The Night Serpent

God have mercy on them, the poor innocent beasts, she thought. She wasn’t much for religion—going to church had always left her feeling more empty than fulfilled, and her brief foray into Buddhism during college wasn’t much better, but there had to be someone who looked after those so ill used….

She swallowed hard against the surge of emotion, willing herself into professional behavior. Thankfully, some coolly analytical portion of her brain came forward, sorting the scene into dry facts, something she could process, the way she handled numbers at her day job at the bank. All right then. Aggie wanted her here for some reason. She knew cats. So she would study the cats.

Seven bodies, all spotted tabbies, their silver, gray and white coats covered with black thumbprint-size spots, tails striped with wide black marks. Young, male. Not at their full growth yet, they weren’t, with tails too long for their bodies and ears too large for their heads. There was a slice across each throat, a puddle of red underneath where each one had bled out. Where had the blood on the walls come from, then? How much blood was in a single cat, multiplied by seven?

No, don’t go there. Keep the thoughts all clinical, detached, distanced, and unreal. Safe. Like counting out money, entering numbers. Important but not emotional. Not anything that could make her chest hurt for the horror of it. Lily was good at being practical, at making the world make sense, especially when it didn’t. She only wished she’d had more sleep last night.

The headache was back, sneaking up like a bully with bad intent, and Lily wished she had taken her own car, which had painkillers stashed in the glove compartment. She reached up to rub the ache between her eyes, allowing her concentration to slip.

That was a mistake: the separate details clicked into a whole picture, the smell and texture and reality of it slamming into her. Wrongwrongwrongwrong! A sheen of red to match the blood on the floor and walls rose over her vision, and her hands shook until she clenched them together. Someone had done this to cats—to kittens.

The headache was swamped, disappearing under the onrush of rage. Anyone—anything—that could do that needed to be stopped. Punished.

She felt someone coming up behind her, the heavy tread and swish of wool uniform slacks telling her who it was even before the smell of stale cigarette smoke that hung around him reached her, mingling with the smell of blood and meat and, oddly, settling her stomach before she even realized that it was upset.

“What do you need me to do?” she asked Petrosian, not taking her eyes off the scene. If he heard the rage in her voice, either he had been counting on it, or he didn’t want to call attention to it, because he didn’t flinch or make any movement to try to soothe her.

“I don’t know,” he said instead. “I’m hoping you can tell me. Tell us what’s going on. What happened here.”

She looked over her shoulder, then looked back at the cats, and then up at the ceiling, which, she noted now, had been painted black. The paint looked oddly flat, under the fluorescent lights, as though it had been meant to reflect softer, kinder lights. None of the blood had reached that high, she noted. “Other than animal abuse?”

“That much we got. But that’s Patrick’s problem, what he’s here to study. What I want you to take a look at is back here.” Petrosian’s thick-fingered hand came down on her shoulder, steering her past the grisly tableau, the only apology for putting her through this that he could give her, the only one she would accept.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Agent Patrick kneeling by the bodies, pulling on a pair of latex gloves before reaching out to touch one of the kittens gently.

He looked up and met her gaze. A spark seemed to jump between them, invisible electricity that she felt through the palms of her hands, running like a ribbon of warmth all the way to her feet.

He looked away first, and in another place, another time, she might have felt a flush of feminine triumph. But not here.

There was another room behind the first one, and that was where the smell was coming from. Ten mesh cages, each one with a water dish—most dry—and spilled dry kibble. A small plastic box in each, half filled with uncleaned litter.

“Nobody touched anything once we found it. How many cats, Lily? How many cats were here? Tell me what this guy was doing with them.”

Usually she had to listen to the cat’s vocalizations, watch its body language, before she got a read on the situation, on how it had been treated. Not this time. This time it came out of the empty space, swarming her, almost knocking her over.

Crowded. Anticipation. Fear. Hunger. Lust.

Even without the cats, she could feel the emotion still in the room, could almost hear them meowing, scratching at the wires of their cages, scratching at the metal floors, the rasping of their tongues as they tried to keep fur clean and claws sharp…Not a bad dream. Not something she could block, ignore or forget.

She gagged at the strength of the knowledge, forcing the words out carefully. “More than ten. More than…there were kittens here. Litters.”

That was the smell she had picked up, even over the blood and shit. Pheromones. The scent of a female cat in heat. The thought made her ill, where the killings had only made her angry.

“He was breeding them. This wasn’t just storage, it was a cattery.”

“Go, do your thing,” Petrosian had said to him when they got out of the car. The cop hadn’t said it rudely, or mockingly, the way some did; more along the lines of “you do your thing and I’ll do my more productive thing.” Profiling was still looked at sideways and suspiciously by a lot of folk, especially outside the agency. Hell, Patrick knew that he occupied a strange sort of niche within the FBI hierarchy itself: he had a master’s in psychology, but he had never been interested in profiling, preferring to play a more active role in chasing down criminals. He might have had a very traditional career; fieldwork landing him in a desk job leading him all the way to retirement and possibly a teaching job after that, except that during his second year in the field he had discovered in himself an odd fascination for—and affinity for solving—a particular kind of crime, specifically animal mutilations, and the criminals who perpetrated them. Those acts, along with a few others, often heralded the beginning career of a serial killer.

A profiler got into the head of an unsub—bureauspeak for an unknown subject of an investigation. He tried to feel where they were going, mentally and emotionally, and sense how close they were to breaking out to human victims. Patrick was less interested in what went on in their heads than in the end result; the instinctive reaction response to that internal stimulus. His skill might have ended up simply as a side talent, except that he was very very good at finding those patterns, even where none seemed to exist. And so, whenever a case with certain elements—domestic animals, ritualistic injury—came up in the reports, the agency tapped him to immediately take a look. Catch an unsub when he was still targeting animals, and save human lives later.

