“The cross she’s on—I think it looks like Dade County pine,” Amy said. That wood was almost impossible to acquire these days. But the CSI team would know more on that; she was hardly an expert on wood or trees herself.
“I think you’re right,” John agreed. “And it wasn’t recently chopped down—more like crude carpentry. I think the wood might have been taken from various demolition sites, a house or some other building. Though you’d think we’d be preserving our older homes. It was abundant here once, used in most of the Victorian-era houses down in Key West. I’m going to say reclaimed from somewhere.”
“We’re looking at something planned, yes, with religious overtones,” Amy said. “Something extremist...” She looked around at their group. “As we all know well, any extremist is dangerous...”
Dr. Carver twisted on the ladder to look at her. “And you’re afraid this is a harbinger of more?”
“Dear God, let’s hope not,” she breathed.
Aidan Cypress walked over to them. “We’re trying to pull tire tracks, but as you can see, the ground is mostly muck. And it’s rained, so even the paved area is giving us just about nothing. One thing about being on an old road almost no one uses anymore—not a lot of trash. But we’re doing our best to get everything, the tiniest scrap. And some of this is sawgrass—long sawgrass, but we’re doing our best.”
“Thank you, Aidan. You guys are the best,” Amy assured him.
“Sketching again, eh?” Cypress asked.
“You never know.”
“Okay, Picasso!” Dr. Carver called out. “I’m going to get my crew busy taking her down so I can get her to the morgue. From what I’m seeing, and what I believe, she was killed just as darkness was falling last night, and she was between twenty and thirty years old.”
Amy stood just to the side of the corpse, swallowing hard as she saw the blood had covered the body in such quantities and had dried so it was almost as if she were dressed.
“Like Fantasy Fest down in Key West,” John murmured.
She turned to stare at him.
“All the blood...it’s almost as if she’d been body painted.”
Somewhere inside, Amy trembled at the horror of what they saw. Death had taken the woman in such a way she was almost surreal, like a Halloween prop set out for a wickedly scary party.
“That’s what happens,” Carver said, “when you pierce the heart and rip up veins and arteries. Anyway, we’re good to go, team. We’re going to need to get her off the cross—carefully, carefully, my friends,” he said to his assistants.
“And we need to get the cross to the crime lab, as much as is possible,” Cypress said.
Detective Mulberry had been watching and listening. He spoke up. “Yes, please, get everything. This had to have been wackos from somewhere else in the state—or the country. This sure as hell didn’t come from anyone local! And my citizens are going to be terrified. And there aren’t a lot of homes with fancy alarm systems out here.”
Amy hoped he was right: that the murderer—or murderers—had come from somewhere else, and that they would not strike again. She looked down at her sketch of the scene; it was one that would probably give her nightmares.
She swatted another mosquito buzzing around her face. It was going to be a long morning.
The body was removed from the stake with painstaking care.
Dr. Carver wanted the murder weapon left in the body until he reached the lab; his assistants argued over fitting the stake into their vehicle, but it was done. Then Aidan Cypress’s crew began working on the crude cross to which she had been tied.
Amy was watching them work, sketching their efforts, when she thought she saw something tiny fall off the top of the cross as they lowered it.
No one else had seen anything, it seemed, and she wondered if it was a trick of the light, or maybe a small leaf blowing in something that resembled a breeze that had come up as the day had worn on.
Rain was coming.
Floridians liked to joke among themselves about their seasons: they came in hot, hotter, blazing hot and then hotter than hell. The atmosphere didn’t always acknowledge the changing of the seasons, and while winter caused an ease in the rain that tended to come daily in summer, early fall was still part of their hurricane season.
They’d been lucky so far that day. It had rained the night before, a weak rain, ruining much of the crime scene, but not enough to wash away the pints of blood that had half-congealed on the body. Some of the blood had run again; some had stayed hard and crusted.
The forensics crew finally had the cross down.
She walked over to the great hole that had been dug to set the cross. Now it was an area of mucky darkness against the rich sawgrass and foliage that grew around. Her heart sank.
Whatever it had been—if it had been anything—had sunk deep.
Amy went down on her knees, wishing her hands were covered by something a bit tougher than crime scene nitrile gloves.
“What are you doing?” John asked her.
“I think I saw something...something falling off the cross,” she said.
Dr. Carver shouted out to them, “I’m heading out. She’ll be set for autopsy tomorrow. My crew will get her cleaned up and prepped by about nine.”
“Thanks!” John called to him. He turned to her. “Amy, come on, we have a fantastic forensics team—”
“They were busy finagling that cross, John. I saw something.”
“You’re going to cut yourself on all that sawgrass.”
She kept her eyes on the ground, scanning. “It will drive me insane if I don’t look, John.”
He sighed. “All right, I guess I’ll get down in the dirt, too. When I’m itching like crazy from all the brush scratches tonight, just know I’m going to be cursing you out in my sleep.”
