Eleanor Adare Schofield bent down and kissed her husband goodnight. He squeezed her hand and rubbed it against his cheek. “Love you. Don’t stay up too late,” she said. She worked the early-morning shift as a nurse at Oak Forest Hospital. She was in bed early most every night.
“Love you too,” Harrison Schofield said as he watched Eleanor ascend the open staircase leading to the second floor of their beautiful home.
The dark wooden floors were a custom job based upon vintage designs. They featured a perimeter apron made from strips of oak in a log-cabin pattern inlaid with narrower strips of walnut with a square-knot pattern in each corner. Schofield had found the design on the Internet and had learned that inlays and intricate patterns became popular after the Industrial Revolution when wood flooring became cheaper to manufacture. The house itself was four thousand, six hundred, and fifty-six square feet, not counting the partially finished basement. Five spacious bedrooms. Three full bathrooms. Dark granite countertops. The master bath contained a whirlpool tub and a large and luxurious walk-in shower with multiple shower-heads that caressed his body from all angles. He and his wife both had walk-in closets the size of many people’s apartments. The ceilings were twelve feet high in the normal rooms, but many of the others had cathedral ceilings. The outside of the house sat on two lots and was clad in red brick dotted with diamonds of white brick.
It was their dream home. It was perfect in every way.
And yet it wasn’t enough.
He hated himself for not being happy in this life, but nothing seemed to fill the numb hollow feeling that had infected his heart like a cancer. He felt so anesthetized, so empty, so worthless.
A few years previously, Eleanor had found him a psychiatrist with a ratty gray beard, and he had agreed to a few visits. After a few months of sessions, the therapist had told Schofield that further testing was needed but he might be suffering from a reduced hedonic capacity or an impairment of his ability to gain pleasure from enjoyable experiences. The doctor with the gray beard had gone on to say that this was coupled with a knockout combination of mild depression and Avoidant Personality Disorder. He had explained that this accounted for Schofield’s feelings of inadequacy, extreme sensitivity to negative evaluation, and avoidance of social interaction.
But Schofield knew it was much more than that. He had ended the sessions shortly thereafter. A psychiatrist couldn’t help him. There was no treatment for what he had.
He couldn’t feel joy because he had been born without a soul.
Still, he loved his family, and he wanted to be better for them. They deserved better. They deserved a whole person, and there was only one way to accomplish that.
Schofield pressed the power button on the remote and the large flat-screen television blinked out with a digital chime. He sat alone in the dark for the next hour, planning out the rest of his evening. Then he walked up the stairs and checked on his wife and children. They were all sleeping peacefully in their beds.
It was time for him to go to work.
He made his way to the garage connected to his workshop and opened the trunk of his Toyota Camry. Jessie Olague was still asleep. He had dosed her periodically throughout the day based upon her height, weight, and body-fat percentage in order to ensure that there would be no complications that evening.
He stroked a strand of brown hair away from her face. Jessie reminded him of one of the girls from the compound in the woods where he had grown up. That was what had attracted his attention when he had first seen her working at the coffee shop in the mall. She looked so much like the adult version of the girl he had known all those years ago. The girl’s name was Mary Kathryn, and he had once had a secret crush on her.
A vision of the other children screaming and burning flashed through his mind. Their eyes were held open in terror as they stared into the center of the circle at him.
Schofield swallowed hard and pushed away thoughts of the past. He took one last long look at Jessie, and then he closed the trunk. It was time for another sacrifice.
Taking aim at the target, Maggie placed six 9mm rounds into the center circle of the black silhouette’s chest. Breathing hard and seething with frustration, she ejected the magazine and slammed home another. This time she unloaded all fifteen rounds in quick succession into two tight circles, one in the chest and one in the head.
She blew a strand of light blond hair from her eyes and dropped the ear-protection headset over a nail on the side of the firing stall. Then she expertly broke down the Glock 19 by holding back the slide with her right hand and pulling down on the slide releases on both sides of the gun. She pushed the spring forward and pulled it out, repeated this with the barrel. She sprayed down, brushed out and oiled all the components, and reassembled the weapon.
As she exited the firing range, she flipped the lights on and off three times and proceeded down a long hallway to the second door on the right. The bathroom contained an old white sink with exposed pipes and an American Standard toilet. She moved to the sink, washed her hands with anti-bacterial soap, rinsed, and repeated the process twice more. As she stepped back toward the hall, she quickly flipped the lights on and off three times, creating a strobe effect.
The end of the hall opened into a large room that had once served as a sorting area for the old textile plant. The room now contained an odd combination of brick walls crumbling from decay and rusty red support pillars sitting beside some of the most advanced computer equipment that money could buy. The various server racks and workstations rested inside a large cage. Maggie remembered their resident tech genius, Stan Macallan, mentioning something about it being a Faraday cage that guarded against electromagnetic-pulse attacks. Network and power cables snaked across the floor in a tangled mess. Along with the computer equipment, the cage also contained an eighty-two-inch television, two black leather couches, a coffee table, and a PlayStation 3. The big television displayed the pause screen of a game, and a game controller flashed bright red on the coffee table.
