Wren Delacroix Series Box Set Page 3

  Lopez was his captain, even though he technically worked outside the purview of his local department. The task force covered the tri-state area, the eastern West Virginia panhandle and parts of northern Virginia and eastern Maryland.

  The task force was a bit of sleight-of-hand put in place to shuffle off cases that couldn’t be solved into some other territory’s percentages. This way, even if a crime occurred in Maryland, it didn’t count against the current sheriff or mayor, because it was now the purview of the task force. Difficult cases, like serial killers, were perfect fodder for the task force.

  The original task force had tackled the FCL murders, and had originally brought two other serial killers to justice. Then there had been a period of time of relative quiet, and eventually the task force was disbanded.

  Only recently had they reformed, and Reilly had to admit they weren’t giving him a lot to work with. For the departments in the tri-state, the task force meant they had the cases off their plates and they no longer had to worry about them. He was sometimes frustrated that they didn’t seem more concerned about his case getting solved.

  Then again, serial killer cases could drag on for long periods of time while officers got lost in the weeds of going through every person in the area who drove a beige Volkswagen Beetle named Ted. For instance.

  Reilly stood up. “It’s not even 10:00. Nowhere near midnight.”

  Lopez laughed. “True. Listen, this case is heating up. We’re thinking about moving you.”

  “You mean it’ll be easier to forget that the task force even exists if no one walks past us in the office?”

  “I mean that you’ll be closer to the action if you go out to the old task force headquarters.”

  “In West Virginia?” said Reilly. “I thought they turned that into a dance studio or something.”

  “It went belly up,” said Lopez. “Anyway, they were renting the building from the local government, and it’s open. You’ll benefit from being closer to the crimes.”

  “Do I have a choice?” said Reilly.

  “No,” said Lopez cheerily.

  Reilly sighed. “They want my office for Vice, don’t they? Vice is always scoping out my office.”

  Lopez laughed again. “You know the way of it.”

  “Hey, listen, if someone finds a body and then asks to look at crime scene photos of other victims, then what would you think about that?”

  “I would bring that person in for questioning,” said Lopez. “Come on. That’s not raising red flags for you all over the place?”

  Reilly chuckled softly, looking down at his desk. “Right, right, you’re right.” Man, he was going to have to pack up his desk, wasn’t he? He didn’t have a lot on the desk, but what was there was kind of a mess. Packing was easier when things were organized.

  “Who’s this person?”

  “Daughter of Vivian Delacroix,” said Reilly. “She, uh, she said she dropped out of the FBI Academy. She started spouting off a profile at me. I tend to think it was probably professional curiosity, except, well, she’s not a professional.”

  “Interesting,” said Lopez. “Yeah, I’m not sure I’d bring her in for questioning necessarily either. What’d you think about the profile?”

  “Might be spot on,” said Reilly. “Might not. No way to know until we catch the son of a bitch.” He dragged a hand over the top of his head. “Which is why I should probably start packing up my desk, so I don’t waste time on that tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, Vice wants in by noon.”

  “Fucking Vice.” Reilly shook his head.

  * * *

  The truth was, the old headquarters would be more convenient for Reilly. Even though he worked in Maryland, he and his ex-wife Janessa had decided to buy a house in West Virginia due to the cheaper prices of land and houses. It made his police salary go further, and it wasn’t that bad of a commute, due to the fact that he wasn’t heading all the way to D.C. He could leave later and miss the worst of the traffic.

  Now, he and Janessa were apart, and she had the house they’d purchased together, He could have moved closer to his job, but he’d chosen to stay closer to her and their son. Janessa said it was a token gesture that didn’t mean anything, because he had never divorced his first love, the job, and he might as well be closer to work, because that was all he cared about.

  It wasn’t true.

  Well, he didn’t really care about Janessa anymore. The divorce had been messy, and they had both shown their worst sides, and he had fallen out of love with her somewhere in the middle of it. Not right at the beginning or anything. When she’d asked for the divorce, he’d still been in love with her, but then, later… So, she would always be the mother of his child, but he didn’t care about her the way that he used to.

  He did care about Timmy. He adored his son. Having Timmy in the world changed everything. It made things matter that never mattered before, and he would do anything for his son.

  However, Janessa was right that he and Timmy weren’t exactly close. But, hell, it wasn’t easy to be close to Timmy. Even Janessa wasn’t really close to him. She spent more time with him, but she couldn’t penetrate whatever shields Timmy had put up to protect the little world he lived in.

  Thinking of how isolated his son was only made Reilly feel depressed.

  He decided to stop off on the way home for a drink. The bar he frequented wasn’t actually that far from where the body had been found tonight. It was on the outskirts of Cardinal Falls. He knew that members of the Children came there, too, but they were harmless these days. Honestly, he didn’t get it. After you found out that your religious group had been so corrupt that it was sending people out to commit murder, you didn’t stay. You left.

  But there were still people up on that compound. Maybe not as many as there had been back fifteen years ago, but more than made any sense.

