CHAPTER THIRTY NINE
Ella's desk looked like a crime scene itself. Papers everywhere; from crime scene glossies to handwritten notes that she’d scrawled in haste.
She leaned over the wreckage and moved from one document to the next.
The list of therapists from the Scarecrow app sat open on her laptop - Dylan Hartley's gift - and she was running each name against Todd Williams's journalistic efforts.
But so far, she’d found no matches.
The unsub had to be on Scarecrow. Had to be at the group sessions. But the names didn't line up; they vanished into smoke the second she tried to pin them down.
‘Goddammit.’
Ella found herself adrift. She reminded herself that people at the group therapy sessions probably didn’t use their real names, so cross-referencing them with the names on Scarecrow was going to be a futile gesture anyway.
Sure, Todd Williams had discovered some of their real names, but not all of them, and who was to say that their unsub was even in full view when she’d been at the group sessions?
It could have been a church worker or a volunteer that had been eavesdropping.
Ella pushed away from her laptop and the mountain of paper. She got up, moved to her whiteboard, and began attacking it with a marker pen.
‘Our killer meets his victims at the group therapy sessions, then possibly lures them onto the Scarecrow app and gets closer to them. Does he reveal his true identity to them right there, and how long does he talk to these victims before pulling the trigger?’
Not long, Ella concluded. And why did no one in the group report that one of the members was a therapist in hiding?
Ella laid all of her thoughts out on the board. It became a chaotic yet strangely ordered reflection of the entire case from three days ago until now. It was messy, but it was a manifestation that somehow, amidst its chaos, it began to take on the shape of coherence.
‘He poisons them before subduing them, which means he has to get one-on-one time with them. How to administer enough poison into one’s system in one go?’
Ella benched the thought and moved on to the next question in line.
‘Whoever this unsub was, he was at the group classes when I spilled my needle phobia, but that doesn’t mean it was a member of the group. There were staff loitering around, church workers, priests.’
She stared at the board and hit a wall. Her mind drifted back to the cabin; to Derek's last seconds; to the words he'd choked out through the poison.
Find him. Group. Name. Don’t know. The man. Nick.
What had Derek been trying to say? Manic? Or did he say Nick? According to her notes, there was no one named Nick at all, be it a fake name or real name. Nor were there any therapists named Nick or Nicholas within fifteen miles of Cedarburg.
Or had Ella misinterpreted that too?
Ella clenched her teeth as she found herself caught in an eddy of confusion.
What if it was all wrong?
What if she was completely off the mark here?
Suddenly, the door swung open with force to announce Ripley's arrival. She, too, looked exhausted, and Ella had to wonder if retirement wasn't on her mind again.
‘News,’ Ripley said as she joined Ella at the whiteboard.
‘Go.’
‘Derek had paraquat in his system.’
Ella immediately thought of the famous paraquat poisonings in Japan in the eighties. Twelve dead. ‘Jesus Christ. Paraquat is crazy strong.’
‘Yeah, so unless those syringes were filled with magic, you weren’t saving his life no matter what. Derek was as good as dead from the moment you got there.’
The comment was as good as a boxer’s fist to the jaw. ‘Small mercies.’
‘Yeah. We found Derek Graham’s car in an alley near the church, where he always parks. So our killer ambushed him on his way to his group session tonight.’
Ella filed it away. Another piece. Another angle.
‘Is there CCTV at the church? Maybe we can get a visual on our guy.’
‘No. The church is old school. No cameras.’
‘For God’s sake.’
‘Literally.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I talked with Derek’s brother – his only surviving relative. Got some personal insights, though nothing that screams important.’
Ella glanced back at her whiteboard and asked, ‘Like what?’
‘Derek’s life, that kind of thing. Poor guy didn’t have many friends, it seems.’
‘Did he mention Derek’s son?’
‘Yeah,’ Ripley nodded. ‘Lost his wife ten years ago and his son last year. Poor guy had a tough run.’
Ella’s professional barriers eroded as she found herself momentarily lost in the sea of Derek's grief. She pushed her hair back off her face and said, ‘He didn’t deserve this.’
'Yup. Other than that, he didn't own a cell phone, and he loved fishing.'
In that breathless moment, standing before the sprawling canvas of her thoughts as her partner spilled the details of Derek’s life, Ella felt the adrenaline rush of breakthrough coursing through her bloodstream.
‘Wait a minute. Say that again.’
‘Huh? What can I say? The guy loved fishing.’
Ella's pulse rate amped up. A surge of energy coursed through her in a tide that washed away the silt of doubt and frustration. She felt as if a veil had been lifted.
‘No, not that. The cell phone. Derek didn’t have a cell phone?’
'That's what his brother said. He had a laptop, but that was it. Why?'
This seemingly trivial detail about Derek's lifestyle ignited a flare in the dark.
That was it. That was the thing she'd been missing while it sat right in front of her face.
The detail that made everything else fall into place.
The connections lit up and formed patterns and shapes that had been hidden in plain sight.
‘Ripley,’ she said. ‘I’ve got it.’
The poison, the killer’s trap, the small gestures of deceit, manic.
‘Got what?’
Life coaching. I know, I know. What's an ex-con like me doing giving people advice, right?
‘Our unsub,’ Ella cried, ‘I know who he is.’
Ripley's expression transformed in a blink. ‘What? Who?’
Saw you coming, so I made you a coffee. Dark Roast, right?
‘What? Who?’
Derek Graham hadn’t been saying manic.
‘The unsub. It’s Mason Arthur,’ Ella said.