CHAPTER SIX
At the Cedarburg precinct, Ella and Ripley had been given a corner table in a records room.
They’d driven straight here from the scene, and Ella’s sinuses were still plagued by the olfactory assault of decomposition.
She'd opened the car windows despite the cold, trying to air it out, but it hadn't worked.
Ella had just begun scouring through the missing persons reports.
She’d got into the Cedarburg PD network via ethernet port and established a secure tunnel back to the FBI database through the FBI’s encrypted VPN.
Then she used her CJIS credentials to access the national N-DEx portal, which gave her a direct, if sluggish, window to Wisconsin’s local databases.
Ripley was doing the same, albeit much slower.
Ella was convinced that her partner was still recovering from the whisky overdose on the plane.
People disappeared for a thousand different reasons. Most came back drunk or embarrassed or broke. Some ended up in hospitals or jails. A handful turned up dead. And a few just evaporated, never to be heard from again.
‘How many of those cabins are out there?’ Ripley shouted across the room.
‘Dozens, according to Bartram. Most of them are abandoned or only used during hunting season.’
'So our guy had options. Could've checked out multiple locations before deciding on that one.'
‘Could have.’
‘So we need eyes on all of those cabins, if we’ve got eyes to spare.’
Ella looked out of the glass partition at the main office area. It was the result of a small town budget stretched thin. ‘I doubt it. The force seems pretty light around here.’
‘We’ll see what’s available. Nothing in Waukesha for me. No one that looks like our vic, anyway.’
‘Something I’m wondering is how our unsub saw what he was doing in that cabin. It must have been pitch black.’
‘Dark, if he brought his own murder table, he probably brought a light.’
‘I suppose. So, he abducted this woman, drove her out into the woods, set up his equipment, and then eviscerated her? That's a lot of planning. Could the evisceration be overkill?'
‘Get off that train of thought. That was debunked back in my day, so you newbies should know better.’
Overkill was when the physical violence went far beyond that necessary for death, and that included postmortem mutilation too.
Profilers of yesterday also treated it as gospel: extreme overkill meant the killer and the victim knew each other.
The theory was that a stranger was a symbol, but a friend or a lover was a person.
To obliterate a person like that required a deep, pre-existing well of hatred.
Of course, a dozen cases of stranger-on-stranger murders had since proven the rule too rigid, but Ella never believed in throwing out the entire playbook.
Just because it wasn't always true didn't mean it was never true.
Sometimes, the oldest explanation was the right one.
Ella refocused her efforts on the database, and then as if she’d projected her subconscious musings onto her computer screen, she realized that she was staring at a familiar face.
Ella simultaneously processed the details of the cabin scene and the face in front of her, and she had no doubt that she’d found a match.
The picture of a smiling brunette, grainy as it was, resonated with the image imprinted in her mind - the one of an eviscerated woman restrained to a table in an isolated shack.
Ella’s pulse rate doubled in speed. The profile picture showed an attractive brunette, warm smile, caramel eyes, hooped gold earrings.
‘Ripley, I think I’ve got her.’
‘Have you?’
Ella angled her laptop. ‘Julia Dawson,’ Ella said. ‘Thirty-eight years old, admin worker, reported missing by her roommate at 1 AM this morning.’
‘Julia Dawson. Missing by 1 AM, found dead by 7 AM. The timeline fits. Get her address.’
She found it. 117 Middlegreen Gardens, which was around 6 miles from the crime scene according to her quick search. They needed to interview the person who reported her missing, because the answer to Julia’s death might lie in the events leading up to her disappearance.
‘Call the roommate to see if she’s home?’ Ripley asked. ‘She’s left her cell.’
‘You really wanna deliver this news by phone?’
‘Fair point. Grab your jacket and let’s go deliver some bad news.’
Ella closed her laptop and grabbed her things, driven by a new sense of responsibility for the woman she’d never met in life but needed to get closer to in death.