The Immortals

by J. T. Ellison

  Taylor took a second to wind her hair into a bun and secure it, slipped her hands into purple nitrile gloves. Baldwin followed suit—their hands suddenly all professional, no more the recipients of holy palmers’ kiss. They couldn’t afford to confuse the crime-scene techs with their own DNA, nor allow their personal relationship to affect the case. It had been difficult for Taylor at first, pretending she and Baldwin weren’t emotionally entwined. It was easier now. She was learning his detachment skills.

  Simari was already gloved up, and let them in.

  A teenager with rough skin and a jet-black bob sat at the foot of the stairs, white and shaking. She had black circles under her eyes and the faintest trace of dark lipstick in one corner of her mouth. Her lips were jammed together in a thin line; it seemed she knew if she opened her mouth the world would collapse.

  “Lieutenant Jackson, this is Letha King. She found the body.”

  Taylor bent at the waist to get to the girl’s level. “Letha. I’m so sorry for your loss. Are your parents on their way home?”

  The girl didn’t meet her eye, just shook her head. Simari stepped in. “They’re out of town. We’re tracking them down now.”

  Letha wrapped her arms around her waist, trying to hold herself together. Her nails were painted black, the polish wearing away. Taylor was tempted to reach out and touch her, to give a bit of warmth, of comfort, but refrained. She needed to see the body first, then she could worry about the living.

  She stepped back onto the porch and whistled at McKenzie. He was on his cell phone, raised his eyebrows in question. She gestured for him to come to her. He nodded, said something briefly into the cell, then slapped it shut and bounded up the stairs. Taylor spoke quietly.

  “I’ve got the victim’s sister in the house. Kid’s completely shattered. She needs to have someone with her. Would you mind?”

  “Not at all. Everyone’s on their way.”

  “Great, thanks. Come with me.”

  They reentered the house, and Taylor led McKenzie to Letha.

  “Letha, this is Detective McKenzie. He’s going to talk to you for a few minutes while we check on your brother. We’re going to go upstairs now. If you need anything, anything at all, you just ask Detective McKenzie, okay?”

  The girl nodded, silent as the grave. She gave Taylor an odd feeling, a premonition that worse things were to come, though she couldn’t pinpoint why.

  “How about we go into the kitchen, Letha?” McKenzie held out a hand. The girl took it and rose, unsteady on her feet, eyes blank. She allowed herself to be towed away. Shock. Poor, creepy little thing.

  The staircase was mahogany, sweeping, twin rises that met together in a catwalk loft on the second floor. They took the left set of steps, Taylor unconsciously counting as they went up. Thirty-three stairs. The view down to the grand foyer was only slightly obscured by a brilliant chandelier strung with fake cobwebs, creating a gauzy veil on the downstairs. The hallway floor was wide-planked oak topped with elegant throw rugs and capriciously placed tables covered in ethnic crystal and wood tchotchkes. Tribal masks lined the corridor. The parents were either travelers or collectors.

  Four doors bled off the center hall. One was open.

  Taylor glanced back over her shoulder at Baldwin. His face was calm, placid, ready for anything. His eyes met hers briefly, questioning. She hadn’t realized she’d stopped in her tracks until Simari cleared her throat.

  “Everything okay?”

  Was it? Taylor had the strangest sense, almost like a strong hand was pushing at her chest, pushing her away from the bedroom door. She couldn’t detect any of the usual smells that accompanied a violent crime scene—blood, fear, human waste. It smelled…like flowers. Once she realized that the scent was coming from the open bedroom, she placed it. Jasmine. The murder scene smelled like jasmine. Once her nose got used to that idea, she did catch just the tiniest hint of copper, tangy underneath the cloying sweetness.

  The odd sensation left her. She smiled at Simari.

  “Sorry. I’m fine. Just…smelling.”

  “I know,” Simari said. “It’s weird. I don’t usually expect boys to wear perfume, but what do I know? In this world, anything is possible. He’s in there.” She pointed toward the open door, let Taylor take the lead.

  “Probably the sister’s. Though I didn’t catch it downstairs,” Baldwin said.

  Sometimes at a crime scene Taylor had the overwhelming feeling that she was on camera, that some unseen videographer tracked her every move. She was fodder for the silver screen, walking down a darkened hallway while the audience knew something horrible lay just beyond her grasp. Look out behind you, don’t go into that dark space alone, better run out of the safety of the house into the forest when the killer is coming after you with a knife. Goose bumps paraded up and down her arms. God, she hated horror movies.

  She shook it off. Halloween always got to her. A crime scene on Halloween was just designed to play into her over-active imagination.

  Steeled, she stepped into Jerrold King’s bedroom.

  She struggled to take in the whole scene and not make judgments. Her job as lead investigator was to make sure her detectives didn’t jump to conclusions, didn’t make snap decisions about the case. She emphasized considered opinions, reasoning, a belief in the evidence.

  But Jerrold King’s body made her want to discard all she’d been taught.

