Chapter Forty Four
Healing Artists was a well-oiled machine.
Her days were primarily filled with grant applications, board meetings, and managing a small team of people who helped with fundraising and community outreach.
She wondered if she could use her connections through Healing Artists to spread the word about her treating practice, but she wasn’t sure how to go about doing that.
Using the cross necklace she took from Mateo to find other magical people was an option, but something about it felt wrong, like an invasion of privacy.
Ophelia ultimately decided to keep Healing Artists separate from her other work for now.
Avery promoted her business verbally through all of his connections and gave out her number so people could start scheduling appointments.
But no one had yet. Soon, she hoped. Soon she’d be able to help even more people and carry on Mawmaw’s legacy.
As she continued to work in her studio, an email chimed in her personal inbox, and she switched screens to check it.
She gasped when she saw what it was. The files from Detective Lewis.
Without wasting a minute, she downloaded the attachment and began looking through the numerous documents.
The first fifteen pages appeared to be customary forms that detailed what happened, when it happened, who responded on the scene.
Each document had to be signed off on, and so far, there was nothing she didn’t already know in great detail.
On the sixteenth page, she saw the composite sketch of her attacker. She recoiled from his evil face.
Steadying herself through a deep breath, she returned to the composite, her eyes locked on the biggest clue thus far—the cross necklace.
It hung around his neck outside his hoodie.
She stood from her desk and ran from her studio, across the lawn, and into her cottage.
She opened the bedside table drawer and grabbed the cross she’d taken from Mateo.
She recalled describing the cross in detail to the artist, and this image could confirm what she had been thinking all these months.
Her heart was beating fast, and her hands were clammy as she returned to her studio and held up the cross to the computer screen. It was the same exact cross.
Her mind hurt. What could this possibly mean?
Ophelia grabbed her notebook and began to write out her thoughts.
Mateo and her attacker had the same cross, but Mateo wasn’t the killer.
He was already dead when Mawmaw’s murder occurred.
Plus, he said he purchased the cross on the “black market,” whatever that meant.
Did he mean on the dark web or something else?
She wasn’t sure. But what she wanted to know was if there were duplicates of the cross with the same ability.
And was there a connection between the cross and the Cutthroat Killer?
With her thoughts organized, she paused writing and kept going through the files. “Ah-ha,” she whispered when she found the coroner’s report.
Death Record
Kings County Coroner’s Office
Brooklyn, New York
Name of Deceased: Albert Thompson
Address: Unknown
Marital Status: Single
Age: 52
DOB: June 18, 1954
Found dead at: Fulton Park, 70 Chauncey St, Brooklyn, NY 11233
Date and Time found dead: December 7, 2019 5:31 AM
Immediate cause of death: Starvation
She had a name. Albert Thompson. Ophelia continued to scroll through the pages, stopping when she found notes from Detective Lewis on Albert’s criminal background.
Albert had quite the rap sheet. In the years leading up to his death, he had been arrested several times for public indecency, assault, and battery.
Charges for the assault and battery cases were dropped due to credibility.
His first arrest occurred the year Ophelia moved to New York. He was arrested in Atlanta for inciting a riot and released due to a lack of evidence. It appeared he moved to New York shortly after that, where he attacked Ophelia.
The background notes on Albert were alarming.
He was a confirmed founder of an alt-right Christian group formed in 2010 called The Pure.
Ophelia’s face scrunched in disgust. Lewis’s notes said that The Pure was active primarily in Southern states and believed in purging the world of all “heretics.” The Atlanta riot forced the dissolution of the group due to the number of arrests and negative political attention.
She’d never heard of The Pure before. Through a quick online search, Ophelia noted that there was very little mention of the group, but her search led her to the online archives of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she found one article that referenced the riot where Albert Thompson was arrested.
The Pure had met downtown on a busy Saturday afternoon and marched through the streets, “haphazardly attacking innocent people without motive,” according to the paper.
The riot was classified as an act of terrorism.
The group used pepper spray, baseball bats, nunchucks, smoke bombs, and other miscellaneous weapons.
The pictures from the instance were horrific.
Hate-filled men and women with disgust and anger coating their faces, inflicting violence on fearful citizens.
The group was dressed in street clothes, so aside from the weapons the group members carried, it was difficult to discern who was part of The Pure and who was a citizen.
Ophelia zoomed into the photo, and in utter shock at what she saw, she slammed both hands on her marble desk.
Two men in street clothes, carrying baseball bats, wore silver medieval cross necklaces hanging from their chests.
“Holy fuck,” she said under her breath.
Since the article was all she could find in her initial search, she turned to the forum-based site that she used to research the serial killer.
The site held millions of forum topics from skincare reviews to discussions around the best plants to grow in the Pacific Northwest during an El Nino year.
She began combing through posts related to alt-right groups.
Eventually, she found a thread from 2010 about the creation of The Pure.
There was no mention of Albert Thompson, but a commenter asked if anyone had heard of the group, and twenty-three people responded.
There were comments about the name being stupid and hypotheses around what the group stood for, with most agreeing that it was some type of Christian supremacy group.
The second-to-last commenter wrote a whole paragraph.
AnonymousPapaya07445: Y’all, my cousin is in this group, and he’s mentally ill.
He told me The Pure will eliminate all “magical people.” I kid you not.
He thinks magic is real. He believes that only “good” Christians should be allowed to live.
And he got a tattoo on his back that says “I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God.” Fucking whack. My aunt kicked him out of the house.
Ophelia stood up from her desk in disbelief, her world tilting on its axis.
It was all clicking into place. There were two key pieces gluing it all together— the cross necklace and the Exodus verse.
The article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper confirmed the existence of multiple necklaces and validated AnonymousPapaya07445’s comments.
The Pure was using the necklace to identify magical people, and the Exodus verse connected The Pure to the murders.
It was all coming together. The murders were hate crimes against magical people.
She was confident that all of the other Cutthroat Killer victims possessed magic of some kind.
She couldn’t prove it yet, but questioning family and friends could help.
She didn’t know what to do or where to start.
Did she go to the cops? Did anyone else know about what was happening?
She began to feel the gravity of what she uncovered.
Her heart squeezed, and a heavy feeling unexpectedly pressing down on her chest made it hard for her to breathe.
Her hands shook. Breathe, she reminded herself.
She took a shallow gulp. It was too much.
She needed help. Grabbing her phone, she thanked God Etienne was off work today and called him.
“Hey, O,” Etienne said through the phone.
“Hi, um…I need you to come over. I got the files from Detective Lewis.” Another shallow breath. It wasn’t enough. She tried to force air into her lungs again. “I need someone.” She felt like she was about to die. “I need…I…I…I’m having a panic attack.”
“Ophelia,” he said calmly. “It’s okay, baby. I’m coming over right now, and you’re going to stay on the phone with me. First, lie down somewhere. Are you at home?”
“Yes,” she said shakily and climbed onto her large beanbag pillow.
“Okay, I know it’s hard to breathe right now, but let’s first try to find something to focus on. Pinch your arm.”
“W…what?” She didn’t understand.
“Yes, pinch your arm till it hurts.”
Ophelia pinched her arm that was holding the phone. It didn’t really hurt, so she did it till all she could feel was the sharp squeeze of the flesh on her forearm.
“Okay,” she said.
“Do it again.” So she did, and it brought her mind to that singular place of pain.
“I’m in the car. I’m almost there. Can you breathe with me now?”
“Yes, I’m still shaking, but I can breathe.”
“Great. Breathe in, one, two, three, four. Breathe out, one, two, three, four.” Etienne did this with her till he arrived at her house.