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At her desk the next morning, Stella yawned so deeply her eyes began to water. She and Hagen hadn’t gotten anywhere close to enough sleep last night. Stella wished hot chocolate came with more than a teaser of caffeine.

Stella finished her stretch, shifted her weight in her chair, and focused her thoughts on the day’s work in front of her. She logged onto her computer and opened her mailbox.

The top email was marked with the subject line, TOP PRIORITY RE : ALESSANDRA LAGARDE PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION .

The sender was Washington, D.C. SAC Kelly Tysen.

Stella clicked on the file and scanned its contents. It appeared Alessandra’s death, in combination with the Claymore Township and Nashville ritual murders, had triggered a national task force. Tysen had requested Stella and Hagen’s expertise.

A video meeting was scheduled for ten a.m.

Stella checked her watch. Two minutes from now.

Shit.

No longer sleepy, she spun in her seat just as Hagen shoved to his feet. He’d clearly finished reading his own email.

“Stella, Hagen.” Slade strode into the bullpen. “I just got a call from D.C. You check your messages?”

“Yes, sir,” they said in unison.

“Let’s go.”

In the conference room, Slade pulled down the projector screen and set up his laptop with about fifteen seconds to spare.

On their screen, video conferencing in from the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., Kelly Tysen snapped open the file on the desk in front of her with all the authority of a woman in charge. Stella liked her immediately.

Hagen took a seat next to Stella and placed a bottle of water in her hands. They both had their notebooks at the ready, as well as a copy of their preliminary report. In light of Mac’s work in trying to hack into the Dispatch group, Slade had pulled her to sit in on the meeting.

Mac entered quietly and took a seat.

Tysen, the special agent in charge in the Investigative and Operations Support Section of the CIRG, the Bureau’s elite unit dedicated to providing rapid assistance in a crisis, had an authoritative look to her. Her dark suit fit her broad shoulders, and her blond hair was tied back neatly.

“Thank you both for being able to call in at such short notice. Considering recent events, we’ve decided that file sharing is just not enough.

” She looked straight into the camera. “I’m very sorry for your office’s recent loss.

But Alessandra Lagarde’s death is the reason I’m pushing for a more intense investigation. ”

Stella liked the way she got straight to the point. They could save the small talk for when business was done.

Tysen’s gaze flicked to the corner of her screen, as if she’d just received a notification. “That’ll be the rest of them. ”

Stella cocked her head. “The rest of who?”

“I’ve invited certain agents from around the country to join the call. The unusual markings have appeared on murder victims in all their jurisdictions. We’re forming a national task force. I’ll let them in now.”

Tysen went around and made the introductions. The conference included agents representing field offices from all across the country, including Pittsburgh, New York, Milwaukee, and Lincoln, Nebraska, as well as three others from Charleston, Dover, Delaware, and Phoenix.

The SAC singled out the two special agents from the Pittsburgh field office, Journey Russo, an attractive brunette with penetrating indigo eyes, and Lucas Sullivan, whose slicked-back black hair reminded Stella of James Dean.

“Agents Russo and Sullivan have extensive experience dealing with cults. And they’re located in Pennsylvania, where all this seems to have started.”

Stella had heard of Russo and Sullivan. The FBI had been hunting down a group called The Chosen for a long time. Recently, the partners had taken the organization down. Stella was excited to hear their insights into this case.

Tysen got down to business. “Let’s get started. If you would, please save your questions until the end of the presentation I’m sharing with all of you. A lot of this might be repeat information, but all of us need to start on the same page.”

The screen changed to a picture of a New York subway train.

The floor was covered in blood, with barely an inch unmarked.

It ran from one end of the car and reached almost to the other end, as though someone had spread red paint across the floor and done a pretty good job of coloring between the lines.

A man sat slumped in one of the seats, his head tilted at an unnatural angle, chin brushing his shoulder. The sleeves of his army surplus coat hung in tatters from cuff to armpit. Blood streaked down both arms, pooling dark and sticky over his hands.

Tysen’s cursor circled one wrist.

“Queens, New York. The cut was vertical on both arms.” Tysen shifted the cursor to the man’s other arm. “This wasn’t just a random stabbing. The killer wanted the victim to shed as much blood as possible. And then there’s this.”