  The bar was named Billy’s, after the previous owner, a man named Billy O’Donnell. He’d died of cancer a few years back, and now his wife Judy and his daughter Nancy ran the place. It was a small place. There was a horseshoe-shaped bar in the middle, surrounded by stools. In one corner, there was a pool table and next to it, a dart board hung on the wall. There were a few tables scattered here and there.

  He’d never seen the place packed, probably because they didn’t do much to entice people to come in. There were no drink specials, or live bands, or karaoke nights. The place was kept afloat by its loyal regulars, and that was that.

  Reilly used to come here a lot, but lately he’d been trying to cut back on his drinking. During the divorce, he felt like he’d spent his nights either drunk or sleeping off a hangover. It had been hell on his performance at work, truthfully. It was a wonder he’d gotten this promotion to head up the task force.

  When he swung open the door to Billy’s, the first person he saw was Maliah Wright.

  He almost walked back out again, but she had seen him, and she raised her drink in greeting.

  That was the other reason he was staying out of this bar. There was no reason to see Maliah anymore.

  He shut the door behind himself and gave Maliah a friendly nod and a smile before directing his attention elsewhere. As it happened, his gaze landed on Wren Delacroix who was sitting at the bar nursing a beer.

  Well, what were the odds?

  He loosened his tie and strode across the bar to her.

  She looked up at him, surprised. “Detective,” she said. “I didn’t expect to see you here.”

  “You kidding?” said Reilly. “Billy’s is my home away from home.”

  To add weight to this point, Nancy, who was tending bar, set a beer in front of him. She already knew what he was going to order. Always had it waiting for him.

  He grinned at her, sliding his credit card across the bar to her. “Keep the tab open.”

  “You got it,” said Nancy, taking the credit card.

  “Really?” said Wren. “Because I’ve been here practically every night since I moved here,
and I haven’t seen you.”

  “When did you move here?”

  “About a week ago.”

  “And you’ve already got a job as a tour guide.”

  “Well, I’ve got friends in the right places, what can I say?” She laughed wryly.

  “You, uh, you pretty interested in all this? The murders, the Fellowship, the tours?”

  She furrowed her brow. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I saw how you stuck around,” he said. “You were still at the scene when I left, long after I released you.”

  “So?”

  “So, did you do it? Are you killing those girls?”

  “Me?” She touched her chest. “There’s no way this is the work of a female serial killer. I mean, sure, female serial killers might kill children, but it’s usually children in their care, and they don’t draw attention to it. The presentational thing, that’s not some Munchausen-by-proxy shit, that’s some dude whose moving things around on his own private chessboard. The killer is definitely male, and it’s not me.”

  He grinned at her. “Yeah, okay.”

  She glared at him. “You know, you should let me help you.”

  “Help me with what?”

  “With the murders,” she said. “I can help you solve them. They’re obviously tied to the FCL. I know about the FCL. I have some FBI training. I was planning on working in the Behavioral Analysis Unit. This is what I do.” She flinched. She picked up her beer. “What I would be doing if I hadn’t imploded my life, I mean.”

  Reilly stroked his chin. “You want to help me solve the murders. You think I’m not capable of doing it on my own?”

  “You’re insulted? Seriously?” She regarded him. “You need me.”

  “Do I?”

  She picked at the label on her beer. “I think you do. I don’t think you’re anywhere with this case at all.”

  The funny thing was, on his way over here, Reilly’d had an errant thought about the discretionary funds he had for bringing in experts. He’d thought that Wren Delacroix might qualify. He could bring her in as a consultant.

  He opened his mouth to tell her this.

  But she suddenly picked up her beer, downed it, and dropped it on the bar with a clatter. “What the hell? What am I doing? I can’t do this. I don’t even know why I’m in this damned town.” She picked up her leather jacket, which was slung over the back of her chair and shrugged into it. “I gotta go.”

  “Hey, wait, don’t,” said Reilly. “We should talk more about this.”

  “Can’t,” she said. She was heading for the door, hunched into her jacket, head down.

  He went after her. “At least let me give you my card.” He held it out.

  She pulled a crumpled card out of her pocket. “I got it.”

  “Just in case.” He pressed it into her hand. “Let’s talk again, okay?”

  She shoved the card into her pocket with the other one. And then she left.

  Reilly took a deep breath and headed back to his unfinished beer. That had been weird.

  Maliah was waiting for him, leaning against the bar. “Hey there, Cai. You should know better than to try to hit on the skinny white chicks.”

  “I wasn’t hitting on…” He shook his head. “I thought you weren’t speaking to me anymore. Well, outside of work, anyway. I thought it was strictly on the clock only, you and me.”

  “I thought it was you that wasn’t speaking to me outside of work,” she said.

  “I got no reason not to speak to you,” he said.

  “Right,” she said. “It was the other things that we were doing that were the problem. That was what was making your wife so rabid in the divorce proceedings.”

  “Right.” He took a long draught of beer.

  “I hear that’s all done now, though. You’re officially divorced.”

  “True,” he said.

  She tapped her lower lip, winking at him mischievously. “Mmm mmm mmm.”

