Chills (2 page)

“Calling card, maybe? Business card?” Jack asked.

“No idea. Though, whoever it belongs to might want to be rethinking their business plan.”

Jack handed it back. “Maybe they can get something off it. Or off that piece of wood there. Cordwell seems pretty sure this was some kind of orchestrated animal attack.”

There was a pause. “Cordwell's saying they might call Kathy in on this,” Teagan said, his gaze fixed on the piece of wood.

“Yeah, Brennan said the same thing to me,” Jack replied. “For her sake, I hope all this black-magic bullshit is coincidental. Last I heard, she could use a break from it.”

“Her input couldn't hurt,” Teagan said thoughtfully, handling the bag with the wood sliver. “Even if she only identifies this . . . language, or whatever it is.”

“You know superficial involvement, at least in cases, isn't how she operates.”

Teagan reined in a small smile. “Yeah, I know.”

Jack prided himself in thinking he understood the thoughts, feelings, and motivations below the surface—the ones others wore in their eyes and their smiles and nowhere else. He was fairly certain Teagan was in love with Kathy. The way he looked at her, the softness that crept into his voice when he said her name—it wasn't an investigative stretch to see his longing for her, however smooth and subtle he thought he was. Kathy, though, likely had no clue. In spite of their individual eccentricities, or maybe because of them, Teagan and Kathy were probably soul mates, but knowing her as Jack did, he was pretty sure she never allowed herself to entertain the thought. And Teagan . . . he approached his job with the relentless instinct and perseverance of someone resigned to giving up anything like a normal life. To Teagan, there were dead folks and the folks who killed them, the psychology behind how and why, and not much else.

“Well, I'm off. Could eat the ass of a low-flyin' duck,” Teagan said suddenly. “We on this thing together, yeah?”

“Yeah, looks like,” Jack said, leaning an elbow on the table. “You, me, and Morris. Tomorrow, nine a.m. My office.”

Teagan nodded and jogged off to his car. Jack watched him go, then turned his attention back to the chunk of wood in the bag. He took a deep breath, frigid in his nose and throat, and let it out in little white puffs. It was time, he knew, to start the job.

* * *

Although the official start of summer was a month away, the forecast of eight to ten inches of snow for Colby, Connecticut, raised few eyebrows, as late in the season as it was. It had been a particularly harsh winter; temperatures often dropped into the negatives and a leaden sky had dumped snow by the foot on a weekly basis for months. When it didn't snow, the rain during the day turned to black ice at night. The children's spring break had been eaten into by the accumulation of snow days. The county had run out of salt for the roads by early March and had been having a tough time acquiring more to clear them.

Still, most people believed this storm would be the last of them for the year, and patiently suffered the weather to exhale its arctic breath one last time over all. The town of Colby warmed up the snowplows and salt/sand trucks in preparation for winter's last hurrah, and the townsfolk swarmed the local supermarkets, the Targets and Walmarts, the Costcos and the gas stations, to stock up on gasoline and supplies.

Most were still blissfully unaware of the body found hanging from a tree in Edison Park, but they felt it, in the vaguest, unarticulated way. They felt the cold trying to wrench their skin from their bones, and they felt something else, too—a kind of forlorn loneliness trying to wrench peace of mind from their souls. Just as they stocked up on food and bottled water, shovels and gloves, they squinted into the night outside their homes before drawing blinds and locking doors, double-checking on the kids in bed and huddling closer to each other than usual. Something other than a late winter was in the air, and it chilled them just as much, if not more, when they thought too long about it.

Though not even the gossips would give voice to it, the people of Colby knew something was coming with the snow.

