KALLUM
With a clear sky also comes a new form of clarity, one where the FBI task force realizes that a small town doesn’t mean small thinking.
What remains of the storm travels through the killing fields as a biting wind, bringing the scent of foul death with it to match the bleak surroundings. The marsh waters rose with the downpour, requiring every member currently trekking through the wetland to wear wading boots.
I glance down at mine, a single thought spared for the ankle monitor presently submerged under the murky water. Agent Alister leads the way through the tall reeds, swatting the grass with zeal, as if the very marsh is at fault for the latest report.
At some time during the night, when the rain drove most people to take shelter, there was at least one busy bee buzzing around the fields up to no good.
As we come up on the second crime scene marked by tattered caution tape and a black willow tree, the only thing that remains of the hemlock grove are the bare canes. The poisonous patch has been stripped.
“Goddammit—” Alister shouts. He rounds on one of the federal agents nearest him. “I want eyes on every scene at all times.”
I glance to my right, tempted to make a bad joke to Halen about how the eyes were already on the first scene…but decide against it as Alister’s tapered gaze falls on her in accusation.
“Since you like to traipse around crime scenes at night,” Alister says to Halen, tone patronizing, “do you know anything about this, Miss St. James?”
“If I had, I would have reported it right away,” she says.
Alister gauges her suspiciously before he instructs the task force to start processing the scene. I don’t know what transpired between them during the interrogation last night, but she’s not barred from the scene today.
When she chose to leave me standing in the rain like some cliché movie scene, I had to restrain myself from following after her. The next time she decides to be fearless and go off without me, I won’t let a tracking monitor or the threat of being locked up hold me back.
It was late when I heard her enter her room. Then the sound of a chair being slipped under the doorknob. The chain lock on the conjoining door remains broken. It was a long, restless night where I fought the temptation to simply kick in the door.
Other than returning my jacket, Halen’s been actively avoiding me all morning. As I watch her diligently setting up her gear, I decide I need something stronger than a lame icebreaker after my confession last night.
What does one do after one rips out their proverbial heart? Greeting card? Flowers?
I’d rather pin her down in the mud and fuck her hard and filthy until she’s forced to break her silence. But since we have an audience, I settle for clandestine glances in a dirty marsh.
When a gust of wind sends another blast of decay through the reeds, I bury my head close to my jacket collar and inhale her sweet scent that still clings to the fabric. Hunger sparks anew and burns at the back of my throat.
My willpower won’t last another night.
“Sir, you need to see this.” One of the feds points past the grove.
While Alister follows the young agent around the barren stems toward a steep ravine cut through the marsh, Halen talks with Detective Riddick, who stepped up to take charge during Detective Emmons’ absence.
“Christ,” Alister says loud enough to draw others toward the site.
I return my focus to Halen. She’s my only concern. My only reason to work this case is to keep her safe.
Her emotions are muddled today. Like the dark marsh waters blocking the GPS signal on my monitor, my link to her is dulled and muted. Frustration at not being able to read her tightens my jaw.
“Shouldn’t you be more interested in what’s going on over there than the cute forensic profiler?”
I slide a sideways glance at Devyn, feeling her rhetorical question hit the mark and doesn’t require a response.
“Yeah, I don’t blame you.” She sidles up beside me in her wading boots. “Halen is far more intriguing than a smelly marsh, but could you humor me anyway with your thoughts on what happened here?”
Halen laughs—she fucking laughs—at something Riddick says, and my back teeth grind. I look at Devyn, then direct a glance at the bare hemlock grove. “What do you want to know?”
She arches a perfect eyebrow in amusement. “I don’t know, you’re the expert. Possibly who did this and why? Let’s start there.”
Halen’s tinkling pixie laugh reaches my ears, and I curl a bandaged hand into a fist. The cuts are healed over, but the sting feels just as raw.
“Wow, they’re really hitting it off,” Devyn comments. “Riddick isn’t that funny. At all. He must be trying to impress her.”
“Well, you know what Nietzsche said.” At her curious expression, I say, “Most people are too stupid to act in their own interest.”
“That sounds dangerously like a threat,” she says, eyeing me, “or like someone who feels threatened.”
A humorless laugh escapes. “Touché. But what if I was referring to myself. Funny how easily philosophy can be misinterpreted.” I flash a smile, then wade through the reeds and lower to my haunches to get a closer look at the hemlock canes.
Using the cuff of my jacket, I nudge one of the white roots that was ripped out of the ground. “They were in a hurry.”
“Professor, a rookie can see the perp was in a hurry,” Devyn says, sarcasm sharp on her tongue.
A smirk tugs at my mouth. “Don’t the locals have their own expert consultant?” I lift my gaze to her. “You should probably get her thoughts.”
Like right now, before I tear Riddick’s spine through his neck and toss it with the rest of the discarded vertebrae in the grove.
“She’s a bit preoccupied right now. Besides, Halen seems to trust your opinion.”
“She thinks I’m a killer.” I rise to my feet. “Do you believe I’m a killer?”
