“Wow,” she said. “When you said he had a file, I thought it was like they show on TV. A couple of pages and some photos.”
“This is the one he keeps at home,” said Ethan as he set the file on the desk. “He said that all the case files combined fill three cardboard boxes. Uncle Frank made a kind of shorthand master file for himself.”
Instead of immediately removing the rubber bands, Ethan took a notepad from the unlocked top drawer and used a pencil to make a detailed and exact sketch of the angles and colors of each rubber band, including how and where they were layered over the others.
“In case he has them set a certain way,” explained Ethan. He removed the rubber bands and laid them on the diagram. “Frank’s very detailed oriented, and he knows that I snoop around sometimes. But he doesn’t give me enough credit.”
“Clearly,” said Dana, impressed. “But didn’t you tell me that you hadn’t looked at this folder before…?”
He grinned. “Maybe I peeked,” he admitted, “but I haven’t had time to really go through it.”
“You’ve looked at his other files, though, right?”
He shrugged but didn’t answer, which was answer enough.
They brought the file over to the pair of leather chairs in front of the fireplace, and he dragged a small coffee table between them and placed the heavy folder on it. He placed his hand flat on the cover, though, and gave her a serious look, brow knitted. “Are you sure you want to see this stuff?”
“What did you say about your uncle not giving you enough credit?”
He winced. “Okay, sorry.”
The folder contained individual case files for each death. They set to work reading the reports. Much of the material was technical, and her progress was bogged down by what Ethan called “cop-ese,” the acronym-filled verbiage used by police. After a few pages, and some interpretation from Ethan, she was able to navigate. DB became “dead body,” EC was “emergency contact,” HP was “highway patrol,” and MVA was “motor vehicle accident.” Some of the acronyms were all too obvious, like JUV and DOA.
When they reached the first folder of photos, Dana braced herself. Saying that she was ready for anything and actually being ready were worlds apart. She had seen pictures of dead people on TV and in the newspapers, but this was different. These were people her own age, and unlike newspaper photos, these were in crisp, clear, brutal full color.
The name on the first folder was Connie Lucas, from Oak Valley High School, which was just over the county line. There was a picture paper-clipped to the outside cover, a school photo that showed a pretty girl with short hair, wearing a blouse with a sunflower pattern, earrings, and a charm necklace on a delicate chain. Dana took a breath and opened the folder.
The first twenty photos had been taken at the crime scene. A station wagon had hit a tree at very high speed, and the whole front was wrapped around the heavy oak. There was so much damage that it was hard to even tell the make or model of the car. All the tires and windows had been blown apart and the driver had been thrown from the car. A body lay battered on the rocky ground, having rolled away from the car down a slope. Other photos showed Connie on a plastic sheet in the harsh glow of floodlights. The pictures had been taken to document the scene and were clearly not intended to be lurid or exploitive, but they hit Dana like a series of punches. Her lungs clutched, and breath burned to dust in her chest.
She made no comment because speech was simply not possible.
Then Dana turned to the second set of photos. The lighting was different, and the victim lay on a stainless-steel morgue table. There were instruments and drains and machines. The girl’s clothes had been cut away and were heaped at the foot of the table. She lay naked and vulnerable, robbed of every dignity, exposed under the glow of cruel fluorescent lights.
The next forty photos were the step-by-appalling-step of the autopsy.
Dana could feel greasy sweat run down inside her clothes, and the room seemed abnormally bright. How in God’s name had she thought she was ready for this? When she turned to Ethan, she expected him to look as stoic as he said he’d be, but there were tears glittering in the corners of his eyes.
They did not speak to each other. Not one word. Not until they had finished that file and gone on to the next. A Japanese boy, Jeffrey Watanabe, eighteen, and a black girl, Jennifer Hoffer. Along with a white girl, Connie Lucas that made three from Oak Valley.
The next two folders were of the FSK students, Maisie Bell and Chuck Riley, both also white.
Dana went through them and then returned to the photos of Maisie. It was her. It was definitely the girl from her visions. There was a school photo of Maisie, as there was with all the others, but that was her alive. She looked like a different person dead. The body looked … wrong. Not a person at all. Empty. Abandoned.
A wave of sadness hit Dana and she wanted to cry, but she fought the tears back. Even so, the pain was there. Having seen Maisie in the locker room had made the girl totally real to Dana. It was as if she had known her and lost an actual friend.
Maybe that was how it was supposed to feel, she thought. After all, how different was Maisie from herself? Or from Melissa?
She looked at Ethan. “Where’s the file for Todd Harris?”
“Uncle Frank didn’t bring it home yet,” said Ethan. “Maybe it’s too new. I heard him talking about it on the phone, though. I went into the kitchen and listened on the extension.”
“Sneaky,” she said with approval.
Ethan shrugged. “I hate doing that to Uncle Frank, but…” He let the rest hang.
“What did you hear?” asked Dana.
“Todd wasn’t crucified, that’s for sure. I don’t know most of the details but I’m sure Todd’s neck was broken. That’s pretty much all I heard.”