* * *

The first time Kathy Ryan ever fired a gun, she was seventeen. A good-looking farm boy with strong arms, warm hands, and big brown eyes had shown her a .38 from his own gun collection. He'd stood close behind her, his chest pressed against her back, his arms around hers, and those hands guiding her fingers and palms to the right positions. He'd made sure she understood the basic rules—always point the gun down and away from everyone, and never even touch the trigger until she was ready to shoot—and then he'd positioned a plastic jug of water ten feet away in his dad's field. He told her where to aim to hit it. She fired seven times, and hit the jug every single time. She remembered being surprised by how loud the firing of the gun was, so loud it set off a ringing in her ears and an excited pounding in her heart. It was a sound of momentous
thereness
, a sound of something happening, of a definitive change from what had been only seconds before. It was a powerful, scary, sexy sound, and she was hooked.

Seventeen was twenty-two years ago, when there had still been some people, albeit few to name, who knew Kathy Ryan as something other than a homicide detective. Back then, she had been just “that pretty young daughter of that hard-ass Jim Ryan, with the dead mama and the brother no one talks about.” It was a mouthful of tag line for Kathy, who had felt back then that a lot had been shoveled her way in those seventeen years, and she was fighting an uphill battle with the world just so she could look at it with simple wonder and amazement.

Jim Ryan's only daughter had bright green eyes, a shining stream of blond hair that the tomboy in her felt compelled to pull up off her soft, narrow shoulders, and a smile of innocent amusement. She'd always been thin, but it had looked right on her then, the kind of tight body boys liked. Back then, her smooth, lightly tanned skin had been unmarred by anything but a light dusting of summer freckles.

No scars, inside or out.

The Kathy Ryan who stared into the mirror hanging on her stark apartment's bedroom wall was still pretty nowadays but in a lean, angry, indifferent sort of way. Those bright eyes had retreated to a safe distance behind dark circles and dark memories; they were eyes that were not afraid to lock gazes but which seldom offered any indication as to what was behind them. Her mouth rarely smiled, and when it did, it was a sardonic twist or an uncomfortable flutter that telegraphed how out of place it really was. And there was the scar.

It tripped down through her left eyebrow and over her eye to land firmly just below the socket, working its thin, jagged, white way across her cheek to her jawbone, where it unceremoniously ended. When she looked in the mirror, she seldom paid much attention to her eyes or her mouth, but she could never quite overlook the scar.

The paradox of her face, she thought, mirrored the juxtaposition of opinions others held about her. It created an unusual reception of mistrust and avoidance up close, and from afar, an almost secret awe. Professionally, she was always requested ahead of a long line of similarly educated peers to handle certain cases, to assist in more troublesome interrogations, and to consult on certain task forces because of her experience and her ability to get the job done. But those requests were made in offices with blinds drawn, over heads and under personal radar, with minimal paperwork and never, ever to her face. Kathy Ryan didn't care much about all that; if police departments wanted her to work a case, no matter how they asked for her, so be it, so long as she was paid.

It was such a case that had gotten her out of bed this morning, the third day into her somewhat forcefully suggested vacation. There was a homicide with ritualistic overtones, Morris had said, and the mayor of Colby himself wanted her in right away, as early as she could make it there. The case involved an as-yet-unidentified middle-aged man found hanging upside down over an invocation circle. He'd been branded with what sounded to Kathy like a powerful sigil, and among his belongings were a totem and a small calling card she recognized well. So she'd swigged from the vodka bottle in the medicine cabinet and then brushed her teeth. Then she showered, slipped into her underwear and a bra, and pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweater.

As she did every morning, she looked at the collage frame on her dresser, gently touching the empty matte squares where the pictures of her and her family had been. She'd removed the ones of her brother and father first, and then that last one of her mom. She never looked at the remaining two of her anymore, only at the empty spaces where her old life used to be, and only for a minute.

Her thoughts returned to the case. Whoever this John Doe had been, he'd pissed off a group of very bad people. That calling card probably meant a Black Stars sect, in which case the snow wasn't going to be the only kind of storm to hit Colby.

She grabbed her purse and keys from the dresser beside the mostly empty picture frame and left the apartment.

