From the Blue

  From the Blue

  Book 1 of the Atlantis Rising Cycle

  By

  Mark Stephens

  Published in 2015 by Mark Stephens

  Copyright 2015 Mark Stephens

  Additional Books by Mark Stephens:

  Mortal Sins Book 1

  Mortal Sins Book 2

  Amy and the Unicorn

  Atlantis Rising Cycle

  Book 1 – From the Blue

  Book 2 – Treading Water (coming Spring 2016)

  Book 3 – Rising Tide – coming soon

  Book 4 – Into The Depths – coming soon

  Book 5 – ???????

  Book 6 – ???????

  Time After Time

  Blake’s Story – A Mortal Sins Novella

  Roll of the Dice: a novella

  For updates on upcoming projects, follow me on Twitter @MarkStephens6

  Chapter 1 – 243 Willow Street

  The dark blue, non-descript sedan turned the corner and drove up Willow Street slowly and unobtrusively. Its tinted windows reflected the morning sun and created an even greater mystique around this foreign obtrusion. On any other day along this sleepy, little street, a strange car would’ve been noticed, watched. The license plate might’ve been written down. Details memorized. Its progress noted. In this day and age, one had to be vigilant.

  But this morning was different.

  Strangeness had already visited this normally quiet, out of the way, sedate collection of cookie cutter houses. Their slice of suburbia had been invaded and their attention was collectively occupied by the array of police cars, ambulances and other official vehicles that had descended upon Willow Street.

  The sedan ambled down the street towards the cordoned section of the road with nary a second look from the people that lined the sidewalks and stood on their porches.

  It glided to a stop a dozen feet behind the flimsy yellow tape that fluttered in the morning breeze and the stark white van that screamed Crime Scene Unit in bold black letters on the sides. The engine idled while both occupants surveyed the scene through the dark windows. The driver glanced uneasily at his passenger. The younger, Hispanic man returned the look with one of his own, lips clenched tightly in a thin line. Neither of them said a word. They didn’t need to. Both of them had seen enough crime scenes to know that most murders didn’t warrant this much fanfare. Only the most gruesome and sensational did.

  Unfortunately, their business centered around the gruesome and sensational.

  The driver, Federal Agent Mark Fitzsimmons, stepped out of the car first. He was taller than most men, just an inch or two shy of six and a half feet, depending on what shoes he was wearing. He was dressed in a dark blue tailored suit with impenetrable shades covering the sad concern that creased his eyes. His short cropped brown hair belied a severity that was softened by his round cheeks and easy smile, at least it did when he had the occasion to smile.

  With one arm propped on the door frame and a polished loafer cocked up on the panel, he looked over the neighborhood. If he hadn’t known better, he could’ve imagined that he was back home in Pope, Indiana, and was looking at the street he had grown up on.

  The houses were all two story, most painted a neutral white or beige with an occasional blue or brown or yellow thrown in. Front yards were neatly manicured and bright green with bursts of color from the flower beds along the foundations. Tall oaks and elms lined the boulevards, interrupted only by the driveways that cut across them. It would have been the cozy, mundane piece of suburbia that he would expect to find if not for emergency vehicles blocking the street and the crowds that had gathered on the sidewalks.

  His eyes roamed over the small groups of spellbound natives, all of them still wearing their bathrobes and sweats and pajamas. They all looked disheveled, hastily wakened by the early morning circus that had visited their quiet suburban lives. Their necks craned around the support vehicles to get a better view. Their eyes were filled with macabre curiosity despite the dark circles around them. Children grasped on to their parent’s hands and legs, uncertain of what was going on, some eating Pop-Tarts, while the adults whispered amongst themselves.

  People could be so morbid sometimes, he thought.

