CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Of all the ways to find a man dead, headless was the one the mind struggled with the most. The face was where a person’s identity was kept, but the man in the chair offered her no such luxury. He ended in a ragged, bloody stump at the collar.
‘No. We haven’t found his head,’ said Chief Hibbert.
Ella, Ripley and Hibbert were in an upstairs office in a house belonging to a man named Curtis Brennan, thirty-five, who lived alone.
It would have been a pleasant room under any other circumstances.
Cream was the theme. There was a wide desk that ran along the far side, and on it sat a camera on a small tripod, still pointing at the chair.
Beside the camera, a desktop computer hummed away to itself and its three monitors had all gone into standby mode.
There was a microphone on a boom arm, swung off to one side.
A man’s room, kept by a man who cared how it looked. There was even a coaster.
And then there was the rest of it.
The blood had not stayed where a tidier death would have kept it.
It had gone up the cream wall behind the chair in a fan, thinning to a fine spray near the ceiling.
It had come down the back of the headrest and pooled in the seat and run off the front edge in two long ribbons that had dried partway to the carpet.
It had decorated the monitors, all three of them, in diagonal lines of pressurized arterial spray that the textbooks always rendered as arcs and which in real life looked more like random brushstrokes.
Down the front of the grey Capitals sweatshirt the body was wearing.
Across the lap. Onto the carpet. There was blood on a framed photograph.
There was a fine mist of it across the underside of the desk lamp where the bulb had cooked it dry overnight.
Ripley, who was confined to a square foot of space as not to contaminate the scene, said, ‘No need to ask who called it in. This went out live to tons of people.’
‘We had hundreds of calls. People all over the country dialed 911.’
‘Nice to know people still care,’ Ella said, then turned to the body. ‘It looks like our unsub’s hanging phase was just that.’
Ripley said, ‘Yeah. The good news is that we know exactly what happened and how it happened. No mystery there. How many times did you watch the video, Dark?’
‘A lot.’
‘And?’
‘And it’s the same man who killed Billy Hayes. He’s just updated his killing method.’
‘Updated?’ asked Hibbert. ‘I thought you both said hanging was the hardest way to kill someone.’
‘It’s joint number-one,’ Ella said.
‘Joint with what?’
‘Taking someone’s head clean off in one swoop,’ Ripley finished. ‘Decapitation isn’t easy. Decapitation in one swing, unless it’s with a guillotine, is unheard of.’
Ella didn’t turn back to Ripley. She was looking at the chair, and at what was in it, and at the angle of the wound at the collar.
‘From the video, we can glean the size of our guy. We heard it from Ronnie Cobb at the faire, but Cobb was drunk and scared, so I had it filed under maybe. The video’s not maybe.
He fills the frame. Brennan’s chair is a normal chair and the man standing behind it makes it look like something out of a doll’s house.
Six-eight wasn’t an exaggeration. If anything, Cobb undersold it. ’
‘Agreed. The guy in that video is monstrous. What else?’
‘Second, our vic here was already gone before the blade ever came near him. You can see it. He’s in the chair, upright, but his head’s lolling, his eyes won’t hold still, he can’t lift his own hands. The killer lured him out of his office and drugged him, like he did with Hayes.’
‘Probably ketamine again,’ Ripley said. ‘So he breaks into the house, ambushes the vic at an opportune time, drugs him, takes his head clean off with an axe and flees. All within what, a minute?’
‘From the time the vic came back into view, it was fifteen seconds before his head came off and the killer disappeared.’
Ripley asked, ‘Hibbert, were the doors downstairs unlocked?’
‘The back door was, yes. That’s how my guys got in.’
‘Then that’s probably how the killer got in, too.’
Ella continued, ‘And does all of this dressed up in full executioner gear. Why?’
‘For show?’ Hibbert asked. ‘He knew he was on camera.’
Ella said, ‘Yes he did, but that’s not why he wore the costume.
If you look at the video, you’ll see his forearms are on show.
Anyone worried about concealing their identity wouldn’t show any skin at all, even with no tattoos or birthmarks.
And why would he go to the lengths to dress up in this costume? Why not just use a sweater and a mask?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Theatrics,’ Ripley said to Hibbert. ‘Our killer is acting out a fantasy, and fantasies always have very specific elements that only make sense to the perpetrator. This costume addresses a compulsion and amplifies the overall thrill.’
