CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ella sat on a leather couch in a living room that didn't match the occasion. It was too bright and too put-together. There were cream-colored walls, an oversized flat-screen mounted above a gas fireplace, and a small aquarium humming in the corner.
Across from her sat Miranda Barker. She was early forties, with blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and a silk robe wrapped around her tightly.
She was also a woman who’d just discovered she’d become a widow.
Miranda's eyes, wide and unblinking, stared into a void that the news of her husband's death had catapulted her.
Ella found herself unusually unsettled by the eerie calm that enveloped Miranda. There were no tears or sobs of grief, merely a stillness.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Ella said. ‘I know that there’s nothing I can say that’ll help you right now.’
‘Tom is…?’ Miranda trailed off.
In moments like these, Ella often felt like an intruder in the sacred privacy of grief.
Yet, her duty anchored her there, in the horror of a life abruptly dismantled.
She watched Miranda, whose lips had frozen, as if the very words that could express her agony had abandoned her.
They said the hardest part of police life was putting your life in danger every day, but memories of such moments faded.
On the contrary, moments like this didn’t.
‘Yes. I wish I could make it easier for you.’
‘He left for work. Like any other day. He...’
People responded differently to grief. Some people collapsed in an inconsolable heap immediately. Others went numb as their brains refusing to process the information. Miranda was the second type, at least for now.
‘He had a conference, some meeting thing,’ Miranda said.
Ella thought back to the business cards. Thomas Barker must have been networking. ‘And he never came home?’
‘No. But last night was Monday night.’
‘It was. Does that mean something?’
‘Tom went out Monday nights.’ Miranda’s tone was hollow, like she was speaking from a great distance. It reminded Ella of a speaker at a church sermon.
‘Where did he go?’
‘He never said.’
Ella’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Tom just disappeared? Every Monday night?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you never thought it suspicious?’ Ella kept her tone non-accusatory. That was the last thing Miranda needed.
'No.' Miranda's hands twisted in her lap, which Ella concluded was the physical manifestation of an internal struggle. 'Tom has his secrets, and I know it. I just assumed he was out drinking. Last night, maybe he got too drunk. It wouldn't have been the first time.'
Ella remembered Ripley’s suggestion of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. ‘Tom had a drinking problem?’
'Tom had a lot of problems. Drinking was just one of them. We didn't talk about it. Every time I brought it up, we'd fight. Eventually, I stopped trying. It was easier to just let it be.'
Ella understood that logic. Dysfunction had a way of becoming routine if you lived with it long enough. 'Did he have a regular place he went? A bar, a friend's house?'
'I don't know. Like I said, he didn't tell me. And I didn't ask. Our marriage wasn't great, and I'm not going to pretend it was.'
'I'm not here to judge. I'm just trying to understand Tom's life. His routine. Who he spent time with.'
Miranda seemed to withdraw further into herself. ‘His life was simple, at least on the surface. He worked, came home, spent time with our daughter. On weekends, he'd do yard work, watch sports. That's all there seemed to be.’
Ella noted the mechanical way Miranda described Tom's life. It was as if she were reciting a well-rehearsed script, but one that omitted the nuances of their real life together. ‘What about friends, colleagues? Did he socialize much?’
‘Not really. Tom was private. Kept to himself. Occasionally, he'd meet a colleague for lunch, but he rarely brought anyone home. As for friends... I'm not sure he had many. He was a loner in many ways.’
The picture forming in Ella's mind was familiar: a man living two lives, one visible and mundane, the other hidden. Julia Dawson had been the same way. It was this duality that intrigued Ella, the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the unknown.
But Ella was sure of one thing: Tom hadn’t been out drinking the previous night.
As Ella pondered this duality, she gently probed further, ‘Did Tom have any habits or hobbies at home that stood out? Anything he did regularly?’
Tears began to well in Miranda’s eyes. She gripped her thighs with both hands and began to shake. Ella recognized it as the body moving past the shock and arriving at its new reality, a reality that the mind didn’t want to accept.
‘Miranda, are you okay?’
The widow was suddenly choked by the sobs that had surfaced. ‘I...I'm sorry. It's just...it's hitting me now. He's gone and he’s not coming back.’
Ella gave her a moment. Let the tears come. Grief had its own timeline.
'He was my husband,' Miranda said through the crying. 'We had problems, sure, but he was still…’
‘I know this is incredibly hard,’ Ella said. ‘Take your time. I'm here to listen, not just as a detective, but as someone who understands loss.’
Miranda wiped her face with the sleeve of her robe and took a shaky breath. 'Tom didn't really have hobbies. He worked, spent time with our daughter. That was about it. His job consumed him. I think he used it as an escape.'
Ella watched her carefully. There was something Miranda wasn't saying. A lingering thought was hanging there, and her lips were fighting to keep it sealed. 'Was there anything else? Any small thing he did regularly that stood out?'
Miranda clutched her hands together in prayer, then quickly broke them again. Ella could feel the agitation building, the urge to speak. 'Uh… I don't…'
'Mrs. Barker, your husband was murdered. He's the second victim in two days. If there's something that could help us find whoever did this, I need to know.'
