The Immortals
J.T. Ellison
It is Samhain—the Blood Harvest. Nonbelievers call it Hallowe'en. The night when eight Nashville teenagers are found dead, with occult symbols carved into their naked bodies. It's a ritual the killers believe was blessed by Death himself. When children are victimized, emotions always run high, and this case has the public both outraged and terrified: a dangerous combination.Recently reinstated homicide lieutenant Taylor Jackson knows she has to act quickly, but tread carefully. Exploring the baffling culture of mysticism and witchcraft, Taylor is immersed in a darkness that threatens to unbalance the order of her world, and learns how unchecked wrath can push a killer to his limits.Praise for J.T. Ellison"A terrific lead character, terrific suspense, terrific twists…a completely convincing debut." - Lee Child "A taut, striking debut. Mystery fiction has a new name to watch." - John ConnollyThe Taylor Jacksons series1. All The Pretty Girls2. 143. Judas Kiss4. The Cold Room5. The Immortals6. So Close the Hand of Death7. Where All the Dead Lie
Praise for J.T. Ellison
“Carefully orchestrated plot twists and engrossing characters… The story moves at breakneck speed… Flawed yet identifiable characters and genuinely terrifying villains populate this impressive and arresting thriller.”
—Publishers Weekly on Judas Kiss [starred review]
“Crime fiction has a new name to watch.”
—John Connolly
“Combines The Silence of the Lambs with The Wire.”
—January Magazine on The Cold Room
“Darkly compelling and thoroughly chilling…everything a great crime thriller should be.”
—Allison Brennan on All the Pretty Girls
“A twisty, creepy and wonderful book…Ellison is relentless and grabs the reader from the first page and refuses to let go until the soul tearing climax.”
—Crimespree on 14
“[A] tight and powerful story. Judas Kiss moves at a rapid-fire rate…rushing like adrenaline through the bloodstream.”
—The Strand Magazine
“Flawlessly plotted, with well-defined characters and conflict…quite simply a gem.”
—RT Book Reviews [Top Pick] on The Cold Room
“A terrific lead character, terrific suspense, terrific twists…a completely convincing debut.”
—Lee Child on All the Pretty Girls
J.T. Ellison
The Immortals
For Jill Thompson (ti amo molto!)
and my darling Randy.
These eight words the Rede fulfill:
“An ye harm none, do what ye will.”
—Doreen Valiente
The Wiccan Rede
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
—Emily Dickinson
Because I Could Not Stop for Death
Contents
Third Quarter Moon Samhain (Halloween)
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Waning Crescent Moon Twenty-five Percent of Full Hallowmas (All Saints' Day)
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Waning Crescent Moon Twenty Percent of Full Feast of Odin (All Souls' Day)
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Waning Crescent Moon Fifteen Percent of Full Three Days Past Samhain (Halloween)
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Acknowledgments
Third Quarter Moon Samhain (Halloween)
One
Nashville, Tennessee
October 31
3:30 p.m.
Taylor Jackson stood at attention, arms behind her back, her dress blues itching her wrists. She was feeling more than a bit embarrassed. She’d asked for this to be done without ceremony, just a simple here you go, you’re back in our good graces, but the chief was having nothing of it. He’d insisted she not only receive her lieutenant’s badge again, but be decorated as well, in a very public ceremony. Her union rep was thrilled, and at her direction, had dropped the lawsuit she’d been forced to file against the department when they demoted her without cause. Taylor was pleased, as well. She’d been fighting to get reinstated, and she had to admit it was nice to put all of this behind her. But the pomp and circumstance was a bit much.
It had been a long afternoon. Taylor felt like a show pony, was flushed with the overly exuberant praise of her career, her involvement in catching the Conductor, a serial killer who’d killed two women back-to-back, kidnapped a third and fled Nashville with Taylor hot on his heels. She’d arrested him in Italy, and the story had immediately caught international headlines, because at the same time, she’d been party to the capture of one of Italy’s most notorious serial killers, Il Macellaio. In the world of sound bites and news at your fingertips, taking two serial killers into custody had garnered so much attention that the chief had been forced into action.
Not only was she being reinstated; Taylor had command of the murder squad again, and her team was being reassembled. Detectives Lincoln Ross and Marcus Wade were shipped back up from the South Sector, and after a long discussion with the chief, she’d even talked him into allowing Renn McKenzie to become part of the permanent team. She had her boys back.
Most of them.
Pete Fitzgerald had fallen off the face of the earth. Taylor had last talked to him when he was in Barbados, anchored and waiting for a new part for his boat’s engine. He’d called to let her know he thought he’d seen their old nemesis, and she hadn’t heard from him since. She was sick with worry, convinced that Fitz had been taken by the Pretender, a killer so obscene, so cruel that he invaded her dreams and consumed her waking moments. A killer Taylor hadn’t caught; the one who’d quite literally gotten away.
Her concerns had been compounded just last week, when the Coast Guard had picked up a distress signal off the coast of North Carolina. The GPS beacon matched the registered number for Fitz’s boat. Despite countless days of searching, nothing had been found. The Coast Guard had been forced to call off the search, and the police in North Carolina couldn’t get involved because there was no crime to be investigated. She had a call in to the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigations, in the hope they would see things differently, but she hadn’t heard anything yet.
Taylor tried to shake off the thought of Fitz, of his body broken and battered, of what the Pretender was doing to him, or had done. The guilt spilled through her blood, making it chilly. She’d issued a challenge to the Pretender, told him to come and get her. Instead, she was positive he’d taken her friend, the man closest to her, aside from Baldwin. Her father figure. She had probably gotten Fitz killed, and she found that knowledge desperately hard to stomach.
She looked into the crowd, the sea of blue seated in compact rows before her. John Baldwin, her fiancé, sat in the front, grinning. His hair was too long again, the black waves falling over his forehead and ears in a tumble. She resisted the urge to roll her eyes; that was sure to get on the evening news, and she didn’t want any more attention than she already had. She touched her engagement ring instead, twisting the channel-set diamonds around her finger.
Her team sat beside him: Lincoln Ross, hair grown out just enough to slip in some tiny dreadlocks; Marcus Wade, brown-eyed and sweetly happy. He was getting serious with his girlfriend, and Taylor had never seen him so content. The new member of the team, Renn McKenzie, was at Marcus’s left. Taylor saw McKenzie’s partner, Hugh Bangor, a few rows back. They’d been very discreet—only Taylor and Baldwin knew they were an item.
Even her old boss Mitchell Price was there, smiling benevolently at her. He’d been a casualty of the events that led to Taylor losing her badge in the first place, but had moved on. He was running a personal protection service catering to country music stars, and had made it clear that anytime Taylor wanted to bail on Nashville Metro, she was welcome to join him.
Fitz was the only one missing. She forced the lump in her throat away.
The chief was pinning something to her uniform now. He stood back with a wide smile and started clapping. The audience followed suit, and Taylor wished she could disappear. This was not what she wanted, this open, public enthusiasm on her behalf.
The chief gestured to the microphone. Taylor took a deep breath and stepped to the podium.
“Thank you all for being here today. I appreciate it more than you know. But we really should be honoring the entire team who participated. I couldn’t have done any of this without the help of Detective Renn McKenzie, Supervisory Special Agent John Baldwin, Detective James Highsmythe of the London Metropolitan Police, and all the officers of the Metro Police who participated, in small ways and in large, on the case. The city of Nashville owes these men and women a debt of gratitude. Now, enough of the hoopla. Let’s go back to work.”
Laughter rippled through the crowd, and they clapped again. Lincoln whistled, two fingers stuck in his mouth, and this time she did roll her eyes. Baldwin winked at her, his clear green gaze full of pride. With her back ramrod straight and her ears burning, she thanked the chief and the other dignitaries, nodded at her new boss, Commander Joan Huston, and made her way off the dais. People began milling about; the language of the force rang in her ears like a mother’s lullaby. She was back, and it felt damn good.
Baldwin met her, took her hand. “So how’s the Investigator of the Year?”
She took a deep breath and blew it out noisily. “Don’t start,” she said. “This is mortifying enough as it is.”
He laughed and kissed her palm. A promise for later.
Lincoln and Marcus both hugged her, and McKenzie shook her hand.
“Congratulations, LT!” Lincoln’s gap-toothed smile felt like coming home, and she clapped him on the back. Price joined their group, shaking her hand gravely, his red handlebar mustache neatly trimmed and waxed for the occasion.
“What’s your first act as a newly restored lieutenant, Loot?” Marcus asked.
“Buying y’all a beer. It is Halloween, after all. Let’s get out of here. How about we head down to Mulligan’s and grab a Guinness?”
“You’re on,” Marcus said.
She gestured to her stiffly starched uniform. “I just need to change.”
“Us, too. Race you to the locker rooms.”
Ten minutes later, once again in civilian clothes—jeans, cowboy boots, a black cashmere turtleneck and gray corduroy blazer, left open—Taylor felt much more comfortable. She snapped her holster onto her belt, then risked a glance at her shield. Her phantom limb. Losing it had just about cost her everything. She lovingly caressed the gold for the briefest of moments, then attached it to her belt in front of her holster. Complete. Again. She slammed her locker shut and met the boys in the hall. She saw Baldwin’s eyes stray to her waist and pretended she didn’t see his satisfied smile.
As they left the Criminal Justice Center, Taylor’s spirits lifted. The joshing, joking group of men behind her, Baldwin in step at her side, all served to remind her how lucky she was. Now, if she could only find Fitz and do away with the Pretender, life would be grand indeed.
They’d just passed Hooters when Taylor’s cell rang. She looked at the screen, saw it was dispatch. She held up a hand and stopped on the sidewalk to answer.
“Jackson,” she said.
“Lieutenant, we need your response at a 10-64J, possible homicide, 3800 Estes Road. Repeat, 10-64J.”
The J designator made a shiver go up her spine. J meant the victim was a juvenile. She hated working crimes with kids involved.
“Roger that, Dispatch. I’m on my way.” She slapped the phone shut. “Hey, guys, I’m sorry. I’ve got to go to this scene.” She pulled her wallet out of her jacket’s interior pocket and handed Lincoln two twenties. He shook his head.
“Hell, no, LT. You’re back on the job, so are we.”
“But you’re not on today. Go on ahead.”
“No way,” Marcus said. They lined up shoulder to shoulder, a wall of testosterone and insistence. She knew better than to fight. They were all just as happy as she was to be back together.
“I’ll drive,” McKenzie offered.
She smiled at them, then turned to Baldwin. “Well, aren’t you coming, too?”
“What, the Nashville police want the help of a profiler?” he teased, his green eyes flashing.
“Of course we do. Come on then, let’s go. We’ll have to take two cars.”
They drove up West End, McKenzie in the lead, Taylor and Baldwin following. Getting to Green Hills at this time of day was difficult at best, the traffic stop-and-start, so McKenzie was leading them through the back roads. Up West End, then left on Bowling, through the gloriously wooded neighborhoods, wide green lawns, large homes set far back from the main streets.
Many of the houses were decorated for Halloween, some professionally, with complete horror tableaus on their front yards: Black-and-orange twinkling lights and tombstones and full-size mummies—some crafted with the obvious hand of a child—fake spider webs and friendly ghosts. On the corner of Bowling and Woodmont there was a large inflatable headless horseman. It was starting to get dark, and there had been rain earlier in the day. Fog rose in wispy streams from the lawns. A few jack-o’-lanterns had been lit, their insides glowing with sinister comfort.
Once they turned left onto Estes, it only took a moment to reach the address. The first responders—firefighters and EMTs—had already left. Patrol cars littered the street, crime-scene tape was strung across the road. Blue-and-white lights flashed in the evening sky, reflecting off the brick houses. Farther down the street, moving away from the commotion, small groups had started floating from door to door; the youngest trick-or-treaters escorted by their parents before full dark set in. Even if it hadn’t been Halloween, it would have been an eerie scene.
Paula Simari was there, standing by her patrol car. Her canine partner, Max, was in the backseat, grinning a doggie smile at the activity. His services had not been needed tonight, it seemed.
The five of them approached and Paula held up her hands. “Whoa. No need to bring out all the big guns. Just one body up there.” She gestured over her shoulder at the second story of an expansive Georgian red brick house. “How’s it being back in charge, Lieutenant?”
“Very nice, Officer.” Taylor liked Simari. She was good people, always ready with a quip, but knew when to be serious. “Why don’t you brief us, then we’ll take a cruise through the scene.” She signed in to the crime-scene call sheet, then handed the pen to Baldwin. By the book, that was her new middle name.
“Sure. Body is that of a seventeen-year-old male Caucasian, name Jerrold King. His sister, Letha, came home from shopping with friends—they both go to Hillsboro but they had a half day today. It’s a teachers’ in-service afternoon. Said she went into his room to borrow a CD and found him naked on the bed. She called 911 and they responded, but he was deceased when they arrived.”
“Suicide?” Taylor asked.
“Not exactly,” Simari replied grimly. “Not unless he was into pain.”
“Pain?” Baldwin said, eyebrow raised.
Simari bit her lip. “I think you should see this for yourself. That’s why I had dispatch call you directly.”
Taylor looked at her for a long moment, then shrugged. “Okay. Let’s go. Baldwin, you’re with me. Marcus, Lincoln, could you start chatting with the crowd?” She pointed to the driveway of the house next door, which was accumulating people, some dressed in costumes, some obviously just home from a day at the office. The suits outnumbered the costumes three to one. “See if anyone saw anything. McKenzie? Make sure the medical examiner is on the way. We need a death investigator and crime-scene techs.”
“Will do.”
She followed Simari up the elaborate steps of the house, through white Doric columns onto a wide brick porch. A trio of witches nestled in between two spider-webbed rocking chairs; dual arrays of orange chrysanthemums in black wrought-iron planters were parked on either side of the door, their blossoms bright and new.
Taylor took a second to wind her hair into a bun and secure it, slipped her hands into purple nitrile gloves. Baldwin followed suit—their hands suddenly all professional, no more the recipients of holy palmers’ kiss. They couldn’t afford to confuse the crime-scene techs with their own DNA, nor allow their personal relationship to affect the case. It had been difficult for Taylor at first, pretending she and Baldwin weren’t emotionally entwined. It was easier now. She was learning his detachment skills.
Simari was already gloved up, and let them in.
A teenager with rough skin and a jet-black bob sat at the foot of the stairs, white and shaking. She had black circles under her eyes and the faintest trace of dark lipstick in one corner of her mouth. Her lips were jammed together in a thin line; it seemed she knew if she opened her mouth the world would collapse.
“Lieutenant Jackson, this is Letha King. She found the body.”
Taylor bent at the waist to get to the girl’s level. “Letha. I’m so sorry for your loss. Are your parents on their way home?”
The girl didn’t meet her eye, just shook her head. Simari stepped in. “They’re out of town. We’re tracking them down now.”
