[MD2, 5:40PM, the house]

>"I wanna see where this door leads to" Craig said
>opening the door.
>When he opened the door he found a small room
>with Five dead bodies in it,
>He called to the others and they had a look.

Kate was kneeling over the entrance to the pit where Damian and Sharlyn had been held, using one of the candles to get a better look at it - next time she would remember to bring a flashlight along - when Craig called out to them. "What have you found," she asked. Getting to her feet, she got the answer to the question, not in words, but when the stench of decomposition hit her.

"There's five of them," Craig said. "A couple of them have been here a while."

Looking into the small room, little more than a closet really, Kate saw the bodies of five girls, each partially concealed under a white sheet. The math was simple enough - five girls had been found murdered on or near the Karellon campus, and the five here. That left two more missing, but Kate had a pretty good idea who they would *not* find among the dead. Where they would find them was another matter. This was starting to feel more and more like a trap that Megan had lured them into. "Flynn, do they have the tattoos?"

Flynn pulled on a pair of latex gloves and approached the more intact of the bodies. He didn't look happy about the task, but without flinching, he lifted the sheet and examined the dead girl's arm, then nodded. He repeated the procedure two more times. "Yes," he said, "these three have them. The other two…" He shrugged.

Kate could see what he meant. The other two bodies were too decomposed to tell whether they had the tattoos or not. Meanwhile, Patrica was also looking at the bodies.

"Any guess how they died," Kate asked.

Patrica shook her head. "We'll have to get them to the morgue to determine that. What's this?" She indicated a piece of twine tied around the girl's neck. Pulling the twine necklace out from under the sheet, she found a human thumb tied to the end of it.

"Looks like they've all got them," Sharlyn said. "Some kind of ritual?"

Kate looked to Flynn. "You're the expert on this White Plague. Does this mean something?"

"Probably means something to Burrell, but exactly what, we won't know until we find him," Flynn said. He looked around at all the candles. "It kinda looks like we walked in on the middle of a ritual, but where are they?"

"I was just wondering the same thing," Kate said.

Just then, they heard the sound of footsteps coming from above them.


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