Jackson 05 - The Immortals Read Online Free

need to get out ahead of it. The media is going to have a field day.”
    She heard finger snapping in the background—Huston getting some unwary soul’s attention. “Thank you, Lieutenant. Go to it.”
    She closed the phone. Baldwin put a hand on her shoulder. Her team was already responding, people being gathered into manageable knots, patrol cars stationed at the corners of Estes and Woodmont, blocking access to the street. She could hear more sirens coming closer, the response almost immediate. She looked at Baldwin. His eyes were dark in the gloom.
    â€œSatanists murdering people is something for urban legends, not Nashville,” she said.
    â€œI agree. I find it hard to believe, but it is Halloween.”
    â€œMeaning?”
    â€œWhat better time to try and spook people with occult images?”
    Taylor shook her head. “Someone wanted to send a message. This was a coordinated plan of attack. It takes a level of sophistication to pull off multiple murders. Let’s just see what we can find out.”

Three
    C ontrolling the bedlam only took half an hour, which was incredible, considering. Taylor had set up a temporary headquarters on the street in front of the King house. She’d assigned each of her team a role managing a group of patrols on their specific tasks. She had officers interviewing every person who tried to enter the area, getting addresses and finding out if they had children. Those who did were passed into a secondary control—do you know where your children are? If the child couldn’t be reached by phone, the address was marked and a team sent out. A fourth group of patrol officers were responding to the 911 calls and reporting in their findings.
    The body count was up to seven, in five separate houses. She could only pray that they’d discovered all the victims.
    Four females and three males, all between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, were dead. It quickly became apparent that all of the victims attended Hillsboro High School—so far no students from any of the multiple private schools or the robust homeschool network in the area had been reported missing or deceased.
    Two crime scenes held multiple victims—a couple involved in a sexual interlude, a condom still on the tip of the boy’s penis, and two girls hanging out for the afternoon, their physics books on the floor, the scene scattered with USMagazine, People and Cosmopolitan. Half studying, half gossiping.
    The neighborhood wasn’t pleased with her identification system, but she couldn’t figure out a more efficient way to determine the breadth and depth of the situation. She had to show a calm face, a force, a presence. She needed to be composed and reasonable. She’d been trained to handle major emergencies, and she was exercising her training to the fullest. They had the situation under control.
    A little voice in the back of her head kept screaming—you might be missing him, you might be letting the killer get away with more—but second-guessing herself wasn’t going to make things better. Once they’d determined that the primary event was over, they could start putting the pieces together.
    The first victim found, Jerrold King, had been dead for at least a couple of hours. Taylor was working on the premise that the murders had taken place sometime between 12:30 p.m. and 3:00 p.m. School had let out at noon, the first body was found at 3:00 p.m. Assuming the victims had attended the half day of school this morning, she had an initial framework to follow.
    She shuddered, thinking about the methodical staging, and wished she could fast-forward a day so she had an idea of what killed them. Drugs of some kind—the cyanosis and pinpoint pupils pointed to an overdose—something they had all ingested or injected. She was having dark thoughts about mass suicides. But that couldn’t explain the pentacles, could it? Could seven teenagers all