CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
He drove south with the windows down and the radio off.
Four. He’d done four and the sky hadn’t fallen. However, it soon would, and that’s when he would ascend to a higher plane.
His mentor had been right all along. This was the thing that would finally quiet the screaming in his head and make the world finally bend to his will. It was power distilled to its purest form, and it seemed that at last, his bad luck had finally run out.
And what about that hard-nosed bitch who’d tried to outsmart him on the phone?
The confusion in her voice was music to his ears, and it was quite funny.
He thought it would be harder to get her on the phone.
He figured he’d have to go through layers of security, probably spin a few lies and call her out by name.
But all it took was a few choice words – something about a fourth body and speaking to the lead detective on the case.
The Red Sea had parted instantly and a minute later, he was talking to her directly.
He guessed everybody wanted a piece of the action when the reaper came calling.
He flicked on his turn signal and banked a hard right onto a long, barren road that he knew better than his own reflection.
Initially, this step in the process hadn’t been part of the mission, but the mentor had asked a favor of him.
A fair trade, he thought, given the mentor’s assistance before this whole thing began.
As his car rolled to a stop at the gates, he let the silence of the evening engulf him. Here, cloaked in shadow, he could finally give voice to the strangest symptom of his metamorphosis.
And that was that even though the mentor had blocked his messages for reasons he didn’t understand, he missed the mentor like he missed a vital organ. The mentor had been the only one who’d ever really seen him stripped bare of social niceties.
Now it was radio silence across the board. If he didn’t know better, he might’ve thought it was all some figment of his apparently volatile psyche.
He groped the figurine around his neck and squeezed. It grounded him in the here and now and did away with all of those intrusive thoughts the mentor had warned him about. There was no time for reflection or concern, not when the final piece of the puzzle was about to fit nicely into this picture.
Agent Dark. Truth be told, he only talked to her for the first time today, and had never met her in the flesh or even seen her from afar.
But still, he knew her like back of his hand.
What was she doing now? Well, that depended whether or not she’d had enough brain cells to rub together and puzzle out his little riddle.
He hoped so. It’d be a damn shame if she let her reputation down, after all the good things the mentor had said about her.
Maybe one day, when this was all over and he was back home, he’d ask her about it.
But that was for later. He had more pressing concerns at the moment.
He eyeballed the distant farmhouse. He couldn’t take his car down there, so he’d need to hide it away up here and make the journey on foot.
He didn’t know why the mentor wanted this particular person dead.
He hadn’t asked. The mentor’s reasons were the mentor’s business, and part of what made their relationship work was that neither of them demanded explanations the other wasn’t ready to give.
He trusted the mentor’s judgement. If she said this person needed saving – and that was still the word that kept cropping up, because the mentor had taught him that killing and saving were not opposites but the same act seen from different angles – then this person needed saving.
Now all he had to do was wait, because if Ella Dark was as smart as the mentor claimed she was, then she’d know exactly where he was.
And she was going to get the surprise of her life.
***
Ella tipped her head back and tried to find solace in the star-pricked sky, but all she saw was a bottomless black, as cold and pitiless as a raven’s eye. It seemed to say: ‘You are small. You are meaningless. You will never be enough’. She caught Ripley side-eyeing her from the shed’s doorway.
‘CSI will be here in ten,’ she said. ‘You gonna hold onto that figurine forever or give it to the techs?’
‘I know this figure, Mia. I’ve seen it before.’
‘Dark, it’s a pelican. Like a million other pelicans. It doesn’t even have any identifiable marks or anything.’
‘I know, but-,’
‘Look, I’m not saying you’re wrong about being part of this. That phone call made it pretty damn clear you are. But recognizing one pelican out of every pelican in Louisiana? That’s a stretch, and right now we’ve got a body on the floor that needs our attention more than your déjà vu does.’
Ella swallowed the snarl building in her throat. Much as it pained her, Ripley had a point. Her brain was latching onto anything that might make this senseless freak show make sense, even if it meant seeing ghosts in wooden pelicans.
So she went back into the shack and crouched down beside the vic. Up close, the old man looked something akin to an unwrapped Egyptian mummy. He had waxy skin, translucent over feeble bones. His clothes hanging off him like he was a toppled scarecrow.
But the bruises around his neck told the real story. There was a ring of red that was on the way to becoming purple. 'No defensive wounds that I can see. No head trauma either, at least not that left a mark. Our unsub strangled him,' she said.
‘And the sky’s blue. The guy looks frail as hell. No wonder the unsub didn’t need to cave his head in this time.’
‘But the question is – why kill him? This guy looks a few months from the grave as it is. What’s he got to do with two girls in their twenties and a guy in his late-thirties?’
‘You’re asking me. It’s like using a sledgehammer to kill an ant.’
The victimology was as inconsistent as any Ella had seen in her career.
Age and gender were cast to the wind, so trying to find a pattern in this patchwork was death was like trying to crochet with barbed wire.
If there was one thing killers stuck to it was a routine.
Once they found a groove that worked, they rarely deviated.
