I Will Fear No Evil

by Debbie Viguié

  “Okay. Wait.”

  “Yes?” Mark asked hopefully.

  “At the prayer vigil for her at the synagogue I did notice a very expensive car in the parking lot. I was introduced to an older woman, an aunt, who was wearing designer clothes. So was her daughter who spent the entire time looking irritated which I thought was pretty rude.”

  “Trust fund brat!” Mark said triumphantly.

  “What?”

  “One of the coven members, that was her nickname. Do you know the names of these people?”

  “Aunt Sylvia, that’s all I heard.”

  “That’s good enough. I’ll call Meghan’s family right now.”

  Mark hung up the phone and within a minute was talking to Meghan’s mom. The woman had clearly still been awake and her voice was sick with worry. She readily provided the contact information for her sister-in-law without even asking questions. She even confirmed that Sylvia’s daughter, Casey, did indeed live with her even though she was in college.

  After hanging up with her Mark filled Trina in. “We need to get over there and find Casey and try and make her talk. People like that are going to have a lawyer on stand-by, though.”

  “I can be very persuasive,” Trina said, eyes narrowing.

  “No doubt. What we really need, though, is a search warrant so we don’t lose any evidence. What we’ve got, though, is so thin even I wouldn’t give me a search warrant.”

  Trina smiled. “I’ve got that covered.”

  “How?”

  “Like I said, I can be very persuasive. While I’m taking care of that call Liam and tell him to meet us at the house with a bunch of officers and a forensics team.”

  She pulled out her phone, stood and walked toward the front of the restaurant while Mark brought Liam up to speed. A minute later she was back.

  “Tell Liam to meet us at the house in thirty minutes. That will just give us enough time to stop and pick up the search warrant.”

  Mark relayed the information then hung up. “How on earth did you pull that off?”

  She lowered her voice slightly. “As I said, I can be very persuasive.”

  He believed her.

  Thirty minutes later, just as she had predicted, they were outside a sprawling mansion with Liam and a dozen other officers. Mark had rung the doorbell and was now waiting, practically holding his breath.

  A woman answered a couple minutes later, wearing an expensive looking robe and managing to look both confused and angry at the same time. “What is going on?” she demanded.

  Trina stepped forward with the warrant. “Sylvia, we have a warrant to search this house.”

  Even as the woman gasped in shock officers began flooding inside.

  “Ma’am, is your daughter, Casey, home?” Mark asked.

  “What is the meaning of this?”

  “Mom?”

  Mark looked inside and saw a young woman coming down the stairs. Unlike her mother she was dressed. She made it to the bottom of the stairs.

  “Casey?” Mark asked, moving past the mother.

  Casey took one look at Mark and Trina and bolted to the left. Trina leaped after her and Mark was left to chase after both of them. Casey made it out a back door and was halfway to the street when suddenly she fell, sprawling in the middle of the lawn.

  Trina was next to her in a moment, slapping handcuffs on her. When Mark reached them he noted that a tree root on the ground seemed to be what had tripped Casey when she was running. It seemed so odd to see it in the middle of the well-manicured lawn, especially when the nearest tree was a good fifteen feet away. He wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth, though. He began reading Casey her rights as Trina hauled the girl to her feet.

  They started walking her toward Mark’s car. As soon as Mark had finished the spiel, he looked at Casey and growled, “We know you’re part of the dark coven sacrificing girls.”

  “What if I am?” she asked, brazen, mocking.

  He was stunned that the first words out of her mouth hadn’t been that she wanted her lawyer.

  “You needed a personal sacrifice of your own and poor confused, angst ridden Meghan must have been the perfect choice,” Trina said.

  Casey actually laughed. “Sure, I was the one who grabbed my cousin. Stupid little girl just wanted to get away from home. I provided that. I also got Brenda. I’d met her at that stupid prayer vigil and knew she was friends with Sarah. She recognized me when I offered her a ride to the church and she got right in my car. I knocked her out, tossed her phone, and it was simple.”

  “You had no connection to her,” Mark said. “Which means someone else in your coven must.”

  They had reached Mark’s car. For a moment Casey looked slightly confused. “I want my la-”

  She was about to say she wanted her lawyer and then it was all over. They’d have to stop questioning her. Before she could get the entire word out, though, Trina slammed her hand down on the car, startling him and Casey.

  “Tell us where the girls are!”

  “I don’t know!” Casey said, suddenly looking frightened.

  Mark believed her and he hated that he did.

  “I had Meghan here with me for a couple of days, letting her think she was hiding out. Then when she started talking about going home I had to knock her out. Lacey came and took her somewhere.”

  “Where?” Trina demanded.

  “I swear I don’t know!”

  “Where would Lacey go if not her apartment?”

  “I don’t know! I didn’t even know she lived in an apartment, I swear. She didn’t talk much about herself.”

  “But you’ve got her phone number,” Mark said.

  Casey shook her head. “She had to ditch her phone a couple of days ago. Lizzie had gotten to it. She’s called me three times since then, but all from different numbers. I don’t have a way to call her back.”

