Girl, Sought (Ella Dark #24)

CHAPTER TEN

Ella couldn’t take her eyes off the display in front of her.

Blood dripped from Alfred Finch's hands and feet. Not the messy arterial spray of a fresh kill, but the slow, sticky ooze of a body going cold. The industrial nails that pinned him to his living room wall had done their work with surgical precision. Four spikes through his palms and feet, another two through his shoulders. The human butterfly, spread-eagled on his own wall like just another specimen in his collection.

Crime scenes had their own personalities. This one screamed ‘look at me’ with every detail.

Somewhere behind her, Detective Reeves barked orders at a group of uniforms setting up tape around the perimeter. Luca was pacing, clearly trying not to decorate the carpet with his breakfast.

‘Hawkins,’ she shouted.

‘What?’

'I don't know. I just want to check you're not going to hurl.' It was a lie, she reasoned. She just wanted Luca beside her while she processed the fact that someone could do this to another human being. All these years studying serial killers, and sometimes she still felt a million miles away from understanding them.

‘It’s give or take,’ he said. ‘Look at the holes in his hands and feet. Our guy pierced him, maybe drilled him. We can add sadism to the list.’

Luca, as sharp as he was, always struggled with the visuals. One of Ella’s late-night shows of choice involved a celebrity doctor who drained cysts, and Luca would always wince at that. She could only imagine what havoc this scene was playing with his stomach.

‘You want to take a breather?’ she asked.

‘Do I hell. I want to figure this maniac out.’ Luca gestured to the creatures behind glass. ‘No prizes for guessing what our vic got up to in his spare time.’

‘He was a collector,’ Ella said. It was obvious, but someone had to voice it.

‘Just like Eleanor, only it’s insects instead of dolls. Our unsub has a type.’

The questions came in violent waves. How did the killer find this victim? How did he get access to the house? How did he pull this off without anyone hearing?

And why did he seemingly have a grudge against collectors?

‘We can safely say that this isn’t about dolls,’ Ella said.

‘Nope. It’s about a type of person, not a type of collector.’

Detective Reeves ambled over in a sweat despite the cold. ‘I haven’t seen anything like this in thirty years. Who does this?’

This unsub’s psychopathology was still a mystery. Ella had a lot of thinking to do if she wanted to try and scratch the surface of this killer’s worldview. ‘Still working on it. What do we know about the victim?’

‘House belongs to a man named Alfred Finch, who I can only assume is…’ Reeves gestured to the crucified man on the wall.

‘Any details on him?’

’51 years old, twice divorced. Works as an entomologist at the Virginia Museum of Natural History.’

Entomologist. The dead things behind glass suddenly made a sick sort of sense. ‘Well, it’s definitely the same unsub. That’s our only positive right now.’

‘We sure?’ Reeves asked.

'One hundred percent. Scenes and victimology might be different, but the brush strokes are the same. The eye for detail, the personalized method of murder. Serial killers usually select victims based on appearance, but our killer's targeting a personality type.'

‘Which is what? Collectors?’

‘Collectors,’ Ella repeated. ‘They represent something he either covets or despises. If we can figure out what that is, we might have a chance of protecting the next potential victim.’

‘Well, no doors show no sign of forced entry, and call me crazy but Alfred Finch doesn’t strike me as the kind of person to leave his door unlocked.’

‘Definitely not. Not with all these specimens in here. These things must be worth a fortune.’

‘Maybe that’s it,’ Reeves said. ‘Could he be boosting these things for cash?’

‘Doubt it, otherwise he wouldn’t go to the lengths he did. I hate to say it, but there’s something personal about these kills. Serial killers – male ones, at least – rarely kill for financial gain. This is a pure power trip.'

Something crunched under Ella’s boot. Glass. She crouched down and found fragments of what might have been a display case. Among the shards lay a single cockroach, its label still clinging on like a dying declaration: Saltoblattella montistabularis .

‘Anyone know what this is?’

Luca leaned in. ‘I can’t even pronounce it, but any creature with a Latin name must be worth something.’

‘Even a dead one?’ asked Reeves. ‘Why do people keep this weird shit?’

Ella didn’t know. She’d never been one for collector’s items. Hoarding stuff for the sake of it seemed pointless.

‘More importantly, why’s it the only thing here that’s been smashed? Everything else is pristine.’

