Ritual Dreams

by Hadena James

  He had admitted to paying someone to kill Donnelly and Isabelle because Donnelly suspected he was killing teen and young adult women in my hometown. He had also admitted to hiring Callow to kidnap me in order to derail the serial killer investigation that Donnelly had been working on at the time. He told the NSA that he had ended up having to do the kidnapping because Callow had chickened out at the last minute. He was afraid to even have me in his house, which is why he hadn’t done to me what he had done to the other children he had kidnapped.

  Upon learning that Director Belmont was in the custody of the US Marshals, Raphael had started talking, or rather, writing down everything he knew. He had been deposed for more than seven hours. And when Belmont was confronted with Raphael Henders’ confession he cracked and decided to plead guilty to all charges and asked that he be put into protective custody within the Fortress, he said it was so he wouldn’t be murdered by my fan club, but I had a feeling it was more because Eric was inside the Fortress once again.

  Peter West and Harry Burns had kept their silence throughout the investigation, although as I understood things, they were the ones that had helped Patterson escape my custody. Peter had confessed his role in the escape one night after the dust had started to settle. He and Malachi had joined Mom, Badger, and I for dinner and he had confessed over my mom’s meatloaf. Mom and I both were willing to ignore it considering the reason he had helped Patterson escape was to make catching Director Belmont easier and that the reason no one had been able to find Patterson for a while was because he had been given a new identity by Peter West and stuck in a house right down the street from Belmont to watch his movements.

  I had also ignored the fact that I had gotten a post card from Patterson. The post card hadn’t had his name on it, just a smiley face. But I had no doubts about it being from him. It was obvious to me, unless I now had fan club members in Mexico. The post card had come from a small town in Mexico known for its Mayan ruins on the Yucatan Peninsula. The common language wasn’t Spanish but a Mayan dialect that wasn’t spoken anywhere else in the world. I didn’t know if Patterson knew Mayan, but he seemed like the type that could pick it up.

  In other words, it had been a long month for all of us. Lucas had gotten confirmation that his parents had been murdered and hadn’t just abandoned him to his fate, which was reassuring in its own way I supposed, however, knowing your parents were murdered didn’t really fill any voids that were left in your soul by the loss of them at a young age. In that sense, I thought I was lucky. I wasn’t as emotionally invested in my parents as most people, so while losing Donnelly to murder had been horrible, I had dealt with it like all psychopaths and sociopaths.

  My mom and I had spent a lot of time talking, though, about Lucas losing his parents once we confirmed without a doubt that it was their skeletons Patterson had dug up. I felt some responsibility for it. If I hadn’t told McMichaels about any of it as a child, he and his wife would still be alive, Lucas’s brother probably would be too. Lucas would have had a completely different life. My mom had tried to point out that Lucas was who he was because someone had murdered his family, and without that catalyst, he wouldn’t be the person he was today. It hadn’t made me feel less responsible. My mom called it guilt, as close to guilt as I would ever get anyway. In this way, I was different than most psychopaths and sociopaths who rarely think they are responsible for anything.

  Fiona had a new scar, it cut across her cheek like a lightening bolt, zigzagging just below her eye and going towards her ear. A piece of the RTV Lucas was driving had embedded itself in her face, rupturing the sinus cavity in her cheek and forcing surgeons to get creative with how to replace it. It turned out you really needed your sinus cavities, even if they did bother you every time the wind blew pollen your way. It was still healing, and at the moment it was red and angry looking against her pale skin. It would eventually become raised, flat, and pale and people would tell her it added character to her face.

  To me, it was a reminder that Malachi was mostly concerned with Malachi and the consequences be damned as long as they didn’t happen to him. He was always smarter than the other guys. It was his responsibility to keep things like that from happening, and even though he’d been warned, he had ignored that warning because he had been more concerned with his own interests than with what might lay under the soil.

  Jacob Myers, otherwise known as Jacob Strong or Apex was becoming a regular around my house. He and my mother were reconnecting. I had decided she hadn’t so much lied about knowing him, as failed to mention that he was her brother. In a lot of ways, they didn’t know each other. They hadn’t grown up together nor had they had time to sit down and talk in years. Peter and Harry made good on their promise and my uncle had not only gotten his life back, but had been pardoned for any crimes he had committed while being Apex.

  Nyleena and Gabriel were still sneaking around. I didn’t know if they were trying to hide their relationship from just me or if they were trying to hide it from everyone. There was a conflict of interest involved in it, after all, Nyleena was a prosecutor that specifically worked SCTU cases and Gabriel was the one in charge of catching the bad guys Nyleena prosecuted. If a defense attorney found out, he could claim their pillow talk included conversations about his client’s guilt. I was sure it didn’t, but only because I hadn’t mentioned to either of them that I knew.

