CHAPTER SEVEN
‘Alright, ya got me,’ Fields said.
They were in a place called Janet’s Diner, where Fields had insisted they rendezvous.
Ella peered at Fields over the rim of her coffee mug.
On the other side of the table sat the Sergeant with a file he’d collected from the precinct.
Beside her, Mia Ripley waged unholy war on a plate that could’ve fed half of Louisiana.
‘You didn’t have to hide it,’ Ripley said through a mouthful of steak. ‘Just tell us there are two bodies and you need some help. Then we’ll decide whether we want to or not.’
‘I hold my hands up. I knew that the second the word serial got out there, the feds would come in and take over. I don’t need that right now. Not after the failure with Doyle.’
‘Failure?’
‘Yeah,’ Fields said. ‘I thought we’d hand her over gift-wrapped for you guys. That didn’t happen.’
Cops operated by a strange code, Ella thought. Pride came before many things in this game, most notably the fall. The job could be killing you, and you'd still tell everyone you were fine, because asking for a hand meant admitting you needed one.
‘So you do want us to help, but you don’t want anyone to know about it?’
Fields laughed and looked out of the window. His silence did the talking.
‘We’ll take that as a yes,’ Ripley said.
‘You know how it is. I got three kids doing Micky Mouse degrees at college. I’m gonna be supporting them all ‘til they’re forty. I can’t afford to get demoted. I’m struggling to make headway with anything new because half of my guys are dealing with some drug empire that showed up last month.’
It would be hypocritical of Ella to be anything but understanding of Fields's situation.
Law enforcement ate its own without much encouragement.
Two bad cases in a row and it didn't matter what you'd done before.
The file got thinner, and the assignments got quieter, and you were first on the chopping block when new budgets came in.
Fields didn’t read as a bad man, but there was one issue.
Ella said, ‘I’d say yes if it was up to me, but it’s not up to me. We need to get approval from our director to help out. I can get it within a few hours. We wouldn’t take over, either.’
Fields looked hopeful. ‘And it would stay quiet?’
‘Yes. Our director’s got bigger things to worry about than telling the world that two of his agents helped out NOPD on their day off.’
‘Would you do that? If I could just get a break here…’
Ella shot a look at Ripley and, judging by the sigh she tried to conceal, knew exactly what Ella was thinking. Helping out Fields would keep them busy while they were here, however long that might be, and Ripley clearly didn’t like that plan.
‘Just what I wanted, Dark,’ Ripley said.
‘Come on, Mia. We might as well put the skills you spent a lifetime amassing to good use.’
Ripley set her fork down and looked at the table for a moment, as though weighing it up. Ella knew the look. It was the same one she'd given on the plane and at the precinct when Ella had suggested skipping dinner. It was a performance of reluctance, and not a particularly convincing one.
‘Fine,’ Ripley said.
Fields’s whole body seemed to drop an inch with relief.
Ella hid her smile behind her coffee mug. She’d known Mia Ripley for long enough to know that the stubbornness had a shelf life, and apparently today that shelf life was about four hours. A personal best.
‘Thank you both,’ said Fields. ‘How can we make this work?’
‘Leave it to me,’ Ripley interrupted. ‘We can operate as consultants, so there’ll be no dick measuring contests between the feds and NOPD. It stays under your control. We’ll do what we can to help, but remember we’re on a time limit until we get the clearance to transfer Creed.’
‘Perfect. I appreciate it.’
‘I’ll call our director after this, now show us what we’re working with.’
Fields opened the file and turned it so Ella and Ripley could see. Inside were two sets of photographs separated by a divider. He tapped the second set.
‘This one came first. Found last night by a jogger on the bank of the Bayou St. John, about a mile north of where Rose Michaels turned up. We still haven’t confirmed who she is.
She didn’t have ID on her, and we’ve got her cell phone but no warrant to access it yet.
Apart from that, all she had was the clothes she was wearing and what you’ll see in the photos. ’
Ella pulled the photographs toward her. The first was a wide shot taken from the riverbank.
The woman was on her back on the dried mud with one arm above her head and the other across her stomach.
She was mid-twenties at a guess, clearly in the prime of life.
She had red hair that was cut to chin-length and was wearing a pink hoodie and dark jeans.
The second photo was closer. Ella could see the bruising on the victim’s throat. It was the same spread pattern as Rose Michaels, created lateral compression marks either side of the trachea. Someone had wrapped their hands around this woman’s neck and held on until her brain starved of oxygen.
Ripley leaned over and said, ‘Same age range as the victim in the alleyway.’
‘That was my first clue that these were related,’ said Fields.
Ella rifled through the next few photographs and found more of the same. Close-ups of the bruising, wide-angle shots of the ground where she’d fallen. ‘What was your second?’ she asked.
‘This.’ Fields reached over and pulled the picture from the back of the pile. He lay it on the table. ‘I was looking for anything that might identify her, and found this when I was checking her jewelry.’
The photograph showed the woman’s necklace. Fields had pulled it from under her hoodie and laid it out.
It was a thin silver chain with a small ceramic figure attached to it.
A snowman.
It had a round white body, black dot eyes, an orange triangle nose. It was crude, slightly lopsided. It was not the kind of thing anyone would put on a necklace. There was string around the snowman’s neck, which had then been tied to the necklace.
