The Bone Forest Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

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  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The Bone Forest

  Wren Delacroix, Book One

  by V. J. Chambers

  THE BONE FOREST

  © copyright 2019 by V. J. Chambers

  http://vjchambers.com

  Punk Rawk Books

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  CHAPTER ONE

  “I have the key somewhere,” Wren Delacroix said into her purse, which wasn’t even that big of a purse. Wren thought of herself as a pretty low maintenance kind of girl. She didn’t have makeup in her bag, not even a compact powder with a mirror or a lipstick.

  She never really bothered with makeup. Whenever she did, she felt like she looked like a clown, because she put it on way too thick. She blamed growing up in a cult where women didn’t wear makeup. That, and not receiving proper instruction from her mother.

  Of course, the things she didn’t receive from her mother, well, that was an earful. Best not to go there.

  Wren dug through her purse, a little black leather number that she slung over her shoulder. Whenever a woman wanted to find something in her purse, she couldn’t. It was a law or something. Wren glanced up at the people who were gathered around and gave them an apologetic smile. “Just a minute.”

  Where the hell was that key? It had a big yellow key chain on it, because the building was now property of the historical society for which Wren was giving this tour. She hadn’t quite imagined herself as a tour guide, especially not as one giving tours of the places that that had traumatized her childhood, but desperate times and all of that.

  “There!” Her fingers brushed cold metal, and she tugged the key out of her bag. She held it up triumphantly.

  The people on the tour didn’t look as jubilant as she felt. She looked them over, wondering—not for the first time—what kind of people signed up for murder tours anyway. Not that she should begrudge them it. She was now earning money to feed herself by running these tours.

  The historical building status, the establishment of the society here in town, it had all been good for the local economy. Lord knew there wasn’t much of anything else going on around here. And by Lord, she didn’t mean the Horned Lord either. But maybe she should say something like that for the people on the tour. Would they like that?

  She turned to the door of the former Walker residence and fitted the key into the lock. She unlocked first the deadbolt and then the knob beneath it. The house itself didn’t look like a murder house. It looked fairly normal from the outside. It was brick, and it had a carport on the side. The historical society kept the lawn mowed now, and they’d taken pains to restore it on the inside. After the murders, it had sat empty for years. Kids had come and thrown parties here, spray painted the walls, left beer cars in the corners.

  But now, as she swung open the door, the house looked clean and tidy. She stepped aside, letting the tour come in.

  The historical society had restored the house as best as they could, using pictures from the crime scene, to try to make it look as it would have fifteen years ago, when the murders had taken place. Some things hadn’t been possible. They hadn’t replaced the carpet for instance. It had been destroyed when the house sat empty. When they ripped it up, though, they found very nice hardwood floors underneath. Why anyone had covered them up was a mystery. They’d been sanded down and refinished. Kimora had told Wren, though, that they’d put down a rug in a similar color to the carpet.

  Thus far, during every tour that Wren had given, no one had noticed that the carpet was different.

  Instead, there were sometimes a few sharp intakes of breath as the tour would file inside, taking in the surroundings, but then there would be silence. Because it did feel as if they had come into someone’s home. But the Walkers didn’t live here anymore, and they would never be coming home.

  “Well, this is the site of the final incident,” said Wren in a quiet voice. It was important not to shatter the atmosphere. She gestured to the living room, where they had all come in. “The living room was set up for the meeting that was taking place that night. Julia Walker pulled out all her dining room chairs.” Wren walked into the middle of the room, into the circle of the chairs. Besides the dining room chairs, there was a couch, the love seat, and two easy chairs. She gestured for the people on the tour to come closer, and they did, but they didn’t come inside the circle.

  Wren gestured around her. “These chairs all would have been filled. There were eight other concerned members of the community here besides the Walkers. Some of them had been part of the fight from the beginning. Emma Johnson was Conrad Johnson’s sister. She and her brother had resisted the encroachment of the Fellowship on the community.”

  The full name of the cult that Wren had grown up in was the Fellowship of the Children of the Lord. Sometimes they were just called the Fellowship, sometimes just called the Children, sometimes the FCL.

  Wren pointed at one of the dining room chairs. “Little Felix Wilson was on the floor here in front of one of the chairs, playing with his action figures while his mother Georgia was sitting next to him. Georgia had planned for Felix to stay with his grandmother that evening, but his grandmother had come down with the flu, and so Georgia was forced to bring Felix with her to the meeting. Felix was only six years old.”

  Wren looked at the members of the tour, when she said this. She always wanted to see if they flinched at this knowledge, but they rarely did. They knew that a little boy had been killed in this last incident. They were desensitized to it all at this point.

  Wren pointed at the door behind them. “At 8:08, there was a knock on the door.”

  Everyone turned to look at the door.

