by Kami Garcia
Fox ran to the door, heart pounding. The sidewalks in his quiet neighborhood were dark, except where the lampposts cast pale halos on the sidewalks. Had Samantha gone outside? Maybe she was next door with their parents?
But as he raced down the front steps and into the middle of the street, Fox knew the truth.
His sister was gone.
CHAPTER 5
Rock Creek Cemetery
March 31, 8:40 A.M.
Mulder woke up earlier than usual the next morning. Avoiding his father was an art, and he didn’t want to be home when his dad left for the airport. The nightmare about Samantha already had him on edge.
He jogged the same route every Saturday—down New Hampshire Avenue, past the convenience store, around Rock Creek Cemetery, and back to the apartment. Running cleared his head, and if he lucked out, he would pass a hot girl. Not that any of them compared to Phoebe.
Today, even Phoebe’s long legs and killer smile couldn’t take his mind off the missing kids. First the little boy, Billy Christian, and now Sarah Lowe. What were the odds of two children in the metro area disappearing within a week and a half of each other? What if the police didn’t find them?
Did Billy and Sarah have any brothers or sisters? Were their siblings blaming themselves for what happened? He wouldn’t wish that kind of misery on anyone.
Except for the bastard who took Samantha.
He pushed away the thought and focused on the statues coming into view.
Rock Creek Cemetery was an older cemetery, dominated by mausoleums with stone archangels standing sentinel on the rooftops. His favorite crypt had four statues, located on the corners of the slab roof. Each angel held a sword, as if they were guarding the souls of the people inside.
Mulder jogged up the hill and rounded the bend, debating whether to take a break and check out the warrior angels, when he noticed the police cars. He stopped and took in the scene below. A row of mausoleums was sectioned off with yellow crime scene tape, and a white coroner’s van was parked inside the perimeter.
Behind the tape, uniformed officers were talking to a groundskeeper and a well-dressed man consulting a map and a bound ledger. Nearby, two detectives stood in front of an older brick mausoleum speaking with a middle-aged woman wearing funeral attire. The woman glanced at the mausoleum, inching farther and farther away from it, but her high heels kept getting stuck in the grass.
One of the detectives was tall and thin, with squinty eyes, and the button-down under his suit jacket was wrinkled as if he’d slept in it. The other detective was short, and his gut hung over the waistband of his slacks. His face glistened with sweat beneath a black fedora. They reminded Mulder of Laurel and Hardy.
Police squad cars and a news van had parked across from the taped-off area. Two cameramen toting boxy video cameras were trying to talk their way past a cop, who seemed to be in charge of keeping them away from the crime scene. Behind the officer, a group of people dressed in black huddled together just outside the yellow tape, not far from reporters vying for prime spots.
Something serious must have happened to attract this much attention. Mulder could hear Phoebe’s voice in his head, saying, Whatever’s going on is none of your business, Fox.
But other people were hanging around. Did it really matter if he stayed to check things out? Wondering what happened would drive him crazy, and for an insomniac, that guaranteed another sleepless night.
Phoebe always says I should get more sleep, he thought, mentally preparing his defense.
Mulder followed the footpath around to the side of the taped perimeter, then walked down the hill. As he moved closer, a reporter called out to the detectives, “What’s going on over there? Give us something.”
A uniformed officer approached the tape, waving his hand at them as if he were scattering gnats. “Nobody’s talking to you, so have some decency and get outta here. The family’s been through enough this morning.”
Mulder noticed a guy around his age leaning against a tree, looking bored. He was wearing a black suit, with an untucked gray button-down shirt, as if he was dressed for a funeral like the other people in the group near the crime scene tape. Maybe he knew something?
Mulder walked over and stood next to the tree. “I wonder what happened.”
The guy sighed. “We showed up to say some prayers while they put my grandmother’s casket in the crypt, and a little kid was already in her spot.” His eyes darted to a huge weeping angel on top of another mausoleum. “I’ll probably be stuck here all day now. I hate cemeteries. They give me the creeps.”
