Chapter 10
“ANOTHER BODY IN HERE?” WREN asks, looking around the dimly lit room she was called into. She snaps on a fresh pair of gloves and squints, trying to make out the random shapes and lit-up props.
“Uh, maybe,” Will says. His voice is distant, as if he’s lost in thought.
She looks to Leroux, putting her hands up in confusion. “Context. I need some context,” she says hurriedly.
He sighs, rubbing his hands together in front of him, then points to a golden hand displayed with several rings on its fingers. It’s grasping an antique cross and looks appropriately spooky in the setting.
She moves closer to it, immediately recognizing what he must have seen. Her heart jumps at the sight of this decorated human hand, though she immediately notes indicators of age that don’t align with the young woman who’s been missing for nearly a week.
“Okay, how many of these do we have?” she asks, looking around and cataloging each body part she can spot. She sees feet in red heels on the floor, a leg in a large bird cage, and, finally, what appears to be a human head in a dark alcove covered in cobwebs.
“That’s what we don’t know. It looks like these may be from different people?
At least, some of them are,” Leroux says, walking toward the officers stationed at the entrance.
“Don’t let anyone else in here. This is officially closed down, got it?
” he says to a young man with a mustache. He appears barely old enough to drink.
Wren walks to the head first. It’s tilted on its side in a roughly dug niche in the wall.
It looks as if someone rolled it in there and it landed however it tumbled, mouth open in a slack-jawed expression of horror.
It’s the head of an elderly woman. Her white hair appears to have once been neatly styled into a soft bun.
“We have a very strange deviation in victims and methods here,” Wren says, reaching out a gloved hand to press a finger against the cheek of the victim. When she presses the flesh, she notices it’s got a waxiness to it, but it’s clearly human.
As Will walks over, a slight sound of disgust escapes his mouth. “What the hell is this? That’s real? It looks like a wax figure.” He bends down, putting a hand on his knee to get a better look at it, and shines his flashlight on the bloodless wound at her neck.
“She was definitely drained of fluids, and there is a preservative at play, but I don’t want to speculate too much until we get her back to the morgue,” Wren says, moving some hair from the woman’s eyes and smoothing it back into place.
Leroux joins them, shaking his head. “We gotta take a look at the missing persons and see if anything matches. When I got the call, I thought this was a prank. I never anticipated such a horror show.”
Wren can see the anxiety forming on Leroux’s face.
His eyes are etched with worry and stress.
He had genuinely hoped that they would get to Melissa and Beth’s abductor before something horrible happened.
It’s a shock to his system to discover Melissa in such a state, with Beth nowhere to be found.
Adding an elderly mystery woman and stray body parts to the mix feels like a gut punch.
“I’ll do my best to separate these parts so we can determine how many different people we’re looking at,” she says, moving on to the leg in the cage.
Barely needing to probe at it, she can tell it’s human as well.
Upon first glance, it appears to belong to a young male.
She can’t picture this leg belonging to the elderly female victim, but she doesn’t like to make assumptions.
She marks down the location and her initial thoughts in her notes and approaches the feet in the middle of the floor.
Using a gloved hand, she touches the top of one, where the leg was chopped at the ankle.
It feels hard and preserved, like the elderly woman’s neck.
Before going further, she turns and motions for a tech to take photos of the feet. The tech complies quickly, taking several shots at different angles.
Once they’ve been properly documented, she attempts to pick one up by the shoe, but it is anchored to the floor.
“I tried to pick them up too. Seems like they’re glued or something,” Will says, slowly walking over and squatting down next to her.
She shakes her head, deciding not to reprimand him for attempting to move a body before she was present to document it. “The shoes are glued down, but are the feet glued into the shoes?”
“Good point. This is why we need you here: to bring the brains into the situation.” He stands up and puts his hands on his hips.
She chuckles and pulls one of the feet gently out of its shoe. Holding it with both hands, she turns it over, examining it, and notes that although it looks to be from someone younger than the elderly woman, it does appear to belong to a female victim.
“All right, we have to meticulously document this scene. You two, get in here.” Leroux waves over to the crime scene technicians now gathered at the barn’s entrance, instructing them to help make sure everything is tagged and photographed.
“I don’t want a hair unchecked in here. If you have glasses, put them the fuck on and get documenting. ”
He stomps out of the room, moving back to the first room.
Wren follows, instructing a tech to finish examining the feet in her absence, then watches from the makeshift doorway as Leroux walks toward Melissa’s body and squats down.
He’s face-to-face with her, and there’s a sadness in his expression that Wren has not seen in a long time.
He’s exhausted; deep circles have formed under his normally alert eyes, and his hair is unkempt from however many times he has angrily run his hands through it.
“You did everything you could to save her, John,” she says, seeing his muscles tense ever so slightly at the intrusion.
He looks over his shoulder, casting her a sarcastic look. “Obviously not. He had time to carve her fucking eyes out.” He looks back at Melissa, shaking his head.
His tone surprises her. He’s becoming unmoored, letting his emotions begin to consume him. He’s pulling too many strings, and they’re starting to strangle him.
“You know this isn’t your fault,” she says, walking closer to him.
