Wren Delacroix Series Box Set

by V. J. Chambers

“Well, none of the suspects are,” she said. “But that could be that my profile is flawed. Profiling, it’s not an exact science.”

  “More of an art?” He arched an eyebrow at her.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” she said. “It’s not creative. I mean, it’s evidence-based.”

  “I read that book by John Douglas, Mindhunter,” said Reilly. “Guy seemed to make up those profiles from his gut. He was pretty arrogant about it too. Seemed to think he was a goddamned genius. I bought the book to try to help myself figure out criminal cases. It was less than helpful. And that’s the granddaddy of profiling, right?”

  Wren chewed on her bottom lip. She opened her mouth to answer and then closed it.

  “Hey, I’m not trying to give you shit,” said Reilly. “I think I’m jealous. I wish I could do it. But I don’t know if I ever could. It requires some ability to get inside a killer’s head that I don’t possess. I don’t want to either.”

  “I understand that,” said Wren. “I don’t know why I can do it. Sometimes I wonder if it’s biological or something.”

  Right, because of her mother. He waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. He debated asking something, but then he decided not to. Instead, he volunteered a bit of personal information. “My mother was killed by Mark Quentin Rhoads.”

  She turned to look at him, surprised. “Oh, really? Wow, I’m so sorry. That’s awful.” Then she looked away. “I, um, interviewed him when I was at the Academy.”

  He stiffened. “Really? They just let you do that? Let students in there to talk to dangerous killers?”

  “Not alone,” she said. “We were there to observe other agents, mostly, but we were allowed to ask questions as well. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you. I shouldn’t have—”

  “No, it’s all right,” he said, too quickly. He wanted to shut down that part of the conversation suddenly, because he felt himself feeling a helpless rage that mirrored Wren’s own anger towards Spencer. It was the way he always felt about his mother’s murder. They said that you got over that kind of thing, but you didn’t. You just got better at compartmentalizing it, shoving it to the back of your head. He tried to think of something to say to change the subject, but came up empty.

  It was quiet.

  Finally, Wren spoke. “We should have asked him if he knew what the initiates wore. The killer would need to know that.”

  “True, good point,” said Reilly. “I’ll keep that in mind. But he did know about the meditation pose.”

  “That’s true,” said Wren. “I don’t think that’s common knowledge, but there is a lot of information about the FCL on the internet. I’ve done research myself to figure out the cult’s history, and there’s a lot out there. So maybe the readiness pose is too. I mean, I guess I could go looking into it myself, see if I could find it online. Honestly, I don’t like digging into all of it if I don’t have to.”

  He tightened his grip on the steering wheel, feeling a stab of guilt. Had it been horrible for her, growing up in that place? What had they done to children there? “We’ll put Maliah on it,” he said. “That’s her job.”

  “Oh, right,” she said.

  “Look, maybe he didn’t make the calls at all. He said something about some other guy coming and getting high with him before he blacked out. Maybe that guy made the calls.”

  “That’s definitely possible,” said Wren. “Maybe that guy was the killer.”

  “If so, it would mean that the killer wanted you back here for some reason.”

  She made a face. “I’d rather not think this is all about me.”

  “Well, it might make it easier to catch the killer.”

  “I guess.”

  They were quiet again.

  He switched the cruise control on, sat back in his seat. Outside, the scenery flew by. “By the time we get back, it’ll be quitting time. I think today’s pretty much shot. But tomorrow, I was wondering if you’d want to give me a rundown on David Song.”

  “You think David Song is the killer?”

  “I just don’t understand all of it,” he said. “How’s he connected to the original murders?”

  “Oh, no one knows that,” she said. “But sure, if you want, we can go to his house. They keep it cleaned and ready for him, in case he should show back up.”

  “Whoa, really? Do they think he will?”

  “Not really, I don’t think,” said Wren. “He’s probably dead.”

  “Is there any chance that the person who called you really was David Song?”

  “You mean, it was his ghost and Spencer channeled him? No way.”

  “I mean, he was really alive, and he went there and got Spencer drunk and high and then used his phone. Did this person say anything that only Mr. Song would know? Is there any reason that Mr. Song would want to talk to you?”

  She hesitated. “No, I don’t think so. He was pretty generic. And I can’t think of any reason.”

  * * *

  No reason except that there’s a possibility he’s my father, Wren thought. She didn’t want to tell Reilly that, not because she was embarrassed about not knowing who her father was, but because it was a vulnerability within her. She wanted to know about her father, and she didn’t know. She felt like telling Reilly about it would exposing a wound. She didn’t want to do that.

  So, she kept it to herself and she went home that night. She deliberately didn’t go to Billy’s, because Hawk had made that dig about her always being there and because she’d seen Reilly there before. She didn’t want to see anyone. She wanted to be alone.

  She dug through the cabinets in her cabin and found an old bottle of gin, which she drank mixed with orange juice. It wasn’t that bad of a combination. She would recommend it. Maybe she could invent it as a drink.

  And then she remembered Snoop Dog, and figured that she hadn’t actually invented it. Honestly, though, she wasn’t really sure what kind of juice was in gin and juice. She thought of asking Reilly, but then she felt like a racist asshole, because why did she assume it was a black thing?