“Was it a mix-up?” Mulder already knew the answer. Interring someone in the wrong crypt wouldn’t warrant detectives and a coroner.
“Nah. The cops are saying the kid was murdered.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I didn’t see the body, but my mom and the dudes from the cemetery did, and they flipped out.”
“That still sucks. Sorry about your grandmother.”
The guy shrugged. “Don’t be. She was mean as hell. She used to spank us with a plastic hairbrush. I just feel bad for the kid they found.”
“Me too.” Mulder nodded at the guy and walked over by the crime scene. He inched toward the trees between the taped-off area and the next mausoleum.
A bald man wearing a jacket with CORONER on the back signaled to a uniformed police officer. “Let the detectives know that we’re bringing out the body. And get the family out of here.”
“Sure thing.” The cop followed the instructions, and Laurel and Hardy trudged over to the coroner.
The detectives lowered their voices, and Mulder only caught snippets of their conversation. “What kind of sick—?”
“I’ve never seen anything like—”
“—the kind of thing that keeps you up at night.”
Something had them rattled. What was so disturbing?
“Can you tell us what happened?” someone called out.
The police officer was holding up the crime scene tape for the family, and the reporters had descended on the woman wearing the black dress and heels.
“What did you see?”
“I heard an officer say there’s a child in there.”
“Can you confirm that information?”
“Back off.” The cop threw his arm up between the woman and the reporters who were grilling her. “I said, back up now, or I’ll arrest you.”
It took another cop to clear a path for her and the rest of the family.
The coroner’s van was parked with the back facing the row of mausoleums, which ranged in size from a storage shed to a garage. The spaces between them offered the perfect hiding place. He could easily slip into one of the gaps and eavesdrop while they loaded the gurney back into the van.
Mulder looked around. The guy in the black suit had taken off with his family, and half the reporters had followed them, while the other half were still giving Laurel and Hardy the third degree. Everyone was preoccupied.
It’s now or never.
He slid into one of the narrow spaces and waited for what felt like an hour, though it was probably closer to ten minutes.
The coroner finally knocked on the door of the van and his team got out to unload a gurney from the back of the vehicle and follow the coroner into the small mausoleum. The crypt wasn’t gigantic, like the one with the warrior angel statues on the roof. The brick structure was probably designed to hold two people or three people, tops. They managed to get most of the gurney inside, but the bottom third stuck out.
The reporters rushed toward the van. Between the crime scene tape and the strategic parking job, they couldn’t see anything. But Mulder had the perfect view. A black body bag was strapped to the gurney, the ends sagging because the body inside was too small to fill it.
A female detective with her badge hooked on the waistband of her jeans ducked under the tape and approached the coroner. “I’m Detective Perez with the Special Operations Division. Mind if I take a look?” she asked.
“Do yo
u have kids?” the coroner asked. “If you do, you might not want to see this.”
She pointed at the bag with the phantom of a child’s shape inside. “Not every woman has kids. Open it.”
Mulder scooted forward until he was standing at the mouth of the narrow space. The coroner walked around to the other side of the gurney, shielding the top of the bag with his body. Detective Perez moved closer, blocking Mulder’s line of sight.
The coroner leaned over the body bag and unzipped it halfway.
Detective Perez cursed under her breath and lowered her voice. “Is that Billy Christian? The boy who disappeared nine days ago? Is that a bird on his chest?”
A bird?
“Yes to both questions,” the coroner confirmed. “But I can’t go on record without a formal ID.”
Mulder pressed himself against the stone, attempting to get a better angle.
“I’ve seen lots of twisted crap, but nothing like this,” Detective Perez said. The slight change in her stance allowed Mulder to catch a glimpse over her shoulder.
