Boy Crucified (7 page)

“Lieutenant? I have a Mr. and Mrs. Peters here to see you. Do you, like, want to see them? It’s about that crucified kid thing.”

Daniel and I both looked at the phone, frowning.

The crucified kid thing?

I hit the button to reply. “I’ll be right there.”

I walked down the hall to the receptionist’s desk, with Daniel trailing. Mary Beth gave me her doe-in-the-headlights look, which I did my best to ignore.

“Do you, like, want to talk to them?” Mary Beth asked.

“Is the pope, like, Catholic?” I replied.

She frowned. “I’m not sure. Is he?” She probably didn’t know. I tried not to think too unkindly of her; there were Americans who weren’t even sure who George W. Bush was. Which probably wasn’t a bad thing, ignorance sometimes being bliss and all of that—what else could it be if the subject was George W. Bush?

“Yes, I’ll talk to them. Do you suppose that’s why I asked them to come?”

She offered a beaming smile, which was odd.

I went into the waiting room. “Mr. and Mrs. Peters?”

They both stood.

“I’m Lt. Thomas Noel. I’m the one who called. This is my partner, Daniel Qo.”

The woman put a hand to her mouth, then turned to her husband.

“You think you’ve found Frankie? Is that it?” the man asked.

I nodded. “Would you come with us, please?”

I led them to my office and had them sit in the chairs opposite my desk.

“Can we get you something to drink? Coffee, water?”

Neither wanted anything to drink. Both looked to be somewhere in their forties. Both had gone soft around the middle. Both obviously shopped for their clothes at Walmart and pinched pennies to get by and had probably driven here in a pick-up truck. They lived in Liberty, Missouri, which was on the outskirts of Kansas City.

Daniel stood solemnly off to one side, watching me carefully, knowing he was going to have to conduct such conversations himself in the not-too-distant future.

“He ran away two years ago,” Mr. Peters said. “We haven’t heard from him since, don’t know what became of him.”

“Maybe the best thing to do is have a look,” I said, “and then you can decide whether it’s your son or not. Perhaps it won’t be.”

“We just heard from him Friday,” Mr. Peters said. “He called us up. Said he was in trouble and didn’t know how much time he had. We didn’t know what he meant by that. He was in quite a state. Of course we were surprised. Hadn’t heard a word from him in two years. We were starting to think we might never hear from him again. Out of the blue, the telephone rings.”

He fell silent.

Mrs. Peters looked like she might add something, but she did not.

“We stayed home,” Mr. Peters said. “We thought he might call again. We just sat around and waited. We saw the news about that crucified kid, but we didn’t think it would be Frankie. That sketch didn’t look anything like him.”

“Why don’t we go have a look?” I suggested as gently as I could. “Chances are, it’s not your son that we found. But then again, it might be. It might be best if we just settle this right away, and if it’s not your son, then we can talk about his phone call and figure out a way to find out where he is.”

I called Durmount over at the morgue, asking if we could do a viewing of the body.

“Right now?” she asked.

“If it’s possible, yes. We have parents who might be able to identify the body.”

“I’ll get ready.”

Mr. and Mrs. Peters looked at each other, and I could see hope fighting with fear in the gaze that passed between them. The husband stood up, refusing to look at me. The wife glanced in my direction and made a face.

“I’m really sorry,” I said gently. “It’ll just take a minute.”

“It’s no trouble,” Mr. Peters said, but his voice was small and lost.

I led them through the maze of corridors, out the front door and down the street to the morgue, which was in a separate building. Durmount was waiting for us in the hall. She had pushed the autopsy table to the viewing area where there was a plate glass window. Viewers could stand outside in the hall and look through the window.

I introduced them.

“Thank you for coming,” Durmount said kindly.

They nodded.

“Are you ready?”

They again nodded.

Durmount went back into the autopsy suite and approached the table. Very slowly and very gracefully she pulled back the sheet to reveal the boy’s face and the upper part of his chest, then stood on the other side of the table so she would not obstruct the view. She had cleaned Frankie up as best she could, but there was no disguising the fact that he had been brutalized.

When Mrs. Peters burst into anguished tears, we had our answer.

