Chapter 2 Firefly #2
The victim has been preserved as best as possible despite the wind, which has layered a thin sheet of sand over the body, pushing up around the frame like the wall of a sandcastle. His shins show signs of pinches and bite marks from fiddler crabs and other crustaceans.
From a distance, it appears as though he merely fell to his death down the steep dune.
Up close, it’s the gruesome sight that denotes a violent murder, and links the crime to the Reaper killings—the moniker the FBI has failed to keep out of the media—now spanning nine states over the past five years.
The exposed victim has been stripped of clothes. His hands and legs have been impaled with steel, skewer-like rods, pinning his appendages to the earth like an insect to a board. Yet it’s what’s missing that gives my guy his moniker.
The head has been severed, taken from the scene.
Reaped.
It’s more than the perpetrator’s MO, it’s his signature.
A frisson of exhilaration prickles my skin as I observe the precise, clinical slices along the victim’s vertebrae.
“Griffin Klane Anders,” Valdes says as he approaches from the side.
“Prints just identified him. Serial predator. Wanted on numerous abductions and murder charges. Honestly, some of the most disturbing shit I’ve ever seen.
The Bureau’s been actively hunting him since he dropped off the radar three years ago, unable to bring him in.
” He shrugs, releasing a dry grunt. “Until now.”
I look up into his tense face, features cast sharp by the pale moonlight, his graying hair windblown. “Any connection to previous victims?”
He shakes his head, pulling out his phone to scroll updates. “Nothing pinged during a cursory sweep. Keats is running a deeper analysis now. But it’s not likely.”
I nod once. Other than the history of dark deeds, there’s been no obvious connection among the victims. Just the fact that they’re all wanted for vile crimes and untraceable.
Valdes stares at the staged body, brows furrowed. “I mean…” He hesitates, voice dropping low. “Hell, this perp is taking out the trash. Maybe we shouldn’t even catch this guy.”
A ripple of apprehension coasts down my spine, and I force a tight smile. “Yeah, maybe.”
Here’s what I know: If the perp is intentionally targeting these wanted offenders, then he’s using something beyond mere skill; a method of profiling and hunting that surpasses even our most sophisticated agency systems.
Valdes mutters a curse and kicks a fiddler crab away from the body. “Shit, we need a tarp.”
My throat constricts, and I swallow past the sudden tightness. Before I step onto every crime scene, I arm myself with a defensive wall. But like the sand creeping into every crevice of my briefcase, trauma always finds a crack.
I bring my hands together, thumb resting over the pulse of my wrist. “Can you keep me updated on the progress?”
“Sure thing.” The agent tucks his phone away before he returns to the medical examiner.
While the agents document the scene, I focus on the body, even though the victim isn’t really why I’m here.
As a psychopathologist specializing in abnormal psychology and maladaptive behaviors, I’ve conducted over forty interviews with violent offenders. I’m here to make sure this one is captured alive, and that I’m the first to interview him.
From the moment I realized the connection, he became mine.
I’m here for him.
Aiming my tablet at the body, I snap a few pictures for my report. The skin is blanched, tissue devoid of blood. What remains has congealed on the sand at the point of decapitation.
First, he administers a paralytic to incapacitate his victim. Then, depending on what the environment calls for, he uses either a wire bone saw or an oscillating surgical saw to slice through the tendons and bone of the neck—
While the victim is still alive.
Although the act is especially brutal, it’s not done for deviant delights. The staging of the victim is too purposeful for his intent to be sadistic torture.
Whether the head is taken as a trophy or in connection to a deeper, darker compulsion is irrelevant to me. It may interest the Feds, and even further our understanding of the serial offender mind, but this one—this particular offender—has something far more valuable to offer.
As I move around the body to capture images from different angles, I record the pose. Each previous victim earned a unique position, even the first buried beneath the desert sand.
This victim has been placed on his left side, his front facing the ocean. His knees are curled toward his stomach. Left arm extended, right arm stretched at a forty-degree angle away from his chest.
A sudden commotion rises above the roar of wind and waves, and I can hear Dr. Lancer speaking passionately into her phone. Not long after, Darby crosses under the yellow ribbon and tunnels his fingers through his thick hair.
“That might buy us a little time,” he says, exasperation weighing his shoulders. “And just to be clear, I never want to hear about fireflies again.”
