Nothing.
I could feel nothing but darkness and death. It was just like the other crime scenes. It was as if no ritual or ceremony had ever been performed in this room.
“ This is just the dress rehearsal,” a child’s tiny voice echoes in my brain.
“This is just a dress rehearsal,” I whispered aloud as my eyes opened wide.
“What was that, Mister Gant?” Doctor Sanders looked up from her work.
“A dress rehearsal.” I made the comment louder now as the thought scratched its way up through my brain to reside clearly and positively in the front. “Look at the way she’s arranged.” Ben and Deckert had broken off their conversation to listen to me. “Her hair. Her hands, palms upward in supplication or offering. The detail of the flaying. The opium in the incense.” By now I had moved around the bed motioning to each of the points I had mentioned. “The whole ritual has gotten more complicated each time. The first three were for practice, and this one was the final dress rehearsal.”
“Dress rehearsal for what?” Ben appealed.
“For the invocation,” I answered quickly. “For the actual ceremony.”
“No offense, but so what?” Deckert interjected.
“So it’s something that has bothered me ever since the second murder, but I could never really put my finger on it.” I continued, “I’ve never felt any residual energy from the crime scenes. I know that means nothing to you, but to me it’s important. I’ve just been assuming that I was missing something, and now I’m sure that I was.”
“I still don’t follow.”
“The refinement in the ceremony with each murder. This has all been one big rehearsal for the final ceremony. This was the dress rehearsal. The next time it’s going to be for real.”
“That still doesn’t tell us anything,” Deckert returned. “It just means that the asshole is going to kill again. That is, unless you’re trying to tell us you actually believe he’s going to summon up a demon or something.”
“That’s entirely beside the point,” I returned. “I’d rather he never get a chance to even try. All of this DOES mean something though. It tells us WHEN, and in a certain respect, WHO he’s going to kill next. That’s what I’ve been missing.”
“How’s that?”
“Based on some of the things I dug up when I researched ritual sacrifices.” I continued, “If I’m on the same page he is, and I’m pretty sure I am, he’ll plan to perform the ritual on a full moon.”
“Anyone got a calendar?” Ben called out. “When is the next full moon?”
“This Friday,” I told them before anyone else could respond.
“Okay, so that’s the when.” Ben looked at me expectantly. “What about the who?”
I bit back a rush of bile in my throat at the thought, then quietly uttered the answer, “He’ll believe he needs a virgin.”
“A virgin?” Deckert posed, “How the hell is he going to know if the victim is a virgin?”
“A kid,” Ben answered him flatly, still holding my gaze.
“A kid?!” Deckert exclaimed. “Holy fucking shit, you can’t be serious!”
“Tell me I misunderstood, Rowan,” Ben appealed, eyes still fixed on mine. “Please.”
I couldn’t.
I just looked away.
There was a note waiting for me when Ben dropped me back at home later that morning. Felicity had already left for a photo shoot she had scheduled, and she was letting me know that she would be home later in the afternoon. I showered and changed clothes while the coffeepot performed its prescribed duty. After grabbing a cup and filling a thermal carafe with the resulting brew, I settled in at my desk upstairs.
I hoped that doing some work would take my mind off the events of the past days and allow me at least some small period of rest. Much to my chagrin, I found the reason behind why the previous week had been so grueling. I was entirely caught up. No unanswered support calls. No clients needing upgrades or modifications. I had nothing to do.
I was just preparing to call it quits when I noticed the yellow pickup slip in my box. It had been lying there since Saturday afternoon, completely forgotten. The odds were that the package was a software backup from a client needing a minor modification or a database recovery; either of which would only amount to an hour or so worth of work. In any event, it was better than nothing, so I snatched up the canary ticket and made the short drive to the post office and back.
As expected, the small package contained a tape cartridge full of data. The included trouble sheet indicated that the database was corrupt and needed to be recovered, which was one of the contract services I provided to my clients. I quickly scanned over the trouble sheet to see if there was any more information and noted that this particular client was located in Seattle, Washington. I was just preparing to slip the cartridge into my computer’s tape drive when the hair rose on the back of my neck.
“ It always rains here,” Ariel’s voice rings through my head. “It’s mostly just a misty rain.”
Rain.
Constant misty rain.
Seattle, Washington.
The second of my nightmares suddenly made sense as the electrochemical reaction within my brain generated the connection. It almost always rained in Seattle. I remembered that from a magazine photo layout Felicity had done about the Seattle Bumbershoot Festival. A festival to celebrate the rain. Work was once again forgotten as I seized the phone and stabbed out Ben’s cellular number on the keypad.
His voice came after the second ring, “Hello?”
“Ben, it’s Rowan.”
“Hey,” he replied, “I was just gonna call you. You’ll be happy to know that the D.A. decided to hold off on filin’ charges against R.J. pendin’ further investigation.”
“That’s great,” I answered quickly, “but that’s not why I called.”
“What’s up?”
“I know I’m going to sound crazy again,” I started. “But I’m calling about another vision I had.”
“When? Just now?” he asked.
