CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Ella had already spent an hour on the figurine from Eddie Foxall’s hand before changing tactics.
The wooden man with the oversized key, standing on his flat base with the blue line along the edge.
She’d photographed it from every angle and run image searches online for anything resembling it.
She’d tried every combination of search terms she could think of and come back with nothing useful.
Whatever this thing was, it wasn’t mass-produced.
It wasn’t in any catalogue. It had been made for a specific purpose by a specific person, and the internet had never seen it before.
Which meant the answer wasn’t online. It was in the NOPD database.
‘Time to go digging,’ Ella said as she navigated to the NCIC system and pulled up the regional crime records. She flexed her fingers until they all cracked in unison, then caught Ripley staring at her in disgust.
‘I wish you wouldn’t do that.’
‘And I wish you’d make me a coffee. What are the odds of that happening?’
‘Low.’
Ella input her search parameters: theft from antique shops, estate sales, auction houses, domestic burglaries where antiques had been stolen, and fraud or forgery connected to antique appraisal or restoration.
The first search returned over five thousand results across Louisiana.
‘Good lord. I’ve started at four figures across the whole state.’
‘That’s too broad.’
‘I know.’ Ella narrowed the geography to Orleans Parish and the surrounding parishes. Then she filtered by gender – male – and age range, twenties to fifties. She added a secondary filter for any record that mentioned specialist knowledge, tools, or skill-based offences.
The suspect pool narrowed to a still eye-watering 2,132. Apparently this part of Louisiana had more than its fair share of sticky-fingered scumbags.
Still too many. She added a time filter – offences in the last ten years – and cross-referenced against anyone with a prior criminal record.
1,216.
Next came a more realistic location. So far, the unsub’s killing radius had stayed within ten miles, and historical reflection told Ella that serial killers tended to live within five miles of their first crime scene.
And someone this self-aware would never commit homicide on ground they were unfamiliar with.
Five hundred and three.
Ripley pulled a chair over and sat beside her. ‘Forward me half. I’ll start from the bottom.’
‘You don’t have a laptop.’
‘Don’t need one. I’ve got my phone.’
‘God bless you.’
Ella did just that, then began devouring names one by one. By her mental math, if she spent just one minute per name, she and Ripley could have this whole list checked in just eight hours.
It was going to be a long day.
***
‘I can’t do this anymore, Dark,’ Ripley said. ‘Everyone’s got their limit, and I’ve reached mine.’
Ella knew where her partner was coming from. She was two-hundred names deep and her eyes felt like two pee holes in the snow.
‘Suck it up, Mia. Think of it like exercise. You don’t want to do it but you have to.’
Ripley leaned back and groaned. ‘I’d rather bench press a train than do this. It’s been two hours and I’m barely one-tenth in. Can’t we get Fields or his guys to give us a hand?’
'He's still working the Foxall scene and making sure his wife is okay. Not to mention he's still dealing with the Creed transfer paperwork.'
‘I’d rather do that than this.’
‘What name are you at?’
‘Vincent Kohler. Thirty-four. Two convictions. He stole from an estate sale in Metairie in 2016. He walked out with a box of carved wooden figures and a set of porcelain ornaments valued at six thousand dollars. He said he’d been hired to appraise them and took off with them and never returned.’
‘We’re in the wrong job.’
‘Aren’t we just.’
‘But it’s too long ago. Whatever triggered our unsub happened recently.’
‘I know. I was just telling you what name I was at.’
The next name on the database was Frederick Olsen. The details said he’d been busted for a string of home invasions and cracked the owners over the head when he got caught. He didn’t fit the profile.
Next.
Some names Ella had discarded right off the bat. The small-time thieves and the white-collar fraudsters. Murder wasn’t their kind of thing. This killer was a different breed altogether.
Others earned a closer look. The ones with a history of violence; the high-value thieves and burglars whose hair-trigger tempers had landed them in jail once or twice. But even they didn’t quite fit the bill. They were too impulsive and reactionary. Their unsub was the opposite.
And on and on it went. Name after name, dead end after dead end. Ella caught a glance at the clock. Midday. If the killer held his pattern, they had maybe twelve hours at most before another body landed in their lap.
‘Ugh,’ grunted Ripley. ‘I’m going to get a sandwich.’
Ella looked over her monitor. ‘What happened to the all-meat diet?’
‘It’s giving me headaches. Do you want anything?’
Ella must have had sympathy pains, because there was a one-two punch of fatigue and frustration behind her eyeballs that didn’t leave much room for anything else.
Including fine-tuned instincts apparently, because she almost missed it.
A little blip on her screen, an unremarkable face in a sea of unremarkable faces.
Darryl Croon, the file read. 38. Caucasian. 6’0’, 170 lbs.
She skimmed through the details, the petty larceny and miscellaneous property crimes.
The guy wasn’t exactly a criminal mastermind but he had a certain flair.
He seemed to like letting himself into unattended homes by picking their locks, and then he’d swipe whatever valuables he could stuff into his pockets. He had two domestics to his name too.
But it wasn’t his record that got her hackles up. It was his employment history. Or rather, his most recent place of employment.
Dufrene & Sons, the report read. It was an antique store, and Ella remembered seeing it on the way to Amber Holloway's shotgun house. It must have been less than a mile from it.
‘Mia, get over here.’
Her partner was already at the door with the decision to ruin her diet already made. She spun back.
‘I don’t care what you’re going to say, I’m eating bread.’
‘Not that. Look at this.’ Ripley strode over and Ella jabbed a finger at the suspect’s sullen, unshaven face. ‘Darryl Croon, 38. He fits the profile.’
‘Holy… yes he does.’
‘Holy is right. The guy knows his way around a lockpick according to his file, but look where he works. Dufrene & Sons in Gentilly.’
‘Hmm. Gentilly. We were there yesterday.’
‘Yes we were.’
‘Well, he fits, and he looks like someone who could strangle three people, but fitting isn’t proof.’
‘No, but it’s a conversation starter.’ Ella picked up the desk phone and dialled Dufrene & Sons. It rang four times before a woman answered.
‘Dufrene and Sons, how can I help?’
‘This is Agent Dark with the FBI. I’m trying to reach one of your staff – Darryl Croon.’
‘Darryl? He’s not here today. He only comes in when we’ve got appraisal work for him. Maybe once or twice a week, sometimes less.’
‘When was the last time he was in?’
‘Let me think. Saturday, maybe? We had a house clearance come in from Lakeview and he priced up the lot for us. He’s good at what he does, I’ll give him that.’
Saturday. Two days before Amber Holloway died.
‘Do you have a contact number for him?’
‘I’ve got his cell on file. Hang on.’ The woman read it out. Ella wrote it down.
‘Thank you. What about his address? There isn’t a current address listed on his file.’
‘No address, but I know Darryl works on a construction site in the day. I don’t know the name of the place, but it’s that big yard, the one on St. Claude Avenue in the Bywater.’
Ella’s hand went tight on the phone. St. Claude Avenue in the Bywater. The same street as the Colisée Theatre.
‘Thank you,’ Ella said, and hung up before the woman could ask why.
‘St. Claude,’ Ella said. ‘He works construction at a place on St. Claude, which is right by the theatre.’
Ripley began searching on her phone. ‘Got it. Brossette Contracting. It’s a hundred feet from the theater.’
‘Let’s go. One way or another, I want to be looking at Darryl Croon’s face within the hour.’