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“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.
