And today was one of those days.
The smoke was thick and harsh, and she nearly sputtered with her first drag. She chased it with a sip of beer and quickly glanced around.
Rob was gone—he had left the bar in a fit of fury, probably to jerk off somewhere. The bartender was still there, of course, but he was obsessed with drying glasses. Leaving only her and Father John, which, under normal circumstances, would have been a nightmare.
But for some reason it was cathartic.
Kendra was confused as to how in the world it was possible, how her past had come back to her in Rickshaw County, of all places, especially given the fact that she had never been here before. But with all of today’s bizarre coincidences, she had nearly given up questioning them.
Nearly, but not quite.
“I heard you on the phone earlier,” the priest said, his voice hoarse. “I heard you say the word ‘adopted,’ and at that moment I knew. I knew you were going to find out, but I still couldn’t bring myself to tell you.”
Kendra stared into the man’s eyes, trying to gauge his intentions.
Does he know that I know?
She racked her memory, trying to recall if after the horrific events that transpired that day she and Father John had ever crossed paths.
She didn’t think so; even in the ensuing chaos, Father Callahan had protected her.
I know… I know what you did, she felt like saying. I know that you drove Christine to suicide. I know that you caused her death.
But she held her tongue. It was time that she had her own secrets, ones that might come in handy at a later time.
“Go on,” she said.
Father John nodded subtly and took another drag.
“And there is also the issue of confidentiality.”
Kendra scoffed and the man took a deep breath.
“I get it, Kendra. I understand. I’m not a lawyer or a doctor, but I am a priest. And while that holds a different meaning to you, it means something to me. A lot to me, in fact. And I have never broken that bond.”
He took another drag, and Kendra noticed that his hand was trembling.
“Until now.”
The sheer rawness of the emotion in the man’s face brought her back to that time, when she was eleven, after Christine Barker had first come to the church.
She had seen him like this before—during the exorcism.
And then, unexpectedly, Kendra was overcome with emotion. Kendra hated the tears that spilled down her cheeks at that moment, and she hated the way the she could no longer take a full breath.
Her back hurt from where Martin had tackled her, and her stomach hurt from where her scars had ripped.
But what hurt most of all was being alone.
The priest waited. Kendra could tell that he wanted to go to her, to hold her, but he resisted the urge.
Like everything else in her life, she needed to get through this on her own.
“I just want to find Lacy McGuire,” she whispered at last. “I just want to find the missing girls.”
This was true, in a way. She did want to find the missing girls, probably as much as she had wanted anything in her whole life.
What she didn’t say, however, was that she was one of them—she was a missing girl too.
The priest nodded solemnly.
“I think I can help,” he said. “I hope I can help.”
Kendra wiped the tears away and waited for Father John to continue.
“Two years ago, Jenna McGuire came to me. Now, mind you, this is years after I first spoke to Peter and begged him to bring his wife in, so you can imagine my surprise when she actually showed up. Still, it was obvious that she was a, uh, a disturbed woman, so to speak. She spoke quickly, desperately, looking for guidance, for support, for help. I was reminded of—”
Christine Barker, Kendra thought instinctively.
“—another damaged woman that I tried to help years before Jenna. I—I—”
The man stammered uncontrollably, then averted his gaze. Kendra waited, and eventually Father John turned back to her. Staring into her eyes, he hauled so heavily on his cigarette that Kendra actually saw it get shorter.
“When I was younger, I met a young woman… one that had problems just like Jenna. Back then, my approach failed and I lost the girl. With Jenna, I tried something different. I tried to convince her to seek professional help, to see someone that might be able to prescribe something, to… to—Kendra, I tried everything. But based on what I know now, it wasn’t enough.”
He exhaled a thick cloud of smoke.
“It clearly wasn’t nearly enough. Part of it was because I was too young at the time—not young in age, but young in knowledge and experience. Even myself, a loyal servant of God, had a hard time believing the tale that Jenna wove. Especially because I had grown fond of Peter. Through his weekly confessions, I grew to know him quite well. And he’s a good man, Kendra. Despite the apprehension I saw in your eyes this morning, if there is one thing I can assure you of, it is that Peter is good. After his wife became intractable, he was on his own, in a strange, foreign place without family, without friends, trying to raise a troubled young girl. And he was doing the best he possibly could.”
He paused, and Kendra placed her elbows on the table. Fatigue was beginning to surround her like deep, cold water.
“But I am getting ahead of myself. You see, a part of me never acted on what Jenna told me because I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want it to be true for Peter’s sake, but mostly for Lacy. Because what she told me, well, that changed everything—Kendra? You okay?”
Kendra felt her eyelids droop.
“Fine,” she grumbled. Part of her, the part that still held this man and all of his fellow men of the cloth responsible for her abandonment, wanted to hurry back to the station and start grilling Martin again.
But another part wanted to know.
For now, the latter won out.
“Please, continue.”
The priest obliged.
