Ritual Dreams

by Hadena James

  “It’s basically a festival atmosphere,” Xavier offered her.

  “Yes, it is a festival of sorts. The city pays for a carnival to come to town and it sets up near one of the largest parks and fills the streets. There are rides and games. You can watch the morning sacrifice and then the preparation of the food, settle in for some live music, and wait for the evening, there are food trucks and vendors everywhere to cover breakfast and lunch, but come dinner time, everyone eats the morning sacrifice and sides because it’s cheap and it’s delicious.”

  “Most of the visitors are like us, they aren’t Satanists, they don’t watch the morning sacrifice. They spend money at the carnival, watch the band or other entertainment, buy lunch from the food trucks, and come dinner, form a line to eat. Satanists don’t eat the sacrifice, it’s considered taboo, but everyone else can and does. Last year the sacrifice to St. Lucian raised more than three hundred thousand dollars that was parceled out to the homeless shelters, food banks, women’s shelters, children’s home for orphans, and the children’s cancer hospital here in town. Even the protestors eat from the food trucks and spend money, it’s a bit of a joke really. One guy that sets up every year is a guy that can airbrush shirts and his best seller is a shirt that reads ‘I protested animal sacrifice in Tallahassee’ with the year under it. What most people don’t realize is he donates all the profit from those shirts to the Satanists, which they then add to the collective pot for donation to charities. Also, they don’t realize he’s an Alienist, he’s convinced God is an extraterrestrial. However, his shirts are big sellers and we get a lot of visitors from around the country that come for the event mostly out of curiosity. It’s a money maker for the city, and it serves the less fortunate community.” Kimberly’s husband told us.

  “That’s a lot of money raised.” Xavier commented.

  “The other pagan religions get in on it, too, like the shirt guy that everyone thinks is so awesome. Because it’s a sacrifice day for the Satanists, most of the registration and assisting with vendor set up is done by the other religious groups, the Goddess Movement for example handles the vendor booth applications and begins six months before the festival. Our six or seven Alienist religions handle organizing entertainment and getting the food trucks. .” Kimberly told us.

  “I need a text for next year’s St. Lucian Sacrifice Festival,” I told her and then looked at Gabriel. “I’m going to need a few days off to bring Cassie and Kyle down for it.”

  “You?” Gabriel looked at me. “Now my curiosity is piqued, and we might all need a few days off to come down for it.”

  “We can say it’s a team building exercise,” Lucas offered.

  “I knew Aislinn would be interested, but I’m surprised by everyone being interested.” Kimberly said.

  “We aren’t a particularly religious group of police officers,” Xavier shrugged. “And we don’t get time off very often, especially not with the opportunity to attend a festival also involved.”

  “However, because it is such a big deal around here, there is increased pressure to solve the arsons.” Fiona said, bringing us back to the less happy reason we were here.

  “Yes, when the parking lot full of cars, not all of them belonging to Satanists, caught fire and halted the festival, it turned into a massive problem due to public safety. Once that became an issue, there were commands from on high to find out who had done it. Originally, one of the animal rights group took credit. A few days after it happened, though, a letter was sent to a TV station in town care of their newsroom and it stated it must be read on air. Thankfully, they opted not to do that. The letter proclaimed they were responsible for the fire and that they were very sad no Satanists had died and that the threat to public safety would continue until the Satanists stopped their practices. There was more about child sex abuse and sacrifices in it, as well as claims that Satanists were brainwashing us into believing they were being helpful to the community, and that someone would die for every day that the Satanists continued their practices. The clencher was that the writer knew paint thinner had been used and the animal rights group claimed they had used gasoline to start the fire. There were, however, two murders in two days immediately following the receipt of the letter. The first victim was shot twice from a moving car, a lawyer that was an open Satanist. The following day, another open Satanist was shot, but they survived. The third day, there was another hit and run. The driver of the car pinned the victim between the driver’s car and another parked car. The driver managed to get away by backing up into the crowd that was trying to mob them and pull them from the vehicle. The witnesses couldn’t agree whether it was a man or a woman or how old the driver was, some thought it was a teen, others an adult. In other words, they sucked as witnesses. That person died. A few days later, we found the first couple killed. However, what worries me is that the poisoned couple predates the current crime spree by about a year.”

  “They knew they couldn’t keep up the blitz attacks,” Lucas said. “It all speaks toward planning. Someone wanted you to think it was a group, so those crimes were done to implicate multiple people involved and to keep the police busy chasing dead ends. It’s all part of a premeditated plan.”

  “When the editorial appeared in the paper proclaiming the murders were justified, the FBI sent a profiler to us.”

  “A profiler that needs to make a name for herself and who will always read the party line regardless of what of what the evidence says.” I said. “Whoever did it doesn’t want a connection to be drawn between the first victims and the current victims.”

