Dark Rites

by Heather Graham

  “Come on, we’ll see you home,” he said, beckoning to Roxanne.

  “To my door, and then you two go away. Shoo. Keep your deadly shenanigans away from me!” Roxanne said. “Sorry, kidding. No, I’m not. I’m scared again, Vickie.”

  “Don’t be scared. Just be careful. Be extra careful. You know the ropes now, right? Well-lit places with lots of people, no super-late-night excursions,” Vickie began.

  “No candy from strangers. Yeah, I know the drill. I’ll be cautious,” Roxanne said. “And I’ll keep in touch. Hey, have your talked to your mom? If she and your dad get wind of the stuff happening here with you involved, you’re in for it,” she warned.

  “I’ll write them an email tonight,” Vickie promised.

  “Let’s get going,” Griffin said.

  The three of them left the hospital.

  * * *

  Griffin thought that he tended to be aware of the world around him—it was part and parcel of his training. Tonight, it seemed ever more important.

  He understood why David Barnes had wanted to believe that it was all over. There was no way for an average citizen to prepare for a spontaneous attack when just walking down the street. And it was impossible to ask the population of Boston to just hole up in a house or apartment and never go out.

  Constant fear was debilitating. It wore on the mind and the nerves and therefore, eventually, the whole of the body. Random attacks set the entire city on edge.

  But now Barnes knew. Now they all knew, for a fact, that it wasn’t over. And it was all connected. Alex had been attacked first, then others. Alex had disappeared. This girl had called Vickie by name, and most importantly, she’d attempted suicide in the same manner as the young man the other night.

  They reached Roxanne’s place, and Griffin warned Vickie to keep the car doors locked as he walked Roxanne up to her apartment, even though Vickie was in his sight line at all times. She smiled at his overprotectiveness.

  With Roxanne safely in, he returned to the car and pulled out onto the road, heading the short distance from Roxanne’s to Vickie’s.

  Vickie was thoughtful as they drove. “She was a redhead.”

  “Yes, definitely, a redhead. Why?”

  “No reason, I guess. I just...”

  “What?”

  “Going back to Sunday night, when Roxanne and I were in the coffee shop looking for Alex, I thought that I saw a blonde woman—really pretty, just staring at me.”

  “Ah, well, maybe she admired you,” Griffin said, trying to speak lightly. “I love looking at you. Let me try to get a little poetic. Eyes like emeralds, hair like a raven’s wing...you’re pretty beautiful yourself, you know.” His left hand on the wheel, he reached out briefly with his right, drawing his knuckles down her cheek.

  She caught his hand and turned to him, smiling. “Thanks. I was just thinking... I can’t begin to understand or make sense of what is going on. We keep trying to come up with explanations. A guy dies the other night by his own hand, the girl today tried to die and may still die, and...”

  “And?”

  “I dreamed of someone dying or dead, Griffin. I thought that it was Alex calling to me, and this is absurd, yes, but I do think he’s trying to reach me somehow. But Alex wasn’t hurt in the dream. It was definitely a woman. I keep trying to remember details, but the cross was upside down, she was all bound to it upside down and everything was covered with blood.” She shuddered suddenly. “Like I was today!”

  He squeezed her hand. “You’re pretty good at this, you know. Okay, so you may have been foolish and rash, as well, chasing after the woman who threw the blood at you.”

  “Devin went after her.”

  “Devin went through the academy. She’s armed.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s that. But I was pretty sure the redhead wasn’t armed with more than that cup. It’s just so sad, Griffin. And so confusing!”

  He agreed.

  When they walked into the apartment, she turned in his arms immediately. It had been a ridiculously long day, an emotional day, and he was glad that she was turning to him—rather than away. And yet she seemed keyed up and distracted.

  She suddenly stepped away from him, murmuring, “I’ve got to take a shower.”

  “You were just sanitized!” he told her.

  “That’s the point. I need to feel like I’m not a large swab of disinfectant soap,” she told him.

  She turned and headed toward the bedroom.

  He followed more slowly, taking off his jacket and sliding his Glock and its holster onto the bedside table. He sat on the bed and wondered if he should just walk in and join her, or give her a moment.

  He smiled, thinking about the incredibly erotic way she had intended to greet him the night before.

  The water was still running.

  Why not? Griffin thought. He looked around the room.

  Maybe he simply needed a few props.

  * * *

  Vickie was startled to hear music playing.

  After the long day—food and coffee just snatched up here and there on the run, the last hours at the hospital—she’d been zoning out under the shower when the music jolted her back to reality.

  She frowned. The water was falling around her, steam rising, and she was holding a little round ball of her favorite rose soap in her hands.

  Griffin had not come into the shower.

  She had really at least half expected him to do so.

  She rinsed quickly, stepped out, grabbed a towel and headed out of her bath and into the bedroom.

  And there, of course, he was.

  Returning the favor.

  He looked like a million bucks, she thought, lying across the foot of the bed on an elbow, a rose in his hand, wearing nothing but a white collar and tie, and a fedora.

  Rod Stewart was singing away on the radio, and as she stood there, laughing, Griffin stood and tossed off the fedora and drew her to him, pulling away her towel and dipping her low in his arms. “Laugh at me, will you?” he demanded.

