Chapter 15
Eddie
It’s later the same day I hear about Evelyn’s divorce and subsequent disappearance that I hear the other news.
"We've got another body,” Deputy Miller says. “The abandoned gas station in front of the creek. Female, mid-thirties, blonde. A real estate investor found her twenty minutes ago."
Another body? I'm already heading out the door.
There’s a pause, then, "Red handprint on the wall. Red nail polish on the fingers. It’s Red Hands, Detective."
The words land in my chest like boulders.
"I'm en route. Fifteen minutes. Nobody touches anything."
This has to be a previous kill, just now found.
Red Hands himself admitted that there are far more victims than I thought.
Fourteen total, twelve within city limits, two in the county.
We've only recovered seven. The math leaves plenty of room for a body to surface in an abandoned gas station that nobody's checked in months.
When I get to the crime scene, two patrol cars are already on scene, their lights painting the fading daylight in alternating blue and red.
The abandoned gas station sits at the end of a short gravel road that dead-ends at Clearwater Creek, one of those places the city forgot about the same way it forgot about the industrial corridor where we found Sera.
The pumps are gone, pulled out years ago, leaving stained concrete islands.
The building itself is a single-story cinder block rectangle with a flat roof and windows that have been boarded over with plywood.
The door hangs open. Someone propped it with a chunk of concrete. Yellow tape stretches across the entrance in a bright X.
"Investor's name is Dale Pruitt," Deputy Miller says, reading from his notepad. "Says he came to assess the property for a potential buyer. Walked in, found her, called 911. He's in the back of unit two. Pretty shaken up. Forensics is on the way."
"Anyone else been inside?"
"Just me. I confirmed the victim was deceased and backed out. Didn't touch anything."
"Good." I glove up and duck the tape.
The smell hits me first—mold, rat shit, and decomposition. Not the full assault of advanced decomposition. This is recent, a day or two at most.
She's arranged like all the other victims. Kneeling.
Hands bound, fingers laced together in her lap around a burnt rose.
Head tilted down in submission under a ceiling that's sagging with water damage.
A broken mirror is scattered around her knees.
The pose is Red Hands's signature, the victim arranged in the posture of someone forced to watch all of their reflections die and thus finally see the truth.
The red handprint is on the wall beside her head, positioned at eye level. A deliberate calling card left by a killer who wanted his work witnessed, who craved an audience for his acts of spiritual undressing.
Her fingernails are painted red with Crimson Kiss. I recognize the shade immediately. The color he used to mark them as finished. Finally unmasked.
The same color I scrubbed off Sera's nails in a hospital room, working carefully around the IV line, using acetone pads I bought from the gift shop downstairs because I couldn't stand the sight of his signature on her hands for one more second.
I turn on my flashlight app and crouch in front of the victim to look at her face. Then I squeeze my eyes shut to try to erase the image.
Evelyn Harrow.
The sheriff's wife. The woman who filed for divorce three days ago and vanished.
Blonde hair, fine-boned features, the kind of face that photographs well for church directories and charity galas.
In death, her expression is slack, emptied of whatever she was feeling in her final moments. Her wedding ring is still on.
I observe the scene the way I have every Red Hands scene. With detachment. But underneath, a cold, heavy feeling settles into my gut.
What really happened here?
I study the handprint first, the flashlight on my phone angled to catch the texture of the blood against the grey cinder block.
Red Hands—Allen Webb—wore ultra-thin latex gloves molded with generic fingerprint whorls.
It was one of his signatures within the signature, a layer of deliberate anonymity that made the handprint untraceable while maintaining its visual impact.
The print he left was always the right hand, always positioned at the victim's eye level, always applied with a single, firm press that left a clean, complete impression.
No smearing. No gaps. No hesitation marks. The man treated it like a stamp, a seal of authenticity on his finished work.
This print is the right hand, but the size is wrong.
Webb's hand measured approximately seven and a half inches from the base of the palm to the tip of the middle finger.
I know this because I measured it myself at every crime scene.
This print is larger—closer to eight and a half inches, maybe nine.