  The passenger door creaked open and his partner finally stepped out. Although he was dressed identically to the driver, the similarities ended there. Angelo Rodriguez was shorter and bulkier, his hair slicked back, his skin several shades darker. He grabbed a dark blue windbreaker from the back seat and tossed it over the roof of the car, donning one of his own with heavy white stenciled letters that read FBI. Nodding silently at each other, both men began to navigate around the parked vehicles before stopping at the bright yellow tape that cordoned off the area.

  Mark surveyed the scene quickly, taking in every detail with practiced ease. Taking the lead, he ducked under the flimsy barrier and walked forward into the chaos of the murder scene before being stopped by a visibly shaken police officer that looked young enough to be carded for beer.

  “I’m sorry, sirs. You need to step behind the yellow tape.” His voice cracked between registers, which only served to undermine the authority he was trying to project.

  Mark eyed the rookie sympathetically. The body in the house was probably the first dead body this kid had ever seen and, like one’s first love, it would be the one he never forgot. If this crime scene was anything like the others, the kid would have nightmares for the rest of his life.

  Reaching inside their breast pockets simultaneously, he and his partner procured the thin leather binders that held their badges and flipped them open for the young man.

  “Agent Fitzsimmons. Agent Rodriguez.” Mark said and nodded in the direction of his partner.

  “Yes. Yes, of course.” The cop said with a fair amount of fluster in his voice and only a cursory glance at their clout. He seemed almost relieved that the Big Boys had arrived and waved them on through.

  Before both men waded into the pandemonium, Mark paused, wanting to say something to the kid, some sort of platitude that would help him make sense of what he’d seen, but there was truthfully nothing he could say. Either the kid would find a way to come to terms with the brutality he had seen and would see in the future or he wouldn’t.

  Seeing his partner up ahead, he picked up his pace and caught up to where Angelo had stopped. At the far side of the condoned area, he could see the media circus had begun with scores of reporters waving their magic wands and trying to catch a sound bite for the evening news. Scores of uniforms stood at the perimeter and guarded the sawhorses and yellow tape that enclosed the unassuming house. White lab coats with their own stenciled anagrams bustled about, beating a path between the inside of the house and the vehicles they had arrived in.

  As they watched, a young woman from the Crime Scene Unit came bursting out of the house and made a beeline towards the neighboring yard. She had almost made it before she suddenly fell to her knees and began to wretch up her breakfast.

  “Well,” Angelo Rodriguez commented gruffly as he watched the woman climb to her feet shakily. “Seems like we’re in the right place.”

  “Unfortunately.” Mark Fitzsimmons replied absently and continued to inspect the area, looking for any oddities or discrepancies that might clue him in as to why their suspects chose this locale over somewhere else.

  Like the other five murder scenes, though, there was nothing spectacular about this house or the neighborhood. Both were as white bread as you could get and this house was no different from the rest of them. It was dull white with green shutters, two stories tall and bordered by a row of bushes that stopped at the lowest eaves of the window sills. The neighboring houses were just far enough away to stop nosy neighbors from easily intruding, which would give th
em some privacy and make the perimeter defensible. And, as with the other crime scenes, this house had been foreclosed on and empty for quite some time. All in all, it was just like the other houses he’d been to, a scene that was becoming all too familiar by now.

  “See if you can find the officer in charge of this mess, will you?” Mark asked, getting a sharp nod in reply before Angelo moved off into the throng.

  He took a moment to massage the knots out of his stiff shoulders. Sometimes, he wondered, if at 38, he just wasn’t too old for this crap. Of course it didn’t help that he’d been woken after four hours of sleep and stuck in the tight confines of an agency sedan for another three. Ah, the joys of being a federal field investigator for Special Divisions.

  There was no time to dwell on his aches and pains or the ‘pleasant’ perks of his job. He had a job to do and a body to examine. So, with a deep breath, he pulled a pair of blue latex gloves from his suit pocket and slipped them on.

  Seeing the bold FBI stenciled on his jacket, everyone gave him a wide berth as he approached the wide, wooden stairs that led up to the house. He stepped up on to the porch and saw the shadowed indentations of the house number on the column. The once-white flooring was faded and brittle, dead leaves were piled high in each corner.

