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I stood under the shower head for a long time. That was the great part about staying at a hotel, nearly limitless hot water. My skin was pink, making the scars that crisscrossed it stand out in striking relief.
At the moment, I didn’t have any red ones, they had all healed up and become flat, white, shiny patches of skin, highlighting the darker skin around them. Both of my parents were of Scottish decent, but somewhere along the way, had been something a little swarthier. My skin tanned, it didn’t burn. I didn’t have or get freckles when I was exposed to the sun unlike Nyleena or my mom. My natural complexion had a touch of olive to it, something that was perhaps Mediterranean in my heritage.
My brother Eric was like me, not fair skinned like our mother. He did have some freckles to go with the red that he got in his facial hair when it grew in. However, it didn’t grow real well, growing up I remember him once trying to grow a goatee and giving up after several months because it just wasn’t happening for him.
Like my brother, my hair had some red to it as well, mostly natural highlights. Until I met Trevor, though, I hadn’t even known I had natural highlights, let alone red ones. He had done lots to make me more aware of my appearance. I kept trying to think of a way to help him come to terms with what had happened during the blitz on the FGN and kept coming up empty. He had managed to be safe and sound in his bunker, but he had been alone, which gave his imagination time to run wild and confront ideas he had never considered before.
If he had holed up with my mother and Nadine’s mother, it probably would have gone better for him, mentally. Ivan’s kids and the two adult women would have kept him from thinking about things that no one wants to think about. I had tried to set him up with a trainer, someone to teach him to use a firearm, a good instructor used by the Kansas City Metropolitan police force. He had declined saying it was Lucas’s job to handle the guns.
I hadn’t pressed it because I didn’t want to traumatize him even more. The FGN had a shooting range, and if he changed his mind, there were plenty of cops that would help him learn to use a firearm. Many of the spouses were taking private lessons so if it ever happened again, they wouldn’t feel like the fish in the proverbial barrel.
While showering, I had pondered on the problem of our serial killer being a woman. Females tended to be less consistent and put more thought into planning each kill. Rarely did they take victims of opportunity. Whereas male serial killers were more impulsive, leading to more mistakes and more evidence to help us narrow down finding them.
I secretly harbored the opinion that there could be almost as many female serial killers as males and we probably wouldn’t know it. When we did get on the tail of one, it was because they were disorganized, impulsive, and sloppy, traits found in younger females rather than older, more experienced ones.
Even with the rates of serial killers rising, people just didn’t think of women as being capable of brutal killings such as these. Brutal murders that involved torture were just automatically thought to be the work of males. The world was still chauvinistic in that respect.
And what was up with the nursery rhyme. To write it in blood meant it was important, something the killer wanted us to see. Was she seeking revenge for a child? Maybe her child had gone missing and she suspected kidnapping by Satanists. That seemed like a good enough reason to use acid on someone. Perhaps the threat was to get them to tell what had happened to her child. Was there a link between the victims that went beyond them all being members of a Satanist church, we had been told no, but what if there was and they just hadn’t found it yet? I texted Fiona and asked her to see if she could dig up anything. Fiona was a bit of a search guru. I suspected she didn’t restrict it to the public part of the internet, but we were fighting an epidemic and I was a bit utilitarian anyway.
Using my phone, I searched for tutorials on how to apply Día de Los Muertos make-up. I suspected it was something that had to be learned as opposed to innate talent. More than a hundred links for YouTube videos came up. I watched the first one, a girl maybe my age applying makeup to herself in preparation for Day of the Dead celebrations.
I watched five or six others, deciding the make up on our victims looked more clownish and garish than true Día de Los Muertos makeup. Our killer was not putting in the time and effort on the make-up to make it look good, but that could be because they were applying it to dead people.
My search brought up something else, a website that linked Day of the Dead celebrations to Satanism. I rolled my eyes, but my phone didn’t respond to eye rolls, and neither did the website. The problem with the internet was that it gave every crackpot on the planet a forum and a way to find other crackpots.