Stan sat at one of the workstations, pounding away at its keyboard in quick staccato blasts. The big hacker wasn’t at all what she had expected after hearing about his career highlights. Stan had a PhD from MIT and had started a small software firm that had been purchased by Google for a lucrative stock-and-cash package. Maggie wasn’t sure what had happened to him after that.
Within the Shepherd Organization, they had an unwritten “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy concerning their sordid pasts. They all understood that they had been selected to join the group because of a trauma or incident that gave them a unique perspective. They were all damaged goods. She had learned that Andrew had once had a wife and a daughter and the Director had once been a profiler with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.
And then, of course, there was her own story involving her younger brother and a serial killer known as
The Taker
. She cringed, thinking of how her brother’s killer was still out there, still at large. But she knew virtually nothing about Stan’s dark secrets except that she had never seen him leave the building.
Stan also didn’t resemble what she’d expect from someone with a PhD. He was six-foot-three and weighed two hundred and seventy pounds. Tattoos ran down his arms, and a reddish-blond beard stretched from his chin to the center of his stomach. A half-empty bottle of twenty-year-old Scotch and a plastic cup sat next to him on the formica surface of the desk.
Flipping a chair around backward, Maggie sat next to him and said, “What are you working on?”
His stare didn’t leave the computer screen. “Marcus thinks the Anarchist may not have been dormant during the past year and a half. He thinks maybe he just altered his MO or changed cities. So I’m scouring the cyber landscape for any connections.”
“Have you found anything?”
“Nada. What are
you
working on?”
Maggie filled the plastic cup with a double shot of Scotch and downed the whole thing. “You’re looking at it.”
Stan stared at her, his mouth hanging open. “I don’t think I’ve been more attracted to a woman in my entire life. Would you mind taking off your shirt and doing that again?”
She punched him in the shoulder and poured another glass.
Stan checked the time and said, “I take it Marcus hasn’t called you yet.”
“No, he hasn’t.”
“It’s still early.”
She said nothing but tipped back the glass of Scotch.
Stan continued. “You know, I agree with you. I think it’s a load of crap that he made you stay behind. What do you think Marcus would do if he were in the same situation?”
Maggie laughed. “Marcus would tell his superior where to stick it and do whatever he thought was right.” The smile faded from her lips. That was exactly what
she
needed to do.
Stan swiveled his chair toward her and said, “If it were me, I’d be off like a prom dress.” He grabbed a piece of paper sitting on the opposite side of the computer monitor and held it out to her. “I took the liberty of booking you on the next flight out of DCA heading to O’Hare. Here’s your boarding pass. You better get packing.”
Harrison Schofield sat down for breakfast beside his three children: two girls and one boy, ranging in ages from five to fifteen. His oldest daughter, Alison, placed a plate heaped with pancakes into the center of the dark granite island. He and the kids ate breakfast together every morning at the island in the middle of their kitchen. They had an elegant dining room, but it seemed so formal and impersonal. He and the kids typically ate cereal or Pop-Tarts for breakfast, but Alison had been taking a cooking class at school and had insisted that she prepare them a real breakfast at least once a week.
He knew that he should have felt a surge of pride and pleasure at her responsible and caring nature. After all, his firstborn child was becoming a young woman. But he felt very little, only the same dull ache that permeated every other moment of his existence.
Despite this, he went out of his way to make sure that his children couldn’t gauge his true feelings. He sniffed the air and put on a false smile. “It smells wonderful, Alison. I’m very proud of you. You did a great job.”
She sat down and winked at him. “You know me, most awesome daughter of the year and all.”
He grinned back at her and gave her a loving squeeze on the shoulder. His fork shot out to the plate of pancakes and stabbed the first of the heap.
“Daddy,” his five-year-old, Melanie, said. “We need to pray first.”
“Of course, dear. Would you lead us, please?”
They joined hands, and in a tiny high-pitched voice, Melanie said, “Thank you for the world so sweet. Thank you for the food we eat. Thank you for the birds that sing. Thank you, God, for everything.” She pronounced the
th
sound as just
t
, making “thank” into “tank” and “everything” into “every ting”.
Schofield barely noticed. His mind had traveled back in time to prayers that he had recited during his childhood. The prayers had been taught to him by a man he knew only as The Prophet while he’d been living in the commune of a satanic cult known as the Disciples of Anarchy.
He thought of the other children within the cult.
He thought of their screams. He thought of them burning alive.
“Daddy?” Melanie said.
He snapped back to the present and said, “Yes, honey?”
