Ritual Dreams Read online

  “Eventually, you will pick up that even a simple question to Aislinn can result in a history lecture, because she doesn’t believe in simple answers.” Kimberly continued to smile.

  “The world is not a simple place,” I commented in my defense.

  “I agree with Ace,” Fiona stated. “Satanism factors into these killings to be sure, but not for the reasons everyone thinks. The killer is not a Satanist. More likely he is an overzealous Christian.”

  “This is one hell of a hate crime.” Kimberly said quietly.

  “Yes, it is,” Gabriel agreed. “However, hate is a strong motivator.”

  “Hate would explain the acid,” Lucas added. “I have been trying to figure out a way for the acid to be a sexual tool, and I just can’t. No matter what way I look at it, acid is too strong for sexual gratification. He’d almost have to have necrophiliac tendencies along with being a sadist and the two rarely go hand in hand. Most necrophiles want the body intact. These aren’t. If you are right and they are tools used to cover a sexual assault, then he must do it after they are dead as a forensic counter measure because even as a sadist, he isn’t getting off on knowing he’s going to kill them after he defiles them.”

  “That does happen,” the FBI agent stated, I realized I had already forgotten her name.

  “Yes, it does, but the killing is more hands on than what the acid would afford.” Lucas agreed. “The acid doesn’t fit with any profile. It is either there as a forensic counter measure for something we don’t understand yet or it is there as a tool of punishment. Considering the other victims were alive when they were injected with the acid would suggest it was punishment. Sexual assault would be punishment itself. Also, the killer isn’t making them drink it,” Lucas sighed. “If used as a forensic counter measure, I would think the men would be forced to drink it. And the women douche with it, but that isn’t the case.”

  “In other words, while the acid is destroying evidence, the delivery method doesn’t support forensic counter measure for sexual assault. Since almost none of the men have had the acid in their stomachs, it’s been found in the lungs suggesting they breathed it in, along with a lot of blood, meaning it is being aspirated, not mistakenly breathed in while they were drinking it. We should still find traces of semen in the stomachs of the male victims and we aren’t, despite the acid not really reaching the stomach.” Xavier offered. “Also, while it is leaking out the vagina of the female victims, it isn’t completely destroying the uterus. We should still be able to find traces of semen there if they were raped. Basically, all the acid is doing in the women is covering up any damage to the vagina.”

  “That just suggests they were covering up a sexual assault with an object other than a penis,” the FBI agent told us.

  “I don’t think so,” Xavier countered. “Forced felatio leaves signs, and none of the men died from asphyxiating on vomit. If the men were sexually assaulted with an object that wasn’t soft and to some degree flexible, then at least one would have vomited during it, gag reflexes are fairly sensitive.”

  “When this is over, we’ll see which of us is right,” she sneered at Xavier. I hid a smile behind rubbing my eye with the palm of my hand, covering my mouth with my arm. She didn’t need to know how petulant I found that statement.

  Under Pressure

  Martha had zipped herself into a large sleeping bag and was lying on the hardwood floor beneath the bed. Her head rested comfortably on a pillow. The bed was a large wooden bed that was older than most people’s homes. It had once belonged to her great grandparents. Now it belonged to her aunt, her guardian. Someone had made the bed longer at some point, and the joints of the inserted boards could be seen most clearly from the underside of the bed. Like her, it wasn’t perfect, but it was the imperfections that made it perfect.

  Her aunt, Sandra, had gone to bed a few hours ago, tucking Martha in, inside the bed. Every night, after Sandra tucked her in, she crawled under the bed and slept in the sleeping bag she had under there. It was safer under the bed. The monsters couldn’t hide under the bed to get her if she was already there.

  She wasn’t sure why more children didn’t sleep under their beds. She shrugged, bad parenting. Her parents hadn’t wanted her to sleep under her bed either. But her aunt was fine with it. Of course, her aunt didn’t have children and sometimes those made the best parents, Martha had decided. Once people had their own kids to raise, they began to forget that they weren’t always right, weren’t always in control.