I clicked the link opening the page and read the blog of this particular crackpot. The author seemed to have a theory about everything religious. Much of it was thinly veiled racism aimed at Hispanic Catholics, who the author deemed were procreating fast enough that eventually they would take over the world and we would all be forced to participate in Carnaval and Día de Los Muertos, both of which were cleverly disguised religious holidays honoring Pan. There was also a post about how Satanists had found and sacrificed the child that embodied the return of Jesus Christ. Another post talked about how serial killers were the result of government experiments in order to bring about the End of Days.
I stayed in the bottom of that rabbit hole for two hours, reading archived posts about different conspiracies. For the most part, I hated investigating, that was the job of the police, it was my job to keep them from getting killed when they found out who the bad guy was. I texted the link to Kimberly because there was a post on how all Satanists should be murdered in their beds to protect their children from the influence of evil.
After reading for two hours, I decided the author hated women, Catholics, Satanists, Hispanics, Jews, and Russians, none of which was illegal. However, if they were in the Tallahassee area, it might behoove us to go talk to them.
After poking around for a few final moments, I found a page on the blog with links to “evidence” to support the conspiracy theories and hatred the author spouted. I clicked one of the links and fell into another rabbit hole.
This rabbit hole was even more deranged. The primary focus of the site was provide proof that Satanists were trafficking in babies that had been aborted, that they had somehow saved and raised in incubators until they were old enough to be sacrificed to the Dark Lord. It also informed me that the antichrist had been born in China and included a picture of a child who suffered a vestigial tail along with a few other genetic deformities. I rolled my eyes again. I didn’t know as much about human anatomy as Xavier, but I did know that tails happened. Most babies born with tails had the tail removed. Having a tail made other people uncomfortable and they could be quite painful to deal with. However, when a rare genetic malformation such as a tail happened in a poor or rural area without access to modern medical treatments, they were often left because removing them had risks.
I rolled my eyes again and found another page of links, which I clicked and suddenly I was staring at a page with a swastika dripping blood. I went back a page and clicked a different link, white supremacists weren’t on the agenda tonight. Having read the blog post of the first crackpot that linked Satanists to Day of the Dead celebrations had made me realize that there might be a reason to target Satanists beyond them just being Satanists.
The next link lead me to another conspiracy theorist page that dealt with the Illuminati. This was closer to what I was looking for. There were all kinds of theories about the Illuminati being agents of Satan, I didn’t even need to read the page to know that. I was a non-believer in the Illuminati, secret cabals definitely ran the world, but I didn’t think the Illuminati was one of them. World leaders were more Skull and Bones types than Illuminati types.
It was after four am when I stopped reading up on Satanists and the Illuminati. I book marked the page on my phone for future reading. The author appeared more reasonable than the others I had read. So far, I hadn’t found any claims on the page that espoused hatred of any groups of people or even a single individual. There was something to be said for that.
I shut off my phone and curled up in the hotel bed. Like most hotel beds, it had seen too many travelers over the years, making it lumpy and uncomfortable. I didn’t go any further than that with the thought, because if I did, I’d start carrying plastic sheeting to cover hotel beds I had to sleep in. This was at least a decent hotel. We had stayed in some sketchy places during my time as a US Marshal. One would think that with all the travel US Marshals did, they would have an agreement with some place like Marriot to house us.
Instead we had credit cards that the US Marshals paid off every month for our travel. They had daily spend limits, but that was the majority of the oversight on them. Unless we all started charging five hundred-dollar meals, our expenses were easily justifiable. Including staying at hotels that had doors opening on hallways and not to the parking lot. At least there was some security in hotels with hallways. Although, once in a while, someone from the Marshals’ service booked us rooms and apparently that person hated us. Because they were constantly booking us into sketchy hotels.
I was awakened not by my phone ringing, but by someone knocking on my hotel room door. I grabbed a gun as I walked towards the door. Even though Gabriel was one room over, even he would have called before knocking on the door. I wasn’t a morning person and I was slightly paranoid, possibly justifiably so.
