Ritual Dreams Read online

  With help from Xavier, they started lifting the body that had been dissolved into two pieces up into the air. We all took several giant steps away from it. The fluid that had been puddled on the floor got larger as it drained down the plastic sheeting, and we all took several more steps away. Fiona tapped my arm and I handed her back the small metal container that had her balm in it. I also dug my container out of my pocket. She took both of them. Mine was stronger than anyone else’s because I had a condition that gave me a heightened sense of smell and dead things were really hard on the olfactory system and stomach.

  Everyone seemed to follow Fiona’s lead, pulling out their own containers of balm. Lucas passed his container to Kimberly, which she gratefully took and began to smear liberally around the bottom of her nose. A version of it could be bought commercially, but we made our own because the commercial stuff wasn’t always strong enough and because we went through a ton of it. It was just a mix of coconut oil, shea butter, beeswax, and essential oils like peppermint. Everyone had their own spin on it, because we all liked different smells. Lucas used eucalyptus and vanilla. I loved vanilla and refused to mix it with anything that was going to associate the smell of vanilla with death in my brain.

  Kimberly gave him a wide smile. She had something already smeared under her nose, ever so often I’d catch a glint of light off of it, but I was guessing it had stopped working because her face looked a little healthier after she applied Lucas’s balm under her nose.

  After they got the body up onto the gurney, I noticed that several detectives and officers had all left the building. The area around the door was now devoid of people. We weren’t talking and we all followed the body out the door with Lucas being nice enough to open it for the men with the gurney. Sadly, both bodies fit on it, because one could be moved around like a jigsaw puzzle piece and fitted into the areas the mostly intact body left empty.

  Four

  Once outside, the person in the HAZMAT suit removed the helmet with face mask. It was not a reptilian hominid with dwarfism, it was a woman with short, blonde hair and big, blue eyes. The whites of her eyes looked like cracked glass with red paint filling in the break lines. Wisps of hair clung to her face. It would have been a pretty face, except she didn’t look like she had slept in months. Dark circles shaded her eyes. Her lids looked droopy. Coupled with the bloodshot eyes, I believed lack of sleep was becoming a serious problem for her.

  “Special Agent Krystal Pierce,” she held out a gloved hand to me. Not one of the nitrile gloves that everyone wore at crime scenes, but one of the heavy-duty rubber gloves, like women used to wear in the 1950s to wash dishes. Except they were blue, unlike the ones my mom wore when I was a kid in the 1980s, those were sunshine yellow with a white interior.

  “That’s a pixie cut,” Fiona said to me. We’d had a discussion about it a few weeks ago with me disagreeing with Fiona about what a pixie cut was and why she thought it would look good on me. Looking at HAZMAT girl’s haircut, I was even more convinced it would not look good on me. For starters, I doubted her blonde came from a bottle, unlike my auburn brown, which was more bottle color than natural anymore. At twenty-nine, I had more grey than natural color hair. Trevor had taken a picture of me from high school to a salon to have them color match it to my natural tone from what felt like a life time ago.

  Plus, there was no Trevor to take me to the salon and help them find a cut for me. So my hair continued to be cut the way it had been cut before he’d decided to go stay with some friends, nearly half a year ago. It wasn’t Lucas that was the problem, it was that Trevor, who had always had to deal with the bad guys from afar, was still trying to process the reality of having them so up close and personal. Like my mom and Nyleena, Trevor had fled after the destruction of our safe zone. Trevor was a chef and a queen, he was not a serial killer hunter, nor did he want to be. When he called me after he left, he told me he had begun to worry about what they would have done if they caught him. He was the husband of a cop, and not just any cop, but a member of the SCTU.

  It was hard on Lucas not to have Trevor to come home right now, but Lucas understood. The bad guys had raped and tortured Nyleena simply because they could. They would not have been any gentler with a gay man. Even I’d had a few nightmares involving baseball bats wrapped with barbed wire. I was sure Trevor’s nightmares had been much, much worse. I’d discovered men, men like Gabriel, didn’t have nightmares about being raped. That was almost exclusively a problem females faced in our society. Females and effeminate men in the exact wrong place, at the exact wrong time, men like Trevor, who lived too close to the serial killers. I wasn’t even sure Lucas understood, because Lucas was not effeminate in any way and even though he wasn’t a sociopath or psychopath, he could handle his own with one.

