CHAPTER NINETEEN
The tech’s glasses were large to the point of ridiculousness with microscopes for lenses. The tech – who’d introduced himself as Sheldon and then insisted Ella call him Shelly – had spent the past thirty minutes hunched over Eddie Foxall’s body.
‘I’m no coroner,’ he said to Ella, ‘but I’m not seeing any signs of strangulation here. If you ask me, your perp bashed his head in.’
Bashed his head in seemed an odd phrase for a man of his position, but everything about this crime scene was odd.
Ripley appeared and tapped Ella on the shoulder.
She’d materialized at some point when Ella was clutching Sheila Foxall, but it could have been minutes or hours after she’d collapsed into Ella’s arms. Time warped in the presence of death.
‘So, this isn’t some vendetta against women,’ Ripley said.
‘No. Victimology has taken a hard left. Young women to a thirty-something man, and it’s not just the victim that’s changed.
Amber and Rose were ambushed in the open, but this indoors, earlier in the evening, in a residential neighborhood with houses on either side.
He’s adapting his approach to fit the target, which means these victims aren’t surrogates. He’s targeting them for a reason.’
Ripley scanned the room. ‘Well-off couple, nice house, American dream. Jealousy?’
Ella looked beyond the sunroom doors into the garden.
The houses on this street were spaced out by about thirty feet, but the Foxall home was smack in the middle of them.
‘No. If that was the case, he’d pick an easier house to get into.
Why choose one in the middle of the row?
He’d just pick the one at the end. Less chance of anyone seeing him. ’
‘I guess. What’s with the blood? That’s new.’
‘Blunt-force trauma. He used a weapon this time.’
‘Maybe because it’s the first male he’s killed. He probably didn’t have the strength or confidence to strangle a big guy like Foxall.’
‘Agreed,’ Ella said. ‘Or they got into a struggle, but I doubt it because nothing around here is broken.’
‘At least he’s consistent with his calling cards.’
‘Another figurine, which means there’s a fourth victim in the pipeline, so we need to pull apart every detail of that thing once forensics have swept it. You get any eyewitnesses?’
‘Neighbors are a bust. No one saw or heard anything until the wife got home and started screaming.’ Ripley flipped through her notes. ‘No time of death yet, but Sheldon over there guesses about an hour ago.’
One hour. The world could tilt on its axis in one hour. Lives could end, and the living could have no idea until they walked through the door and found their loved ones dead on the floor with wooden figurines stuffed in their hands.
‘Then let’s work the scene,’ Ella said. ‘See what we can piece together.’
‘After you,’ said Ripley.
Ella glanced over at the pristine living room and then back to the sunroom. ‘I’ve checked every other room – upstairs included – and there are no disturbances, which means everything took place in the sunroom.’
Ripley nodded at the French doors. ‘So, he had to have come through the back door.’
‘Yup.’ Ella headed towards them, careful not to interrupt the technicians working alongside Foxall’s corpse, then stepped out into the garden. ‘This is the same way I came too, because the front door was locked.’
Ripley moved onto the lawn then said, ‘Easy enough to scale that fence. Some of the plants near the back are trampled. Our unsub could have hidden right at the back, away from prying eyes.’
Ella put herself in the killer’s head. ‘So he jumped the fence, came to the back door – but how’d he know it’d be open?’ She leaned down and inspected the lock. Brass, single-barrel, nothing out of the ordinary.
But then something caught her eye.
She ran a gloved finger across the metal. ‘What’s this? Scuff marks?’
‘Looks like it, but every lock has scuff marks.’
Ella scanned the garden again. Two rows of well-loved plants, a lawn that didn’t have a blade of grass out of place save for Ella’s recent trampling. ‘You reckon? Even someone as house-proud as the Foxalls?’
‘Well, no one’s going to scuff a lock on purpose, are they? But accidents happen. Are you telling me you never missed the hole and scraped the side?’
