Page 39 of Ares

They’re hillbilly mafia.

“The medical examiner removed seven one-dollar bills jammed into his mouth. Then, of course, there’s this—” He points to the next photo where the word greed is carved into the victim’s chest.

Paw shakes his head. “So, we’re looking at someone who has a thing for the seven deadly sins?”

“Like that movie with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman where the serial killer picks off people and then leaves one of the seven deadly sins written somewhere nearby?” Shooter asks.

“It’s called Seven,” I tell him.

“That’s it.” He looks back to Pinkwater. “This guy got a hard-on for the seven deadly sins?”

“Not just that. It seems they have a thing for picking off people involved in organized crime. Kandi Kurtman was dating her pimp, a low-life called Jimmy Knuckles. He’s tied to the Sullivan family, who are involved in everything from prostitution to money laundering. Merchant was involved with the Hermanns. These freaks are religious vigilantes, and they’re not going to stop until they’ve made their point.” Pinkwater pushes another two photos across the table. “These were taken at a crime scene yesterday.”

The first photograph shows three men slumped around a kitchen table littered with empty beer cans and drug paraphernalia. They’re sitting in a trailer that looks like it’s never been clean, the stained singlets they all wear looking no better. Two of the men are upright, the third lays with his head pressed against the tabletop. All three of them are dead, each with a putrid foam oozing out of their mouths and a needle hanging out of their arm.

“You’d be forgiven to think it this was an overdose. But it’s not. Someone forced those boys to sit down at that table before they filled them with a hotshot each. Their feet were bound to the chairs they sat on, and it’s my guess someone held a gun on them to keep them there while they loaded pure, uncut heroin into their veins. That same someone then did this.” He spins another photograph across the table showing the word sloth carved into the nape of each man’s neck.

“You have an idea of who this someone is?” Jack asks.

Pinkwater adds another picture to the table. It’s a surveillance image of three men dressed in suits but wearing Halloween masks. White faces with crosses for eyes and a maniacal grin on its lips.

“They call themselves The Three. Three psychos who go around doing…” he air quotes, “… God’s work.”

Jack’s eyebrow shoots up. “Have they reached out and declared that?”

“Looks like they’ve declared it right across their victims’ bodies,” Shooter says.

“There was a letter found at yesterday’s crime scene.” Pinkwater opens his cell to show us a picture. “They placed the paper onto one of the victim’s hands and stabbed a steak knife through it to hold it in place.”

Jack takes the phone from Pinkwater and reads the letter out loud.

“We are The Three.

“Here to clean up the unholiness of man.

“Blood will be spilled for every sin.

“From start to finish.

“And we will re-begin.”

“Re-begin?” Shooter questions.

“Shitty English,” Paw says. “Tells us something, at least.”

“That they’re not very good poets?” Shooter raises an eyebrow.

“FBI linguistics should be able to pinpoint where they’re from.”

“No, there’s just the one letter, and it’s too short to tell us much,” Pinkwater replies.

“Who are the men in the third photo?” I ask him.

“The Fallon brothers. Not the smartest tools in the barn, but they did manage to set up a lucrative heroin trade over in Copperville.”

Heroin dealers.

I hate heroin.

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