  She drank her gin and orange juice until she felt sleepy and then she crawled into bed.

  The next morning, she and Reilly met at the coffee shop and she ordered a macchiato again. Angela commented that she was committing to a drink, and she immediately changed her order to an Americano.

  “I don’t like to be predictable,” she said when Reilly laughed.

  “But you wear the same clothes every day,” said Angela.

  “No, I don’t.” Wren waved this away, even though she was wearing the same jeans she’d been wearing for the past four days. Maybe she should wash them. Eh. Nah.

  They took Reilly’s car up to David Song’s house, which was at the top of a hill, overlooking all of the compound. The driveway up to the place was winding and steep, and parts of it had been washed out. It was slow going.

  “I thought they kept things nice in case he came back,” said Reilly as they bounced along the driveway.

  “Apparently, not the driveway,” said Wren.

  Finally, they reached the house.

  It was easily three times the size of one of the regular cabins. It had a two-story wraparound porch that allowed someone to stand up there and look out and see the view from all sides.

  They got out of the car, and Reilly shut the door. He straightened his suit jacket and peered up at it. “Impressive.”

  “Yeah,” she said. She was hunting through her purse.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Keys,” she muttered. “I got them from Kimora last night. She used to come up here and clean and she never gave the keys back.” Where the hell were they? She should have put them in the little pocket. The last time she’d been looking for keys like this…

  She gulped.

  Holy shit, if she found another body in this house, she was going to lose it.

  There. Keys. She yanked them out, but now she felt grim. She stalked toward the house.

 
; “You okay?” called Reilly.

  She put her head down like a linebacker and pushed forward, gritting her teeth. She stepped onto the porch and headed for the front door.

  “Hey, wait up!” called Reilly.

  She didn’t. She fitted the lock into the door and turned it. The door swung inward. Inside, it smelled like patchouli, because people in the Fellowship had a thing for incense.

  She stepped inside. She was in an expansive great room that encompassed the entire lower floor. In the center, a natural-wood staircase ascended to the upper levels. In one corner, there was a kitchen area with a massive floating island and stainless steel pots and pans hanging over it. Wren peered at them and wondered how much of a pain they were to dust. Maybe someone should put them in a cabinet or something.

  Reilly stepped inside behind her and shut the door. “You okay?”

  She looked back at him. “Fine.” She scanned the rest of the bottom floor. There was a dining room in the opposite corner and big windows looked out on the surrounding forest. The rest of the great room contained couches, easy chairs, and an imposing fireplace. She didn’t see a body.

  But maybe it was on the other side of the staircase.

  She walked around it, looking on the floor.

  Nothing there.

  “We should check upstairs,” she said quietly.

  “Check for what?” said Reilly.

  She was already climbing the steps, now seized with a horrid certainty that there was a body here, and that she was going to find it, and that it had been left here especially for her. Who had she told she was coming here?

  Only Kimora, but maybe she’d said something to someone else, and maybe it had gotten around to others. Maybe Major had heard or maybe Hawk or maybe Isaac. Maybe the killer had staged this just for her.

  Upstairs there was a large bedroom, with a huge closet. There was a luxurious bathroom with a marble tub with jets. David’s office was also up there.

  There was no body.

  Reilly found her looking behind David’s clothes, which were hanging in his closet. Someone must beat them to get the dust off, because they were dust free.

  Or… well, maybe there wasn’t much dust in a house where no one lived. Wren remembered hearing that most dust came from people shedding their skin cells.

  “What are you looking for?” said Reilly.

  “I just… I have a feeling there’s a body here.”

  Reilly went still. “Okay,” he said, obviously taking this feeling of hers seriously. “Where haven’t we looked?”

  “The office,” she said. “It’s through there.”

  Reilly took his gun out of his shoulder holster. “Stay behind me,” he murmured.

  Together, they tiptoed over the wood floor, out of the closet, out of the bedroom, past the stairs and into the office.

  There was a computer in there, but it was fifteen years old, and it looked clunky and too big. It was dust free as well. It sat on an oak desk, and beneath that was a thick, white rug. Behind the desk were bookshelves, all filled with various religious books. Stuff about Christianity, stuff about Scottish pagan religions, stuff about Wicca. It was an eclectic mix.

  Reilly looked behind the door.

  Nothing there.

  He turned in a circle in the middle of the room, pointing his gun at everything. When it settled on her, he immediately pointed it at the ceiling.

  Then he relaxed.

  He tucked it inside his holster again. “I don’t think there’s anything here.”

  She swallowed. “Right.” Oddly, she didn’t feel reassured. She felt sure that the body was there, maybe lying on the bed or face down in the bathtub. She had just checked both places, but she could see a little girl there, clad in her black flowing pants and shirt, her face drawn and gray. She hugged herself.

  Reilly went over to David Song’s desk and started opening drawers.

  “I don’t think there’s a body in a drawer,” she whispered.

  He paused, looking at her over the top of the computer monitor. “Why keep this place preserved like this?”

