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
C ontrolling 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.