I am afraid of peepholes. I have this fear of someone on other side waiting for me to put my eye to the peephole and then shooting me through it. I had never heard of this happening to anyone, but in my head, it was logical, most bullets through the eyes were lethal, it was almost as good as using a laser scope to sight in a shot before firing.
I opened the door to find Kimberly on the other side. Dark circles framed her deep, rich brown eyes. Her hair was messy even in the ponytail that that held it off her neck. It appeared she had pulled it up without brushing it first, a sure sign that she was in a hurry to get here.
She frowned, looking at my gun held by my side. She didn’t say anything about it, probably used to my version of insanity from our days as roommates at college.
“There’s been another murder?” I asked after she said nothing for several minutes.
“Yes and no.” She sighed. “There was a murder, but I would say it wasn’t related to our string of them. It’s possibly a one off, but I think you and the rest of the SCTU should look at it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you are the closest thing to an occultist I have and because I would consider it a personal favor.”
“Is it your case?”
“No, but the detective who caught it is fine with you guys coming to look at it.”
“Occultist?” I raised an eyebrow at her.
“Most murders in Tallahassee are shootings or stabbings, occasionally someone runs someone over with a car. You know, average murders, with average motives, this is not one of those.”
“Kimberly, I’m not a detective.”
“We have lots of detectives, I don’t need one of those,” she shrugged. “I need someone with a history degree and an interest in the weird shit, plus you have Lucas, Xavier, Gabriel, Fiona, all people with their own insight and specialties. That’s what we want.”
“Why not use the profiler?”
“Because we listened to her already and decided she was an idiot.”
“Oh,” it was my turn to sigh, shrug, and frown. I called my team and told them what Kimberly told me as she paced around my hotel room. They agreed to get up. I dressed in the bathroom in jeans, combat boots, a t-shirt that read “If History Repeats Itself, I am So Getting a Dinosaur”. Kimberly looked at my shirt for a moment and smiled for the first time since entering my room.
“I see you still prefer t-shirts.”
“I prefer them to blouses when visiting crime scenes. They are cheaper if the smell doesn’t come out.”
“Does that happen often?”
“More than I’d like.” I nodded.
Kimberly left her police issued sedan at our hotel, riding with us to the crime scene in our SUV. Gabriel put the bubble light he carried, but never used, when we traveled on the dashboard and turned it on, alerting everyone on the road that we were police and in a hurry.
“What do you know about the victim?” Lucas asked.
“Not much,” she told us. “White male, no identification on him. When I left, the coroner estimated he’d been dead about six hours.”
“Manner of death?” I asked.
“Exsanguination,” she answered.
“That isn’t that uncommon a cause of death,” Xavier said.
“No, it isn’t,” Kimberly agreed, “and if someone had simply opened up a vein, I wouldn’t have come to you guys.”
GPS chirped that we were less than a mile from our destination. I took out my peppermint oil balm to place under my nose. Blood could overwhelm my sense of smell quickly when someone had bled to death.
“Sorry, that was snarky, I had only gotten about three hours of sleep when my phone rang and the detective in charge of the case, Pete Brown, called me to get my assistance, but I only took a couple of religion classes and all of them were in contemporary major religions.”
“I only took a few more than you,” I stated.
“I know, but this is more up your alley than mine,” Kimberly told me. I frowned harder as we turned down a street alive with people even at 6 am. Light strobed off the houses, making it look like a rave. There were cops huddled everywhere along with a few paramedics and firemen.
“How did you guys find a murdered person in a suburban house in the middle of the night?” Gabriel asked.
A neighbor filed a noise complaint at one am. Said she had knocked on the door to ask them to turn down their music because it was keeping them awake and no one answered. We sent a patrol unit out, and when they went to the backdoor to knock, noticed the windows in the door had been painted red. When they knocked on the backdoor, it swung open and they realized the red paint was blood. Which brings us to now.”
Gabriel parked next to a squad car and we all got out of the vehicle. The FBI agent, Baxter, was standing in the grass, looking a little green. Her face pale and features pinched. It was the look of a person trying not to toss their cookies.
