Both of them looked frustrated and disappointed. They were still in their suits. Frank took his jacket and tie off. Mike headed to the wet bar and broke the seal on it. “I need a drink.”
While Mike made himself a drink, Vince turned to Frank. “You didn’t find her.”
“We didn’t find her,” Frank said. Aside from the look of frustration on Frank’s mug, there was also a look of worry. “But we found stuff out. Boy, did we find shit out.”
Mike took a sip of his drink—Jim Beam straight—then sat down at the desk. “Where to start?”
“The beginning,” Vince said. “You went straight to Nino’s right?”
“We went to Nino’s,” Mike said, nodding. “There were a couple of kids there. Frank and I identified ourselves as FBI agents. It was easy, considering what happened there today. Everybody in town had already heard about what happened at the Family Cupboard.”
“I bet,” Vince said. He was beginning to yearn for a drink himself. He could make out the distinctive label of a Rolling Rock beer in the refrigerator.
“We asked them where we could locate Mary Ann, and one of the kids directed us to her friend Jackie. They gave us Jackie’s address. We went over there and Jackie proved to be very cooperative. She told us that Mary Ann was gone.”
“Gone?”
“She split,” Frank said. He took his shirt off and looked at Mike. “If you don’t mind, I’m taking these off. I never was used to wearing this suit and tie shit.”
Mike nodded and Frank stripped down to his underwear and began rummaging in his overnight bag. Vince turned to Mike. “So Mary Ann skipped town, too?”
Mike nodded, sipping his drink. “Jackie said Mary Ann called her this morning from a bus stop in North Carolina. She said that she was afraid of those guys coming back to Lititz to finish what they started.”
“What did she mean by that?” Vince was listening with bated breath.
“I don’t know,” Mike said. He sighed. “Fortunately, we were able to talk to Jackie at length. Her parents were at work, so we sat in the living room and talked. She was quite the chatter box.”
“I got the impression that she was standing on the sidelines when this shit happened,” Frank said, pulling a pair of black jeans over his legs. “She and Mary Ann were friends, but she didn’t hang out with this other gang of kids much.”
Mike chuckled. “Yeah. She said that she felt she was much better than Clint and his crowd. I caught a whiff of contempt.”
“More like an air of superiority,” Frank said, pulling a T-shirt over his lanky frame. His tattoos gleamed in the light.
“The basic story is that Jackie confirmed to us that Clint and his friends were dabblers in a devil worship group,” Mike said. He took a sip of his drink. “She admitted quite freely that they were into it for the shock value. She didn’t hang out with them, but Mary Ann did. She said Mary Ann usually went along for the ride whenever Clint and his friends were out on the town.”
“They were a bunch of your usual Marilyn Manson fan boy, pot smoking losers who thought it was cool to worship the devil,” Frank said, sitting down on the second bed. “Twenty years ago they would have been Black Sabbath fans.”
Vince nodded. He remembered the stoner scene very well from high school.
“Anyway,” Mike continued, “she said she never met Mark Lancaster and the other fellow, but Mary Ann did. And Mary Ann was scared of them the instant she met them. She told Jackie that Mark and Glenn were definitely serious about the occult. Jackie says she warned her friend to stay away from them, and luckily, Mary Ann heeded her advice. But she was still loyal to Clint; after all, they were dating. She loved him. So most of what happened comes directly from Clint telling Mary Ann, and Mary Ann later telling Jackie. It sounds like pretty reliable third-hand information, though. Jackie struck me as a very smart girl. She did some research of her own and found out some disturbing things.”
“What kind of disturbing things?” Vince asked.
“In a minute,” Mike said. He took another sip of his drink. Frank got himself a Coke from the refrigerator. He looked at Vince and resumed the narrative. “According to Jackie, Clint wanted to impress these guys. He was thrilled that a pair of older guys was into the same things he was. Clint and his friends felt they were respected when they were with them. So they started hanging out. When Mary Ann told Jackie the name of the cult these guys claimed they belonged to, Jackie grew even more concerned and scared. She’d already done a lot of reading on the occult, and some of the things Mary Ann said about them bothered her. So she did some more research. There was one bit of information that kept nagging at her—the group Mark and Glenn claimed they belonged to. Apparently they told Clint they belonged to an organization called The Children, and that they were based out of New York City.”
“Another name for The Children of the Night?” Vince asked.
Mike nodded. “Yes and no. I’ll get to that in a minute. What Jackie did, was she went on the Internet and did some intense research on the occult and Satanism for three days, asking people on various newsgroups about the Children. She got one response. The only thing the person said was that The Children was supposed to be a secret, sinister devil cult based in New York. That was all the correspondent would relate. The correspondent even went so far as to admit that the group itself was only rumored to exist. Jackie did some more checking and was able to confirm evidence of the rumor in a book linking the Son of Sam murders to a secret, underground satanic organization.”
“So what did she do?” Vince asked, entranced by the story.
“It scared the hell out of her,” Mike said. “And rightly so.” He traded a glance with Frank. “The Children are the New York State counterparts of The Children of the Night. There are factions in other parts of the country that go under other names as well. There’s a group in Alabama called ‘The Children of the Black Cross,’ for example. Another group in the Midwest calls itself ‘The Children of Darkness.’ They’re all connected with the main group in California.”
The bottle of Rolling Rock was weighing heavily on Vince’s mind, and he finally dashed over to the refrigerator and pulled it out, opened it, and took a drink.
“Jackie claims she told Mary Ann to stay away from Clint,” Mike continued. “She told her friend everything. She didn’t know if Mary Ann related all this to Clint. She claimed Mary Ann told her she would find a way to tell Clint without revealing the source. She seems to think that Clint already knew he was over his head and was staying away from Mark and Glenn out of his own fear. When the dead dogs turned up in that field she knew something big was going to happen, but she didn’t know what. She said Mary Ann avoided her in the next few months. Like she was ashamed that she was still seeing Clint, who by now was regarded as the Black Sheep of Warwick County. Then Maggie Walters was murdered, and at first the newspapers weren’t reporting the occult symbols found written on the walls at the murder site. But for some reason, Jackie had a feeling there was a connection. Then last week, the Intelligencer ran an in depth article on the case, and for the first time all of Lancaster County learned about the mutilation and the Satanic symbols found in Maggie’s house. And then Clint disappeared, followed closely by Mary Ann.”
“Does she have any idea what might have happened to them?” Vince asked.
“Not really, but get this. Jackie came to the same conclusion Frank and I have been coming to. Maggie may have been killed by these guys for some kind of revenge ritual. The killing of the dogs on April 30—Walpurgisnacht—is significant. It’s a day that is said to provide great power to the black magician for certain rituals. The murder of the dogs was done in conjunction with a preliminary ritual for something bigger in Lititz. That something bigger was probably the murder of Maggie Walters.”