  She edged closer. He was naked, lying on his back, arms spread to the sides. His mouth was open, slack, with small edges of spittle gathered in the corners. His lips were blue; eyes unfocused and slitted. There were no ligature marks, no strangulation bruises. Granted, that could show up later—contusions took time to develop. But for now, his naked skin was free of visible hematomas. In their place were bloody channels, carved into his flesh. The red-on-white effect was startling, gapes in the tender skin. A sharp knife, no doubt. But these weren’t stab wounds. There was a distinct pattern to the slashes.

  She was a foot away from the bed now, and carefully bent to get a closer look. Baldwin was on the other side of the bed. She looked up from the wounds into his worried eyes.

  “No,” she said. “It can’t be.”

  “It most certainly can,” he said.

  “Urban legend,” Simari said.

  Taylor stepped back a few feet to see if she could make sense of the wounds. Yes, from a distance, she could see it plainly.

  Five slashes, connected at the points, outlined in a ragged circle.

  A pentacle, carved into the dead boy’s chest.

  Two

  The scream startled Taylor, and she jerked back from the body.

  Simari’s shoulder radio crackled and Taylor’s cell rang almost simultaneously. She looked at the caller ID. It was Lincoln.

  “Yes?” she answered.

  “You need to get down here now. We’ve got a serious problem.”

  “What?”

  “There’s another one.”

  “Another victim?”

  Simari was already hightailing it out of Jerrold King’s bedroom. Taylor slapped her phone shut. She and Baldwin followed Simari down the staircase and onto the porch. The screaming was coming from the other side of the street, three houses down.

  “Help! Please help me!”

  A woman stood in the driveway, waving her arms. Lincoln was standing by her, unsuccessfully trying to calm her down.

  The street was nearly as bright as day—all the houses’ front lights were on, headlights from the influx of patrol cars cut through the murk, multitudes of Maglites were trained on the faces of people standing frozen in their driveways. As they ran up the street, Taylor felt all eyes turn to them. Her boots clanged against the asphalt, ringing out louder than Baldwin’s steps. She had an odd thought; terror wasn’t a familiar feeling in this neighborhood.

  They reached Lincoln, and Taylor skidded to a stop, some loose gravel nearly causing her to turn an ankle. She caught her breath.

  “Ma’am, I’m Taylo
r Jackson, Metro Homicide. What’s the problem?”

  “My daughter. My daughter is—” Her voice caught, the sobs breaking free from her chest. “She’s dead in her room.”

  “Show us,” Taylor said.

  “I can’t. I can’t go back in there.”

  Imploring Lincoln with her eyes, Taylor nodded at Baldwin and Simari. They hurried into the house, strangely similar to the King home, and up a sweeping staircase. The scent of jasmine lingered in the air. Taylor’s chest felt tight.

  The scene was easy to find. There were towels scattered on the floor, the mother must have been bringing up some laundry. A plaque on the girl’s door had the name Ashley in pink bubble letters. Below it was a stop sign that screamed, Ashley’s Environs. KEEP OUT!

  The door was ajar. Taylor stepped over the wad of towels into the girl’s room.

  She was faceup on the bed, arms stretched out over her head. Her brown hair was pulled into a ponytail and a green mask had dried on her skin. There was an open bottle of nail polish on the bedside table, the scent acrid. Giving herself a home spa treatment, a facial, a manicure. Typical afternoon in a teenage girl’s life, her innocent ablutions cruelly interrupted by death.

  She’d been stripped like the previous victim. The skin of her breasts and her groin was nearly translucent compared to the tan skin around it. She’d either been lying out in the sun or using a tanning bed recently; the brown skin only slightly dulled the knife slashes in her stomach. Familiar cuts, five points connected by a circle of rent flesh.

  “Some sort of overdose, I’d expect,” Baldwin said, gesturing to the girl’s blue lips.

  “Same as Jerrold King. What in the hell happened here this afternoon?”

  A frantic movement caught Taylor’s eye, her peripheral vision picking up hurried motions outside, lights swinging crazily in the semidarkness. Maglites, their blue-white beams bobbing and weaving up the street, away from her location. She abandoned the body, went to the window. People were running back and forth, screaming, crying, cursing. The sharp wail of a siren split the nubilous air. Patrol cars were edging their way through the crowds, driving farther up Estes, toward Abbott Martin Drive. One kept going, disappeared over the edge of the hill.

  When her cell phone rang, she almost didn’t answer. Running away was sounding like an excellent option. Though if she were honest with herself, the adrenaline was building in her gut. Intrigue. A new case. She opened her phone.

  “What in the hell is going on?” Taylor snapped.

  “I need you now!” Lincoln yelled into the phone.

  “I’m on my way.” She turned to Baldwin. “We need to go.”

  “What in the world is happening?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. But I think we better find out.”

  They rushed down the stairs and into the night. The street had turned into utter chaos in the five minutes 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

  Controlling 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 Cosmopo
litan. 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.”