VIII

“W
HO
did this to our boy?” Mr. Peters asked.

We were seated in my office once more, and this time they decided that maybe a bit of coffee would be good. They were both about to come unglued, and the age-old ritual of figuring out coffee needs had provided a necessary distraction. Yet when Daniel brought their coffees, neither drank so much as a drop.

“We don’t know yet,” I said, answering his question. “Can you tell me about the phone call you received from your son?”

Mr. Peters seemed bewildered, as if he were a man in a dream, where things weren’t quite right.

“He just called us,” Mr. Peters said absently. “Friday night. Was real odd. He didn’t talk much. Talked to his mother.”

I looked at her.

She was wiping her eyes, and if there had been even an ounce of wind in her sails when she first sat down in that chair, it was now gone. Losing a child had that effect.

“What?” she said, not really paying attention.

“Could you tell me about the phone call?” I said.

“We just got up from the supper table,” she said, looking to her husband for confirmation. “The phone rang. I answered it. I always do. Ralph doesn’t like to talk on the phone.” She again looked at her husband. “And darned if it wasn’t Frankie. Like to thought we was never going to hear from him again. I was so surprised, I didn’t know what to do with myself. He was trying to tell me that he was in trouble, but I just kept asking him where he’d been all this time, almost two years, maybe more than two years. Where’d he gotten himself off to, and didn’t he know how worried we was about him?”

I listened while she tried to tell me what their conversation had been about.

“I just couldn’t get over it, kept asking him where he’d been. He kept saying he was in trouble, that he was going to go to the police and turn himself in, and that he didn’t have time to talk. ‘Mama, please, I can’t talk right now’—that’s what he said. Several times. I asked him why. He said he was afraid they were going to come and get him.”

“Who’s
they
?” I asked.

“He didn’t say. Just said he couldn’t talk, and he was going to the police, and we could find him there, and he would explain everything when we saw him. But then the phone line went dead—like he was cut off. Like he was standing there, and someone came up and pushed the button down on the receiver. He was just talking, then he was gone. Weren’t no more than a minute.”

“What time was this?” I asked.

She looked to her husband.

“It was about 6:30 p.m. or so,” the man said. “That’s generally when we finish supper.”

“And this was Friday evening?”

He nodded. They both did.

“Do you know who did this to my boy?” Mrs. Peters asked, taking up where Mr. Peters had left off.

I shook my head. “We’re trying to figure it out, ma’am,” I said. “Do you know why Frankie ran away in the first place?”

This produced looks of discomfort.

“It was that damned Internet crap,” Mr. Peters said, turning his face away so I couldn’t see him.

“How is that?” I asked.

Mrs. Peters sighed. “He met some Catholic people,” she said, pronouncing the word “Catholic” the way she might have pronounced the word “cancer.” “Took a notion in his head that he wanted to be Catholic. Well, we’ve always gone to the Church of Christ, and I just couldn’t understand what had gotten into him. This was about three years ago, I suppose. And these people were a bit odd. Said the Pope was the Antichrist, strange things like that. The whole church had gone into ‘apostasy’ or whatever, and they weren’t no longer Catholics, or something like that. I just couldn’t understand it myself. If the Pope ain’t Catholic, then what is he? But Frankie said there had been a lot of changes in the Catholic Church, and they weren’t Catholic any more, but this group he had found on the Internet was. They were ‘true Catholics’.”

I frowned.

“They kept writing to him, sending him books and stuff,” she said. “I just don’t know what happened. He started talking about wanting to be baptized a Catholic, and I said he’d already been baptized, and he couldn’t go off and join the Catholics ’cause we was Church of Christ people and always had been. He said we were heretics and going to go to hell, and we was mocking Jesus by not being Catholics ourselves—‘true Catholics’, whatever that is.”

“So he got himself baptized?”

She shrugged, and a bit of despair washed across her face. “I don’t know. He ran away. He kept saying he wanted to go visit these people, and we wouldn’t let him. I was scared of those people, didn’t know who they were or what they wanted. And they did something to him. He sort of lost interest in school, lost interest in his friends, was fighting and arguing with us all the time, didn’t want to do his chores. I didn’t know what to make of it.”