‘This is what connects them,’ Ella said.
Fields rubbed the back of his neck. ‘I wasn’t sure. I’m still not. But when I saw what Rose Michaels had in her hand, and then looked at this again…’
Ella slid the photograph across to Ripley, who had stopped eating.
That alone told Ella everything about how seriously Ripley was taking it.
Ripley studied the image and studied the snowman.
Then she looked at Ella and said nothing, which was Ripley’s way of saying we’ve got a multi-murderer on our hands.
‘It’s the same killer,’ Ella said.
Fields leaned forward. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Two women within the same age bracket, killed within hours of each other, less than a mile apart, both strangled. And both left with a small ornamental figure that has no reason to be on their person. A ballet dancer glued into Rose’s palm.
A snowman fastened to this woman’s necklace.
Ask yourself what young woman would carry a bulky snowman around her neck.
These figurines weren’t put here by accident. ’
Fields said, ‘So these toys are like his signature.’
‘No,’ Ella said. ‘It’s his ritual.’
Fields frowned.
‘A signature is what identifies a killer. Strangulation is his signature. Young women is his signature. This part of New Orleans is his signature. The figurines are different. They don’t serve a practical purpose.
Strangling these women achieves his goal without a ballet dancer or a snowman anywhere near the scene, but he puts them there anyway, which means they fulfil a psychological need that the killing alone doesn’t satisfy. It’s compulsive. He can’t not do it.’
‘Which tells us what, exactly?’
‘That he’s organized,’ Ripley said. She’d pushed her plate to one side now.
‘He brings the figurines with him. He selects them before the murder, which means there’s a planning phase.
He doesn’t grab the nearest heavy object and beat someone to death in a car park.
He picks his victim, he picks his figurine, and he picks his location.
And then he arranges the scene afterward.
He posed Rose Michaels with her palms facing up.
He tied a snowman to this woman’s necklace.
This is someone who can control himself. ’
‘And the figurines mean something,’ Ella said. ‘They could be personal to him or they could represent something. We need to find out if these victims are surrogates or intended targets.’
‘Come again?’ said Fields.
Surrogates are symbols of the source of his rage.
If he hates women, then there's a woman out there who caused him to hate women, and he's re-enacting killing her over and over again.
If these women are his intended targets, then they've personally done something to wrong him.
We need to find out which, and it'll be a lot easier if it's the latter.
Ripley said, ‘What I’m wondering is why he hid the snowman underneath the victim’s hoodie, when he left the ballet dancer out in the open.’
‘Easy,’ Ella said. ‘This snowman looks ceramic to me. Is that right, Fields?’
‘Right.’
‘Ceramics can crack under thermal shock. If there’s freezing rain on it one minute then blistering sun the next, the snowman could break and ruin his ritual.
Or the string could come loose and make the figurine blow away.
That wouldn’t happen with wood. The killer hid it under her hoodie to make sure we found it. ’
‘Either that or he’s still experimenting,’ Ripley said. ‘If he’s early in his cycle, the method will be more important than the ritual. Rituals get more sledgehammers as killers get more confident. If there's a third victim, don't be surprised to find a figurine stuck to their forehead.'
‘Which means that these are his first foray into murder, so that’s one silver lining.’
Fields looked between them. He seemed like a man watching a tennis match being played at a speed he hadn’t expected. His phone buzzed on the table. He checked it.
‘The coroner’s finished with victim one and says she’ll have victim two done within the hour. She fast-tracked them both.’
Ella drained her coffee and set the mug down. ‘We should go see her.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Fields.
Ripley said, ‘No need. Three of us in a coroner’s office is one too many.
We need both scenes locked down tight. Make sure you’ve got enough officers holding the perimeter at the river and at Natkin Way.
If forensics have anything new, we want to hear about it before the end of tonight.
And check whether any cameras from that factory caught vehicle traffic in or out between ten last night and when the body was found. ’
For a half-second, Ella thought Fields might push back, but he didn’t. He nodded once, scooped up his files and slid out of the booth.
‘I’ll have the updates to you as soon as they come in,’ he said. ‘And thank you. Both of you.’
‘Don’t thank us yet,’ Ripley said. ‘We haven’t done anything.’
Fields left. The bell above the diner door rang after him.
Ripley looked at Ella sideways. ‘Are you happy now? You’ve got a murder investigation to keep you busy.’
‘So have you.’
Ripley rolled her eyes. ‘Great. Now excuse me while I go talk to Vernon, unless you want to do the honors?’
‘He’ll be more receptive to you, because he lets you do whatever you want.’
‘That’s the advantage of being a bitch. Meet me outside in five.’
Ella thought everything through. Two figurines left on two dead bodies, both of which were discovered within around twelve hours of each other. Ella didn’t know if that meant they were both killed during the same span, but hopefully the coroner could give her some answers.
She needed to find the answer to this, and not because Fields had asked nicely or because she had nothing better to do while she waited on clearance for the Creed transfer.
She needed this because it was the part of the work that made everything else worth enduring.
These two dead women deserved someone who’d sit with their photographs in a diner and not stop looking until their killers were brought to justice.
She stood up and grabbed her jacket.
Time to talk to the dead.