Jessie noticed something else too. He was covered in scars, including what looked like healed-over bullet wounds. Having studied his career in detail, she knew he’d been in Vietnam and won a Purple Heart for injuries suffered in a firefight in 1969. She also knew he’d had several “up close and personal” run-ins with violent killers over the years. But she’d never seen the physical accumulation of all those encounters laid out so plainly. She couldn’t help but wonder if one day, someone would be looking at her body on a metal table, studying the map of disfigurement that her body was fast becoming.
“I never realized just how much he’d been through,” she said quietly.
“Yeah,” Ryan agreed. “A detective who retired a few years ago told me Garland was asked to give a lecture when he first started consulting for the department. It was mostly an overview of the basics of behavioral analysis. But apparently people just kept peppering him with questions about his past cases. They wanted to hear his war stories. This retired detective told me that Garland mentioned that he got an exit physical when he left the FBI. The nurse counted up all his various scars and wounds. There were fifty-seven. And that was prior to any of the cases he handled for LAPD.”
“Jeez,” Jessie muttered.
“The detective said Garland didn’t give any more lectures after that.”
Jessie studied several of the deep marks that ran along both of the man’s upper arms. They looked meticulous and intentional.
“I wonder how many of these are from his run-in with the Night Hunter,” she mused.
The Night Hunter was a notorious serial killer that Garland Moses had pursued while in his last years at the FBI. The killer had murdered and dismembered over fifty people up and down the eastern seaboard for a decade.
When Garland closed in on him, the Night Hunter got the upper hand, captured him, and tortured him for two days before Garland finally got free and fought back, using the man’s own machete against him before the killer ran off into the night. Garland managed to get to a hospital and recover.
The Night Hunter was never found but the murders stopped after that, so many in law enforcement believed he died that night. Garland still thought the guy was out there, but that didn’t stop him from retiring a month after getting out of the hospital. He never spoke of it to Jessie.
“I’d say at least half of them,” Ryan said, jolting her out of her thoughts. “He’s got a series of carvings in his back from the guy, like some grotesque artwork. I would have thought he might have tried to have plastic surgery at some point to clean them up.”
Jessie looked over at him and shook her head.
“We profilers keep the scars as keepsakes,” she told him, her voice filling with emotion at the renewed realization that Garland Moses was done with reminders. “So we don’t get too comfortable.”
“I wonder what kind of keepsakes he kept of his wife,” Ryan asked.
Garland’s wife, Gloria, had died nearly forty years ago from breast cancer, when he was still new to the FBI. She was only twenty-seven. They hadn’t had kids and he’d never remarried. Jessie never even heard of him going on a date in the intervening years. None of that information came directly from Garland, who rarely spoke of those days.
“Those keepsakes are internal,” she said softly.
There was a slight cough from the medical examiner, who was standing there quietly, waiting to give his report.
“Go ahead,” Ryan said.
The guy began methodically listing off the injuries that Garland had incurred last night.
“He has bruising on his upper back, a fractured right hip, torn skin on his forehead, a hematoma on the back right portion of his skull, and a crushed trachea. It looks like almost all of those occurred during the course of the struggle. The actual cause of death was asphyxiation as a result a wide, leather-based item, almost certainly a belt.”
“Are you sure? I thought this guy used a stocking,” Jessie noted.
“The woman was killed with a stocking,” Ryan inserted. “But it looks like things got changed up here.”
“Can we account for the source of all the injuries?” Jessie asked.
Ryan nodded.
“Trembley worked with the tech team and CSU to put together a meticulous recreation of events that I think makes a lot of sense,” Ryan answered, pulling up the report on his phone. “They used audio from the smart speaker in the bedroom, along with clothing fibers, blood spatter, and carpet markings. He thinks Garland was at the wife’s dresser when he was surprised by the assailant. They struggled and he was knocked backward into the dresser, explaining the bruising on his upper back. They think he broke his hip when he either fell or was pulled to the ground. The trachea is explained by the belt, as is the damage to the forehead skin. It seems the attacker was on top of him, with Garland lying on his stomach. The only injury they couldn’t account for was the hematoma on the back of his head. They assumed the attacker smashed the back of his head down on the ground at some point but there was no blood or hair on the carpet and no carpet fibers in his hair. Trembley thought that Garland might have initiated the contact, maybe using his head as a weapon to break free.”
“That actually fits,” the examiner said. “He does have some neck strain than doesn’t seem connected to the belt strangulation. It looks almost like whiplash. If he was throwing his head back in an intentionally violent way, then that could account for the strain.”
“It sounds like he was a fighter to the end,” Ryan said admiringly.
Jessie was turning over ideas in her head. After a moment, she responded.
“I’d like to think that’s the case,” she said. “And maybe it is. But I’m not sure.”
“What do you mean?” Ryan asked.
Jessie closed her eyes, picturing the struggle, imagining Garland on the floor with a broken hip, a belt around his neck, and a man straddling him from above.
“It’s true that he could have been fighting to get away,” she acknowledged. “But Garland wasn’t a man known for false hope or dramatic gestures. He had a broken hip. He wasn’t going anywhere. He had to know he was going to lose this fight. So maybe he wasn’t trying to get away. Maybe he was trying to help us catch his own killer by branding him with evidence of the fight.”
“How?” Ryan asked curiously. He’d known Jessie long enough not to be dismissive of her theories, no matter how out there they were.
“I’m not sure. But maybe we should ask the MBPD to make a note of any local residents with bruises on their faces and forward them to our team. I know it’s a long shot but I feel like Garland was trying to leave us one last clue.”
*
Hannah couldn’t focus.
It didn’t help that she’d already read Wuthering Heights twice on her own and the lecture her English teacher was currently giving captured none of the romantic torment that made the story so compelling. Ms. Gorton made the stormy battles between Catherine and Heathcliff seem somehow bland; the tortures they inflicted on each other rote.
Of course that wasn’t the only reason she was having trouble paying attention. She couldn’t stop thinking about Garland Moses. She couldn’t help but imagine him lying cold on some metal table, his eyes forcibly closed by some flunky who thought it might bring him peace.