“No, a couple of nights ago,” I continued. “I’ve been having them almost every night since I got involved in this whole thing. They just haven’t necessarily made sense until now.”
“So what is it?” he pressed anxiously. “Did you see another murder? The kid?”
“No, not yet.” I hoped we could make that yet into a never. “I’m pretty sure this one is a clue about the killer’s identity, but I don’t quite know what to make of it.”
“Well spit it out man,” he urged. “What is it?”
“Seattle,” I told him. “Seattle or the Pacific Northwest. I think that’s where he’s from or something.”
I could hear him scribbling notes in his book. Less than half a dozen hours ago, he had considered me a lunatic and possibly even a murderer. Now he was accepting what I said on blind faith. He wasn’t taking any chances.
“What makes you think Seattle?” he asked.
“Rain,” I told him simply and then explained it. “It almost always rains in Seattle. In the vision, I saw Ariel and she told me that it was always raining. I think she’s trying to tell me who the killer is or where he’s from at least.”
“Okay. I’ll check NCIC and call Seattle PD to see if they have any cases similar to ours, open or closed. You got anything else I should know about?”
“I’ve had two other visions, but nothing has clicked yet… except maybe money.”
“Money?” he asked in a perplexed tone.
“It doesn’t make sense to me either but then neither did the rain until just a few minutes ago.”
“No problem. I’ll start makin’ some calls, and I’ll get in touch with ya’ as soon as I know somethin’. If anything else falls into place for ya’, call me right away.”
“I will. Talk to you later. Bye.”
“Bye.”
I gently settled the handset back into its holder, silently grateful that Ben had been willing to believe me this time.
I only wished that a young woman hadn’t had to die in order to open his eyes. But then, that wasn’t his fault.
I really didn’t feel like working anymore, but my clients weren’t paying me to track down serial killers; they were paying me to fix their computer software. I turned back to the small tape cartridge and spent the next hour and forty-five minutes earning my living.
It was almost three hours before I heard anything from Ben, and instead of calling, he and Detective Deckert simply appeared at my house. The pendulum clock had just issued an audible announcement of the time, telling me that it was 1:00 in the afternoon when I answered the doorbell.
“What’s for lunch?” Ben said to me as I swung open the front door.
“I was just nuking some lasagna,” I answered.
“That’ll work.”
The dogs scrambled about, nosing one another out of the way in a contest for the attentions of the two visitors. I sent them out the back door as Ben and Deckert seated themselves at the kitchen table.
“Where’s Firehair?” Ben asked, lounging back in his chair.
“Working. She had a shoot for some department store scheduled today.”
“Shouldn’t she be restin’ or somethin’?”
“How long have you known Felicity, Ben?” I returned.
“Yeah. You’re right. Forget I ever asked that.”
“So, I’m assuming you didn’t just come by for lunch,” I told them while preparing the dish of pasta.
“You assume correctly,” Ben returned, “but I still wanna eat.”
“I’m working on that,” I answered and looked over at Deckert who gave me an animated shrug.
“Well, it appears that you’re two for two on this nightmare thing,” Ben started. “We hit paydirt with the Seattle PD. They’ve got an open case that bears a striking resemblance to our four. Especially Ariel Tanner.”
“Coed at the University of Washington, Seattle.” Deckert picked up the thread. “Found dead in her dorm room. She had been skinned in a similar fashion to the Tanner woman, but the autopsy revealed that she was probably already dead due to respiratory arrest.”
“He overdosed her on the curare,” I mused.
“Kinda,” he replied. “Toxicology showed the dose to be too low to have caused respiratory arrest in your average person. Seems this young lady was unlucky enough to be a member of the small percentage of people who are hypersensitive to the drug.”
“Considering what she would have had to endure otherwise,” I observed, “I’m not sure I would call her unlucky in that respect.”
“Yeah,” he grunted, “I see what you mean.”
“The mirror in the room was shattered, and there was a Pentacle inscribed on the wall along with the words ‘All Is Forgiven,’” Ben added. “Not to mention that the door was propped open. Sound familiar?”
“More than just a little,” I answered. “But shouldn’t it have shown up earlier? I thought this was what things like NCIC and VICAP were all about.”
“They are,” he affirmed. “Clerical error. The case was never entered into the database.”
“Lovely… Well, did they turn up any leads?” I queried. “Fingerprints? Anything?”
“No prints,” Deckert answered. “According to their forensics lab, the size and shape of the incisions were consistent with those of a scalpel or a similar cutting implement.”
“There’s a medical school at the University of Washington,” I voiced. “A friend of mine attended it. That would tie in with the curare and the theory about the killer having some kind of medical background as well. When did this happen?”
“A little less than a year ago,” Ben answered this time. “And nothin’ else came up on the NCIC database, so to our knowledge, he hasn’t killed anywhere besides here and Seattle.”
The timer on the microwave beeped, so I stepped over to pull out the tray of lasagna. I moved through the task of dishing it onto plates automatically, still pondering everything that had been said.
“So our killer moved from Seattle to Saint Louis sometime within the last year,” I ventured, “and might have been a medical student at the University of Washington.”
