Romanski stood at the crime scene perimeter tape and watched two CSI colleagues moving slowly through the area where the drone had been left lying on the ground, which was also where the ceremony had taken place earlier and been prerecorded. They were on their hands and knees, crawling across the forest floor with head-mounted macro-binocs, looking for the slightest specks of evidence—hair, fibers, drops of sweat or blood—and sticking little numbered flags into the ground where they found something and tweezered it in a test tube. The altar stood in the center, and around it, the ground was trampled and scuffed. The ritual—if that’s what it had been—appeared to have taken place several hours earlier. It had been recorded on the drone video in non-GPS transmission mode. Then, later, the video had been turned on with GPS and issued the prerecorded broadcast.
Whoever figured out how to do that was either clever—or possibly even a drone operator himself.
The light from the setting sun had just vanished from the treetops, and gloom was collecting in the forest. There was a lot more work to be done—they’d be laboring well into the night with a generator and lights.
The weirdest thing they found were the ornaments hanging around the altar. They were about three inches in diameter, woven out of grass and pine needles and tiny twigs. The six objects now sat neatly arranged in an evidence container, nestled in acid-free paper, and they looked to Romanski like Christmas ornaments being put away for the season. He stared at them. They were amazingly well crafted, the needles and grasses tightly woven, forming a three-dimensional, filigree-like sphere.
Cash came over. “What do you think?”
“It’s fucking nuts,” Romanski said. “And them quoting Shakespeare? These are crazy people, for sure.” Romanski was proud of himself for identifying the little song at the end as being the last lines of Twelfth Night.
“And the Nikes? It’s so random,” Cash said. “But the guy who quoted Shakespeare—his diction was good. He might have been an actor before. That and the long yellow hair might help us identify him. And another thing—was it my imagination, or did they not seem to be native English speakers?”
“I think they were disguising their voices,” said Romanski.
“Could be. What’s the plot of Twelfth Night?” Cash asked. “Could there be a message in there?”
Romanski shook his head. “It’s a play about a shipwreck and a girl disguising herself as a boy and a whole bunch of comic misadventures—it’s quite a silly play, actually.”
Cash gestured toward the evidence box. “What about these ornaments? You think something might be inside?”
“I do. When you heft them, they feel heavier than you might expect if they were grass and twigs all the way through.”
“Why don’t you open one up?”
“Here?” Romanski asked. “I’d rather do that in the lab.”
“You got five others to dissect in the lab. I don’t want to wait a day for results. Use your tweezers and pull one of them apart now.”
“You’re the boss.” Romanski reached into the evidence box with a gloved hand and removed one. He held it up to the light and tried to look through it, but it got denser toward the middle and he couldn’t see. “Okay. Here we go.”
He placed it on an empty plastic container top to use as a sort of operating theater, and then, fishing out a pair of rubber-tipped tweezers and a small scalpel, he began to tease it apart, while Cash hunched over behind him, taking photographs.
The first layer was mostly grass, but then he reached an inner layer of thin willow leaves, wrapped in a tight ball around something. Using the tweezers, he grasped the tip of a leaf and peeled it back, and another leaf, and another—to expose an object: a tiny metal shoe.
“What the hell?” Cash asked.
He turned it in the light. Romanski recognized it immediately. “It’s a Monopoly game piece. One of the classic ones.”
“Holy crap,” breathed Cash, staring at it.
Romanski held up the old beaten-up shoe with the tweezers. “There were six Monopoly tokens, right? Let’s see—the shoe, thimble, top hat, iron …”
“Cannon and battleship,” said Cash.
Romanski nodded.
“You think the other tokens are in the five other balls?”
“Seems logical.”
“This is just too crazy,” said Cash. “Quoting Shakespeare, wrapping up Monopoly pieces—could it be some kind of comment on American culture?”
“Or maybe an anti-capitalism rant,” said Romanski. “Not to mention that chant about We will purify. And did you see the women and children? This is like the Branch Davidians or that weird UFO cult, Heaven’s Gate.”
“God, I hope not,” Cash said.
Maximilian came over. He looked like he was falling apart, his face mottled, his hair damp and mussed up. “What’d you find in there?” he asked.
“Mr. Maximilian, do you play Monopoly?” Cash asked.
He looked puzzled. “I did when I was a kid. Not recently.”
“Does Erebus, the company, or anyone here have a connection to Monopoly in any way?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Why do you ask?”
“We found a Monopoly game token inside the ball. The metal shoe.” She nodded to the box. “Take a look.”
Maximilian’s eyes narrowed. He finally breathed out, “Bloody hell. Monopoly?”
“Yes. Does it mean anything to you at all?”
He shook his head.
“Are there any Monopoly sets up here, that you know of?”
“We have a game room in the lodge—maybe there’s one there.”
“We’ll check that out. But let’s keep this under wraps,” said Cash. “This is the kind of thing that’ll bring all the weirdos out of the woodwork with conspiracy theories.”
“Right,” said Maximilian. “Agreed.”
Romanski put the dissected ornament back in the evidence container, sealed and labeled it.
“On another note,” Cash said, “Sheriff Colcord’s back at the lodge waiting for the dogs to arrive. They’re flying them back in tonight. We’d like to keep them here for now so they can track right away if the need arises. Do you have a kennel for them?”
“We’ve got state-of-the-art animal facilities,” said Maximilian. “I’ll arrange it.”
Romanski began packing the evidence boxes in a suitcase. “I need to get this stuff back to the lab.” He called out to the CSI guys. “What’s your status?”
“Got a ways to go.”
“Okay.” He turned to Cash. “Can you get a second chopper to pick you all up? I want to take this evidence directly back to Arvada.”
“That can be arranged,” said Maximilian.
As Romanski knelt and continued to seal and secure the evidence cases for the ride back to Arvada, he heard Cash say to Maximilian, “Don’t you think it’s time to shut this place down? You saw the video: we’ve got a homicidal cult out there with at least nine members.”