The Poet's Blood (Heinous Crimes Unit Book 7), page 1
THE POET’S BLOOD
HEINOUS CRIMES UNIT™ BOOK SEVEN
DANIEL SCOTT
This book is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2020, 2023 Daniel Scott & David Beers
Cover Art by Jake @ J Caleb Design
http://jcalebdesign.com / jcalebdesign@gmail.com
Cover copyright © Marlow & Vane
Marlowe & Vane supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Marlowe & Vane
an imprint of LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
Previously Published as The Poet
Version 1.00, April 2023
ebook ISBN: 979-8-88541-376-3
Print ISBN: 979-8-88878-318-4
THE POET’S BLOOD TEAM
Thanks to the JIT Readers
Wendy L Bonell
Kelly O’Donnell
John Ashmore
Alison Kelly
Editor
SkyFyre Editing Team
For all those that I’ve lost.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Letters from a Killer
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
The Poets
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Letters from a Killer
Chapter 13
The Poets
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
The Poets
Chapter 21
Letters from a Killer
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
The Poets
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
The Poets
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
The Poets
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Connect with The Author
Books by Daniel Scott
PROLOGUE
Madness can only be destroyed. It cannot be shelved indefinitely. Humane treatment of madness will not eradicate it. Mercy only gives it time to incubate and grow.
Humanity has managed great feats during its rise to world dominance, but that is a lesson it has not learned. The madness began years ago, and was thought to be kept at bay for a while.
But it has returned, as madness always must.
CHAPTER ONE
His days in jail are the most repetitive of his entire life, and he doesn’t mind. For someone like him—on the autism spectrum, as they say—repetition feels like home.
The scars on his body have faded slightly during the last two years, but the knife wound to his face is still easily noticeable to other people. He doesn’t notice it because he rarely looks in a mirror. There aren’t many mirrors in his prison, and he doesn’t bother looking in them when he passes them.
For him, peace is a state he can find neither inside nor outside. It is a rare place between both of those extremes. The existence outside has caused him more problems than he ever cares to think about. The world of mirrors and people landed him in this prison. Yet, retreating internally is no better.
The mansion that he’d built brick by brick to hold and analyze more information than perhaps any other mind on Earth is boarded up. The windows are shuttered and the doors are nailed shut.
Signs telling him to stay away aren’t needed. The architect and builder of the mansion knows the truth of it. The mansion is a world unto itself, and it holds only terror. It is haunted by the ghosts and other things that should not exist waiting for him inside.
In this prison, where each day is the same as the last, and tomorrow will be the same as today, he has found peace. He stays away from the part of his mind that makes him unique.
He lives in a place of focus, maintaining his delicate balance between the external and the internal.
Savant, genius, disgraced FBI agent, Federal Prisoner, Inmate #04475–046.
Christian Windsor has found peace. He hopes this in-between place will last. That he can remain in this state for the rest of his life.
Perhaps it is cruel, or perhaps it is just, but Christian’s peace will not last.
In fact, it was nearly finished.
His days in the asylum are the most repetitive of his entire life, and he doesn’t mind. For someone like him—evil incarnate, as they say—repetition allows him to focus on what is truly important.
The scars on his body have faded slightly during the last two years, but none of them are easily noticeable when he is clothed. He wouldn’t notice if they were. His body is simply a tool to be used for a greater mission.
For him, peace is a state he achieved a long time ago. When his life’s purpose crystalized as a young man, discord and fear ceased to exist in his mind.
He lacks the ability to create such a wonder as Christian’s mansion inside his head. He doesn’t search his own mind. He knows himself more intimately than God knows His own creations and doesn’t fear what lies inside.
His days are the same, but he knows it won’t always be this way. He knows his destiny. While the world considers him insane, the arc of the universe will bend. The world, the universe, and time itself will bend to his will as it has in the past.
The repetition allows him to focus on the task of attaining both his freedom and his life’s purpose. In this asylum, where each day is the same as the last, and tomorrow will be the same as today, the illusion of time passing is shattered.
He lives in a place beyond past, present, and future. This delineated perception is his mind’s way of calculating which combination of probable events would lead to the future unfolding the way he wants.
Inventor, scientist, genius, former FBI Special Agent, Gauvin Memorial Hospital for the Criminally Insane Patient #0746.