Letha wrapped her arms around her waist, trying to hold herself together. Her nails were painted black, the polish wearing away. Taylor was tempted to reach out and touch her, to give a bit of warmth, of comfort, but refrained. She needed to see the body first, then she could worry about the living.
She stepped back onto the porch and whistled at McKenzie. He was on his cell phone, raised his eyebrows in question. She gestured for him to come to her. He nodded, said something briefly into the cell, then slapped it shut and bounded up the stairs. Taylor spoke quietly.
“I’ve got the victim’s sister in the house. Kid’s completely shattered. She needs to have someone with her. Would you mind?”
“Not at all. Everyone’s on their way.”
“Great, thanks. Come with me.”
They reentered the house, and Taylor led McKenzie to Letha.
“Letha, this is Detective McKenzie. He’s going to talk to you for a few minutes while we check on your brother. We’re going to go upstairs now. If you need anything, anything at all, you just ask Detective McKenzie, okay?”
The girl nodded, silent as the grave. She gave Taylor an odd feeling, a premonition that worse things were to come, though she couldn’t pinpoint why.
“How about we go into the kitchen, Letha?” McKenzie held out a hand. The girl took it and rose, unsteady on her feet, eyes blank. She allowed herself to be towed away. Shock. Poor, creepy little thing.
The staircase was mahogany, sweeping, twin rises that met together in a catwalk loft on the second floor. They took the left set of steps, Taylor unconsciously counting as they went up. Thirty-three stairs. The view down to the grand foyer was only slightly obscured by a brilliant chandelier strung with fake cobwebs, creating a gauzy veil on the downstairs. The hallway floor was wide-planked oak topped with elegant throw rugs and capriciously placed tables covered in ethnic crystal and wood tchotchkes. Tribal masks lined the corridor. The parents were either travelers or collectors.
Four doors bled off the center hall. One was open.
Taylor glanced back over her shoulder at Baldwin. His face was calm, placid, ready for anything. His eyes met hers briefly, questioning. She hadn’t realized she’d stopped in her tracks until Simari cleared her throat.
“Everything okay?”
Was it? Taylor had the strangest sense, almost like a strong hand was pushing at her chest, pushing her away from the bedroom door. She couldn’t detect any of the usual smells that accompanied a violent crime scene—blood, fear, human waste. It smelled…like flowers. Once she realized that the scent was coming from the open bedroom, she placed it. Jasmine. The murder scene smelled like jasmine. Once her nose got used to that idea, she did catch just the tiniest hint of copper, tangy underneath the cloying sweetness.
The odd sensation left her. She smiled at Simari.
“Sorry. I’m fine. Just…smelling.”
“I know,” Simari said. “It’s weird. I don’t usually expect boys to wear perfume, but what do I know? In this world, anything is possible. He’s in there.” She pointed toward the open door, let Taylor take the lead.
“Probably the sister’s. Though I didn’t catch it downstairs,” Baldwin said.
Sometimes at a crime scene Taylor had the overwhelming feeling that she was on camera, that some unseen videographer tracked her every move. She was fodder for the silver screen, walking down a darkened hallway while the audience knew something horrible lay just beyond her grasp. Look out behind you, don’t go into that dark space alone, better run out of the safety of the house into the forest when the killer is coming after you with a knife. Goose bumps paraded up and down her arms. God, she hated horror movies.
She shook it off. Halloween always got to her. A crime scene on Halloween was just designed to play into her over-active imagination.
Steeled, she stepped into Jerrold King’s bedroom.
She struggled to take in the whole scene and not make judgments. Her job as lead investigator was to make sure her detectives didn’t jump to conclusions, didn’t make snap decisions about the case. She emphasized considered opinions, reasoning, a belief in the evidence.
But Jerrold King’s body made her want to discard all she’d been taught.
She edged closer. He was naked, lying on his back, arms spread to the sides. His mouth was open, slack, with small edges of spittle gathered in the corners. His lips were blue; eyes unfocused and slitted. There were no ligature marks, no strangulation bruises. Granted, that could show up later—contusions took time to develop. But for now, his naked skin was free of visible hematomas. In their place were bloody channels, carved into his flesh. The red-on-white effect was startling, gapes in the tender skin. A sharp knife, no doubt. But these weren’t stab wounds. There was a distinct pattern to the slashes.
She was a foot away from the bed now, and carefully bent to get a closer look. Baldwin was on the other side of the bed. She looked up from the wounds into his worried eyes.
“No,” she said. “It can’t be.”
“It most certainly can,” he said.
“Urban legend,” Simari said.
Taylor stepped back a few feet to see if she could make sense of the wounds. Yes, from a distance, she could see it plainly.
Five slashes, connected at the points, outlined in a ragged circle.
A pentacle, carved into the dead boy’s chest.
Two
The scream startled Taylor, and she jerked back from the body.
Simari’s shoulder radio crackled and Taylor’s cell rang almost simultaneously. She looked at the caller ID. It was Lincoln.
“Yes?” she answered.
“You need to get down here now. We’ve got a serious problem.”
“What?”
“There’s another one.”
“Another victim?”
Simari was already hightailing it out of Jerrold King’s bedroom. Taylor slapped her phone shut. She and Baldwin followed Simari down the staircase and onto the porch. The screaming was coming from the other side of the street, three houses down.
“Help! Please help me!”
A woman stood in the driveway, waving her arms. Lincoln was standing by her, unsuccessfully trying to calm her down.
The street was nearly as bright as day—all the houses’ front lights were on, headlights from the influx of patrol cars cut through the murk, multitudes of Maglites were trained on the faces of people standing frozen in their driveways. As they ran up the street, Taylor felt all eyes turn to them. Her boots clanged against the asphalt, ringing out louder than Baldwin’s steps. She had an odd thought; terror wasn’t a familiar feeling in this neighborhood.
They reached Lincoln, and Taylor skidded to a stop, some loose gravel nearly causing her to turn an ankle. She caught her breath.
“Ma’am, I’m Taylor Jackson, Metro Homicide. What’s the problem?”
“My daughter. My daughter is—” Her voice caught, the sobs breaking free from her chest. “She’s dead in her room.”
“Show us,” Taylor said.
“I can’t. I can’t go back in there.”
Imploring Lincoln with her eyes, Taylor nodded at Baldwin and Simari. They hurried into the house, strangely similar to the King home, and up a sweeping staircase. The scent of jasmine lingered in the air. Taylor’s chest felt tight.
The scene was easy to find. There were towels scattered on the floor, the mother must have been bringing up some laundry. A plaque on the girl’s door had the name Ashley in pink bubble letters. Below it was a stop sign that screamed, Ashley’s Environs. KEEP OUT!
The door was ajar. Taylor stepped over the wad of towels into the girl’s room.
She was faceup on the bed, arms stretched out over her head. Her brown hair was pulled into a ponytail and a green mask had dried on her skin. There was an open bottle of nail polish on the bedside table, the scent acrid. Giving herself a home spa treatment, a facial, a manicure. Typical afternoon in a teenage girl’s life, her innocent ablutions cruelly interrupted by death.
She’d been stripped like the previous victim. The skin of her breasts and her groin was nearly translucent compared to the tan skin around it. She’d either been lying out in the sun or using a tanning bed recently; the brown skin only slightly dulled the knife slashes in her stomach. Familiar cuts, five points connected by a circle of rent flesh.
“Some sort of overdose, I’d expect,” Baldwin said, gesturing to the girl’s blue lips.
“Same as Jerrold King. What in the hell happened here this afternoon?”
A frantic movement caught Taylor’s eye, her peripheral vision picking up hurried motions outside, lights swinging crazily in the semidarkness. Maglites, their blue-white beams bobbing and weaving up the street, away from her location. She abandoned the body, went to the window. People were running back and forth, screaming, crying, cursing. The sharp wail of a siren split the nubilous air. Patrol cars were edging their way through the crowds, driving farther up Estes, toward Abbott Martin Drive. One kept going, disappeared over the edge of the hill.
When her cell phone rang, she almost didn’t answer. Running away was sounding like an excellent option. Though if she were honest with herself, the adrenaline was building in her gut. Intrigue. A new case. She opened her phone.
“What in the hell is going on?” Taylor snapped.
“I need you now!” Lincoln yelled into the phone.
“I’m on my way.” She turned to Baldwin. “We need to go.”
“What in the world is happening?” he asked.
“I don’t know. But I think we better find out.”
They rushed down the stairs and into the night. The street had turned into utter chaos in the five minutes Taylor and Baldwin had been in Ashley’s room. It looked like a bomb had gone off—no bloody limbs or smoking ruins of cars, but people rushing aimlessly up and down the street. Many years earlier, Taylor had seen a man walk out of a burning building—eyes vacant, clothes on fire—and try to walk up the street, away from help. Shell shock. She could identify with that.
The riot of people surged up and down the street, neighbors mixed with patrol officers and emergency workers. Taylor didn’t see Lincoln right away, but caught the eye of Marcus Wade, gestured him over.
“What happened? We were upstairs at the second victim’s house and all hell broke loose.”
“There are more, Taylor. I’ve already got reports of another three, and dispatch has been receiving 911 calls for the last ten minutes.”
“More,” Taylor said, quite uncomprehending. “Three more bodies?”
Marcus swiped his hair out of his eyes, and Taylor saw the beads of sweat building on his forehead in the reflection of the nearest patrol car’s headlights. “Yes. All teenagers. All in this neighborhood.”
She saw Lincoln then, running past them. He turned into a house two doors up. The wailing of sirens was overwhelming, so noisy and loud Taylor thought her eardrums might burst.
Her cell phone trilled again. Headquarters. She took a deep breath, calmed herself, then answered. It was her new commander, Joan Huston.
“What’s happening out there, Jackson? I just got word from the 911 call center that they’ve been overloaded with emergencies.”
“Yes, ma’am. Multiple victims, multiple crime scenes. I have no sure count on the dead at this point, minimum of five casualties. We need a full tactical response on Estes Road in Green Hills. Send every available officer. I’ll need Dan Franklin and everyone the medical examiner can spare. I need to go manage the scene. I’ll call you back when I know more.”
“Biological threat? Do we need Hazmat? I can put the Emergency Operations Plan into action.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary. It looks like several homicides, but it’s going to take a while to sort through. We don’t even know how many scenes we have.” She stopped, looked at the street. The swelling mass of people seemed to grow with every minute. “The parents are coming home from work to find their children dead. I can’t tell you much more than that.” No sense sharing the information about the pentacles until she had a clear view of what was happening. That wasn’t the leak she needed for the local news—Satanists Rampaging Through Green Hills.
She turned away from the chaos, spoke quietly into the phone. “Whoever did this wanted our attention, and now they have it. We’ve already blocked off part of Estes Road. I’m going to push those roadblocks to Hobbs and Woodmont, move the perimeters back on all of these houses, start trying to sort this out. You’ll need to get out ahead of it. The media is going to have a field day.”
She heard finger snapping in the background—Huston getting some unwary soul’s attention. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Go to it.”
She closed the phone. Baldwin put a hand on her shoulder. Her team was already responding, people being gathered into manageable knots, patrol cars stationed at the corners of Estes and Woodmont, blocking access to the street. She could hear more sirens coming closer, the response almost immediate. She looked at Baldwin. His eyes were dark in the gloom.
“Satanists murdering people is something for urban legends, not Nashville,” she said.
“I agree. I find it hard to believe, but it is Halloween.”
“Meaning?”
“What better time to try and spook people with occult images?”
Taylor shook her head. “Someone wanted to send a message. This was a coordinated plan of attack. It takes a level of sophistication to pull off multiple murders. Let’s just see what we can find out.”
Three
Controlling the bedlam only took half an hour, which was incredible, considering. Taylor had set up a temporary headquarters on the street in front of the King house. She’d assigned each of her team a role managing a group of patrols on their specific tasks. She had officers interviewing every person who tried to enter the area, getting addresses and finding out if they had children. Those who did were passed into a secondary control—do you know where your children are? If the child couldn’t be reached by phone, the address was marked and a team sent out. A fourth group of patrol officers were responding to the 911 calls and reporting in their findings.
The body count was up to seven, in five separate houses. She could only pray that they’d discovered all the victims.
Four females and three males, all between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, were dead. It quickly became apparent that all of the victims attended Hillsboro High School—so far no students from any of the multiple private schools or the robust homeschool network in the area had been reported missing or deceased.
Two crime scenes held multiple victims—a couple involved in a sexual interlude, a condom still on the tip of the boy’s penis, and two girls hanging out for the afternoon, their physics books on the floor, the scene scattered with US Magazine, People and Cosmopolitan. Half studying, half gossiping.
The neighborhood wasn’t pleased with her identification system, but she couldn’t figure out a more efficient way to determine the breadth and depth of the situation. She had to show a calm face, a force, a presence. She needed to be composed and reasonable. She’d been trained to handle major emergencies, and she was exercising her training to the fullest. They had the situation under control.
A little voice in the back of her head kept screaming—you might be missing him, you might be letting the killer get away with more—but second-guessing herself wasn’t going to make things better. Once they’d determined that the primary event was over, they could start putting the pieces together.
The first victim found, Jerrold King, had been dead for at least a couple of hours. Taylor was working on the premise that the murders had taken place sometime between 12:30 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. School had let out at noon, the first body was found at 3:00 p.m. Assuming the victims had attended the half day of school this morning, she had an initial framework to follow.
She shuddered, thinking about the methodical staging, and wished she could fast-forward a day so she had an idea of what killed them. Drugs of some kind—the cyanosis and pinpoint pupils pointed to an overdose—something they had all ingested or injected. She was having dark thoughts about mass suicides. But that couldn’t explain the pentacles, could it? Could seven teenagers all coordinate a mass suicide and carve pentacles into their flesh as they were dying?
No. These crimes were committed by an outside hand. One who’d struck quickly, mercilessly and efficiently.
Taylor saw McKenzie putting Letha King into a patrol car. It pulled away, the child’s blank stare fixed forward. McKenzie stood next to Taylor, watching her go.
“What’s up?” Taylor asked. “She give you anything?”
“She hasn’t said much of anything. I thought it best to hold on to her until her aunt comes to get her, out of the house, at least. She called a few minutes ago, she’s on her way.”
“Good. We’ll want to talk to her again, once things settle down.”
They walked back to the Kings’ house. Despite the crowd, the kitchen was strangely quiet.
Baldwin handed her a stack of photos. “Are you ready? Simari gave me her extra Polaroids so we can start recreating the scenes. Though I’ll be able to pull this from memory for a while.”
“No kidding. Have all the victims been identified?”
Lincoln nodded. “For the most part, yes. There’s going to be formal IDs done for a few of them tomorrow, once next of kin are notified. Two of the families are traveling.”
“We can’t release names to the media until we have all the notifications done. I think it would be best to wait, make all the names public at once.”
“We can try, but you know some of the names will leak. Nature of the beast.”