  “Who are the other members of your coven?” Trina demanded.

  “I don’t know, Mother recruited them all.”

  “Wait, your mother?” Mark asked, half-turning toward the house.

  “No, our high priestess. That’s what she insisted on us calling her. Lacey, Lizzie, another guy and I had broken off from our wiccan group, formed our own coven. We wanted something the other group could never give us.”

  “Power,” Mark said.

  Casey nodded. “And we were getting it, but slowly. Then Mother showed up one day several months back. She was from the Santa Cruz area. Something had happened to her coven up there though she never talked about it.”

  Trina actually jerked and Mark wondered if she knew something about that. He’d have to ask her later.

  “Mother said that we could get power, real power. And she was right. The things I’ve seen! Then she told us about this amazing spell.”

  “Immortality,” Trina said.

  “Yes. But she said that it would take sacrifice and that we’d need three more coven members. She recruited them personally. The last one joined us a few weeks ago. Then, we were ready.”

  “What are their names?” Mark demanded.

  “I don’t know! We all tried to avoid names and the more intense it got the better an idea that seemed.”

  “So, describe them to us,” Trina said.

  “There were two guys, one older and one younger. The younger one’s my age and the older one has gray hair but he’s weird, you know. It’s like some days he looks fifty and some days he looks thirty. I don’t know how old he really is. She also brought in another girl, she’s like nineteen or twenty. We called her Smoking Girl.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s a chain smoker.”

  “Who is Creepy Tall Guy?” Trina asked.

  “I don’t know his real name! He was with us in the wiccan coven for just a couple of weeks and came with us when Lacey, Lizzie, and I broke away.”

  “Which one did you kidnap Brenda for?” Mark asked.

  Casey opened her mouth then shut it. Her en
tire body shuddered. “I want my la-”

  “Answer the question!” Trina screamed in her face.

  Casey blinked, and then nodded slowly. “I kidnapped her for Smoking Girl.”

  “How are she and Brenda related?” Mark asked.

  “I don’t know. I just know that Brenda was needed for her.”

  “Brit, who was she for?” Mark asked.

  “One of the two new guys.”

  “There are three others. Mother’s sacrifice, Creepy Tall Guy’s sacrifice, and the other new guy’s sacrifice. Have those people been kidnapped yet?”

  Casey smirked. “Mother’s sacrifice is already dead. He was the first, and you guys still haven’t found him.”

  Mark felt like he’d been punched in the gut. “What?”

  Casey nodded. “Killed him a week before Cheyenne.”

  “Where?”

  “Don’t know. Mother drove. We were all crammed into a van and we couldn’t see out. When we got there, he was already there, chained up. We just had to perform the ritual. That was when she freaked out.”

  “Who?” Trina asked.

  “Lizzie. Apparently she thought the whole “death thing” was supposed to be symbolic. Boy was she stupid. Once she realized what was going on she tried to back out. But no one leaves the coven. Funny thing about the ritual. You just need eight coven members to make it happen, not all of them have to be conscious for it.”

  Mark felt himself sag in relief, but he refused to show it outwardly. “So, that’s when the group kidnapped Lizzie.”

  Casey nodded. “Left her there, tied up in the same room as the body. Mother’s been checking on her.”

  “Is that where they’re keeping the other sacrifices?”

  Casey shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “And what about the other two? Have they been taken yet?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Something seemed to be happening. Casey’s eyes were getting glassy and it was like she was shutting down.

  “Where’s the next sacrifice supposed to take place?” he asked.

  “Don’t know.”

  “When?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t know.”

  He looked into her eyes and it was as though she had somehow checked out.

  “She’s done. She’s told us everything she knows,” Trina said, her voice hoarse sounding.

  Mark opened the back door of his car and Trina literally gave Casey a tiny push. The girl’s body crumpled, falling forward into the backseat.

  “Fried,” Trina muttered under her breath, sounding disgusted.

  “You think she was on something?” Mark asked.

  “What?” Trina looked up at him, almost looking surprised to see him standing there like he had somehow startled her when she was in deep thought.

  “You think she was on drugs or something?” he reiterated.

  “No. I just think...never mind, I’m just talking to myself.”

  “It’s been a long day for both of us,” he said.

  The sound of squealing tires caused Mark to jerk his head up and look down the street. A news van was shooting around the corner and came careening down the street.

  “It’s about to get a lot longer,” he muttered.

  “Let’s get out of here while we can. We’ll apologize to Liam later,” Trina said, quickly getting into the front seat.

  “Yeah, I think you’re right,” Mark said.

  Casey’s behavior at the end was creeping him out. The sooner they got her down to the precinct and booked the better he’d feel. Then they could focus on who connected with Brenda could be Smoking Girl. He yawned and realized he was actually nodding off. Some sleep somewhere in there might be a good thing, too.

  It was Monday morning and Cindy sat in her car in the parking lot, dreading going into work even more than she usually did on a Monday. It was going to be a week of raving lunatics, homicidal maniacs, and bloodthirsty monsters. And that was just counting the people at church. After a minute of quietly contemplating the drawbacks of quitting and being unemployed she forced herself out of the car.

