CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
The precinct was dead, save for the occasional janitor gliding past her office window.
Ella sat devouring Todd Williams’s notes on the therapy group while every other available officer patrolled the woods on the outskirts of the city.
Ella wished she could join the scouting operation, but she had too much digging to do back here.
Ella rubbed her temples, feeling the onset of a headache.
Todd’s notes were a jumble of observations, theories, and ramblings, seemingly without any coherent structure.
It was clear that Todd had a keen eye for detail, but his method of documentation was chaotic at best. As she scrolled, she found snippets of conversations he’d had with other members, descriptions of group dynamics, and musings on the therapy methods.
But it was all surface-level stuff, nothing that gave her the insight she needed.
She had hoped for a breakthrough, but so far, Todd's notes were proving to be more of a distraction than a help.
The only thing Ella could really extract from the notes was a list of all the group members that Todd had met during his time there.
Ella didn't know which ones were aliases and which ones were real, but it was useful data to have regardless.
Todd had also done some of the legwork for her by looking into some of the names and suggesting their real names next to them.
Perhaps he did have some journalistic integrity, she thought.
Just as Ella was about to delve deeper into the list of names, her cell phone rang. She glanced at the name, or lack of.
Unknown caller.
‘Hello?’ she answered.
‘Hi, Miss Dark. It’s Doctor Sanchez from the Medical Examiner’s Office.’
‘Oh, hi Doctor Sanchez. You’re working late.’
‘Yes indeed. There’s a joke in our industry that we always work the graveyard shift.’
Ella had never met someone in the mortuary business that didn’t have a weird sense of humor. She guessed you had to in that job. ‘Very good. How can I help you?’
‘Well, I found something you might be interested in.’
Ella’s ears perked up. ‘I’m listening.’
‘I just got the toxicology reports for Thomas Barker. There were traces of poison in his system. Actually, more than just traces. Lots of it. Much more than what I found in the first victim’s system.’
Ella’s nerve endings began to tingle. The pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together, but the image they formed was still unclear. ‘The same kind of poison?’
‘Identical. Sodium oxybate. Or gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.’
‘Can you tell how it got into his system?’
‘The most effective way,’ Sanchez said. ‘Orally.’
Ella quickly scribbled down notes. ‘Any idea on the timeline? How long before his death was the poison administered?’
‘It's tricky with GHB, but given the concentration, I'd say no more than two hours before death,’ Sanchez replied.
She quickly checked the St. Augustine’s Church website and saw there was no group session last night. Which meant that the killer had arranged to see the victim privately.
Ella couldn’t see any other possibility. This unsub had intimate time with their victims prior to death. So intimate that he could trick them into willingly ingesting sedatives.
‘And much less than you found in Julia Dawson’s system?’
‘A lot less. About three-hundred percent less.’
The killer had tested the waters with Julia Dawson, Ella concluded. When the drug hadn’t taken effect, he’d upped the dosage for his next victim.
But how did he isolate them? How did he get them to consume drugs willingly?
‘Thanks doctor. Call me if you find anything else.’ Ella said.
‘Will do. Take care.’
Ella hung up and thought everything through.
The killer's M.O. was now becoming clearer: he was using trust and intimacy as weapons, seducing his victims into a false sense of security before striking. Then once he had the victim subdued, he’d begin enacting his fantasy, which was to recreate the conditions of his victim’s worst fear.
The disparity in the dosage of the poison between the two victims suggested one of three things; either it was a learning curve, a deliberate progression or he didn’t have as much alone time with Julia Dawson.
The therapy group was the common link. The killer had to be someone within that circle, someone who had access to the victims' personal fears and vulnerabilities. The question was, how did he manage to isolate them?
Suddenly, the door to her office burst open, and Ripley stormed in, her face flushed red, the look of a woman subjected to some unexpected cardio.
‘Dark, you need to come quick. We got a report of a fire out in the woods. A cabin.’
Ella’s head snapped. She grabbed her jacket. ‘A fire? Whereabouts?’
‘I don’t know the exact spot. One of our patrolling guys caught it.’
Adrenaline surged through Ella's veins, overriding her fatigue. ‘A body?’ she asked.
‘Don’t know. All we know is there’s a vehicle outside.’
Ella’s thoughts became a maelstrom. Another victim? Was the killer trying to cover their tracks?
Fire, Ella thought.
She prayed it was a false alarm, but there was no time to theorize. She needed to see this scene in person.
‘Let’s go,’ she said and led the way out.