CHAPTER THIRTY EIGHT
Bedford Hills in November shouldn't feel like the surface of the sun, but Victor Ashford's studio hit Ella with a wall of heat that reminded her of a recent tangle with an inferno. Even through the door, waves of scorching air rolled out into the grassy lot and distorted the world like a desert mirage.
Her legs seized as muscle memory kicked in. Fire had a way of rewriting your DNA.
‘Jesus.’ Luca hung back near the car. His burns probably sang the same song as hers, but he’d barely said a word to her since they’d left the precinct. She couldn't blame him. She'd violated his trust to score points in an interrogation, and now she had to pay the price via the silent treatment.
‘Ready?’ Ross asked from the doorway.
No. She wasn't ready. Not for whatever waited inside this fortress of fire and glass. But being ready wasn't part of the job description.
The smell hit her first - scorched wood and melted sand and something underneath. Something that belonged in crematoriums, not art studios. The place sprawled through what had once been an industrial warehouse. Brick walls rose to steel rafters thick with cobwebs. Ancient windows let in weak light, and tools hung on pegboards like surgical instruments. A few half-finished pieces dotted steel tables - vases and bowls and statuettes.
And there, above the furnace that dominated the far wall, five symbols spread across the old brick in black strokes.
The same intricate patterns she’d become best friends with over the past few days.
But there was one small difference. The final symbol to the right – the triangle inside the circle – was partially incomplete. Luca must have noticed it too.
‘Our guy missed a stroke.’
‘Maybe he screwed up. Or someone interrupted him.’
‘Yeah.’ Luca scanned the workshop. ‘There’s no body?’
Ross wiped his forehead. His tie had come loose, and his collar was already soaked through. He pointed toward the furnace. 'Yes, there is.'
Ella’s stomach tied itself in knots. ‘God, no. ’
The industrial kiln loomed like the gate to hell itself. Ella approached slowly, and she could feel the heat radiating off it at a ten feet. ‘How the hell do we open it without burning our hands off?’
‘Luckily I came prepared,’ Ross said. He pulled on a pair of heavy-duty gloves and grabbed a blackened fork from the victim’s tool collection. Ross hooked the fork around the handle of the kiln and yanked. The door swung open and brought hellfire with it.
Ella stepped back. In her years hunting monsters, she'd seen her share of horror shows. She'd memorized crime scene photos that she’d give anything to unsee. But what appeared in front of her was a level of horrific she was yet to witness. This wasn't rage or lust or any of the usual drivers that turned people into killers. This was science. Clinical precision. Their unsub had rendered a human being down to ash with the same cold efficiency they'd used to bury Marcus in the earth dry, own Sarah in her element, or send Tessa spiraling from the sky.
‘Guy’s name is Victor Ashford,’ Ross said.
What remained of this poor gentleman had twisted in on itself like a charcoal sketch. The body curled into a fetal position, caught forever in that last moment when fire had claimed victory over flesh. Bone showed through in places where meat had burned away and teeth gleamed in a skull that would never smile again. Luca covered his face with his forearm and took a few steps back.
‘How'd you find him?’ She needed details. Something solid to focus on besides the charnel house smell that filled her lungs.
Ross consulted his notepad. The client showed up for a pickup around ten. Door unlocked, no sign of Ashford. Guy waited an hour then called it in. One of my guys recognized the symbols, contacted me right away.'
‘Where's the client now?’
‘One of my guys got him clear before you arrived.’
‘Probably for the best. Timeline?’
Ross shrugged. ‘How the hell do we timeline this? Body is burned to a crisp. He could have been in there for three days or three hours.’
‘What about security cameras? When did anyone last speak to the vic?’
'Still working on both, but I doubt there are many cameras around here. Our guy was living in the Stone Age. No alarm system either. Nearest neighbor's five miles up the road. Right near that Blackwood farm. '
Perfect isolation. Perfect killing ground. Their unsub had chosen their targets with surgical precision - each one connected to their element, each one vulnerable in their own way. How did the killer keep pulling this off?
‘Got something that might help with that timeline you’re talking about,’ Luca said. Ella and Ross moved to his position. Luca nodded at a pool of yellow vomit in the corner.
‘Our vic threw up,’ Ross said. ‘How does that help?’
‘Ross, I can feel my eyeballs drying up and I’ve only been in here a few minutes. How long do you think a small pool of liquid is gonna last?’
‘So, this vic was killed what – within the past few hours?’
Ella listened to the exchange, lost in thought. Luca was right in that any liquid in here would dry out quickly, but the pool of vomit raised another question: why would the victim vomit at all? Between being killed and stuffed into a furnace, where would the victim have found the time to throw up?
The idea didn’t lend itself to an ambush. It lent itself to the killer being alone. To being killed without anyone else present.
And that suggested a different type of killer than the one she thought she’d been chasing so far.
Ross said, ‘Ezra could still have been responsible for this. We’ve had him locked up for two hours. He could have visited here this morning.’
‘Not that there’ll be any evidence behind. Nothing left to examine, is there?’
He was right, loath as Ella was to admit it. The kiln had done its grim work, reducing Victor Ashford to little more than charcoal and bone fragments. Any evidence, any clues to his killer's identity, had been burned away.
No. There was always something. Killers always left something behind, physical or not.
She surveyed the workshop while Luca and Ross debated timelines. The place looked normal enough - if normal included two thousand degree furnaces and tools that belonged in a museum. Nothing suggested struggle. No signs of forced entry.
Then she saw the water bottles.
Six-pack of Pure Life on the workbench. Five full bottles remained, still wrapped in loose plastic. But something about them caught her eye.
‘Water,’ she said.
‘Of course he’s going to have water in here,’ Ross said .
Ella surveyed the workshop again. There was a sink in one corner and a hosepipe tap in the other. No shortage of water there, and bottled water would have boiled in this temperature. Ella couldn’t see a fridge anywhere, either.
Something about them sang the wrong notes.
She broke the webbing and pulled one out.
‘Whoa, should you be touching that?’ Ross asked. ‘Could be prints on it.’
Ella held the bottle up to the light, and suddenly, the scene of what happened here recreated itself in her mind’s eye.
She inspected the next bottle. And the next.
There. And there. And there.
Every seal broken. The plastic rings snapped.
Someone had been busy playing bartender with these bottles.
Ross's phone buzzed. He stepped away, had a brief conversation, then returned looking like someone had just rewritten his rulebook.
‘That was the lab.’ He tucked his phone away. ‘Tox screen came back on Sarah Chen. Found traces of something called sodium thio-something in her system.’
‘Sodium pentobarbital.’ The words fell off Ella’s tongue.
‘That’s the one. No idea what it is.’
‘It’s…’ Ella began, but then she trailed off. Her mind suddenly erupted in a cascade of neural fireworks. Details that had lurked in her peripheral vision suddenly snapped into sharp focus – the careful precision of each kill, the clinical methodology, the way their unsub got close to victims without raising any red flags. Five thousand cases worth of profiling knowledge realigned themselves in her head like atoms finding a new molecular structure, and one of the biggest details she thought she knew about this killer underwent a violent reorganization.
‘Jesus Christ.’ The words escaped before she could stop them.
‘What?’ Luca asked. Some of the ice had melted from his voice. Whatever anger he held toward her, the job still came first.
She couldn’t deny the evidence. The minor details. The little things that seemed insignificant at the time but now blazed with new meaning.
‘Guys, I don’t think Ezra Crowley is our man.’
‘No?’ Luca's eyebrows climbed north. ‘Why not?’
‘Because no one is our man.’ Ella picked up the water bottle again, examined the broken seal. ‘Our killer is a woman.’