Dead Run

by Erica Spindler

  Satanists Believed Responsible for Death of Livestock.

  The story came from nearby Homestead. It detailed a rash of livestock killings-the animals had been found with their throats slit. Images associated with satanism had been drawn on fence posts and the sides of farm buildings. Pentagrams. Horned goats. An inverted cross.

  A horned goat.

  The Horned Flower.

  Heart pounding, Liz altered her search from Gavin Taft to satanism.

  CHAPTER 44

  Tuesday, November 20

  5:00 p.m.

  “Hey, gorgeous.”

  Liz jumped and gasped, a hand going to her throat. She swung in her seat to find Rick standing behind her, expression amused.

  She scowled at him. “You scared the life out of me!”

  “I see that.” He bent and kissed her, then pulled out a chair and sat. “Sorry.”

  She rubbed her arms. No wonder he’d frightened her, considering the things she had read in the past hour. She might never not be frightened again.

  “What’s so interesting?” He tipped one of the books up so he could read the title. The Devil’s Hour. He looked at her, eyebrow cocked in question.

  Rick wasn’t going to take what she had to say well. Considering the brevity of their relationship, she shouldn’t know him well enough to predict that, but she did. He would be resistant to anything that fell outside the typical law-and-order scenario of bad guy is busted by good guy-nice, neat and explainable.

  A cult that worshiped Satan and murdered its wayward members and all others who might expose them fell way outside of that.

  Liz changed the subject and forced a weak smile. “How’d it go with your friend?”

  “Good. Seems Taft spent a semester at Florida State.”

  “That’s where Pastor Tim went to school.”

  “Yup. Bill’s checking the date for me.” Rick caught her hand and laced his fingers with hers. “He told me something I’d never heard before. Said Taft always claimed to have a divine mentor. A spiritual adviser.”

  She frowned. “And?”

  “Think about it, Liz. A spiritual adviser. Who in society is recognized as-”

  “A pastor,” she murmured, excited. “Of course.”

  “This might all be nothing but a coincidence. But if it turns out that Gavin Taft and Tim went to school together, I’ll feel a lot more confident that what we found is solid enough to go to Val with.”

  “We have, I’m certain of it.” She drew a deep breath. “They’re satanists, Rick. The members of the Horned Flower are satanists.”

  He gazed blankly at her a moment, then laughed. “Very funny.”

  “I’m not joking.” She tightened her fingers over his. “When I was looking for stuff on Taft, I found this article. Here.” She slid the copy she had made out from under a pile of books and handed it to him.

  He read the article then handed it back. “I saw stuff like this when I worked on the Miami-Dade force. What about it?”

  “The horned goat, the horned flower. See the connection?”

  He shook his head. “You’re making a pretty big leap there, Liz. My feeling is the Horned Flower is a sexual image, the group some sort of sex club. Think about it. The flower is a symbol for the female genitalia, the horn for a man’s.”

  He had a point, but she knew she was right about this. She had to convince him. “Just listen to me, please. Satanists aren’t as rare as you might think. They’re not just the stuff of Hollywood. Research suggests there are more than a hundred thousand practicing satanists in the United States alone. And that figure doesn’t include self-styled satanists who aren’t part of a coven or those simply dabbling in the black arts. Research also supports that satanists’ belief in the power of darkness predisposes them to acts of lawlessness and violence.

  “According to my research, law enforcement has learned to repress any satanic elements of a crime because they don’t play well in court or with juries. The defense calls it supernatural mumbo jumbo and the real evidence is discredited by association. So, they make their case without mention of black candles, altars, gutted animals or pentagrams. Can you tell me you didn’t do the same when you were with the Miami-Dade force?”

  She took his silence to mean he couldn’t and continued. “Think about the rash of school shootings. The great majority of those kids had satanic paraphernalia in their possession.”

  “And a great number of them had Nazi symbols and objects, too. They were troubled kids looking for anything out there that was associated with the dark side of human nature.”

