The Punisher

Chapter 1: The First

The skies were a uniform gray from horizon to horizon, and drizzled down in a fine mist too anemic to be called rain. It was, one might have pointed out if one had a poetic sensibility, the perfect day for discovering a body. Which a random jogger did.

Linda Montrose was taking her morning jog, as she did every morning, come rain or shine, and noticed a spot of color in the bushes alongside the trail – a dash of red against the faded greens and browns of the late summer shrubs. This being roughly the halfway point on her usual path, and a place where she normally stopped to rest a moment, she halted. Investigating that red area of the bushes where she had never noticed anything before would give her reason to catch her breath. But when she walked up to the bush, she realized that it was not flowers or berries, but a red substance splattered on the ground. It looked very much like dried blood. Looking around, she saw something light colored and barely visible against a tree trunk. Pushing the branches aside, she obtained a better look.

And then she screamed.

* * * * *

“What is it this time?” Lt. TJ Baker asked the sad-looking, short and heavy set man standing by the road side. The detective was walking from his parked car towards where the ambulance and other police cars were assembled. Their rotating lights were turning the early morning forest into a crazy quilt of reds and yellows and blues.

“Not pretty,” said Malcolm Carter, the local medical examiner. “Young woman, Caucasian, about twenty-one or two,” he added as he led the way around a bush. “Blonde, cute, with a nice figure. Or at least she did have a nice figure. Someone handcuffed her to a tree, then committed hairy-carry on her.”

At that point they came in sight of the aforementioned young lady. She was, indeed, handcuffed to a tree, her arms pulled behind her and the trunk and locked very tightly in steel handcuffs. Her legs were also spread wide with the ankles locked in a second pair handcuffs, also behind the trunk, the steel cuffs holding her in a kneeling position, back hard against the trunk. The head that was bowed down was blonde, and the long hair covered most of her medium sized, firm breasts. There was not a stitch of clothing on her, not even shoes. Below those breasts peeking out through the hair, the scene became gory. Someone had cut a wide slash across her abdomen, from hip to hip. The cut was not deep, but deep enough so that a great deal of blood had come out of it. Along with some of her intestines.

Baker forced himself into his police mode and examined the scene carefully. “Photos taken?” he asked.

“Yeah. All that’s needed is for you to give permission to let her down, the examiner said.

“I assume you won’t have much problem determining the cause of death,” Baker said in a half mumble to himself.

“Probably not, but we’ll have to do the autopsy anyway.”

“Of course.”

Keeping a stern mental detachment developed over years of taking in gruesome sights, he made a mental inventory of the scene. There was no sign of the murder weapon: no knife, sword or anything with a sharp enough edge to do that kind of damage. There were leaves fallen off the tree and scattered around. The leaves prevented footprints from showing. Nothing else was visible, just the naked woman and the silver colored handcuffs holding her to the tree.

Straightening up, he looked around. There was the dirt road that passed this point, curved around and disappeared into the trees. Nothing else was visible in any direction but bushes and trees with some open patches of leaf-covered earth.

“I guess you can take her now,” he said. “Doesn’t seem to be much to see here.”

“Would you?” Carter asked.

“Huh?”

“The handcuffs. I assume you have a key.”

“Oh, yeah. Just a minute.” Turning to one of the crime scene investigators standing by, he requested a bag and a pair of disposable rubber gloves. Donning the gloves, he knelt behind the tree and inserted his handcuff key into one of the cuffs around her ankle. It clicked and the cuff loosened. He unlocked the other cuff and carefully placed them into the plastic bag. If they were lucky, the perp might have left some fingerprints on the shining steel surface.

“Get ready,” he told Carter, then inserted the key and unlocked the steel cuff from her left hand. With the cuff off and her arms no longer joined behind the tree, he had expected her to fall forward or at least lean in that direction. Her arms slowly lowered but she stayed on her knees. Carter had to lean her forward to get her body away from the tree.

As they lifted her onto the stretcher, he noted a pattern of the abrasions impressed on the inside of her arms. She must have struggled very hard. The skin was rubbed raw by the bark where she had fought to get her arms free. Likewise, there was torn skin on the inside of her thighs and even on her back.

“How long?” he asked as Carter zipped up the body bag.

“I’d say about six to eight hours to judge by the rigidity and body temperature. That would place the time of death at about midnight, give or take a bit.”

“I meant how long did it take her to die?”

“Oh, well, with a cut that big it is most likely she bled to death reasonably fast. There were no vital organs in the area of the cut. I’d say maybe fifteen minutes. Depends on how much she struggled. Could have been as quick as ten minutes. Could also have been half an hour if the struggling had been done before the cut, or if she didn’t struggle much after.”

Baker frowned. Even at the lower end of the scale, that was a long time to take to die.

As the stretcher was carried away, Baker noticed Detective Lane standing by the road. He went over to the younger officer who was also his partner.

“You see it all?” he asked.

“Yeah. Ain’t pretty.”

Lane was twenty-two years younger than the near-to-retirement Baker but they had worked together often enough to know each other very well. The younger man looked good in a freshly pressed suit and his military-short hair. Even though in his early thirties, he was considered a most desirable bachelor by the females in the department, yet a strict policy of never dating anyone he worked with had left them wondering why such a good looking man never seemed interested in women. And, of course, the usual rumors about his preference in partners.

“Not your usual kind of stabbing,” Lane said. “More like seppuku.”

“Like what?”

“Seppuku. It’s Japanese and means ‘stomach-cutting’. Americans usually call it “hara-kiri,” which means ‘cutting the belly’. A ritual form of suicide.”

“Where do you get all these strange facts?”

“Some of us went to college,” was Lane’s reply.

“So you think this form of death has a ritual meaning?”

“Maybe,” Lane said slowly. “But the girl was not Japanese, for what that’s worth. And it is obvious that she did not do this herself – not a suicide. Perhaps this is someone’s way of saying that she should have committed suicide, and he was just helping her.”

“So our killer might be a Japanese?”

“Maybe.” They paused to watch the ambulance drive away. “Maybe not. Hara-kiri is a Japanese cultural tradition but is well known to most Westerners. Through all those Japanese movies and such.” He paused before adding, “I would like to know if there are signs that she was raped first.”

“The autopsy will tell us,” Baker said. “Hope so. That will give us some DNA of the perp.”

Lane said nothing. Wishing that the girl had been raped before she was killed might sound crude to most, but he understood how important that sample of sperm fluid and the DNA analysis could be in obtaining a conviction – after they caught the guy.

“When you get back to the station, check on that computer of yours for any similar patterns. Maybe this guy’s done this before.”

“Already planned on that. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

“I won’t be back until this afternoon. I have to make a court appearance to testify in the Connor case.”

“Maybe by then we’ll have an ID on this victim.”

“Yeah,” was all that Baker said as he turned to go back to his car. No matter how many times he had seen death in his profession, he never really got used to it. Especially if the victim was young and had barely started out on life. And especially if it was something as gruesome as having your belly cut open.