“Then what happened?” I prompted.

Mr. Peters snorted. “We took that damned computer away from him, that’s what happened. Wasn’t going to have my own damned son telling me I was a heretic and going to burn in hell, not after all I’d done to raise him and raise our family and be a good husband and a good father.”

There was silence.

“Then what?” I asked.

“Well,” Mr. Peters said, “he ran away. Shortly after that. He got quiet for a few weeks. Things seemed to be getting better. Then we got up one morning and he was gone.”

In other words, their son had most likely run off to join a religious cult. Not exactly original, by any means. I gave Daniel a brief look.

“Do you know where he went?” I asked.

They both shrugged. They didn’t know. Their son didn’t say. It was, I thought, rather like Earl Whitehead’s story.

“I searched through his things,” Mrs. Peters said. “I was trying to find letters they’d written to him, something with a return address, but he must have taken all that stuff with him or got rid of it. We went to see the Father at the Catholic church in our town, but he didn’t have an idea of where Frankie had gone. He said there were a lot of strange Catholic groups that weren’t really Catholic that were going around and saying things like that, that the Pope was a heretic and all of that business. He said our son could have gone anywhere in the state of Missouri, and maybe even Kansas or Chicago or Lord knows where else. So we filed a missing persons report, but the police couldn’t help us, and we didn’t hear anything, all this time. Not till this past Friday.”

We regarded each other in silence for many long moments.

“It seems to me that your son got himself mixed up in a cult,” I said. “Maybe the group is located here in the city. Maybe he finally got away and was trying to call you and get help, but they found him. He didn’t give you any names, like the name of this group that he was talking to over the Internet?”

“No,” Mrs. Peters said. “Well, he might have, but we can’t remember now. ’Course we tried and tried to think back, trying to remember everything he had told us, but it was all so strange to us. ‘Saint’ this and ‘saint’ that, and ‘father’ this and ‘father’ that and ‘bishop’ this and ‘bishop’ that. It didn’t really make any sense to us.”

“But he talked about ‘fathers’ and ‘bishops’?”

She nodded. “Well, not bishops, but ‘the bishop’. Apparently the one in charge of the group was a bishop. Frankie was always talking about how ‘the bishop said’ this and ‘the bishop said’ that. Frankie said he was the only real bishop left, that all the rest of them weren’t Catholic no more, that they was all going to go to hell for destroying the Catholic Church. We just didn’t know what to make of it.”

Neither did I.

“The TV said Frankie was… crucified,” Mr. Peters said, his voice very quiet. “I guess I don’t understand that.”

“We don’t either,” I replied.

“I guess I don’t understand why they would….”

“We don’t either,” I said again.

He fell silent. His wife burst into fresh tears.

Georgina Durmount very graciously came over to my office to take them in hand, to explain to them how to go about having Frank’s body moved, how to deal with the paperwork, the death certificate, the hundred and one details. She was also going to do the hardest part: she was going to explain to them exactly how their son had died.

And she was going to have to answer the question most on their minds: how much had he suffered?

I watched them go and reached into my desk drawer for the bottle of Advil.

“Oh man,” Daniel said, rubbing a hand through his hair.

“Perks of the job,” I said.

IX

F
R
. C
YRUS
was an old friend. He was the one who had accepted me into the seminary program run by the Franciscans. I had gone to live at St. Joseph’s House when I was eighteen, first becoming a religious brother, eventually a priest. I had been a good student, but what I didn’t understand at the time was that the Franciscans had accepted me not because they thought I would become a priest, but because I had needed somewhere to go. That I had been ordained at all had surprised them, and Fr. Cyrus sat me down after my ordination and asked me whether or not I really wanted to be a priest. Or was I perhaps just running away from the past?

That conversation had made me extremely angry, but Fr. Cyrus was right. I did not have a vocation to the religious life. I had not been called by God to live a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience, following in the footsteps of St. Francis of Assisi. I did not really understand what “poverty” was all about, and chastity and obedience were all but impossible. I had not been called upon to become an
alter Christus
, “another Christ.” I was a boy running away from the past and looking for the family I’d never had, and Fr. Cyrus had been saying it was time to start dealing with reality. It was time to grow up.