A little boy lay in the bag. His skin had a gray cast that was unnatural and terrifying. In movies, dead people looked like they were sleeping, with a little fake blood splattered around for effect. This kid did not look asleep. The ashen color of his skin and the stillness of his body gave Mulder goose bumps.
“You think we’re dealing with a satanic cult?” The coroner sounded concerned.
“Most likely,” Detective Perez said. “But it’s hard to know until we figure out if this bird, and whatever they did to it, means anything.”
A black-and-white bird, no bigger than a soda can, rested on the boy’s chest, as dead as the child.
Something was sticking out of the bird’s body.
When Mulder realized what he was looking at, he pressed his mouth against the inside of his elbow to keep from heaving. Arrows protruded from the bird’s body—fanning out around it, the way little kids draw the rays of the sun.
Two.
Four.
Six.
Eight. Or was it nine? Mulder counted the points again. Eight.
But the bird wasn’t the worst part, not by a long shot.
The little boy was dressed in white pajamas, with gray elephants marching across his fleece-covered arms and chest. Gray-and-white elephant pajamas—exactly like the ones Sarah Lowe had been wearing when she was kidnapped.
Mulder swallowed, his heart galloping in his chest. The team who brought over the gurney lifted the boy slightly and tilted him in Mulder’s direction. As they raised the body withered white flower petals fluttered to the ground. His eyes went straight to the top of the zipper on the child’s pajamas.
Gray elephants. And one brown hippo.
The stain was there, in the exact same spot where Mulder had seen it on Sarah Lowe’s pajamas, on the newscast.
Shouting erupted behind the coroner. The reporters and the cops were at it again.
“Zip it up,” Detective Perez said. “We can’t afford to let the press see the body.” She stood up straight, obscuring Mulder’s view again.
He heard the zipper close, but his heartbeat didn’t return to normal. If anything, it pounded faster. The little boy was wearing the missing girl’s pajamas, which meant that whoever killed the boy and left him in an old lady’s crypt, holding a dead bird, was the same person who had taken Sarah Lowe.
He sidestepped toward the back of the gap between the mausoleums and came out at the other end, behind them. Bile rose in his throat. He couldn’t get the photo of Sarah Lowe’s dimpled smile and her elephant pajamas out of his head. Or the image of Billy Christian in a plastic body bag, wearing those same pajamas.
Mulder bolted through the grass, dodging avenging angels carved from stone and trees with thin limbs that reminded him of arrows. He didn’t need anyone to confirm that both children had been kidnapped by the same person. Mulder knew it. His memory recorded details the way a camera captured an image—with precision and accuracy—exactly as they appeared in that moment.
One thought replayed over and over as he ran.
There are no coincidences.
CHAPTER 6
Mulder Residence
10:50 A.M.
Mulder returned to the apartment out of breath. At least his dad was gone. He still couldn’t wrap his head around what he’d seen at the cemetery. Someone had abducted two kids, and the way Sarah Lowe had been taken also mirrored Samantha’s kidnapping—the time of night, Sarah sitting in the living room, the power going out just before she was taken, and the front door left open afterward.
Did the same person take Samantha?
The possibility got under his skin. Actually, crawling around underneath it was closer to the truth. His nerve endings buzzed and he couldn’t stop moving. As he paced back and forth across the living room, the thought burrowed deeper and deeper with every step.
There was only one way to figure out if Sarah Lowe and Billy Christian’s kidnappings were connected to Samantha’s disappearance. Mulder needed to find more information about Billy Christian and the details related to his abduction.
Because I’ve been down this road before.
After Samantha disappeared, he became obsessed with the idea that whoever had taken Samantha could’ve been the same person who abducted a girl named Wendy Kelly, in New Haven, Connecticut, the day before. Wendy was kidnapped from her house, just like Samantha. But every time Mulder brought it up, his father bit his head off, and the small-time island cops refused to investigate.
The kitchen phone rang and Mulder jumped. He let it ring seven times before he finally answered it. “Hello?”