I turn my face away from the gust, guarding my eyes against the spray of sand. “I don’t understand how they can be out here with this wind anyway.”
“Unfortunately, I do. I now know more than I ever wanted to.”
A smile slips along the seam of my mouth. “Like what?” I ask, knowing he’s actually dying to share. Darby acts tough, but he secretly enjoys trivia and—his worst offense—documentaries.
He blows out a terse breath. Then, glancing around, he points out one of the lightning bugs. “They’re beetles, not flies. Dr. Lancer was insulted I referred to them otherwise. The glow or light or whatever they emit can be different colors.”
I watch the lone firefly flutter its tiny, winged body against the wind and land on a blade of dune grass. The bottom of its abdomen illuminates into a brilliant green glow. The bloom of light is beautiful, filling me with a foreign emotion.
“They blink in a sequence, like a code,” Darby continues as he gloves his hands and crouches next to the body. “Flashing their light to create a pattern unique to their species.”
I recall what Dr. Lancer said about their mating signal, how they follow a pattern to find a mate. The male will flash while the female waits to be impressed by the light display. When she selects a suitor, she’ll time her flashes with his to lure him to her.
“Jesus,” Darby says, tilting his head at an angle to examine the mutilated neck. “No hesitation marks. Cut clean through. He worked fast.”
“Then the vic didn’t suffer long,” I say, my voice cut low by the wind. “Unfortunately.”
Darby looks up at me with a thoughtful expression. Though I give him credit, he doesn’t let an ounce of pity register in his eyes. “I also found out the female fireflies are toxic to predators,” he says. “Even in death, the victim fights back.”
A hard swallow scrapes my throat. Besides my superiors, Darby is the only agent who knows of my past, a consequence of his field in intelligence. He was the investigator who conducted my Personal Security Interview for the background investigation during my hiring process.
“Too bad her retribution comes a little too late,” I say.
Darby glances away. “Insects have their ways, and we have ours. That’s what we’re here to do.
” He absently touches the leather band around his wrist. “Anyway, the last victim blew my theory out of the water. He’s not targeting offenders who commit the same crimes. His victimology is all over the map.”
“Same as his kill sites.”
Like strings connected to points on a murder board, we’ve tried connecting every conceivable variable. Once a connection is made, it always feels obvious after the fact.
I need to be able to predict where he’ll strike next.
As Darby becomes invested in his evaluation, I wake my tablet and fill out the initial findings for my report, my thoughts still clinging to patterns and the blinking, harmonic glow of fireflies.
In psychology, the Gestalt principles explain how the mind uses innate pattern recognition to organize seemingly random details, applying laws of perception that simplify the chaos.
Like how the law of connectedness helps link separate objects into a single shape.
It’s why our brains see a pattern even when there’s no intentional pattern to begin with.
Like how the flashing of the fireflies, set against the dark backdrop of a starry ocean sky, resembles the stars dotting the night.
Their glowing bodies look like constellations.
“Oh, my god.” As soon as the thought strikes, I push my sleeve up, my fingers tracing the starry points inked across my wrist.
I glance up at the rolling ocean, the horizon now lost to the hazy offing. Clusters of burning stars scatter the black sky, their light reflected on the surface of the dark water.
Walking a circle around the victim, I keep my face cast upward as I pick out the distinct shapes amid the stars until I find the one I’m searching for. Then I look down at the victim, the way his body is posed.
As soon as I see it, I can’t unsee it. Obvious after the fact.
“Shit.” I stagger away from the body, hands unsteady as I download a sky map to my tablet, then angle my device skyward. “Aquarius,” I whisper, the excited tremble of my voice snatched by a gust of wind.
Wary, Darby eases my way. “Hey, you all right?”
Wasting no time with assurances, I rush to find a sturdy reed and yank it free of the dune.
I drop my tablet and scratch a sloppy symbol into the sand.
“It’s a constellation,” I say, looking up at the sky and using the stalk to trace the air and connect the twinkling dots.
I then trace out the same design above the victim, my arm shaky with the surge of adrenaline.
“He staged the victim in the shape of a star constellation.”
Darby tears his gloves off, pocketing them into his pristine suit as he comes around to stand at my side. “What are you talking about?”