  She took a small pocket knife from its hiding spot among the mattress boards and put a small circle on the wooden board above her abdomen. Yesterday had been exhausting and she hadn’t slept very well the night before. Today she hadn’t done much, her day had consisted of playing video games and babysitting the girl across the street.

  Martha pulled a large teddy bear close to her. It was two feet tall and wearing a sweater with the year 1999 embroidered on it. Her father had gotten it for her just before he died. They said it was a car wreck, but Martha knew better. She had been in the car. Her father had started bleeding before he wrecked the car. Bleeding from a spot in his abdomen. They weren’t headed home when the accident happened, they were headed to the hospital. Martha had been eleven.

  His head had fallen on his chest and he had stopped talking moments before the car they were driving zipped into an intersection at a red light. They were hit by a large truck. It had slammed into them head on, shoving the dash over Martha’s knees and sending pieces of glass flying through the vehicle.

  Martha had been told that one of those pieces of glass had perforated her father’s abdomen and he had bled to death waiting for people to arrive on scene to help them. No one had listened to her. No one had believed her when she said her father had been bleeding before the accident, nor did they believe her when she said the driver of the truck had come up to the car, leaned in the driver’s side window, and shoved a large chunk of either the windshield or the driver’s side window into the hole that had already been in her father’s abdomen.

  Thinking about it made Martha scared and angry. She held the teddy bear in a death grip while tears rolled down her face, soaking into the bear’s ears. Her body shook. The driver of the truck was dead now. Her aunt had killed him a mere six years later when he had shown up looking to kill Martha. He had broken into the house to get to the girl, but her aunt had been alerted to his presence. She’d owned a large dog, a beautiful rottweiler named Duke that had barked and barked and barked that night. He didn’t do that normally. Normally he was a good, quiet dog, only barking when people, strangers, were near the house. He didn’t even bark at the mailman. He had taken to sleeping with Martha after that night. Her Aunt Sandy said Duke slept with Martha to protect her. He could tell she needed it. Unfortunately, Sandy had gotten Duke when he was just a puppy and by the time the driver of the truck had broken in to kill her, he was an old dog.

  While Martha called the police, Duke had jumped at the man, knocking him into a small table in the foyer. Dog and man had both tumbled to the ground. The man had then put a stun gun to Duke’s chest and Duke gave a yelp before he stopped breathing. Sandy had gotten her handgun by then, and when the man stood up, Sandy shot him seven times in the chest. She told the cop she practiced several times a week because there was no use owning a gun if you didn’t know how to properly use it.

  Sandy and her mom, Karen, had money. Their father had been an oil man in Louisiana. He had invested heavily in a company that built offshore oil rigs. Martha’s father had been an engineer on an offshore rig until he got hurt in an accident, Martha had never heard all the details, but what she had heard was enough to let her know that her father had lost his hand in a fire drill that had gone terribly wrong, causing a stampede, that included men abandoning their posts and causing a real fire and emergency.

  Sweet Caroline

  Caroline sat opposite a very severe looking woman. Caroline was in her prettiest sun dress, a pale-yellow color with a mix of
pink and white flowers on it and a lace ruffle sewn into the ruffle at the bottom hem. She didn’t know why this woman always looked grumpy and annoyed with her. It wasn’t Caroline’s fault she had an amnesia condition that left holes in her memory, including why she had to come see Mrs. Doyle every month so Mrs. Doyle could scowl at her and make her feel bad about herself.

  “Your boss told me you missed work a couple of days ago,” Mrs. Doyle said after an unbearable ten minutes of silence.

  “Did I?” Caroline asked and frowned. “I must have had a bad day, I don’t remember missing it, but then I rarely do.”

  “You don’t remember what you did that day?” Mrs. Doyle asked.

