Ritual Dreams Read online

  “This couple was active in their church, active in the community, and they had kids. Killers usually do some experimentation with how they kill, but once they find a victim type they like, they stick to that victim type. Couple that with the fact that poison and acid aren’t that different as murder weapons and it seems very likely that this was the first.”

  “Why would they start with poison?” She asked.

  “Because you can walk into a hardware store and buy 400 ant poison traps without much attention, harder to do that with, say, thirty gallons of drain cleaner.” I replied. “As a kid, I grew up in an area that had a prolific ant problem. It was like our house was built on an ant hill. I can remember my parents going to the store and buying ant bait stations for inside use as well as outdoor bait stations and they would buy them by the cartons. They’d come home with several bags of ant poison as a result. Same with rat and mouse poison. It could be bought in large quantities without anyone thinking much about it, especially if you lived in an area that had a barn or silo. Buying large amounts of drain cleaner gets noticed because people keep trying to flush body parts down toilets.”

  Fiona gave a heavy sigh that stopped all arguing for a moment. We all looked at her. She had sighed in the past, but it wasn’t the norm for Fiona, especially not loud sighing. We waited.

  “Besides most serial killers need to find out how to kill,” Fiona finally said. “From what I’ve seen in the last year or so, serial killers don’t innately know how to kill, it’s like everything else, they have to learn. Look at the last serial killer Tallahassee had. Brent Timmons had six learning kills. He wanted to use a sword for the murders, because he thought it was cool, but while he could picture it, he didn’t understand the mechanics of it. He didn’t start by executing his victims by chopping off their heads. He started by slitting throats, not with a sword but with a ceramic chef’s knife, and as the throat slitting got deeper, he moved to trying to remove their heads, but even then, his first two beheadings didn’t work. The first was paralyzed by the blow and left bleeding profusely, but Timmons had to go into the guy’s kitchen and get a kitchen knife to finish the job, because he hadn’t figured out how to behead his victims yet. That would only come after a couple of botched attempts and then he began practicing cleaving through the spinal column at the neck by practicing on pig carcasses with his sword. I’ve read the transcripts of his kills that he gave to the SCTU after capture and it is scary, but more importantly, it shows that even when they do know how they want to kill, they must figure out how to do it. Killing isn’t like in the movies or TV. I have found that is true for both cops and serial killers.”

  “It is my understanding you didn’t think this was the killer’s handiwork,” the FBI agent commented.

  “I didn’t at first. But part of that was because I had my mind closed to the possibility. After further consideration on the matter in light of Aislinn’s staunch position that it is the same killer, I have to admit, if it isn’t, then our killer is probably either an acolyte or a copycat or both.”

  “Copy cats require the same method,” she told her.

  “It is the same method,” Fiona answered. “You have a very narrow focus and understanding. A knife and a sword are basically the same weapon. A bullet and an arrow are basically the same weapon. When you think of the similarities to how the victims suffered, acid and poison are also basically the same weapon.”

  Are we going to have to battle you on this every step of the way?” Gabriel asked.

  “No, once you realize you are wrong, you’ll stop fighting me,” she stated. Xavier took that moment to come into the conference room. His hair was matted to his head from the cap that he wears in the medical examiner’s autopsy rooms. His clothes looked somewhat less wrinkled than normal for Xavier. His cheeks were flushed and he was practically dancing a jig. He’d only been in the autopsy for a couple of hours. He couldn’t have found anything case breaking in that time.

  “While we were examining the male victim, we found something unusual.” Xavier told us. “He was dead before he was injected with the acid.”

  “Dead how?” Gabriel asked.

  “He had a heart attack from what we can tell. He had massive blockages in his legs and several of the arteries leading out of his heart. I’m guessing the guy lived on fried foods. Now, this is a Lucas thing I think. We think he would have shown signs of the heart attack while it was happening. He died while the killer was there. Yet, the killer went ahead and injected him with acid. We swabbed the area around his neck where the carotid artery goes into the head and found a dried gel like substance. We think the killer checked his pulse. The dried goo has been sent to a lab for identification.”

  “If the killer did that after he had died, it must be important to the killer. Beyond the removal of DNA evidence from an alleged assault. It also means the act of injecting the acid is important. If he was dead by the time the killer got around to dissolving his throat, then it would have been easier and faster to either pour the acid down his throat or just pour it on his throat. There was no need to inject him with it.”

  “How do you know he didn’t have a heart attack after he was injected?” She asked.

  “Because the fluid that we gathered from inside his body wasn’t thick with blood like it should have been and because all the other male victims showed signs of breathing after the acid was injected into their throats, pulling tiny amounts of acid into their lungs via their bronchial tubes and this guy didn’t. So, he didn’t breathe it in after it was in his throat, the only reason for that was he wasn’t breathing by then.”

  “What would happen if the victims drank the acid as if it were a poison?” The FBI agent asked.