Dana nodded and then something occurred to her. She scanned down a page marked Inventory, looking to see what Maisie had with her when she died, and realized that what she was looking for was the eclipse pendant she had seen during her strange encounter with Maisie. It wasn’t there, though there was a notation: Silver chain, 20 inches. Broken three inches below clasp.
Dana wondered what had happened to the pendant itself. Had they missed it among all the wreckage? No way to know, and she did not think it was a practical idea to go to the crash site and try to be Sherlock Holmes. So she kept digging through the file. There were inventory pages for each of the dead teenagers, and she scanned them, just on the off chance that they might have had similar pendants, but there was nothing like that. So much for a budding theory. There was very little jewelry of any kind, though, even among the girls.
On another page, she found a list of noted Scars, Marks, Tattoos. Nothing there that connected the victims, although there was a notation that the two boys, Jeffrey and Chuck, had indications of tattoos that were materially obscured by trauma. She fished for the autopsy photos of the two boys and peered at them closely, grunted, and showed them to Ethan.
“Look at this.”
“That’s gross,” he said.
“No, it’s just that each of them had tattoos on their upper arms at about the same place. Same size, too. And look there and there? You can see some orange and black.”
“So?”
“So, maybe they had tattoos of an eclipse.”
“Again … so?”
“Maisie was wearing an eclipse pendant when I saw her. They only found a silver chain.”
Ethan began to dismiss it, then stopped and chewed his lip for a moment. “Hmm … since the sheriff’s department only found the chain and not the pendant, and both tattoos were messed up, you think someone’s trying to hide a connection?”
“Maybe,” she said.
He studied her. “You’d make a good cop.”
“We would.”
They searched for more, but there was nothing else that could even remotely connect with an eclipse. So they moved on. There was a page attached to each victim’s report that summarized their
blood analysis. She read them over, then showed the pages to Ethan. “See this? It shows that none of the teens had been drinking.”
He read through them. “Blood alcohol levels normal? In every case? I missed that.” Ethan looked at her. “Okay, so none of them were drinking. They said they were high.”
“But on what?” Dana asked. “There’s just this.” She pointed to a comment, then read it aloud. “‘Evidence of synthetic compound simulating effects of standard 5-HT2A receptor agonists.’” She shook her head. “What does that mean?”
“I have no idea,” said Ethan. “Maybe we can figure out a way to ask Two-Suit.”
She agreed and began to close the big folder but stopped, took a breath, and then went back and pulled Maisie’s autopsy photo out again and studied it. Maisie had been badly mangled and the wounds were horrific, but Dana forced herself to look closely at them. Clipped to the last photo was a photocopy of a page that had been used to take notes. It had an outline of a generic human female body, with arms out to the sides. There were dozens of X’s marked on it and a list of corresponding injuries, all in medical shorthand that Dana could not interpret. Remarks like subdural hematoma and comminuted fractures of the occipital bone are observed, and the mucosa of the epiglottis, glottis, piriform sinuses, trachea, and major bronchi are anatomic. Picking through that to make sense of it would require a medical dictionary, and despite all the books on the shelves, there wasn’t one to be found.
But then something struck Dana, and she stopped and looked more closely at the diagram, then shuffled through and pulled out the autopsy photos.
“Do you have a magnifying glass?” she asked quickly.
“Sure, why?”
“I want to check something.”
Ethan got up and fetched a big magnifier from the desk, and she took it and used it to look at each separate wound. The damage was so extensive that it was difficult to find what she was looking for, but it was there.
It was all there.
The damage to Maisie’s wrists, the punctures in the tops of her feet, the smaller cuts along her hairline, and the deeper cut in her side. Dana’s mouth went suddenly dry, and once more it was hard to breathe.
“No…,” she murmured.
“What?” asked Ethan.
“Oh my God,” said Dana. “Quick, get me something to draw on.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“Do it,” she snapped.
He hurried over to the desk again and brought back a yellow legal pad and mechanical pencil. Dana took them without a word, tore off a sheet, placed it over the diagram, and traced the same female outline. Then she removed the copied sheet, studied it, and carefully drew only those injuries she had seen in both her dream and waking vision. When she was done, Dana showed it to Ethan.
“Okay,” he said. “So?”
“I think these are the injuries that really killed her,” said Dana, and went over her memories again.
“How do you know that?”
“When I saw Maisie in the locker room, all I could see was what was being done to her.” Dana went over the locker room incident again and then explained about the dark angel in her dream on Sunday night, the night Maisie was murdered.
“Wait, you actually saw this … this … angel … cut and stab her?” said Ethan, appalled. “That’s gross.”
“No, it wasn’t exactly like that. The dream is hazy. In the locker room I saw her with stigmata. Seeing this diagram, I think—no, I’m sure—that Maisie was killed using the wounds of Christ and that the car accident was set up to hide it.”
“Why? By who?”
“How would I know?”
Ethan gave her a guarded look. “Um … do you think an actual angel…?”
“Don’t be stupid,” she snapped, then immediately said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean it to come out like that.”
“No, it’s fine. I just don’t know how to have this conversation.”
