Missings, The by Peg Brantley Read Free Book Online

the departmental loop to check on any active cults in the area. This kind of mutilation was often connected with cults—for good reason. Cattle mutilations in Colorado went back for hundreds of years. Usually they were connected to kids practicing some kind of cult activity. Nothing showed up on the LEO site. He wasn’t surprised. Maybe he could find something coming at it sideways. He turned to the internet. Google didn’t exist simply for the idly curious. It had become a tool for law enforcement as well.
    When he searched “cult,” he got a whopping fourteen million hits. He revised his search to “cult mutilation.” Twenty minutes later he’d printed out several documents related to cattle mutilation and a couple regarding something he hadn’t thought of earlier. Covens.
    Witches? Really? Chase made a call to the college. He learned about a registered coven on the campus, got the contact information, and made an appointment with their representative. What exactly made him think college would be a good option for his daughters to continue their education?
    Chase had to admit he got kind of a creepy feeling when the websites he’d pulled up had things like Satan worshippers as part of the FAQs. The normal-looking websites somehow gave credence to the whole concept and made him worry for the sake of the casual searcher. He made a mental note to block these from Angela and Stephanie’s shared computer.
    After he felt like he had a rudimentary knowledge, he decided to check the county law enforcement site for anything related to his cases.
    He typed in “mutilation” and felt an electrical shock. Two cases popped up from the previous summer. Could this be right? Data errors happened in the best of circumstances—the output was only as accurate as the input—and he needed to confirm this information.
    The cases were county, not city. Chase vaguely remembered hearing something about them last year, but he’d been working an exceptionally difficult case where one child had killed another child. At the time, he didn’t have any room for a couple of county cases he couldn’t possibly solve in his brain.
    Chase had worked with the county sheriff’s office more than once and he picked up his phone and called Jerry Coble. The sheriff had gone home for the day but the operator remained gracious and said she’d relay his name and contact information. Chase thanked her, reiterated the importance of the call, and assured her he would be available whenever Sheriff Coble had the time.
    The autopsy reports from the two earlier DBs were laid open on Chase’s desk. Information from his cult research lay next to them. It didn’t feel right. He went back to the internet.
    One posting caught his attention. Mutilated corpses were found in Mexico and determined to be ritualistic sacrifices to invoke blessings for a drug cartel. The religion of Santeria justified the carnage. All of his victims were Hispanic. Could there be a connection between them and a cartel?
    The dark corners of the room seemed to grow darker, leeching the color from the rest of the space. Chase had dealt with the manifestation of evil often during his career. He could hope to do something about evil he could see and touch, but this unseen evil crawled up the scale to a hundred times worse. And he had no control over it.
    He read a little more, then needed to stop. When he reached for some licorice the bag was empty.
    Chase pressed a number on his phone and waited.
    Bond’s voice warmed his heart. “Hey, hon. What’s up? You on your way home?”
    He inhaled as if he could catch her familiar musky scent nearby. “Just needed to hear your voice. I’m going to be here another hour or so.”
    “You want me to let the kids wait up?”
    He laughed. His wife knew that "another hour or so" could easily turn in to three or four or seven. “I’ll be home by nine. Promise,” he said. “Love you.”
    “I love you too.”
    Ready now to deal with more evil,