  “The esophagus, throat, tongue, gums, would all have chemical burns. As would the lungs. Sulfuric acid in the stomach in small quantities wouldn’t have done much damage, because stomach acid is basically sulfuric acid and our stomach lining protects the organ from damage. You’d need a much stronger acid or base to make ingesting it problematic or you would need a lot of it. Of course, small amounts administered over a long period of time would cause a bleeding ulcer to form eventually, because it would begin to damage the lining of the stomach over time.”

  “In other words, poison and acid do very different things to the body,” she stated.

  “Not really and it would depend on which poison and which acid.” Xavier replied. “Exposure to arsenic or ricin would be very similar to what would happen if I forced someone to drink a beaker of hydrochloric acid. There would be massive internal bleeding, leading to hemorrhaging in the organs, vomiting blood, but I think the victim would either aspirate their own blood, die of shock, or suffocate, if they drank a large amount of a strong acid. Which would be quite similar to someone who had consumed either ricin or arsenic. Borax is a common substance, but it is toxic in large doses. It causes significant damage to the stomach, esophagus, and mouth. I imagine someone killed with it would vomit exceptional amounts of bloody foam. The thing about borax is while it is safe most of the time, there are times it is dangerous.”

  “Why did you bring up borax?” She asked.

  “I’ve already talked to Ace about the death of the couple who died from eating a massive amount of ant poison. The coroner listed ingestion of borax as cause of death. And he remembered the autopsies. He said at first he thought they had been exposed to ricin. Ricin is a bad poison. It’s rare for borax to be used as a poison. If they had gotten medical attention after ingesting the borax, they could have lived. However, borax is easy to get and most people think that since the packaging says do not ingest and to keep away from pets, borax is a poison similar to say arsenic which is found in mouse and rat killer. Whether it’s borax or sulfuric acid, neither death is fast or clean. We are talking about messy crime scenes, messy bodies that are hard to autopsy, and substances that require repeated exposure or high doses. In the case of the borax poisoned couple, it seems more likely it was given over the course of a
few days and then a large dose was introduced suddenly and that the prolonged exposure coupled with the sudden high dose lead to their deaths. If it wasn’t done that way, it would have taken longer for the borax to kill them and they would have probably died from blood loss due to damage from the excessive vomiting. Since I haven’t looked at the autopsy results of that case, I can’t be sure about either of those things. I do know it would have been very slow, we are talking hours and hours not like an afternoon. The killer would have had to be near them the entire time. Acid is probably faster than borax as a murder weapon.”

  “Medically, do you think the murders could be connected?”

  “Absolutely.” Xavier nodded emphatically. “I would say the killer probably wanted to kill his victims slowly, but borax poisoning turned out to be too slow and there are only a few brands of rodent killer that still contain true poisons like arsenic. Arsenic causes massive hemorrhaging and destruction of mucus membranes. It’s bloody and awful but faster than borax especially in high doses. Some states require you to sign a registry when you buy products with arsenic in them, but you can probably buy it online easily. Medically speaking, poisoning and forcing someone to drink acid is related. They produce similar symptoms, and neither is terribly fast. Even consuming a large dose of arsenic isn’t something that is going to kill immediately. You essentially bleed to death, which is what the female victim did and has done in every case, both the acid murders and the poisoning case.”

  “This means our killer is probably young,” Lucas told us all. “Even if you aren’t a chemist, most adults know and understand how arsenic works because it was a common substance from our childhoods. We would also be more inclined to understand how poisons and acids work in general.”

  “You think a teenager did this?” I asked.

  “I think it is very possible that a young person did this.” Lucas crossed his arms over his chest. “And possibly not a male.”

  “What do you mean not a male?” Gabriel asked.

  “I think a woman would be more inclined to sit around and wait for the deaths of their victims from borax poisoning or injecting acid. Young males do not have the patience to sit and wait it out. That seems more like a female murder trait.”

  “They found a pair of women’s shoes at the scene of the borax poisoning that none of the children had ever seen. They were covered in bloody vomit.” I offered. “If the killer was a woman, that would explain the shoes and the detectives who caught the case thought the same thing, the shoes belonged to the killer and were left behind because of what was on them.”

  “We have a cross dressing serial killer of Satanists?” The FBI agent asked.

  “No, we have a female serial killer of Satanists.” Lucas corrected. “And it may not just be Satanists. It may be all pagans, but Satanists are easier to find since it is a more organized religion with church services and things than Druidism or Wiccan or Voodoo.”

  “Women do not kill like this,” the FBI agent said.

  “Says who?” Lucas asked her. “Some of the most brutal serial killers have been women. We say women like to poison their victims, which is true to some degree, but poison is not an easy death, even prolonged poisoning which is a much slower death is still painful and involves lots of cleaning up. The reason women are more likely to poison their victims then men is because women have the patience to wait for their deaths. Men rarely want to wait days, months, or years for a victim to die. They want to get in, get it done, and be gone.”