“The first thing she told me was about the dreams. About the horrible dreams that she was having. And also about the guilt. She never went to live with an aunt when she was pregnant—that was a lie she had told Peter. She had gone somewhere else. Somewhere in a swamp, although I was never able to find out exactly where. And, believe it or not, that was the most believable part of her story. The rest was nearly incomprehensible. Stories about a cellar, about a woman she called Mother, about milk.”
Kendra’s eyes snapped open.
“What’d you say?”
The priest nodded.
“I know, I thought the same thing. When I saw the glass of milk on the table at Peter’s house, I thought the exact same thing; I thought that somehow Jenna had escaped from the facility and had taken her daughter back. But I know now that there is something much worse going on here. Something more sinister. Something that can only be the workings of the Devil.”
The priest prattled on for a few more minutes, but Kendra barely heard him. Her mind had stopped functioning after she had heard those two words: Mother and milk.
Mother… mater est, matrem omnium.
Those words had been written in the secret room, and they had been on Christine Barker’s lips as she lay thrashing on the table, holy water being dumped on her face, gurgling from her nose and mouth as she fought drowning.
And milk… milk that had been on the counter at Steph Black’s house, milk that had been left behind for the three other missing girls.
And there was also the sour scent of milk on Martin’s breath as he jammed a spoon into her spine, pretending that it was a gun.
“I need to get back,” she gasped, grinding the cigarette into the ashtray. “I need to get back, now.”
CHAPTER 36
The director hung up the phone and sat silently at his desk. A file was open before him, one that he had read so many times that he could recite it by heart.
It wasn’t a case.
&nb
sp; It was the evaluation file for one of his agents.
There was a glass of water beside the file, and he calmly reached over and took a sip before gently putting it back down. Then he reached over and switched the television audio back on.
He had the channel set to the ACN News, and was switching back and forth between that and the Rickshaw News. It was one of the perks of being in the FBI: having access to all local channels, which came in handy at a time like this. It was also a blessing when, once in a blue moon, he actually had time to catch his high school Alma Mater football game… to see his estranged son play wearing the same number he used to wear. No simple feat, given that his high school was more than twelve hours by car and had a population of less than five figures.
But, regrettably, today was not one of those days.
“We are here outside of the Black family home, the grisly site of what some members of the media are calling Family Massacre 2018.”
The woman, a frumpy brunette with a knuckle for a nose and eyes like chalk remnants, waved her arm expansively across the home behind her.
How did a woman with a face for radio get on TV?
The thought was instinctual, but of no value, so he brushed it away.
The woman actually attempted to pass beneath the yellow tape—a journalistic no-no in every book—but a black man with a mustache stepped forward and blocked her path.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, the mic in the woman’s pudgy fingers only just picking up the sound. The reporter backed up, but otherwise failed to acknowledge who the director thought was for certain a detective.
“As you can see behind me, this home is the site of multiple grisly murders. We are expecting more information in the near future, but regardless of the details, rest assured that the approximately seventeen hundred residents of Torrance, West Virginia, will be buying locks for their houses that they thought, until today, they would never need.”
The director sighed, and longed to be able to watch his Augustine Falcons playing on the gridiron this evening, to see his son who had made it painfully clear that this was the only way that he would get to see him. He checked his watch. It was ten minutes to three.
I can be in Rickshaw before five.
His lips turned into a grimace and his eyes went from the television to the folder open before him. Although he knew the words by heart, he read them anyway.
Psychiatric evaluation for FBI Agent Kendra Wilson.
The director’s eyes drifted down the page until he saw the box that was circled three times, twice by the psychiatrist and once by his own hand.
Recommendation: DISMISSAL.
The director sighed, closed the folder, and stood. A moment later, he was out the door, making his way to the parking lot, wondering how he was going to justify pulling his best agent off a case that had the potential to explode.
A case that could not only leave four young girls—babies, really—dead, but also an entire media circus getting hard-ons over not just a serial killer, but a pedophile serial killer.
CHAPTER 37
“Hello?” The word came out in a huff, squeezed out of Kendra’s lungs as she broke into a light jog.
“Agent Wilson?”
Kendra immediately recognized the gravelly voice and she slowed. She needed to get back to the station, and fast, but this dripped with importance as well. Otherwise, why would he be calling her?
As her jog regressed into a brisk walk, she felt Father John catch up with her.
“Tennison? What is it? Did you find out something?”
“So glad to get a hold of you, I tried to get a hold of your partner, Agent, uhh, Cherry?”
“Detective, just spit it out… what you got?”
They had reached the Rickshaw Police Station now, but Kendra hesitated before pulling the door wide. She raised a hand in response to the confused look on Father John’s face.
Wait, she mouthed.
“Tennison?”
When he answered, the man’s voice was professional bordering on robotic.