Hibbert stepped inside the room proper, but then retreated again once he realized he couldn’t walk anywhere without stepping in blood. ‘So, our killer’s a pervert?’
Ripley said, ‘No, that’s the one thing our killer isn’t. Perverts leave behind evidence of their perversion. These vics haven’t been sexually assaulted, and hanging and decapitation aren’t overtly sexual crimes. Lust killers stab and strangle, almost exclusively. And how old’s our victim?’
‘Thirty-five.’
‘Billy Hayes was forty-six. That’s an eleven-year difference. Lust killers don’t deviate so much. They have a type and they stick to it. Our two victims are polar opposites, by the looks of it. Not to mention that they don’t resemble each other at all.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Hibbert said. ‘I can’t see his face.’
Ripley had drifted to the bookshelf along the side wall, the one patch of the room she could reach without standing in remains of the dead. She tilted her head to read the spines, then drew one out with two fingers and turned it over.
‘Here’s his face,’ she said, and held up a book so Ella and Hibbert could see. Ella peered closer. It was one of the few objects in this room not sprayed with blood.
‘Eye For An Eye. Soft Justice In A Hard World. By Curtis Brennan. Host of the Watchlist.’
Ripley read the blurb and said, ‘Thirty-five years old and he’s writing books about justice. He wasn’t even alive when D.C. abolished the death penalty. I might sound old-fashioned, but you can’t have this strong of an opinion about something you didn’t live through.’
Ella decided not to mention that if Ripley’s belief was the general consensus, there’d be no such thing as historians. Now wasn’t the time for a debate. ‘What’s his book about?’
‘We should be harsher on criminals, apparently.’ Ripley leafed through the book. ‘And it’s got all the lack of nuance you’d expect. It’s the usual recycled talking points we hear every day.’
Two men. That was where Ella’s head went, while Ripley thumbed through the dead man’s book and Hibbert guarded the doorway from passing officers. The fewer people who witnessed this display, the better.
‘Do we know much else about this guy?’ she asked.
Ripley said, ‘A little too much. The guy broadcasts his life online. He runs an online channel called the Watchlist. I watched some clips while we were outside. He’s a political commenter, justice advocate sort of thing.’
‘How extreme?’ Ella asked.
‘Anyone who steals a candy bar should get the death penalty extreme.’
‘And now someone’s given him a taste of his own medicine,’ Ella said. ‘We need to dig through this guy’s life and find out if he’s got a criminal record.’
Hibbert interrupted, ‘Forensics should be here soon. We’ve got the street on lockdown, and my guys are checking local CCTV. With a guy this size, I don’t suspect we’ll have any problems spotting him.’
Ella somehow doubted that. She stepped out of the room and looked out of the window to the street below. There were three cruisers, now accompanied by a forensics van. They were going to have their work cut out for them here, and she’d be surprised if they could sweep everything before nightfall.
Ripley joined her at the window. ‘Looks like we’ve got to move our asses. Dark, you ready to get to the precinct?’
‘Yeah. What are we doing about the video?’
‘I’m on it. Well, the tech guys at HQ are on it.
I’ve been on the phone with them since stupid o’clock.
They’re using the child-exploitation agents to scrape the internet for images that match any stills from the video.
It scours the web every sixty seconds and blocks the host, whatever that means. I’m just repeating what they told me.’
Good, Ella thought. This footage didn’t need to be seen by anyone other than the people hunting this monster. ‘Who says artificial intelligence is useless?’
‘Me, but that’s another story. And before you ask, yes, I’ve got the tech guys devouring every detail for something we can use. Reflections in the background, little bits of audio, whatever. He filmed the murder for us, so let’s use it.’
There was something different about Ripley these past two days, and it took Ella until now to place it.
There’d been a period last year when Ripley had been going through the motions, culminating in a short-lived retirement.
However, the Ripley next to her was the old Ripley, the fiery bitch who never hesitated to crack a few skulls and, in some cases, welcomed it.
It was contagious. Ella felt the slack go out of her own spine.
‘Then let’s stop standing in his crime scene,’ Ella said, ‘and go make him regret leaving that camera on.’