“I don’t know.” She makes a point to look me up and down. “You don’t look anything like a moth to me.”
I smirk and dip low near her ear. “I hide my wings well.”
“Locke, get over here,” Alister commands from his perch on the ravine ridge.
This catches Halen’s attention, and she makes brief eye contact with me.
Devyn glances between the two of us. “Just an observation, but I don’t think it’s your killer nature that frightens Halen.”
I make a sound of amusement. “Show people a reflection of what they fear, and they will question their convictions.”
Devyn lowers her notepad. “Thank you for the lesson, professor.”
“Here’s another,” I say. “Whatever the offender has planned with the hemlock is more important to him than whatever he was hiding down that ravine.”
Her dark brown eyes widen a fraction. “You think it’s something to do with the victims?”
I study her pinched expression, wondering if she was close to any of the missing locals. “Every crime scene so far has been linked to the victims,” is all I say before I start in the direction of the ravine.
A line has formed at the clearing’s edge. Techs snap pictures, gloves slide into place on hands. As I stride closer, I lift my booted feet to climb out of the marsh waters. A jolt zips down my back as I peer over the edge.
Below are tens if not hundreds of deer carcasses piled at the bottom of the chasm.
The unnerving sight of skeletal remains pales to the stench wafting up from the ravine. From this vantage point, I identify the largest as stags. The pelts have been skinned, the skulls exposed.
The antlers have been removed.
Alister talks into his phone: “Bring those two hunters in for questioning,” he orders the person on the other end of the line. “The ones that discovered the first crime scene.” He ends the call, then looks my way. “What do you make of this?”
“Which part?”
Jaw set hard, he rolls up his shirt sleeves and situates his shoulder harness in a firm reminder that he’s armed with a weapon. “The fucking mutilated deer, Locke.”
I grin, enjoying twisting the agent’s short fuse. “It’s not staged,” I say simply. “I don’t see any esoteric or ritualistic connection here to link to your offender’s agenda.”
“What about the Harbinger,” he says, hooking a thumb toward the bare grove. “He invaded one of the perpetrator’s sites already, so it stands to reason he’d hit another. Why would he raid the hemlock?”
If he’s asking about the Harbinger killer, then Halen didn’t relay anything we discussed last night in the rain.
“I’m not a crime-scene profiler,” I say.
The tension gathering around Alister draws a rigid line across his shoulders. He blatantly looks at the faded celestial rose peeking above the bandage on my hand and the sigils inked into my fingers, disgust evident in his tight features. “That’s all you have to say?” he demands. “I couldn’t shut you the fuck up a few days ago. If you’re no help here, maybe it’s time to send you back.”
“That would be a mistake.” I lock with his flared gaze, the veiled threat behind my words as deadly as my stare.
I sense her proximity before she appears at my side. “I agree with Professor Locke,” Halen says, defusing some of the hostility. “This isn’t a dumping site for hunters, but it’s not a tribute or ritual site, either.”
Alister tugs his tie to loosen the knot at his neck. “Get the hell down there and figure out what it is, then.”
The animosity between Halen and Alister is tangible. My instincts say the agent in charge wanted someone to blame for not yet having a suspect in custody, and Halen presented an opportunity with a contaminated crime scene to place some of that blame.
The media are spinning enticing click-bait stories around the victims and the FBI’s lack of progress on the high-profile case. One such headline declared the feds incompetent for not catching the perpetrator in such a small town.
I thought it was a fair observation.
Halen drapes her camera strap over her neck and tucks her notebook under one arm, then starts down the slope. I reach out and take her forearm, helping to guide her down the steep incline. To my surprise, she doesn’t pull away or chastise me for touching her.
As we reach the base, the putrid stench of decaying flesh and death is so pungent, she covers the lower half of her face. “He’s been dumping here for years,” she says.
“So you think it’s the offender.”
She tilts her head in a mocking gesture, then looks across the bed of remains. “You know it’s him. There’s only one perpetrator in this town, right?” Her sharp remark teases at a ribbon of fear buried beneath the sarcasm.
Whether or not she fully believes she’s in the Overman’s sight, that’s not what she’s afraid of. She’s not scared of Alister or his empty threats. But she is wary of something. I want to pull at that ribbon until she unspools.
“I’m just cautious with what I reveal to Alister. Before I’ve verified the evidence or have a provable theory,” she amends.
The question of what went down during their meeting is right on the cusp of my tongue, but I decide to give her something instead. “The stag skulls are all different sizes, ages. There are layers of decomp in the heap, ranging from years to weeks.”
“So now you’re a forensic anthropologist.”
The hint of a smile playing on her mouth stokes a blazing brushfire within me, and I want more; I want to earn her laugh. “I am whatever you need me to be.”
Her smile falls. “That’s what worries me.”
She traps me in the intensity of her gaze, refusing to release me until she’s forced to swipe the unruly lock of white from her vision.
I cross my arms and look down at one of the rotting stags. “You don’t agree with Alister’s theory that the Harbinger raided the hemlock.”