  I had talked to Trevor three times in the last couple of months. He was going to therapy and working on his fears and hoped to get himself to a place where he could return to life in the gated community with the people that had adopted him. It had taken my mom and Nyleena a long time to return and I hadn’t been sure Nyleena would. I had my fingers and toes crossed that eventually Trevor would return to us, like Nyleena had. Trevor was the only one I had told about Nyleena sneaking into Gabriel’s when she thought no one was looking. We’d both agreed they deserved happiness, but weren’t sure they would find it with each other, and then wondered why they thought it was so slick, considering I was Gabriel’s next-door neighbor. That last had made both him and I giggle a little.

  The Behavioral Science and Analysis Unit had been restructured under the new director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, it was meant to help them function more like the Violent Crimes Unit, but mostly it had just confused everyone. Literally everyone, including those inside the unit, the FBI, and the US Marshals. Both the FBI and the US Marshals expected to work with them from time to time. There were no resident psychopaths or sociopaths in house with this unit, and I didn’t know how much experience this agent had with either, so I said nothing.

  This was harder than one might imagine. As the agent droned on and on about the theories the profilers had about the killer, I couldn’t help but wonder why she was here. Had she ever chased a serial killer? Was this a trial by fire sort of thing? Perhaps sending her here, where the SCTU was, was a hazing ritual? The Behavioral Sciences and Analysis Unit and the Serial Crimes Tracking Unit had a long history of not cooperating very well.

  The problem was that profilers were obsessed with sexual sadism, mommy issues, and sexual dysfunction. That was all well and good, but at the end of the day, it didn’t provide us with a door to kick down. The only one of these that we encountered time and time again was sadism. Serial killers tended to be sadists, some of them sexual sadists. But again, that didn’t give us a lair to raid before the sun went down.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” Gabriel said to HAZMAT girl as he introduced first himself and then his motley band of serial killer hunters.

  “The acid is a forensic counter measure,” she said, and I snapped back to attention.

  “Counter measure for what?” I asked.

  “Rape.” She answered. It took a force of will not to roll my eyes.

  “If it’s a counter measure for sexual assault why inject it into the abdomen when it would be more effective to inject it into the vagina like an acid douche?” Fiona asked. If we hadn’t been in public, I would have given her a high five.

  “And why use that same method to dispose of the husbands?” Xavier asked.

  “We believe he is sexually assaulting both the male and female victims,” she answered quickly, like she had anticipated the question.

  “Then why inject it into the neck?” Lucas asked, and no one said the unspoken part of his sentence out loud.

  “Forced sodomy isn’t the only way to sexually assault a man,” she told us.

  “Now I have that image in my brain,” I thought out loud and tried to grab the words and shove them back into my mouth. When people referred to
things like a fate worse than death, they were talking about rape. Rape wasn’t about sex, it was about power, rapists and serial killers weren’t that different. For many, being sexually assaulted was worse than death because it destroyed pieces of them. This was just as true of male victims as females. And it was exactly what Trevor was in Hawaii dealing with his problems. No, he hadn’t been captured and assaulted like Nyleena, but the threat had been there, and it had left a gaping wound on his psyche that screamed at him every time he closed his eyes. While my mom and Nyleena had fled to Australia, Trevor had friends living on the big island in Hawaii and he’d gone to stay with them.

