It was another cold, dark, rainy day. The sun may not shine for weeks in Washington but at least the winter weather was predictable in its awfulness. The wind and rain were light today thankfully, a steady drizzle that had been falling for what felt like days and weeks on end. Heavier rains could cause enough flooding in the valley to do damage which was the biggest concern here in terms of winter weather. Kaitlin stopped next to the small window, rolling down her car window and exposing her black leather interior to droplets of moisture.
“The usual today?” The barista inside the coffee cart asked her.
The young woman had purple hair and piercings all across her face, a stark contrast to her warm and sweet personality. Kaitlin always stopped at this same coffee cart even though there was literally one every other block here. She was a creature of habit. The baristas knew her order - triple Americano with one scoop of white mocha powder and cream.
“Please.” Kaitlin responded, offering the girl her punch card and debit card.
Kaitlin was on her way to speak to the coroner about the girl they’d found last week. The autopsy was finally complete and Dr. Lee was ready to run through the report of her findings. Kaitlin knew she’d need some caffeine in order to wake herself up enough for this meeting. The crime had been gruesome and the long days of the past week had been difficult.
She’d worked late that night, looking through every piece of the scene. She had a team of uniforms scour the entire area and bag anything that could even possibly be worth evidentiary value. In all honesty, she had never seen an attack so vicious and she wasn’t exactly sure what she was looking at. She figured she’d rather be safe than sorry so she had them bag anything and everything. Her instinct told her this crime was personal. Her legs had been spread wide, exposing her genitalia, suggesting the offender wanted to humiliate her. The amount of effort the perp put in to torturing, mutilating, destroying the victim was horrific. Part of Kaitlin worried that the perp they were looking for might be the devil himself. The mountain of evidence would take the lab weeks, if not months to sift through.
The most troubling part of the scene to Kaitlin had been the symbol carved into the victims flesh. Some type of very sharp instrument had been used to carve a hook with a cross at the end, intersected with a semi circle into the victims chest. Kaitlin had asked the coroner to try her best to determine if it had been done pre or post mortem but she hadn’t received the report. Something about the symbol shook Kaitlin to her core, but she wasn’t quite sure why.
Some of the evidence had led to immediate discoveries thankfully. Lack of blood at the scene told them that it was a dump job - she’d been killed somewhere else and then left there to rot on the side of the road. Additionally, the victims wallet had been discarded nearby the body. Her license was still inside, leading them to the name of their victim.
Her victim was Allison Clarke, a 26 year old school teacher. Kaitlin had learned that the victim was a local girl. Allison had grown up in a Seattle suburb before attending UW where she received a degree in secondary education. She married into a wealthy family shortly after graduating and worked as a high school teacher in Bellingham. Her husband, Brody, worked at the family business, a very successful string of companies ranging from local brew pubs to petrol distribution. The Clarkes were well known around town, their family money having earned them recognition after several generations of successful patriarchs bought up more and more stake in the town. Bellingham wasn’t a small town but it wasn’t a large one either. Everyone here seemed to be connected to everyone else in some way or another. The “Seattle Freeze” extended this far North, keeping outsiders away for the most part. She’d learned her victim was well liked by pretty much everyone. She was loved by her family and friends, her students respected and liked her, no one seemed to have a bad word to say about her.
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There were so far no red flags in Allison’s life so far. She seemed to be living a happy, quiet life as a successful and well liked teacher. But this crime was personal. Someone must have wanted Allison dead. Kaitlin’s best lead right now was the first murder, the Dubois case. It seemed too much of a coincidence that two young women who worked at the same school would both be murdered and it not be related. Problem was that one mysterious and unsolved murder wasn’t a great lead for a second mysterious murder.
The mother had positively identified Allison’s body, breaking down into uncontrollable cries of anguish at the sight. Allison’s father had died years ago and she’d been an only child. KaitlSince then the mother had called every single day to ask if they knew what happened to her child and every single time Kaitlin had felt her guts twist into uncomfortable knots when she told the woman no. Hopefully today would bring her closer to answers for this mother.
Kaitlin held out her hand to retrieve her cards and coffee from the barista before rolling back up her window and putting her car in gear. She drove off towards the coroner’s office while sipping her coffee. The drink seared her tongue, but she didn’t notice, her mind was elsewhere.
******
“Pierce, give us an update.” Her captain’s voice was gruff, abrasive. Everyone was on edge with this case.
They were sitting in the large conference room within the station. This room had become the command center for the case. The victim was cute, white, affluent and a teacher - a recipe for a media circus. The press had been breathing down their necks since the morning after the body was discovered. There was a lot of pressure to solve this case, and soon. The story had started to be picked up by some national news outlets. Her captain was becoming more and more impatient with each passing day as more and more press descended on the town. They were all camped right outside, hounding them for information as they entered the station.
“Not much to report yet unfortunately. I meet with the coroner this afternoon and I am still waiting to hear back from the experts.”
She’d sent pictures of the carving on the victim out to experts on ancient civilizations and societies, hoping someone could identify it. She hadn’t heard anything back yet from any of them. Apparently the academics were busy.
“Are we thinking this is a cult like thing?”
Detective Barnes, one of the old timers of the department, asked. He was well past retirement age Kaitlin was pretty sure but refused to leave. He spent pretty much every day with his ass glued to his desk seat. She didn’t know the last time she’d seen him go out into the field.
“No, I don’t think so.” Kaitlin responded.
Immediately there had been whispers on the scene about cults and satanic rituals, Kaitlin suspected it was due to the carved into the victim. Thankfully the press hadn’t gotten wind of that yet. If they did it would be a complete shit show. The satanic cult sacrifice angle was one the press loved to spin, it captured some part of the public imagination that was secretly fascinated with the dark and macabre.
During the late eighties and nineties America went through what was coined the “Satanic Panic.” Satanic cults were blamed for hundreds of crimes, some weren’t even real. A string of “repressed memories” were recovered, using now defunct psychology, that exposed supposed town wide satanic cults. Some of the claims went as far as to state that entire towns full of respected community members were raping, torturing and then sacrificing young children. The problem was that there was no evidence, in fact, the actual evidence proved many of the claims could t have been true.
Kaitlin did not think this case had anything to do with cults of sacrifices. She was almost certain that this was a crime of revenge and passion. It was personal. As far as she knew, there weren’t any murder cases in America that had actually been definitively linked to Satanic cult rituals and sacrifices. It was all media hype and the dark imagination of our fucked up society.
The symbol was mysterious though. Kaitlin didn’t know what it meant, but she was certain that it was an important clue. She was as certain that if she found the origin of the symbol it would lead her to the perpetrator.
Deep down, past the rational and logical part of her brain a nagging voice worried that the experts would come back and say that this symbol was something dark - a mark made by the devil himself.