CHAPTER FORTY FOUR
‘Start talking.’ Felix Blackwood looked like death had already claimed him. His black clothes hung loose on a frame that had gotten thinner since Ella had last seen him. Dark circles beneath his eyes suggested he hadn't slept since their barn fight. She kept her Glock trained on his center.
‘We… all have to leave. It's not safe here.’
‘What are you babbling about? Not safe from what?’
His hand moved toward his jacket. Ella's finger tightened on the trigger, but instead of steel he produced paper.
‘Found this an hour ago. On my desk. Another message from the Order. They won't stop. They'll never stop. Ezra is threatening me.’
Ella kept the gun trained on him with her right hand while her left plucked the envelope from trembling fingers.
The elements demand completion. The transformation cannot be stopped.
Ella lowered her weapon an inch. ‘Ezra Crowley's in custody. We arrested him this morning.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really. So unless he mailed this yesterday, this didn't come from him. But I know who might have sent it.’
‘Who?’
‘Tell me about the Order. I need a list of your female members.’
Felix shifted his weight, and for a moment Ella thought he might bolt again. His shoulders hunched like he was trying to fold in on himself, become small enough to vanish completely.
‘Female members? Why would you...’
‘Because your fearless leader might be in jail, but someone's still sending threatening letters. Someone who knows about the elements. Someone who’s a woman.’
Felix’s mouth dropped an inch. The tears suddenly froze. ‘A woman? No. That can’t be.’
‘I assure you, it can.’
‘But… there are only two women in the Order, and… ’
Her phone began buzzing in her pocket. It must have found some signal at this altitude. Ella fished it out, not taking her eyes off Felix. She glanced down and saw Luca’s name flashing on her screen.
'Sit. Don't move.' Ella gestured to the bed with her gun, then answered the call. 'Hawkins. Talk to me.'
‘Ell, listen to me. I found something.’ Luca's voice carried that specific pitch it got when he'd found gold.
‘Hit me. I’m staring at Felix Blackwood right now and if he moves I’m going to shoot his knees off.’
‘Right. So I went to NYU’s archives and found an English copy of Corpus Hermeticum. Check this out. It’s from the introduction. It’s written by the author, Hermes Trismegistus. And get this – it’s a she.’
Another tick in the unsub being female column. ‘What’s the intro say? I didn’t translate that part. I went straight to the elemental talk.’
'I know, but this author? She's disfigured. It says, 'I, Hermes, once deformed and shunned, have used the primal elements to transform my wretched flesh.''
The first threads of understanding began to weave themselves in Ella's mind. A woman. A deformed woman, desperate enough to kill.
Luca barreled on. ‘If our unsub identified with this book so much, chances are she’s disfigured too, and she wants to fix that.’
The puzzle pieces were rearranging themselves, forming a picture Ella didn't want to see but couldn't look away from.
‘There's more.’ Luca sounded like he'd run a marathon. ‘At the meeting. I saw one of the members, number four. I thought it was a man at first, but the build was wrong. It was a woman, Ell. And she had this skin condition. Flakes falling off her face onto her mask.’
Ella barely heard him over the sudden roar in her ears. A woman. Disfigured. Skin like parchment.
And just like that, the final tumbler clicked into place and the lock shattered wide open.
Clarity suddenly hit her like a thunderbolt. Three days of images conversations, and information suddenly aligned with exact precision. Details that she'd seen but overlooked at the time now took on a new meaning, and Ella felt like she – or Luca – had peeled back the mask and were glimpsing the true face beneath.
And a disfigured face at that.
You said female serial killers have different motives than men. With gender roles changing, do you think that might shift in the future ?
Ella had seen this killer in the flesh three days ago. She’d been right there in the fifth row while she’d given a talk to starry-eyed students on life as an FBI Special Agent. The goth girl, the girl wearing black everything. The one with three layers of makeup and a scar on her cheek – a scar Ella now realized she was trying to hide. The innocent-looking student with a tattoo on her wrist that looked like a triangle inside a circle.
One of the symbols Ella had seen at four different murder scenes.
Then Ella's gaze fell on the photo on Felix's desk – him with his arm slung around a girl. A pretty girl, under the same layers of makeup, but with her face angled to one side to hide the scar on her cheek.
That's all you got. My sister hits harder
Sister.
‘Ell? You still there?’
She snapped back to the present. She was in a bedroom in upstate New York. A bedroom in the house of a serial killer.
‘Hawkins. Meet me at the precinct.’
‘Roger that, but Ell? Who is this woman? And how do we find her?’
Ella lost herself in her thoughts again. Knowing a killer’s identity was one thing, but stopping them before they killed again was another.
In her peripheral vision, she saw the book she’d thrown on the bed.
Beyond the Veil by Lydia Soul wright.
A psychic. The embodiment of spirit, as loose a notion as that was.
Sanguine, Felix. Love Lydia.
There were only two female members of the Order, Felix had said.
Ella couldn’t deny the math.
‘Just get to the precinct. I know exactly who this killer is – and who our final victim is.’