“I know. Do your best, okay? Run me through the scenes, give me some names to put with the faces. After Jerrold King and Ashley Norton, who was found next?”
She laid the pictures on the granite countertop. Lincoln shuffled them around until he had them in order.
“We have Jerrold, then Ashley Norton. The two doubles after that, Xander Norwood and Amanda Vanderwood, then Chelsea Mott and Rachel Welch. Then we go back to a single we just found, Brandon Scott.” He tapped the last photograph. The picture showed the rictus-gripped face of a young man who’d not seen enough sunrises. Beautiful features ruined by death. Taylor wondered what they looked like alive, then pushed that thought away. No sense in it—she’d be haunted by their death masks forever.
“Are you hearing of any links between the victims? Any enemies?”
“No. No one knows a damn thing.”
“Where was the first couple found?”
“At the Vanderwood girl’s house.”
“Then let’s go there.”
The trek didn’t take them long—the Vanderwoods’ house was only a quarter mile up Estes. It was less showy than the previous two homes, smaller, with whitewashed clapboard and a red front door. All the lights were on, and crime-scene techs darted in and out. A small group of neighbors watched silently from the lawn, sadness etched on their faces.
The stairs seemed endless, the now-familiar scent of jasmine clinging to the air in the hallway. Amanda’s room was the first at the top of the stairs. A death investigator took pictures, the shutter’s snap rang in Taylor’s ears. It was one of the most common sounds she heard at a crime scene, but it felt invasive and new tonight.
Xander Norwood was on the floor, on his back, naked. Amanda Vanderwood was also nude, her body faceup and partially on the bed, arms trailing onto the floor. Taylor noticed that Amanda’s forefinger was touching Xander’s palm. It looked like she’d managed to use the last of her strength to partially shift her body off the bed, and Xander had reached out to her, struggling to get their flesh together in the waning moments of their young lives. Love everlasting.
For the first time in many years of crime scenes, Taylor felt sick to her stomach.
Wouldn’t Baldwin’s caress be the last she’d ever want to feel? Wouldn’t his face be the last image she’d want to see, his lips the last to touch hers, his words to fill her ears? To die with the one you loved at hand, that was grace.
Taylor forced the romanticism away, became clinical and cool. Rigor was setting in. Their lips were tinged with blue, the bodies carved with the same pentacles as the others. Xander was partially wearing a condom, the wrapper was on the floor next to the night table. Were they in the act, getting ready to have sex or finishing when the killer struck? She supposed it didn’t matter, there were no defensive wounds, no real disturbance in the room. It was like they’d simply gone to sleep in permanently awkward positions, with a large, glowing star cut into their flesh.
Baldwin circled the bodies, then stepped to the girl’s messy desk.
“Have you photographed all of this?” he asked. The ’gator nodded. Baldwin poked through the girl’s gym bag, then moved to her purse. He withdrew a plastic bag from the inside pocket of the Coach hobo, four small pills riding in the bottom.
“Taylor,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Look at this.”
The pills were blue, tiny as baby aspirin, with a heart stamped on one side.
“X,” Taylor said.
“Yep.” He handed them to the death investigator who was attending the body.
“Don’t lose these,” Baldwin admonished.
“Like that would happen,” the kid replied. He was new—Taylor didn’t recognize him. She felt like she’d seen him somewhere before, but couldn’t place him. Not surprising—with Metro’s influx of new people, there were plenty of faces she couldn’t put to names. His ID card was strung on a yellow-and-black lanyard around his neck, she saw his picture and the name B. Iles. He took the Baggie from Baldwin reverently, photographed it and labeled it into evidence.
“They were found like this?” Taylor asked the young man.
“Yes, ma’am. Nothing’s been moved. We’re waiting for the medical examiner to declare.”
“Can’t you do it?” She was surprised. Death investigators, fondly referred to as ’gators, had the power to run a scene without the presence of a medical examiner.
“I can, but word came down that each scene had to be cleared by one of the ME’s.”
“Who gave that word?”
“Commander Huston.”
Ah. Her new boss was by the book, too. Taylor had no problem with that, though she knew Sam would be frustrated as hell. They’d have to roust the entire staff of Forensic Medical, all six of the medical examiners, to handle this mess.
“That’s good enough for me. Anything else you saw that I should know about?”
“No, ma’am. I’ve documented everything, stills and video. Crime Scene’s been looking for the weapon, the knife that was used, but as far as I know, none have been found at any of the scenes. We’ve lifted fibers galore, trace, fingerprints. If the killer left anything of himself behind, we’ll find it.”
“Why do you say ‘himself’?” Taylor asked.
Iles blushed. “Well, I shouldn’t jump to conclusions, but we found a couple of black hairs that obviously didn’t belong to either of these two. One was lying right on top of the male decedent’s chest. It was short, I just assumed it was male.”
“That’s interesting. Does it have a tag?” They’d be able to get DNA off the hair if a follicle was attached.
“No. It was broken off.”
“Too bad. Keep looking, there might be more. If you see something that matches what he used to carve them up, let me know immediately. We need to make sure that every kid’s effects are accounted for, that their gym bags, backpacks and purses are all searched. Find their cell phones and planners, too. Okay? Pass that down the line to your other investigators for me, tell the crime-scene techs, too. And ask them to keep an eye out for more drugs.”
“I’ll take care of it right now.”
“Thank you. Hey, what’s your first name?”
“Barclay. Barclay Iles.”
“Okay, Barclay. I’m Taylor Jackson. This is Supervisory Special Agent John Baldwin.”
“I know,” he said, his voice tinged with the kind of awe that made her cringe. Ah, well. Better awe than derision.
“Get on it,” she said. The ’gator scooted from the room. Taylor heard him breathing deeply in the hall. This was bound to be rough on all of them, heck, half the investigative staff were fresh out of college themselves.
She stared into the room one more time, at the touching, the carving, the silent agony Xander and Amanda had experienced. She wished she could rewind their day and prevent this. It was a fruitless wish.
“What do you think happened here, Baldwin? Is there something I’m missing?”
He was stalking around the room carefully, taking everything in. She knew that look—he was there, but completely abstracted, thinking about the incidents that would have led to the murders.
“I’m just wondering about the timing.”
“Halloween?”
“No, the time of death. All of the victims died around the same time. If the killer was in every house…”
“We have to wait for Sam to determine time and cause of death, but I think you’re right. Too many dead for just one person—is that where you’re going?”
He looked at her with a smile of appreciation. “I am.”
“How many killers, do you think?”
“I don’t know.” He turned away from her, ran his gloved finger along the spine of a book. Taylor saw it was one of her favorites, Wuthering Heights, and felt a pang. Amanda Vanderwood would never read again.
She heard a commotion from downstairs, voices raised.
“Now what?” she asked, resisting the urge to pull her hair down and run her fingers through it to help her think. The gesture was so compulsive, so ingrained that she had to stick her hands in her pockets, the nitrile catching on the edge of her jeans. Baldwin leaned his head toward the open door, where the voices were growing louder.
“We better go find out what’s going on.”
“I know.” Taylor sighed. Please, God, not more bodies.
They made their way downstairs to see Lincoln arguing with an older couple. Taylor was surprised, she thought the Vanderwoods were out of town. When Lincoln made the introductions, she understood and immediately went on guard.
“Lieutenant, this is Laura and Aaron Norwood, Xander’s parents.”
Taylor took off her gloves and shook hands with them. The Norwoods were an older couple, the husband still dressed for work in a blue suit and light blue tie, his wife in a brown velour jogging suit that stretched tight across her ample chest. She’d been weeping and her eyes were swollen and red, but dry of tears at the moment.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Taylor said automatically, knowing the words were hardly a comfort.
Mr. Norwood nodded brusquely. “We came when we heard. We wanted to be close. We want to see our son. Who did this?”
“We’re trying to figure that out, sir. Can you excuse us for a moment?”
She stepped into the hallway with Lincoln and Baldwin, speaking to Lincoln in a low undertone.
“We need Father Victor and some more chaplains. Can you get him over here?” The department chaplain was required to be a part of notifications to family members, and Taylor was so used to having a member of the clergy along that she was uncomfortable speaking to the Norwoods without him.
Lincoln whispered, “He’s at another scene. We’ve asked for backup, and we’ll get it for tomorrow, but right now, we’re it. Just FYI, Norwood’s being awfully pushy. I had to restrain him when he first got here. He’s calm now, but I’m not sure how long that’s going to last.”
Taylor indulged at last, took her hair down, rubbed her fingers across her scalp, then put her hair back in its bun. It wasn’t like she could go back to the Norwoods and say, sorry, I can’t talk, my favorite priest isn’t here to shelter me from your distress.
Baldwin’s cell phone started to ring. He put up an apologetic hand, murmured, “I need to get this,” and disappeared outside.
Taylor watched him go. “Can’t blame him. I hate this part, too. All right. Let’s do this.”
She reentered the living room with Lincoln, met the pain in their eyes full on. They’d retreated into that helpless state, unbelieving, unresisting, the reality of their son’s death still trying to seep into their souls. She didn’t have much time—they’d either slip away entirely into a grief so profound nothing would rouse them, or fly off the handle, become belligerent and difficult. Better to keep them focused on the here and now, if at all possible.
“Mr. and Mrs. Norwood, can you tell me more about Xander and Amanda?”
Mr. Norwood shook his head, reiterated his request. “We want to see Xander. It’s only right. We deserve a chance to say goodbye to our son.”
Just in case they decided to ignore her, Taylor crossed her arms on her chest and leaned against the doorjamb, effectively blocking their access to the stairs.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t let you do that. We have to work on the scene, and I’ll be completely honest with you, it’s not pretty. You don’t want this vision of Xander as the last you’ll ever have. You’re going to have to trust me. I give you my word that I’ll take good care of him.”
Mr. Norwood stared into her eyes for a long moment. She took his gaze, unflinching. I will treat him with respect. I will see his killer punished. After a long minute, he dropped his eyes to the floor and nodded. She seized the opportunity to try again.
“It would be a big help if you could answer some questions for me. Can you talk about Xander for a few minutes? Tell me about him? About Amanda?”
Laura Norwood breathed out a ragged sigh, a small smile of remembrance playing on her lips.
“What do you want to know? They were inseparable. Been going together for two years, were probably going to be together forever. You know how there’s always that couple, the ones who met early and that was it? That’s Xander and Amanda. The big joke was they were going to change their name to Woods, since our last names are so similar. That’s what their friends called them, the Woods. Amanda’s nickname was Woodie before she met Xander, so her friend’s teased her, called her Woodie Woodpecker. Xander and Amanda loved it. She was on the cheerleading squad, and it was just announced that she’d be captain next year. My God, I can’t believe this is happening.” Her hands started to shake and her husband took them, held them hard between his palms.
“Now, Laura, that’s not the kind of thing the police want to know. They need to know about enemies, and last moves, what kind of drugs and alcohol they were into. They only want to know the bad things. I’ve seen it all on TV. Just the bad things….” He broke off with a sob.
Taylor put her hand on his arm, spoke gently.
“No, sir. We want to know it all. Everything you tell us is relevant. Everything matters, the good and the bad. The more information we can gather today, the quicker we can catch the person who hurt your son. But if he did have any enemies or problems, we need to know.”
As she said it, she realized she was going to have this conversation with seven families, and the thought nearly made her legs buckle. Who could do such a thing? Who could annihilate seven children? Focus, Taylor.
She looked around the room. “You know what, why don’t we sit down? We’ll be more comfortable. And you tell me anything that comes to mind about your son. It sounds like he had a lot of friends. Was that the case?”
They settled on opposite sides of a walnut coffee table, on facing barn-red twill couches, the perfect conversational grouping in the living room. The Vanderwoods obviously entertained—the whole house was set with various nooks and spots for small gatherings to linger.
Mrs. Norwood wiped her eyes with a ragged tissue. “Of course. Xander was very popular. Captain of the wrestling team, letterman, honor society. Smart, that was our boy. He was accepted early to Vanderbilt, that way he could stay at home his first year until Amanda graduated and joined him. Amanda is…oh, God, was, such a lovely girl. We were proud to have her as a part of our family. Even Xander’s sister seemed to like Amanda, and she’s not usually fond of her big brother’s friends.” As she spoke, her eyes started to shine, the recollection pulling her from her misery. Just as quickly, she collapsed back into tears. Mr. Norwood tried to take over, but his voice was shaking, too.
“Xander was a good boy. Reckless, sometimes, like any boy his age. Had a slew of speeding tickets. He was probably going to lose his license if he didn’t buckle down and go through that class you have to take. He loved to drive.”
“Does he have his own car?”
“Yes, a Volvo. We took one look at his driving skills and got him the safest car we could find. Amanda had a Jeep, and I was always worried about him driving it and tipping over.”
The Norwoods shared a private laugh. Taylor was struck by their composure. It was rare for parents to pull themselves together so quickly. The shell had tightened; the cool, calm, rational people were poking through. It was strange—some parents became hysterical and unable to talk, some would sit you down and relay every detail. She never knew what to expect, was happy the Norwoods fell into the latter category. She needed this information, needed to build a victimology on their son.
“Is that his Volvo parked in the driveway?”
“Yes, it is.”
She nodded at Lincoln, silently indicating that he needed to get Crime Scene on the car. He nodded back. Oh, it was good to have her team together again.
Taylor tried to figure out how to put the next question delicately. “Was it…typical for Xander and Amanda to have private time alone?”
Mrs. Norwood blew her nose, then said, “Are you asking if we knew they were having sex, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She sighed heavily. “Surely you remember what it was like being a teenager in love. We discouraged them, of course, but they were hell-bent. We talked to Xander extensively—he promised that they were being careful. I believe Amanda was taking birth control pills, but you’ll have to ask her mother about that. We’ve called her parents, but they’re overseas. It’s going to take them a day to get back home. Just terrible for them. At least we’re here, can be with Xander’s sister through this.”
“Where is your daughter?”
“Susan? She’s at home with our housekeeper. Aaron, we really should start getting back there for her.” They started the small shiftings that told Taylor their interview was at an end.
“Before you go, can you tell me anything else about Amanda?”
“Oh, Mandy was…sunny. Beautiful. Smart. She was in honor society too, debate, student council, you name it. Her parents are from a very old Nashville family who wanted her to be as proletariat as possible. They were pushing her toward a life in public service. They could have sent her anywhere, but they both went to public school and wanted her to, as well. That’s how many of us feel around here. Really, she and Xander were the perfect couple.”
A perfect couple who’d been targeted by a madman. There was something wicked this way, Taylor was sure of it. No child is perfect, and if Taylor’s background could be any sort of guide, it was the ones who seemed rosy on the surface that hid the biggest secrets.
“Was there any drug or alcohol use that you know of?”
“Here we go,” Mr. Norwood muttered.
“I’m sorry, sir. I have to ask.”