  She stroked his face, curled her fingers around his neck and kissed him long and hard. “Laugh at you,” she said huskily. “That was fantastic. Wonderful. I really would like to see just how far it could go—the music, the tie is a nice touch...and you, well, the display of the body, the muscles...wow. Just one thing missing.”

  “What’s that?”

  She laughed softly. “Some friends at an open door!”

  “You’re heartless, wench. Will I never be forgiven?”

  “These muscles really are great,” she told him. “If you let me up a little, I can try to show my forgiveness?”

  He eased her up. He lifted her and she jumped up, winding her legs around his waist. She loved the strong hot feel of his naked flesh against hers, and loved even more that he had thought to amuse her, tease her, arouse her...

  Take the day away and make magic of the night.

  He fell backward on the bed, bringing her down on top of him. She found his mouth first, and then moved against him, bathing his bronzed flesh with erotic sweeps of her lips and tongue. It lasted only so long before he reached for her, tossing her underneath him and rolling with her, returning each kiss, each feathery tease and aggressive touch.

  They made love.

  Sighing, her head on his chest, Vickie slept deliciously. He was the greatest nectar ever for her, body and soul, and he could exhaust her, as well, and let her sleep...

  So peacefully at first.

  And then the dream came again.

  She heard her name being called. She wasn’t certain—she just couldn’t be certain—but she thought that it might be Alex’s voice.

  She rose and found her robe and slipped into it. She started down the path that seemed to be forming in
front of her.

  She paused, and looked back.

  She could see Griffin, splayed out on the bed, his body a glorious bronze against the opaque white of the sheets. She wanted to go back to him, crawl into his arms, or at the least wake him and make him come with her.

  “Vickie, Vickie, Vickie...please!”

  She turned. The note of anguish in the voice calling to her was so very deep.

  And, so, she walked the path again.

  She could hear running water, see a deeply forested region before her. Pine needles lay upon the path where she walked. She could smell the very richness of the earth.

  The voice kept calling to her.

  She stepped out of the path and into a clearing.

  And there it was—the inverted cross. There was something else there—a table, a large tiled concrete table. People were gathered in the clearing. They were chanting lowly.

  “Vickie, Vickie, Vickie, please!”

  Chanting and swaying.

  She heard a scream. The cross wasn’t empty. The woman was upon it, upside down. Her throat was slit, and blood...

  Blood was rushing, along the trail, into the water beyond the clearing, and it was becoming a tidal wave.

  She turned to run. She screamed and screamed and screamed...

  She awoke; Griffin was there, holding her, shaking her lightly, trying to get her to focus on him.

  She stared up at him.

  He stared back at her with his incredible dark eyes, empathy heavy within them.

  “The nightmare again?” he asked her softly.

  She nodded.

  “I’m so sorry!” he said. “They are—such dreams—common with us. People who speak with the dead. But, Vickie, though I know how bad they are, I also know just how important it can be to remember them. Someone is trying to reach you. Maybe it’s Alex, maybe it’s someone else or maybe there’s more than one person.” He smiled gently, holding her even closer. “None of us has answers. Really. You’d think that we—who speak with the souls or remnants of our humanity, ghosts, what have you—would have more answers. We just don’t. Maybe we’re not meant to.”

  She cupped his face with her hand. “You’re... I really do love you,” she murmured. “You’re so...special.”

  He winced, laughed and kissed her fingers. “Special. Great.”

  “I didn’t mean...oh! Never mind. You are kind of special in a fedora!”

  They both jumped when there was a knock at her door.

  “What the hell?”

  “Someone must have left the front door to the building open again—hate to say it, even after the Undertaker thing, none of my neighbors ever remember to lock the outer door,” Vickie said, jumping up.

  “Seven-thirty,” Griffin muttered, looking at the clock on her nightstand. He stood and slipped into a T-shirt and shorts and headed out. Vickie found her robe and did the same.

  Griffin reached the door first and looked through the peephole. He opened the door right away, just as Vickie came up behind him.

  Rocky and Devin were there.

  “What’s happened?” Griffin asked them. He didn’t mention the hour.

  And he wouldn’t, Vickie thought. He knew that if they were there, it was for a reason.

  “Barnes called you and then me,” Rocky said. “They—”

  He broke off, staring at Griffin, and frowning.

  “What’s on your neck?” he asked Griffin.

  “What? Ah!” Griffin reached up and grabbed at the white collar he’d donned for his pose the night before.

  Vickie hadn’t thought it was possible for someone so tanned to blush so fiercely.

  “Oh,” Rocky said.

  “Ohhhh!” Devin said, and laughed.

  “Hey!” Griffin protested.

  “Don’t tease, it’s all great,” Devin said. She punched Rocky in the arm. “No judgment. Go for it, you guys! Anyway, we’re not here to ruin your sex lives.”

  “Well, you’re not doing a bad job!” Griffin said.

  “You didn’t ruin anything. We just woke up,” Vickie said. She couldn’t help giggling, and then they were all really laughing, and it felt good—their lives could be far too filled with tension. Yes, it was good, even if a little embarrassing.

