AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The patient's voice, strained andchoked with emotion, tore through the speakers. Why can't you cure me?
The words were a pained howl,reverberating off the stark white walls of the tech room where Ella stood, her fistsclenched so tight that the knuckles blanched.
‘Jesus,’ whispered Ripley, her ownhand gripping the edge of a desk as if anchoring herself to reality. Ella'sheart hammered against her ribcage, each beat syncing with the sounds ofdestruction emanating from the speakers. She listened as the room DonnaShepherd had used to heal now echoed with the cacophony of its desecration; thecrash of furniture splintering under force, the shattering of glass thattinkled like sinister wind chimes amongst the chaos.
And then the recording went silent.
Dead air.
The guy analyst, ‘That's it.Seventy-five minutes of silence after this,’ He fast-forwarded through theremaining audio, confirming the emptiness that followed the storm. A silencethat seemed to stretch out endlessly, an abyss of nothingness that was somehowequally as disturbing as the violence it succeeded.
‘Dammit.’ Ella straightened, hereyes cold flint. She pressed her fingers into her temples, pushing back thenausea that threatened to overwhelm her. In her mind, she fired round afterround at this mysterious patient – an unseen enemy whose brutality was now laidbare in the form of an audio recording.
‘Lots of questions,' Mia said.
Ella's mind was a whirlwind,replaying the tape over and over again in her head, zoning in on the cacophonyof distress, anger, and violence that had unfolded in Donna Shepherd's office.
But amidst the chaos, one piece ofdialogue clung to her, refusing to be drowned out by the tumultuous storm.
'Ripley,' Ella said, 'did youhear?'
'I heard a lot,' she said.
'No.' Ella leaned over the techguy's desk. 'Can you rewind to about one minute before the audio ends?'
'Sure.' He worked his magic,maneuvered to the fourteen-minute mark and hit play. The sounds of Donna's lastminute alive re-emerged, but amongst her choking and spluttering, Ella heardthe dialogue as clear as day.
Frank, stop!
The moment those words filteredthrough the speakers a second time, Ella's heart ceased its frantic pounding,replaced by a sharp focus that narrowed her world to a single word - Frank.
'The unsub gave us his name.'
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Back in her office, the air feltstagnant to Ella, as if the revelations from the tape had sucked the life outof the room. She sat heavily at her desk, the ghost of Donna Shepherd's finalmoments haunting the spaces between the scattered papers and cold coffee cups.Ripley was there too, her presence a silent pillar of support, yet equallyengrossed in the grim task ahead.
Ella couldn't shake the recordingfrom her mind.
Frank, stop.
The desperation in Donna's voiceechoed in her head, but now, they had a name—Frank.
Could it have been an alias likethe others?
It was a solid lead, yet it didlittle to alleviate the crushing weight on Ella's shoulders. She replayed thetape in her mind, focusing on the unsub's confession.
‘He said he wanted to be cured,’Ella said.
It was a rare thing, almost unheardof in the serial killer realm. The majority of them took satisfaction in theirwork, and the remainder weren’t self-aware enough to understand that they weredoing anything wrong. Psychopathic killers, especially ones driven by rage,always found ways to justify their actions.
‘When psychopathy meets sentience,it happens.’
Ella began sifting throughhistorical cases in her mind. She first thought of William Heirens, theLipstick Killer, who had scrawled a message at one of his crime scenes thatbegged the police to catch him. Next, she thought of Tsutomu Miyazaki, a Japanesekiller who had willingly handed himself over to the police following fourmurders of infant girls.
These cases were outliers,aberrations in the pattern of cold, unfeeling brutality that characterized somany serial killers. Not to mention that both cases took place decades ago.
‘And if he wants to be cured, whyis he lashing out at the people that could help him?’