They occasionally upped the ante in terms of experimentation, but if anything, this victim choice and killing method were regressions.
From beating a middle-aged man to death with a blunt object to strangling a frail old man with his bare hands.
This unsub was only a spree killer by definition, not by psychological makeup. He was someone playing the part of a spree killer and getting it wrong.
It was almost as if this wasn’t was his choice. Like someone else was guiding his hand. An unwilling serial killer.
But perhaps there was an answer here. Buried under the cobwebs and dirt, just waiting for her to dig it out and polish it. Ella straightened herself and raked her eyes over the shed’s gloom as she hunted for God only knew what.
Not much to look at.
But then amongst the rusty tools and brown handles, she caught a splash of color hiding beneath some papers on the victim’s desk. Ripley caught her look and scooped one up with a gloved hand.
‘Pill bottles,’ Ripley said.
‘Not surprised this guy needed pills to keep upright. What are they?’
‘Donepezil, galantamine, memantine. Heavy hitters.’
Ella narrowed her eyes at her. ‘Heavy hitters? You know what memantine is?’
‘Yeah. Do you?’
‘No idea. Enlighten me.’
‘Alzheimer’s drugs. Or dementia.’ Ripley set the bottle back down. ‘Nasty business. This poor guy was really feeling it. Surprised he could still work.’
Ella stared at her, taken aback. It wasn’t like her partner to be so easily versed in the varieties of geriatric pharmacology. ‘The hell do you know that off the top of your head?’
‘My mom had the same thing. I could rattle these names off in my sleep.’
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to bring it up.’
‘You didn’t. The point is our vic here wasn’t just old, he was on the way out. If he’s on forty milligrams of memantine a day, he must have already lost his mind.’
Lost his mind. The words ricocheted and struck sparks behind her eyes as pieces long scattered began to drift together. Lost his mind.
Lost it.
Conversations replayed in her head. Some throwaway comments and half-formed musings coalesced into a shape she’d been too pigheaded and preoccupied to see.
Amber Holloway’s mother had said: Amber walked away with nothing but her clothes and a pile of debt.
Rose Michaels’s sister had sat numb with rage as she laid out Rose’s losing battle with the family court.
Sheila Foxall had crumbled to ash in the back of a squad car as she spoke of her husband’s brush with cancer and the way it had ruined their chances of having children.
The common thread woven through each life.
Amber Holloway had lost her home.
Rose Michaels had lost her child.
Eddie Foxall had lost his manhood.
And now, Earl Parsons had lost his mind.
Ella thought she might choke on the fluid rising in her gorge because how had she not seen it? How had something so goddamn obvious slipped right past her and left her grasping at straws with blood on her hands?
‘Ripley, I know what’s going on,’ she cried. All of these victims. They lost something.’
‘Come again?’
‘Loss. Amber lost her house, Rose lost custody of her son, Eddie lost his chance to reproduce…’
Ripley gaped at her. She could see the facts and inferences clicking into place. ‘And this gent here lost his mind.’
‘Not just his mind, but the thing that defined him. The things our vics lost – it affected their entire lives.’
‘Jesus,’ Ella breathed. ‘That’s why the disparate victimology. That’s why there’s no connections between them. The figurines are symbolic, but of what?’
‘These figurines don’t relate to their losses at all. Amber didn’t lose a snowman. Rose didn’t lose a ballet dancer. None of the victims lost any of the things that the figures represent.’
‘No, so that means the figurines are personal to the killer. They only mean something to him, not to the victims.’
Ella was rapidly processing everything, ensuring she hadn’t missed anything along the way. Anything that might give her a clue where this freak might strike next.
Finally, Ripley said, ‘He said on the phone he had one more person to save.’
‘To save,’ Ella repeated.
‘Yeah.’
Another jigsaw piece slot into place. ‘He’s not killing these people, at least not in his head. He’s saving them from the pain. That’s why he doesn’t fit the mold of a typical serial killer, because he isn’t one.’
‘He’s an angel of mercy.’
Ella nodded. ‘He thinks he’s a hero.’
‘Right, so how can we use that to catch him? This pelican could lead anywhere in this whole state, or it could even lead to Florida.’
The million dollar question. Ella wanted to put her fist through the wall, splinter her knuckles and watch the blood flow just to feel something besides this impotent rage.
Ella rose the pelican to eye level.
‘You’re going to stare a hole in that thing.’
‘I told you. I’ve seen it before.’
‘And I told you, it’s a pelican. Louisiana’s state bird. It’s on the flag, it’s on licence plates, it’s on half the restaurant signs between here and Baton Rouge. You’ve probably seen a thousand of them since we landed.’
‘Not like this. I’ve seen this specific pelican before, or one close enough that the person who made it was either copying the same thing or made them both.’
‘Okay,’ Ripley said. ‘So where did you see it?’
The image was right there, vivid as a photograph, but the context around it was fog. Something she’d turned a page on.
‘I don’t know yet,’ she said. And the admission cost her more than Ripley would ever know. ‘But I’m not going to find the answers here. Call me if you find anything. I’m going to the precinct and I’m not leaving until I’ve figured this out.’