Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“And then he just, what? Showed up in New York with a private jet like some kind of prince charming?” Aisha practically squeals on the other end of the line, and I cover my face as the blush she can’t even see spreads across my cheeks.
“It definitely felt surreal. And I felt so … relieved when I saw him standing there waiting for me,” I confess.
“Aw … he’s your person.” She didn’t return from her date across the Atlantic married, but she and Eddie are officially a couple—officially in an adorable, swoony yet mature relationship.
Since she came back from visiting her former-archnemesis-turned-lover, Aisha is even more of a romantic than she was previously.
Maybe there’s something to us dealing with hard situations in our work lives that makes us long for romantic notions in our personal lives.
“I mean, I think he could be. Is that crazy?” I close my eyes and lean my head back on my office chair.
When I woke up in Ryan’s guest room yesterday, it still felt like a dream.
I wasn’t sure if the dynamic would be different between us after he showed up for me in such a literal way, but if anything, our connection felt deeper, not different, just richer.
He snuck out before I woke up, and when I came downstairs, he had cinnamon rolls and coffee from Java Jive waiting for me on the kitchen island.
And his house? Talk about a Pinterest dream, and that’s before he explained how it used to be his grandparents’ home, then one of his brothers renovated it for him. Nostalgia and emotional capital all wrapped up in the house of my dreams?
I had to remind myself more than once that this was actually my life, and I wasn’t sleeping.
I may have even left a tiny bruise from where I pinched myself on my arm.
“I love that so much for you, Harlow. Seriously, he sounds great.”
“He is.” Whatever I was going to say next is interrupted by Christine knocking on my door and pointing to the conference room. “Shoot, I have to go. I’m getting called into a meeting.”
“Of course. Text me when we can schedule a video chat to discuss all these swoony moves by this man.” Aisha laughs before adding in a more serious tone, “Go get the bad guys and be safe, honey.”
“Always. Talk to you soon, lady.”
I grab my two notebooks and fountain soda from lunch—that I purchased myself today—and walk to the conference room with a smile on my face.
Until I see the grim look on Mason’s face, that is.
He nods as I take my usual seat at the table.
“Is it a new case or an update?” I inquire, knowing that he’ll want to keep most of the details until the rest of our team arrives.
“Update, unfortunately.” His sullen tone matches the room’s atmosphere.
Tara and Kelly arrive just behind me, and Walker enters the conference room with Christine right behind him, closing the door. “What do we have, Mason?” he calls out as he takes his seat at the head of the table.
“We, unfortunately, are finding out after the fact, but there has been another case that matches the previous homicides committed by The Carnation Killer. Carmen Martinez was a thirty-four-year-old single woman who was discovered in an isolated area of a city park on the morning of July fifteenth of this year.”
“July? What the hell, it’s December!” Kelly calls out.
“Let’s let Mason present the update, then we can collectively get pissed off together, alright?” Walker says, and Kelly nods but tosses his pen on the table slightly harder than necessary.
“Carmen had told friends that she was meeting a date from a dating app, and the last contact with loved ones was prior to the expected date.” The unsub hasn’t used dating apps to lure his victims that we know of.
Up until now, it’s been a crime of opportunity where he cares more about the setting than the victim’s demographics thus far.
Something’s changed.
“Is there any video of the date?” Tara asks.
Mason shakes his head. “Not that we can confirm. The bar where she met the date, or was going to meet the date, is old school and doesn’t have any cameras inside.
Local police interviewed bar staff and customers, with a few of them placing Carmen sitting at the bar for approximately twenty minutes before being approached by a man, but no one could confirm or deny if that was who she was planning on meeting, or if this man approached her out of the blue. ”
“So, the dating app could be a non-starter?” Kelly asks.
Mason shrugs. “I don’t know yet, but now that we’ve been given access, it’s on my list to get into her cell phone records and see what I can find, or if there’s anything I can trace, even though we are five months after the fact.”
“If the unsub is even remotely smart, he’s long gone from the app by now,” I say without thinking, but my team is used to me verbally processing when my mind is going too fast to catch up.
“Where are the crime scene photos?” Walker asks as Mason pulls up the scene that is eerily similar to the previous crime scenes—except for two very distinct differences.
“The lips.” Kelly points to the screen and notices it the same time that I clock the first variance.
Up until now, the victims had a dark red lipstick applied to their lips, but Carmen’s lips are vibrant pink.
Not red. But the question is whether that shift in ritual is symbolic to the killer or was his ritual disrupted by something?
I tilt my head and get up from my seat to step closer to the screen. “Yeah, the color is different, and that may be significant, but … can you zoom in here?” I point to the victim’s body where her hands are resting on her belly.
Under her hands is what appears to be an evidence collection bag—with a carnation inside it.
“He’s taunting us.” I start pacing as I put all this information together, and my team goes silent while they listen to me process.
“Initially, the unsub presented with a godlike complex. He didn’t kill his victims hands-on, but he put them in positions where they could either live or die, depending on what he decided.
He held their fate and breath in his hands, although he may be able to absolve himself of guilt because he didn’t physically end their lives, he just didn’t step in to prevent their deaths after he set things in motion. ”
But then he changed.