We were taken around to the back door and let into the house. The smell hit me and I felt myself automatically reaching for the peppermint balm again, wanting to apply even more. It wasn’t just blood, it was blood and other bodily discharges.
Despite the smell, I was not prepared for what I saw in the living room.
“What the hell?” Lucas asked. I couldn’t have agreed more.
The victim was attached to the wall using metal and rope bindings at the wrists and ankles. His head was missing. His chest and abdominal cavity was open and his internal organs were on the floor surrounded by weird chalk drawings. I tore my eyes from the body and examined the floor. I recognized some of them, but not many. And what they had to do with the guy who looked like he’d gone toe to toe with a demon was beyond me.
“Someone really hated this guy,” Lucas said. Silently I agreed. My eyes did not flick up to the body of the man, they stayed on the floor trying to sort out the mess of chalk on it. The problem was, none of it made any sense. I saw one symbol that looked like it might be the Latin name of a demon, but I wasn’t positive. I picked out a few runes, symbolic old Norse writing that wasn’t exactly an alphabet, but also wasn’t a hieroglyph. I also saw a piece of Latin that was supposed to ward off evil and was used heavily during the Black Death, written on door ways and window casing to keep plague from entering the house. Other parts of it looked like Cyrillic and some of it looked like gibberish.
After several minutes, I decided they didn’t need an occultist or a historian, they needed a psychiatrist, and if I was right, there were going to be more of these bodies.
“Human sacrifice?” A detective asked. I shrugged. It could have been a human sacrifice, I supposed, but most people trying to conjure powers from beyond, used circles to contain the magic and the demon itself.
“This makes no sense,” Fiona shook her head and pointed to the floor. “This is a religious symbol used in Neo-Druidism.”
I agreed with her. Under the symbol was the Sanskrit name of Shiva the Hindu destroyer and creator goddess. The two did not go together. It felt like someone had searched the internet for symbols that focused power and drawn them all together on the floor with some elements of Latin and other things they didn’t understand.
“What’s his tattoo of?” I asked, noticing the ink that ran up from the man’s chest and onto his collar bone.
“It’s a shield with a dragon in it and a clawed hand full of black roses,” someone told me.
“I admit this is strange, but I’m not sure it’s out of the depths of the Tallahassee police department,” I whispered to Kimberly. Kimberly nodded and took me down the hallway. There was a closed door that she opened to reveal a baby’s room. Crib against one wall. Baby monitor near it. Mobile hanging from the ceiling. Blue paint with ducks and dragons on it.
“Does he have a baby?” I asked.
“That’s the thing, neighbors say no. Neighbors say he isn‘t married and they have never seen him with a girlfriend.” After another moment of taking in the room, Kimberly touched my arm and we exited to the hallway. Instead of returning to the living room, she walked further down the hall. She opened a second door and I stared in at a room decorated for a baby girl.
A handcrafted mobile with cats and unicorns hung from the ceiling. The room was painted pink with flowers and unicorns on the wall. There was pink carpet with what appeared to be a confetti pattern on it. Much like the boys room, it was unnerving and creepy to see the baby room knowing that there wasn’t a baby in the owner’s immediate future or present.
Kimberly wasn’t done revealing rooms to me. She closed the door on the second baby’s room and opened the door directly across from it. There was a bed, and two metal bars in the room, nothing else. The bars were fastened to the wall at studs and looked like ballet practice bars, except the bottom one was only two inches above the carpeted floor and the upper bar was about shoulder level for me, making it too tall for ballet.
There was sound proofing on the walls of this room. I wasn’t sure what was more creepy, the baby rooms that had no one to use them or the room I thought was probably a good place to confine a prisoner.
We returned to the living room to find Fiona and a crime scene technician holding up the flaps of the guy’s chest to make his tattoo more visible. A third person was photographing it.
“They’ll do that during autopsy,” Kimberly told her.
“I know, but I don’t think it can wait that long,” Fiona answered, pulling off her nitrile gloves and shoving them into a bag that the other technician seemed to make appear out of thin air.