Luke Titan never needed peace. He only needed his purpose, and while society thinks he is insane, he knows that those who put him here are the ones under a delusion.
Their delusion will be destroyed, and they will soon find out why their peace cannot last.
In fact, it was nearly finished.
CHAPTER TWO
Sarah Besser blinked away tears and sweat. She tried to open her mouth and realized she couldn’t. She tried to scream, but only a muffled noise escaped her clamped lips.
A drop of sweat burned her eye. She blinked harder, straining to see where she was. The right side of her face hurt badly, throbbing as it swelled against…
What is on my face? What is on me?
Her heart fluttered in her chest, beating like a hummingbird’s wings. She lifted her hands to feel her face. They were bound together. She was in a dark room.
No, no, no, she thought frantically. This can’t be happening!
A sudden bump made the entire room lurch.
That’s not right. Rooms don’t bounce. Sarah wriggled her limbs like she’d been taught and ascertained she had more space than she’d have if she was in the back seat of a sedan or the trunk of a car. She couldn’t see anything, but she sensed that she was in a box. A moving box…
You’re in a van. Oh, God, this can’t be happening!
There appeared to be a divider between the front of the vehicle and her portion. Whoever was driving had no way of seeing if she moved. She slowly worked her way to the side of the van and placed her back against the wall. Her head felt full of hot air but she managed to get herself upright. When her head stopped feeling like it might float off and hit the vehicle’s roof, she noticed her feet were also bound together.
Her feet were touching something soft. Something human.
Another scream erupted from her throat but its exit was stopped by whatever was over her mouth. She couldn’t remember anything before waking in the darkness, but she knew for sure she was in a van. The walls were vibrating from the road.
Sarah reached out again with her feet and carefully poked the soft shape she’d bumped a moment earlier. Someone groaned.
Jasper? she wondered.
She pushed with her feet a third time and there was another moan. It was her boyfriend, but why were they in this van? What in the hell was happening? Sarah felt panic rising in her, a low moan in her throat that sounded more animal than human.
None of this made sense. She had to get out of here. She had to find help. She shouldn’t be here, and her face shouldn’t hurt, and she shouldn’t be gagged, and—
The van stopped moving and Sarah heard two doors open up front.
Sarah’s breath rushed harshly in and out of her nostrils. She quit trying to remember how she got here. Danger was closing in on her. She strained her hearing and made out two people walking on either side of the van, their footsteps grinding on what sounded like gravel.
Sarah kicked Jasper, hoping to wake him up, but that only resulted in a louder groan.
The van’s back doors opened and moonlight flooded the interior. Sarah’s eyes narrowed at the two figures silhouetted against the night. She screamed again, and the muffled noise of fear and rage died inside her mouth.
One of the figures grabbed Jasper’s arm and dragged him out. He fell flat onto the gravel with a groan of pain. The second figure stepped into the van and bent over to grab Sarah.
She kicked with both feet, simultaneously trying to throw herself backward and hurt the looming person. She kept screaming, desperately hoping to get help somehow.
Her feet connected with her kidnapper’s lower leg.
The man grunted, “Damn it, girl.” His voice was thick with a southern drawl.
He swung a hand at Sarah and the back of it collided with her face. She’d never been hit before. Her head jerked to the side and her scream ended abruptly as her mind froze.
Her body followed suit.
The man grabbed her leg and dragged her across the empty van. Sarah saw what was about to happen but was powerless to stop it.
He hopped out and she landed on the ground, her spine rattling as her ass hit the gravel. The moonlight revealed a lonely road with nothing but trees on either side. She didn’t understand how this was possible. The last thing she remembered was being safe in Jasper’s apartment. She had no idea where this desolate area was.
Sarah realized that the second kidnapper was a woman. She couldn’t make out much of her face, or the man’s, either. The moonlight painted their features with shadows. The woman squatted over Jasper and put her fingers on his neck.
She looked up at her male partner. “He’s alive.”
Her voice held the same southern twang that Sarah had only heard in movies, where people said things like, “I reckon,” and “It’s over yonder.”
“Good.” The man squatted in front of Sarah.
He was holding something, but she couldn’t see what. She found his eyes, and in the darkness, they looked like pools of ink.