With each step she takes across the wooden planks, Melissa’s hands sway, as if she’s filled with the power of a holy spirit none of them can detect.
“We can still find Beth. If none of these parts belong to her, which I suspect they don’t, then we still have a chance.
” She places a hand on his shoulder just as his head drops to look at his feet.
“Don’t give up on her, and don’t give up on yourself just yet. ”
“Shut up. You’re starting to sound like a self-help book,” he says, standing up and rubbing his hands together. He grins at her, blinking a few times and burying the depth of what he’s experiencing inside again.
She shakes her head, not smiling back. “John, I’m serious. You are taking it too personally. We will get to the bottom of this.”
He nods, but he’s still far away. “We will. I know,” he says unconvincingly. “It just got heavy for a minute, but I’m going to check out that back area. There’s more sick shit that we haven’t really looked at.” He walks out of the room without another word.
Wren looks down at Melissa, knowing and feeling what Leroux feels. The weight of a young girl’s murder shouldn’t burden anyone but her killer, yet here they stand, given the job of observing and dissecting, all while completely disassociating.
Finding herself forced to participate in the aftermath of yet another killer’s playtime, Wren feels her frustration gnawing at her. Standing amid the ruin alone, tasked with gathering the remnants of a soul shattered by a merciless monster, she can’t help but feel anger blossom inside her.
She takes one more look around the room, reading the last few sorrowful lines of Melissa’s story, before she rejoins the techs. A sea of scattered body parts are waiting for her to listen to them too.
It’s hours before Leroux and Wren walk out of the scene together, questions swirling in Wren’s head. She imagines they are weighing heavy on Leroux’s mind too. With the way Melissa was discovered, this investigation suddenly got so much more complicated, so much messier.
“I have to tell you something,” he says, stopping her stride to have her face him.
She can feel her heart begin to race. “What is it?” she asks, not truly knowing if she wants to know the answer.
“Sister Moreau, the nun from the shelter?”
She nods. “Yes, I remember. Been dying to hear more. What about her?”
He chuckles, looking back toward the haunt scene. “She definitely wasn’t what I expected. She was kind of a tough cookie, but she had this wildly likable way about her. She really gives a shit about those girls at Resurrection House.”
“Well, that’s great, then. She can offer a lot more insight than we initially thought,” Wren says. She’s a little confused by the direction of the conversation.
He nods. “Absolutely. In fact, she gave me Melissa’s diary.”
“John, holy shit! Why are you burying the lede here?” She’s shocked, a little put off that he’s withheld this information for so long.
“Well, here’s the thing, Melissa mentions meeting a guy named Jeremy.” His eyes flick up to register her reaction.
“Wow.” She stops to steady herself on a tree stump. “Okay. Um, wow.”
“It’s not Rose. The dates of the entries line up with the time he’s been in prison.” He says it fast, like he has to close the wound he opened quickly lest Wren bleed to death out here in a backwoods crime scene.
“Jesus, John.” She exhales, clutching her chest. “Ever think about working in PR? You really know how to couch a reveal.” She straightens and starts to walk toward their cars again.
He laughs, rubbing the back of his neck and picking up his pace to follow her.
“Let me finish. It’s not him, but I can’t shake the feeling that he’s connected somehow.
It’s a weird gut thing.” He looks back at the haunt as they reach Wren’s car.
There’s a faraway look in his eyes, like he’s running through things over and over.
“And with the religious setup, the fact that these girls were both staying at a church shelter … I can’t help but think maybe it’s even related to Trudeau, I don’t know.
Something just tells me there is a through line here. I know it sounds crazy—”
“Honestly, I can see it too. Not sure how he’d pull it off when he’s serving up sermons so far north, but I’ve actually been digging into Trudeau a little more on my own. We are for sure on to something. That man is violent.”
A heavy look passes between them. “It’s time to enter the lion’s den again, huh,” Wren says, not as a question but as a reluctant statement of fact. The cold sweat that breaks out on the back of her neck lets her know that it’s real. “He’s our only lead right now.”
Leroux looks sympathetic, pursing his lips. “I wish I could do this without you, Muller,” he says quietly. She can see that he is internally battling with the very idea of making her a shiny toy for Jeremy Rose to focus on.
The color drains slightly from her face.
She wonders if he can see her fighting with herself, trying to determine whether this kind of stress will be worth it in the end.
She doesn’t answer him right away, choosing instead to live a few seconds longer in a world where she hasn’t yet committed to this plan.
“He needs to think he has the upper hand. You know him,” Leroux says, seeming to realize that he may be losing her. “If you aren’t there, he won’t talk.”
Wren’s face twists into a look of disgust, and she almost laughs at the absurdity. “What a strange position to be in,” she says, opening her car door and sliding into the driver’s seat.
“It’s not enviable, but it’s important.”
She smiles, chuckling and rubbing her hands over her face. She just knows that stress is radiating from her like heat pouring off a stove. “You know I agree, John,” she says, finally looking at him again. “I want nothing more than to see Jeremy’s plans fall apart at the seams.”
“This time, we have a little more to bribe him with. You know he’ll be dying to see these crime photos.” Leroux smiles cheekily.
“Whatever it takes,” Wren says. “I’ll be ready tomorrow.”