  “No, I don’t.” Caroline answered. Mrs. Doyle got up and walked over to Caroline and bent down close to the young girl. Her breath smelled bad and she was breathing a little hard, but Caroline didn’t believe Mrs. Doyle was so out of shape that getting up from the desk was a great strain on her body. She wasn’t fat. She was a trim woman with pretty hair. “Are you feeling okay Mrs. Doyle? You’re breathing really hard and fast. You aren’t going to pass out are you? I don’t have much training in first aid and I don’t want something to happen that I can’t handle.”

  “I’m just unhappy Miss Caroline, I thought we had a deal. I thought that since our meeting a couple of months ago, you were going to have your aunt write down when you had bad days and any details you could remember about them.”

  “I think I went for a ride, but I don’t know that for sure.” Caroline said quickly. “Maybe my aunt took me to the beach.”

  “Do you remember going for a ride or to the beach? Do you remember being with your aunt that day?”

  “Not really,” Caroline admitted. “It really must have been one of my bad days.”

  “What do you remember?” Mrs. Doyle asked.

  “My aunt coming in to wake me up and telling me that I had an appointment with you in a few hours. Then I got dressed, had breakfast, called work to make sure they knew I needed today off. They said I had scheduled it, so my aunt gave me a French lesson in the kitchen while we waited to come see you.”

  “What do you remember before today?” Mrs. Doyle asked.

  “I took a book to the park,” I said. “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. But I don’t remember coming home and that seems like it was a few days ago. I thought that was Tuesday, but it’s now Friday. I don’t know what I did on Wednesday or Thursday. I feel like I must have slept through it. Maybe I feel asleep at the park and my aunt came and got me and then because of the amnesia problems, I don’t remember anything between Tuesday and today.”

  “Did perhaps Amber take over while you were at the park?” Mrs. Doyle asked.

  Caroline frowned. She had been told about Amber but wasn’t sure she believed in her. Amber supposedly shared her body. She didn’t know how that was possible or why it happened. It wasn’t like she was pregnant, she didn’t even have a boyfriend. How could she have another person inside her that made her forget things she did?

  It didn’t make sense, but she couldn’t deny that she didn’t always remember what she had done that day or the day before or for two hours out of the day here and there. She had one day suddenly come awake while watching American Idol. She hated American Idol. She didn’t know why she had been watching it.

  Nor did she know how she had gone from being at work to being home with her aunt watching American Idol. She also couldn’t deny that Amber liked weird books. Caroline was currently working her way through the greatest novels ever written, novels like The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and War and Peace, but Amber seemed to want to read The Boxcar Children and Cam Jansen, books that were too young and stupid to keep Caroline’s attention, but they kept showing up at the house, and when she asked her aunt about them, her aunt would tell her Amber wanted them.

  That didn’t explain the other books, though. Every couple of weeks a new Danielle Steele novel appeared in her room. She didn’t believe Amber was reading Cam Jansen and Danielle Steele and she, Caroline, had no desire to read Danielle Steele. She had tried one of the novels and it was all about love and sex and didn’t interest her. She preferred her romances to be based in history, books like Jane Eyre and War and Peace.

  When she asked her aunt about the Danielle Steele books, her aunt had told Caroline she had picked them up for her, she liked romance novels from other eras, she thought she might like some from modern day. Caroline had thanked her and the subject had been dropped, but it seemed like the Danielle Steele books were being read. She’d find her bookmarks in them occasionally or find them opened and face down on her nightstand. She didn’t believe this was being done by her aunt. Maybe Amber was trying to read them. She’d once found her bookmark removed from Wuthering Heights. She had been forced to rediscover her place, reading several chapters she was sure she had already read. They were familiar and she knew what they were about even though she couldn’t quote from them.

  She had other dreamlike memories as well, nightmares really. Nightmares that involved blood and screaming and people she had never met, which was weird, because she had read in a book that you couldn’t dream about people you didn’t know. The brain was unable to create faces in dreams. Every person in a dream had to be someone you had at least run across in real life, but Caroline was sure she had never met any of these people that screamed and bleed in her dreams.