  “I guess because he’s like God to the people in the FCL,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “You know, when little kids are naughty in the regular world, their parents tell them Santa Claus is watching or Jesus is watching. But when I was a little girl, my mother said that David Song was watching.”

  Reilly raised his eyebrows. “He was omnipresent?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wasn’t it pretty easy to prove that he wasn’t?”

  “We rarely saw him,” she said. “He stayed here, in his house, and people came in and cooked for him and entertained him and treated him like royalty. He seemed like a god.”

  “Could he still be alive? Could he be murdering the girls?”

  “I don’t think he was involved in the first murders, not physically,” she said. “It would be more likely, if he was involved now, that he was influencing someone else to do it.”

  “Huh,” said Reilly.

  “And if so, my money would be on Isaac Scott. He’s probably the most devout member of the Children that exists anymore.”

  Reilly opened another drawer.

  She hesitated. She wasn’t sure she wanted to say this. “Also… what you said yesterday, about how this could all be about me?”

  He looked up. “Yeah?”

  “Well, if it is, then I would say that means that Hawk Marner is the most likely suspect.”

  Reilly furrowed his brow. “Yeah, you mentioned both of these guys before.”

  “I think you should talk to Hawk. I’ve known him since I was a kid. I don’t know if I can see him clearly.”

  “Huh,” said Reilly. “All right, I’ll do that.” He tugged out a piece of paper from one of the drawers.

  “What’s that?” she said, coming closer.

  He set it on the desk. “I don’t know. The other drawers were all empty. This was the only thing in there.” He scrutinized it. “Kinda creepy, huh?”

  She looked down at it.

  The paper was covered in jagged lettering, angry strokes of a pen. In the center was a crude drawing. She wasn’t sure what it was. Tree branches? Lightning? Antlers? On the rest of the paper, the same phrase had been written over and over again, the words overlapping, going in different directions, marching around the edges of the paper, going diagonally across. The words were scrawled large. They were scrawled small.

  The Crimson Ram wants in.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “So,” said Reilly. “What’s this Crimson Ram stuff?” They were back in his car, and he was glad of it. He wasn’t a superstitious sort of person, and he didn’t believe in weird shit like that, but he sometimes thought that various places had a kind of energy to them. He noticed it when he entered crime scenes sometimes. It could all be something he projected. He was willing to admit that was it.

  But whatever the case, he didn’t like it in that house. The whole time he’d been in there, he’d felt like something was crawling at the back of his neck. Now that they were leaving, he felt better.

  “The Crimson Ram is… God,” she said.

  He laughed. He couldn’t help it. “Like the-Father-Son-and-Holy-Spirit God? I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I don’t know when it started,” she said. “I know that back before David Song became the leader of the Fellowship, they never called God that. It was more like what you’re saying. A traditional Christian God. But David brought the Horned Lord.”

  “Wait, the who?”

  “Another name for the Crimson Ram,” she said. “The Horned Lord. I feel like he’s somewhat based on a god from pagan tradition in England. I don’t know a lot about that, but he was a god of the hunt or something. I don’t know. If you know people who are Wiccan, they believe in that god. They have a god and a goddess, and the god is the Horned god.”

  “So, what? David just said, ‘We’re going to worship a differen
t god?’”

  “Not exactly,” she said. “He told everyone that all gods were the same god. That God had a lot of different names. But over time, the Crimson Ram started to be the focus of everything. And when Vivian started gathering her army, bringing people together for her bonfires, she would rely heavily on imagery that involved the Horned Lord. It would be… violent and bloody and… there was fire a lot. Crackling, burning bones and smoking flesh.”

  “Gross,” said Reilly.

  She laughed, and it was a little wild and uncontrolled. It went on a long time. Finally, she stopped.

  Reilly felt that stab of concern for her again, but he didn’t say anything.

  “Anyway, the Crimson Ram needed sacrifices,” said Wren. “And he wanted the Children to prevail. At the time, we were growing, and we wanted more land for the people who were coming to join the group. But the locals wouldn’t sell. And they were threatening to sue us. They were organizing against us, trying to do whatever they could to get rid of us. The locals thought we were some kind of Satanic cult who sacrificed babies.” She considered. “I mean, maybe in the end, we were almost as bad, but we didn’t think that way. When I was a little girl, I thought that everything they told me was true, and I thought we were sent here to be a light to a lost generation. I thought we were the heroes and everyone else was in need of saving.”

  “By the Crimson Ram.”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Kind of a creepy god, if you know what I mean.”

  “He was very Old Testament,” she said, “bringing his rage to bear and punishing the wicked. Only he couldn’t do it on his own. He needed us to carry out the punishments for him.”

  “And that’s why the murders happened.”

  “Well, that’s how Vivian got people to commit the murders,” said Wren. “She convinced them what they were doing was the right thing. You’d be surprised what people will do when they’ve got the fervor of fanatical belief behind them.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said. “Not anymore. I’ve seen a lot.”

  She nodded. “Of course.”

  “Do you, uh…” He wasn’t sure if he should ask. “Why do you think Vivian did it? Did she really believe the Crimson Ram was giving her those messages to punish the evildoers?”