Groups of students moved about here and there, walking through the courtyard or lounging in the sun. Griffin could overhear some of the chatter. Young men and women talked about different subjects, many of them animatedly.
“I wish I could help you. I love Alex—such a great guy. He gets so excited about any kind of knowledge.” She turned and looked at Griffin, and he thought again that she was just so incredibly beautiful; she should have been floating above the ground, rather than tethered to a wheelchair. “I do worry that something is very, very wrong. He doesn’t miss class. He has family, but they’re not in the area right now, and he wouldn’t just disappear to go for a visit, anyway. He loves art shows and good music venues. He’s not a drinker. He loves coffeehouses, although he will go to a neighborhood bar for some good music. He’s a great friend. He...” She hesitated and shrugged. “He has always treated me with the utmost respect. I don’t know where to tell you to look. He has his apartment—he has his spots around the city. Here, a coffee shop by Faneuil Hall, an Italian restaurant just across the highway. If he were going to be away from Boston, I think he would have told me. It would be something that he had planned. I’m... I’m very afraid for him!” she finished.
Griffin stood. He reached into his pocket and produced one of his cards again.
Every once in a while, people actually thought of something that they hadn’t said—and they did call him.
He hesitated, thinking about Vickie’s dream of the night before.
“Does Alex ever go...to the country. Is there anywhere he loves where there are forest paths, anything like that?”
“Alex?” she asked. “Not on purpose! Roughing it to Alex would be a roadside motel instead of a Hyatt or Hilton.”
“Thanks,” he said. He started to walk away.
“‘Hell’s afire and Satan rules, the witches, they were real. The time has come, the rites to read, the flesh, ’twas born to heal. Yes, Satan is coming!’”
He turned back around. Lacy Callahan had just repeated the quote word for word.
She looked at him. “There was a place called Jehovah, once upon a time.” She shrugged. “There was also an incident—besides the Lizzie Borden case—out in Fall River. Those words were taken from the distant past once before.”
“You think that Alex has been taken somewhere else. By cultists.”
“It’s what you think, too, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said softly. “Yes, it is. Professor, thank you again.”
Griffin hurried on. His phone was ringing. He glanced at the caller ID.
Vickie.
He could almost feel her anxiety, as if it was part of his special ring for her.
He answered the phone.
“There’s a real witch out there, Griffin!” she announced over the line. “Seriously—I think she drugged him and then she kidnapped him. And she doesn’t even seem to be real.”
“What?” he asked.
“Audrey Benson. She doesn’t even really exist. Devin had the social security number she was using called in to headquarters—Audrey Benson with that number died in 1958! And her address—she’d have to been living a hundred feet deep in a shipwreck or something. Griffin, I think that Devin and I found out a very scary truth. There’s no question anymore. Alex has definitely been kidnapped.”
4
Kidnapped...
Vickie’s words kept repeating in Griffin’s mind as he looked over records.
Missing: Carly Sanderson, twenty-three, college student from Barre, Massachusetts...
Missing: Natasha Jacoby, twenty, day care worker, New Haven, Connecticut...
Missing: Lawrence “Larry” Meyers, twenty-six, construction worker, Ware, Massachusetts...
Missing: Taylor Genera, twenty-five, hostess, Fall River...
The list went on, and it was long.
Griffin had done a search that encompassed the last several years. There were at least twenty-three cases of young people gone missing in the general area—who had never been found. They included not just those who hailed from New England, but those who had been visiting Massachusetts or a neighboring state when they had vanished.
He drummed his fingers on his desk. Cult activity wasn’t usually so hidden. Mainly, of course, because it was hard to hide a community that might include dozens of people. There was usually some kind of compound, and a charismatic leader who drew in lots of followers. There was nothing like that on the FBI’s radar lately. These people who were listed had been reported as missing to the police. They all seemed to have vanished.
Darryl Hillford had not been reported as missing.
Maybe no one had cared enough to report him—and maybe that was why he had clung to a leader or philosophy that demanded self-sacrifice should he be caught.
Why? What a waste, what a waste of human life!
And he hadn’t been able to stop it!
Griffin was in a spare office at the Bureau offices at 1 Central Plaza. Barnes and Rocky were due to meet him here.
Vickie was still with Devin; they were also on their way in. Vickie was going to describe the pretty brunette waitress who had been using a social security number stolen from a dead woman to a forensic artist.
There was a tap on the door; Rocky stuck his head in.
“Anything?” Griffin asked.
Rocky walked in and took a seat in a chair in front of the desk.
“Okay, I didn’t get much from the officer who’d been Alex’s protection detail. Our friend Mr. Maple went to work, went home, made it very easy for the cops. He liked Alex very much. He was smart, friendly—and always bringing coffee out to him when they were watching his place. His main entertainment was going to the café by Faneuil Hall.”
“Vickie and Devin are headed here from the café, to get a sketch made of a waitress who was working there under a false identity. She’s disappeared, it seems.”
“Alex is gone...this waitress is gone. A man died last night.” Rocky lifted his hands. “And someone is spouting Satanism.”
“I’ve been pulling up state records,” Griffin said. “Finding all kinds of young people who are missing. I feel like we have a bunch of puzzle pieces and I can’t figure out how they go together. We have Alex missing. We have the attacks. We have a young man who committed suicide rather than be arrested. It’s crazy—he wouldn’t have been up for murder. The victims didn’t die.”
“No, they didn’t die,” Rocky murmured. “And you think that the attacks were just a cry for attention by someone out there?”
“Or a way to divert attention,” Griffin said. “That’s why I’d really love to start looking into some of these disappearances. Check with authorities in Barre, Ware and other places. Maybe some of the missing persons have joined a cult—and some have been victims of a cult.” He hesitated. “Last night, Vickie had a terrible nightmare. She heard her name being called, and she walked through a forest and found...”
“Alex?”
“No, a woman hanging upside down on an inverted cross, her throat slit. There was water nearby, and the water was running red with blood.”
“Has she had dreams like this before? You know, Griffin, that a lot of us have had vivid dreams that seem to be messages from somewhere else,” Rocky said. “When I was a kid, I thought I heard a friend calling me. I followed the voice. There was a reason I was being called. In my case, I had to grow up, join the Bureau, come back to Salem and meet Devin to find out why and bring it all to rights. I say that whatever Vickie saw could be our best clue at the moment.”
“I agree,” Griffin murmured. “I’m not sure where to start out. Follow up on missing-persons cases, I’m thinking. Maybe we should head to Fall River. That’s where a Satanic cult used the saying in the 1800s—and again in the late 1970s. We could start there.”
“You said that in Vickie’s dream, the water ran red. So we’re also looking for water,” Rocky said.
“We have water just about everywhere from the Atlantic to the Quabbin and through a zillion rivers and lakes in between.”
“True.”
“Yes,” Griffin said. “But I think you’re right. We trace it on back to the source.”
*