That was the theory, anyway. There was no quantitative proof either way. It could all be hand-waving and luck.

Patrick had, in self-defense, come up with his own theories about sociopaths and the making thereof. Forget the psychology, the biochemistry, the sociology. Jon Patrick was a believer in intent. Not that someone chose to be a stone-cold killer, but that they always had a trigger, something to make all the parts come together from where they lay latent in every single human being.

He focused on the ritual aspect rather than the actual violence—violence was universal in the end, while the steps chosen to get there were individual. Identify a strain of ritual, and determine where that particular mind might go, criminally. Find the pattern break the pattern and prevent a killer from being born.

The problem was that, without enough distinct data points to prove or disprove his ideas, he couldn’t get anyone to take them seriously. And being taken seriously was what Agent Jon T. Patrick was all about. Being taken seriously, and getting serious results.

He was damn good at his job, though, and even if his ideas were unsubstantiated, his results were getting him some notice at higher levels; the bureau cared less about theory than they did about getting results they could use. The suits back in D.C. were marking him as a player of note, and Patrick had goals above and beyond being a field agent with nightmare memories and a passable retirement package at the end. Ambition, to him, wasn’t a dirty word.

His career, if he didn’t screw up, was looking good. It was all good.

This, though…this wasn’t good. He made a circuit of the scene, aware of the technician taking additional photographs and jotting down measurements, observations and verified facts. Good—he would need the daylight shots, too. He knelt beside the small, still bodies, careful not to disturb the black cloth or the blood splatter around it, and pulled a pair of latex gloves from a pocket, sliding them onto his hands His last girlfriend had referred to them as fingercondoms. He had been amused by that: a pity that had been the extent of her sense of humor.

“Poor moggies,” he said again, reaching out to touch one of the bodies. The flesh was firm even in death, meat and muscle over the ribs. The cats hadn’t been abused before being killed. Small mercies. But that put a different spin on the scene, and his unsub. Usually animals were tortured before they were killed. It was all about power in most cases. Power, control, authority. To kill animals that, although helpless, were undamaged, especially in such a methodical, almost ritualistic manner? All it lacked was an athame—a ritual knife—and some candles, and the press would be screaming black magic.

He didn’t believe in magic, black, white, pink or polka-dot. He did believe in the power of belief, though. Believe something, and you could take power from it. Believe in it strongly enough, and it took power over you.

Normal people with normal emotions didn’t kill small cute cuddly animals. This killer was bent at best, and possibly a textbook sociopath, working his way up to more of a challenge.

Despite the violence inherent in the act, though, Patrick got the feeling that this guy wasn’t acting out of unformed rage or irrational fear. He wasn’t striking out in any desperate attempt to be heard, or regain control or any of the usual textbook profiles. There was a cooler, more rational mind behind this. A mind with a list, maybe, or a plan.

Intent. What was his intent? What triggered him to take cats, care for them, kill them, arrange them this way and then just leave them here?

“Is this guy just your everyday boring psychonutter,” he said, sitting back on his heels and looking at the bodies. “Or is there something else going on? And if so, what? Where is he coming from, that this is a logical progression?”

What he wouldn’t give to be able to talk to this guy, to unpack his brain and see where the wires went and which ones were crossed….

A noise behind him made him look away, up and toward the door to the backroom. Petrosian and the woman—Malkin—were coming back. The cop looked a little grim around the mouth, issuing soft-voiced directions to the painfully young uniform who had been first on the scene. Ms. Malkin—he tried to read her expression, and failed utterly. It was as though a stone wall had come up, leaving him no opening to see through. Even his charm might not be enough to win her back, if he needed her help with this case.

Then she looked up, and he almost recoiled. Even under the fluorescent lights overhead, there was no mistaking the fury in those wide-set eyes. He had never bought into that whole cliché of flashing or sparkling eyes—eyes were just bits of meat and veins, and they did not shoot anything except glares.

But he would have sworn an oath that Ms. Lily Malkin’s hazel eyes filled with dangerous green sparks as she stared at the dead cats under his hand.

It was scary. It was also, he admitted to himself, pretty damn hot.

Chapter 2 (#ub713b0f2-da7b-54f5-9bab-86e2d37b35da)

Lily had gone outside to get some fresh air. She was waiting there, watching the cops canvassing the neighborhood, when Patrick and Petrosian finally came out. It was close to 4:00 p.m., and dusk was falling. She loved winter, but getting to it…Autumn just depressed her. She shivered, crossing her arms over her chest, less from the evening chill than the inner one. The spark of attraction that had warmed her earlier was long gone.

She tilted her head, looking for the first evening star. It was an old habit from her childhood, stargazing. But no matter how many times she looked, however much she read about constellations, the sky never seemed quite right to her, the ancient drawings in the sky never familiar. She kept looking, hoping that one night the patterns would suddenly make sense to her. They never did. They didn’t tonight.

“Sorry, took longer than I expected,” Petrosian said, breaking her concentration. “I just need you to give a report, and then you’re done. Okay?”

Normally she did whatever they needed her to do, and went home, or took the cats involved to the shelter for processing. This was different. Everything about this was different. Knowing that there were people who were cruel, who could do things like that; it was different actually seeing it. Experiencing it.

It made her ingrained distrust of the world suddenly seem like a good idea, not a handicap.

“Lily?” Petrosian was watching her, his careworn face filled with regret. “I’m sorry. I needed you to go in without any knowledge beforehand….” He had apologized more to her tonight than in all the time they had known each other.