“Nothing that was out of the ordinary. Xander was an eighteen-year-old boy. But he’s a straight arrow, had to be for the wrestling.”
Mrs. Norwood shook her head. “He’s been caught with beer a few times, but nothing more than that. We always grounded him. There were repercussions. But you know how it is. Sometimes it’s easier to let them do what they’re going to do in a place where you can keep your eye on them.”
That was the trick. Serve your child the liquor at home so you could monitor them. Taylor’s family had always allowed alcohol at the table, but if she drank out with friends and got caught, she was grounded. Nothing out of the ordinary there, outside of a few laws or fifty broken.
Taylor nodded. This wasn’t her battle right now. “Okay. So school let out at noon today. Did you talk to Xander this afternoon?”
Mrs. Norwood’s face fell. “No, I’m afraid we didn’t. The last I saw him, he was walking out the door this morning, happy as a lark because it was Halloween. They had a party to go to tonight.”
That got Taylor’s attention. “Where was the party supposed to be?”
“At his friend Theo Howell’s. Evelyn and Harold are friends of ours. They’re actually traveling with Amanda’s parents now. But we know them well. We’ve always trusted Xander to be at their place without supervision.”
Taylor made a note. With any luck, the party was still going on, or at least had a gathering of kids who might have a better handle on the victims. She couldn’t push the thought from her mind that they might be a target too. She couldn’t take that chance, but she didn’t want to alarm the Norwoods.
“Do you have the address? I’d like to talk to Theo, if I could.”
“Certainly. I have Theo’s numbers too, home and cell. I’ll get them. They’re in my purse.” Mrs. Norwood straightened out of her chair and disappeared, returning a moment later with a handwritten note and more tissues. When she sat, Taylor noticed the woman looked gray. It was time to wrap it up for now. This family needed a chance to grieve, and Taylor was itching to get someone to the party, to get more information from the living. To protect them, if need be. She stood and shook their hands.
“Ma’am, sir, I’m going to leave you now. I need to get back to another scene. If you think of anything that might be relevant, please don’t hesitate to call.”
They seemed smaller, less consequential than when she had first walked in. It was always that way—reality set in and sapped their strength, their air, their very being.
Mr. Norwood looked at his wife, pale as a ghost, and said, “Are you sure we can’t see him?”
Taylor touched him on the shoulder, light and reassuring.
“I’m sure. It’s for the best, believe me. I think you and Mrs. Norwood need to go home to Susan now.”
Defeated, they struggled to their feet, arms wrapped around each other. Holding themselves together. “We’ll be at the house if you need anything.”
Taylor was terribly relieved. Sometimes families fought her harder on this, insisted on sticking at the crime scene, even going so far as to sneak into the scene for a last peek. It was never a good idea. At least at the medical examiner’s office, the visual identifications were done on a closed loop feed, so parents and loved ones wouldn’t be face-to-face with their dead. The little bit of distance sometimes helped.
Sometimes.
Lincoln escorted the Norwoods out the front door. The moment they were out of earshot, she called McKenzie, ordered him over to the Howells’ house with four patrols to stand guard. Protection for their case, and the innocent lives, all in one swoop.
She just hoped she wasn’t too late.
Four
Samhain
Moonrise
They were four—the points of a compass, the corners of the earth. North, South, East and West. The elements of their worship: Earth, Air, Fire and Water. Wraiths dressed in black, scurrying through the graveyard one by one so they weren’t seen from the road.
This was a desolate place, far from the safety lights that peppered the modern landscape, astride a pitted country lane. A family cemetery: the husband and wife were buried at the head of the path. The road cut through their progeny, one side of the path for the man’s family, the other side for the woman’s. It had started as a cow path, centuries before, wormed its way into the earth gradually, until it was a clear demarcation. The people who took the earth felt it was prophetic, a way to walk amongst their dead without trampling on their spirits. They were considerate thinkers, these hardy men and women. The intent to travel, to wander, was stamped on all who sprang from the loins of this family, permanently marked by the meandering path through their consecrated land that allowed travelers to disturb their eternal rest.
Balance was necessary. That’s why he’d chosen this cemetery in the first place. He’d spent hours combing the countryside, looking for his sacred place. Once he found it, he claimed it as his own, drew an invisible circle, grounded his body and cast his spell, making a sacrifice to the land—three drops of his blood mixed into the earth beneath the tall, stately oak that bounded the west border of the graveyard. The oak had responded in kind, accepting his offering and allowing a limb to drop at his feet. It was exactly the length of his arm from his elbow to the point of his middle finger, already smooth of bark and leaves, tapered slightly at the end, which created a perfect place for his hand to grasp.
The branch became his wand, and he used his athamé, a two-sided blade with a hilt of the blackest obsidian, to carve his name into the oak in sigil letters—the witches’ alphabet—each corresponding to a point on the numerological chart, giving the wand incalculable powers at his hand. The athamé had cost him a year’s allowance, the wand cost him blood, but it was well worth it. They were the tools of his religion.
He worshipped alone at the base of the oak, calling on the Goddess to bless him, the God to give him strength. He danced in the moonlight, cast harmless spells against his enemies carefully, followed close to the Wiccan’s Rede—First, do no harm. He knew that whatever he cast forth would return to him threefold, so he didn’t seek to maim, just annoy. He worshipped with joy, with despair, with love in his heart, with pain in his limbs.
When he felt the space was so completely attuned to his nature that it greeted him when he returned, the oak dropping leaves or bending to the whispering breeze, he brought his friends.
They were four—the corners, the watchers. North, South, East and West. Two boys, two girls. Balance.
The older of the two girls belonged to him, six feet of creamy, milky skin so pale she almost didn’t need to use makeup to make herself disappear, with tumbling black locks that reached nearly to her waist. She was green-eyed, thin as a whippet but with womanly curves in all the right places, and if it weren’t against all his beliefs he would worship her as the Goddess. But she was flesh and blood. His flesh and his blood. They shared everything, every fluid, every waking moment. He felt incomplete when she wasn’t near, and as such kept her close always.
The boy was his closest friend and his occasional lover. He was handsome, with tousled blond hair and brown eyes, short and stocky and incredibly strong. Their youngest member had dark hair too, uncontrollably curly. She was a good physical match for her mate, small and solid, with thick calves and a cleft chin.
He trusted them with his life.
The four shared blood; through sacrifice, through a common vision, through the Great Act. Sex was their most powerful union, the blessing on their worship. They had been handfast, in the tradition of the Old Ways, declaring themselves for one another. They were looking for a Wiccan high priest who would do the official ceremony, legalizing their marriages in the eyes of the Goddess. They would go as couples, then as a quadrant.
While his magick was powerful, with his corners he could shift the very earth. His corners were his friends and lovers. His coven. They would follow him anywhere, and he would sacrifice himself for them in turn.
So when he told them the nonbelievers must die, they believed. They were The Immortals, and the night was theirs.
They had come tonight, the first night of the new moon, to cast a spell to Azræl, the Angel of Death. The last new moon, they had congregated, taken earth from the graveyard, said their spells and magickally charged it to allow the earth time to open, to allow a rift in the universe to form. Tonight they sought Azræl’s blessing; a celebration of their wondrous evening.
Samhain, what the Christians and Jews called Halloween, was a sacred night, when the veil between the two worlds was at its thinnest and spirits walked openly between the afterlife and the living. Samhain marked the Wiccan New Year, a sober celebration, a time for reflection. Messages were sent, ancestors honored, blessings bestowed. He had chosen Samhain as the night of the cleansing, the night when they would rid the world of their enemies. If they received the proper blessings tonight, he could put the rest of his plan into action.
It was nearly time. They had a great deal of work to do. He led the four to the oak.
“Who comes to call Azræl?” he cried.
They stepped forward in turn, beginning with the tall girl.
“It is I, Fane. Blessed be.”
“I am Thorn. So mote it be.”
“It is Ember, the bright spark. Blessed be.”
He stood with them, head thrown back to the sky, speaking slowly and carefully. Their names conjured great power—he could already feel the ripples of energy coursing through the air.
“I am Raven, leader of this coven. In the name of the God and the Goddess, so mote it be.”
He struck a match and touched the flame to a stick of jasmine incense, then lit twelve black candles, three for each of them. The clearing began to glow. They’d already set out the stones: a violet amethyst, melanite, dark tiger’s eye and a piece of jet. The elestial stone, their record-keeper—a jagged piece of milky quartz—sat on top of the pile. It would be buried near the site after the ceremony, a permanent archaic tie to the earth.
Contact with the netherworld was meant as a silent meditation, but Raven had written a beautiful oral spell in his Book of Shadows, had copied it out neatly three times for his coven. They’d memorized it silently on the way over, each poring through the letters until they’d committed the words to heart.
They shed their clothes, kicked the dark stacks of cloth well out of the way of the candles so there was no chance of fire. They worshipped skyclad, naked in the cool night air, never feeling a moment’s embarrassment. Their bodies were astral temples, and beautiful despite any superficial cultural flaw.
They drew cords from their bags, each nine feet in length, and took up their athamés and wands. They shuffled a bit, from foot to foot, shaking away any last bits of energy that would disrupt their ritual. Focusing.
Raven glanced at his watch, looked to the moon-blank sky. It was time.
They lined up in their corners, facing one another in a circle, silent and serious. The dark was broken only by the shimmering candles that reflected the glow of their pale flesh.
Raven began the ceremony. “We come together in perfect love and perfect trust. So mote it be.”
“Perfect love and perfect trust. So mote it be,” they repeated after him, speaking in practiced unison. He used his athamé to draw a wide, invisible circle at their feet, chanting, “Cast the circle, draw it right, bring the corners to us tonight.” He walked in a wide arc, sprinkling salt water to create the borders of the circle. Fane followed behind him with the lit incense, sanctifying their footsteps. The circle was where they practiced their magick—inside the consecrated space, their prayers could be heard.
Once the circle was cast, Raven stepped inside, bade his coven to follow suit. When they were secure, he called the corners, using his athamé to trace specific angled pentacles in the air, each slightly different, depending on the corner he was calling.
“All hail to the element of air, Watchtower of the East. May you stand in strength and bless our prayers. Powers of the air, we summon you to join our circle.” He turned to his right and drew in the air again, forceful slashes, purposeful. Practiced.
“All hail the element of fire, Watchtower of the South. May you stand in strength and bless our prayers. Powers of fire, we summon you to protect our circle.”
He turned again, and again. “All hail to the element of water, Watchtower of the West. May you stand in strength and bless our prayers. Power of water, we summon you to guard our circle.
“All hail to the element of earth, Watchtower of the North. May you stand in strength and bless our prayers. Powers of earth, we summon you to provide us guidance and success in our ministrations.”
The calls complete, Raven reached into the bag next to him and sprinkled the magickally charged earth they’d taken at the last new moon around the circle in a slow dribble. This would open the portal between the two worlds while keeping them safely grounded in the now.
“May the Goddess and the God look upon us in favor. All hail the Goddess. All hail the God.”
The group spoke in turn. “All hail the Goddess. All hail the God.”
He kissed the blade of his athamé, the others followed suit. Then they took up their cords, intertwining them, feeding them through each other’s hands until they were bound together. Raven caught each eye, nodding slightly. It was time to call Azræl. Time for their reward.
They pushed their personal energy into the earth, grounding, then reversed, bringing the earth’s power into their bodies. The force of it made them shiver. With their hands facing into the circle, they directed their power to the center and created an invisible cone, then walked widdershins, counter-clockwise, three times, pushing that energy down, toward their goal, ending back in their original spots. There was great danger in casting a widdershins circle, but Raven had assured them that the best, most direct route to Azræl was through a negative portal, downward, not upward to the light. Besides, they were guarded by the four Watchtowers and the God and Goddess. He was confident they were safe.
He reached behind him and withdrew a small finger bone from his bag. Death liked bones—it was the soul’s truest form. Death understood that he was a part of all natural life.
The four of them turned to face the west, and Raven carefully, gently laid the finger bone in the dirt beside their stones. They breathed slowly, modulating their breath to match their partner, calming and balancing their energy. Deeper breaths now, with pauses in between to help them overoxygenate their blood and raise their consciousness. Raven could tell when they were all perfectly attuned, and he began to chant. The others followed a fraction of a second later. Their voices carried through the graveyard.
Azræl Azræl Az-rah-el.
Azræl Azræl Az-rah-el.
Azræl Azræl Azzzz-raaaah-elllll.
Angel of darkness, come bless us.
Angel of darkness, come bend us.
Angel of darkness, bring our true natures to the fore.
Bring us your power, and a sign of your blessing. We call to you, O ancient one, who dwells beyond the realms.
You who once reigned in the time before time. Come, hear our call.
Assist us to open the way, give us the power!
They repeated the poem three times, building into a tuneless chant.
Then Raven spoke, his arms spread wide, his head thrown back. “Bless us for finding the strength to rid the world of those who hurt us, who deceived and tortured. Fight our oppressors—punish those who are cruel to us. Allow us to know your divinity, to understand your ways, to find a painless path to keep us from shame. Show us the way, oh, Azræl. Night and need give life to your helping fire. Rectify our darkness, spread your wings of shadow through our souls. Watch over our houses, deflect their ire.”
At the end, they repeated their nocturnal God’s name over and over and over, turning in circles, winding themselves around each other, sinuous as snakes, then at the moment they felt the energy peak, consecrated their prayers with the Great Act. Raven and Thorn were so attuned to each other that they were able to climax at the same time. Their energy, like their seed, spilled into the earth, sanctifying their pact. The girls kissed, and the boys. They smeared the fluids along each other’s bodies, intricate glowing trails of symbols, then switched partners. The men writhed together while the women brought each other to a wild, breathless climax. They were all so good together, so right. The strongest magick was cast during the Great Act at the moment of shared orgasm.
Panting in the dust, they allowed their minds to come back. They stood, shakily, and unbound their cords. Raven thanked the corners, bid them hail and farewell. He closed the circle, careful to walk deosil, clockwise, to close their downward portal.
There was still energy in the air, crisp and crackling, so Raven told his coven to ground again so it wouldn’t drain their essences. Raven shut his eyes and envisioned a long, glowing root leaving his body and securing itself in the land, then let all his extra energy pour down the root. He felt better when he finished, smiled at Fane. They busied themselves with ending their prayers, burying the stone and the finger, blowing out the candles, dressing silently.
A breeze started, getting stronger until their hair was whipping around their faces. Thunder rumbled in the distance, then again, and lightning flashed, suddenly close. The sharp scent of ozone invaded Raven’s nose. He smiled.
“I didn’t think it was going to rain tonight,” Fane whispered.
“It wasn’t. Azræl has blessed our prayers,” Raven said. “We have been blessed. Nothing can stop us now.”
Five
Nashville
7:50 p.m.
Baldwin circled the Vanderwoods’ house until he found a quiet spot in the backyard.