Miranda stared at her hands. 'Tom didn't sleep well. Insomnia, I guess. When he couldn't sleep, he'd get up and go to his office.'
Ella felt something significant was on the horizon. ‘What did he do in there?’
‘He'd spend hours in there, just... drawing. I'd catch him sometimes, hunched over his sketchbook. But he never showed me what he was drawing. He was very secretive about it.’
‘Drawing?’
‘Yes. He wasn’t a good artist,’ Miranda sniffed, ‘but he didn’t let that stop him.’
A sketchbook. Private, hidden. The kind of thing that might reveal what someone was thinking when they couldn't say it out loud. ‘Could I see this sketchbook?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know where it is. Tom kept it hidden. Curiosity got the better of me a few times and I searched for it, but… never found it.’
Ella wasn’t the most grandiose person in the world, but she fully believed that if it existed, she could track it down. ‘Understood. Could I take a look anyway?’
***
The air in Tom Barker's office was stale, like dirty laundry had festered here and nobody had opened a window in weeks. However, there was no sign of any filth in here. In fact, the place was hospital-levels of clean.
Ella stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
It didn't match what Miranda had described.
A man with secrets, a drinking problem, insomnia.
This room looked like it belonged to someone who had their life together.
A desk with a computer and a bookshelf with every spine flush with the next.
Books on business, a few on art, and some on personal development.
She suffered a pang of solemnity as she began her search.
There was an intimacy in rifling through a deceased person's belongings, so she told herself she’d be as respectful as possible and leave the place as she found it.
She began her search for this mysterious scrapbook at the desk, but she found nothing but the usual office supplies.
In the bottom drawer lay a few personal items: a wristwatch, a couple of old photographs, and a small, intricately carved wooden box.
She opened the box. Keys inside. Five of them, all different sizes. No labels. She had no idea what they opened. She closed the box and put it back. Another question for another time.
The bookshelf was next. Ella scanned the titles, pulled a few out at random, checked behind them.
Nothing. Between two books on project management, she found a framed photo: Tom with Miranda and a girl who must've been their daughter.
Another photo showed Tom at some corporate event, shaking hands with a man in a suit.
He looked younger in that one, and certainly happier.
She scanned every visible book spine but found nothing resembling a sketchbook, no amateur creations.
She moved to the computer. Checked behind the monitor, underneath the keyboard, on top of the tower. Clean. She thought about turning it on, but that would require a warrant. She'd have to come back for it.
Another drawer. This one had envelopes. Unopened. All from the same bank. Ella flipped through them and found mostly overdue notices. Tom had been behind on something. She put them back and closed the drawer.
The office was revealing itself in pieces. Tom Barker wasn't just a guy with a drinking problem. He'd been drowning financially, hiding things from his wife, spending his nights doing something in this room that he couldn't talk about.
Ella stood in the center of the room and tried to think like Tom.
If she were hiding something personal, something she didn't want anyone to find, where would she put it?
It would need to be somewhere accessible, yet not immediately noticeable.
She reflected on his character - a man who cherished order and precision, yet maintained a chaotic inner life.
Such a man might hide his deepest secrets amongst the mundane and everyday.
He would hide it amongst similar items and use anomalies as misdirection.
She remembered how, as a kid, she'd keep her fake diary in the top drawer of her dresser, but she'd keep her real diary in a secret compartment in that same drawer.
If her mom or dad ever found her diary, they'd read through her purposely-boring ramblings and their curiosity would be satisfied.
Yet in the diary below sat her real thoughts, the ones she kept hidden from everyone.
Instinct brought her back to Tom’s wall-to-ceiling bookshelf.
The framed photographs and business books were typical, almost expected in an office like this.
But what if they were part of the misdirection, just like her childhood fake diary?
Ella scrutinized the bookshelf again, this time with a keener eye, searching for any subtle signs of concealment.
Ella's eyes were drawn to the top shelf.
It was packed with books, but unlike the rest of the shelves, it was two rows deep, thus creating a space between the front and back rows.
On tiptoes, Ella carefully began to remove the books from the front row.
As she worked her way through the row, her fingers brushed against something that felt out of place amidst the hardcovers.
Leather. Worn smooth.
She pushed the remaining books aside and pulled it out.
A sketchbook.
Her blood rushed hot.
Black cover, spiral binding, pages dog-eared and stained.
Ella climbed down and set it on the desk.
Opened it.
One by one, page by page, Ella took in every drawing.
At first, Ella thought her mind was playing tricks on her, projecting her inner thoughts onto the page. But her body and mind responded in a way that confirmed that none of this was imagined – everything in front of her was very real.
This was no projection.
A surge of dread crept in as she lingered on the final page. It was a crude scene that seemed to leap from the deepest recesses of a psyche in disarray.
The images were not just illustrations.
They were manifestations of a crippling phobia.
Ella’s fingers began to tremble as she realized that she’d misinterpreted everything so far. She thought about Julia Dawson. The rats. The cabin. Cardiac arrest from extreme stress. She thought about Tom Barker. The coffin. The unsealed lid. The restraints that made escape impossible.
They hadn’t been killed using ancient torture techniques.
She wasn’t chasing a medieval obsessive.
She was hunting a predator who preyed on the fears of his victims.