  If it made both of them happy, then I was okay with it. They were both decent human beings and they both deserved some happiness in their lives. It was hard to get with the jobs they had. Nyleena regularly received threatening mail and had a few run ins with families of both victims and killers because they weren’t happy with this or that in a trial. I just hoped it didn’t turn around and bite them in the butt as reality had a tendency to do just that. The first case Nyleena had tried that I had worked on, the defense had tried to get all the evidence thrown out under the presumption that I had discussed the case with her while we were still tracking down the killer. I hadn’t, but it was an easy enough inference to make considering the close relationship Nyleena and I had.

  Her dating Gabriel made me feel a little better. We had grown a little distant lately and I had been thinking it was something I had done that I needed to apologize for but didn’t know what. However, Nyleena wasn’t great at keeping secrets from me and she was really bad at lying to me. She was so bad at both these things, I had known every birthday and Christmas present she had gotten me for more than a decade. This year had not been an exception. If she didn’t just flat out tell me, I was able to guess, and she wasn’t able to convincingly say no that wasn’t it.

  This meant dating and trying to keep it a secret would be a problem, and the best way for her to avoid lying or just blurting it out was to avoid me.

  “Now that we’ve all had a nice vacation,” Gabriel said as he walked into the conference room from his office. He’d been talking on the phone for a long time and no one was sure who he was talking to or why.

  “Now that we’ve had an unpaid vacation, we are expected to pull on our boots and delve into it again,” Xavier said.

  “We’re salaried,” I pointed out. While our vacation had technically been administrative leave without pay, none of the powers that be had docked wages from my check for this time off and I had accrued the same amount of time as always, which was ridiculous because I wasn’t able to take vacations, ever. Technically, we were supposed to rotate cases, we’d work one, then Team Bravo would work one, but the truth was, there were more serial killers than serial killer hunters. We would need Teams Charlie, Delta, Echo, Fox TrotFoxtrot, and India, before we were able to take a real vacation. However, it was a great concept and made it look better to the outside world if someone could say, “Team Alpha is on vacation for a week.”

  The US Marshals hadn’t cared about my salary which was paid by special funding with

  the Department of Justice. As long as I was doing my job and there was money, they would continue to pay all of us
our salaries every month until we died, and even then, we had sweet death benefits. My beneficiary would get two years’ worth of my salary plus a quarter of a million-dollar bonus and they would pay my funeral expenses in a special cemetery. This meant all my mom would have to do was attend and maybe buy a new dress.

  “Did you actually not get paid?” Fiona asked Xavier.

  “That’s correct. I was told I could take vacation days, or I could work for Malachi if I wanted to get paid,” Xavier was nodding as he spoke.

  “But they gave you options that would allow you to work and get paid,” Gabriel clarified.

  “Yes,” Xavier admitted. “So, I took vacation for the second half of the month.”

  “You should have a ton of vacation,” I told him.

  “I do.”

  “Okay, then why only take half a month?” I asked.

  “It was in protest.”

  “Okie dokie then,” I said.

  “Don’t complain if you had options and just didn’t use them,” Fiona grinned at him. Fiona had been injured on the job and then required to do physical therapy for three weeks. She’d been paid from the special circumstances account. I didn’t know what the real name was, I just knew when I had to miss work for work related injuries my hours were coded under “special circumstances” instead of salary.

  “We are headed south in a few hours, Malachi’s team is busy and we, or rather, Ace was asked for specifically on this case.” Gabriel said.

  “How far south?” Lucas asked. He’d come to terms with the murders of his parents really fast, of course he had suspected they were dead the entire time they were listed as missing.

  “Florida,” Gabriel told us.

  “Who asked for me specifically?” I asked our boss, interrupting the overlapping voices that were now trying to shout each other down as they asked questions that didn’t seem important to me.

  “A Detective Kimberly Alwood.” Gabriel said motioning for Xavier to stop talking. Xavier rolled his eyes.

  “I don’t know anyone by that name,” I told Gabriel.

  “Maybe she saw you on the news,” Xavier offered.

  “If she had seen Ace on the news, she would have asked for our team, not Ace specifically,” Lucas countered. I didn’t like it when random people requested me to come hunt serial killers in their town, mostly because I was paranoid. However, having just ended a more than twenty year old conspiracy did that to a person.

  “What do we know about the case?” Xavier asked.

  “It is some of Ace’s favorite things all rolled into one,” Gabriel shrugged. “It has serial killers, the Church of the Rising Sun, and unusual ways to kill people.”

  “I don’t remember liking any of those things,” I smiled at Gabriel. So far, I had kept it secret about him and Nyleena and would continue to do so, but if Nyleena thought he was good enough for her, I was good with it. She was normally a good judge of character with only minor dating hiccups here and there and even I thought Gabriel was a good person. Sadly, I didn’t think Nyleena was anymore the marrying kind than I was, which was a bit awkward because I thought Gabriel deserved happiness and I wasn’t sure he’d get it with my cousin considering she wasn’t one to put effort into permanent sexual relationships.

  “I just want to go on record as saying, while the Church of the Rising Sun may not be the most beloved group of Satanists, most of the congregation is fairly average and the removal of Fred Thompson from the leadership has improved conditions within the church.” Fiona said.

  “And now the group has someone else that understands alternative religions,” I commented.

