“You don’t know,” the girl said, “Oh, Darkness, you don’t know. How could you? What it’s like, night after night…” She was crying now as she lent up against the cold, hard stone, “I don’t think I can handle it anymore. I don’t think I can bear to try. Please, Darkness, don’t make me do this anymore. Let me go. I would give anything, Darkness. You just don’t know.”
- - -
“What was that, Morgan?”
“Huh?” Ariianne Morgan looked up from where she was kneeling in the dewy grass, “I didn’t say anything.”
Molly Selzor wasn’t listening; she had planted her hands on her hips and was glaring at nothing in particular. “What are we doing here?”
“Three different people called in about hearing screaming coming from the graveyard at dawn.”
“Not screaming, a scream,” Molly corrected and rolled her eyes, “This is uniform work. I served my time doing this trash, got my promotion. I’m task force, I chase serial killers, that makes my parents proud, not follow up on some routine kids-in-the-graveyard case.”
“Hamm thinks this case is connected.”
“No, he doesn’t. He thinks we have nothing better to do.”
“You think this case is a lost cause,” Ariianne said, shocked.
“I think we’d solve this case with flying colors if the higher ups stopped wasting our time with pointless crap like this.” Molly snapped her blank notepad closed and stalked off towards the car parked at the bottom of the hill.
“You don’t know,” Ariianne whispered as she ran her fingers over the gravestone, “Why won’t you let me go?” Her eyes followed her fingers down the dark marble to the ground where she stopped. “Selzor!” she called, but Molly had already left. Arii sighed and carefully used her handkerchief to drop her find into an evidence bag.
- - -
“Now that is one silly little girl,” a voice in the darkness cackled.
“Silly girl,” someone echoed.
“But she has gone,” another voice argued.
“She will find no salvation,” answered the first.
“No salvation.”
- - -
“Any luck?” Alexiel Starmen asked as the girls entered the office.
“Shit, Starmen,” Molly explained, “You know as well as I do there was nothing there. Hamm is making fun of us.”
“What happened?”
“Don’t know. Don’t care,” Molly continued, “Not our case.”
“Morgan?” Alexiel asked Arii.
“Crap,” Ariianne confirmed, “May I have a word?” Alexiel nodded and motioned to a small office off to the side of the main room.
“Molly is being a close minded bitch, isn’t she?” Alexiel asked as soon as the door closed.
“How long have you two been partners?” Ariianne asked.
“Two years.”
“Is she always this bad?”
“Sometimes she’s worse, usually she’s a really good cop.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is she’s a close minded bitch. She never jumps to conclusions, never sees anything that isn’t there.”
“But sometimes she refuses to see what is.”
“Morgan,” Alexiel explained, “Sometimes things are what makes the least sense. Molly doesn’t like that. She’d be a better detective if she was willing to see it. What happened out there?”
“I don’t know,” Arii answered.
- - -
“Could it be her?”
“It’s her.”
“Her.”
“Are we sure?”
“Only time will tell.”
“Will tell.”
- - -
“Starmen said that which makes the least sense is sometimes the truth,” Ariianne explained.
Neil Viels just looked confused, “That’s so obvious it actually pains me that you would felt compelled to repeat it.”
“Neil, he said it like it was a lesson, an important lesson.”
“So now you’re taking lessons from Alexiel Starmen?”
“He meant something, something he felt he couldn’t come right out and say.”
“Arii,” Neil said, “you’re my partner so I’m only saying this to protect you. If you’re looking for a mentor skip over Alexiel Starmen.”
“I’m not looking for a mentor. But I am curious what your problem with Starmen is.”
“I don’t have a problem with him,” Neil explained. He turned back to his computer and began typing something in.
“What are you doing?”
“Just give me a second to pull this up.”
“Is that Starmen’s record?” Ariianne asked, “Should we be looking at this?”
“Probably not. But look, he’s been under bureau investigation three times in five years.”
“That’s impressive. What was he being looked into for?”
“This isn’t in his file but I have it from a very reliable source,” Neil explained, “the first two times were for possible schizophrenic paranoia.”
“The department thinks he’s crazy. But clearly not crazy enough to fire. Just crazy enough to put on a badly funded task force in a position that doesn’t see a lot of action,” Arii pondered, “What was the third.”
“Cult connections, but I’ll get there in a second, this is juicy. Both times the investigation was prematurely dropped. Someone high up came to his rescue.”
