Ritual Dreams Page 10

  “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 ch
est 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.

  Nine

  Fiona was practically prancing as she pulled out her Chromebook and began hitting buttons. After a moment, she looked at Kimberly.

  “This is a good news, bad news situation,” she told the detectives that were assembling around her.

  “Always start with the good news, it makes the bad news seem less awful until later,” Kimberly told her.

  “I don‘t think you have a serial killer on your hands,” Fiona told her. “And I don’t think this crime is connected to your other weird and bizarre crimes.”

  “That is good,” Kimberly agreed.

  “The bad news is, you did have a second serial killer in town, but I’m sure they were long gone before you even got the call about the noise complaint.” Fiona turned her little tablet, laptop, combo thingy around for us to see. On the screen was a picture of a man who had the same tattoo on his chest, and while this victim might be missing a head, the picture still looked convincingly like the dead guy.

  “Who is he?” Lucas finally asked.

  “Nick Bacon, international thief and elite criminal,” she told him. “A little over a month ago we got a notification that Bacon had kidnapped a set of fraternal twins in Bohemia. If Bohemia was still a monarchy, the twins would be the heirs to the throne. He also kidnapped their nanny. King Gustav paid the ransom and one child was returned, with a note pinned to her basinet, to a hospital in London. The other was not recovered.”

  “Fraternal? I don’t suppose one child was male and one female?” Kimberly asked.

  “As a matter of fact, they were. Zelda Adele was returned, but Uwe Wolfgang has not been.” Fiona stated.

  “That explains the rooms,” a man in a suit that I hadn’t been introduced to said.

  “What rooms?” Lucas asked.

  “Baby rooms and a prisoner containment room,” I told him.

  “I would DNA test every abandoned male infant in the country against the DNA of Zelda Adele,” Lucas said. “My guess is he came here to dispose of the male child because the US has lax drop off laws and he would be unsuspected of having come here with a child and a nanny he had kidnapped.”

  “Bacon was tortured, psychologically at first and then physically, trying to get him to tell where he had dropped off Uwe.” I added. “This was a professional killing made to look like the work of a madman.”

  “I would find out the time line of when the ritual murders started here and when Zelda Adele was dropped off in London,” Lucas said.

  “Why?” Another man in a suit asked.

  “Because Bacon might have lived here a long time, simply because within a community heavily diversified, he would fit in and no one would get curious enough to intrude on his privacy. I bet he returned here within a day or two of the first ritual murder.” Lucas said.

  “That doesn’t answer the question of why are the two related?” The man reiterated his question.

  “The two aren’t,” Lucas said. “The ritual murders were a smoke screen used by the contract killer that killed Bacon and Bacon returned because no one in Tallahassee is going to show much interest in a kidnapping from Europe with couples being dissolved by acid. The two things are related only because they aren’t related.” Lucas theoretically clarified.

  “Essentially, Bacon came back with Uwe because he was sure no one here would be paying attention to the kidnapped twins from Bohemia in Tallahassee where a serial killer is striking down some of the city’s most prominent citizens. The drawings on the floor and the dissection is a result of the media. I’m sure if you check the internet someone has mentioned the writing on the wall, but it didn’t say what was written and it didn’t explain that it was written in blood, just like there’s been no in-depth coverage of how the victims are being murdered, just that the internal organs are gone. As a European, Bacon’s killer wouldn’t know much about the Tallahassee murders, except that there is a ritual aspect and there’s some stuff written near the victims, and the internal organs can’t be analyzed, so he tried to stage the scene and make it look like it might be connected to the other murders.” Xavier actually did clarify what Lucas was getting at.

  “In other words, the reason everything on the floor doesn’t make sense is because the writer isn’t a pagan practitioner.” Fiona commented.

  “Yes,” Lucas agreed.

  “Great,” I sighed.

  “Why do you look sad about this?” Kimberly asked me.

  “Because it means Interpol needs to get involved and someone is going to have to ask some really tough questions of King Gustav.”

  “Because King Gustav is the person most likely to have ordered the hit,” Kimberly said.

  “Yes.”

  “That makes more sense than the FBI’s theory,” the man in the suit said. “She told me the dismemberment and removal of internal organs was a surrogate for sexual tension.”