  At least there were no reporters at the church. It seemed like the one place there weren’t reporters these days. It was the one silver lining in the whole mess. She had stayed up half the night praying for Brenda, Meghan, and anyone else who might be in danger and she was beyond tired.

  She trudged toward the gate, forcing one weary foot in front of the other. She had to get some rest soon. This was getting ridiculous. She unlocked the gate as she contemplated what horrors awaited her in the office. She wasn’t ready to deal with them, especially not until she’d had some caffeine. She’d forgotten to pick up soda at the store the night before and she was running on empty in that area.

  She made her way over to the sanctuary. There was going to be an early morning prayer meeting in there and she wanted to make sure everything looked presentable. She unlocked the door and made her way toward the light switch. Before she reached it her foot caught on something and she staggered sideways, crashing into the wall. She managed to keep her feet.

  Cindy reached out with a shaking hand and found the switch. A moment later the lights came on and she looked down. The body of a man was sprawled face down on the ground, a hangman’s noose knotted around his neck.

  21

  Cindy choked back the scream that was rising in her throat even as her mind was frantically repeating the words Not again! over and over. She was having flashbacks to the first time she’d tripped over a body on the sanctuary floor. There was something different this time even though she was struggling to put her finger on what it was.

  She was about to reach down and tug on the man’s trousers when it hit her. Something seemed off about his proportions. A terrible suspicion dawned on her and she grabbed one of the legs which lifted off the ground with ease.

  With a disgusted grunt she flipped the entire body over. It was fake, a Halloween prop that the kids must have been prepping for their haunted house. The face was distorted with bulging eyes and tongue. It was grotesque but seen from this angle not at all realistic looking.

  She closed her eyes for a moment struggling to calm her nerves. She had thought for sure that she was going to be calling Mark because she had managed to trip over another dead body. She was fairly certain she would never have lived that one down. She was immensely grateful that wasn’t the case, though. The church had already seen its fair share of death and didn’t need any more. Then again, neither did she.

  She was going to have to tell Dave that his kids needed to be more careful with their props, though. Someone could have been injured or badly frightened. They were all very lucky that she had been the one who had tripped over it. Even that she realized was ironic. So much had changed in her life since that first body in the sanctuary. Looking back she marveled at it all even as she picked up the mannequin and carried him to the office.

  Once inside she briefly considered hanging him from one of the light fixtures before realizing that wasn’t a good idea. The fact that she had even contemplated it though was proof of just how different life was than it had been a couple of years ago. It was also proof that she’d had too little sleep and her judgment was seriously impaired. She really did need some caffeine as fast as possible.

  Mark had only managed to get a couple of hours sleep. By the time he’d made it home the sun had been coming up. He blamed the fact that he had been half-awake on that, but in his heart he knew it was because he couldn’t sleep in the bed without Traci. The worst part was that she still wasn’t returning his phone calls.

  He knew that she and the kids and Buster were at Amber’s house so at least he knew they were safe. He had thought about going there but had images of the press somehow following him and just making things worse.

  Trina had done a great job procuring the search warrant the night before. Maybe she could convince a judge to issue an injunction against the reporters wh
o were hounding them. It was a dream at any rate.

  He knew they weren’t going to get any more information out of Casey. After they’d gotten her booked he’d had to call in a psychologist to take a look at her. She seemed to have just checked out, like she was barely there, and only capable of answering the most rudimentary questions with either “yes” or “don’t know”. Maybe the stress of it all had gotten to her. He didn’t know what was going on inside her head, but to do what she’d done it already had to be full of messed up wiring.

  They had found Meghan’s phone and some of her other belongings in the house, proof that she was telling the truth about that part. They’d also found some hair and blood in the front seat of her car that should belong to Brenda. Now they just needed to find where they were being held before something happened to them.

  His phone rang and his heart skipped a beat when he saw it was Traci calling. He picked up. “Hello?”

  “You said in your message this morning that you found out something about Lizzie?”

  When he’d gotten home he had left her a message to that effect. He was going to tell her what he knew, but realized that if he didn’t then she might actually call him to find out the information. It had worked.

  “I did. I found out that she is being held by the coven, and that she was a part of it. The good news, if you can call it that, is that she has not been a party to the murders. When she objected is when they kidnapped her.”

  “Thank heavens,” Traci said. “Wait, I know that sounds weird, she’s still in danger and all...”

  “I’m just as relieved as you are that Lizzie isn’t an accessory to murder,” Mark said gently. “I’m still terrified for her, but I’m relieved, too. The girl I used to know would never have been able to hurt someone like that.”

  “I know. I’ve just been having the most terrible imagery in my head.”

  “Me, too. The other thing I discovered is that they can’t...get rid of her until they’ve completed all eight rituals. So, they have four more they have to get through before they could do anything to her. Given that we just captured one of their number, they might not even be able to accomplish those.”