  Wren walked through them to open the door. “Julia Walker got up to answer the door. On the other side of the door were Karen and Terrence Freeman, and Garrett Edwards and Lexi Hill. It was practically Vivian Delacroix’s entire dream team. She had sent them here with the order to kill everyone in the house. They did as she asked. According to testimony, Garrett came first. He shot Julia three times in the head and chest as he came in the door.”

  Wren turned and shut the door. “It was pandemonium. Everyone was screaming, but the Fellowship members were intent on their task. Lexi Hill said that she was trying to get it over with as quickly as she possibly could, but she was the one who was armed only with a knife. She slit the throats of Hannah Moore, Jane Taylor, and Iris Anderson. Several other bodies had knife wounds as well, which it seems were inflicted postmortem, although no one was willing to testifying to doing anything like that. Most of the people were shot. Joe Thomas was in the hallway.” Wren pointed to the hallway beyond the living room. “He was trying to run
. But none of them got away.”

  Wren walked through the circle of chairs to the hallway.

  And stopped, her heart in her throat.

  There was something in the hallway, lying on the floor.

  Wren turned back to the members of the tour. She wanted to tell them to leave, to go back out the door now, because things had changed, they wouldn’t want to see what she was seeing. But she couldn’t find words.

  So, she turned back to the hallway.

  She stepped closer to what was lying in the center of the hallway, to the… the body.

  Her pulse picked up speed and bile rose in the back of her throat. She had to see it. She couldn’t turn and run, something drove her forward, the same horrible fascination that had set her on the path to Quantico in the first place, even though she’d failed at all of it, even though she knew she couldn’t handle it, even though she didn’t want to see this.

  It was a girl. A young girl. She looked maybe twelve. Maybe ten. Wren licked her lips.

  The body was posed. The girl’s right arm was bent. Her right leg was bent. They made two triangles against her body.

  Wren started to shake. No, that couldn’t be. That didn’t make any sense. Who would know to pose her like that?

  She turned back to the tour, who had followed her, gaping at her as if this was part of the show. “Phone,” said Wren in a hoarse voice. “There’s a phone in my purse.” She reached into her bag, but her hands were shaking. “I know it’s in here somewhere.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Caius Reilly, head of the tri-state task force, burst through the door of the old Walker house. Conflicting emotions bubbled up inside him. On the one hand, he was disgusted by this new development in the case. Another dead girl was bad, and he hated that. On the other hand, he was nowhere with the evidence he had. Maybe this new crime scene was going to have a piece of evidence that would blow this wide open. He hoped the killer had been sloppy this time.

  Sure, the killer hadn’t been sloppy at all thus far, but sometimes, you caught a break. This could be that time.

  This was the fourth body to be found, but it was only the second crime scene he’d been called out to.

  That was because he hadn’t headed up the task force until after the second body had been found. Actually, there hadn’t been a task force. They had closed down the task force a few years ago, because things were quiet, and they finally didn’t have a serial killer they were chasing, and there wasn’t any reason to divert more tax dollars to keeping the task force running. But then, this case.

  When Lopez asked him if he wanted to head up the task force, of course he said yes.

  It was technically a promotion, for one thing. And there was nothing keeping him from taking promotions anymore. His family had dissolved, and now he was left with this. Work.

  Besides, he was good at this kind of killer. He could work these kinds of cases. He wanted it, and he’d taken it. But now, months later, he was nowhere closer to finding the killer than he’d been before, and now there was another body. Be sloppy, please, he begged the killer.

  “Reilly!” called Jim McNamara.

  He hurried over to the hallway, where McNamara was standing next to the photographer. She was on her knees with the camera, getting shots from every angle of the victim.

  “You’re finally here,” said McNamara.

  “Got here as quick as I could.”

  McNamara was one of the local boys. He worked for the Cardinal Falls Police Department. He’d also recently done a week helping out with the task force, so Reilly knew who he was.

  “I’ve just been holding down the fort,” said McNamara, looking pleased with himself.

  “It’s like the others, then,” Reilly muttered to himself, looking over the hallway. “Posed like that. Why does he do that to their arms and legs?”

  “Got me,” said McNamara.

  The question had been rhetorical. Reilly ignored McNamara. He knelt down to look at the body. It was disturbing, that’s what it was. They never quite looked dead. Whoever did this took pains to make sure that their bodies weren’t harmed in any way. The girls were killed by suffocation, and, judging by the evidence of the sedative in their systems, he did it while they were unconscious. There were no signs of sexual contact, but that didn’t mean that the motive wasn’t sexual. In these sorts of cases, it almost always was. Sex. Power. One of the two, or the killer had mixed them in his head so that they were interchangeable.

  It was all the worse because these were little girls. Reilly’s son Timmy was about the same age as this one. That someone could hurt something so small and young and defenseless was bad enough, but that he would rip a child out of the world…

  Reilly hated this bastard.