Luca said, ‘Collateral damage? It might have been knocked over in the struggle.’

Ella glanced around. There weren't any tables or stands on this side of the room. 'But where the hell did it come from? This is in a shadow box, whereas everything else is in a frame.'

‘Could have been a fight. We don’t know.’ Luca pointed to the victim. ‘There’s no blood, so our killer must have strangled him. Same as he did with Eleanor.’

‘It’s possible.’ Ella put the cockroach back where she found it then snapped a picture with her phone. When she got back to the precinct, she had some serious searching to do.

Luca said, ‘I’m gonna take a look around. See if I spot anything out of the ordinary.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said Reeves.

Ella nodded and went about her own search, beginning in the living room. For now, it was just her and Alfred Finch, the human butterfly. She stopped and stared at the poor man, tried to imagine what his last moments alive might have been like. Was he ambushed? Did he have time to contemplate his demise, or was it over in a flash? Strangulation took many forms, some quicker than others.

Alfred’s collection seemed to cover three of the walls in his living room. The wall facing the window was devoid of creatures, although it now had a human being attached to it. If Ella was guessing, maybe Alfred kept that wall free of specimens so that people couldn’t glimpse his insect museum from the street. Wise choice. Advertising rare stuff like this was asking for burglaries, which suggested Alfred was security-conscious, and security-conscious meant locked doors.

So how did the killer get inside?

Something about the layout of the specimens on the walls nagged at Ella’s subconscious, and then she thought about Eleanor Calloway’s collection room. The way everything was arranged to the millimeter, except for that blank space in her trophy case that seemed at odds with everything else in the room.

Just like the blank space above Alfred Finch’s fireplace.

It was like a missing tooth in an otherwise perfect smile. It noticeably skewed the symmetry, even more so when Ella saw that the mounting bracket was still in the wall.

The killer had removed something.

But why?

Taking trophies was par for the course with serial killers, but removing something from the victim's prized collection didn't fit the typical trophy-taking M.O. A lock of hair, a driver's license, a piece of jewelry. Something personal and intimate that would help them relive the kill long after the body went cold.

But this felt like a different approach completely. The unsub wasn't just grabbing a souvenir - he was curating these scenes with the same obsessive attention to detail as the collectors themselves. Plucking the centerpiece from a carefully arranged display and leaving a void that screamed its own meaning into the silence.

Unless this killer didn’t fall prey to the typical serial killer mindset.

Maybe to this killer, the collections were the most personal thing about his victims. These carefully curated displays were extensions of their owners' souls - their passions, their obsessions, their life's work distilled into glass cases and careful labels.

By taking pieces of the collections, was he collecting pieces of them?

‘Ell!’ Luca's voice shattered her train of thought. ‘You need to see this!’

The urgency in Luca's voice sent her heart rate skyrocketing. She found him and Reeves standing at the end of the hallway, staring into what looked like a mad scientist's wet dream. The room had a green hue and a constant hum, like the server room at HQ. Shelves were lined with glass tanks and jars, tangles of tubes and wires connecting them like some kind of buggy life support system.

‘The hell am I looking at?’

‘I don’t know, but we got some movement in here.’

The space hummed with life - actual life, not the preserved facsimiles that filled the rest of the house. Glass terrariums housed miniature ecosystems complete with soil beds, heat lamps, and mesh coverings. Tiny bodies stirred amongst them.

‘Well, Finch was an entomologist. Makes sense he might have…’

‘Never mind that,’ Luca interrupted. He pointed to the top corner of the room. ‘Look.’

Her gaze followed his pointing finger and landed on a small, black lens nestled in the ceiling joint like a glittering eye.

A camera.

Ella's breath caught. She moved closer, eyes fixed on the device's red-blinking eye. Its position gave it a perfect view of the door, of anyone coming or going.

Coming or going. Like their killer.

‘God damn,’ she said.

‘If our killer spent as much time in this house as we think he did…’ Luca trailed off.

‘He might have come in here, either before or after the murder.’

‘Yup.’

The possibilities spun out in Ella's mind like a roulette wheel. Motive, method, identity - it could all be there, trapped in ones and zeroes, just waiting for them to crack open the secrets.

She met Luca's gaze. ‘We need that footage. Now.’

Their psycho collector might have just made his first mistake. And Ella was going to make damn sure it was his last.