The Thirteenth Sacrifice (4 page)

She watched distractedly as an officer bagged all the boxes, the wrapper, and the remnant of the crayons on the candle.

“The pentagrams seem like a last-minute thing,” Ed said quietly to her. “What do you make of it?”

“Someone’s trying to stir up fear, superstition?” she guessed.

“Or frame someone.”

She thought of the pentagram around Katie’s neck and the other one under her bed. “You think someone’s got a grudge against little Miss Goth?”

“It would make sense, except I don’t get what her connection to the nun could possibly be. The roommate, sure, but the sister?”

“I hear you. Sounds like we need to find out at the very least if Katie knew her.”

Ed’s phone rang and he answered it. Samantha took the opportunity to walk slowly around the body on the altar. A crime scene photographer was carefully shooting every nuance, every angle that he could. Barricading off an apartment for a few days was one thing; having to barricade off a church would be quite another. Given the details of the crime scene, it was in everyone’s best interest to get the entire thing examined and cleaned up as quickly as possible before photos of a dead nun hit the front page and caused an onslaught of curiosity
seekers. A murdered coed was a senseless tragedy. A murdered nun was potentially a hate crime and the lead on the six o’clock news. And that was if they all got very lucky and no one uttered the words “sacrifice” or “devil worship.”

Ed walked up beside her, finished with his phone call. “This could get ugly very fast,” Samantha whispered.

“It already has,” Ed said.

The hair on the back of her neck stood up and she turned to him. “Another murdered girl?” she asked.

“Not quite. Katie’s ex-boyfriend just turned up dead in his room. Apparently it’s not pretty. I called Joe and told him to bring Katie in for questioning. After we check out the new body I think we’ll be wanting to question her a little more… aggressively.”

Samantha turned, eager to be out of the church and away from the sight of the sacrificed woman. As meaningless as the pentagram on her forehead was, as deliberately staged as the body atop the altar was, all seemingly meant to mislead them, she still couldn’t shake the feeling that the woman
had
been a sacrifice.

“What’s going through your head?” Ed asked when they were back in the car.

“I was wondering how many more times we’re going to crisscross the city.”

He snorted. “Tell me about it. I think I should have ignored the phone this morning. You know, take a page from your playbook.”

“And miss all this excitement?” she asked.

“Gladly. There’s such a thing as too much excitement, you know.”

“Trust me, I got that message loud and clear,” she said, staring out the car window and doing her best not
to dredge up memories of her childhood. She should have taken it as a bad omen when she was interrupted at breakfast. She had never gotten to fully unwind from the nightmares that woke her in the middle of the night. “What did they tell you about the dead guy?”

“He was in a fraternity.”

“Great. Another one.”

“Yeah. This one’s more for jocks than geeks, though.”

“Even better.” She sighed.

“Apparently two of his housemates discovered the body when they broke open his door.”

“They broke it open?”

“Yeah. Locked from the inside. They called nine-one-one. When officers arrived on scene, the guys said they were sure his witch ex-girlfriend, Katie, was responsible. One of the officers at that scene was a first responder this morning and figured he’d better call us in.”

“Wonderful. So that’s two dead who knew Katie. This just keeps getting better and better.”

“If we can prove the nun knew her too, then we’ve got a trifecta.”

A few minutes later they were standing outside a different fraternity house, talking to the two guys who had found the body. One was tall, outspoken, and carried himself with a certain amount of arrogance. The other was slightly shorter and seemed genuinely shaken up by what he had seen. His name was Gus. His eyes were red from crying and he kept staring at Samantha.

“It had to be his crazy ex, this chick named Katie,” said Jerry, the taller of the two guys. “She was like psycho and into scary stuff. She was a witch, literally. When he dumped her, she came around a few times, and she was totally mental, begging him to take her back, totally
stalking him. I think he got a restraining order against her. You should go arrest her now. I can tell you where she lives.”

“You’re really eager to blame her. Any particular reason?” Ed asked.