  But focusing on emotions like that didn’t do him any good. Emotions wouldn’t solve the case. Facts would. That was what he needed to focus on.

  He sometimes wondered if he’d taken to the job so much because it would be practice at confronting his worst emotions and learning to turn them off. When his mother had died, he had wanted so deeply to be able to run from those feelings, but he’d been unable to do so. Now, however, it was as easy as switching off the lights.

  He straightened, getting to his feet. “So, who found the body?”

  “Tour guide,” said McNamara. “She was showing people the spot where the Walker massacre took place and then she walked back here and saw it.”

  “Right,” Reilly said. “The Walker massacre.”

  “Get this,” said McNamara. “Little girl? Vada Walker.”

  Reilly furrowed his brow. “Related?”

  “Yeah,” said McNamara. “Great niece of the people who died here fifteen years ago.”

  “Shit,” said Reilly. He needed to look back at the other victims. He hadn’t been considering that there could be a connection with the old case from fifteen years ago, but now, he had to consider it.

  The killer did take care with his victims. He didn’t leave them where he killed them, but moved them and posed them. Maybe there was more significance that Reilly was missing.

  “And it gets better,” said McNamara. “The tour guide? It’s Wren Delacroix.”

  “I’m supposed to know who that is?”

  “She’s Vivian Delacroix’s daughter,” said McNamara. “Come on.”

  Reilly glanced at him sidelong. “That some kind of sick joke? Why would the daughter of the person responsible for the murders that happened in this house be giving tours of the place?”

  “No idea.” McNamara shrugged. “I knew her from high school. They all stayed even after Vivian and the others got arrested, you know. They went to our schools. We used to call them the culties.”

  “Oh, that’s enlightened.” Reilly moved further into the hallway. The photographer was done with her work, and he could get closer now.

  “We were kids,” said McNamara. “She was a piece of work, I tell you. Once, I remember she got in trouble for smoking or something, and she put her cigarette out right on the floor of the hallway in school. Just ground it out with the heel of her foot and looked the principal over, like she was daring him to say anything else.”

  Reilly cocked his head at the body. Hell, the dead girl looked even younger than he’d thought. Maybe she was nine years old. She was so small. This was shit. His emotions were threatening to come roaring back. He forced himself to focus instead on what McNamara was saying. “Well, if your mother was a serial killer, you’d probably be pretty twisted. Smoking, defiance, seems like the tip of the iceberg.”

  “Her mother wasn’t a serial killer. Vivian didn’t kill anyone.”

  “She didn’t pull the trigger or stab anyone, but she trained her army and sent them out to do her bidding,” said Reilly. “It’s all the same in the end, right?”

  “Maybe,” said McNamara.

  “The courts agreed with me. They locked her up for the rest of her life.”

  “True,” said McNamara.

  Reilly wasn�
�t even sure why they were talking about this.

  “Well, I heard that Wren was doing better,” continued McNamara. “I heard she was joining the FBI, doing her training at Quantico.”

  “No shit.” Reilly looked up at McNamara, now interested. “So, why’s she a tour guide?”

  “I heard she failed out,” said McNamara.

  “I don’t think Quantico is like that,” said Reilly. “I don’t think you fail out of the FBI Academy. Hell, it’s like going through nine circles of hell just to get in. They don’t let people in who fail out.”

  McNamara shrugged. “Well, like you said, probably pretty twisted. She’s still here. You going to want to talk to her?”

  “Yeah, yeah, sure.” Reilly turned back to the body.

  “If you don’t want to interrogate her, I will,” said McNamara.

  “I just said I would, didn’t I?”

  “I’m just saying. I had a little bit of a crush back in the day. When she told the principal off, it was kind of hot.”

  Reilly rolled his eyes.

  “Just saying, man. If you want, I’ll be happy to handle that for you.”

  “You’re going to hit on a woman who just found a body?” said Reilly. “At the crime scene? That’s class, McNamara.”

  McNamara just laughed good-naturedly. “You’re acting like I have pride or something, Reilly. Come on, you know me better than that.”

  Reilly stood up and stepped away from the body of the girl. It was wrong to have a conversation like this next to her. “I better talk to this Wren person myself. Point her out to me?”

  * * *

  Wren cleared her throat. Detective Caius Reilly was one of those baby-faced black men with powerful shoulders. He had a deep voice, a regal voice. He was wearing a gray suit and a checked tie, and she was thinking that it was entirely inappropriate to be finding him attractive at this moment, in this place. “Yes, I found the body,” she said.

  “I’m the head of the tri-state task force,” said Reilly. “We’re handling these cases instead of the local boys. Well, I mean, technically we’re working together, but trust me, they’re happy to have to someone else step in. Most of the folks around here are sick to death of serial killers.”