  Parts of them disintegrated like in a horror movie. She hadn’t told her aunt about the nightmares, she was afraid she’d have to go back to the hospital and she didn’t like it there. It was boring and made her amnesia worse. The best part of the hospital had been Dr. Abernathy. Dr. Abernathy had been very nice to her, Caroline, and had been the first person to tell her about Amber. She didn’t like Dr. Durant at all. He was a mean man who didn’t care about Caroline’s feelings, he just wanted to tell her about all the bad things that had supposedly happened to her that really hadn’t. Maybe they had happened to Amber, maybe that’s why Amber was hiding in Caroline’s body. She had tried to discuss that theory with Dr. Durant and he’d just continued to shout at her.

  Her life was confusing enough without Dr. Durant telling her she was bad or evil or that horrible things had happened to her that hadn’t. He also told her a lot of stories of some woman named Martha that didn’t make sense to Caroline. Martha made Dr. Durant angry, but that wasn’t Caroline’s fault, she had never met Martha, had never even heard of the woman until Dr. Durant had started ranting about her one day. Why should he hold Caroline responsible for her actions? Didn’t Caroline have enough to deal with? She had Amber who somehow caused her amnesia. It was hard to keep a job when Amber made her forget to go to work.

  Then there were the uniforms. When Caroline wore her work uniforms they always had Amber’s name on them. She had tried to get them changed, but her bosses always told her they couldn’t change it. She had created a new name tag with a label maker that read Caroline and she often wore it instead of the name tag issued by her boss. Her boss had never told her she couldn’t, so she guessed it was okay.

  She didn’t have any friends at work and she was being homeschooled by her aunt. It made for a lonely life. Sometimes she wished Amber would talk to her, maybe since they were sharing a body they could be friends, but Amber never contacted her. Repeated pleadings in the mirror for Amber to contact her usually resulted in a bout of amnesia.

  Five

  Fiona was sipping a Diet Coke as I ate my slice of pizza, with a regular Coke set just out of knocking over reach. Fiona had a plate that had two slices of Hawaiian pizza on it, or my version of Hawaiian pizza on it anyway; mushrooms, sausage, black olives, jalapenos, ham, and pineapple, the only thing that could have made it more Hawaiian was spam. The FBI was feeding us. Kimberly had ordered from a place that had a whole lot of toppings you wouldn’t find at a chain pizza place.

  Gabriel, Lucas, and the FBI agent were conducting interviews. Fiona and I were looking at every murder case from
Tallahassee that had happened in the last year where the victim practiced a pagan religion.

  There were a lot of them. Tallahassee’s general population was 50% pagan. There were nine different branches of organized Satanism, the usual Wiccans and Druids, then there were five revivalist religions that worshipped deities belonging to ancient cultures, like the Cult of Osiris that worshipped the ancient Egyptian pantheon of gods, five or six Asian religions based on mysticism, and about thirty or so religious cults that didn’t really explain what they worshipped. This meant that a disproportionate number of murders involved victims that were practicing pagans.

  There was a criteria to our search, we wanted female victims where the level of violence was extreme or prolonged torture was evident. Our killer hadn’t just woken up one day and started stalking Satanist couples and injecting them with acid. Killers that used extreme methods tended to work up to it. Rarely did a guy immediately start with rape, torture, and mutilation. There was a progression to it. Fiona and Lucas had decided we could rule out crimes where the victims were raped, but that still left a lot of cases. Tallahassee was not the murder capital of the US, but it did average 1,000 homicides a year. It did not have many ritual murders or serial killers. Every once in a while one would crop up like Brent Timmons, but they were the exception not the rule.

  We had five bins set around the room, each one labeled. I closed a file and got up and took it to a bin labeled “Not our serial, but still a serial” and gently placed it inside. Fiona did something similar with the folder she had been looking at, placing it in a bin marked “Absolutely not related to our serial”. They had let me create the bin names and I liked names that left nothing to the imagination.