Apocalypse Island by Mark Edward Hall

This time I’m just gonna let her go.”
    Jennings knew Cavanaugh well enough to know that letting Kate go would not be as easy as he professed. Just the same, he hoped, for her sake, and his, that he was being honest with himself.
     

Chapter 24
     
     
     
    Putting Cavanaugh’s problems aside, Jennings mulled the murder over in his mind. He pretty much figured the woman had been killed elsewhere and the body dumped at the landfill. This was the second victim and both had been handled in essentially the same manner. Although the locations had been vastly different he had no doubt that it was the same killer. Both victims had been brutally stabbed to death, a large cross had been carved on their upper torsos, and some sort of greasy kohl had been smeared around their eyes. And they’d both been decorated with tattoos. The first victim had not been sexually assaulted. Jennings would bet that this one hadn’t been either. Whatever the motive, it didn’t seem to be sex, but definitely the work of an extremely sick individual. Strange when one took into consideration that about ninety-five percent of all serial murders were based on sexual repression, and the victims were almost always sexually assaulted in some way. The killer seemed to be twisted up with some sort of religious pathos. To him these women were whores, Jennings surmised. They walked the streets, engaged in indiscriminate sex and decorated their bodies with sacrilegious artwork. It just seemed to fit. He put himself above them morally. It’s why he didn’t sexually molest them. He was above all that.
    Something else baffled Jennings about these crimes; he’d seen a strange apparition at both scenes. In his twenty-five plus years on the force he’d never seen anything quite like it. He could have dismissed the first one as the work of his imagination, he’d nearly convinced himself that’s what it had been, until this morning when Officer Myers had described seeing the same thing at this scene. That changed everything. And there was one more detail he could not explain; advertisement fliers for a local rock band known as Bad Medicine had been found in the vicinity of both victims. They had seemed to appear out of nowhere, as if some malevolent force had produced them for his eyes only. On both occasions he was the one who had found the fliers, and inconceivably, he had kept the information to himself. He kept telling himself it was because he wanted to make sure there was a connection between the murders and the fliers before he brought them to the attention of higher-ups in the force. But down deep he knew his reasons were more complex than that. He was very confused about the whole situation, and Jennings was not used to being confused about anything.
    Had it been the killer who’d left the fliers at each of the crime scenes, or someone else, or perhaps something more...intangible?
    Jennings simply did not know. What he did know was there had to be a logical explanation for it.
    At the moment the investigation was centered on the downtown night scene. Local law enforcement was in the process of doing a city-wide sweep of bars, tattoo parlors, piercing joints, illegal brothels, drug houses, you name it. So far they had turned up nothing. And perhaps the strangest thing of all, no foreign DNA had been found on the first victim. The killer was very thorough.
    The whole town was spooked and now the mayor and city council were putting pressure on the chief, who was in turn putting pressure on Jennings and his men, to solve this thing promptly. Portland was a tourist town, and for each day that passed without some sort of resolution, potential consumers were being frightened away to other towns up and down the coast. At least this was the theory politicians liked to espouse. Fucking assholes. All they cared about was money and image.
    Jennings turned his thoughts back to his partner. He had known Frank Cavanaugh for almost fifteen years, and though he called