Chapter Four Come on, Santa #2
Kenny turned to him. The question wasn’t academic. Nor performative. It was human. Because he hadn’t asked what he thought. He asked how he felt.
Kenny inhaled, the cold slicing sharply through his chest. He let the question sit for a beat before answering.
“Unease,” he said. “Because someone did this at leisure. Intentionally. There’s no panic here.
No chaos. It’s… precise. And that kind of stillness?
” He exhaled. “It always unsettles me. Stillness usually means control.”
“And planned. And meticulous. And practiced.”
“Yes.”
“Which means they’ve done it before.”
Kenny met his gaze. Held it.
Long enough to say I know what the words serial killer means to you. He stroked his fingers along Aaron’s. Knuckle to knuckle. Not a hold. Not enough to expose anything to the world. But enough to tell Aaron he saw it all.
The fear. The fire. The history. The ache.
And loved him anyway.
Aaron wiggled his fingers in response, grazing back. And with that, the silent acknowledgement. Let me fall apart later.
And Kenny would.
Behind them, footsteps approached through the frost.
Parry joined them again, notebook in hand. “We’re compiling a list of seasonal roles. Santas, grottos, event staff, costume rentals. Anyone who might’ve had access to the suit he was found in.”
“You’re assuming the suit wasn’t his?”
“We are. He’s known locally. Seventeen. No fixed address. Been in and out of hostels since he was fifteen, age-out complications. Sometimes stayed at the night shelter, sometimes rough-slept near the charity shop by the square. He’s not your average Santa impersonator.”
“What else do you know about him?”
Parry flipped back through her notes. “Name’s Luke Wells.
No living parents on record. Foster placements didn’t stick.
Bounced between short-term care and emergency accommodation.
History of running. Petty theft, loitering, a few warnings.
Nothing violent. But smart. Staff at the youth centre said he was sharp.
Could read people a little too well for his own good. ”
Kenny tapped his knuckles to Aaron’s again. Subtle, quiet. Enough contact to say I see you. Because he knew that look. Knew exactly where Aaron’s mind had gone. And Kenny needed him to feel the line between empathy and collapse.
Aaron didn’t speak for a beat. Then, “So, what? Someone carried him here like some fucked-up festive offering?”
His voice was steady. Neutral. But Kenny heard the shift. The calibration.
Aaron was already thinking like him. Already stepping into his shoes. Because yeah, he was good at reading killers. That came with the bloodline. But reading victims?
That was where Aaron lived.
He didn’t need crime scene photos or case files to understand what Luke had been running from.
He knew. He’d walked the same pavement, slept under the same silence.
Knew the difference between kids who wanted to disappear and kids who had no other option.
And he’d already stepped into Luke’s shoes and known he wouldn’t have come here willingly.
And Kenny, watching him fold into that headspace, felt both awe and unease.
Because Aaron could see these not as cases, but as mirrors.
And that was both his gift and his vulnerability.
“We believe he was killed elsewhere and brought here,” Parry said. “No drag marks. No scuffing on the shoes either. So we’re assuming the killer’s a male?”
Kenny studied the scene, eyes narrowed. “Strong enough to lift a teenage boy, yes. Confident enough to do it here, in the open, without rushing. That tells us something. They had time, and they knew how to use it.” He gestured towards the carefully posed body.
“Positioning someone unconscious, or dead, with this level of care takes control. Upper body strength helps. That leans male, yes. But don’t get locked into that too early. ”
Parry lifted a brow. “You’re saying it could be a woman?”
“I’m saying there are plenty of professions that teach you how to move dead weight efficiently.
Nursing, mortuary work, palliative care.
It’s not always about brute force.” He paused, then added, “And we’ve made this mistake before.
Profilers attributing strength-based staging to men, only to discover two women working in tandem.
Or one woman, methodical enough to go unnoticed. ”
Parry tilted her head. “Still rare though.”
“Rare, yes. But not impossible. Women slip through the cracks all the time because we still cling to this idea of them as the weaker gender. Less violent. Less capable.”
He didn’t look at Aaron when he said that. The shadow of Roisin Howell stretched long, even now. And Kenny had spent the past few years learning how to speak around it.
“Could that be the case here?” Parry asked. “Two people? A joint effort?”
“It’s possible.” Kenny rubbed his chin in thought.
“But I don’t think so. There’s no split in detail.
No mismatched intent. The staging is seamless.
Purposeful. This feels like one mind. One vision.
One hand.” He turned back to the boy laid out in the snow, peppermint held in his closed hands.
“This isn’t disposal. It’s presentation.
There’s ownership in that. The gift tag?