Dana snorted. “No kidding.”
He smiled at her. “How are you not losing it after all that?”
“Who says I’m not?”
Ethan chose not to reply to that. Instead he cleared his throat and said, “How sure are you about her wounds? The, um, wounds of Jesus, I mean?”
Dana took her tracing of the body diagram and drew a series of straight lines and right angles as if the victim’s body were in front of a big wooden cross. She scribbled in a thorny crown and drew a crude spear with the blade stabbing deep. Ethan looked appalled, but then he began to nod.
“I read about mass murderers and cults and all that stuff all the time,” Ethan said. “There are a lot of total nut jobs out there who think God is telling them to kill people.”
“I know.” Dana absently touched her crucifix. “I think whoever did this was trying to make a statement.”
“What on earth kind of statement could any of that make?”
Instead of answering, Dana spent the next few minutes tracing the outlines of the other victims and penciling in the location of each wound. For the Asian boy, Jeffrey Watanabe, his car had been so badly torn up that he had actually been decapitated. Jennifer Hoffer had been impaled on the broken steering column of her car. Connie Lucas had been thrown through her car windshield. And there were scores of other injuries, too, which complicated everything. Ethan watched with great interest.
“Well … one thing’s clear,” he said when she was finished. “He’s not doing the same thing over and over again. They’re not all killed like Jesus.”
“No, but he’s definitely making some kind of statement. Something else religious,” she said, setting the papers down and sitting back. “I’d bet my life on it.”
Her words seemed to freeze in the air, haunting them both.
CHAPTER 35
Craiger, Maryland
1:38 P.M.
The angel sat cross-legged on the floor, his body running with sweat. Though it was still mild weather outside, inside the sacristy the temperature hovered above one hundred. There was no boiler running in the basement, no space heater, nothing to account for it.
Except the fires of his faith in the grigori.
Except the fires in his own flesh. Not the parts of him that were still human. The rest. The parts that were revealing themselves as nephilim, as a giant, not in size but in power, in glory, in understanding.
The Book of Enoch spoke about the grigori—whom the ancients called the Watchers—and how they left heaven to try to take control of humanity, that race of naughty, errant children. The glorious great ones had even married among humans, producing the nephilim, hoping that their own majesty would spread like a plague of greatness through the generations of man.
That had been a glorious thing.
That it had failed spoke more to the weakness of men than any fault of the Watchers. Men, though weak in the ways of the spirit, were as strong as they were stubborn when it came to following their greed, their lusts. They built their worlds with walls and towers and closed out the grigori. And the seed left behind, the nephilim offspring, became few and were scattered until no one of grace stood among the human herd. And the humans, those who bore no trace of holy blood, labored to destroy the nephilim, labeling them as devils, as demons, as witches, and hunting them to the edge of extinction. Sickened and sad over what man had become, the last of the grigori left the mortal plane and sealed the door behind them.
Until now.
Until he was born. Until he awakened within his own flesh and understood his nature, his mission, his purpose.
Until he realized that he was so much more than human.
Until he heard the soft, faint cries of others like him, trapped inside drab husks. Begging for release. Begging for him to free them.
It was his sacred duty to draw the nephilim forth to reclaim their heritage and then together break through the door that separated this world from the one into which the Watchers had gone.
And that work was going so very, very well.
The painting, though, was a challenge. It had taken him years to discover what the shape of the door needed to be. Not a simple portal, not a square or oblong window, but instead a portrait of a grigori. But how to do that? The Watchers were, in their truest forms, formless. Their nature was the furnace of life, of transformation, of magnificent change.
How to paint that?
The angel looked at what he had rendered. The grigori could speak to him through it, but it was not yet complete, and the words, the lessons from the other side, were not always clear. It was not yet a doorway.
He did not yet have enough blood to complete his sacred task.
His paintbrush lay on the floor next to the cold purity of his knife.
There was still so much to do.
CHAPTER 36
Hale Residence
3:37 P.M.
Dana and Ethan went through it all again, every page of the case files, every awful photo, every line of the nearly incomprehensible medical reports.
They wound up at exactly the same place.
“Look,” said Ethan, “if Maisie was killed like Jesus, then maybe the other deaths were meant to look like other famous deaths. Maybe it’s only that we can see the Jesus injuries because they’re more well known. The others might not even be religious at all.”
“Maybe,” Dana said dubiously, “but I kind of think they might be.”
“How? ESP or—?”
“No. I just think it.”
Ethan sighed. “That’s not very scientific, though. We need to build on actual evidence, don’t we?”
“It’s a theory,” she said defensively. “Theories are part of science.”
“Sure, but maybe we should bag it for now,” said Ethan. “I’d kind of like to share all this with the science club.”
“Okay, but what if they can’t help? It’s not like we can bring the case files for them to go through,” said Dana, getting a little heated.
“Then we…,” he began, but trailed off, clearly not knowing where else to go. “We can’t talk to my uncle about it, that’s for sure.”
“No,” she agreed, “but maybe we should go to the library. They’ll have books on how other religious people died. How did Moses die or Daniel or any of them?”