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 Taylor 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