“Sorry about that, Garrett. Needed to get clear of a situation. What’s up?”
“Well, I don’t have good news. The crypto boys sent a report in about some things they found on Charlotte Douglas’s computer.”
Baldwin stood straighter. Charlotte Douglas was a profiler he’d worked with years ago, and again just a few months back, on the Snow White case. She’d ended up embarrassing the Bureau before her untimely demise at the hands of a killer she’d recruited into her life—the same killer who stalked Taylor now. The Pretender was Charlotte’s creation, first an apprentice of the Snow White, then a self-named terror who’d invaded all of their lives.
Charlotte had brought death to their doors, and now it sounded like the Bureau was resurrecting the past. He held out hope that Charlotte’s records would help identify who the Pretender really was. But when she died, and the Bureau tried accessing her files, they self-destructed using a sophisticated encryption. Their best people had been working for months to resuscitate her work.
Charlotte was just as dangerous dead as she had been alive.
“And?”
“It seems she has some files pertaining to you. To a…relationship the two of you were having. She was rather graphic. And she’s made some other allegations against you.”
“Son of a bitch.”
“Yes. Well, we knew parts of this might come back to bite us. Don’t worry, okay?”
“Garrett, you know that Charlotte—”
“Baldwin, I know. Trust me, I know. I’m sorry, but this is out of my hands. I’ve been instructed to recall you to Quantico immediately so you can go before the disciplinary board first thing tomorrow morning for a little chat. I caught a shitload of heat when I told them you were in Nashville. So get yourself back up here. I’ve sent the plane for you. It should be ready to collect you shortly.”
“Is this serious, Garrett?”
His boss was silent for a few moments. “Yes, I think it is. They haven’t disclosed everything to me. I’ve arranged for Reginald Beauchamp to represent your interests at the hearing, just in case.”
“Whoa, I need counsel? I thought you said this was just a chat.”
“Baldwin, I’m not willing to take any chances. I’ve already defended you, told them any charges against you by that woman were ludicrous. But they’re very insistent.”
“Making an example out of me,” Baldwin grumbled.
“It’s possible. They have her files now. The focus isn’t on you and Charlotte—it’s gone deeper. They’re especially interested in the Harold Arlen incident. The past is catching up with us.”
This time Baldwin groaned aloud. “Damn it, that case has been closed for years. I was cleared of all wrongdoing. Why are they bringing it up again?”
“You know why.”
Baldwin breathed deeply through his nose, surprised that all he could smell was burned leaves tinged with fresh blood. He’d spent years trying to forget, to move on. To erase the dank scent of basement rot, the vision of shattered lives. The self-fulfilling prophecy that was Charlotte Douglas. God, Taylor couldn’t know. He needed to make sure of that.
Garrett was speaking again.
“I need to warn you. Apparently, Charlotte’s files had some extras that weren’t in your original reports. They want…clarification.”
“Clarifications that include lawyers and hearings. Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?”
“Yes. Obviously, the phone…”
Baldwin felt himself shutting down, the rigid professionalism that got him through the most heinous of crime scenes filtering into his system. His detachment was his gift, and he readily employed it now. To think, to speculate about what might be waiting for him in Quantico would surely derail him before they asked the first question. He’d need all his powers of stability to face this issue all over again. The last time it had nearly cost him his life. He had much more to lose now.
“I’ll be there. Thanks for trying, Garrett. You’ve been carrying this load for a long time. We’re just going to have to take our chances and see how things shake out.”
Baldwin hung up his cell phone and slumped back against the deck. The woods behind the house were dark and foreboding, alive with crickets and the rustlings of small rodents. He thought he heard thunder roiling in the distance. This was not good news. Two thousand-four had been a horrible year, and reliving it, as he was sure to have to do, wasn’t going to be a good experience. He’d fought hard to clear his name back then, and he’d do it again now. Surely Charlotte’s notes were exaggerations of the truth. That was her forte.
He could only hope that it didn’t go any deeper.
Six
Nashville
8:00 p.m.
Taylor shut the door on the Norwoods and leaned back against the frame. She needed to see the last two crime scenes—the second double especially—but she needed a break. She wondered where Baldwin had gone.
She had just flipped open her cell phone to call him when he rounded the corner of the house, hands in his hair. The ends were sticking up in the back. She stepped off the porch and met him in the yard. He was white, obviously furious.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
He look startled for a moment, then shook his head. “Nothing. I’ve just got to go back up to Quantico. Garrett needs me on a case.”
There was something in his voice, a note of doubt that she immediately seized on. He wasn’t telling her the whole truth. She reached out and touched his chin, turning his face to hers.
“A case?”
He gave her a halfhearted grin. “An old case. They need some testimony about it. I’m so sorry to have to run out on you.”
“We’ll be fine. Are you leaving in the morning?”
“Now, actually. Garrett sent the plane. I’ll have to review my notes and the hearing starts at 7:00.”
She could feel his distraction, decided not to force it. One thing she’d learned about Baldwin, he would eventually tell her what was going on. Pushing him when he was still working things out wouldn’t get her anywhere. And she had enough on her hands here.
“Do you need a ride? I can get a patrol to take you to the airport.”
He nodded. “That would be great. Thank you.”
He kissed her, letting his hand linger for a moment around the back of her neck. He felt so…sad. It was coming off him in waves. She wished she could help, knew he’d come to her when he was ready for actual consolation.
“Honey, can I help?” she asked softly.
His answering smile was grim. “I wish you could, Taylor. But I have to handle this myself.”
Taylor watched the patrol car drive away, wondering again what in the world could drag Baldwin to Quantico at this hour. She didn’t have time to worry about it; she had too much work to do. The chill was setting in, the air crisp with cold. She shivered, started to go back inside the Vanderwoods’ when her cell rang.
It was Marcus, distraught and short.
“We have another body,” he said. “Female teen, four streets over from Estes, Warfield Lane. Completely off the original path.”
Jesus. She thought they were in the clear. There’d been no new reports for over an hour. The house-to-house canvass had calmed, people were off the streets and barricaded in their homes. The media was frustrated, being kept away from the crime scenes. Too bad. They’d be able to dine out on this news for weeks anyway.
“I’ll be right there,” she said.
Taylor bolted out the front door, ran directly into Sam. She grabbed Sam’s arm for balance, narrowly avoided falling down the front steps.
“Good grief, cookie, who lit your hair on fire?”
“Sorry about that, Sam. I’ve got another. Want to hit it with me?”
“Another? Good God. That makes, what?”
“Eight. Can we go now? Marcus just called and he’s obviously crushed.”
“Yeah. I’ll come back and declare this one afterward. Where’s Baldwin?”
“He got called back to Quantico, some sort of emergency.”
“Like this isn’t one.”
“No kidding.”
They wound their way under the crime-scene tape strung across the road and drove down a few streets to Warfield Lane. This house wasn’t as fancy as those on Estes—just a single-story cottage, but still spacious with a lovely, well-groomed yard. A pumpkin sat on the steps, not yet carved.
Marcus met them at the door, face pale.
“She’s in the back room. And just so you know, that’s not the only part of the pattern that’s broken. She’s not a Hillsboro student, she goes to St. Cecilia’s.”
Taylor took that in. “Hmm. She wasn’t in her bedroom, either?”
“No, a den. Looks like she was doing her homework. She’s on the floor behind the desk. Her mom said she likes to work in the window seat. The dog is lying next to her. He won’t leave her side.”
His voice was thick with sorrow. Taylor empathized. They were all going to be taking turns with the department shrink after this was over. Now they were up to eight. Eight teenagers in a single day. The only way it could get worse was if it had happened at school, with more children witnessing the deaths of their classmates.
A narrow hallway, voices from the kitchen. She caught a glimpse of color—a red blouse, the mother sobbing at the kitchen table—then they were at the entrance to the den. The room was paneled in walnut, small and cozy, with bookshelves lining the walls and a big bay window. Taylor and Sam stepped behind the desk.
A chocolate lab growled at them, the whites of his eyes showing. He dropped his head on his paws and whined, the hackles raised on the back of his neck.
“Down, boy. It’s okay.” She turned to Marcus. “What’s his name?”
“Ranger.”
“Okay, Ranger. It’s okay.” She inched closer. The dog seemed to sense the inevitable. He bared his teeth and snapped at her, then slowly, as if his bones ached, got to his feet. His back legs hitched as he moved. Hip dysplasia, Taylor noted absently. Poor thing was old.
“You’ve done your job, Ranger. She’ll be safe with us.” As Taylor spoke, she gently eased her hand around the dog’s neck and got ahold of his collar. She could feel him shaking. “He’s exhausted. Okay, sweet boy. Time to go.”
The dog sighed, then allowed himself to be led away. Taylor scratched him behind the ears as she handed him off to Marcus, then turned back to the body.
The girl was petite, blond hair in a disheveled ponytail, strands sneaking out and falling in tendrils around her face. Her lips were blue. She was naked from the waist up, her budding breasts smeared with blood, the top button of her jeans undone. The pentacle carved in the long curves on her flat stomach was oozing blood. Her small body started to shake.
“Wait a minute,” Sam said. “Son of a bitch. She’s convulsing.” Taylor saw a small bubble of blood form on the girl’s lip. She stared in dull horror for a moment, then both women leaped to the girl’s side. Taylor pushed her fingers into the girl’s neck, felt a tiny, thready pulsing.
“Get the EMTs! She’s alive.”
The ambulance screamed away into the night, EMTs pumping hard on the girl’s chest, her mother crying, holding her free hand. Taylor stood in the doorway to Brittany Carson’s house. Ranger was cuddled against her legs.
Sam was behind her. She ripped off her gloves, snapped, “It’s been within the last hour. And it’s definitely drugs—her pupils were fixed and pinpoint. Whatever they’ve taken, it’s some kind of narcotic.”
Taylor turned back to her best friend. “Do you think that’s why the dog wouldn’t leave her side? Because he knew she was alive?”
Sam tucked a swoop of bang behind her right ear, then rubbed her hand across her eyes. She suddenly looked older, more harassed. She sighed, then said, “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s probably a moot point. She’s lost a lot of blood, and she was cyanotic. All the other bodies were carved up postmortem. Their hearts weren’t pumping blood. Hers was a steady, slow loss. Depending on what she took…regardless, it’s definitely more recent than the others.”
Taylor watched her sharply. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m just really tired. Can’t seem to catch up on my sleep these days.” Sam stepped away, started loading her gear back into her scene kit.
“Sam?”
“What?”
“You know the last time you looked tired like this?”
“No, when?”
Taylor smiled, crossed her arms. “I don’t know, think back. Maybe…twenty, twenty-one months ago?”
Sam stopped, still and frozen in time. Her eyes met Taylor’s. “No.”
“I think that’s the wrong answer, Mommy.”
Sam sank into a chair, groaning. “No, no, no! I can’t be. Not yet, not now. I refuse. The twins just had their first birthday. Oh, shit. Simon is going to murder me.”
Taylor laughed at her best friend. “I think he might be thrilled. How far along do you think you are?”
“Hold on, I’m trying to count.” She grew silent for a moment, then said, “I can’t…oh, yeah.” She exhaled a laugh and blushed, then looked at Taylor. “I can’t be more than six weeks. Simon had that forensics conference in Denver, and I went with him. We got a suite and a sitter and had ourselves a little night out. I’ve been so freakin’ busy I didn’t even realize I missed my period.”
Taylor kneeled by the chair, swept her into a hug. “Honey, this is the most wonderful news. I’m thrilled for you.”
Sam hugged her back briefly. “Don’t tell anyone, for God’s sake. I need to warn Simon, and get to the OB. Shit, shit, shit.” But she was smiling, and the dark circles under her eyes looked a little less threatening.
Taylor gestured toward the den door. “When you warn him, let him know I may need his services. I seriously doubt you’re going to be able to handle tox and trace for all these crime scenes, and the TBI is backed up for months. We could probably ask Baldwin to send some of the samples to his lab at Quantico, but I’d rather do this quickly and quietly. I’ll arrange for some extra funding to get Simon’s lab to help you out.”
Sam’s husband, Dr. Simon Loughley, ran a firm called Private Match, one of the leading forensic specialty labs in the country. DNA matches for paternity were their bread and butter, which allowed Simon to take on outside work that fascinated him. He was always there in a pinch when Metro needed an immediate turnaround; the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation lab was so far behind on rape and murder samples that sometimes it was necessary to take their labs to independent, private vendors. It would cost, but Taylor didn’t anticipate that would be a problem. My God, six crime scenes in one day’s event? Even their notoriously tightfisted chief would agree with the necessity.
She couldn’t wait for their new crime lab to open. The funding was in place, a site selected. Everything was moving forward. No more relying on the kindness of others to get their pressing forensic evidence processed.
The dog whined at the door, jerking Taylor from her reverie.
“Okay. On that happy note, we need to get back to work.” She looked at the blood that had soaked into the carpet where Brittany Carson had lain bleeding to death. “Wish we’d gotten here sooner. She might’ve had a better chance.”
“How were you supposed to know? Are you telepathic now?”
“No, but—”
Sam shook her head. “No buts about it. You’re not a mind reader. You’ve got a killer who’s obviously thought this through very, very carefully. I’m praying this is the last call we get tonight.”
A horrible thought dawned in Taylor’s mind. “Do you think he could have been watching, waiting for us to arrive, before he came down here and finished up with Brittany?”
“Watching? Sure. You know how these kooks love to watch. He could have been at one of the houses at the far end of the neighborhood while we were in one of the other residences.”
“Jesus. The media is going to have my head.”
Sam was back to being all professional. She and Sam hadn’t hung out in a few weeks, and Taylor missed her. “Taylor, you’ve done the best you can. Let’s get back, I still have two bodies to declare.”
“Okay. Let me tell Marcus, I’ll need to come back here later.”
She found him in the kitchen, staring hard out the back window into nothingness. His shoulders were slumped in defeat. She knew exactly what was going through his mind. Blame, guilt. Taylor decided to give him the same pep talk Sam had just given her.
“Hey,” she said softly. “It’s okay. It wasn’t your fault.”
He met her eyes, bleak with despair. “She didn’t have a pulse earlier, Taylor. I swear it. The EMT who came couldn’t find one, either. Jesus, she’s been lying here dying while I chatted up her mom and figured a way to get the dog to leave her side.”
Ranger sat heavily on Marcus’s feet. He reached down and petted the dog absently.
“Did the mom have any idea what went down this afternoon?”
“No. She’s a single mother, a nurse. Name’s Elissa. She worked late, came home and found Brittany in the den. Brittany’s a scholarship student, I did find that out. Strait-laced, shy. Her mom says there’s no way she was doing drugs voluntarily.”
“There’s no sign of forced entry. Whoever tried to kill her, she let him in.”
“She’s younger than the others, too. I’ve got a patrol canvassing, but this house is set back so far that no one has come forward yet to say they saw anything out of the ordinary.”