That’s intimacy. You don’t share that kind of ritual with anyone. ”
Parry nodded. Taking it in.
And Kenny watched the blink of the tree lights overhead. Red. Blue. White. As if someone had planned it that way.
He turned back to Parry. “Have you canvassed local CCTV? Traffic cams? Shop fronts?”
“We’ve started,” she said. “Slow progress. Limited angles.”
“Any bags or packaging near the scene?”
“Nothing that looked relevant, but we’ll sweep again.”
Kenny drew a breath and looked at the boy in the snow again.
“This isn’t a one-off ornament,” he said quietly, more to Parry than to the gathering.
“When someone chooses to clothe a victim like this, to make them a figure in a seasonal tableau, they’re inventing a role.
That role can be reused. Rituals like that become templates.
Once you find what works for them, they’ll lean on it again and again because it gives their violence meaning. ”
Parry paused. “You think there’ll be more?”
“Not think — expect.” Kenny shivered at the prospect, but at least he could blame the cold.
“The peppermint, the gift tag, the costume: they’re all pieces of the same symbolic grammar.
If the killer is presenting these deaths as offerings, that presentation will have reproducible elements.
Clothes, in particular, are significant.
They’re intimate, they shape how a victim reads to the world.
And unlike a sweet or a scrap of paper, garments leave traces.
Purchases, hires, donations, charity drop-offs, bags at kerbside.
Those are all traceable. If they’re sourcing costumes, they’ll need a supply.
If they’re dressing bodies to fit a script, they’ll likely follow that script again. ”
He rubbed a hand over his forehead.
“Broaden the costume search,” he said to Parry.
“Don’t limit it to hire shops. Check recent purchases, charity-shop drops, CCTV outside seasonal stalls.
Anything that reads as ‘Santa’ to a witness counts.
If we can map the supply chain, we map their movement.
And if this is a template, then catching the next staging means catching whoever it is before they can perform it again. ”
Parry nodded, scribbling as he spoke.
And beside him, Aaron stood perfectly still.
But Kenny could feel the tension thrumming off him.
Parry shifted beside them. “I can send over everything we’ve compiled so far. Initial scene reports, preliminary post-mortem, CCTV. Anything useful.”
Kenny didn’t reply immediately. Visiting the scene was one thing. Offering insight in a moment of crisis? Fine. But taking this on? Wearing it? That was something else entirely.
Parry glanced between him and the covered body.
“Hampshire’s Major Investigation Team flagged a series of unsolved deaths from the last decade.
Vulnerable youths. Some found dressed post-mortem.
A few with partial staging that didn’t make sense at the time.
They’re forwarding the files to see if anything aligns.
” She paused. “They’re not saying it’s a serial.
But… they’re not saying it isn’t, either. ”
“So you’re asking me to look for behavioural linkage?”
“Exactly. Even a framework. Something to help us see the shape of this before it escalates further. And it looks like this could be time sensitive. If this is Christmas-specific and we don’t get to him—”
“We’ll be decking the morgue, not the halls,” Aaron said, low, heavy.
Parry stared at him, startled.
Aaron dipped his head. Not flippant, not smirking, but with the flat weight of stating an inevitability. It wasn’t a quip to mock; it was a grim marker in the air, a reminder to everyone within earshot that the clock was already ticking.
Then, with a loose shrug, he added for Parry’s benefit, “Seasonal sarcasm.” A thin pause. “He rubs me with ointment for it.”
Kenny caught the deflection for what it was. A quick pivot to take the edge off the truth he’d just dropped. And yet, under the surface, the warning still pulsed, refusing to be smoothed away.
Parry turned to Kenny. “We’d appreciate your help with any triggers or signatures we might miss. We’ve got good people, but none with your background.”
Kenny didn’t answer immediately.
He was already seeing the shape of it. Already hearing the quiet logic behind the staging. He met Aaron’s gaze. Asked for his permission.
“Send what you have,” Aaron breathed out. “He’ll take a look.”
Kenny gave the smallest nod.
So he was in.
Parry nodded and moved off to brief her team.
Kenny glanced at Aaron. “You okay?”
“We’re standing in the middle of a fake winter wonderland next to a staged corpse. You tell me.”
“That’s not a no.”
“You want me to ask you to hold me here?”
“You can.”
Aaron said nothing. But he reached for his hand. Laced their fingers. And Kenny gripped it, stroking his thumb along Aaron’s.
The wind picked up as they stood there with Christmas music drifting from a nearby shop, muffled and wrong, lyrics bending around the cold. And the boy beneath the tree stayed still, a gift no one had asked for, wrapped in a symbol no one would forget.