I
t began to snow again as Kathy reached the tan brick Colby Police Department building where Jack Glazier's office was. She flashed her credentials at the unsmiling, bulky policewoman at the front desk and nodded to the officers she passed on the way through the bullpen to the senior detectives' offices. They nodded back with a mixture of unease and politeness that she had come to expect from them. She got that reaction a lot from people who knew her profession. It was almost as if they thought the remnants of it—otherworldly bad mojo, curses, haunts, and evil—clung to her hair and clothes like smells or smoke, and that those intangible things might somehow poison their space or infect them if they got too close to her. Because of the possible outside chance that their fears were not superstition, she didn't take their reactions personally.

Jack's door was open, and Kathy found him sitting behind his desk. Teagan leaned on a corner of the desk, tossing and catching a glass paperweight, much to Jack's tightly controlled dismay. Teagan smiled at her when she walked in, and she found herself smiling back. Oliver Morris sat in a chair across from Glazier. He offered her a small wave, and she tipped her chin at him in return.

“Hi, Kathy,” Jack said. “Get here okay?”

“Sure,” Kathy said, sitting in the remaining empty chair next to Morris. “Long early-morning drives are my reason for living. So what've we got here?”

“Well, let's not waste any more time with pleasantries,” Jack said with a small smile. He slid the file across the desk to her. She leafed through Jack's and Teagan's notes and read over Cordwell's report, then leaned back in the chair as she studied the crime scene photos. There was a photo of a chunk of wood with runes carved into it. She recognized most of them as an archaic language rarely seen, even in occult circles.

“Can you read that?” Jack asked.

“Yeah,” Kathy answered after a moment. “Yeah, most of it. Hmmm. . . this is all . . . names. Places. Invocations to gods to protect the soul while it travels to the realms beyond ours. This was in the guy's pocket? That's usually a voluntary thing, not something to be left behind with a sacrificial body. Of course, these specific names are significant entities and locations primarily worshiped by the Hand of the Black Stars cult, so it's likely some perversion of the usual occult rites.”

“Who?”

“Bad folks. Big trouble. They are the kind of ‘church' that makes LaVey's satanists look like potluck-and-PTA moms. It's a twisted derivation of chaos magic rituals with significance placed on patterns and fractals as the basis of sigils which can—”

She had come across the crime scene photo showing a close-up of the symbol that had been burned into the John Doe's back.

“What is it, love?”

“It's . . . this. This sigil,” Kathy said to Teagan. “I've seen it before.”

“What does it mean?” Jack leaned in to take another look at it.

“I know it's believed to be very powerful, but I'll have to get back to you on the particulars of how. For now, what it gives us is a confirmation that this isn't some amateur goth kid dipping a black-painted toenail into the occult. This sigil would only be recognized, let alone used, by someone very experienced. And, I'd be willing to guess, someone with the kind of agenda followed by the Hand of the Black Stars. An indication,” she said, looking up from the file, “that your John Doe is probably not going to be the only body.”

Jack exhaled slowly. “Okay. I think the mayor was afraid of that. So you and I are heading up this task force, Kat. Mayor's request. My understanding from the captain is that we should defer to you on occult aspects. You let us do the heavy lifting.”

Kathy nodded.

“Morris,” Jack said to the young man next to her. “You dig up what you can about related deaths from exposure or animal attacks, or both. Start with just this county. Oh, and add any missing persons in the last two weeks to the search. Teagan, we need an ID on the John Doe.”

“Challenge me,” Teagan responded with a grin.

“Kathy—” Jack began.

She was already on her feet and halfway to the door, waving the photo of the sigil. She turned. “I've got a connection I can talk to.”

“An informant?”

Kathy paused and met Jack's eyes. “You could call him that. If anyone knows what the HBS is up to or where to find them, it'll be him.” She paused a moment, her expression clouded, then added, “And he owes me.”

“Okay, good. If Teagan doesn't turn up anything, we'll follow up with missing persons and cold cases, see if we have any possible leads there. We'll all check in at seven p.m., back here. And gang,” Jack added, “stay safe.”