  I didn’t buy the theory that the victims were sexually assaulted. It didn’t make sense to me. Not just because the killer was injecting them with acid, but because the killer was achieving their goal with the acid; he was obliterating them. Sexually assaulting them as well seemed over the top, even for a psychopath. I didn’t say any of this at the moment because I was aware that profilers didn’t want any information from the US Marshals. To them, we were just the people they sent in so they didn’t get dead. We weren’t supposed to think or reason. Later, I would talk to Lucas about it, because I was fairly sure that Lucas, who had studied abnormal psychology, would have his own thoughts on the FBI’s theory. I had read Lucas’s dissertation once. It was about how aberrant personality traits differed in women and men. Essentially, he had come to the conclusion that aberrant personality traits in women were more extreme than in men, but that women were nurtured in such a way that they were able to hide them better. For example, as a sociopath with some psychopathic tendencies, I was better at hiding the traits than say Malachi or Caleb, but they were every bit as intense within me as they were in them.

  I didn’t disagree with him. Women were capable of extreme brutality and violence and were very creative in their methods of killing. I believed more so then men. I also believed men were more likely to be motivated by deviant sexual desire than women.

  This was only true, however, when the deviant sexual desires were motivated by sadism. A condition in which inflicting pain on others arouses the person inflicting the pain. I was not a sadist. I enjoyed inflicting pain, but it didn’t cause sexual arousal or release. In this way, I was different than Malachi who did get a sexual thrill from inflicting pain. I didn’t know Caleb well enough to know if he was a sadist, but I had grown up with Malachi, and he had attempted to rape Kimberly when she was my college roommate. Forced sex is almost as good as blood letting, according to Malachi. I’d given him an ultimatum after that event, I’d kill him if I ever caught him again. So far, so good. The threat was only good as long as Malachi believed it. It was part of the reason I tasered him from time to time, just to remind him that I did not have an issue with inflicting pain onto him, friend or not. “Rape doesn’t explain why he is targeting pagans,” Fiona said. “There has to be something other than that going on. Besides, if the acid was merely about covering up a rape, there are easier ways to accomplish that goal. Based on that, we are looking for a guy who gets aroused by women who are married and practice a pagan religion. That doesn’t seem like a very good profile, it has too many variables and unanswered questions. The guy is capable of stalking his victims and learning their patterns. Patterns of married couples with children, who are less likely to maintain the same routine day after day, and then attack, rape the wife, dissolve the husband’s throat, and then dissolve the wife’s abdominal cavity, to cover up sexual assault? That last bit doesn’t sound as thought out as the first bit. I have learned that killers tend to be organized or disorganized, organized killers are capable of the forethought you are talking about, the planning and stalking, disorganized killers are not capable of that kind of forethought, but once he begins the actual attack, he is so into it that he loses his ability to follow through with his plan. That leaves some gaping holes in your profile. Also, the guy has to have a job of some sort. Stalking doesn’t pay well, and none of the murder scenes were ransacked for things he could sell, so he isn’t making his money by selling his victims’ things, which means he has to have some source of income that allows him to stalk his victims, while also paying him well enough to keep him from needing to sell their stuff.”

  “Private detective,” I offered. “From what I understand of it, Kenzie Reynolds and Alexandra Zeitzev have a lot of downtime but still get paid well. Might explain how he finds Satanists.”

  “We think he finds his victims because he is a Satanist.”

  “I see a ‘devil made me do it defense’ there,” I commented dryly.

  “That is possible.” The FBI agent told us.

  “Nope, I just don’t buy it.” Fiona told her. “Satanists are people, sure, there has to be a few psychopaths in the group, but generally speaking, Satanists are among the more peaceful pagan religions. The motto of most Satanist religions is, “Live and Let Live”. No judgement and you are free to do what you want, as long as it doesn’t hurt another person.” Fiona added quickly. “I just can’t see someone raised as a Satanist doing this.”

  “You know a lot about Satanists,” the FBI agent said to her.

  “I was raised Methodist, but it never fit well on me, so when I was in college, I went on a quest for spiritualism. Satanism is one of the religions I tried on before I settled on becoming a Wiccan.”

  “Also, I didn’t think all of the victims belonged to the same temple,” I tossed in. “I thought they belonged to different Satanic groups.”

  “They did.” Kimberly told me.