  “Even cannibalism is more likely than that,” Lucas said. “But that’s the problem with profilers. Profiling is still a very Freudian based science, and Freud was obsessed with human sexuality and the repression thereof.”

  “I’m not sure I follow,” the man who I assumed was a detective said.

  “Today there are multiple schools of thought that can be followed when studying psychology. Profilers go through training after they join Quantico, and that training exposes them to more Freudian theories than they would have been exposed to by getting a doctorate in psychology, so they tend to think everything is about the expression of a persons repressed sexuality.” Lucas said. “So, stabbing a victim becomes surrogate sexual penetration because a knife is a phallic symbol and it pierces the skin, going into the victim, that kind of thing.”

  “Because of this, they are very good at catching murderers who kill as a release of sexual repression,” Xavier offered up.

  “Are you both psychologists?” The man asked.

  “No, I’m a medical doctor, technically,” Xavier smiled. “But I’m only allowed to work on dead people and members of the SCTU. However, some knowledge of psychology would be required even if I had wanted to be a pediatrician.”

  Xavier had never explained why his medical license had been revoked and I wasn’t cruel enough or nosy enough to ask him about it. I figured eventually, one day, he’d talk about it, but until then I was okay with not knowing. I couldn’t picture him as a pediatrician, yet that comment indicated he might have been.

  “I’ll be,” Kimberly suddenly sighed. She held her phone out to the other detective. I got a glimpse of the screen as it moved, she had found an article about the killings. I’m guessing it had some information that made this killing look like it should have belonged to our acid murderer.

  Xavier had wandered over to the body and was helping the coroner and his assistant take the body down off the wall where it had been crucified. I looked at my shoes. The booties I wore were covered in blood. For the most part, I hated these things, but it was better than having blood squelch in my boots.

  I walked outside in time to see the sun start to rise. Within minutes of the sun brightening the sky, it was hot. The air felt heavier as I pulled it into my lungs. The police presence hadn’t diminished. One uniformed officer was using his phone to record video of the looky-loos.

  I consider looky-loos to be parasitic. I understand human curiosity, especially when it comes to unnatural deaths, but I have been at the center of the looky-loos a few times in my private life, and they don’t respond to a person’s pleas to be left alone, which is nauseating and irritating.

  Unfortunately, his killer wasn’t in the crowd. He was probably on an airplane somewhere over the Atlantic. It would take a few days for Interpol to get o
fficers here, hopefully we were wrapped up by then, because if we weren’t it was going to get very crowded in the Tallahassee police department.

  Fiona and Kimberly came out of the house and stood next to me. Fiona was staring at the ground. In the time that she had been with the SCTU, she had made huge strides to enjoy her job. She hadn’t wanted to go to crime scenes when she first started, complaining that it wasn’t in her job description. Which may have been true, but she kept on top of crime not related to serial killers and the rest of us really didn’t.

  “How did you know all that about Bacon?” Kimberly asked her.

  “The CIA asked us to look into it, he falls under the purview of the SCTU because he’s a serial kidnapper. I read the case file and decided they needed a scalpel not a sledgehammer and told them to get the FBI’s behavioral unit involved not the SCTU. They hadn’t yet because they knew who the guy was, they just weren’t able to get evidence on him,” she paused and looked pensive, her face drawing together, creating deep frown lines. “Maybe they had needed a sledgehammer.” She added after a few moments.

  “Coulda, woulda, shoulda,” I told her, trying to alleviate her angst over the case evaluation. If it wasn’t a serial killer or mass murderer case, it was at our discretion whether we took it or not. “Besides, can you imagine me trying to gather covert evidence on a serial kidnapper?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  “Exactly,” I agreed. “And besides, it was the CIA, they could have turned it over to anyone, like the FBI or Secret Service.”

  “True,” she said. I had a horrible thought that Fiona might be feeling somewhat responsible for Bacon’s death. Was there a voice inside her head telling her that if the SCTU had taken the case, he’d still be alive?

  I wanted to point out that sending the SCTU after a non-violent criminal was not a good idea, I had a temper that was fueled by a bottomless pit of rage. Since the rage was internal and not the direct result of any specific thing, it was easy for me to funnel it into any small annoyance or irritant. I didn’t mostly because there were people around us. And while almost anyone that read a newspaper was aware I was a diagnosed sociopath, it was different to be confronted with that knowledge when I was standing just a few feet away.