Amy continued diligently pawing through the sawgrass when she vaguely heard the arrival of another car.
Cypress called out in greeting to someone, and Amy finally looked up.
Another man had arrived at the scene. He was tall, dark-haired, midthirties. Wearing a suit, he must have been sweltering in the heat. Then again, both she and John were clad in their daily business suits—blue, light cotton blends, but the kind of outfit that meant work clothing.
The man seemed impatient, pushing back the hair from his forehead, looking around at the scene with keen eyes that were light against the bronze of his face.
She watched him, and John rose, frowning, then smiling in recognition.
“Hey, Hunter! What the hell are you doing down here?” John greeted the newcomer.
“Who is that?” Amy asked.
John hadn’t heard her; he’d gone to meet the man.
Apparently, Aidan Cypress knew him, too. After calling out his own greeting, Aidan left his work for a minute to go over and shake hands with the man. “Sent out already, eh?” she overheard.
She shook her head; she’d know soon enough. If she was going to find something, she had to keep looking.
She carefully delved her way through the cutting grass.
But then she had the sense that John had come to stand near her, on the pavement off the mucky embankment.
“Amy, look up for a minute?”
She raised her eyes.
He’d brought the man with him. She waited, watching the stranger. He had the perfect face for law enforcement—which she figured he must be of some kind. His expression gave away nothing. His eyes, she saw then, were a rich, piercing blue that could certainly quell many a suspect. Hard jaw, lean face, high cheeks—the old classic-sculpted bone structure. He stood a few inches over John, which made him at least six-foot-three.
But she didn’t get up; if she did, she’d lose the grid she’d created in her mind.
“Amy, Hunter. Hunter, Amy,” John said.
“Mr. Hunter,” Amy acknowledged.
His mouth moved in something that might have been a dry smile. A severe one.
“Hunter is my first name,” he said.
“Oh, I’m sorry—”
“No, I’m sorry,” John said. “I know you both so well that I forget myself. I’ll start over. Special Agent Amy Larson, meet Special Agent Hunter Forrest.”
“Hunter...Forrest?” she murmured, immediately regretting the words that had slipped out. She quickly added, “You’re FDLE? I’m surprised we haven’t met.”
“No, no, Hunter is a G-man, a fed,” John said. “He thinks he had something like this—not as elaborate, but when the info went out...”
“I might have had a practice run for this event,” Hunter said.
“Oh?” John asked.
“A practice?” Amy heard the surprise in her own voice.
“North in the state, little town near Micanopy. I’ll be joining you at the autopsy tomorrow. Joining the investigation,” he said.
She tried to be as expressionless as he was; she wasn’t sure what this meant. The FBI had to be invited in, and she wasn’t sure how and when he could have been invited, since they’d just started with the crime scene.
And what had he been doing north in a small town near Micanopy?
Maybe he was so confident that he thought he could just make decisions on his own.
“He’d like to see us tonight, go through the cases. You didn’t have plans, did you?”
“Not after this,” she said.
“Drove here as fast as I could,” Hunter Forrest said.
Special Agent Hunter Forrest.
“And I’m sorry I missed the scene in situ,” he continued. He looked at John. “But I’m assuming—and I know your guys are good—that we’ll have plenty of photographs.”
“And sketches,” John offered. “Want to see them now?”
“Sketches? You had a photographer and a forensic artist working?” Hunter asked.
“Nope, my partner,” John said. “Amy, can he see your book?”
“Really, I’m not trained in forensic art in any way—they’re just something I do for myself,” Amy protested.
“Amy, come on,” John said.
She reached into her pocket, digging out her little pad, and handed it over.
Hunter leaned down and accepted it with a quick, “Thank you.”
He fell silent, studying her work. Amy went back to her search.
She was startled when he spoke, hunching down beside her, the book still in his hand.
“These are really good.”
“Uh, thank you.”
“Mind if I ask what you’re doing now?”
He was studying her carefully, and she had to wonder if he was thinking she was probably in way over her head, incompetent to handle such a crime and crawling around in the sawgrass just to prove she could do something.
There was nothing to do but explain—evenly and articulately.
“I thought I saw something. A tiny object, but something flew from the body or the cross. I saw it when they were taking the cross down.”
“You thought you saw something?” he asked.
She smiled through gritted teeth before speaking with assurance. “No, I did see something. I don’t know what. We may never find it, but my eyes are good, and I know I saw something.”
“Leaf. I think we’re looking through grass and leaves—for a leaf,” John said, grinning. Of course he was joking with her. He never minded when she had an idea, or when she was convinced she needed to explore in a certain direction.
But his joke didn’t sit well there and then—when she was certain she was being looked on as too young and possibly too fragile or maybe even too female to handle this kind of job.
“And that’s sawgrass,” John said. “Careful, it can cut you badly.”