“Two things: one, I did some digging into the McGuires’ past and came up with nothing. At first I thought that this was simply a limitation on my part, so I gave your colleague at the FBI another call. Agent Grover said he spent more than two hours searching and also came up with nothing. The McGuires seemed to materialized from mid-air about four years ago, around the time they came to Rickshaw, when Lacy was born—but that’s also a point of contention; neither of us could find any record of her birth.”
Kendra’s brow knitted.
“What?”
Materialized out of thin air, no past, no memories, nothing but the crying face of her father and her mother’s affect—no record of her birth.
The first thought that came to her mind was Witness Protection.
She opened her mouth to ask as much, but then something Tennison had said earlier came to her.
‘The Black-ers, not the Blacks.’
“Wait—did the Blacks or Blackers and the McGuires know each other? Could it be possible that both girls were adopted? Maybe biologically related?”
The words sounded strange coming out of her mouth, but as she listened to their echo in her head, they gained traction. And there was also what Father John had told her—about Jenna’s story—but like Christine long before her, Kendra wasn’t sure how much stock to put in that.
Sisters? Could they be sisters?
“Uh-huh. And that brings me to point two, Kendra,” Tennison continued. “Your colleague ran their info—what he could find—through your system. A hit came back, but, get this, not just for the McGuires and Blackers, but for the Millers and Harpers, too. At first, I had no idea who the Millers or Harpers were, but a little digging of my own revealed that they too are more missing girls… and all around four years old.”
The man hesitated, and Kendra, heart racing, pulled the door to the station wide.
“And?”
“And they all had one thing in common: all had bank or credit card statements from in and around South Carolina—Batesburg or Elloree or Santee—around the same time, within a year of when their daughters were born. So I don’t know about sisters or any of that, but it does sound like a strange coincidence, doesn’t it?”
“Shit.” The word came out in a whisper.
Kendra raced down the hall, not caring that Father John could no longer keep up with her. She was lost in thought, her brain desperately trying to process what Tennison had told her. The theory that had formed in her mind a little over an hour ago had at the time seemed ridiculous, but now not only did appear feasible, but maybe even likely.
The crimes were connected—all of them.
She just had to figure out how and why. And Kendra knew just who to ask.
CHAPTER 38
“You can’t go back in there, Kendra.”
Kendra didn’t even bother answering. Instead, she pushed by Brett and reached for the door to the interrogation room.
“Kendra!”
Brett rarely raised his voice, so this time when he shouted, Kendra paused. She didn’t turn, didn’t let go of the door handle, but she did hesitate before pulling it wide.
“Kendra, you can’t go back in there,” he repeated.
Now she turned, eyes blazing.
“What?”
Brett had a depressed look on his face—tired and downtrodden.
“You can’t go in, Kendra.”
Kendra looked around briefly. The outer room was a mess, the chair pushed the wrong way against the wall, the stack of notes that had been there when they had first arrived scattered across the desk, with several sheets on the floor covered in footprints.
“What the fuck happened here? Where’s Peter McGuire?”
“Kendra,” his voice was soft now. “You can’t go in.”
“The fuck I can’t. Where is Peter?”
For the first time since entering the room, she noticed that Brett had something in his hand, an env
elope. It was old and worn, the corners brown, the entire surface dirty with finger smudges.
“What is that?”
“Kendra, I had to call him. I had no choice.”
Kendra ignored the comment, and instead indicated the envelope with her hand.
“What the fuck is that, Brett?”
“Nothing,” he said, but the way he moved it protectively behind him, a subtle, yet telling movement, made him a liar. “I had to cuff Peter.”
The door handle in her hand suddenly felt icy cold. She gripped and twisted the metal, trying to warm it. Instead, she only served to make it slick with the sweat that seemed to suddenly cover her entire body.
Brett’s eyes went to the floor.
“And I had to call him. I had to.”
Kendra ground her teeth; there was no question who him was in this context.
“You fucking asshole.”
Brett looked up, and again she saw sadness in his blue eyes.
“I had to. Come on, I had no choice. You smell like a bar, you’re sweating like crazy, and you lost your mind, Kendra. I had to.”
She wanted to walk over and punch him; she wanted to walk over to Brett and punch him directly in the face.
“You didn’t mind my drinking last night, did you, Brett?”
“That’s different.”
“Why? Why was it different?”
Brett had no immediate answer. Instead, he continued along the same narrative that he had been spouting ever since she had arrived.
“Kendra, I’m sorry, but you can’t go in there.”
Kendra quickly weighed her options. She had never seen Brett like this, his usual lopsided smirk now a saggy frown, the glint in his eyes all but worn away. Brett wasn’t an aggressive person, like her preferring to use her mind rather than her body, but he had changed. This case wasn’t just wearing on her, it appeared, but Brett as well.
Her ‘extra-curricular’ experience with Brett told her that if he wanted to, he was more than capable of stopping her.
Physically stopping her.
But the real question was… would he?
Thankfully, a sound behind him gave Kendra the momentary distraction that she needed. She barely heard the officer’s words as she pulled the door wide.
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