  Mark flashed his badge again at the two officers that guarded the door and stepped through the threshold unimpeded. He should’ve waited for clearance from his partner and the officer in charge, but he wanted to verify that this crime scene matched the first five. If it didn’t, then they could be on their merry way. If it did, well then, they’d have number six on their hands.

  He walked slowly and cautiously through the foyer and down the hallway towards the activity he could hear. His trained eyes scanned the empty house carefully, taking in every inch he could see and looking for anything out of the ordinary. All he found was a thin layer of dust on everything and a few scuffed bare footprints that were too obscured to be of much use.

  At that moment, he heard the loud huff of his partner’s breathing and turned to face him. “We’re all set, albeit grudgingly.”

  “And we’re in the right place.” Mark said back to him. He pointed towards the tracks. “See the toe outlines? Just like the other houses, whoever did this wasn’t wearing shoes.”

  Both of them continued onward, their faces grim with the realization that this was the sixth murder house. Out of all the oddities that surrounded their investigation, the fact that their suspects never wore shoes had only been one of the weirder aspects. Seeing the dusty tracks confirmed that this wasn’t a wild goose chase.

  Sighing heavily, Mark walked on until he came to the arch that opened up to the front room. There was a swarm of cops, crime scene investigators and photographers moving around the length of the room, but he could already see the tell tale signs that he was familiar with.

  On the far wall that led to the dining room, there were two metal hooks driven into the support beams. The wood flooring around the hooks were gouged from moving heavy equipment hastily and the walls and floor below the hooks were spattered with dried blood. The bodies had already been removed, probably taken to the coroner’s van out front.

  Mark silently cursed at the investigators for disturbing the crime scene by removing the bodies, but, to be honest, there probably wouldn’t be much new to be gleaned from them. Still, they had been instructed to leave everything as they had found it until the feds got here. Even as he was fuming, though, something drew his attention away from his ire: the one thing in the room that stood out starkly from the first five houses. This one had an extra body.

  “Well, that’s new.” Angelo commented snidely from beside him and Mark walked up to the body that lay crumpled in the center of the room.

  Agent Mark Fitzsimmons knelt beside the white chalk outline around the man’s corpse. His brow was furrowed in contemplation and his eyes studied this new development with earnest. All around him, men snapped photographs, made notes and took measurements, but he ignored them all. Every report would read the same as the last ones. What he cared about was this man. He was the oddity, the difference, and possibly their first lead.

  Which of these things is not like the others?

  With a keen eye, Mark looked over his face and body.

  Dark purple and yellow bruises had blossomed on the victim’s chest, arms and face that puffed up the skin around his eyes and nose, obscuring his features badly. Dried blood crusted around his mouth, staining his teeth a brownish color. Even so, with his trained eye, he guessed the man to be in his thirties, maybe a little more, and definitely older than the other victims.

  Mark could see that he was clean cut, well-groomed, definitely upper class. His body was wired with thin, hard muscle, easily discernible since he was naked except for a pair of Speedos. He was of the same physical archetype that these butchers seemed to want: in shape and good looking. Just like all the previous victims had been.

  Except John Doe here, he wasn’t hanging on the wall with a bunch of tubes hanging out of his sides. He was just beaten to a bloody pulp, but that wasn’t what had killed him. Of that, the agent was certain.

  Mark ran his gloved fingers along the upper ribcage and found two loose flaps of skin, maybe only an inch or inch and a half long. He tilted the body up off the floor and found the same size exit wound at a diagonal angle.

  “Look, Angelo. What do you make of this?”

  His partner crouched down and examined the wounds that Mark showed him. “Hmm. I would say a knife wound, but the aperture is too small. A knife that size wouldn’t have gone all the way through. Maybe a sword or a spear?”

  “Who, in this day and age, uses swords or spears?” Mark asked with a hint of incredulity in his tone.