“Because she butchered my friend. It was her. I guarantee it,” he said heatedly. “She wanted him dead. She threatened him all the time.”

Samantha turned to Gus, who had been quiet since their arrival. “Is that true?”

He nodded. “Katie used to scare me,” he whispered. “I didn’t think, though… I mean, they’d been broken up a long time.”

“Used to scare you?” Samantha repeated.

He nodded, staring at her in a way that made her uneasy. Did she know him from somewhere? She racked her brain but couldn’t place his face. There was definitely a sense of familiarity in the way he looked at her, though, like he was trying to remember who she was. She forced herself to break eye contact.

“So, what makes you guys think she did this?” Ed asked.

“Who else could have?” Jerry said. “I mean, how could something like that happen without anyone hearing anything? The house is old; the walls are thin. You can’t whisper without someone hearing you. She cursed Kyle. She’s a witch. And you know what they used to do to witches in the old days?”

Samantha jerked her head toward him. His tone was aggressive, threatening, and he was growing more and more agitated. Was he trying to cover up something?

Ed took a step back and raised his hands defensively. “Settle down, guy. I’ve gotta ask.” Although his stance was meant to placate and calm Jerry, Samantha recognized
it as the position Ed assumed when he was about to go on the offense.

Everyone needs to just calm down,
she thought, wishing that she could whisper a word and make it happen.

Suddenly a girl screamed, high and loud. Samantha spun around and saw a blonde wearing a light blue polo shirt and a white miniskirt, her hair in a high ponytail, wrestling with one of the officers stationed in front of the door to the frat house. “Kyle!” she shrieked. “Kyle! Let go of me! I have to see him!” The girl was stronger than her slender frame would seem to indicate, and the officer trying to restrain her was having trouble doing so without hurting her.

Samantha stepped forward and laid her hand on the girl’s shoulder. The girl spun toward her, fists flailing uselessly and landing harmless blows to Samantha’s chest and shoulders. Instead of grabbing her hands, Samantha pulled the girl close, crushing her body to her and hugging her tight. The girl’s hands pounded a couple of times against her back.

“It’s going to be okay,” she said, lying to the girl.

The girl slumped in her arms and began to sob brokenly. Samantha glanced up and saw both guys staring, stricken. Jerry started forward and Samantha gratefully handed the girl to him. She leaned against Jerry and continued to cry as he patted her back awkwardly.

Samantha moved back over to Gus. “Who is she?”

“Kyle’s girlfriend, Tina. They’ve been dating for a few months.”

Samantha glanced back. Tina was still crying uncontrollably, but occasionally she could make out a word. She didn’t like the ones she heard, particularly when Tina screeched “witch” loud enough for everyone to hear.

“Something tells me we’re in for an honest-to-goodness witch hunt,” Ed breathed in her ear. His proximity startled her and she shied away just for a moment. He shot her a puzzled look and then said quietly, “Tell me I’m wrong.”

She prayed he was wrong. She turned her attention back to Gus. “Explain to me about being afraid of Katie.”

For a moment she thought he looked embarrassed. Then he said, “Yeah. She’s into all that weird stuff. I used to think it was scary…”

“What changed?” Ed asked.

Gus shook his head, but continued to stare at Samantha.

“What scares you now, Gus?” she asked softly.

“People like you.”

She blinked and then stepped forward until she was in his personal space and looked him squarely in the eye. She saw honesty there and something else. Terror. There was no other word for it.

“You mean police officers or attractive women?” Ed asked, his eyes narrowed.

Gus shook his head but continued to stare at her. “People with… power,” he said, licking his lips nervously.

A chill danced up her spine. Before she could say anything, one of the uniformed officers hailed them. “Detectives, you want to see the scene while it’s still intact?”

She turned with Ed, all too eager to get away from Gus and the way he stared at her. They passed by Tina and Jerry and walked into the house.

“What was that guy saying about you?” Ed asked.

She shrugged. “Who knows? He’s probably still in shock. We’re lucky he knows his own name.”