  He pointed at her. “Whatever you’re thinking, stop it. It’s no good. This thing with us, it’s over.”

  She just laughed.

  * * *

  Wren slammed the door of her cabin as hard as she could.

  She backed into the door and rested her head against it, closing her eyes. What the hell was she even doing?

  It hadn’t been so long ago that her life was on track. She’d been through the hell of the selection process to become an FBI agent, all of the background checks and the interrogations and the promise of the blood of her first born—well, not really, but it had been nearly as bad. And then she’d started studying at the Academy at Quantico, and everything seemed to be coming together.

  It was hard. It was horrifying. But she was good at it. She understood the case studies they read in a way that she didn’t think all of the other students did. Maybe it was because of Vivian. Maybe she had some genetic insight into the criminal mind.

  But for the first time, she felt as if whatever Vivian had given her was being put to good use, not simply making her lose her mind.

  And then those phone calls.

  She had been in her apartment where she was staying, pulling an all-nighter, studying for an exam the following day. She had cans of Mountain Dew littering the table along with her books. When her phone rang, she’d had to pull it out of the pile of text books.

  She didn’t recognize the number, however, so she didn’t answer.

  She declined the call.

  Two minutes later, the phone started ringing again, same number. She figured it must be someone she knew, maybe one of her classmates who needed help. They could have lost their phone and been stranded on the other side of town. There were a few other girls who lived in the same apartment building as she did.

  She picked up the phone

  “Hello, Wren,” said the male voice on the other end, with a tinge of a southern accent. A deeper southern accent than the slight West Virginian twang she had grown up with, but a familiar accent all the same. She had heard him speak many times, even though he spent most of his time hiding in his luxurious cabin while Vivian waited on him. “It’s David.”

  She hung up on him.

  He called back. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember me. David Song. I knew you when you were just a little girl. I was there when you were born.” David Song had taken over as a leader of the Children in the late 1980s. He was originally from somewhere in Georgia. He had an evangelical background, but he’d been converted to the FCL in his early twenties. He lived on the compound, and he was popular, and then he took over after the previous leader died. And, at first, nothing untoward happened.

  Not until Vivian found her way into David’s inner circle and began whispering in his ear. Then things started to get crazy.

  “You’re not David Song,” said Wren. “You’re dead.”

  “Am I?” said David. “Funny, I don’t feel dead.”

  “Why are you calling me?”

  “Come home, Wren. You don’t belong there. The Crimson Ram has decreed that thou must come under the protection of his glorious horns and rejoin thy brothers and sisters. Come home.”

  It was the first of many such phone calls.

  At first, she suspected that she was going crazy. The phone calls were all in her imagination. Because immediately after they started, she began to remember things. She wasn’t certain if she had buried these things before, if she had pushed them down, or if they had been such traumatic memories that her brain had forgotten them as some kind of survival technique.

  Whatever the case, they were coming back now, and they were surfacing at the most inopportune times.

  That exam she’d been studying for? It was interrupted by bright memories of Vivian’s face, illuminated by the dancing bonfire, as she whispered instructions to the gathered members of the cult who’d she’d brought together as her special army. Any normal woman would never have allowed her own daughter to be there while she ordered people to commit murder. But then, Vivian w
asn’t normal.

  Wren didn’t like to think about Vivian, however.

  Wren had been to most of those bonfires, and most of them didn’t have anything to do with murder. Vivian would bring people together for them for other occasions. Usually, the adults gathered were all dosed on various psychedelics and narcotics. Vivian didn’t give acid to children, for whatever that was worth. That was one moral line she didn’t cross, anyway. Many times, it was all about some kind of vision quest, something they were guided on by Vivian’s voice.

  But Wren still remembered the visuals that Vivian’s words had conjured in her brain. The Horned Lord astride a black horse, waving a bloody sword as he cut down his enemies.

  Wren had vague memories of the Fellowship before her mother’s influence. Then, the Lord was sometimes called the Father, or even God, and he wasn’t that much different than the God that they taught about in Baptist Sunday schools. Sure, he was all for smoking marijuana and going on drug-fueled vision quests. And, sure, he wasn’t nearly as disapproving of sexual freedom as the Baptist God. But he was harmless.

  And then… he grew horns.

  Was that David’s idea or Vivian’s? Where had the Horned Lord come from?

  She found herself wanting to know badly. Instead of coming home and studying her textbooks, reading the case studies she was given in her classes, she stayed up all night studying the history of the FCL, trying to figure out where it had all gone wrong. How it had gone from some kind of benign hippie Christian sect to a full-blow murder cult?

  Everything started to go wrong.

  She couldn’t read a case study without seeing the flames of a bonfire, see the members of the cult in their black flowing pants and shirts, splayed out on the ground, their arms and legs bent, their mouths open in ecstasy.

  She was plagued by questions, and she spent most of her time surreptitiously googling on her phone instead of listening to her professors.

  She fell asleep on her laptop and slept through her alarm. She missed class.

  She failed exams.

  And David kept calling.

  Finally, she tried calling David back.