  “Do we know who the young lady is in the hospital? Our redheaded Jane Doe?” Griffin asked.

  “No,” Rocky said, “but they’ve found a match for the blood that was thrown on Vickie.”

  “A match? Already? You mean, they have more than O positive...a real match to someone?” Griffin asked.

  Rocky nodded. “Helena Matthews, twenty-five. She was reported missing six weeks ago. The police took a DNA sample from her toothbrush during their initial search for her. She left work in Bristol, Rhode Island, to meet up with friends for an annual dinner in Fall River.”

  “She never came home,” Devin finished quietly.

  6

  “All right, there might have been several relevant events in the past,” Griffin said, reading from the file in his hand.

  Rocky was driving the Bureau-issued SUV; Griffin was in the back with Vickie, his computer on his lap and a pile of printed files on top of them. Since Rocky and Devin had arrived at Vickie’s door, they’d been in a flurry of activity: packing a few things since they’d stay overnight, and making arrangements.

  Griffin had spent more than an hour all told on the phone, first with David Barnes, and then with Jackson Crow and Adam Harrison down in Virginia. Barnes was going to see that Boston was flooded with a likeness of the woman who had claimed to be Audrey Benson, along with a recent picture of Helena Matthews, garnered from her missing-person file.

  She was—or had been, Griffin reluctantly thought—beautiful. Her face was serene, heart-shaped and lovely. She’d had warm amber eyes and long honey-blond hair. In her picture, she was smiling.

  Agents in the Virginia office would be doing record searches, seeking anything they could find, and, of course, clearing paths for Griffin and the others with other law enforcement agencies.

  “First off,” Griffin continued, “Fall River was once alive and prosperous with textile mills. When the mills began to go down, it was just a quiet town. Then, of course, you had the ‘trial of the century,’ that being the trial of Lizzie Borden in 1893, as in ‘Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one.’ Except, of course, she was acquitted, and to this day, historians and scholars argue over whether she did or didn’t do it. Me, I think she did. But hey, they were living in Victorian days, so they missed a heck of a lot of evidence, and then, even if they’d had it, they didn’t have the science we do today.”

  “In reality, she gave her stepmother nineteen whacks and her father ten or eleven. It was overkill either way, if, in fact, she was guilty. I tend to agree that she was,” Vickie said, looking out the window as they drove.

  Griffin smiled. Of course Vickie would know accurate details. She was a walking encyclopedia when it came to the state of Massachusetts.

  “You also know about the murders in the 1970s, then, right?” he asked.

  “Vickie is probably better than our files!” Devin said, turning to smile at Vickie.

  “I know about them, yes—so tragic,” she said. “There was a sudden rise in prostitution in the area. Teenagers, mostly. The first murdered girl was found with her head so beaten and bruised that it was difficult for authorities to make an identification. The second girl was found in the same condition. The third girl, Karen Marsden, had actually come in to the authorities—and then decided against testifying. Only her skull was ever found. At the trial, her ‘ritual’ beheading was graphically described. She had spoken against a man named Carl Drew, and his girlfriend, Robin Murphy,
gave testimony against him and others in Marsden’s murder. Anyway, I don’t think it was really a case of Satanism as much as it was a method of manipulation, though the killings are known as Satanic cult murders. Robin Murphy might have been just seventeen, but she knew how to rule the ranks. She used all kinds of manipulation against people—including Satanic rituals out in the forest, and, of course, encouraging and helping in murders to carry out so-called rites.”

  She broke off and looked over at Griffin. “The words that people have been using in Boston, written on Alex and other victims, weren’t linked to that group. In fact, what happened with the Drew/Murphy cult was so horrible and so terrifying that the other murder was barely noted. A single body was found by the river that didn’t fit the other murders, and those words—Hell’s afire and Satan rules, etc.—were found in the dirt by the river. The victim was a young woman named Sheena Petrie. The killing was accredited by many to the cult, but it was different. Her throat had been slit. She had recently left her husband, who had an alibi. It was never solved. Oh, and in the other case, both Drew and Murphy were convicted, but Murphy is eligible for patrol now and goes before the board every so often.”

  “That’s terrifying,” Devin said. “Though, honestly? The number of really chilling murderers who might be out on parole at any time is damned scary.”

  “True,” Griffin murmured. “Today we’re meeting with Robert Merton and Cole Magruder first—the detectives on our current missing-person case of Helena Matthews. Detective Merton is from Bristol, Rhode Island, and Detective Magruder has been working the case from the Fall River side of it. This afternoon, we’re going to see one of the detectives on the 1970s case. Then tonight, we’re meeting with a man named Syd Smith. He was almost drawn in years ago. But more important than that, he was also the one who came upon the writing in the ground—and the body of Sheena Petrie.”

  “So, we’re definitely staying in Fall River tonight?” Vickie asked.

  “Yep,” Rocky said.

  “Where are we staying?” Vickie asked.

  “Where are we staying?” Griffin asked. Their sleeping arrangements had been set up by Angela Hawkins, a coagent and Jackson’s wife, back in their Virginia headquarters.