  “Except we caught someone in the first case.”

  “I think that was part of the plan,” Lucas told her.

  “Oh shit,” Kimberly said.

  “Yep, if that’s the case, you have a bigger problem than you realized,” Lucas agreed. “Because it means they plotted out how to get away with that murder while framing someone else, which reads like a training exercise in how to frame someone, and that several people could be in the works to be framed for these murders.”

  “And the churches did stop services, temporarily, but the killer is still killing.”

  “Have them open back up for service and let us put someone inside the churches as decoys,” I told her.

  “Think we can catch them that way?”

  “Not really, but sometimes we get lucky.” I added.

  Eight

  I stood under the shower head for a long time. That was the great part about staying at a hotel, nearly limitless hot water. My skin was pink, making the scars that crisscrossed it stand out in striking relief.

  At the moment, I didn’t have any red ones, they had all healed up and become flat, white, shiny patches of skin, highlighting the darker skin around them. Both of my parents were of Scottish decent, but somewhere along the way, had been something a little swarthier. My skin tanned, it didn’t burn. I didn’t have or get freckles when I was exposed to the sun unlike Nyleena or my mom. My natural complexion had a touch of olive to it, something that was perhaps Mediterranean in my heritage.

  My brother Eric was like me, not fair skinned like our mother. He did have some freckles to go with the red that he got in his facial hair when it grew in. However, it didn’t grow real well, growing up I remember him once trying to grow a goatee and giving up after several months because it just wasn’t happening for him.

  Like my brother, my hair had some red to it as well, mostly natural highlights. Until I met Trevor, though, I hadn’t even known I had natural highlights, let alone red ones. He had done lots to make me more aware of my appearance. I kept trying to think of a way to help him come to terms with what had happened during the blitz on the FGN and kept coming up empty. He had managed to be safe and sound in his bunker, but he had been alone, which gave his imagination time to run wild and confront ideas he had never considered before.

  If he had holed up with my mother and Nadine’s mother, it probably would have gone better for him, mentally. Ivan’s kids
and the two adult women would have kept him from thinking about things that no one wants to think about. I had tried to set him up with a trainer, someone to teach him to use a firearm, a good instructor used by the Kansas City Metropolitan police force. He had declined saying it was Lucas’s job to handle the guns.

  I hadn’t pressed it because I didn’t want to traumatize him even more. The FGN had a shooting range, and if he changed his mind, there were plenty of cops that would help him learn to use a firearm. Many of the spouses were taking private lessons so if it ever happened again, they wouldn’t feel like the fish in the proverbial barrel.

  While showering, I had pondered on the problem of our serial killer being a woman. Females tended to be less consistent and put more thought into planning each kill. Rarely did they take victims of opportunity. Whereas male serial killers were more impulsive, leading to more mistakes and more evidence to help us narrow down finding them.

  I secretly harbored the opinion that there could be almost as many female serial killers as males and we probably wouldn’t know it. When we did get on the tail of one, it was because they were disorganized, impulsive, and sloppy, traits found in younger females rather than older, more experienced ones.

  Even with the rates of serial killers rising, people just didn’t think of women as being capable of brutal killings such as these. Brutal murders that involved torture were just automatically thought to be the work of males. The world was still chauvinistic in that respect.

  And what was up with the nursery rhyme. To write it in blood meant it was important, something the killer wanted us to see. Was she seeking revenge for a child? Maybe her child had gone missing and she suspected kidnapping by Satanists. That seemed like a good enough reason to use acid on someone. Perhaps the threat was to get them to tell what had happened to her child. Was there a link between the victims that went beyond them all being members of a Satanist church, we had been told no, but what if there was and they just hadn’t found it yet? I texted Fiona and asked her to see if she could dig up anything. Fiona was a bit of a search guru. I suspected she didn’t restrict it to the public part of the internet, but we were fighting an epidemic and I was a bit utilitarian anyway.

  Using my phone, I searched for tutorials on how to apply Día de Los Muertos make-up. I suspected it was something that had to be learned as opposed to innate talent. More than a hundred links for YouTube videos came up. I watched the first one, a girl maybe my age applying makeup to herself in preparation for Day of the Dead celebrations.

  I watched five or six others, deciding the make up on our victims looked more clownish and garish than true Día de Los Muertos makeup. Our killer was not putting in the time and effort on the make-up to make it look good, but that could be because they were applying it to dead people.

  My search brought up something else, a website that linked Day of the Dead celebrations to Satanism. I rolled my eyes, but my phone didn’t respond to eye rolls, and neither did the website. The problem with the internet was that it gave every crackpot on the planet a forum and a way to find other crackpots.

