsy table with its inelegant taps and cruel draining holes,
portals for the last of the deceased’s blood and body fluids. There’s far too much dull and deathly metal for Amy’s liking.
Another world away from the thirty-two-year-old’s elegant bachelorette home, steel-free except for the knives in the pretty
picture-window kitchen overlooking a small but well-ordered garden.


Less than a week old, the morgue already smells of Deodorx and Path Cloud cleansers. Amy looks sympathetically at the flesh
and bones laid out on the slab. To her, the remains are still a person, a desperate woman in need of her expert help. ‘So
who are you then? What can you tell me, honey? What secrets do you have for us?’


Even at first glance it’s obvious the victim suffered excruciating pain before she finally died. The injuries are all pre-mortem.
Lips are split, teeth are missing and then there’s the awful cavity where her left eye should be – a terrible testament to
the level of torture she endured.


She clears space so she can work. Adjusts the ceiling-mounted dissecting light with its dual beams and slips on a tiny, head-mounted
video camera for the close-ups. She wants to capture everything she says and sees during the examination.


‘The victim is a well-nourished woman in her late forties or early fifties. She has extensive pre-mortem injuries to her face
including the loss of her left eye and two upper middle teeth. There is evidence of recent plastic surgery, nip and tuck scars still healing around the ears and neck.’ Her voice grows more sombre as she realises how the deceased must
have hoped a more benign encounter with a blade would keep her looking younger and more desirable. ‘Less cosmetic are the
injuries to the left and right cheeks – these are consistent with a series of blows, probably from front- and back-handed
slaps. She’s suffered powerful blunt trauma to the left cheek, possibly from a fist. It’s split open and the flesh exposed
to the bone.’ Amy moves down to the neck. ‘The deceased has bled out through a horizontal three-inch wound that severed the
vessels in the carotid sheath. A fatal cut. She’d have died from an air embolus even if she’d survived the wound.’ Amy can’t
help but notice its precision. No hesitant stab. Just a confident and ruthless action.


She picks up the deceased’s manicured hands. It’s not the first time she’s touched them. Back on the beach she clipped the
nails for trace evidence and toxicology and then had fingerprints taken. ‘No signs of major defence wounds but there are marks
around the wrists, indicating she may have been tied up.’ Amy uses tape to lift what she’s sure are small fragments of rope
twist from the grey skin. She stands back a little and surveys the whole torso, paying particular attention to the feet, knees,
elbows and hands. ‘No friction or abrasion marks on normal surface contact points. No indications of the body being dragged
across any kind of surface.’


Next she examines the empty, red, raw eye socket. The killer used something to lever out the victim’s eyeball.

What?

There are no gouge marks inside the cavity to indicate where any metal might have been forced in. She realises what has happened.
He used his fingers. The attacker pushed his thumb into her eye socket and forced it out. He then cut through the exposed
muscle and nerve attachments. It takes a special kind of monster to do something like that. She grimaces – something Amy Chang
seldom does. In the corner of the woman’s thin purple lips are abrasion marks, tell-tale signs that a tight gag stifled her
screams.


A phone on the wall rings and flashes – then trips to the message service. Amy moves on. She considers the missing teeth.
These probably had been extracted prior to the eye damage. She looks again into the woman’s mouth. There are marks on her
back teeth and upper pallet. Something was jammed in there to keep her jaws open while the guy went about his work. Amy angles
the deceased’s head back and swings down the overhead light. She uses tweezers to extract small traces of white plastic from
the inside of the upper and lower back molars. Unless she’s mistaken the killer forced a golf ball in there to be able to
get at the front teeth.


Amy’s seen a lot of nasty stuff on her table but her tummy turns every time she sees something like this. Something she recognises
as the unique work of the worst kind of predator in the world – the serial killer.


LATE EVENING CARSON, LOS ANGELES


The dark-haired man with thick eyebrows and olive-coloured skin makes sure he’s locked the front and back doors and secured
the windows. Burglary is not something he wants to fall victim to – the irony would be unbearable.


He walks through to the Spartan kitchen and opens an old larder fridge that only ever contains three things: UHT milk – the
type that lasts six to nine months – a box of eggs and a tub of low-fat spread. If he’s really hungry, he’ll use everything
and make omelettes. Otherwise, like tonight, he just drinks milk. Fish and soup for lunch, milk and eggs for dinner. That’s
his entire diet.


He feels somewhat strange as he moves through the house drinking straight from the carton. Edgy. Off balance. Nervous. Not
that any of that surprises him. The day after is always like this – contradictory and confusing. It’s a period of anxiety
and elation.


The mood swings used to throw him but not any more. He’s experienced now – understands that with every kill comes an aftershock.
Like the physical recoil of a firearm. The bruising kick of a rifle against a shoulder muscle. Take a life and your psychological
muscles take a pounding. The purple bruise of guilt surfaces first, then the yellow fear of capture and finally the ruddy red flush of conquest.


He’s spent the day like he normally does, holding down a job that’s beneath him, working for people who don’t appreciate or
understand him. Not that anyone does. Still, routine is important. A change of habit attracts attention if the police go nosing
around. Besides, he’s learned that right after a kill it’s good to be with people, to stay in the stream of mindless fish
flowing to and from homes and jobs. He likes the distraction, the filling of time. And he appreciates the camouflage of commonality,
the necessary disguise that dreary everyday life gives him.


But now it’s the night time. And the night is different. He feels different. Is different. It is a time of energy and power.
A time when kills can be savoured. Darkness brings with it a justification, a validation of what he does and who he is. Throughout
the day he longs for the dipping sun and the rising of the raw energy within him.


The rented house where he lives is plunged in blackness. It always is. The thick curtains are forever drawn. There are no
bulbs in any of the light sockets. No electricity or gas. Instead, he uses an open fire for both warmth and what little cooking
he does.


Pale light flickers from candles in his bedroom, as he strips naked and prepares for sleep. There is no bed. No quilt. No
pillow. In the corner of the room are the few things he treasures. He opens up the folded handkerchief and removes the sacred
wafer of honed steel and crosses his chest with it, then he criss-crosses the tops of his thighs and arms. Before the blood can really show, he wipes the blade. He kisses it and holds
it aloft, like a priest showing the blessed host to his congregation. As his chest fills with red, he returns it to the handkerchief
and refolds it in precise squares.


Flat out on his back, he presses his feet against one skirting board, his left shoulder and arm square to the other. Carefully,
he tucks a single bed sheet under his heels and wraps it tight around himself until he’s completely covered from the head
to toe.


Snug. Tight. Secure.

Like he’s wrapped in a shroud.

FRIDAY MORNING 77TH STREET STATION, LOS ANGELES

The squad room stinks of late-night burritos and looks like a summer-long frat party’s just finshished. Mitzi Fallon’s government-issue
metal desk is an OCD island in the endless sea of male debris.


‘More coffee.’ Nic puts down the lieutenant’s ‘World’s Best Mom’ mug, bought for her two Mother’s Days ago by her twins. ‘What’s
with the hand?’ He nods to the strapping around two fingers.


‘Fat oaf of a husband fell on me when we were fooling around.’ She tries to wriggle it. ‘Celibacy might be a good idea after
all.’


‘Too much detail.’

She manoeuvres the mug to her lips. ‘This has to be my last caffeine of the morning, don’t let me have any more.’ Her eyes
swing back to the surveillance footage running on a flatscreen monitor at thirty-two times normal speed.


‘You seen anything yet?’ he asks.

‘Yeah, my will to live – it went psycho and thr. . .