“I need the syrup.”
“Sure, babe.” He slid the bottle toward her and leaned over to kiss her on the top of the head. She smiled up at him. Her two front teeth were missing. He smiled back at his beautiful little girl and thought of how much he loved his wife and kids. Although he could rarely feel joy, he could feel other things such as love, loyalty, and attachment. It would hurt them terribly to discover how much of a monster he truly was, but he only wanted to make them happy and feel happiness himself. Visions of his children spitting on him and calling him a freak cascaded before his eyes. He imagined their angelic faces curled into snarls as they stoned him to death.
Schofield thought of Jessie Olague burning and bleeding to death during the previous evening, and he knew that he would deserve such a fate. He had earned every stone.
As Allen Brubaker approached the door to the hotel room and raised his hand to knock, he noticed a tiny device mounted at about knee height on the wall of the niche holding the door frame. The device resembled a circular Band-Aid and blended well with the cream color of the hallway walls. It would have been invisible to the untrained eye, but Allen’s were well-trained, at least when he wore his glasses. The little Band-Aid was actually a motion detector that sent an SMS text message to a cell phone or computer if the field around the door was broken. He imagined that Marcus had investigated the typical hours of the housekeeping staff so that he could ignore the maid’s attempts at cleaning the room. A do-not-disturb sign also hung around the door handle.
The kid was really getting paranoid, even for Marcus.
Allen shook his head and again raised his hand to knock, but his fist never reached the door. A voice at his back startled him as it said, “Who goes there?”
He raised his hands and turned slowly. “I am nothing, but truth is everything.”
“Put your hands down. You’re embarrassing yourself.” Marcus smiled. “So who said that, Professor? Quote from Shakespeare?”
Allen—a history and literature aficionado—replied, “Actually, it was Abraham Lincoln.”
“I think I’ve heard of him. Beard, big hat.”
Allen chuckled and gave Marcus a slap on the back. “That’s the fellow.” He had accompanied Marcus during his first few months as a Shepherd, and they had grown quite close. He had become accustomed to Marcus’s smart-ass comments and impressed by his skills as an investigator. But the kid still had a lot to learn. “Are you going to invite me in?”
“We’re over here, Professor.” Marcus pointed to the adjacent room. “That room’s just a decoy. I got that one under my name and put this one under Henry Jones, Jr.”
Good lord
, Allen thought again.
The kid really
is
getting paranoid.
As he stepped through the entryway into the adjacent room, he greeted Andrew and admired their accommodations. It was a two-room suite with a front room containing a pull-out couch, two chairs, a mini-fridge, and a flat-screen television. But the boys had shoved the cabinet containing the flat-screen TV into the corner against the wall and replaced it with a state-of-the-art touchscreen display board. Marcus had talked to him about getting one of these shortly after joining the group. The screen was a foldable paper-thin active-matrix organic LED display mounted on a pair of glass shields and silicone rubber—which was a hyper-elastic material that could endure a huge strain from stretching. The technology had been first developed by Samsung but was still in the prototype stages. Allen knew the Director had connections through DARPA—the DOD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—but he had never seen the need to use such technologies in his investigations.
“What happened to my old corkboard?”
Marcus shrugged. “I had Stan burn it. Welcome to the future, Professor.”
Allen let a low growl escape from the back of his throat but then said, “Show me what you have so far.”
“Well, you’ve read the files, so you’re up to speed on most of it. But a few things have been bothering me. First of all, how does the killer know for sure that the victims are sleeping when he enters the house? This guy is a calculator, not a fighter. I just don’t see how he’s never had any kind of a struggle. Second, why does he take them one night and kill them the next?”
Andrew said, “Maybe he wants to keep them for a while, like a collector. He gets off on possessing them, controlling them.”
Marcus chewed on his lower lip as his eyes scanned the various pieces of evidence listed on the display board. His hand reached up and repositioned a couple of the items. “Maybe.”
Andrew rolled his eyes. “Whenever you say
maybe
, you really mean
I don’t think so.
”
Marcus nodded. “Maybe.”
Andrew looked to Allen for support, but he just grinned. It was good to see that not everything had changed in his absence.
Marcus continued. “Something else. The eyes. Why does he need their eyes to be held open? He makes it so that it’s impossible for them to look away.”
“Because he wants them to watch, to see him. Could be that he feels it’s the only time when anyone actually sees him for who he truly is.”
Marcus gave Andrew a large lopsided grin. “Maybe.”
Andrew’s eyes shot daggers in return.
“Marcus, what do you think about the satanic-ritual connection?” Allen said.