  “Poison ranks up there with actually burning to death. If you die of smoke inhalation, death is much quicker than if you catch fire and die from the flames. It super heats the air you breathe in causing burns in the mouth, esophagus, bronchial tubes, lungs, nose, sinus passages, and sometimes the stomach. The majority of poisons work because they cause massive hemorrhaging of internal organs. This is why people vomit blood and develop diarrhea. Acid works in a similar way. If you drink acid, it’s causes the blood vessels in your organs to rupture. In both cases you actually die of blood loss or organ failure. It’s considered a complication of the exposure to the acid or poison and therefore the source of the blood loss or organ failure is listed as the cause of death, not the symptom. Anyone that can sit around while two people die of borax poisoning would have the ability to sit around and watch after injecting two people full of acid.”

  “Do you agree with your colleagues that this is just as likely to be a woman as a man?”

  “Yep. Female serial killers are more likely to prolong suffering without touching their victims. Male serial killers that prolong death do it for the hands on torture, women do it just to watch their victims suffer.”

  Seven

  Kimberly, who hated to be called Kim, had taken us to a steak house for dinner. We told her to invite her husband along, and she did. His parents kept the kids as a precaution. We weren’t there to talk work, but usually when you got a bunch of cops together that were all working the same murder case, it just happened. This had been no different. We had all finished our meals; Lucas and Xavier were eating dessert. Kimberly and her husband were drinking coffee and Gabriel was having a beer when the conversation turned to murder. It hadn’t been graphic or gory, just a few thoughts on how many practice kills there would have been before our killer, who I was now convinced was a woman, could go the full mile with injecting her victims with acid and then watching them die. I was sure that the poison murder wasn’t the only one and that there might have been an assault or two before the murders started, a crime where she lost her nerve or didn’t execute her plan properly. A moment of hesitation or thought that went beyond “these people need to die.”

  I liked Kimberly’s husband. He was funny, smart, and pleasant. I wasn’t ready to sign him up for my friendship circle, but she could have done a whole lot worse. He had explained his philosophy on medicine and treatment, and he and Xavier had actually talked shop for a good portion of dinner. They had even discussed the disastrous snake venom migraine injections that had given me aphasia.

  He hadn’t told me that if I would quit smoking, they would all go away or tell me that having children would solve my migraine problems, like my last neurologist had done. He simply said if you find something that works, stick with it, because migraines were a serious problem since we didn’t really understand why they happened.

  While quitting smoking had reduced the frequency to some degree, it hadn’t reduced the intensity and I still had them more often than I wanted. So I still smoked off and on. Usually during high stress times, like chasing serial killers.

  The FBI had their theory of the crime and we had ours. There was very little evidence being left at these crime scenes. I wanted to have everything from the poisoning re-examined, but getting it done would be difficult because I wasn’t sure how much of it was left. Things got lost in evidence lockers when they sat for a handful of years. Unsolved cases went better than solved, but this one was listed as solved. A former housekeeper of the family had been convicted of the crime. She had taken her own life in prison just a few days after the verdict. Even in her suicide note she had proclaimed innocence. If I was right, this was going to be very bad. I couldn’t remember the detectives who had investigated it, I hoped it wasn’t Kimberly.

  These kinds of things stalled careers and she had always been very ambitious when we were in college. I didn’t believe being a homicide investigator was the title she wanted to retire with in thirty years or so. More likely she would want to be the Chief of Police or the Chief of Detectives before she retired.

  One night while we had been out for dinner and drinks with some classmates from our psychology class, someone had joked it was good that Kimberly had enough ambition for both of us. I hadn’t found it very amusing at the time, later as I worked on my thesis as a graduate student with no idea what I was going to do with my life, I had finally gotten the joke. I was not ambitious. I was not socially adept. Kimberly and I were polar opposites in many ways, and where most r
oommates would have found having me as a roommate a tedious experience, Kimberly hadn’t minded sharing a dorm room with the little kid who wasn’t quite 18 yet and knew she wanted to get a history degree, but couldn’t tell you what she was going to do with that degree, and who didn’t have friends except the few that visited from back home who were older than her and probably only visited out of pity.

  Now, no longer a child, even though I had a sense of purpose and I had friends beyond Malachi and Nyleena, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life beyond what I was doing, and I had no ambition. I never wanted to have to do Gabriel’s job full time. I never wanted to advance beyond the SCTU. I didn’t want to be a regional Chief of the Marshal’s Service. I didn’t want to coordinate for WITSEC or fugitive apprehension teams. I preferred being a front line soldier in the battle against serial killers. I wasn’t sure if my lack of ambition was laziness or fear of change or some other mental condition. Any and all were possibilities.

  Life for me had begun only after I had graduated with my doctorate and been found by Lucas and Xavier. And while the first month had been rocky, once Gabriel was put in charge of the group we had coalesced and then the job had become more than just a job. Now it was my life. Not just this part, the part where we chased a serial killer, but Lucas, Xavier, Gabriel, Fiona, Trevor. Having friends that didn’t require me to pretend I cared more than I really did about most things in life made me feel content. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was happy, because I wasn’t positive I would ever be happy in the way other people were happy.