  From the corner of her eye, Liz saw a man at the next table glance at her. She moved her gaze and thought she saw the interest of several others. A chill washed over her.

  They could be anywhere. Watching. Listening.

  She grabbed her purse. “Let’s talk outside.”

  Rick followed her out front. They stood in the cool shadow of the Cultural Arts Center’s long colonnade, away from the curious stares of others. Liz picked up where she had left off. “These satanic groups lure troubled teens into the coven with promises of power and a sense of belonging. A family, if you will. Which is the exactly the way Mark told me Tara and her friends referred to the Horned Flower.”

  “That’s typical of cults. From what I learned when I was still on the job, it is that very promise of acceptance and belonging that lures most cult devotees.”

  She ignored him and continued. “Of course, once in the cult, they are expected to do whatever is asked of them, whether they want to or not. Some who have escaped have told they were required to act as sex slaves to other coven members. Others were forced into prostitution.

  “Then, when the member wants out, threats and intimidation are used to keep wayward cult members from leaving the group.”

  “Also standard cult practice, Liz. Absolute loyalty is demanded of sect members and is enforced by threats to body or spirit.”

  “We’re on the same page here, Rick,” she said, excited. “Satanists have been known to threaten to kill not only the cult member, but their family and other loved ones as well. If the member continues to try to separate from the coven, they increase their threats. For example, they might kill the member’s pet, then present the mutilated animal as a very real warning.”

  Rick remained silent and she pressed on, encouraged. “That’s what happened to Tara. She went to my sister, they found out about it and killed Rachel before she could go to the authorities. Then when Tara became involved with Mark, who insisted she leave the group, they threatened to harm her and her unborn child.

  “Tara feared the Horned Flower, Rick. She told Mark she did. And sure enough, the night she was due to run away, they stopped her.”

  “Slow down, Liz.” He held his hands up, palms out. “There’s nothing to suggest Tara’s murder was the act of satanists.”

  “No? What about the pseudoreligious carving on the body? The mutilated genitalia? Maybe the bodies weren’t laid out to form a crucifix but an inverted cross, another satanic image.” She took a deep breath. “Maybe Taft’s spiritual adviser was the devil himself.”

  He sucked in a sharp breath. “Stop it, Liz. You’re talking crazy. Talking like this will get us-”

  “What? Laughed out of the Key West Police Department?”

  “Yes.” He made a sound of frustration. “You’re right, when I was with Miami-Dade, we swept any ritualistic aspects of a crime under the rug because it would discredit us. But also because it wasn’t really pertinent to the crime.” She opened her mouth to argue, he held up a hand to stop her. “If a Buddhist or a Christian or an atheist commits a crime, their faith isn’t thrown up to the jury as pertinent.”

  “But, Rick-”

  “Listen to me. Tara, and probably Rachel, too, were killed by a sick human being acting alone, not as part of a group. In my opinion it was most probably someone who worked directly with Gavin Taft or was an admirer of his.”

  “Then how do you explain w
hat happened to Mark?”

  “The experience Mark described was wholly sexual with none of the chanting and ritual associated with a black mass.”

  “What about the altar. The ceremonial cup? And sex is often a major part of satanic ritual because it can be used in the most base and sinful way. Not as an act of love or as a beautiful gift from God, but as a sinful instrument of the devil. Aleister Crowley, the most famous satanist of all time, issued a creed declaring, ‘Lust. Enjoy all of the things of sense.’ He believed that sex had magical properties and practiced all kinds in his religion, even child molestation.”

  Rick looked shaken. He stepped away from her. “You’re obsessed with this. You’re starting to sound like your sister.”

  She froze. “How can you say that? You never even met her.”

  “Her words and actions discredited her. And if we press forward with the satanist angle, we’ll be discredited. Everything we have to say will be discredited.”

  She recalled the most horrifying thing she had unearthed today. And perhaps the one that best illustrated what they were dealing with. “Did you ask your friend with the Miami-Dade force if any of Taft’s victims had been pregnant?”