* * *

Kathy's drive up to Newlyn was frustratingly slow going; the snow was getting worse, coming down in thick, fluffy flakes that blurred the road in front of and around her in white. She passed by a blue sedan with a crumpled front and a badly dented tan minivan that had, ostensibly, collided and then slid off the highway and into a ditch in the wide, snowy median. Both vehicles were flanked by cop cars, and an ambulance was slowly making its way up the shoulder. The blue car reminded her of her brother's old clunker, the one he had used to pick up co-eds and—

Kathy forced herself to exhale the breath in her chest. It was hard enough to make out the lane's dividing lines without her mind scratching at old wounds (she reached up and touched her scar without realizing it) and stirring up old ghosts.

Of course, she knew herself well enough to know that forcing those memories out of her head wasn't going to work. It never had—not when her mind was made up to work through a thing. And she supposed there was still a lot about her brother she needed to work through.

She had come to find that it was common for families of serial killers and mass murderers to feel the same things she did—dumbfoundedness at the loved one's capacity for predatory viciousness, guilt that they hadn't known sooner or hadn't seen it coming—or worse, that they
had
seen all the signs, all the pieces of their puzzle, but hadn't put them together, and so had never seen the emergence of one hell of an ugly picture.

For Kathy, it had taken accidentally finding Toby's trophy box to finally understand what her brother was.

* * *

It had been a sweltering Pennsylvania summer night when Kathy had found the little wooden jewelry box, a night dense with the sounds of crickets and frogs chirping and small, furry, restless animals rustling in the tall grasses. The air hung thick with the day's unspent and relentless heat, too heavy to stir more than a sluggish breeze. Kathy remembered thinking later that the heat must have somehow gotten into Toby's brain, cooking it, blazing sense and sensitivity out of him. She'd thought then that it had to be something hot and hostile from the outside that had snaked its way in, had clawed into him and had eaten up the insides of the Toby she knew and loved. That Toby couldn't have done those things; something had to have gotten into him. It had to have been buzzing around inside him and the heat had baked it into his thoughts, smoking some kind of crazy out to the surface.

She and Toby had been close as kids, especially after Mom died. Her death had been hard for Kathy, but it had been devastating for Toby. He and Dad had never gotten along—had even come to blows, or close to them at times—and Toby, who had never been particularly good with people, had needed someone. He'd chosen Kathy with a fiercely exclusive devotion, and she had done her best to mother him in the ways she thought he needed. But the relationship grew stranger as they got older. It was wildly uneven, for one thing. His need for her seemed all-consuming at times. He could be possessive and overprotective. His looks and sometimes the casual ways in which he played around with her seemed to her an awkward and uncomfortable combination of filial and even sexual, rather than fraternal, love. At other times, he was unsettlingly cruel and angry, or utterly distracted and almost indifferent to her, a state which seemed to increase as puberty took full hold of him. She'd never been afraid of his moods before, but when he was around sixteen or seventeen, it seemed to Kathy that a switch had been flipped in him, and all warmth toward her had been shut off. It made her acutely uncomfortable. From that point on, intense anger or stony indifference alternately seemed to saturate his every move, look, and word. And it wasn't just with her. In fact, it appeared that Toby had abandoned the idea of human connection and interaction altogether. At least, that's what she'd thought.

By the time he was nineteen, she'd taken to avoiding his sullen, hulking form around the house. He'd lost his job, which had ruined his chances of moving out, a setback that seemed to stoke a barely controlled rage in him. She avoided conversation about him too, with perhaps well-meaning, or possibly just rubbernecking, friends and acquaintances who also found Toby's presence discomforting.

