The sun sank blood red in the sky, and Nikki looked up at the sky and emptied her coffee paper cup. She had texted Lee immediately and breathed a sigh of relief when it took less than two minutes for him to assure her that he was nowhere near Quincy Market. Then she entered the lobby and reached an elevator, pressing the button. Her colleagues were still hurrying through the corridors, startled; only Nikki seemed to be moving in time. She entered the elevator with her head hanging down and pressed the button for the third floor.

Until a few minutes ago, she had been in the morgue, in the autopsy room. The massacre had produced so many bodies that even the five autopsy tables in the next room were not enough.

What was really bad were all the smartphones of the corpses, which rang incessantly, often from abroad or another state, and whose owners would never answer the call again.

The face of a young woman whose throat had been slit by one of the murderers had stuck in Nikki's mind. The young, far too young body that had been lying on the metal autopsy table. The woman was far too young to lie there - eighteen, as the driver's license had shown. That made her older than Mia but still far too young to die. This young woman had dreams, hopes, wishes, plans. And it had all come to an end on that terrible, bloody day when the teenagers had got out of the VW van with their black hoodies, knives, and axes. All the perpetrators were in custody, including Herbert Mencer, who had acted as the spokesman.

Maggie had been in charge of supervising the autopsies.

Even the red-haired ME, who usually had sarcastic and inappropriate remarks up her sleeve, had refrained from making any cynical remarks that day.

The young woman entered the conference room where Nick, Elizabeth, and Katherine sat.

Elizabeth looked at her daughter and furrowed her brows a little.

Nikki recognized the worried look on her mother's face and smiled a little, sitting down next to Katherine at the conference table.

Elizabeth cleared her throat and gritted her teeth. She had given her team a thirty-minute break after seeing that Nikki was becoming increasingly pale and could barely focus. Even Nick was texting incessantly, exhaling in relief when he got a response to his text, just like herself. She knew it was time to give her team time to check in on her friends who had nothing to do with family or the job. She hadn't done much else in those thirty minutes.

She cleared her throat again and looked at Katherine. "Herbert isn't this God of Blood, is he?"

Katherine looked at the teen's file and furrowed her brows. "No, I think that's extremely unlikely. The guys who control that sort of thing usually stay in the background."

Elizabeth kept gritting her teeth, giving her sister a long look with furrowed brows. "What makes you so sure of that?"

Katherine licked her lips and stood up from her chair. "It's not new with these ... Killer cults. Think of the Manson family. They met in Death Valley. Killing together was a ritual that welded them together. Above all, there's always the fear that others might turn you in if you kill and leave the cult."

Elizabeth, like everyone else, knew the story of the Manson family. "But Charles Manson didn't take part in the murder."

"No, of course not. He put his followers up to it," Katherine replied. "Manson was extremely good at analyzing people psychologically and seeing what tasks they were suitable for and what they could do for him. Even John Douglas of the FBI said that if Manson hadn't been a criminal, he could have used him as a psychologist in his unit. In any case, the members of the Manson Family did everything for him."

Elizabeth pursed her lips and drew her eyebrows together. "I never understood that about all those cults. Because what do the followers get out of murdering in the name of some weirdo?"

Nikki took a deep breath as she grabbed a bottle of water on the conference table and furrowed her brows. "First of all, they feel invincible. At not even sixteen, they're still minors, and they're shamelessly taking advantage of that."

Katherine nodded slowly. "I'm pretty sure this God of Blood points that out to his disciples, as well as the fact that they have the insanity option. You can murder through me, and nothing will happen to you. When that happens, absolute submissiveness quickly ensues, which in psychology is called the Reverend Jim effect."

Nikki's eyebrows drew together. "Jim Jones in Guyana? That was another one of those top-notch weirdos."

Katherine raised her eyebrows a little. "But an influential one."

Nikki knew the story of Jim Jones, who had founded his church in the USA with the Peoples Temple and whose mother had allegedly been prophesied that she would give birth to a son who would make all the injustices in the world forgotten. However, he only failed the lives of his disciples, who had taken their own lives in a mass suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, on November 18, 1978. Nine hundred and seventeen people and the notorious Reverend Jim Jones were killed.