  “Yes. Two were.”

  “And did Taft…take the fetuses?”

  “Yes.”

  She whispered a prayer. For strength. For protection from an evil that would commit such a vile act against nature. “A satanic priest’s most prized possession is a candle made from the fat of an unbaptized baby.” Her voice shook slightly. “Maybe this isn’t an accomplice of Taft’s, but a fellow cult member continuing his lord’s work.”

  Rick was silent a moment. “We have to be very careful here. Just because something’s in print doesn’t mean it’s accurate or even true. What did these researchers base their fact on? What kind of studies? A few anecdotal or sensationalized incidents? Stories that were later recanted? The public has an insatiable appetite for the sick and bizarre-it sells newspapers. Liz.”

  Rick’s cell phone rang. He took it from its holster but didn’t answer. “What I know to be true, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that there are cruel and sick people in the world, ones capable of horrific acts. Whether guided by the ultimate evil or simply broken beyond repair, they cannot be allowed to move freely with the rest of us.”

  He flipped open the phone. “Rick Wells here.” Liz watched as Rick listened, his expression changing from intent to jubilant.

  “Thanks, Bill,” he murmured. “I’ll keep in touch.”

  Rick closed the phone and turned to Liz. “My friend got that information we were looking for. Gavin Taft attended Florida State the spring semester of 1987. I’ll need to confirm it, but that should have been the semester Tim graduated from FSU.”

  A tingling sensation started at her fingertips and spread outward. “It’s him, isn’t it? We’ve got him.”

  “There’s more, Liz.” Rick let out a short breath; Liz could see that he was excited. “One of Taft’s victims was a Miami Dolphins’ cheerleader.”

  CHAPTER 45

  Wednesday, November 21

  12:45 a.m.

  The drive back to Key West from Miami seemed interminable. Rick spent much of the trip fiddling with the radio, scanning from one station to another, looking for the most recent weather updates. The depression that had developed in the western Caribbean had begun to move north through the Yucatán, intensifying to a tropical storm. Although late in the season, the conditions looked right for this storm to upgrade to hurricane force in the next couple of days.

  News of the storm had helped fill the silence between him and Liz. They had decided to agree to disagree on the satanist issue, but still he felt it between them like a wall.

  Her zeal had unnerved him. Her passionate insistence that she was right. Every step he took with her seemed to take him not a step forward but one sideways, farther into the realm of the unbelievable.

  Satanists? Black masses and sacrificed babies?

  As he’d admitted to Liz, during his time on the Miami-Dade force, he’d run into some of this crazy cult shit. Most of the guys had. Pentagrams and inverted crosses drawn on the walls and floors of abandoned buildings, burnt black candles that had obviously been used as part of some sort of dark mass or other pseudoreligious ceremony. Rarely had there been a crime associated with the sites and certainly never violent crime.

  But it only took one individual to change those stats. One psychopath whose twisted mind told him that he had been put on earth to do the work of Satan.

  “Here we are,” he murmured, turning onto Duval Street. “Looks like the party’s still in full swing.”

  “Do you need to go by the Hideaway?”

  He heard the tremor in her voice. He drew to a stop at the traffic light and looked at her. “I’m not going to leave you alone, Liz.”

  She tilted up her chin in a show of false bravado. “You don’t have to baby-sit me. I’ll be fine.”

  The light changed and he eased forward, past a group of drunken young people. “I appreciate all that machismo, doll. But you’re stuck with me.”

  She reached out and curled her hand around his. “What’s next?”

  “After sleep?”

  She laughed. “After lots of sleep,” she corrected. “Yes.”

  “First thing, I need to confirm that Tim and Taft were actually enrolled at FSU at the same time.”

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “Call the university.” He found a parking spot just down from her apartment and maneuvered his Jeep into it. “Pretend I’m an employer confirming résumé information. This kind of stuff isn’t considered confidential. It shouldn’t be a big deal.”