The fingers are thicker, the palm broader. It's the hand of a bigger man.
And the outline itself is wrong. It's not as clean, too faded in some parts where insufficient pressure was applied, too heavy in others where the hand pressed harder to compensate. The thumb print is smudged, dragged slightly to the left as if the hand shifted during application.
Red Hands never shifted. His prints were precise, consistent, as reliable as a fingerprint because, in a way, that's exactly what they were. His identifier. His authorship.
This print is a forgery. A good one, if you don't know what you're looking at. But I've spent months staring at the real thing, photographing it, measuring it, learning it the way you learn the face of someone you're hunting.
This isn’t it.
The realization moves through me like ice water. I photograph the print and include a measurement scale, then move to the nail polish.
Crimson Kiss. The right brand, the right color. That specific, aggressive red that sits between arterial and candy, the color Webb chose because it screamed falseness to him, because it was the loudest, most garish declaration of lies he could paint onto a dead woman's hands.
But the application is wrong. Red Hands used multiple coats and overflowed onto the cuticles intentionally, let the color bleed past the nail bed like it was consuming the finger, because that was the point. The excess was the message. Look how false she was.
This application is hardly an application at all.
There are no more than two overlapping coats striped down the center of each nail.
The color sits timidly within the boundaries of each nail, faint and translucent where it should be thick and aggressive.
The brush strokes are hasty, impatient, the work of someone who knows what the finished product should look like but doesn't have the patience or the skill to replicate it.
I move to the body. The cuts.
Evelyn's blouse has been unbuttoned, and beneath it, her chest and abdomen bear a series of incisions. Parallel lines, evenly spaced. At first glance, they match Red Hands's signature work: the methodical, layered cutting designed to peel back skin in controlled strips.
At first glance.
The cuts are the right depth but in the wrong places.
Red Hands knew anatomy intimately from fifteen years of daily practice as a mortuary technician.
His cuts followed the natural lines of the body, the planes, the paths of least resistance.
They were efficient, even elegant, if you could stomach the word in context.
These cuts fight the body. They cross muscle fibers at awkward angles. Two of them have jagged edges where the blade caught on tissue and was forced through rather than guided. The spacing is close to Red Hands's pattern but not exact—slightly too wide in some places, slightly too narrow in others.
This is the work of someone who studied photographs. Crime scene photos, maybe.
Whoever did this never spent years cutting open the dead.
I stand, my knees aching from crouching. The cold in my gut has solidified into something with edges.
This isn't Red Hands.
Red Hands is dead, consumed by knives and cold and the hungry dark that lives in Sera's house. Allen Webb will never kill again. I know this with absolute certainty because I watched the life left his body.
And Evelyn doesn't fit the victim profile. Not even close. Red Hands chose women in transformation—women who had reinvented themselves, changed names, moved towns, shed old skins. Women who were becoming.
Evelyn Harrow was a Hallmark employee who parked in the same spot every day and ordered the same salad for lunch. She wasn't transforming. She was enduring. The only new thing she'd done in her life was file for divorce from a man only three days ago.
Which is exactly why she's dead.
She knew things, and a divorce means depositions, discovery, attorneys asking questions while under oath. A divorce proceeding would give her every reason and every legal framework to start talking.
Vincent couldn't afford that. So he silenced her the only way a man like him knows how. A borrowed mask. A dead man's handprint. The perfect cover: a serial killer who's still terrorizing the city, claiming one more victim, and isn't it tragic that the sheriff's own wife was among them?
I leave the scene in a hurry with strict instructions to Miller to hold the scene.
“I will, and I…I already called Vincent,” he says.
I give a sharp nod and then leave.
Vincent is in the break room when I get to the station, surrounded by deputies. Since he was suspended, he wears plain clothes, but his suspension and the accusations against him must mean nothing to those who circle him like a god.
He's sitting in a plastic chair with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands. The posture of devastation. Two deputies have their hands on his shoulders. Someone has brought him a bottle of water that sits untouched on the table beside a box of tissues.