The image on the screen changed again, this time to a shot of the victim’s bare arm. Alongside the cut, which ran crookedly up the middle of his arm, a series of lines and triangles were carved into the skin. His throat was slit, but the photo focused on the carvings on his arm.

Those same marks had decorated Otto Walker’s and Trevor McAuley’s walls, the same cuneiform script cut into the victims in Pennsylvania.

The same characters that had desecrated Alessandra’s body.

Tysen cut back in. “The killer was wearing a hoodie that hid his face well, and surveillance cameras have yet to locate him. But this kind of hurts. Used to take that train to college every day.”

She brought up a new image. This picture showed a large man sprawled on a sofa. His head had rolled back to reveal a deep slash exposing his windpipe. Blood covered his chest, soaked the cushions, and left a dark stain on the carpet.

“Stanley, Wisconsin. The NYPD have come up blank so far on the subway killing, but this one was easy.” She clicked again.

The picture changed to a bathtub filled with blood and a woman’s body.

A kitchen knife lay on the blood-soaked tiles below her fingers.

“Local cops found the wife. Assumption is she killed her husband in the living room, then herself. They’ve got no motive, though.

Neighbors say they were friendly and quiet.

Rarely argued, and no record of domestic abuse. But we have this.”

The picture changed to show a row of cuneiforms scrawled in blood on the bathroom wall.

“And we also have this.”

Tysen clicked again. A woman slouched against the back door of a bar. Her white coat was stained red from the chest down, and she sat, her legs folded to the side, in a wide puddle of blood.

“Omaha, Nebraska. Stab wounds were in the armpits. Severed the axillary arteries. Police are looking for her date. They’d just met online. His profile was fake, and he paid in cash at the restaurant where they ate dinner. They’re scouring cameras in the area.”

The picture changed to show a single cuneiform scratched into the skin under her jaw. The symbol was easy to miss but unmistakable once seen.

Tysen clicked. “And finally, this one. Meyersdale, Pennsylvania.”

Hagen groaned. Stella breathed in sharply. This picture was much more familiar.

A man’s corpse, stripped naked, hung upside down from a beam that ran across the ceiling of a wooden barn.

His knuckles almost touched the floor. Beneath him, a red circle covered the ground.

A deep cut ran across his neck from ear to ear.

Multiple stab wounds decorated the man’s muscular abdomen, and around the stab wounds were a series of triangular markings written in blood.

Laurence Gill, a psychiatric patient, and Mark Tully, a sheriff’s deputy, had been hung in very similar ways in Claymore Township, Pennsylvania. As had Patrick Marrion, an unfortunate university student in Nashville, before his body was dumped in an alley.

And Alessandra .

Tysen returned to the images of the agents.

“Those symbols were found on each of the victims. We dug into the records and found a couple more murders in Delaware and South Carolina that fit the pattern. They predate the ones you came across in Pennsylvania and just solved in Nashville. So we set up an alert. Got two hits on Friday night and two more on Sunday night, then another on Monday.”

Hagen muttered a low curse, barely audible, his knee bouncing with restless energy beneath the table like it was trying to outrun his thoughts. Stella placed a hand on his leg when the table started to shake.

Tysen leaned back in her chair. “We’ve looked into it, and there’s no personal link between any of these victims. They don’t have anyone in common.

They’re really only connected by the cuneiform symbols.

And look, a wife wants to murder her husband?

There are usually signs of abuse leading up to the event.

There was none of that here, and besides, the cutting of the jugular looked deliberate.

The same for the stabbing on the New York City subway.

You saw how he ran a blade up each arm to open the arteries.

But he left the guy’s phone and wallet untouched. Who does that?”

The agent from Phoenix chimed in. “Are we certain the marks are all the same? They could just look similar?”

“Unlikely.” Agent Journey Russo stepped in. “Can you pull up Delaware?”

Tysen changed the picture to show a single triangular pattern written in blood on a wall.

Journey took over the presentation for the moment. “This was found at the scene of the murder in Delaware. Cops thought it was some kind of new gang tag. It matches one of the symbols Knox and Yates found in Pennsylvania. Tysen?”

Mark Tully’s body appeared on the screen. Tysen zoomed in on one of the signs carved into the skin on his back, then brought up the picture from Delaware and placed the two images next to each other.