“Then we need to start looking for the ordinary. A killer who can disappear into this neighborhood for hours unnoticed.”
“Caucasian, then. Dressed professionally, or in a Halloween costume. It could be anyone.”
“Could be a kid.”
“You think another kid did this?”
“I don’t know. But we need to take that into consideration.”
“If we’d just gotten to her earlier,” he repeated, voice hollow.
She got in his face, forced him to make eye contact.
“Marcus, let’s just focus on the now. Get me a report from the hospital, and let’s take it from there. If the girl lives, post a guard on her room. She’s the only witness we have to this afternoon’s events. I need to get back to Estes—there are still two bodies that Sam hasn’t declared. Take it easy on yourself. Get the patrols to secure this house and we’ll come back to it. This one goes in the win column. Okay?”
“Okay,” he mumbled, misery etched on his handsome features. He wasn’t fooling her. She’d need to talk him off the ledge some more, but right now she needed to attend to the rest of the dead.
“Here, I’ve got something that will distract you. I think our killer may be watching us, waiting to see our reactions. We need to talk to everyone within one hundred yards of these crime scenes that might have a video camera trained our way. Check with the media first. They know to get some crowd shots in the B-roll, and Keri McGee will, too. I’ve noticed some of these homes have a little extra security—they may have cameras that aren’t readily visible. Get through to the security firms in the area, see if any of them service houses near the crime scenes. Can you handle that for me?”
“Of course.” He nodded, putting away the upset, becoming all business again. His eyes shuttered and he snapped open his cell phone, started giving instructions. Taylor squeezed his shoulder and went to join Sam.
She closed the front door and stepped onto the small porch. She stopped for a moment, took a deep breath and blew it out. What a night. Eight kids. Eight.
She started down the steps and caught a flash out of the corner of her eye. She whipped to the side, flat up against the railing, her hand on her Glock. She heard a snap, then the rushing of feet through dry leaves. A mounted spotlight turned on in the backyard.
“Sam, get down,” she stage-whispered, then took off around the corner of the house, yelling, “Police, stop!” The house’s lights were on a motion detector, and the heavily wooded lot was lit up like a Christmas tree. Taylor stopped for a moment, let her eyes adjust to the light, listened to the steps running away from her, stumbling into the darkness.
“Marcus,” she yelled, but he was already next to her, gun drawn.
“I saw the lights go on. What’s up?”
“Someone was on the side of the house, took off running. They’re headed west, deeper into these trees. What’s on the other side?”
“Hobbs Road. There’s nothing between us and there.”
“Okay, slow and steady. Watch out for yourself. You take the left perimeter, I’ll take the right. Let’s see if we can’t circle around and catch him before he hits the road.”
“You get a look at him?”
“No. Heavy footsteps though.” Taylor wasn’t an idiot—she wasn’t about to set off without backup. She grabbed her radio. “All units, this is Lieutenant Jackson, in pursuit of an unknown subject running west toward Hobbs Road. We’re at 2135 Warfield Lane. I need a K-9 unit on the scene, repeat, get Simari and Max out here ASAP.”
There were affirmatives, and she stowed the radio. They jogged off at slight right angles into the woods. The fog was heavier here, the leaves on the trees turned so their under-sides were showing, aglow in the feeble moonlight. The mist enveloped them—Taylor could hardly see Marcus, though he was running relatively parallel to her, within fifteen feet.
It got darker as they moved away from the Carsons’ backyard, and they slowed. This was no good. This was definitely no good. A small rain started up, spattering against her face. The loamy scent of rotting leaves grew stronger. She could still hear their suspect thrashing in the dark, probably fifty yards ahead of them. The thick haze and lack of light meant he’d slowed, too. That helped. She started off again, at a walk, weapon at her side.
A hard crack made her draw up short and dive behind the nearest tree. Her Glock was tight in her palm, her forefinger alongside the trigger. Her heart hammered in her throat—what was that? She listened, felt her chest rise and fall frantically, inhaling deeply through her nose so she could catch her breath. Another sharp snap went off, then another, a whole string of cherry bombs. A firecracker, definitely not a gun. Son of a bitch.
Something about the fact that the calendar denoted a holiday meant the fine people of Nashville felt it their duty to celebrate, and firecrackers, illegal in Davidson County, were their favorite pastime.
Her heart went back to a manageable pace and she whistled to Marcus, slow and quiet. He answered, a decent imitation of a whip-poor-will, trilling at the end, and they set off again, more cautiously this time.
She could see maybe five to ten feet in front of her. She held up again, heard the whoosh of tires on wet pavement. They were getting close to the road. Throaty, staccato barks bled in from the south. Simari had arrived, and Max, her canine companion, was on the hunt. It wouldn’t be long now. Max was nimble and quick, could take down a suspect in a fraction of the time of a human officer during a chase. It was amazing to watch, and Taylor was sorry the visibility was so bad.
It took about a minute before she heard cries to her left. She turned and saw a thin path, jogged up it into a small clearing. Max had done his job and landed the suspect, had his strong jaw clamped around the man’s leg. Officers converged from all sides, Maglites focused on their suspect, weapons drawn. Simari called Max off with a command in German. He whined, but released the suspect’s jeans from his mouth, trotted back to his master with a satisfied air. Simari always fed Max a bloody, raw steak when he had a successful takedown; the German shepherd would be rewarded fully tonight.
Their suspect was moaning, holding his leg like it had been amputated high across his thigh. Taylor approached him carefully, but quickly saw that he was, indeed, down for the count. Blood pooled beneath his torn jeans. Max had taken a decent chunk of flesh out of the man’s leg.
No, it wasn’t a man. The flashlights showed a smooth, round face. This was a boy, Caucasian, no more than thirteen or fourteen. Short for his age, it seemed.
The adrenaline was leaking away; everyone was giddy, joking and laughing. People began to disappear off into the night, back to their cars, back to the multiple crime scenes they’d been pulled away from.
“Hope that was worth it,” she heard one officer grumble.
No kidding. Taylor let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding as Marcus snapped cuffs on the boy.
Taylor Mirandized him, mentally cursing the new laws that forced her to do so immediately in order to question anyone suspect in the commission of a crime, then asked, “What’s your name?”
He just shook his head, looked down at his leg.
“I need a doctor,” he said in a surprisingly deep voice.
“What’s your name first?”
He shook his head.
“Okay, anonymous. We’ll call an ambulance and have you transferred, but without a name, there isn’t a hospital in the city that will treat you. They don’t give it away for free, you know. They’ll need to call your parents to get payment. Sure would be a shame to lose a leg just because you want to play hardball with me.”
The boy went whiter than the Maglite’s beam. He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “My last name is Edvin. My first name is Juri.”
“Like a jury of your peers?”
“No,” he said.
“Spell it.”
“J-U-R-I. It’s Finnish.”
“Where do you live?”
He squinted at her, she didn’t know if it was from pain or the Maglites pointed at him. “On Granny White Pike, near Lipscomb University,” he said at last.
“We need to inform your parents.”
The whites of his eyes flashed and he started to struggle again. Taylor pressed her arm across his chest, applied enough pressure that he couldn’t move without a real fight.
“Stop that. Give me your telephone number so I can contact them, right now.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, then mumbled seven numbers. Taylor memorized them, then let up the pressure. She signaled for the EMTs to come in. They worked quickly, cutting away the torn jeans to show an impressive row of deep punctures, placing a compression pad against the seeping wound, efficiently tying the boy to the stretcher.
“Did you struggle when the dog bit you?” one of the EMTs asked.
“Yeah,” Edvin mumbled. “I tried to get away. Did I hurt the dog? I punched it in the mouth when it bit me.”
Taylor hid a smile. Max was tough, and in the throes of a kill probably hadn’t noticed an ineffectual punch thrown by a scared kid.
“He’ll be fine,” she said. “Why did you run from us?”
The boy was chatty now that his big scare had passed.
“You’re cops. What else would I do?”
“Stop when I said stop, for starters. What were you doing at the Carson house?”
“Whose house?” But his eyes slid away, down and to the left, and Taylor knew he was lying.
“Let’s try that again. You were at the Carson house. What can you tell us about what happened there this afternoon?”
“Don’t know anyone named Carson. I was walking home. Been trick-or-treating.”
“Without a costume? All the way to Granny White? That’s going to take you a while.”
“I’m too old to play dress-up. And I like to walk. You scared me, I ran. Simple as dat.”
In a fraction of a second, the boy had gone from scared and hurt to snarly and mature, talking gangster to her. She’d hit a nerve, no question about it.
One of the paramedics made a twirly motion with his finger. She looked at him and stepped a few feet away. He joined her and whispered, “We need to transport him now. He’s bleeding pretty heavily. Dog might’ve nicked an artery.”
She glanced back at the kid, who did look to be fading. “Okay. I’ll send Marcus with you guys. The kid’s full of crap, and I want to make sure any excited utterances are transcribed exactly. Keep an eye on him, and if he says anything, you write it down, okay?”
“Will do, boss.”
She motioned to Marcus, repeated the same thing and asked him to call Juri Edvin’s parents. She recited the number, waited while he wrote it in his notebook. He promised to check on Brittany Carson for her. She watched him follow the stretcher to the ambulance, the metal legs wobbly on the uneven ground. They nearly pitched the kid headfirst off the thing once.
Shaking her head, she called Lincoln and retasked him to the crime-scene videos, then touched base with McKenzie. He was at the party, had the place on lockdown. Good God, this was a logistical nightmare. She had officers and detectives spread over half of Davidson County.
It took less than five minutes to trek her way out of the woods and back to her car. Sam had left a note on the windshield. Needed to go. Call when you’re done.
Taylor flipped open her cell phone. Sam answered on the first ring.
“You catch him?” she asked.
“Yeah. Just a kid, but he lied to me about being near the house. I’m going to drag a crime-scene tech up here and have them comb the perimeter. Something was fishy there.”
“I’m at the fifth crime scene. I found some interesting stuff. You should come over here.”
“Which one?”
Sam gave her the address, and Taylor hung up. She climbed in her unmarked and drove the few streets over to 5567 Foxhall Close, the home of victim number five, Brandon Scott.
It was all becoming numbingly familiar: the beautifully appointed home, the incongruity of yellow crime-scene tape and people milling about, roaming in and out of the house in a coordinated plan. It looked like moving day, with forensics and blood-spatter experts.
She made her way inside. The focus of attention was again on the second floor. She took the stairs two at a time and went to the beehive.
Sam was standing against the wall, making notes, leaving a clear view of the body. Taylor sucked in her breath, edged closer.
The body presented like the others, on his back, arms down by his side this time, but the carving in the boy’s chest was much more intense. There was pure fury in the slashes. They penetrated much deeper than the other bodies, so far that bone was visible. The sheets were caked with blood, the odd scent of jasmine and viscera combining in a gorge-rising miasma.
He was partially dressed, gray sweatpants with a tie at the waist that had been disturbed—one side hung down over his right buttock. The edge of his pants was black with blood.
Taylor swallowed, hard. “He’s been flayed,” she said. “Our killer really didn’t like Mr. Scott here.”
Sam kicked off from the wall, stowed her notebook in her pocket, walked over to Taylor.
“That’s an understatement. Roll him,” she instructed the death investigator who had joined them.
The boy’s back was covered in strips of bloody channels, long and unevenly spaced.
“What caused this?” Taylor asked.
“Honestly?” Sam pursed her lips, a piece of her too-long bangs caught in her lip gloss. She brushed her hair away impatiently. “I think he was whipped.”
“Whipped?”
“Yeah. Remember Todd Wolff’s basement? He had all that sex paraphernalia down there?”
Did she remember? That wasn’t a case she’d soon forget. She nodded, eyes veiled.
“There’s an S&M tool called a cat-o’-nine-tails. Most are made of leather and not intended to inflict more than pain, but some have sharp, barbed tips on the ends of the separate whips. I’ve seen this before, in another case several years ago. Guy in East Nashville took one to his boyfriend. Got carried away, the guy ended up on my table. He was covered head to toe in slashes like this.”
“Jesus.”
The ’gator laid Scott back, gently. Taylor took in the fury, the anger, the sheer rage. She could feel the intense hatred.
“He’s got defensive wounds, Sam. Look at his hands. They’re all scratched up. That’s different from our other victims too, isn’t it?”
“Yes. The other bodies look like the carvings were done postmortem, and they were stripped completely. Two of them I assume were already naked—the couple. But the rest were probably undressed after they died, before the cutting began.”
“Were there signs of sexual assault on any of the victims?”
Sam shook her head. “Nothing that jumped out and bit me, but I won’t know for sure until I take swabs.”
“It’s not the easiest thing to get the clothes off a dead body. If there wasn’t a sexual assault, why do you think the killer removed the victims’ clothes? Maybe they were already naked.”
“Faulty logic. Think about it, Taylor. How many kids do you know sit around naked in their rooms? Other than the couple, who were obviously interrupted. Plus, if you’re pressed for time and you need your victim to ingest something against their will, are you going to make them take off their clothes first?”
“If you want to humiliate them, yes. I don’t think we can rule it out just yet.”
“But was there time for humiliation? These killings were sandwiched into a pretty tight window. I’m betting the killer removed their clothing after they were dead. But this is different.” She waved her hand toward the victim. “These wounds were infected while the victim was alive, still dressed, and he fought hard. See the bruise on his right shoulder?”
Taylor looked closer. There was the slightest discoloration from the boy’s collarbone to the top of his shoulder, an elongated oval mark.
“A knee?”
“I’d say so. He was held down.”
“Would it take someone very big to leave that kind of mark? He looks like he’s in pretty good shape.”
“Not necessarily. There was a violent struggle, but anyone can be overcome under the right circumstances. There are also marks around his neck—maybe an attempt at strangulation.”
“Hopefully our killer left something of himself behind. Your new ’gator, Barclay Iles, collected a few black hairs off the body of Xander Norwood. Maybe there’s more to be had here.”
“Maybe. You know I’ll look carefully.”
“Thanks, Sam. I know you will. What I’d like to know is why this one wasn’t drugged, since all the others were. Especially if he needed to be subdued.”
“I won’t be able to answer that until I do the post. He’s a big boy, bigger than all the rest. There may be something interesting in his tox screen, I just don’t know. Speaking of which, I need to get back to Gass Street, supervise all of these bodies coming in.” Sam was retreating into medical examiner mode, the cool facade closing in again.
Taylor let her. She needed some distance herself.
Seven
Taylor drove back to the command post on Estes in silence. She tried Baldwin on his cell, he answered on the first ring.
“I just landed. What’s happening there?”
“We found one alive, kid named Brittany Carson. She was pretty far gone. I’ll be surprised if she makes it. Then we got in a foot chase with another kid who was lurking outside her house. Simari had to unleash Max on him. Anything more from Garrett?”
“No. Just this emergency thing in the morning.”
