Page 15 of So Wicked

She pulled her phone from her pocket and googled Rachel Summers. Turk gave her a fishy look, and she said, “I’m just satisfying my curiosity, Turk. I’m not going to do anything about it.”

Turk’s half-closed lids and dry expression suggested that he saw right through Faith’s ruse.

But itwasn’ta ruse. She had decided to play nice and follow her superiors’ instructions. She was just bored and trying to keep her mind active as well as her body.

Dr. Rachel Summers was forty-three and a graduate of Purdue University. She worked for ten years at the Central Indianapolis Animal Hospital before opening her own practice in Carmel. She was unmarried and lived alone with her three tabby cats. That made her an ideal victim. Single women living alone were statistically the most likely to fall victim to a violent crime.

But she wasn’t killed at home. She was killed… well, the police didn’t know yet or hadn’t said yet. She had stayed late the night of her murder and been found dead in the pet cemetery the following morning. Police still hadn’t released details of her murder, but they’d used the words disturbing, terrifying, and macabre.

She noted that they hadn’t said brutal or vicious or any other descriptor that suggested a gruesome death. That was interesting. It was possible, of course, that the murder was disturbing, terrifying and macabre because itwasgruesome, but usually when a crime scene was gory, it was described as such.

But it was also possible that the murder wasn’t gory at all but was disturbing, terrifying and macabre for different reasons. In one of Faith’s recent cases, a terminally ill man had killed three women in an attempt to perform an alchemical ritual called the Magnum Opus which would allegedly give him eternal life. The women were killed violently, but not gruesomely. They weren’t eviscerated or cut to pieces.

Still, the scenes were absolutely disturbing, terrifying, and macabre. Each woman was posed naked in a position that represented a different alchemical signal and then sprinkled with a different color of talcum powder. Those scenes were as horrific as any of the far more gruesome scenes Faith had investigated.

So, what had this killer left behind that affected the officers so much?

Turk barked, pulling her from her thoughts. She lifted her head to see they had reached the lake. A few other people ambled around, enjoying the cool air and the pristine water of the lake. Ice had formed at the edges of the lake, but it was several weeks still before that ice would form a curst over the entire surface.

“No ducks, though,” she said aloud. “Guess they’ve all flown south. Sorry, boy.”

Turk seemed perfectly okay with the absence of ducks because he had robins to play with. The birds didn’t seem particularly happy to have an enormous carnivore chasing them around, but they tolerated Turk’s attention and hopped just out of reach of his playfully swiping paws. One of them cast Faith a longsuffering look, and she shrugged. “What am I gonna do? He’s got too much energy for me.”

While Turk played with the birds, Faith walked along the edge of the lake. Some fish still moved in the icy water below, their movements sluggish from the cold. A large channel catfish, about three feet long, looked expectantly at Faith. She showed him her empty hands, and the fish lost interest.

It was crazy how well some animals had adapted to human presence while others had suffered mightily. Some of that was by human design. Mammoths had been hunted for food and gone extinct meanwhile cows had been bred so that they were far more successful and widespread than they ever were in the wild.

It wasn’t all human design, though. Many animals had died out for no other reason than that humans had moved in and changed the land so much that they didn’t know how to live on it anymore. Meanwhile, other animals thrived in human environments. Rats, for example, would probably lose eighty percent of their global population if cities ceased to exist.

Or maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they’d just adapt to whatever came after people. What was it that allowed some creaturesto survive no matter what hardship they faced while other creatures faded away?

Turk barked loudly. A different kind of bark. Faith's thoughts disappeared as she turned to her dog. He stood with his head high and his ears alert.

Faith reached for her gun, concealed in a holster inside of her coat. She put her hand on the barrel but didn’t draw the weapon. “What is it, boy? What do you see?”

He looked at Faith briefly, then turned the way he was facing before. He sniffed the air and barked again. Then he shot off like a rocket.

Faith sprinted after him, sending snow flying with each stride. Turk bounded easily up a hill, and Faith struggled to follow. When she reached the other side, Turk was already fifty yards ahead of her, and the distance was expanding quickly.

“Turk! Hold on, boy!”

Turk looked around and slowed when he saw Faith. She caught up to him, and he sped up again, matching Faith’s pace but only if she maintained a dead sprint.

And they said he was too old to be a K9.

They ran up another hill and when they came to the other side, Turk vaulted an eleven-foot fence, bounding lightly up the red brick base and over the wrought iron spikes, then landing just as easily on the other side.

Faith sighed and pulled herself over the fence as fast as she could. She sincerely hoped Turk wasn’t causing her to trespass on someone’s private property because he smelled bacon.

Deep down, though, she knew it wasn’t bacon Faith was chasing. She’d worked with him long enough to know the way he acted when he found something interesting versus when he found evidence of a crime.

Dr. Summers’s face flashed across her mind. Was she about to find something disturbing, terrifying and macabre?

Turk slowed to a trot on the other side of the fence. He sniffed the air as he walked through small marble slabs. Faith realized quickly that they were in a graveyard.

But what kind of graveyard? The slabs were placed very close together. Was this some sort of infant graveyard? Did they have those?

Then she saw an etching of a poodle and realized that they were in a pet cemetery. Her eyes widened. Had someone else been murdered?

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