I headed over to where they were standing in a semi-circle around a boulder with a flat face. They pointed their flashlights at the surface of the rock and pointed at something that had been drawn in black, dripping spray paint.
“What’ve you got?” I asked, pulling my own flashlight out of my pocket and clicking it on to get a better look. A symbol of some kind had been spray-painted on the boulder, an open eye with two open-bottomed triangles directly above it.
“Is that...?” It lookedfamiliar but I couldn’t quite place it. Thankfully, Agent Emerson was already two steps ahead of me. She opened her phone and flipped through the images on it until she found the one she was looking for and held it out so that I could see.
“Look familiar?” She asked, the picture was of the first victim’s wrist and despite the blurriness of the tattoo it was clear to see that the two symbols were the same.
I turned, leaving the other agents as I hurried back over to the medical examiner and prayed that the body wasn’t too badly burnt. “Hey, can you look at the inside of the body’s wrist? The left one?”
The medical examiner looked irritated at having been interrupted, but stood with a sigh and reached for the victim’s arm which, despite just being on fire, still retained most of its skin as the fire hadn’t spread as far on this victim as it had on the others.
There was silence for a moment before the medical examiner finally said: “There’s something here.”
He held up the body’s wrist and turned it so that I could see. I shined my flashlight on the wrist that was being held up, and my suspicions were very quickly confirmed. There, tattooed on the wrist, was the same symbol from the rock.
“These victims are not random,” I said out loud, mostly to myself, though I’m sure my fellow agents were quickly coming to the same conclusion. “These people were targeted because of this symbol.”
Now I just needed to figure out where the hell this symbol had come from and who was lighting these people on fire because of it.
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“Hezekiah Jordan. BornRaymond Burnes. He’s one of the most infamous cult leaders of the twenty-first century.” Lizzie, one of the analysts who worked in the field office, slammed a heavy box down onto my desk. I’d been back in the office for all of four hours since our last body was found and was still waiting for the autopsy results to come in from the medical examiner.
“Okay?” I said as I opened the top of the box and peered inside. It was filled with manila file folders and papers that were beginning to yellow with age.
“I was eating lunch with Rachel, and she showed me the symbol from your burn victims case. I knew immediately where that came from—I’m a bit of a cult true crime enthusiast.” She admitted sheepishly as I began pulling folders out of the box. Lizzie was Agent Emerson’s girlfriend. Rachel Emerson was the agent who’d made the connection between victim one and victim three earlier this morning and was the agent I worked with the most when Director Cruz forced me to partner up with someone.
She and Lizzie had been dating for almost as long as I’d been at the San Francisco field office this time around—almost two years. Lizzie was the tallest woman I’d ever met and could probably out-press most of the agents in our office. But despite her strength and size, she preferred to remain behind the scenes, working as an analyst and helping out around the office.
“Hezekiah Jordan was one of California’s most prolific cult leaders—probably the most prolific since Waco,” She continued to explain. The name sounded familiar and I had a vague memory of hearing the name Hezekiah Jordan when I was in training at Quantico. The class on cults was one that I hadn’t paid much attention to as we rarely dealt with cults in the modern-day. I had originally been planning to go into counter-terrorism after I finished with the academy, but life had other plans for me and I’d found myself back in California where I’d been born and raised.
“I’m surprised youhaven’theard of him,” Lizzie’s voice was a bit incredulous, “He was all over the news ten years ago.”
I shrugged sheepishly, “I was in the middle of college in DC and when I’m home my mom and grandma don’t like to talk about bad things.”
“Well, from 1995 to around 2012, he was a religious fanatic who’d post online about alpha supremacy and his anti-pack life stances. He garnered quite a bit of attention. In late 2012, the FBI received a tip that he was planning a mass casualty event—he had posted online about needing to ‘protect his flock.’ The FBI raided the compound, but it was already too late for Jordan’s followers. The majority of the cult members had ingested poison and locked themselves inside of the meeting house, lighting it on fire.”
“Jesus,” I remembered this case now. It was a huge sore spot for the FBI—we’d lost a lot of people that day. “But why do you think Hezekiah Jordan has anything to do with this? I mean the man has been in prison for ten years now.”
Lizzie rifled through the box until she found what she was looking for, pulling a picture out of a folder and handing it to me.
The picture was of a partially burned woman dressed in what I could best describe as a pilgrim nightgown. It took me a minute to get past the extensive burns and focus on her wrist which was turned so that the camera could get what was tattooed on the inside of it.
The same symbol from our three bodies. Tattooed on the same wrist. This was either a cosmic coincidence or it was all connected and I didn’t believe in coincidences.
“Lizzie, you are a genius.” I grinned at her and she returned the grin, but her smile quickly slipped away and I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like what she said next.
“The issue we have now is that only five people survived the mass casualty event at the Jordan Compound. Four adults and a fourteen-year-old minor whose records have been sealed in the San Francisco county courts. It’s not going to be easy to track down the witnesses and figure out who is who.”
I looked at all of the information in front of me, from the picture of the burned body, and knew what all of this meant. It meant that someone was targeting the survivors of Hezekiah Jordan’s cult and that there were only two left. I needed to figure out who both of these people were and soon, or else I was afraid that there would be two more charred bodies before long. Picking up my office phone I began dialing my director’s extension to see if I could get some records unsealed.
