I sat in front of a spider’s web of evidence sprawled out in front of me; the photos and narrative logs littering the floor of my apartment. I set my mug down and pushed my glasses back onto my nose.

I had spent thousands of dollars in Department resources.

I couldn’t count the amount of time that I had wasted going bat-shit crazy.

Suspects had been identified: Barry, Ginny, and Alexandra Stewart. They were siblings, two sisters and their brother. They had lived in a shit-hole trailer with their shitty parents. The trailer park burned down during a thunderstorm; I was still trying to piece together what exactly happened.

I had picked up the three of them, sleeping in an abandoned greenhouse the next county over.

They had been shoving the bodies into a pile, and the rest of the bodies were being eaten by the pigs outside.

Apparently, Barry and Ginny had been snatching critters and dissecting them since they were children. Alexandra, however, had been the baby, dragged into some twisted scheme because she had no one else.

There was just something that didn’t add up: why had they killed almost one hundred people in less than two months?

The not-so-simple answer . . . they were doing this for “something bigger” — at least, that’s what the older ones had told me.

Forensics had taken pictures, even used a drone to take a birds-eye because of the greenhouse’s size.

The bodies inside, they were in a pattern.

It was an eye.

I turned my head toward the bookshelf. Some time between me starting this, and now, it had started raining. The rain was making a pat, pat, pat on the window.

There it was — I had taken a class last summer with the FBI on the occult, and had bought a book shortly after on world mythology.

I thumbed through the glossary until I found ‘eye’ . . . ‘Mesopotamia’ . . . until ‘Dagon’.

Dagon . . .

Pat, pat, pat . . .

What would three white-trash kids want with this?

Then it hit me. I tore through the logs, finding my final interview with Barry. They had never been in school. He had been taking care of his sisters since he could remember. He was scared, alone . . . they all were.

The phone was ringing. How long had it been ringing?

I picked it up. “Detective Jameson,” I croaked.

“Sir, it’s Martinez. Look, I don’t know how to say this, but — Jesus Christ, I’m sorry.”

My eyes unfocused and my vision blurred. There was a heat behind my eyes.

“What do you mean? What happened?!” I yelled.

“The youngest Stewart girl, she’s gone. She slipped her cuffs while we were transporting her to County! I —”

I hung up the phone. I grabbed my gun and badge off the desk when I noticed it.

Pat, pat, pat . . .

It wasn’t the rain. There was something outside the window.