CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
A single click announced the arrival of a new email to Ella’s laptop.
The sender was Dylan Hartley, who was sitting miles away in the company of two officers at his home in Richfield.
The officers had double-checked his CCTV footage from the times of the murders, confirmed there was no digital tampering, and thus judged Dylan Hartley to be an innocent man.
Ella had made the journey back to the Cedarburg precinct and awaited Dylan’s list, because it had taken a lot longer than the half-hour he’d claimed.
It was already well into the late afternoon because getting a tech specialist out to Richfield had been unnecessarily complicated.
She couldn’t call Amelia at HQ because she needed someone to inspect Dylan’s computers in the flesh, and the journey from D.C.
to Wisconsin would have taken time Ella didn’t have.
Ripley was in another room, on a video call with some other members of the UCVU.
They’d reopened a cold case that Ripley had worked on years ago, and it was up to her to brief them, much to Ella’s annoyance.
But now, Ella had what she needed.
She opened the email and found it – a list of every therapist within fifteen miles of Cedarburg that had a presence on the Scarecrow app.
Sixty-two names.
‘That’s a lot of therapists,’ Ella said to herself, but when she did the napkin math, she realized it was a reasonable number. This list covered the entire city of Cedarburg and fifteen miles in each direction outside of it. That was around a hundred square kilometers in total.
But more importantly, somewhere on the list was a wolf among the sheep.
The noise of the precinct faded to a blur as Ella immersed herself in the sixty-two-line list, seeing if any of the names jumped out at her.
She took it carefully, one by one, because pulling on the wrong thread could unravel her investigation, and the last thing she wanted to do was waste more time.
It was just after four-thirty in the afternoon, and by now her killer could already be a hundred miles away.
Worse still, he could already have his sights set on a fourth victim, and if he kept up the same pattern as he had done for the past three days, Ella had about six hours before that fateful phone call came ripping.
She took each name one by one, but the first ten mocked her with their ordinariness.
John Wright, Stephen Booth, Jack Hill – the kind of names she’d expect to find on a database of lawyers.
She thought about checking each one on the police database as their names cropped up, but scrutinizing the histories of sixty-two people would take more time than she had.
Ella blinked away the exhaustion that was quickly catching her up and took in the whole list at a single glance.
The names blurred into a single stream of letters and syllables, and she began to fall prey to the drowsiness.
She’d caught a few hours of sleep in her car earlier, but now she was reaching that typical afternoon crash.
The caffeine, once her steadfast ally in battles against fatigue, now failed to muster even the slightest surge of energy.
But as tried to shake off the exhaustion, she caught something on the screen.
Perhaps it was her subconscious taking control of the wheel, or her weary brain making unexpected connections in the way daydreams sometimes did, but a name on her laptop emerged out of the fog.
Dr. D.L. Graham.
The name – a name she already knew – seared itself into Ella's consciousness.
‘Derek Graham,’ Ella said. The therapist who led the group sessions at St. Augustine's church.
How could she have missed it? He had been there, right in front of her, a figure of trust and healing, yet now potentially the orchestrator of this whole ordeal.
She took a deep breath to steady her nerves, trying to keep herself from overthinking and jumping to conclusions. Gut feelings had their place in law enforcement, but she was already three suspects deep, and each one had a solid alibi. Concrete evidence was needed, and fast.
She recalled Derek's mannerisms, his speeches about fear, his influence over the group.
Could he have manipulated his patients' fears for his own twisted purposes?
Was it possible Derek was able to lure his users onto the Scarecrow app and transpose his group therapy into one-on-one private sessions?
It is in acknowledging our fears, confronting them, that we find our true strength. Fear can either be a barrier or a gateway to understanding ourselves better.
Derek’s words. Ella recalled them with startling clarity.
Was Derek a genuine healer, or a predator hiding in plain sight?
The only way to find answers was to confront Derek Graham directly, but she needed to do it carefully, subtly.
She didn't have enough solid evidence to throw accusations at him, so she needed to talk to him, look for the signs, and try to wrap him up in a web of his own making.
There were plenty of details about the crimes that were yet to reach the public, and if she could extract a minor, unpublished detail from Derek, it was a crack to a bigger revelation.
Her previous interactions with her new person of interest took on a new light as she replayed them.
His monologues about fear, his probing questions, his insightful yet unsettling comments – they all seemed to fit the profile of someone who could exploit vulnerabilities.
But was it mere professional insight, or something else?
And if Derek was indeed her unsub, then he was intelligent and perceptive, possibly even aware of Ella's true identity.
That meant there was no point being coy.
Time to reveal her true identity to him.
Ella opened up the police database database and searched Derek Graham’s name. She pulled his address, noted it down and prepared her leave. Derek’s house was around five miles away. She could be there in thirty minutes if the traffic flow was generous.
Ella knew the next few hours could change everything – they could kickstart a pathway to justice or send her back to square one in her search for the truth.