“Well, get it over with and get back down here. I think we’re going to need your expertise. We’re starting to have breaks in the original pattern. One crime scene was different from the others—the victim was flayed, probably with some kind of whip. I’m telling you, Baldwin, I thought this was done. I’m afraid there may still be more. I need to get my hands on whoever did this.”
“What does Sam think?”
“She feels they ingested a narcotic of some kind, though this last one I attended, Brandon Scott? No signs of cyanosis. It looks like he was either strangled or exsanguinated. We’re about to do a walk-through of each crime scene.”
Her call-waiting beeped. She looked and saw it was Lincoln. “Hey, I’ve got to go. Call me in the morning, okay? Love you.”
“Love you, too. Luck.”
She clicked over. “Hey, Linc. What’s up?”
“We have the entire neighborhood frozen, and we’ve got some very upset parents. They’ve got the pitchforks and stakes out.”
“That’s to be understood. But we need those scenes stationary for now. Tell them we’ll release the bodies and get them back in their homes as soon as we can.”
She hoped she was telling the truth.
Quantico
Garrett had sent a car for him. Baldwin climbed into the backseat and gave the yawning driver his address. He had a small apartment near the grounds of Quantico that he used when he was in town working.
He was tired, but getting to sleep was going to be near to impossible. He needed to be sharp and alert in the morning. Artificial means, then. He checked his watch and calculated, decided against half an Ambien, settled on a Benadryl. It would knock him out for at least six hours. That would have to be good enough. He dry-swallowed the capsule and stared out into the dark of the night.
It was always darkest just before the dawn. He could only hope that the light of day would bring good news.
Eight
Nashville
9:00 p.m.
The rain was letting up, the evening now bittered into teeth-chattering cold. Taylor ran the gauntlet down Estes, driving through a phalanx of Metro blue-and-whites and medical examiner’s vans. A patrol officer waved her through and she parked the Lumina in front of the Kings’ driveway.
Dan Franklin, the department’s spokesman, met her car. Dan was a big guy, light brown hair and blue eyes with a relatively nondescript, almost homely face, but six foot two and an easy two-thirty. He spent a lot of time in the gym, and the hard work showed. Physically, he was threatening at best, emotionally, he was the rock the department depended on. He was their first line of defense against the media. It was a precarious position to maintain—Metro needed the media and the media needed Metro, but sometimes they didn’t like to play nice. Franklin assured everyone on both sides that the road to the news would be as smooth as could be.
He opened her door and she climbed out. “What’s up?”
“I need to talk to you.”
Taylor stopped. “Shoot.”
“I think it would be a good idea to have you give the presser.” He tapped his hand on the hood of her car as he spoke, and the emphasis felt contrived. She was immediately suspicious.
“Oh, come on. The press conference is your job.”
“I know it is, and I’ll be up there with you.” He quit tapping, leaned against the car. He crossed his bulky arms and said, “We’ve been friends for a long time, right?”
“Going on ten years.”
“You trust me, right?”
“Yes.”
“Then do the presser. I promise it’s the right thing to do.”
“But—”
He cut her off. “Taylor, the city of Nashville wants to see you lead again. You’ve been fodder for the press for a couple of months now, and practically the moment you’re reinstated, a huge string of murders happens on your watch. They know about Fitz going missing, they know about the Snow White Killer’s apprentice. You need to regain their confidence. You need to let them know that you’re in control, that the old Taylor Jackson is back in business. Your close rate is still head and shoulders above any cop in the city—hell, most of the country. This is the perfect opportunity for you to get them back in your court.” He took a breath, then quickly said, “And we can put a camera behind you, film forward, see what the crowd shows us.”
“Ah, so that’s the plan. Bribery by B-roll. You’re just appealing to my need to find the creeps who did this.” But she smiled, and he smiled back.
“I honestly think it will do you some good. Quell the scuttlebutt.”
She blew out a breath and thought for a few minutes. Dan was right, she did need to get the city’s confidence back. Badges and honors were all well and good, but in the long run, the only thing that mattered was the close. Though the people of Nashville were a forgiving bunch, the escapades over the past year had tarnished her spotless reputation, and in turn the reputation of Metro. They needed to know that she was back, one hundred percent back, solid and able to solve this case. Because eight teenagers in one night was going to rock Nashville unlike any case it had previously faced.
Too bad Baldwin had to leave town. She’d worked with his team on other cases and knew that, despite their differences in the past, the chief of police liked having the FBI involved in major crimes. He felt it engendered confidence from the masses. No matter what, when people heard those magic letters, F-B-I, they felt safer. Well, most people.
She heard her mother’s voice in her head. Beggars can’t be choosers. No kidding, Mother.
She ran it through her head for a minute. They could use the extra footage of the scene. She had a feeling that their killer was watching, reveling.
“Okay, I’ll do it. When?”
“We’re live in fifteen minutes.”
She put her hand on his arm to stop him. “Hey, Dan? Thanks.”
He just nodded and left her.
She scooted inside and found Lincoln making notes on his netbook.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey back,” Lincoln replied. “Just talked to McKenzie. He’s got the party frozen. Says there’s some parents frothing at the mouth to get their kids home under their own roofs. When you’re done here he’s ready for you to go over there and chat with the kids.”
“You have the video covered?”
“Yes. I’m going to head back to the CJC, upload everything we have and start searching for squirrels.”
“Good. Dan wants me to do the presser, so wait for that footage. Did you two cook this little plan up?”
“Nope. It was his idea. But he did ask if you’d shoot him on the spot if he suggested it. I told him you weren’t quite that trigger-happy.”
She narrowed her eyes at him, and he gave her a small smile.
“I need to get prepped. Do we have next-of-kin notifications on all the victims?”
“All but one. Here’s your information.” Lincoln handed her a sheaf of papers. It was hard to believe that only four hours had passed since they’d arrived at the first scene. It felt like days.
“Got pics from the rest of the scenes?”
He handed her some Polaroids and his notebook, where he’d accurately sketched the layout of each tableau.
“This is perfect, thanks. Oh, a little something to tuck into the back of your mind—the crime scene I just came from, Brandon Scott? You’ll see the level of violence was ten times the rest of the victims. I think he may have been the target, and the rest of the victims were just to cover the killer’s tracks. You need to get as much information on this kid as humanly possible, and fast. He may be the best link we have to our killer.”
“Really? Then maybe the suspect is still close by.”
“I get that feeling, don’t you? This is all so damn…showy.”
“Yes, it is. And coordinated. Not a single person we’ve interviewed saw anything out of the ordinary. No bogeymen creeping in the backyards, nothing. The killer fits into the neighborhood.”
Taylor flipped the page on Lincoln’s notes. He was so thorough, she felt like she’d just relived the last few hours.
“On our suspect? I’m going to hazard a guess that we’re looking for a Caucasian male between fifteen and twenty-five.”
“Fifteen…you think a kid could be responsible for this level of destruction?”
“Anything’s possible. The victimology is the first clue—you know that. But I wouldn’t recommend saying that out loud. I think we need to roust some of the school administrators and see if anyone has been making threats first.”
“I’ll keep all options on the table.”
“Okay, then.” She took Lincoln’s notes and stepped into the Kings’ kitchen to gather her thoughts. Her mind was abuzz with possibilities.
Was Brandon Scott the intended victim and the rest of the murders collateral damage? That was a horrid thought, but something that she certainly needed to be aware of. It was entirely possible that this wasn’t the work of an adult. She knew they had a monster on their hands, but if that monster turned out to be a kid himself, they had bigger problems.
Nine
Nashville
10:00 p.m.
Taylor stood in front of the whirring cameras, Dan Franklin next to her. She was speaking into forced light, and couldn’t see much, just the outlines of bodies, a journalistic nightmare of the living dead. She’d been hoping that she’d be able to look into the crowd, recognize the killer and end this charade, but that wasn’t going to happen.
She held up a hand to silence them and began.
“I’m sorry to see you under these circumstances. Tonight we’ve been struck by a tragedy, the magnitude of which we’re only just beginning to understand. We’ve lost seven of our children. An eighth is fighting for her life at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital. We have the very best men and women at Metro, and they are working around the clock to assure two things—one, that we catch the suspect who committed these crimes, and two, that you and your children are safe.
“I won’t be releasing the names of the victims at this moment because not all next of kin have been notified. We’re doing all we can to make that happen, and as soon as we do Dan Franklin will have the list for you. I’d anticipate that happening overnight. I can confirm that three males and five females were targeted in this attack.
“We are confident we will be able to bring this suspect to justice very soon. We ask that anyone who has information about these crimes come forward. A tip line is available at 888-555-9880 and will be manned twenty-four hours a day. You can remain anonymous if you wish. We do ask that you call the tip line instead of Crime Stoppers so we can keep all information relevant to these cases in one place.”
She steeled herself, then said, “I’ll take questions now.”
There was a cacophony of voices. She picked one she recognized, Cindy Carter from FOX, and focused on it. Cindy asked, “Are there any leads?”
The crowd quieted down.
“The question was, do we have any leads. Rest assured that we are doing everything possible to capture the suspect, and are working these crimes as a single event. We believe the same person is responsible for all of the murders this afternoon. But, as I’m sure you’re aware, I’m not in a position to discuss anything that relates to the ongoing investigation.”
There were groans, then the typical repositioning of questions, all of which Taylor was forced to deflect. That was how the game was played—feed a little bit of information to the reporters, let them ask their questions with the knowledge that they wouldn’t be getting an answer on the air. Off camera, each would sidle up to Taylor, or Dan, or any of the other officers and get the inside scoop. Most of Nashville’s reporters had a great tradition of being told the truth, because the police trusted that they wouldn’t put that truth directly onto the air and ruin their cases.
“If you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to work. I’m going to turn this over to Dan Franklin now. He’ll do his level best to answer as many of your questions as he can. Thank you for your time, and for being patient with us.” She paused for a moment, looked right into the cameras. “You have my word. We are doing everything in our power to solve these heinous crimes.”
She stepped away from the makeshift podium, and Dan caught her eye, nodded imperceptibly. He took her place, faced the group and was immediately barraged with questions. She avoided smirking and backed away until she was out of camera range. Lincoln came up beside her.
“I was watching the crowd. I can’t tell who’s a part of the neighborhood and who isn’t. Feels like half of Nashville is out here watching the show. We’ve got a long-ass night ahead of us.”
“You’re telling me. Okay, I’m heading to the party. You start on these tapes. Lincoln? Find me something.”
“Will do.”
“Okay. I’m outta here.”
Taylor opened her cell and called Marcus. He answered with a morose, “Hey.”
“Hey yourself. Any word on the vic?”
“She’s in a coma. They’ve loaded her full of Narcan. They think it was some kind of drug overdose. But they don’t know if she’s going to make it—you know how quickly Narcan works. She didn’t come to, just slipped into the coma.”
“A drug overdose makes sense. That’s what Sam thought, too. The presentation screams drugs—I instructed the ’gators and crime-scene techs to look for anything that might be the culprit. I need you to join us at this address—8900 Sneed Terrace. It’s the home of Theo Howell, best friend of victim number three, Xander Norwood. He’s supposed to be having a Halloween party. I sent McKenzie over there a while ago to get everyone corralled, and apparently some of the kids’ parents have shown up there, as well. I’m going to need your help taking all of the statements. I’m sure word has spread, and a few kids may have scattered by now, but McKenzie’s got at least thirty people waiting around.
“The victims are being described as the perfect kids, and I want to find out what the real story is. Sam’s gone to Gass Street, and Lincoln’s doing the video footage. So that leaves us. You up for it?” She wanted to get him away from Brittany Carson, away from the guilt, get him preoccupied with something else. Interviewing thirty teenagers should do the trick.
“Yeah, I’ll be there. Give me fifteen. Want me to wrangle up a couple of lattes? I’m across the street from Starbucks.”
Her stomach growled in a Pavlovian response. “That would be heavenly. I’ll see you there.”
“Will do, Taylor.”
“Thanks, Marcus. Hang in there, okay? I know you’ve had a bitch of an afternoon.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Good man. See you in a few.”
Ten
Nashville
11:45 p.m.
Raven lay on his narrow bed, watching Fane apply her makeup. Next to feeling his body inside hers, her warmth enveloping him, it was possibly the most sensual experience they shared.
She was an expert, her hand sure. First the layer of foundation, two shades lighter than her skin, which gave her a pearly glow. Then a dusting of powder, also two shades lighter, to set the makeup. She used a sponge to feather the color into her neck so there was no line of demarcation. She put just a hint of blush on her cheeks, from the apples right into her hairline, then started on her eyes.
Raven had filmed her doing her makeup once. He overlaid it with music, a pulsing track from The Crüxshadows called—appropriately enough—“Immortal.” He’d known it was their song the first time he heard it, the lyrics crying out to him, “With hearts immortal, we stand before our lives.” It was perfect for the video—fast, wicked hot and theirs.
He’d sped the tape up to five times speed and posted it to YouTube as a Goth makeup tutorial. It had garnered more than five hundred thousand views so far. It gave him an unbelievable rush to think about all those baby bats out there using his woman as a guide.
They’d have even more to admire him for now.
Raven sat up and put his chin in his hand, watched Fane create the mystical black cloud that made the green of her eyes look like fifteen-carat emeralds. The long swoops of black liquid eyeliner, the deep black M-A-C eye shadow, more liner, five coats of mascara, then the intricate swirls dripping off the edges of her eyes like she was a bedouin princess decorated for her wedding night. A dark princess. The ruler of his heart.
She finished, screwed the top on her liner, then outlined her lips with a burgundy pencil. She dug into her makeup tray and pulled out a deep, deep cherry-black lipstick. He appreciated the symbolism. Fane sometimes had difficulty talking to others, and the black lipstick reminded her that she was the one with the power. He knew she’d imbued it with strength—they’d done the spell together.
She bent over and ratted her hair so it stood out from her head, allowing it to fall in glorious waves nearly to her ass, then finished with a liberal dose of Aqua Net.
When she flipped up and smiled at him, he could barely contain himself. His love. His perfect, perfect love.
“Your turn,” she said, shrugging into her corset. The stays made her waist about the span of his hand.
Raven tried to distract himself from his woman’s faultless form and glossed his face with makeup, disappearing behind the foundation. He never felt so strong as when he was in full Goth mode. He had to temper it down at school a bit—the administration had strict rules about boys wearing makeup. Capitalist bastards. They had no idea how strong he was.
But tonight, in celebration, they were headed to a club. They would feed on the energy of the crowd, be themselves. There was nothing like a good night of clubbing. Subversion had a five-dollar cover in honor of Samhain, and there was a guest DJ in from Los Angeles, a guy called The Baron. Raven had heard some amazing things about his playlist—he always seemed to have the newest bands at his disposal. He supposed that was the whole Hollywood thing—the Nashville Goth scene rocked, but it was still Nashville. Full-on industrial wasteland. He’d been to a couple of clubs in Washington, D.C., that were out of this world. But beggars couldn’t be choosers—traditional Goth was all Nashville could offer tonight. One day soon he and Fane would head out to Los Angeles, would ride the wave of the Goth scene, rising to the top, glorified in their power. Their art would be watched by millions, and they would never be parted. That day was coming. He’d already purchased their tickets—they’d be gone on Monday. Just a few things left to accomplish before then.
