Chapter 9 #2
Dried blood is streaked down her pallid cheeks, long trails of gore that are starkly contrasted by her pale, lifeless skin.
Leroux can’t help himself from being drawn to the rivers of gruesome tears, mainly because they seem to have originated from now-empty sockets.
Gaping, fleshy cavities remain where her eyes used to be; they’ve been inexpertly carved out.
The sight of the haphazard surgery causes even Will to stifle a gag.
The girl’s mouth is a tight, emotionless line.
Pulling on some gloves, Leroux squats next to the dead girl. He uses a latex-covered finger to move the fabric of the habit aside, revealing a tattoo on the victim’s neck. It reads All you need is love in a delicate cursive script.
“This is Melissa Evans,” he says quietly, standing up to place distance between himself and the reality of the scene.
“Oh shit,” Will says, rubbing his hand across his face.
Leroux can’t help but note the religious overtones. It’s like something a twisted pastor might do …
Could it be?
Regardless of his frustration, even suggesting Trudeau is behind this would have Leroux out on his ass.
All he has is a religious connection and the hunch that Trudeau is a really bad guy.
There’s no way he can take that anywhere without solid evidence that Trudeau’s even in Louisiana or has ever committed a previous murder.
But where is Trudeau?
That sudden trip he took right before Melissa went missing—did he come here, back to his home state, where no one knows him as an adult?
Would he be that bold? When Leroux and Muller went to meet Trudeau at his office, Trudeau had seemed nervous, but he had also seemed powerful.
He clearly relished the authority he held in his house of worship.
Would he feel so untouchable without the security of his congregation around him?
Leroux had noticed that, outside the nave, Trudeau seemed to retreat into himself.
Sometimes that kind of monster is the most dangerous.
They simmer and stew in their own inferiority, but they know what power tastes like, and they begin to crave it more and more.
“This is a hack job,” Will says, bending down to get a closer look at Melissa’s face. “Judging by the brutality, I definitely don’t think this is the killer’s debut.”
“It feels incredibly ambitious if it is,” Leroux says, clearing his throat to keep the emotion out of his voice. His mind reels, trying to stay focused on the present.
Let the scene talk to you. Don’t ignore it. Don’t presume that you know.
He can’t assume anything here except that the murdered young woman kneeling before him was grotesquely posed to elicit a reaction, her life reduced to being a prop in someone’s twisted fantasy.
“But the cuts seem like they were made by a kid with a meat cleaver,” Will says bluntly.
Leroux shakes his head. “You know, I always thought that mattered—how neat the cuts are.” He bends down again, staring into the two empty voids that once held a part of what made her Melissa.
Her eyes seemed to have been torn from her skull; the edges of each orbital socket appear mangled.
He feels a lump in his throat and quickly swallows it down, containing a retch that fights to come out.
“I think sometimes it’s intentional. It’s like one last indignity to deny someone even a clean wound, ya know?
It’s asserting dominance through negligence. ”
As soon as he says it out loud, something clicks. Philip Trudeau enters his mind again. Maybe this is exactly the act of dominance enacted by a man who desperately craves a familiar dominion.
“Dominance through negligence,” Will says quietly, almost to himself. “Damn.”
Leroux nods, looking up at the wires holding her body. They sway slightly with the breeze from the open barn door. “Those wires are messing me up. It’s like she’s moving.”
Just then, Wren walks into the haunt carrying a leather bag and waving in two techs behind her.
The carnage registers on the techs’ faces immediately, both of them audibly gasping as they enter the crime scene.
It shows on Wren’s face too, but she quickly shakes it into a look of professionalism.
She and Leroux meet eyes and quickly exchange grim expressions.
“Is this the only body?” Wren asks by way of greeting, scanning the room around her.
“We haven’t gone farther inside yet,” Leroux says, looking at Melissa again with defeated eyes. “This one seems to be Melissa Evans.”
“Shit,” she says under her breath.
Leroux nods. “I’ll obviously let you confirm, but she has a tattoo that matches a picture that Sister Moreau showed me.”
“You go ahead. Check for more bodies, and I’ll look her over.” Wren squats down and opens her kit.
Leroux nods, stepping around her and following Will into another room.
There are a lot of fake body parts and a couple of mannequins.
With grime and age carefully applied, they look like they belong on a movie set.
It’s a striking attention to detail that highly contrasts the haphazard, amateur setting.
Leroux notices a prop severed hand adorned with rings on every finger. He can’t help but move closer to study it. The rings showcase large gemstones and appear to be costume jewelry, and the hand itself is painted gold and grasping a Gothic-style cross.
“A lot of work went into this shithole,” Will says, finding himself preoccupied with a skeleton that’s poised to attack from a doorway.
“Yeah, it’s shocking,” Leroux says distractedly, not able to tear his eyes from the hand.
It’s a piece of art really, with fine lines expertly added in all the right places.
It’s only when he notices the small, almost undetectable hairs that he realizes what he’s looking at is not a prop but a real human hand.
He unknowingly makes a sound of surprise, and Will’s head whips around.
“What? What’s wrong?” he asks, panic just beginning to leach into his voice.
“These aren’t props,” Leroux says, turning and gesturing to the hand on display. “This is an actual human hand.”
Will’s face twists into a look of horror, and he begins to scan the room, trying to spot more. “Do you think this could be pieces of our second missing girl?”
Leroux shakes his head. “That was my first thought too, but this hand appears to belong to a much older woman.” He looks back at the limb, squatting down a bit to take a closer look.
There’s definitely age in the skin; it’s evident even through the gold paint.
“Though I suppose the processes of decay, preservation, and gilding could have aged the skin up a bit.”
“We better get Wren in here, because now that I’m looking around, I wonder if these are all from the same body.
” Leroux watches as Will makes his way over to two severed feet that are glued to the floor as if mid-stride.
The feet are in a pair of red heels, but the bone that extends from the top of one of them is jagged and far too real.
“Muller, we need your expertise in here,” Leroux calls out, his voice echoing off the strangely acoustic walls.
“Coming!” she yells.
He can hear her murmuring to the techs to continue what she was in the middle of doing, and he begins to notice more and more body parts scattered in different alcoves and shadowy corners. Some are lit up by spotlights, and others are hidden in the dark, but they all look too real.