Hunter Forrest grimaced. “Only if you let it,” he said lightly. “Special Agent Amy Larson has said she saw something. I believe her. We’ll search. Let’s do it.”
Grudgingly, she liked him a little better than her first impression of him.
Special Agent Forrest pulled gloves from a pocket and knelt in a cleared area by the hole in the ground, careful not to press any tiny little thing deeper into the grass or ground.
He didn’t seem to give a damn about his suit, or his own physical welfare.
John sighed and got back down.
Aidan walked over. The vans had been packed up.
“What’s up?” Aidan asked.
“Amy thought she saw something,” John explained.
“Some tiny thing that fell off the cross or the body,” she explained.
“Okay, then. I should get down there with you. Amy, can you tell me, what exactly did you see?” Aidan asked, concerned. He took his work seriously. He was never afraid to admit he might have missed something, but if he had, he wanted to get on it.
“Something tiny that, yes, that flew...no, fell, I guess, sorry...when you all moved the cross.”
“A piece of flesh? Hair...? Can you help any with a description?” Aidan asked.
“Something like this?” Hunter asked before Amy could reply.
She looked at what he was holding.
It was a small plastic figure.
A horse.
It might have gone with a child’s farm or ranch set. It wasn’t quite two inches high and the same width. The little creature had a flowing mane and tail.
It was white.
But it looked as if the eyes had been given a touch of paint. Red paint.
Blood, she thought sickly at first.
But it wasn’t blood. The paint was too precise. The tiny eyes had been specifically painted a crimson shade of red.
“Maybe it’s just some kid’s toy, dropped out a car window,” John said.
Hunter Forrest was staring at the object, shaking his head. “No, it’s not. It was part of the ritual.” He looked at Amy.
Aidan grimaced. “It must have been on the body, or attached to the cross, and... I don’t know how the hell we missed it. Amy, you’re sure it fell off when we moved the cross?”
“There’s nothing else I’ve been able to find,” Amy said. “Maybe it got caught in the ties binding her up there or was even behind the body in one way or another.”
“Maybe... Let’s not jump to any conclusions,” John suggested. “We don’t know where that came from for sure, or if it has anything to do with our crime scene.”
Hunter Forrest was still staring at the small toy.
He looked up at them, shaking his head. “No,” he said firmly.
“What is it?” Amy asked him.
“Death rides a pale horse,” Hunter said quietly. “And I’m afraid this is just the beginning.”
2
Hunter heard Amy Larson speaking in hushed, indiscernible tones as he headed down the hallway of the Central Florida offices of the FDLE toward the conference room that had been assigned for their joint investigation. FDLE was still the lead on this case, and since the murder had taken place just about an hour and a half south of Orlando, they’d all decided to come here and make use of what the central office had to offer with support staff and facilities.
Tomorrow morning they’d head back south—the autopsy would take place in the county where the murder had occurred.
While Detective Mulberry would join them at the autopsy, he had been only too happy to hand over the investigation; he didn’t see many murders, much less one that had been gruesome in the extreme, possibly the work of cultists, and might relate to other crimes in the state or elsewhere.
At this moment, the investigation had yet to be taken over by the FBI.
It would be.
But Hunter didn’t really give a damn who had the lead on the invest
igation; he knew that something deep and dark was behind this murder, just as it had been in Maclamara. A place, he thought, where there were still lots of old houses that had been built with Dade County pine.
Others would die. How many depended on how quickly they could root out what was happening?
He’d reported in to his superior, Assistant Special Director Charles Garza, and Garza had told him that, hell yes, he was to follow through.
“You feel we need to be concerned and involved, right?” Garza had asked him.
“Beyond a doubt.”
“You’ll get all the help you need on this. Just call, ask,” Garza had told him. “FDLE has been in touch. Stay right on top.”
“John Schultz is on it for FDLE. We’re good—I’ve worked with him before.”
“Fine. Keep me in the loop.”
Mulberry had been absolutely convinced the murder had not been committed by anyone local. Such a thing could only have been done by a crazy person from a large city, probably a northern city—someone who had come down, from the areas of massive population to the boondocks, to use the complexity of his county to commit the atrocity. Therefore, the state or the federal government should take over. He’d be there ready to assist in any way. He was distancing himself from the horror.
Eventually, the FBI would take the lead. For now, Hunter had to hope his old friend John Schultz would make it a dual investigation. He could only assume John would have the final say, since he had so much more experience than his young partner. And John knew Hunter, too.
They’d work together easily.
As he neared their assigned conference room, Hunter could hear John’s new partner more clearly.
And he could hear quite clearly that she was talking about him.
“I’m so lost. He was here—I mean, in the state—because of a murder near Micanopy that had shades of a ritual, but why is he here? Micanopy is a long drive. And exactly why was he in Micanopy? He’s federal. Shouldn’t it have been the local police or the county or us, as it proved to be? We don’t know the two murders are related. They took place far enough apart.”
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