  “Ok, then being Satanist to find his victims doesn’t work. It would be like a Baptist going to a Lutheran church to find victims. Yes, all the major Satanist religions are represented in Florida, but being Satanist is like any of the other major Christian sects, they all have a different flare to them. A Baptist isn’t going to be as comfortable in a Lutheran church as they would be in a Baptist church. Just like a member of this temple isn’t going to be as comfortable in a Temple of the Fallen as they would be here. Just because they are all pagans or, in this case, Satanist, doesn’t mean they all have the exact same worship methods.”

  “Are you a Satanist?” She asked me.

  Aislinn is not religious,” Kimberly answered for me. “However, she took more classes in comparative religion than most religion majors simply because she could.”

  “Fine, since you two seem to think you understand so much about pagan religions, how is he picking his victims?” She snipped at me and Fiona.

  “Beats me,” Fiona offered shrugging. “That’s not in my job description. I just think you are being too general in your thought process. You have fallen into the trap most people fall into when they think of pagan religions, they are all devil worshippers or hippies, and neither is true. Organized Satanism doesn’t really worship the devil. It’s more idolatry and hedonism than God/devil, good/evil.”

  “The giant horned figure inside this temple isn’t the devil, it’s Baphomet, a god of unknown origin that has been culturally appropriated. It was first connected to Satanism when the French government and Pope conspired to go after the wealth of the Knights Templar. They claimed the Templars were worshipping Baphomet instead of God, and it was the Catholic church that decided Baphomet was the devil. However, he isn’t even an important deity in any religion. Many of his personality traits belong to the god Ba’al from Phoenicia. Ba’al is now a demon in Christianity, but he was appropriated from Phoenicia in the 14th century. Basically, Ba’al and Baphomet didn’t become evil until the Catholic church and French monarchy decided they wanted the wealth of the Templars. Furthermore, Ba’al wasn’t even all that evil until it was decided that it was a good reason to persecute Jews in medieval Europe. Many Jewish sects in the Middle Ages referred to Yahweh as Ba’al. The practice was stopped because it was a favorite of Torquemada during the Spanish Inquisition to prove that Jews were actual devil-worshippers.”

  “And that is really Aislinn’s specialty,” Kimberly smiled like the Cheshir
e cat. “Aislinn has a Ph.D. in medievalism, specializing in the psychology of punishment.”

  “Does that help our case?” She asked.

  “Understand the victims, understand the killer,” I offered. “Satanists don’t believe in heaven or hell and God and the devil were just figures created to keep people obeying laws that kept them oppressed. All early civilizations have good deities and bad deities, good and evil, but they often overlap. Lamashtu, a Sumerian deity, caused miscarriages and infant death. Pregnant women would set out offerings to her to keep their unborn children healthy and alive. However, Lamashtu wasn’t totally evil. She could protect people from natural disasters like earthquakes and she could cause them. On a grand historical scale, the concept of good and evil is relatively new. Set was an evil deity, he was also the protector of armies and soldiers in Egyptian mythology. If you were going into battle the next day, you set out an offering to Set and Horus, yet Set killed his brother Osiris and chopped him into pieces before disposing of his body in the Nile. Egyptians didn’t consider Set to be evil, despite murdering his brother. It has only been modern eyes looking back on ancient Egypt that has labeled Set as evil. Set could be a very helpful deity, despite. Much like Lamashtu, we look at the acts of these deities and label them as evil deities, but that wasn’t so clear cut at the time of their reign. For instance, we label Set and Lamashtu as evil and ignore the fact that Zeus was a prolific rapist. The reason is because the concept of consent is still very new to all cultures and so Zeus is still thought of as a seducer of women, a womanizer, but the truth is much uglier. Yet, Hades who didn’t rape anyone except maybe Persephone, is considered evil because he was the god of the underworld. In two or three thousand years, Satanism will just be another variant of Christianity, like Eastern Orthodoxy. Or it may be the dominate religion, like Catholicism, was for a thousand years. The point is, you can’t look at Satanism with blinders on and understand it. Most Christians cannot look at Satanism without seeing a religion based on evil because they see it as based on their Christian understanding of Satan and it has very little to do with Satan except the title.”