‘You’re asking the wrong gender,’ Ella said as she snapped photos of the lock with her phone, ‘but my uncle used to go round and T-cut the locks on his doors. Kept them looking new, he said.’
‘He sounds insane.’
‘Maybe, but we can’t rule out forced entry. Make sure techs sweep this door too.’
‘Dark, this would make a drastic deviation in M.O. First he ambushes two young women in public, and then he breaks into a house to kill a middle-aged man? Does that make sense to you?’
‘No, but it makes sense to him. He has to get to these victims somehow. Maybe this was the only option he had to reach Foxall.’
Ripley said, ‘Okay, so he slips inside the house, then just… waits?’
‘Well, there’s a bottle of wine on the table. Something tells me Eddie Foxall didn’t leave that there all day.’
Ripley peered through the glass at the booze setup. ‘So, our unsub made himself comfortable.’
'If you ask me, it was just for show. He's adding some theatrics to the proceedings because he's got a taste for killing now, but just killing isn't enough. He needs additional elements to help chase the high he felt when he killed Amber and Rose.'
‘Or he just likes whiskey.’
Ella shook her head. ‘Our guy’s been meticulous, as much as we hate to admit it.
No prints or hair strands on the first two bodies.
He somehow got hold of an item belonging to Rose Michaels and planted it on another corpse.
And then again with the ballet dancer, and now with that weird oversized key thing.
This is strategic planning, so he’s not dumb enough to leave his saliva behind. ’
‘Duly noted. So, next step is to figure out where that key-figurine thing leads.’
‘That’ll at least help us keep the next target safe, but…’
‘But it won’t help us catch him, and doesn’t mean he won’t just target someone else.’
Ella assumed the mindset of her unsub – an organized, mission-oriented psychopath who set goals and stuck to them. He wasn’t an improviser, he was a planner. He had one foot in reality, another in the realm of derangement, but he was rooted in the real world enough to know how to cover his tracks.
‘He won’t target someone different, because then the pattern will break. A guy like this, he’s OCD, meticulous, military-grade fortitude.’
‘Could be ex-military, indeed.’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised. Where’s Sheila?’
‘In the cruiser outside. Poor woman is a wreck.’
‘Don’t I know it. I practically felt her soul leave her body when she saw Eddie. We need to talk to her though, because our killer knows these victims well enough to plant figurines that relate to their lives. Someone who knows Eddie Foxall did this.’
***
Ella left Foxall’s body in the capable hands of the techs; now it was time to get some answers from the living.
She found Sheila Foxall exactly where Ripley said she’d be: slumped in the back of a squad car.
Her tears had dried but they’d left their mark, carving trenches through her blush and mascara until she looked like some demented painting.
This was the worst part of the job. It went against every instinct to barge in and demand answers from a woman who’d just had her heart cleaved in two. But the job had taught her that time was a slippery thing; wait too long and the breadcrumbs go stale.
She leaned down to the window and knocked. Sheila unlocked the door without looking up.
‘Mrs. Foxall – Sheila – I know this is the worst moment of your life. I can’t imagine what you’re going through. But I need to ask you some questions, okay?’
Sheila stared at the flashing lights painting the street red and blue; didn’t acknowledge Ella beyond a nod.
‘Can you tell me about Eddie? Where he worked, what he was like?’
A hitched breath and then, ‘He was – is – God, I don’t...’ Sheila covered her mouth, stifling something between a laugh and a sob. She grasped for composure. ‘He worked in finance. At J.M. Waterman.’
Ella made a ‘go on’ noise.
‘He managed the Colisée. The theatre on St. Claude. He loved that place more than he loved most people. Me included.’
‘How long had he worked there?’
Four years. The hours were insane, especially recently. Late nights, early mornings. Sometimes I felt like I never saw him.
‘Any idea why he was working so much?’
‘No. He just… liked it.’
There was an edge to Sheila’s words, and Ella had been a detective long enough to know that married couples lied to themselves as much as they did each other. No one wanted to admit that the person they’d sworn their life to might be hiding pieces of themselves.