Nick pulled the corners of his mouth down. "There are still a lot of crazy people. The Davidians, for example."

Elizabeth nodded slowly. "In Waco, Texas. True."

Katherine took a deep breath and looked at her husband. "The Seventh Day Davidian Adventists, actually, Nick. The seventh day is the day of the apocalypse, the end times, the day Jesus returns."

"The story still didn't go well," growled Elizabeth with lowered brows.

"No. The Davidians based themselves on the Kingdom of David from the Old Testament, hence the name. In 1981, three years after the Guyana case, Vernon Wayne Howell joined the group as David Koresh and took over the leadership. Koresh convinced his followers that he was Jesus. However, he had overlooked the small print about the peacefulness of Christianity, so the sect also dealt with weapons. When the FBI wanted to shut the place down, seven hundred state agents with tanks had to besiege the property of the weird group in Palestine, Texas. That was sometime in 1993 when the Davidians set fire to their buildings and, in some cases, killed themselves. They also killed pregnant women, children, and, in the end, David Koresh himself. Koresh shot several members of his sect during the siege, including five children."

"Very Christian," growled Elizabeth with lowered brows. "Would the God of Blood disciples also sacrifice themselves for this God of Blood? And would he have that power over them?"

Katherine thought for a moment and licked her lips. "Yes and no, this isn't a traditional cult since most of it is online. What differentiates the God of Blood is that it promises a certain segment of the, shall we say, killer market, namely the under sixteens, to be able to murder with impunity, which is possible if they pretend to be insane."

Nikki looked at her aunt for a long time and furrowed her brows. "And that's all? What's with the boning, then? There's no need for that if all I want to do is kill, and it doesn't matter if I get caught or not anyway because I'm pleading insane."

Katherine nodded and raised her eyebrows briefly. "Right. That's something else again. So, I wouldn't be surprised if that was some motivational video. Or it's for when they eventually want to keep killing and not get caught."

Elizabeth closed her eyes briefly and ran her fingers across her forehead. "Motivational video sounds good. We'll have to suggest that to our management development team."

Katherine rolled her eyes. "The fact is, the God of Blood wants something from his disciples in return."

"They're already killing."

"Yes, but it could be that next he asks them to surprise him, to do something great, in this case horrific, for him, kind of like Project Mayhem in the movie Fight Club. However, the God of Blood is not as close to his disciples as other cult leaders, such as Shoko Asahara from the Japanese Aum cult, who carried out the sarin poison gas attack on the Tokyo subway in the 1990s, because he probably does most of his work via the internet. According to internal FBI information, he was executed in Japan."

Nikki blinked a few times. "But he had a whole entourage around him, didn't he?"

"Yes. At its peak, the cult had forty thousand members and a fortune of one hundred million dollars raised from donations from the faithful. Then, there were offshoots in several countries. The believers were only allowed to eat vegetables, and the master drove a white Rolls-Royce."

Elizabeth took a deep breath and gritted her teeth. "That's how it usually works. But what can we deduce from all this for our murderer? And for his disciples?"

"The God of Blood," said the psychiatrist, "has a huge number of people he can manipulate at the touch of a button thanks to his digital reach. He doesn't need to raise his cult; he takes cults whenever needed. At short notice and more or less without obligation. It's a bit like what we call the gig economy today. You don't hire anyone, but there are platforms where you can find graphic designers, cleaners, and everything else. The God of Blood makes such a platform for murderers. And by always challenging his disciples to do something new, the group never gets bored of what he wants them to do. As long as they are all under sixteen, they can let off steam sadistically and brutally again and again. And he also helps them for the time beyond sixteen."

Elizabeth shook her head. "Murder beyond sixteen. Almost sounds like a damn insurance commercial."

"Yeah," Katherine growled, "Self-realization as snuff-movie, you could say."

"Sort of like Tinder for serial killing?" Nikki added.

Katherine looked at her niece as if she was proud of everything the young woman had learned from her. "You said that beautifully."