61 - Mystery - J.F. Hire

She spoke on the interrogation room camera. John watched the recording over and over again. He was on his fifth cup of coffee. The police-office lights felt dim to him.

"You'll never find him,

I left him alone.

He'll die tomorrow,

Cold and unknown."

The woman: wide grey eyes staring just beyond the camera.

"I've ripped up his cassock,

And taken his boys,

He'll never have angels again,

Not within The Voice.

He's heard the word of God.

Be he denied the woe of me.

If you can find him,

Then you could set him free.

Just remember,

I'm not as crazy as I seem."

He looked down at his notes, some scratched out, but some highlighted:

bound and gagged

a priest

outside?

an ex lover?

injured? castrated?

But where was he. His office-members felt that he was crazy for trying to decipher such a cryptic murderer. 

It was only the next morning, when his team was removing an unconscious, but alive, priest from an abandoned psychiatric hospital in the east of town. He was tied in a straight jacket, gagged and left in the solitary confinement cell of the small facility from the fifties.

His team asked him how he did it.

He responded, bags under his deep blue eyes, "St. Gabriel's Hospice. She was admitted as a child. There were reports from her neighbors of this priest often visiting. If you were a woman scorned, who lived half of her life in an asylum, where would you store the man who broke your heart for God?"

Reporters asked him similar questions. But, due to his need to keep most of this confidential before the trial, he merely stated this: "Well, it was all very Elementary, I guess."