‘Sheila, I need you to think carefully. Is there anyone who might’ve wanted to hurt Eddie? Someone with a grudge, maybe?’
Sheila’s head whipped towards Ella then. ‘Are you serious? Who would… Eddie was the nicest guy in the world.’
‘I understand he was a good man, but even good men have enemies. If there’s anything you can think of…’
A long silence broken by Sheila’s uneven breathing. Her brow puckered as though she was sifting through a mental Rolodex – but then her mouth twisted and fresh tears spilled over onto her cheeks.
‘No, there’s no one. He was... Everyone loved him.’
Ella had heard this before. Everyone was loved.
Nobody had enemies. It was almost never true, but that didn’t mean Sheila was lying.
It meant she was grieving, and grief made a saint out of anyone who wasn’t around to contradict it.
If she wanted answers, she was going to have to dig for them herself.
‘Sheila, this might sound like a strange question, but did Eddie have any connection to the logo of the theater he worked for?’
‘Huh? What do you mean?’
Ella realized it was a dumb question, but she couldn’t think of a better way to phrase it. She tried a different angle. ‘Did he ever have a figurine of the theater logo? The ballet dancer?’
Sheila blinked away the residue of tears. ‘No. Why would he?’
‘Sorry. It doesn’t matter.’
Sheila rubbed at her red-rimmed eyes with the heel of her hand. ‘I just don’t understand. Who would... We were trying so hard to start a family and some psycho just...’ Her words dissolved into a gut-wrenching sob. ‘The last thing we did was fight about it.’
There it was. The hairline fracture in the Foxalls’ facade. The night Eddie died, he and his wife hadn’t been playing the loving couple. They’d been at war, and war always had casualties.
‘You were fighting? About what?’
Sheila flinched as though Ella had struck her. ‘It... It doesn’t matter. Let the dead rest and all that.’ Her bottom lip quivered and a part of Ella wanted to tell her that it was okay, that she could keep her secrets and her shame, but doing so wouldn’t bring her husband’s killer to justice.
‘Sheila, I know this is painful. But I need you to be honest with me. What were you fighting about?’
Sheila shook her head, and then the words came flooding out like she’d lanced a boil.
‘Kids. That’s all it was ever about recently. I wanted them so badly and we tried. God, we tried everything. But then Eddie got sick. Cancer. They caught it early but not before it...’ A vague hand wave towards her lap.
Understanding dawned. ‘It affected his fertility.’
‘Killed it.’ There was no mistaking the bitterness now. ‘One day we’re picking out names and the next I’m watching him puke his guts up from the chemo and knowing it’s over.’
Ella’s own stomach twisted in sympathy. She’d never experienced it first hand, but she guessed fertility struggles were an ordeal that could suck the joy out of even the healthiest relationship. She fixed Sheila with a searching look. ‘How did Eddie handle it?’
‘Head in the sand. At first he tried. He cut out the cigarettes and booze, but when it didn’t happen he...’ Sheila’s voice warbled and died, and she seemed to collapse inward. ‘He gave up.’
There it was. The ugly, unvarnished truth beneath the fairytale marriage.
An illness and infertility igniting the powder keg of preexisting resentments until something had to give.
The silence yawned between them as Ella grappled with her next move.
Every cop instinct screamed at her to push forward and see what nastiness lurked beneath, but the human part knew that there was a limit to what the living could bear.
So she did what she swore she’d never do. She let it lie.
‘Thank you, Sheila. I know that was difficult. I just have one more question, and then I’ll leave you be.’
Watery blue eyes met hers. ‘What?’
‘Your back door. Did Eddie often leave it unlocked?’
‘What? No, of course not. Eddie would never do that. He was as paranoid about home security as I am.’
Ella thought about the figurine with the giant key in its hand.
A key. A scuffed lock.
What did it mean?
Ella didn’t know, but she didn’t have long to figure it out.