  “Then what?”

  He cut the engine. “I’m going to talk to Carla. Try to catch her before she goes in this morning. I think I might be able to get her to spill what they have on Mark and Stephen. Once I’m fully armed, I’ll go to Val.”

  They climbed out of the vehicle and made their way in silence to Liz’s front door. Liz handed him her keys. He unlocked the door and they stepped inside.

  Rick held a finger to his lips. She nodded and they stood quietly a moment, listening. “I’ll go first,” he murmured.

  They made their way upstairs. When they reached the top, he turned to her. “Wait here. I want to make sure there are no surprises waiting for us.”

  He worked his way through each room, checking closets and under beds, looking for anything amiss. “No dead rats, bodies or burnt black candles,” he called from her bedroom, closing her closet door.

  “Very funny.”

  He turned and found her standing in the doorway watching him, her cheeks pale, eyes wide. He frowned. “What’s wrong?”

  She shook her head. “Needing a bodyguard is a whole new experience for me. One I could have lived without.”

  “I’m hurt.” He started toward her. “Wounded, really.”

  He reached her. She smiled up at him. “I can tell.”

  “Beautiful and intuitive. I’m awed.”

  She brought a hand to his chest. “I can feel your heart beating.”

  “It’s beating only for you.”

  She laughed lightly. “Corny, Wells.”

  He brought his arms around her. “Maybe I’m trying too hard?”

  She stood on tiptoe and leaned against him. “Silly man, you don’t have to try at all.”

  Her meaning clear, Rick caught his breath. He found her mouth and kissed her. She kissed him back, just as deeply. Sweeping her into her arms, he carried her to the bed.

  Their passion didn’t build slowly. It burst forth, full-blown, white-hot.

  And in those minutes, Rick’s thoughts emptied of everything but Liz. The sweet perfume of her body, the way she clung to him, the sounds she made as she orgasmed.

  His release followed hers; she caught his sounds with her mouth. Held him until both their hearts had slowed, their flesh cooled.

  He rolled onto his back. “Wow,”
he said, lacing their fingers, bringing her hand to his mouth.

  Liz blushed and he laughed. “It’s a little late for that, lady.”

  “I suppose it is.”

  They fell silent. Moments passed. Totally relaxed, he trailed a hand over her hip, enjoying the texture of her skin against his. “Tell me about your marriage,” he murmured, realizing suddenly how little he knew about her. Realizing that he wanted to know all her secrets, not just those of her body. “I don’t even know his name.”

  “Jared.”

  “I knew a Jared. He was a total weasel.”

  “Sounds like we’re talking about the same guy.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “Three years.” She rested her forehead against his shoulder for a moment before tipping her face up to his. “Actually, I was married for three years but Jared was married for about three months. That’s when he had his first affair. I didn’t know, of course. The ignorant little wife. I walked in on him and one of my best friends.”

  “Some friend.”

  “Some husband.” She paused, then sighed. “It was his birthday. I wanted to surprise him with all his favorites-prime rib, crème brûlé for dessert, chilled Tattinger’s. I’d been planning it for weeks. I canceled my afternoon appointments to go home and prepare everything.”

  She pulled in a shaky breath. “The house…felt wrong, you know. Like something wasn’t as it should be. I heard sounds coming from the bedroom. It was almost surreal, as if I was outside myself watching as I crossed to the bedroom door, reached for the knob and eased the door open. And there they were, on our bed. For one moment, I didn’t believe what I was seeing. I thought there was some mistake…that I was in the wrong house, that I was dreaming. Then I thought I was going to die.”

  He hurt for her. “I’m so sorry, Liz. You didn’t deserve that.”

  “Afterward, he threw his women up in my face. There’d been a lot of them.”

  Rick wondered what made a man like that. To have a smart, beautiful woman like Liz love you was a gift. One to be cherished.

  “I’m sorry,” he said again.