  His partner had no answer to that, so he didn’t offer one.

  The question didn’t go away for Mark Fitzsimmons, though. It bounced around and rattled in his brain like a loose rubber ball. He couldn’t escape the feeling that the weapon used would be a clue, but what would it mean?

  The agent settled the man back down on to the floor and lightly touched the killing stroke. The chest wound was still fresh enough that the minimal pressure he applied caused the gash to widen and excrete a steady stream of blood that rolled down the contours of his muscles and joined the growing pool of blackish-maroon beneath the body.

  Well, that’s odd.

  Rigor should have set in by now. He recalled the initial reports that his office had received. The 911 calls had come in between 1 and 2. The cops had shown up about thirty minutes later. He’d been called at 4, in the office at 4:30 and on the road at 5. Even now, at a little before 9, that was a minimum estimate of 8 to 12 hours. The muscles weren’t stiff and the blood still looked fresh, almost like the guy had just been killed an hour or two before.

  That didn’t make any sense, so he brushed that train of thought aside. It was just another weird, unanswered question in an investigation full of them. He’d just have to wait for his lab technicians to examine the body and get the coroner’s report. Maybe they would find something useful.

  So was this guy a victim trying to escape or a disgruntled collaborator? That was the $64000 question that he really wanted an answer to.

  “Angelo?” he asked the agent beside him without looking up. “Go, make the usual arrangements. I want our extraction team down here ASAP. We’re taking over jurisdiction. Oh, and make sure the commanding officer understands what leaving the crime scene as-is means.”

  “Yes, sir.” His partner said with more than a touch of sarcasm. Yet, he still got up and left the room, looking for the officer in charge again and leaving him alone with the victim.

  What was your deal? Why are you here? He silently asked the corpse. The agent stood, knowing the body wouldn’t give up any secrets on its own. He’d have to ferret them out for himself.

  Mark stepped over to the wall with the crude hooks in them. This is where the bodies had been hung and all that was left of their ordea
l were crudely drawn outlines of them. He didn’t need the victims present for him to know how they died. He’d seen the pictures a thousand times and was relatively certain that the stain of seeing them would haunt his dreams for a long time to come.

  There would be two of them, a man and a woman, always one of each. Suspended by their bound wrists, they would be swaying precariously, their feet inches above the lacquered floor like rag dolls. Their skin would have a bluish-green tint to it and each of them would have three eight-inch needles embedded through their ribcages and into their lungs with a rubber hose dangling from each one with dripping blood and a mysterious clear chemical compound that his team couldn’t identify.

  Worse of all were their eyes. The pupils would be a clouded, milky white, staring blankly forward, seeming dead to the world. Yet, there was a terrified consciousness in their expressions as if the victims knew what was happening to them and were powerless to stop it.

  Although no machinery had ever been left behind, whoever the perpetrators were, they were thorough, the evidence suggested that the loose ends of the tubes had been hooked up to something, something that pumped their lungs full of that unidentifiable chemical mixture and saltwater. For what purpose, his team had yet to fathom.

  Before Mark Fitzsimmons realized he was doing it, he found himself absently tracing the outline with his gloved fingers, almost as if the wood paneling could tell him what had happened. He’d been with the FBI for a long time and had witnessed acts of brutality beyond the scope of imagination. Yet, ever since he’d been assigned to this investigation two months ago, he’d never have dreamed that anyone could sink to such depths of depravity.

  Not being very professional, Fitzsimmons. He chided himself mentally and pulled his hand away from the wall. There was no need to get maudlin now. He needed his professionalism and emotional detachment intact if he was ever going to catch these monsters.

  He took a few steps back and followed the deep gouges in the wood flooring through the room and under the archway that led towards the back of the house. They seemed to suggest that they left in a hurry, which meant they had been interrupted. They would’ve needed a truck to haul around something heavy enough to leave grooves this deep. He made a mental note to have agents canvass the neighborhood.