Keeping my gaze trained on the hollow eye socket of the skull, I wait for her answer, my inquiry a not-so-veiled attempt to discover if she thinks I’m somehow responsible.
“No,” she says. “I don’t think the Harbinger had any hand in that.”
A small flame of hope unfurls inside me, and as I dare to meet her eyes, some uncertainty passes over her face, dousing that flame just as quickly.
“But then, I’m not sure what I know at all anymore.” She parts her notebook open.
I can work with that.
“Like the hemlock.” She delves straight into the facts. “The offender never wanted this site discovered. We reasoned the hemlock was his contingency plan, his failsafe. If he came to collect it, at the risk of exposing…whatever he was hiding in this ravine, then he’s getting impatient.”
Her thoughts reflect what I told Devyn. “I agree.”
It was our first dinner together at the town diner where I led Halen down the path to the hemlock. Socrates was forced to ingest it when he was found guilty of impiety, for introducing a new deity into society—which is the most important part to remember.
In every society, in every age, if man becomes his own god, then there is no outside force to fear or be governed by. Leaders lose the ability to control the masses. Therefore, the knowledge of this “wisdom” into the Higher Self had to become a secret, hidden.
Fact or fiction, truth or conspiracy theory—it makes no difference.
History is bound and recorded by the violence of those who believed.
“The trunk of the willow tree is where your guy marked his path to ascension,” I say, reasoning out loud. “We discovered no other alchemic symbols at any of the other tribute sites. Only here.”
Those symbols. Three. Always three.
Socrates. The Herd. Dionysus.
I glance around at all the mutilation, at the death. “This site is sacred to him. Not just a practice site.”
“It’s crude. A dumping place for failed attempts.” Halen steps onto a boulder between carcasses. “This is his first site. Where he started.”
“Every alchemist needs a lab,” I remark.
Unlike the other analysts skirting the perimeter, wary of falling into the hovel of decay, Halen walks the scene undaunted, snapping pictures, jotting notes. She goes somewhere inside herself, where all the noise and distractions of the scene fall away. Time and space bend for her as she reaches out to connect with the perpetrator.
Whether it existed before, or was cloaked by a life of love and happiness, she has a darkness inside her—one she taps into to see beneath the veil.
Most people are too frightened to look that deeply.
But this is where she fights her demons.
This darkness cried out to me across the abyss, where I was waiting for her. I’m still waiting for her. Last night, I might have chipped away at her doubt, but like the gorge we’re standing amid now, there’s still a chasm between us.
Halen slings her camera around to her back and rolls off a glove, then takes her phone from her back pocket and holds it up to record her thoughts. “Nietzsche’s allegory described the Overman as a gift, an idealism to elevate humanity, which was rejected by society. If the offender’s gift is rejected by the herd, then just as with Socrates, the hemlock will come into play. But who is the poison intended for? There was always something off about the perpetrator consuming it himself in the initial profile.”
Lowering her phone, Halen finds me across the pile of bones. “Care to share your thoughts, Professor Locke?”
A wicked craving licks my restraint with a forked tongue at hearing her address me like that. “I’m just riveted watching you work, Dr. St. James.”
“Fine.” She gets to her feet. “You tell me when I get something wrong.”
If she keeps stroking my ego like this, she’ll force me to show her how rewarding I can be when she gets something right.
“I profiled the offender as devolving. Out of desperation, he’d resort to a primeval alchemy incorporating human sacrifice, thus sacrificing his higher humans as a more worthy offering to Dionysus. No more pity. No more humanity to bind him to the flesh. His ultimate weakness.” She hunkers and sets her notebook aside, then prods one of the stags with a stick. “Cannibalizing his higher men to consume the aspects of the Overman seems a more logical and direct route. But the offender wouldn’t need hemlock for this purpose. Rather, it would defeat it. You can’t cannibalize people who’ve just ingested poison.”
“Quite the logical deduction,” I say. “Seems like you’ve put the whole puzzle together.”
“Then what am I missing?” Agitation creeps into her locked frame. “Why go through the effort to confiscate the hemlock? It’s a huge risk.”
I cock an eyebrow. “You’re overlooking a vital piece,” I say. “You’re failing to consider that he may no longer have need of his higher men because he’s found someone worthier. In that case, it’s likely they’ve become a burden. Serving up hemlock hotcakes would remedy that.”
She can’t completely accept the danger she’s in, because she can’t trust the source. This is why she has to come to these conclusions on her own.
Trusting that I’m telling her the truth is a double-edged sword—or a doubled-edged tire iron.
If she believes what I tell her is the truth, then she has to contend with a much darker, frightening reality, one where she’s capable of her very own monstrous acts.
That tendril of fear coils tighter, and she wraps an arm around her waist as she defiantly battles her doubts. Then, glancing at the sun-bleached skulls, she says, “Where are the antlers?”
“Maybe he’s fucking with us.”
She eyes me with a healthy measure of contempt. “There’s something else here,” she says, gloving her hand. “Start looking.”
“You mean, like this?” I can’t help the smug smile that curls my lips as I step aside to reveal the symbol.
