Chapter 23
Brooklyn Sloane
The library was quieter than the rest of the house, if that were possible.
The room sat behind the staircase on the ground floor, tucked into a corner of the mansion that the late afternoon light couldn’t reach.
Brook moved along the shelves with slow, deliberate steps, her fingertips trailing across the spines of books that probably hadn’t been touched in decades.
The collection was extensive, hundreds of volumes arranged floor-to-ceiling across three of the four walls.
Hardcovers, mostly, with cracked leather bindings and faded gold lettering.
She'd caught the scent of old paper and leather binding upon first entering the room, but up close, there was a mustiness beneath it, the kind that came from volumes that had been sitting untouched on the same shelf for decades.
Botany, chemistry, biology, agriculture.
The personal library of a man who had spent his adult life studying the things that grew from the earth and the compounds they contained.
She wasn’t taking the time to read the titles.
She was studying the shelves themselves, the joints where wood met wood, the seams where the built-in units connected to the walls.
She was searching for anything that didn’t belong: a hinge concealed behind a row of books, a latch disguised as trim, a section of molding that sat differently than the rest.
Brook crouched as gracefully as she could and examined the hardwood planks along the base of each shelf, checking for scuff marks, for wear patterns that would suggest a section of floor or wall had been moved repeatedly over a period of years.
The sconce lighting cast a warm golden glow across the room, pooling in some areas and leaving others in soft shadow.
A reading chair sat in the corner near the single window, its leather worn to a pale tan on the armrests, and a small side table held a coaster and nothing else.
The room had the atmosphere of a space that had been loved once and then left alone, like a conversation that had been paused and never resumed.
Once she and Theo had returned from Porter’s cottage that afternoon, Brook’s attention had been pulled in several directions at once.
The press release had gone out at noon, and it had taken less than thirty minutes for the first news van to appear at the edge of the property.
By two o’clock, there were four, and Sheriff Gentry had earned her gratitude by personally handling the effort to push them back to the main road, giving Kessler’s team the space they needed to continue their work without cameramen attempting to sit on the stone walls.
Then there was the identification of the third victim.
Another woman, another cancer patient. Three was no longer a coincidence. Three was a pattern, and the pattern was reshaping everything.
“Brook?”
Sylvie’s voice drew her attention to the doorway. Sylvie was leaning against the frame with her notebook in hand, and the expression on her face said she’d been standing there for a while.
“Now that Profile A suggests Nestor murdered the women, and his remains were also found in the greenhouse, is there a potential for you to close out the Bureau’s investigation and hand the second half over to the local authorities?”
Brook pulled a thick botany reference from a shelf, checked behind it, and slid it back into place. Dust motes rose from the disturbance and drifted into the sconce light, where they hung in the air, suspended between falling and floating.
“No. I’ll wait until all the remains have been excavated and the bone examinations are complete before submitting my profile and findings.” Brook moved to the next section of shelving and repeated the process. “Something doesn’t fit, Sylvie.”
“Because Nestor Ellingham doesn’t fit the profile?”
“That’s right,” Brook replied as she pulled another book.
“The behavioral framework I built around Profile A assumes a mission-oriented offender who killed in service of his research. But every person we’ve spoken to, and I mean every single one of them, doesn’t indicate that Ellingham had that type of personality. ”
Brook turned to face Sylvie.
“We know that character testimony is unreliable in most cases. People lie, or they romanticize the dead. But there’s a consistency here that I can’t dismiss.
Five separate individuals, interviewed independently, each describing the same man.
Gentle. Patient. Obsessive about his research, yes.
Withdrawn, absolutely. But unchecked in his experiments?
Not one witness gave such an indication. ”
“So where does that leave us?”
“Stuck between a profile that fits the evidence and a man who doesn’t fit the profile.”
Sylvie stepped further into the room and set her notebook on the reading chair. She joined in the search, taking the opposite side of the room.
“I spoke with Gwenyth earlier today. Upstairs, outside my room.”
“Topic of conversation?”
“Porter, mostly. She asked about a funeral. She wanted to know if he could be buried somewhere nearby so she could visit him.” Sylvie paused before giving her full attention to Brook.
“For a stretch of that conversation, she was lucid. Completely present. She spoke about Porter with a clarity that I haven’t heard from her before. No confusion, no drifting. Just grief.”
Brook stopped what she was doing and motioned for Sylvie to close the library door.
Once the door was shut and the room was sealed from the hallway, Brook spoke freely.
The silence deepened around them, the thick walls and the closed door cutting off even the faint hum of Bit’s equipment from the dining room.
“Even though we’ve been invited to stay here, first by Dale and then by Gwenyth, I instructed Bit to put in for a warrant this afternoon.”
“A warrant for what?”
“To search this house and these grounds. I want our actions covered legally, because I want to get my hands on the medication Gwenyth has been taking. I noticed that she keeps pills in a ceramic dish on her nightstand. No prescription bottle, no label, nothing to indicate what they are or who provided them. If those pills are contributing to her symptoms, or masking the fact that she doesn’t have any, I need to know what they are. ”
Sylvie considered that for a moment.
“We could ask Gwenyth voluntarily. She might hand them over if we explain what we’re looking for.”
Before Brook could respond, her gaze landed on a section of hardwood floor near the base of the shelving on the middle wall behind the desk.
A slight mark on the surface, barely visible, the kind of wear pattern that would go unnoticed in normal light.
She wouldn’t have caught the smudge at all had she not been standing at the precise angle where the dim golden glow from the wall sconce failed to reflect evenly off the floor.
The light pooled and shimmered across every other section of hardwood in the room, but here, along a narrow arc near the bottom of the bookcase, the finish was worn just enough to dull the reflection.
Something had been dragged across that section of the floor.
Repeatedly.
Over a long period of time.
“Sylvie.”
“What is it?”
“I think I found something.”
Sylvie crossed the room and crouched beside her. Brook pointed to the arc, tracing its path with her finger without touching the surface. The mark swept outward from the wall in a shallow curve, roughly three feet in length, consistent with the bottom edge of a door or panel swinging open.
Brook straightened and examined the section of shelving directly above the mark.
The books on this shelf were identical to the others in the room, leather-bound volumes with faded spines, arranged in a tight row with no obvious gaps.
She began with the far left one, pulling each book toward her until she attempted to do the same with the fourth volume.
It didn’t come free.
Instead, the book tilted outward on a hinge, and the motion triggered a mechanical click somewhere behind the wall. The sound was small, metallic, the release of a latch that had been holding something in place. In the silence of the sealed library, it was as loud as a gunshot.
Brook placed her hands on the edge of the bookshelf and pulled, causing Sylvie to step out of the way.
The entire section moved toward her, pivoting on concealed hinges, the shelves swinging outward like a door.
The arc on the hardwood floor aligned perfectly with the bottom edge of the false wall as it opened.
Behind it was a room.
The air that came through was stale and heavy, thick with dust and the sharp, lingering scent of chemical compounds that had been sealed in a confined space for three decades.
It rolled out through the opening in a slow exhalation, carrying with it the ghost of everything that had happened inside, the experiments, the treatments, the failures, the hope that had eventually run out.
Brook held her position at the threshold, not needing to give her eyes time to adjust. The room’s electricity must have been connected to the library.
The space was roughly fifteen feet deep and ten feet wide, carved out of what should have been the interior of the wall separating the library from the kitchen on the opposite side.
Cal had shared with her that Nestor had construction done to the kitchen.
This was the reason why. The construction had been meticulous, the walls lined with the same plaster as the rest of the house, the ceiling height matching the library’s.
Whoever had built this room had understood that the proportions needed to be invisible from both sides.