In the meantime, they had to make do with what they had. First Subversion, then they’d hit Salvation to cap off the night and meet up with Thorn and Ember. Ember was going to have to sneak out tonight, especially after—
“Raven, love, you need to get moving. I want to get downtown.”
Fane had her hands on her hips, stamping her foot in frustration. The platform industrial boots with buckles up to her knee made her six-foot-four and ethereally spectacular. He smiled at her in the mirror, baring his fangs, running his tongue lovingly along the sharp edges. They’d cost him a pretty penny, but they were so worth it. Fane loved hers just as much—it made biting one another so much easier. Better teeth than the athamé any day. It was so much more real.
He took one last swipe of black shadow under his eyes and turned off the makeup mirror’s light. He grabbed Fane by the hand, danced in a circle in the center of his room.
“Let’s go.”
Blue lights were revolving one street over, but theirs was quiet. Raven felt a rush of excitement, squeezed Fane’s hand. The commotion was for him. Him.
They folded themselves into his beat-up Elantra, Rattything, the Rat, and drove away from the turmoil.
The Rat was feeling feisty tonight, so he let it have its head. Besides, all the Nashville cops were hung up in Green Hills. They took the shortcut through the west side of town to Twenty-first Avenue, then got on Broadway. The streets were hopping tonight, everyone dressed up. It was the one night of the year that he and Fane could walk among the masses and fit in.
And he found that pedestrian. He didn’t want to fit in. He wanted to stand apart, to be different. Different was arresting, exciting. These poseurs, thinking they were being so avant-garde, their individuality cloaked in Halloween getups, were nothing compared to Raven. His ability to be unique was legendary among their brethren.
He turned left on Second Avenue, then scooted the Rat into the parking garage above SATCO, the San Antonio Taco Company. The garage was packed tonight—they had to drive all the way up to the sixth level to find a spot. They bundled out of the car and into the elevator, Fane getting more and more exasperated when they stopped at every floor to let revelers on board. They gawked at her, and she didn’t like it. Raven finally bared his fangs at one idiot dressed as a pirate, and he flipped Raven off and turned around.
They ran across the street, not bothering to go to the intersection, and narrowly missed a car barreling up Second. Choking with laughter at the man’s shocked face, they ran into the club, cloaks flowing behind them. They handed their money to Tony, Subversion’s gargantuan bouncer, climbed the darkened stairway, feeling the bam, bam, bam of the bass line thrumming through the walls.
When they entered the strobe-lit room, Zombie Girl’s “Creepy Crawler” was on the turntable and the energy nearly knocked them off their feet. Raven grabbed Fane’s hand and pulled her through the masses into the center of the dance floor. He dug into his pocket and extracted two little blue pills, ones he’d carefully dipped and kept separate from the rest of the stash. He fed one to Fane, slipped the other under his own tongue. The Ecstasy started working quickly, sending golden warmth through his body.
Then the trip began in earnest. They kissed, feeling the energy rushing between them, coursing through their veins. They swayed and jumped, threw their arms in the air. Raven felt a scream building deep in his chest and went with it, riding the energy, building and building until he let loose with a war cry so intense he realized he had an erection and was inches from coming.
This was what it was all about. This was his place, his life, his world.
He stopped, stood still in the middle of the dance floor, his head thrown back, the music building in his very soul, feeding. As the music peaked, his orgasm built to a crescendo, and he howled. He was a God now.
She watched from the corner of the darkened space. Word had spread like wildfire through her community that a series of murders had been committed, and she knew in her soul that whoever did it was in this room, right now. A few minutes before she’d felt the air change, felt the energies shift. A very powerful spell had been cast, and she began to drain. Someone was feeding, close by. Damn vampires. She snapped back and shielded herself deeper, stronger, felt her strength return. She kept her eyes sharp on the crowd.
He was here. She could feel him.
What he’d done was wrong. It broke all their laws. He would have to be punished.
She sighed. Tonight was supposed to be a sober, somber evening, one of great reflection and inwardness, a night to make contact with the departed and assure them that memories of their lives were still precious. A night to look forward with great anticipation at the dying of the God and the rebirth of the Goddess. She’d conducted her spells earlier, at sunset. Set her altar with a white candle and a black, her athamé, her wand, a small skull, real and very powerful, that she’d purchased at the Pagan Festival at Montgomery Bell State Park a few years back, plus black, red and white ribbons.
She’d snapped sprigs of rosemary off her windowsill during the last new moon, let it dry for full potency, then made a posy with it, braiding the ribbons and winding them around the rosemary thrice, chanting, “Rosemary is for remembrance, tonight I remember those who have passed. Those who have crossed through the veil, I will remember.” She’d meditated about those she’d lost, communed with their spirits. She’d left the ceremony feeling peaceful. The posy would stay on her altar until Yule. She always felt such an affinity with Samhain—celebrating the circle of death and life was how she’d begun in Wicca.
Though her phone was off, she had begun to receive calls before her ceremony was over. By the time she had finished and checked her voice mail, she had eight messages. When she heard the news, she knew her evening’s peace was over. It was her responsibility to find who had broken their laws. She needed to look through the veil again, so she lit a fire, set her altar and did a scrying ritual. The flames told her she needed to be among the masses tonight, so she’d hurriedly dressed and come to the gathering.
She recognized many of the faces in the crowd, though not as many could place her. She’d done a strong shielding spell with a cloaking element so she could walk among her kind relatively unseen. It wasn’t like she was invisible, ghostly—far from it. The spell just worked to entice people to look away. She didn’t need the attention.
There was the usual buzzing in the crowd, but it had spiked a fever tonight. Word was spreading about the multiple murders, that there was a satanic component. Everyone in the room knew that was a joke—Satan was a Christian deity, and none of them were practicing Christians. Wiccans, pagans, Goths, vampires—all coexisted in the harmony of the club. Satan was for those who didn’t understand.
But when crimes like this happened, they all got a bad name. What small foothold they enjoyed in the community was immediately severed, and they had to hide again.
She secreted herself in the corner that afforded the best view and watched. The club was crawling with poseurs tonight, civilians who wanted to walk on the dark side for an evening. They were easy to spot, with their inexpertly applied makeup and ridiculous, darting eyes. They’d come in, dance for a song or two, shove each other around in embarrassment, then leave. The true followers would sigh in relief and go back to being themselves.
There.
At the center of the dance floor, two swayed in time to the music. A male and a female, young, but powerful. The moment she saw them her heart constricted. Divination was an elegant art, one best practiced by those with a true understanding of path work. She had the gift of understanding, was able to see into their minds. She felt the evil lurking there, and knew.
She stood, ready to approach, but halted when a small girl strode through the crowd, went directly to the male, pulled at his shoulder until he faced her, then slapped him, hard. His head snapped to the side and tears formed in his kohl-lined eyes. They started to argue, so she hung back to see what would happen. The boy looked startled for a moment, then shrugged. The interloper took off, tears running down her face. The tall girl put her hand on the boy’s shoulder and they conversed, then followed the girl. As they left, the air in the club lightened. The music became louder, and the room felt happier.
What kind of baby bats were these three? Dominants, that was certain, possessing a darkness and authority unusual in ones so young.
She followed, building energy, cloak swinging out behind her. She’d need all of her extensive power to deal with them.
Eleven
Nashville
11:58 p.m.
Theo Howell’s house was obviously the place to be.
It seemed like most of Hillsboro High School’s senior class was in attendance, congregating at the Howell home. The street was lined with vehicles, Jettas and BMWs and Mercedes and Volvos and Jeeps parading up and down the skinny road with wheels half in the ditch and half on the scree. McKenzie’s unmarked was parked across the street.
There was no loud music or yelling, though, just a somber grayness. The rain had started in earnest again and the lights of the Howells’ house did little to illuminate their driveway. A dog began barking incessantly next door. Taylor felt each yap in the back of her skull.
Time to enter the land of text messaging. The door was red, with a bold brass lion-face knocker. Taylor grasped its protruding tongue and banged on the plate three times.
A handsome teenager opened the door, brown hair cut long over his forehead, wearing a Ralph Lauren button-down oxford cloth shirt and khaki trousers. His eyes were puffy, the trace of tears past shed. He gave her a sad smile, looking much older than his age.
“I’m Theo Howell. Please.” He shook her hand and gestured for her to come in. Once she was in the foyer, he threw the dead bolt on the door.
A hush fell over the group of kids. Taylor was faced with a bevy of scared teenagers, all looking her over, and a few parents—she counted seven in all—drinking coffee in the living room. They stood when they saw her, faces bleak and scared.
She could hear the murmurs. What’s happened? Are there more?
McKenzie extricated himself from the group of teenage girls that surrounded him in the kitchen, trying to comfort one another, and came into the foyer to greet them.
“Oh, good. You’re here. You’ve met Theo, I see.”
“Yes,” Taylor said, turning back to the boy. “Thanks for keeping everyone here for us.”
“You’re welcome, ma’am. To be honest, I think everyone realized we could be safe if we had strength in numbers. It would be hard to get in here and take anyone down. A few kids’ parents insisted they come home, and the rest just came on over. We were most appreciative that you sent Detective McKenzie to keep an eye out for us. Do you have any ideas who might have done this? Who killed our friends?”
The locked door. The air loaded with fright. The poor kids had been sitting here all night, friends dying a few streets away, worrying that they were being targeted, too. And the parents didn’t know why, or how, or who had threatened their children’s lives. Not that she blamed them. She’d been worried about them being targeted herself, but seeing their abject fear gave her a whole new perspective on this tragedy.
She faced the group and answered the unasked questions. “We’re doing everything we can. Nothing has changed. We don’t have a suspect or a motive just yet. You’re doing the right thing, sticking together. We’ll keep you posted.”
The murmurs began again, this time tinged with relief. She stepped back into the foyer to get out of their line of sight, and turned to Theo.
“We’re hoping you can shed some light on what’s been happening. I know you were close friends with Xander Norwood. I’d like to talk to you about him, about everyone who was killed today. Is there someplace private we can go?”
“Yes, ma’am. My father’s office is just through here. No one is allowed in there when we, I mean Daisy and I, have guests over.”
“Who’s Daisy?”
“My sister.” He pointed to a neat blond girl sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter. “She’s in there with some of her friends. She’s a junior. They all knew Amanda, and Chelsea and Rachel.”
There was a knock behind her and Theo started. Poor kid.
“That’s going to be Detective Wade. McKenzie, do you have everyone’s statements?”
“Nearly. A few more to go.”
“Okay. Don’t let me keep you. Marcus and I will talk with Theo.”
“Gotcha, boss. I’ll let him in.”
“Detective, sir? Please lock the door behind you,” Theo asked softly. McKenzie nodded at him. She was happy to see that McKenzie had established some rapport with these kids—it would help. In her experience, teenagers were a secretive lot.
Marcus joined her, and she introduced him to Theo. He shook Marcus’s hand, then led them to a set of closed double doors. He fetched a key out of his front pocket, turned the lock and swung the right-hand door open. He allowed her to enter first, twisted his arm around the door frame to pull the chain on a floor lamp. The warm wooden space glowed in the soft light. The walls were lined with bookshelves, and a ladder on rails leaned against the far wall. It smelled pleasantly of paper and leather, without a hint of must.
Theo turned on a few more lights, then stood calmly by a large rosewood desk with a leather top. He saw Taylor looking at the books, waved nonchalantly toward the shelves.
“My father is a collector. He owns the Classics Bookstore in Franklin. He does some work with the public, but his passion, his occupation, is with serious collectors overseas. He’s at a conference in Geneva right now. My mom’s with him. They had their eyes on a first-edition Hemingway. They’re supposed to be bidding on it at auction tonight. Dad thinks he can get it for a steal. He’s got a client in Toronto willing to pay through the nose for it.” He broke off. “I’m sorry, I must be boring you. I forget that not everyone is a bibliophile. I’m hoping to take the store over for him one day.”
“Actually, that’s not boring at all. I love books. And I’d love to hear more about what your dad does. I’m familiar with his store, actually. But that will have to wait for another time. Can we sit?”
There were two large leather chairs facing a cognac-colored sofa in the center of the room. Theo nodded, took a seat on the sofa. He hardly seemed like an eighteen-year-old whose best friend had just died. His presence was comforting her.
Marcus went to the bookcase, trailing his fingers along the spines, and Taylor arranged herself in one of the chairs with her notebook.
“So, Theo. Xander was your best friend. How many of the victims do you know personally?”
“From what I’ve heard about who was killed, all of them.”
“Who have you heard about?”
“Jerry King, Ashley Norton, Mandy and Xander. Chelsea Mott and Rachel Welch were together too, and Brandon. I also heard a rumor that another girl was taken to the hospital.”
“News travels fast. It’s not a rumor. Do you know Brittany Carson?”
“Is that her name? No, I don’t. Never heard of her.”
“She attends St. Cecilia’s. I was hoping she had some ties to your friends at Hillsboro.”
“Well, you know how it is. The kids who live on either side of us go to private school, Montgomery Bell and Ensworth, but we don’t hang out. It’s the neighborhood dynamic, I guess.”
“So how did you hear about the murders?”
He held up his cell. “Everyone’s been talking. I’ve gotten nearly two hundred texts this afternoon. I’m way over my limit—my parents are going to kill me.” He winced as soon as the words were out.
“Would you be willing to let me see your texts?” she asked.
He paused for the barest of moments. “They’ll look like gibberish to you. I know my father absolutely hates it when I abbreviate, the language we use. He thinks it represents the decline of modern society. But the smart keyboard makes it so much easier to talk quickly.”
“I can’t say I disagree with your father there. My computer expert is pretty handy with all things technical. He should be able to translate for us. Tell me how you heard about Xander.”
Theo squirmed in his seat. He’d paled when she mentioned Lincoln’s expertise, and she knew he was hiding something.
“Theo?”
His eyes filled with tears. “I think I talked to him right before he died.”
“You do? Why is that?”
Theo went from a prepossessed young man to a child in an instant, face screwed up in an attempt not to start weeping. She gave him a few breaths to get back under control.
“It’s okay, Theo. We’re just talking. You’re not in trouble, not unless you had something to do with the murders.”
“God, no. Of course I didn’t. You can’t actually think that.”
“Then relax. I just want to know what happened this afternoon.”
“Are you going to tell my parents what I say?”
“Are you eighteen?” He nodded. “Then so long as you haven’t broken any laws, I see no need to divulge the information. Just tell me the truth, okay? We’ll get along much better if you tell me the truth.”
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