  I clicked the link opening the page and read the blog of this particular crackpot. The author seemed to have a theory about everything religious. Much of it was thinly veiled racism aimed at Hispanic Catholics, who the author deemed were procreating fast enough that eventually they would take over the world and we would all be forced to participate in Carnaval and Día de Los Muertos, both of which were cleverly disguised religious holidays honoring Pan. There was also a post about how Satanists had found and sacrificed the child that embodied the return of Jesus Christ. Another post talked about how serial killers were the result of government experiments in order to bring about the End of Days.

  I stayed in the bottom of that rabbit hole for two hours, reading archived posts about different conspiracies. For the most part, I hated investigating, that was the job of the police, it was my job to keep them from getting killed when they found out who the bad guy was. I texted the link to Kimberly because there was a post on how all Satanists should be murdered in their beds to protect their children from the influence of evil.

  After reading for two hours, I decided the author hated women, Catholics, Satanists, Hispanics, Jews, and Russians, none of which was illegal. However, if they were in the Tallahassee area, it might behoove us to go talk to them.

  After poking around for a few final moments, I found a page on the blog with links to “evidence” to support the conspiracy theories and hatred the author spouted. I clicked one of the links and fell into another rabbit hole.

  This rabbit hole was even more deranged. The primary focus of the site was provide proof that Satanists were trafficking in babies that had been aborted, that they had somehow saved and raised in incubators until they were old enough to be sacrificed to the Dark Lord. It also informed me that the antichrist had been born in China and included a picture of a child who suffered a vestigial tail along with a few other genetic deformities. I rolled my eyes again. I didn’t know as much about human anatomy as Xavier, but I did know that tails happened. Most babies born with tails had the tail removed. Having a tail made other people uncomfortable and they could be quite painful to deal with. However, when a rare genetic malformation such as a tail happened in a poor or rural area without access to modern medical treatments, they were often left because removing them had risks.

  I rolled my eyes again and found another page of links, which I clicked and suddenly I was staring at a page with a swastika dripping blood. I went back a page and clicked a different link, white supremacists weren’t on the agenda tonight. Having read the blog post of the first crackpot that linked Satanists to Day of the Dead celebrations had made me realize that there might be a reason to target Satanists beyond them just being Satanists.

  The next link lead me to another conspiracy theorist page that dealt with the Illuminati. This was closer to what I was looking for. There were all kinds of theories about the Illuminati being agents of Satan, I didn’t even need to read the page to know that. I was a non-believer in the Illuminati, secret cabals definitely ran the world, but I didn’t think the Illuminati was one of them. World leaders were more Skull and Bones types than Illuminati types.

  It was after four am when I stopped reading up on Satanists and the Illuminati. I book marked the page on my phone for future reading. The author appeared more reasonable than the others I had read. So far, I hadn’t found any claims on the page that espoused hatred of any groups of people or even a single individual. There was something to be said for that.

  I shut off my phone and curled up in the hotel bed. Like most hotel beds, it had seen too many travelers over the years, making it lumpy and uncomfortable. I didn’t go any further than that with the thought, because if I did, I’d start carrying plastic sheeting to cover hotel beds I had to sleep in. This was at least a decent hotel. We had stayed in some sketchy places during my time as a US Marshal. One would think that with all the travel US Marshals did, they would have an agreement with some place like Marriot to house us.

  Instead we had credit cards that the US Marshals paid off every month for our travel. They had daily spend limits, but that was the majority of the oversight on them. Unless we all started charging five hundred-dollar meals, our expenses were easily justifiable. Including staying at hotels that had doors opening on hallways and not to the parking lot. At least there was some security in hotels with hallways. Although, once in a while, someone from the Marshals’ service booked us rooms and apparently that person hated us. Because they were constantly booking us into sketchy hotels.

  I was awakened not by my phone ringing, but by someone knocking on my hotel room door. I grabbed a gun as I walked towards the door. Even though Gabriel was one room over, even he would have called before knocking on the door. I wasn’t a morning person and I was slightly paranoid, possibly justifiably so.

  I am afraid of peepholes. I have this fear of someone on other side waiting for me to put my eye to the p
eephole and then shooting me through it. I had never heard of this happening to anyone, but in my head, it was logical, most bullets through the eyes were lethal, it was almost as good as using a laser scope to sight in a shot before firing.

  I opened the door to find Kimberly on the other side. Dark circles framed her deep, rich brown eyes. Her hair was messy even in the ponytail that that held it off her neck. It appeared she had pulled it up without brushing it first, a sure sign that she was in a hurry to get here.

  She frowned, looking at my gun held by my side. She didn’t say anything about it, probably used to my version of insanity from our days as roommates at college.

  “There’s been another murder?” I asked after she said nothing for several minutes.

  “Yes and no.” She sighed. “There was a murder, but I would say it wasn’t related to our string of them. It’s possibly a one off, but I think you and the rest of the SCTU should look at it.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because you are the closest thing to an occultist I have and because I would consider it a personal favor.”