“I’m sorry ‘bout all this,” the man told her as he removed the gag. “Y’all might not believe me, but I am. We’re both real sorry.”
The woman nodded. “It ain’t somethin’ we wanna do, but there’s a price to be paid.”
The man dropped his eyes, looking at the object he held. “There’s the voices, y’see. They’re here and they ain’t goin’ away. For a while they went away, but now they want to be paid what’s theirs.”
Sarah believed the concern written across his face, and the sadness in his words. “You could let me go. No one will be mad. We won’t tell anyone what happened.”
The man shook his head. “If there’s anyone deserves people bein’ mad at them, it ain’t us.”
Sarah nodded. It seemed that the man wanted her to nod. He wanted her to give him…
Absolution.
The word floated into Sarah’s mind as if it had been shoved there by a part of her that was paying very close attention. She understood nothing besides the danger she was in.
The man gingerly touched the side of her head, the side that wasn’t hurting. He held his hand there for a moment, their eyes meeting again. “I’m glad you get it. Some of ‘em haven’t. But you do.”
He grabbed her hair and yanked her head hard to the side so that one of her ears faced the sky. His other hand came up and Sarah saw the item he’d been holding clearly in the moonlight. The blade glinted and the serrations looked like monstrous, hungry teeth.
The blade moved fast and pain as bright as exploding volcanoes filled her as hot blood sprayed from her face, hitting her bare shoulder.
There was no more communication between Sarah and the man beyond her muffled screams.
CHAPTER THREE
FBI Agent Patrick Collins was silent as he examined the two bodies. The juxtaposition of lush green and rusty red between the mutilated corpses and grass beneath them struck him as odd. Death and life in one horrible scene, neither able to cross to the other.
Assistant Director Riley Sins stood next to Collins. His boss was vocal with her assessment, as was usually the case. “This is a fucking mess.”
Collins nodded, knowing that she was talking about the media circus one hundred feet in the distance as well as the two desecrated bodies.
There hadn’t been any way to prevent the media from showing up when the news of corpses dropped on a sorority lawn just before dawn broke. One of the sorority members had discovered the gruesome scene on her way to class and drawn a crowd with her screams. Photos of the bodies had hit social media long before the FBI had been alerted.
“It’s him,” Sins said. “We’ve got a serial killer on our hands and a bunch of congresspeople who are going to drag our nuts through glass if we don’t find him.”
Collins nodded again, still remaining silent. He wasn’t going to comment on the fact that Sins was a woman and lacked the anatomy she was referring to. Identifying the victims took precedence.
There wasn’t any denying that this was the same killer’s handiwork. The plastic bags the victims had been suffocated with were tied tightly around their necks, but Collins could see their eyes and ears had been removed. They’d been alive while their eyes and ears were sliced clean off. If he pulled one of those plastic bags off and opened the victim’s mouth, he’d find only teeth looking back at him.
There was more evidence. The theatrics never ended with this killer.
A carpenter’s nail protruded from the female’s naked chest, pinning a handwritten note to her sternum.
“I don’t want to read it,” Sins remarked. “Tell me what it says.”
Collins glanced at the media behind the police cordon in the distance. The cops were making sure the “do not cross” police tape wasn’t being crossed. He saw a lot of college kids, too. More were arriving every few minutes. He wanted to know how many people would see him reading the note. So far, they’d managed to keep the little notes from the media, but the other bodies hadn’t been displayed this publicly.
He squatted, careful not to touch the corpse even with his latex gloves. “To spare the guilty is to injure the innocent. Publilius.”
Sins shook her head. “Who the fuck is Publilius?”
Collins eyes narrowed as he scanned the bodies. “I think he was a Roman slave who won his freedom.”
“Well now he’s giving me a headache.” Sins pulled out her cellphone and found the number she wanted. “Where are you, Bractus?”
Collins didn’t pay attention to her conversation with the head forensic tech working this case. He and his team were running late but it wasn’t their fault. It took time to get from DC to Georgia.
Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia. Five murders, three states, and no idea who was doing the killing or why. The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit working on the killer’s profile were saying that the murderer wasn’t leaving them enough information to surmise anything of value. They needed more murders or more evidence. It looked like they would get the murders, if not the evidence.
Collins stood up as Sins got off the phone.