“Fox? Is that you, sweetheart? It’s Mom.”
As much as he loved his mother, he wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone. “Yeah. Hi, Mom. How’s everything going?”
“Fine, but the house feels so much bigger now that I’m here alone.”
“I could come back,” he offered. Moving in with his dad for senior year had been her idea in the first place, not his. He had gone along with it to make her happy, with the smallest shred of hope that his father might change.
“Don’t be ridiculous, honey,” she said. “You’re graduating in two months. I’m fine. Really. With your father gone, the house feels peaceful. Of course, I would love it if you were here, too. I’m not sure Phoebe would survive until summer if she weren’t going to visit you. I ran into her at the library last week, and she spent fifteen minutes explaining why the technology in Star Wars could be developed within your lifetimes.”
“That sounds like Phoebe.” His best friend was the only person smart enough to challenge him, an activity she considered a hobby. It was one of the reasons he harbored a not-so-secret crush on her.
“I should’ve invited her to come over and take a look at the vacuum cleaner for me.” She paused, and he heard her banging something around. “Because the stupid ElectroVac your father insisted on buying from that salesman is broken again.”
“I’ll fix it as soon as I get home.”
She sighed. “Thank you. But I can’t wait until June to vacuum the floors. Enough about appliances. Are you and your father getting along?”
If ignoring each other qualifies as getting along, Mulder thought, before he gave his mom the response she wanted to hear. “As well as we usually do.”
A timer buzzed in the background on the other end of the line.
“I have to take a casserole out of the oven. Do you want to hold on for a minute?”
“That’s okay. We can talk later.” He wanted to see if there were any news reports on TV about Billy Christian.
“All right. I love you,” she said.
“Me too.”
It was just after eleven o’clock when Mulder hung up the phone, and the news didn’t air again until noon. But finding a dead child was big news. Maybe the local stations would interrupt game shows and sitcoms to report real news. He paced until noon, changing the channel every few minutes to make sure he did
n’t miss any coverage. But they never broke in with a special report. When the news finally came on, he was going stir-crazy.
On TV, a reporter stood in front of the yellow crime scene tape Mulder had seen that morning. Her silky purple blouse had a huge bow in the front that looked as if it might strangle her any minute. “I’m here at Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington, DC, where a child’s body was discovered in a mausoleum early this morning. The child has been identified as eight-year-old Billy Christian, the boy who disappeared from his home nine days ago. The discovery is a shocking blow to the community, especially in the wake of Sarah Lowe’s disappearance two nights ago.”
The detective with the big gut ducked under the tape, attracting the reporter’s attention. She rushed over and shoved a big microphone in his face. “Detective? Has the police department uncovered any clues to the murder of Billy Christian? Is this case related to Sarah Lowe’s kidnapping?”
“The two cases are unrelated.” The detective shot the reporter a warning glance, but she was already done with him and facing the camera again.
“I’ll remain at the scene to bring you updates on the investigation as they develop,” she assured her viewers. “Now Brian North has more on this story.”
The coverage cut to another reporter with a bad comb-over. He was speaking with the groundskeeper Mulder had seen near the mausoleum that morning. “I’m here with Howard Redding, grounds supervisor at Rock Creek Cemetery. Mr. Redding, I was told that you discovered Billy Christian’s body. Walk us through what you saw.”
The groundskeeper cleared his throat. “I unlocked the door of the crypt to make sure everything was in order for the interment. That’s when I saw the boy’s body, laid out on a bed of flower petals, like a saint. Except all the flowers were dead.” He rubbed the back of his neck and shook his head. “And he had a dead bird lying on his chest, like the whole thing was part of a satanic ritual.”
“Turn off that camera!” A cop rushed into the frame and ushered the groundskeeper away.
The reporter turned his questions on the cop. “Officer, this sounds like a ritualistic killing. Are we dealing with a cult? Should residents be concerned?”