Because one of them got away.
“Until Monica Jackson. Her escape not only made him escalate from valium to restrain his victims, but he needed the control that ketamine would give him. But that wasn’t enough.
Monica getting away did more than interrupt the ritual of the kill …
No, it insulted him. It … it angered him and demanded that he no longer be passive in the compulsion.
” I continue to pace back and forth along the edge of the conference room as my team waits on me.
“But then he went silent. It was … what, approximately seven months between his previous victim and this one? So, what is going on in his personal or professional life that would explain the extended quiet period?”
“Could he have been in jail? In a relationship? Traveling?” Kelly suggests.
“Maybe. The relationship would make sense if there were a sexual component to these kills, and if he’s able to find satisfaction some other way, it may have calmed his compulsion to kill, or at least for a short period of time.
If he was in a relationship, either the sexual component is no longer enough for him, or that relationship ended, which could trigger him to kill again.
It’s speculation, but it’s definitely possible. ”
“But what’s with the bag? It’s like he’s mocking law enforcement, right?” Tara asks the table and I nod.
“Yeah, he still thinks he is smarter than law enforcement. He went from having a godlike complex of controlling someone’s fate, to being controlled by his compulsion and needing to quite literally be hands-on in the kill ritual.
The clear bag is a direct message to us—he knows we are looking for him, and he thinks he’s smarter than us. ”
“What about the potential profile of someone with veterinary access that’s lost a spouse within the region? Did that yield any possible suspects?” Walker asks me.
I shake my head. “Nothing yet. Mason has parameters set to alert us if someone matches, but the only viable leads so far didn’t seem likely to pursue.”
“Why’s that?” Kelly asks.
“One of them is an eighty-five-year-old veterinarian in upstate Massachusetts, but he lacks the physical strength to commit these crimes. The other one was a forty-five-year-old vet tech in Boston.”
“Was?” Tara asks.
I nod in response. “Was. He died of a heart attack in January.”
“Pretty solid alibi to be dead when some of the murders occurred. Were there any other anomalies to this case compared to the other ones?” Walker asks Mason as he combs through the files our team received.
“It looks like the toxicology reports are consistent with the presence of ketamine; the grooming ritual and scene set up were all a match.”
“Any explanation of why we are hearing about this now?” Tara asks Mason.
He nods. “It looks like the toxicology reports just came back as Massachusetts had a backlog in the crime labs.”
“But what does this escalation tell us after him being quiet for so long? Am I the only one that feels like I’m missing something?” Kelly asks.
I shake my head. “No, you aren’t alone in that, but I think he’s telling us more here than he intended.
He clearly intended to tell us that he knows we are looking for him with the evidence bag, but we know he is still in the greater New England area, or at least he was five months ago.
If his personal life didn’t have any specific stressors that triggered the decision to act, he may be feeling compulsion to chase the high of the kill, the moment he gets to decide if someone lives or dies. ”
“Oh, shit,” Mason says under his breath.
“What do you have?” Walker asks.
“It looks like Monica Jackson gave an interview about escaping a serial killer to a podcast the week before Carmen Martinez’s murder.” Mason looks to me as I nod.
“There it is. That’s the trigger. Whatever he was doing, he was able to continue his daily life and stay in control of things, but somehow, he found out about that podcast, and it sent him spiraling.
I’ll need to listen to the interview to know what exactly was said, but I think we have the trigger for this one at least.” I return to my seat, but mentally, I’m still pacing the room, because something is bothering me that I can’t put my finger on.
“Was there any trace DNA left at the scene?” I ask Mason.
“Better than that … they found DNA under the victim’s fingernails.”
“Bingo.” I nod at the confirmation that this was different all around. I open my blue notebook to make a note, but I’m not even sure what to write down in it because it’s just this feeling in my gut. I’m missing something here.
“She fought back, and that likely left him feeling even more unstable. Was there anything remarkable in her autopsy compared to the victims?” Tara asks.
“It looks like in addition to death by manual strangulation, she had bruising to indicate physical assault to her abdomen, matching wounds that one would see from being punched repeatedly.”
“So, she pissed him off,” Walker adds.
I nod along. “And he lost it, not only when she dared to fight back, but also something made him snap to make him physically hit her as well, in addition to the strangulation. Does it say if the hits were pre or postmortem?”
“Based on bruising, it looks like she was still alive when he hit her.”
“Asshole,” Kelly says under his breath.
“He is starting to unravel. If he hasn’t already killed again, I don’t think it will be long before he does. There are too many variables he couldn’t control last time, or that went wrong. He’ll have to try and perfect his ritual again or be bombarded with a driving need to fix it until he does.”
“I’ll see when I can get my hands on Carmen’s cell phone. I already contacted the commanding officer as soon as I saw the case,” Mason tells Walker.
He nods in response. “Let me know if you need me to make any calls. Harlow and Tara, let’s work up a profile on Carmen compared to the other victims and see if there are any connections we are somehow missing.
Kelly, can you read through every line of that autopsy report and make sure we aren’t missing anything that would connect her kill to the others?
” We all nod and depart to our separate commands.
But there’s still something nagging my subconscious that I can’t place—something that feels familiar.