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CHAPTERELEVEN
Jo and Arnett secured the crime scene while Incident Commander Roscoe redirected the teams to the new goal of searching the area for further evidence. They left Officer Scott Rankin, a squat, fifty-something white male with a perpetually bored expression, to guard the perimeter as they hurried into new PPE and approached Madison for a closer look.
Despite the intervening time to come to terms with what she’d just witnessed, Jo struggled to coalesce the scene. Two competing tableaux constructed themselves in her mind, as though she were staring at a holographic picture that flipped between two images when she shifted it. On the one hand, Madison called up the essence of a forest fairy lain down mid-frolic for a nap—eyes closed peacefully as though enjoying a dream, brown hair radiating a crown around her head, legs crossed straight over each other and hands clasped in repose over her breast. Beautiful and resplendent—if not for her neck, slashed open and gaping side to side, and the knife stuck nearly to its hilt out of her pregnant belly, dead center amid strange symbols painted across her abdomen in her own dried blood. Try as Jo might, she couldn’t bring the two aspects together in a way that made sense.
She squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to picture the baby inside that abdomen—tried not to think about how at six months it would have fingers and toes and eyelids and ears. Had it felt the pain of the knife slicing through? Had Madison been alive when the knife plunged into her, forced to watch, feeling the tiny life inside her drain away? Jo had lost her own baby when she’d miscarried earlier in the year, a horrible enough experience when it was an accidental occurrence. The stone-cold evil of someone purposefully ripping away a growing soul bruised something deep in her own.
When she reopened her eyes, she snapped a picture of the convoluted lines on Madison’s abdomen. She shifted forward and back, trying to make sense of the symbol—it felt both complete and incomplete, like several separate items merged together. At the top, an inverted triangle dropped two lines down from its top corners, resembling the two points of an upside-down pentagram with a line drawn across the top. But instead of the bottom of a pentagram, the two bottom sides of the triangle extended beyond where they crossed, ending in half-circle curlicues. A large ‘V’ cut through and below those curves.
Jo leaned in for a closer look at the strokes themselves. They were uneven, like finger painting, with blood concentrated on the edges and next to none in the centers. She studied them inch by inch, hoping to find a smear that revealed a partial print—but the killer, or killers, had used gloves. At the end of several strokes she could detect the faint stippled texture of nitrile.
As she straightened, a strange distortion between two of Madison’s clasped fingers caught her eye. She snapped several pictures before calling Arnett over. “Can you record this for me? Right here?”
As he pointed his camera at Madison’s hands, Jo tried to lift the topmost. It resisted; she gripped the arm and carefully broke the rigor. As the two hands separated, a small figurine of a naked infant dropped out.
“A king cake baby,” she blurted.
“A what now?” Arnett asked.
“A baby you put inside a king cake,” she said.
He squinted at her. “I realize you think that explanation helped, but it didn’t.”
“Right, sorry.” She placed the figurine into an evidence bag, and then straightened up. “A king cake is a Mardi Gras tradition. Well, technically, it’s an Epiphany tradition.”
“Epiphany?” Arnett asked. “Why does that sound familiar?”
“It’s one of the feasts we don’t celebrate much anymore, at least not here. It’s the end of Christmas and the beginning of the Pre-Lenten Mardi Gras season. The twelfth day of Christmas, actually, like in the song, the day the three kings visited the Baby Jesus. So, on Epiphany, party hosts serve a king cake, named for the three kings, with a porcelain or plastic figurine of a baby symbolizing Jesus inside the cake. If you get the baby in your slice you’ll have good luck in the next year.”
Arnett waved his arm across the scene. “Just bizarre enough to fit with whatever twisted deal we have going on here.”
Jo followed his gesture. The trio of boulders took on a new significance; the middle boulder’s face was flat, and shaped generally like a revolutionary-era gravestone. The two smaller rocks beside it were short and squat, with flat tops dotted with candle stubs; the candles, all red or black, had melted down, some completely, some with an inch or two left.
“Like a makeshift altar,” she said. But the same sense of discordance she’d felt when looking at Madison washed over her. Something about it felt wrong, like a note sung off-key.
“Satanic panic,” Arnett said, voice framing sarcastic quotes around the words. “Hit-you-over-the-head subtle.”
Yes, the scene felt staged—but that wasn’t what was bothering her. “How well do you remember all that? It was dying out by the time I hit my teens.”
“I missed the heyday, but the tail-end was when I was at the academy.” Arnett squatted down to examine the gash on Madison’s neck. “People running scared of devil worshipers. Made it a ‘cool’ bandwagon for teenaged rebels-without-a-cause. But nothing real.”
Jo snapped several pictures of the candles; the configuration could have been the points of a pentagram. “That fits with what I remember. So I see two possibilities. Someone wants us to think this was some Satanic ritual sacrifice, or we have a serial killer whose particular brand of psychopathy was influenced by the trend.”
“Or,” Officer Rankin interjected from across the crime-scene tape, “it’s that new group popped up ’round here not that long ago. Lucifer something.”
Jo’s head snapped up. “New group?”
He pointed vaguely into the distance. “Property owner over in Scoby caught a group of punks out on his land. Wearing all black, animal skulls and pentacles, the whole nine. Built a fire on his land. And, what, twice now park rangers here at Crone Ridge have found ashes from bonfires with similar items left behind.”
“Three possibilities, then. We’ll look into it. One way or another, that group must be relevant, either because they’re involved directly or because they inspired what happened here.” Jo carefully examined the forest floor. “No footprints or other markings, or trodden underbrush.”
“There wouldn’t be if she went missing yesterday afternoon. Any vegetation would’ve righted itself again by now,” Rankin said.
The comment brought one of the shadows tugging at her mind into focus. “The timing—it’s off. Madison left to walk the dog no later than ten. She was supposed to meet her friends in Oakhurst at one that afternoon, so she would’ve headed back no later than twelve-fifteen to make it to the baby boutique. So whoever abducted her did it not only in broad daylight, but in the middle of the day. But you said the other incidents happened at night.”
“Could’ve stumbled on a pregnant woman, snatched her, then kept her alive until it was time for the ritual.” Rankin pointed at the knife. “And who knows what sick shit they did to her while they waited.”
Jo pushed down the images that sprung into her mind. “So we need to know if she’s been dead twelve hours or twenty-four.” Jo glanced toward the path. “Is the CSI team close?”