She could tell Ed wanted to push, but he didn’t. “You think Katie finally realized after six months that Kyle wasn’t coming back to her and killed him?” he asked instead.

“I’m not sure what to think,” Samantha admitted as she climbed the stairs. “By embracing a Goth look and persona she’s bound to freak some people out, but I wouldn’t think jocks would be afraid of her.”

“Maybe they believe in magic and bought that she was a witch like she tries to make out.”

“Maybe,” she said, unconvinced.

They reached the landing and turned to the left. A police officer outside the room looked pale and nodded his head briefly in greeting.

“Or maybe there’s some truth to that whole ‘hell hath no fury…’”

They walked into the room and he stopped short.

There was blood everywhere—floors, walls, even the ceiling had splatters of it. The body was in the middle of the floor, gutted. Arms and legs were thrown straight out and a circle of blood surrounded it.

“There’s no pentagram on him,” Ed said after a moment, sounding strangled.

“No, because
he
is the pentagram. His head, legs, and arms represent the five points of the star, and the blood is circled around him.” Samantha pointed it out to Ed, anger rising in her.

“Goth chick didn’t do this?” Ed asked, clearly hoping she would contradict him. He stayed where he was while she approached the body.

Samantha shook her head. “She hasn’t got it in her. Whoever did this was ruthless, cold-blooded.”

And a real practitioner,
she thought.
Someone with power.

She knelt next to the body and took a good look at the slash marks on it. The guy’s chest had literally been ripped apart and gutted, as though some wild animal had fed on him. The only problem was that in a locked room on the third floor of a fraternity house in the middle of the city there was no wild animal that could have gotten to him.

No earthly one, at any rate.

“Doesn’t that make you sick?” Ed said. She glanced up and saw that he had covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief. The smell of blood was nearly overpowering in the confined space. That smell had been such an integral part of her childhood, though, that she barely noticed it. Just one more thing that made her a freak.

“I don’t see the heart anywhere,” she said.

“That’s because someone either swiped it to use for something awful—though what’s worse than this I don’t want to even imagine—or someone or something ate it.”

“And yet you don’t have a problem imagining that?”

“I’m telling myself it was a bear. Bear ate him. Or maybe a wolf.”

“You know wolves don’t eat people, right?” she asked, trying to keep him calm as she looked closely at the body.

“Tell that to Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother.” He coughed and took a step back. “So, what do you think about the circle?”

She bent closer, looked carefully at the circle, and then straightened and looked at Ed. “It has brushstrokes in it.”

“Any chance that’s paint?”

“No.”

“Someone painted the circle using the blood?”

“It looks like it.”

“Maybe they just used something that looked like blood, like with the other two.”

“No, that’s blood,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything else?”

“I’m pretty sure it was made after he was dead.”

“Why?”

Because it didn’t protect him
.

She reached up to touch her cross and realized that it was gone.

“What’s wrong?” Ed asked.

“My cross is missing,” Samantha said, working hard to quell the surge of panic that rose in her at the realization.

“Maybe you left it at home.”

“I didn’t,” she hissed, more forcefully than she had meant to. She stood abruptly and began retracing her steps out of the room.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I have to find it.”

“Seriously? Samantha, look, we’ve got bigger worries at the moment.”

“
You
have bigger worries,” she said. “You know that cross is important to me.”

“I—”

“Just help me look for it.”

“What about the body?”

“Whoever killed the other two killed him to frame Katie.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re jumping to conclusions.”

“I’m right,” she said, her eyes flashing back and forth on the landing outside the room. She moved slowly down the stairs. She had to find it. When could she have lost it?

She made it downstairs and then finally outside. “Have you seen a cross?” she asked everyone in her path.

Finally she heard Ed’s voice beside her. “I’ll check the car.”

She met him there five minutes later. “Did you find it?”

“No, sorry,” he said. “I just called over to the church and told them to keep an eye out for it there. No one’s seen it yet.”

She swore under her breath and his eyebrows shot up.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“No, I’m not.”

“I’m sure you can get another one.”