“Someone wants him here. Or at least behind a badge. Does his record say what prompted the investigation or why exactly it was halted?”
“They’re sealed. My sources aren’t that good.”
“Is the third investigation sealed?” Arii asked.
“Now’s when it gets good,” Neil hit a few keys on his computer and pulled up a scan of an internal police memo, “Year before last…”
“This was before I joined, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah. But this buzz started around the office, something about this crazy cult that was trying to take over the department. Huge investigation. Starmen was investigated.”
“Too big for someone to come to his rescue.”
“Not quite. The plot actually thickens. Alexiel Starmen’s father was killed three days before his son was fingered as a cult member. Turns out Daddy Dearest was a well respected and high ranking senior officer.”
“He was being rescued by Daddy? Wow,” Ariianne followed.
“I know. How tacky.”
“But even though no one saved him Starmen didn’t go down.”
“What makes you think that?” Neil asked.
“He’s still here, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, but actually, he went down. Turns out he had strong connections with a group called Triton that happened to be on the bureau’s no-no list.”
“What is Triton? What do they do?” Arii asked.
“That’s the kicker, no one knows.”
“Something must have put them on the watch list. Eating children? Religious connections Helter Skeltor? Bombing abortion clinics? Nothing?”
“Nothing. The identified members seemed to be, for the most part, upstanding citizens with very few criminal infractions.”
“Yet being a member of Triton still gets you in hot water. At least in the police department.”
“Not just in the department. Before long the paranoia spread. Soon these seemingly random people who had no connection other than all being members of Triton were being fingered. Most of them lost their jobs, their family, lose everything. Then people started getting killed.”
“Just like now.”
“Careful,” Neil warned, “You’re making connections where there are none. And, no, not like now. These dead people were all members of Triton. And they didn’t turn up dead a lot of them, they mob killed.”
“Let me get this straight. For no apparent reason the police start investigating Triton, then identified members start losing their jobs, still for no apparent reason, and then start getting killed by mobs? Still for no apparent reason? Department must have had some serious explaining to do on that one.”
“No one made a move for two weeks.”
“Two weeks?” Arii repeated, “You’re kidding.”
“36 dead. Over a dozen injured. How’s that for an egg on the face?”
“That’s like three attacks a night.”
“Finally someone stepped up and started ordering hand selected armed guards to walk the streets,” Neil continued, “Then fired police officers were rehired in hopes that the show of support and acceptance would cull the paranoia.”
“Did it?”
“Killings stopped.”
“Are you telling me this because you think there’s something wrong with Starmen or are you being sneaky and think this Triton thing is connected to our case?” Ariianne asked.
“Sometimes I almost forget how smart you are. But none of the victims this time around seem to have had any connection with Triton.”
“Then why do you think they’re connected?”
“I don’t, really. But these murders all seem very calculated, studied.”
“Serial killers have been known to study their prey. Memorize every detail before striking.”
“Check out Behavioral Science 101. But these killings are happening close to every night, not a lot of time to do the close study most organized serial killers favor.”
“So they’re highly organized yet rapid fire and seemingly random. Does sound odd. And you think this is somehow related to the Triton incident two years ago.”
“Starmen seems to be taking this case very personally, have you noticed?” Neil asked.
“You think he thinks they’re connected.”
“Don’t worry so much about what other people think. Worry about what you know.”
“What does that even mean?”
“No member of Triton ever admitted why they were being hunted.”
“What does that mean?”
“Triton being killed wasn’t an accident. Somehow the police were able to track down a good number of the members despite not even knowing what Triton was. But I’ll bet my life that, even if they don’t know who was behind it, the surviving members of the group know why.”
“Maybe another group like Triton is being killed only this time whoever is behind it isn’t doing it publicly.”
“It’s a possibility.”
“You really think these cases are connected,” Arii confirmed, “If not by victim then by killer or motive.”
“I think it’s a possibility and one that we can’t really exclude without the help of Alexiel Starmen.”
“Why don’t you tell him your suspicions?”
“Because he doesn’t like me.”
“But me.”
“But you,” Neil agreed, “You’re a young officer with no prejudices about the past. And he’s already shown that he likes you at least a little.”
“Fine. I’ll find out if Starmen knows anything about this case but I will not go after him for information just because you’re curious about what happened.”
“I would love to know what prompted a mass killing that gives a good number of executed serial killers a run for their kill counts but it means more to me to stop it from happening again.”
- - -
All contents on this and any other page on Complications is the intellectual property of Rebecca Moses.