“That’s how it looks,” Deckert acknowledged. “The Seattle PD is compiling a list of the med students they interviewed right now.”
“How soon do you think you’ll hear something?” I placed steaming plates before the two men and absently offered them silverware.
“Hopefully sometime this afternoon,” Ben answered, cutting into the lasagna with his fork. “They’re as anxious to find this asshole as we are.”
“Yeah,” Deckert added. “As if it wasn’t enough that this shithead maimed and killed this girl, it turns out she was the daughter of some big cheese out there. The family posted some obnoxious amount as a reward.” He glanced up from his plate and noticed me leaning against the counter lost in thought. “So are you gonna eat or what?”
For all intents and purposes, I had switched to automatic pilot when the two of them began filling me in on the latest news, and the fact that I was hungry was all but forgotten. Before I could answer, the dogs began yelping loudly, raising their general, happy, canine ruckus at the back gate. A moment later, the reason became obvious when we heard the front door open, followed by Felicity noisily entering.
“Ben, your van is in my parking spot,” her voice came from the other room.
I turned to Detective Deckert. “I guess I’ll get that chance after I heat some up for her.” I jerked my thumb in the direction of the living room and then waved my index finger at the both of them. “I’ll let you two get her caught up with what’s been going on.”
CHAPTER 19
So what’s with this theory about the next victim being a child?” Felicity was mechanically sorting film canisters. “I mean, is there something that can be done?”
While she was eating, Ben and Deckert had brought her up to date on the days events, from the latest murder to the discovery of the connection with Seattle. We had now moved to the dining room table where she could do some work while we talked.
“It took some doin’ since we don’t have any hard evidence,” Ben answered, “but I managed to convince the chief of the possibility of a child abduction. We’ve got coppers stationed at all of the area schools, but the truth is, we really don’t know what we’re lookin’ for. This asshole hasn’t established any kind of pattern or anything.
“And what with school just starting in some districts, the effort has been hard to coordinate.”
“Not to mention that it’s quite a bit of ground to cover,” Deckert added. “He could try to grab a kid outside of the metro area for all we know.”
“What about the police in those areas?” she posed. “Can’t they help out?”
“They are,” Deckert explained, “but you’re talking about some real small departments. They can only spread themselves so thin, and like Ben said, he hasn’t exactly been sticking to a particular stereotype…and now we’re guessing that he’ll go after a kid…”
I had been listening quietly, pondering the facts as they were reiterated for my wife’s benefit and trying each of them out on the mental jigsaw puzzle I had created. Each of my nightmares provided another piece, and I felt that my recent revelations had begun putting them together. The border was completed, I was certain of that, and something told me that I had most of the pieces necessary to fill in the center but for some reason, still lacked the dexterity to do it.
I was troubled as much as the rest of them by the paradox the killer had created. It was obvious that he was practicing, preparing himself for the rite of invocation I believed he intended to perform. With each victim, he had grown progressively more intense, displaying increasingly greater skill at his grotesque art. Each of his steps seemed carefully planned out, but at the same time, the selection of his victims appeared random.
Ariel Tanner, Karen Barnes, Ellen Gray, and now Darla Radcliffe. Other than the fact that three of them knew R.J
., they had little in common. There was nothing to indicate that they knew one another. The fact that R.J. was still in custody at the time of the fourth murder tended to rule him out as a suspect and in my mind, as the common thread I was searching for. The women lived in different parts of the city and county. They had different professions, different hair colors, different eye colors, sizes, weights, shapes, birth dates, this, that, and the other thing. They appeared to have nothing more in common than being adult, mid-to-late twenties, and female. Now I believed that the killer’s next victim would be a child, so even that pattern, minute as it was, instantly began to unravel.
“Rowan?”
I plunged back toward reality at the sound of Felicity’s voice sharply prodding me. “Wha…What?”
“You were starin’ off into space for a minute there,” Ben interjected. “Somethin’ we should know? You weren’t goin’ all Twilight Zone on us were you?”
“No. Nothing like that,” I answered, still dragging myself out of my introspective trance. “I was just thinking about the victims. There’s got to be some kind of connection that we’re missing. He had to pick them for a reason. There has to be a common thread.”
“I’ll buy that, but I got no idea what it is,” he returned. “We talked to friends, relatives, and neighbors of all four of ‘em. We’ve been over the crime scenes dozens of times. Personal effects as well. Nothin’.”
“Why does it matter?” Deckert interjected. “If you think he’s gonna go for a kid this time then all bets are off.”
“I don’t know.” I stood up and began slowly pacing about the room. “Maybe it would give us a better idea of who we’re looking for. Maybe it’s something the four of them could have in common with a child…I don’t know.” I began to mutter, “It just bothers me…”
“You’re thinking that if we knew the connection,” Felicity ventured, “that we might have a better idea of the type of child he might abduct?”
“In general, yes. That is, of course, assuming that he hasn’t grabbed a child already.”
“We thought of that,” Deckert expressed. “There haven’t been any unresolved child abductions in the area within the past two years.”
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