Beyond The Chaos Gate

2 THE SECOND CASE

2 THE SECOND CASE

Another one,” said Special Agent Garret when a police officer reported another of the unusual multiple homicides in their little One-Horse Town of Holden, Texas. This small town had no homicides for the last twenty years, until three days ago.

April 7, 2019

Now the town had two multiple murders in three days. The strange thing is that both crime scenes shared the same Modus Operandi. They both had the distinct feature of decapitated murder victims.

According to the uniform, this death scene featured five victims, all members of the McIntire family. The first crime scene had only three victims, again a family on the other side of town. It was time to make his appearance at the scene.

Garret drove the short distance to the McIntire home and ducked under the crime scene tape before entering the house. The situation that greeted him strained his usual composed and unemotional demeanor. Seeing the agent on site, one of the uniforms met with him to fill Garret in on the details of the murders.

Garret wiped his brow and wished that he could erase his memories of this crime scene as quickly. A family friend had found all five members of the McIntire family in the kitchen of their Ranch House this morning, all of them missing their heads.

The horror of the missing heads was just a warm-up for the main course of details. Where the heads should be, someone had grafted the bodies of cephalopods, specifically Octopuses in their place. The term 'grafted' was being used to describe the situation because, while the Octopus bodies were initially sewn onto the necks, the two bodies were also growing together in some manner that nobody could explain. It was as if the bodies would become a single body in time.

Garret had arrived at the scene about an hour ago. Everyone who saw the state of the family felt a mixture of nausea and mystery. The two teenagers with their heads replaced by Cephalopods were bad enough. The three-year-old girl was far worse.

The door of the residence was standing open so that the Forensic team and detectives could come and go freely. Beyond the door, Garret could see shade trees, and hear the birds chirping their greetings to what little sunlight survived the drizzling morning rain.

An intense atmosphere of despair pervaded this sunny morning. The situation could get anyone down, but this feeling seemed to be a force that was external to the minds of the people present at the residence.

"Agent Garret," Officer Craton started. "As far as I can tell, the McIntires were all killed as they sat down to breakfast. If I were going to guess, I would say that they were sacrificed in some sort of ritual killing."

"That theory is as good as any," Garret returned. "Has anyone formed an opinion about the location of the heads?" That was one of the more troubling pieces of this puzzle. What would anyone use five severed heads for, and who would be sick enough to do any of this? Why replace them with the Octopi bodies?

All around the house, the interior walls were decorated with a tracery drawn in blood, presumably that of the victims. It was some sort of macabre graffiti, resembling a spider web drawn in blood.

Garret strolled out of the open door and stood under the eave of the house's roof. He lit a cigarette and stood there smoking, as he tried to decide whether he should go back to the office to update his case files, or not.

Garret was shocked to have another grisly murder in the peaceful town of Holden, only three days after the first one. In the first killing, the Saxon family had been decapitated, but the heads had not been replaced with Octopods. That seemed to be some sort of progression in cult activity.

There was a medium-sized crowd of neighbors and local journalists just beyond the tape. Chief of Police Harold Smite arrived at the crime scene as Garret finished his cigarette, and promptly entered the residence to check out the forensic scene. In less than a minute, he returned to the yard with a look of disbelief and urged the neighbors and local journalists to calm down and stay back.

Garret speculated privately that it was some sort of an insane ritual. Whoever was doing this was following some kind of a cult, and it had only just begun. He reentered the residence and continued his inspection of the home for additional clues and evidence.

Forensic specialists were busy searching the place for evidence of the blood and fingerprint variety. Garret began an examination of each of the family member's bedrooms in his search for additional clues.

A police officer who just questioned the neighbors took a moment to give Garret as many details of the family as they had collected. They did not go to the same church, the kids did not go to the same school, and none of the details of their lives seemed to be common to both families, other than the fact that they lived in the same community.

Garret slowly became convinced that the slain families were not connected. If there were no common trigger details, then the killer was likely not a serial killer of the standard variety. It was further obvious that the killers were targeting random families for murder. This was going to make it much harder to catch the culprit.

Garret ordered the police officer who had filled him in on the case to search for anyone who dealt in octopuses, a rare commodity in this landlocked town. The uniform seemed less than enthusiastic about the task, but he dutifully left the room to radio the request for information into dispatch.

Garret stepped out of the house to catch another cigarette. He was just about to head back to the precinct when a roar of pure anguish came from inside the house. Sprinting that way, the agent saw Officer Craton struggling to restrain a slightly portly man who was doing the screaming, as the man tried to get to the bodies. He had already passed the crime scene tape, and his presence was threatening the sanctity of the forensic analysis.

Garret tackled the man just as he seemed about to break loose from Officer Craton, and they held him down as the Officer affixed his handcuffs to the man. A couple of uniforms led the man away, as Officer Craton explained the situation.

"That was Phillip McIntire, the brother of the murdered man." The Officer explained. He has just found out that his brother's whole family was dead, and I guess it was just more than he could handle. He will be taken down to the station, to cool down before he is released."

"I can't say as I blame him," Garret replied. I doubt I could handle it any better if it were me."

Garret spent a few more moments at the crime scene, putting the finishing touches on his notes. He pulled away in the Impala that the department gave him to drive, headed for the office. The car had developed a strange rattle in the three days that he had it; a rattle that did not seem to exhibit itself when he took it into the fleet mechanics to get it looked at yesterday.

******

HAROLD WAS STILL AT the family home as agent Garret pulled out of the driveway. He was wondering if he should do an end-run around the agent, and give the lead on the case to his most experienced detective, Detective Crawford, instead. Harold finally concluded that he should let it ride. Crawford was good, but he had never dealt with cults and symbolic murders.

He suspected that the department would need to use every resource that they could field to solve this case. Having Special Agent Garret on the case from the FBI was a good start. Crawford had less than ten years on the Force, so collaborating with Garret could well be a learning experience for him.