“Despite public perception, there are almost no cases of people being murdered in actual satanic rituals. Of course there are the rare delusional individuals who claim that the devil made them commit murder, but that’s really no different from saying that your dog or Elvis made you do it. It’s just another delusion. Still, it’s not outside the realm of possibility for it to be a true satanic cult. But even if there is a cult connection, judging by the consistency of the crime scenes, handwriting analysis on the symbols, and footprints found at the scenes, it’s safe to say that we’re dealing with one offender actually committing the crimes. I had Stan working on the cult angle.”
Marcus tapped an icon in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, and a window containing a circular loading symbol expanded from the bottom of the display. After a few seconds, Stan’s face appeared. “Go for Kung-Fu Master Stan.”
“What have you found on the cult connection?”
“The symbols don’t match anything I could find, and there’s no documented ritual that the killer is following.”
“What about the Circle A?”
“Right. It’s the symbol for anarchy, which earned the killer his nickname in the press after some cop must have leaked a photo of the calling card. The flatfoot probably took the wife and kids to St. Lucia or Aspen or maybe Disney with the money he got from that one. Or maybe the mistress. Ran off with her. That makes for a much better story.”
“Let’s stay on task here, Stan.”
“Gotcha, boss. When I dug deeper, I found a source that says the Circle A can represent the Antichrist as the ultimate bringer of anarchy and the apocalypse.”
Marcus stopped him there. “Okay, I want you to hack into the database of every hospital, psychologist, and therapist in the Chicago area and find any references to the Circle A or anyone believing themselves to be the Antichrist or doing the work of the Antichrist. Also, check for any connections between the Circle A and any satanic groups or individuals. Then I want you to find me an insider who would be willing to talk with us. Someone with their finger on the pulse of the subculture.”
Stan was quiet for a moment. The picture of him on the screen blinked rapidly, and his face scrunched up. “Boss, do you have any idea how many psychologists and therapists there must be in the Chicago area?”
Marcus didn’t hesitate. He crossed his arms over his chest and said, “Two thousand, four hundred and ninety.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“It was on the stats sheets that I had you prepare for me.”
“But how could you possibly remember that?”
Marcus thought about it for a moment. “I actually don’t mem-orize the numbers. I take a mental snapshot of each page and then store the image away in my head. Then I can refer back to it as needed. Just like storing digital pictures in a folder on a computer.”
“Scientists should study your brain, boss.”
“They wouldn’t like what they’d find there.” Marcus glanced at the time on his phone. “Okay, Stan, you’ve got some work to do, and we’re heading out to a briefing with the Jackson’s Grove PD.”
Stan gave a sarcastic little salute and then killed the connection.
Allen said, “We’re going to a briefing?”
Marcus rearranged some of the pieces of evidence on the screen again, and Andrew said, “Yeah, an FBI agent named Vasques invited us last night.”
“The Director told me you had a bit of a run-in with the Bureau.”
“You could say that. Her and Marcus really hit it off.”
Marcus’s gaze didn’t leave the board, and he didn’t rise to the bait. “None of the actual murders have crossed state lines, and they’ve all occurred within the same jurisdiction. Typically, the scenes of killings and dump sites for serial murderers follow consistent spatial patterns, although those patterns are different for each offender. They each have a comfort zone, just like any of us, that surrounds their home base, usually where they live or work. But, statistically, their comfort zones also grow over time as they hone their craft. Not this guy. He’s stretched to all corners of this jurisdiction, but has never left it. Makes me wonder if he’s doing it on purpose for some reason. It also means that the FBI has no real jurisdiction on this case.”
Allen snapped his fingers, and the boys turned to him. He wagged a finger at them. “Vasques. I knew that name sounded familiar. Two detectives named Vasques and Belacourt were the leads on the case when we worked it during the last series of murders.”
Andrew said, “But we never actually got involved with the police during that case. We didn’t start working it until the very last, right before those five women went missing and the killer went dark. By then it was too late to accomplish much.”
“I never met them, but I make it a point to do some background work on the lead detectives in any case that I’m working on. Vasques was a good cop. His work was solid. I actually called in about six months after the case went cold to see if they’d come up with any new leads. I discovered that he’d been killed in a fire. The Anarchist was the last case he worked.”
“That makes sense,” Marcus said. “It seemed to me like our Vasques might have had a personal connection to the case. I think she’s suspicious of our involvement. And she had a bit of a stick up her ass.”
Andrew stared in disbelief at Marcus. “Are you serious? It’s no wonder she’s suspicious of us. You were being a complete jerk to her.”
“I was not.”
“Yes, you were.”
Allen raised both hands to stop them. “Boys, it doesn’t matter now. Let’s just stay out of her way and keep a low profile.”
Andrew chuckled. “That’s not one of Marcus’s strong points.”
Marcus pointed a finger at Andrew and said, “Watch yourself. You’re starting to piss me off with all that. I can play nice as well as anybody.”
Andrew shook his head. “Okay. Whatever.”
Marcus checked the time on his phone again. “We better get going. We don’t want to be late for the briefing.”