By the time he had turned twenty-one, he was never home. He used to tell her and Dad that he was going to the bar. She remembered thinking he spent a lot of time at the bar for someone with no known friends around town, and that maybe all that drinking was what was changing his mood and his personality. Toby could be cruel and aggressive and he could even be creepy . . . but she'd had no reason to think he was a liar. She hadn't known then about the Hand of the Black Stars cult or her brother's late-night drives around their rural little hometown. She hadn't known about his stalking, stabbing, and engaging in a host of pet paraphilias. Most of that came out at his trial.

Ironically, she had found the news stories about the dead girls from all over the county morbidly intriguing, given the unusual consistencies. There were carvings on the bodies, and each of them was missing at least one finger. Even then, she'd known about
modus operandi
and signatures from TV, although crime scenes and the people who made them were little more than a passing interest for her back then. She was only seventeen, and cute boys, books, guns, and music more often grabbed her attention. She hadn't had much reason to look further into the disappearances and murders of those girls back then. It was a problem for outside, faceless others, to be dealt with by different outside, faceless others.

It was not a jewelry box on a shelf in the back of her brother's closet—not then.

The problem had been that she hadn't done laundry. She hated it—mostly the lugging of the baskets of clothes up and down the stairs, and the heavy, uncomfortably cold weight of wet clothes as she tried to hang them up. She'd done a lot of cleaning that day, and she was hot and tired and in no mood to do a load of laundry just to have something to sleep in. Toby had T-shirts—long ones she could borrow to use as nightgowns. He'd never miss one if she took it then, while he was out. He'd never even notice.

So that hot, unbearably sticky summer night, Kathy had padded into Toby's room in her underwear and had opened the door to the closet to rifle through his clothes. She slid his dress shirts out of the way, as well as some jackets and sweaters. None of his T-shirts were hung up, which, given Toby's own laundry habits, made sense in a way. She shoved things around a bit, and suddenly there they were—a hastily half-folded pile of old football jerseys and concert T-shirts on the upper closet shelf. Perfect.

She stood on tiptoe and reached up, feeling around for a soft one, and her fingers closed around a black Metallica shirt worn thin enough to be light and comfortable. As she pulled it down, though, something sharp-edged and hard fell with it, its corner bouncing painfully off her foot before breaking open and spilling its contents all over the floor. She swore under her breath, knowing he'd be pissed. He never seemed to notice her taking his T-shirts, but if he even thought she was breathing in the direction of his other possessions, especially those in his bedroom closet, he got livid.

She crouched down, sweeping the little spilled objects into a pile. If she could put them back before—

Kathy frowned. It had taken her a moment to realize what the little ivory things were. Even after, she tried not to let the idea that Toby had what looked like finger bones cause immediate concern.

Don't overthink this
, she told herself.
No reason to overreact, just because Toby has bones in a box.
But she couldn't help remembering him yanking her away from the closet the other day, one fist tangled in her hair and another digging into her arm. He'd been so angry when he thought . . . what? He'd never said why he'd gotten so upset. She'd only been looking for the box of old family photos from when Mom was alive; she'd wanted to look through them and thought he might have them. She was going to ask first. In fact, she'd already had the query half out of her mouth as she reached the closet, but he'd flown off the bed and had practically thrown her to the floor. The look in his eyes had scared her. It wasn't so much what was there as what
wasn't
. He'd had shark's eyes, dead empty, without recognition or empathy.

There are plenty of possible reasons for the bones, right? Right?
She wasn't sure, but she tried to think it through. She thought the little fetishes or whatever they were supposed to be were actually made of real bone and not something synthetic like plastic. They didn't look or feel anything like that necklace of fake bones Toby had gotten for Mardi Gras last year. The texture, the color, even the weight of these bones was different—like the hip bone of the deer she'd once found out in the corn field at the edge of the woods. Even if they were real bones, though, that alone was no reason to cause that growing unease in the pit of her stomach. Animal bones, probably. Toby had always been interested in that sort of thing, animal bones and hides and hunting and all that. And okay, maybe the bones were even from an animal that had fingers, like a monkey, or . . . or a . . .