  “Well, Satanists and Wiccans are both mostly understood. The first tenant of both religions is do no harm, even among the Church of the Rising Sun.”

  “Thank you,” I said to her.

  “I just hate to see stereotypes enforced due to ignorance,” Fiona shrugged. “Most people don’t realize that Satanism is basically just a pagan religion and very few sects of Satanism even believe in a heaven, hell, after life, or devil, let alone a demonic being sent to tempt man into sin.”

  “Then there were two of them,” Xavier snarked. Fiona elbowed him in the ribs, which satisfied my urge to say something to him about it.

  “You will both be happy to know that we weren’t asked in because they suspect someone at the Church of the Rising Sun, we were invited in because someone has killed six Satanists, four of them members of the Church of the Rising Sun and all the bodies are connected by a single phrase written on the wall near their bodies and they don’t have any leads.”

  “Since true Satanists don’t kill people, I’m surprised that they are being targeted.” I said.

  “Even more surprising since I doubt any of them have signs on their houses or cars announcing they were Satanists.” Fiona added. I nodded. From my experience, Satanists were kind of like accountants, they weren’t distinguishable from the general public and didn’t announce that they were Satanists.

  “What do we know about the victims?” I asked.

  “Three married couples,” Gabriel said. “They all had kids, but the kids were at friends’ houses when their parents were murdered or kidnapped, they haven’t worked out which yet and the kids all lived.”

  “Who goes around killing married couples?” I frowned. “That takes a lot of research on the killers part. The killer would have to stalk them, find out they were Satanists, find a time when their kids were gone, and then break into their homes, subdue the husband, because in a situation of violence husbands almost always shield their wives, then kill them.” I said.

  “Normally, I would suggest the killer was unemployed, but they have to have money coming in regularly if they are able to stalk victims, that isn’t cheap. People drive more than they realize.” Lucas said.

  “I already hate this case,” I told them, standing up.

  “We’re going to leave within the hour, go get your bags and we’ll meet back here and carpool to the airport.” Gabriel also stood up, he stretched and I tried not to giggle. I had seen Nyleena sneak into his house again last night, I was guessing that was part of the reason for the stretching.

  Regardless of whatever our familial standing was since Nyleena had been raised as my cousin but was actually my sister, which was all sorts of complicated and not something I invested much time into thinking about, she was also my best friend and had been for as long as I could remember, we told each other practically everything and I had learned over the years that she was very enthusiastic about sex. Knowing that while watching Gabriel stretch made the entire thing very funny to me. At least a dozen flippant comments entered my head in the space of a few seconds. None of them left my mouth, which was good, there was no need to embarrass Gabriel by giving away his secret relationship with Nyleena.

  We were currently sharing a plane with Team Bravo, or Malachi’s team. It would ferry them somewhere and then ferry us somewhere. This was our first time actually being in two very different locations at once and I had reservations about how well it would work. Part of the reason the SCTU had a plane was so that we could respond quickly to volatile situations, like mass murders and rapidly devolving serial killers. That didn’t seem to be the situation with either case at the moment, but we were used to finishing a case and just hopping on the plane and heading home. If our case wrapped up around the same time Malachi’s case did, it was possibly we’d have to hang out wherever we were for a day or something.

  Of course there were a lot of uncertainties about Team Bravo, beyond just transportation questions. I knew I still had concerns about whether a psychopath could adequately lead an SCTU team. Power corrupts and Malachi had more power than he had ever had in the past. I wasn’t entirely sure how well he’d keep himself together, even with Caleb at his side. Sometimes though, he surprised me and his team had done fine the month we were all out of commission. It was possible it would be just fine and his team would be great, increasing our efficiency and earning more accola
des for the US Marshall’s Service. I was currently hoping for that one.

  Two

  We arrived in Florida to a fresh crime scene. This one was another married couple, they were again Satanists, but they hadn’t been killed in their home. They had been killed and displayed inside the main temple of the Church of the Rising Sun. Blood had pooled on the bright tiled floors.

  Most people expected Satanic temples to be dark, morbid places, but the temple on the Church of the Rising Sun campus, because they were a huge religious group, was actually very bright and cheery. The floor was done in bright neutral tones like dusty pink, tan, and sandstone while the walls were done in a complimenting color. There were no pagan pictures drawn on the walls, no inverted crosses hung around the place. Of course, leaders like Fred Thompson had removed most of the cheeriness from it, turning it into a side show act along the same lines as the Church of Satan that had been started by Anton Levey. Another example of power corrupting people, as Thompson had once been a decent guy, very charismatic, and theoretically, looking out for the interests of the Church of the Rising Sun all while killing people, having wild orgies, and forcing underaged girls to participate in sexual encounters with him.

  Men like him gave religion a bad name, but it seemed more poignant somehow when the bad leaders were Satanists. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of sex scandals that the Catholic church had covered up, but the Church of Satan and the Church of the Rising Sun had both gotten very bad reputations because of corrupt leaders like Fred Thompson and the madness of Anton Levey.