Page 52 of Scarred By Sin

23

Brooklyn Sloane

July 2026

Friday — 7:37 pm

The library was quieter than the rest of the house, if that were possible. The room sat behind the staircase on the ground floor, tucked into a corner of the mansion that the late afternoon light couldn’t reach. Brook moved along the shelves with slow, deliberate steps, her fingertips trailing across the spines of books that probably hadn’t been touched in decades. The collection was extensive, hundreds of volumes arranged floor-to-ceiling across three of the four walls. Hardcovers, mostly, with cracked leather bindings and faded gold lettering. She'd caught the scent of old paper and leather binding upon first entering the room, but up close, there was a mustiness beneath it, the kind that came from volumes that had been sitting untouched on the same shelf for decades.

Botany, chemistry, biology, agriculture.

The personal library of a man who had spent his adult life studying the things that grew from the earth and the compounds they contained.

She wasn’t taking the time to read the titles. She was studying the shelves themselves, the joints where wood met wood, the seams where the built-in units connected to the walls. She was searching for anything that didn’t belong: a hinge concealed behind a row of books, a latch disguised as trim, a section of molding that sat differently than the rest.

Brook crouched as gracefully as she could and examined the hardwood planks along the base of each shelf, checking for scuff marks, for wear patterns that would suggest a section of floor or wall had been moved repeatedly over a period of years.

The sconce lighting cast a warm golden glow across the room, pooling in some areas and leaving others in soft shadow. A reading chair sat in the corner near the single window, its leather worn to a pale tan on the armrests, and a small side table held a coaster and nothing else. The room had the atmosphere of a space that had been loved once and then left alone, like a conversation that had been paused and never resumed.

Once she and Theo had returned from Porter’s cottage that afternoon, Brook’s attention had been pulled in several directions at once. The press release had gone out at noon, and it had taken less than thirty minutes for the first news van to appear at the edge of the property. By two o’clock, there were four, and Sheriff Gentry had earned her gratitude by personally handling the effort to push them back to the main road, giving Kessler’s team the space they needed to continue their work without cameramen attempting to sit on the stone walls.

Then there was the identification of the third victim.

Another woman, another cancer patient. Three was no longer a coincidence. Three was a pattern, and the pattern was reshaping everything.

“Brook?”

Sylvie’s voice drew her attention to the doorway. Sylvie was leaning against the frame with her notebook in hand, and the expression on her face said she’d been standing there for a while.

“Now that Profile A suggests Nestor murdered the women, and his remains were also found in the greenhouse, is there a potential for you to close out the Bureau’s investigation and hand the second half over to the local authorities?”

Brook pulled a thick botany reference from a shelf, checked behind it, and slid it back into place. Dust motes rose from the disturbance and drifted into the sconce light, where they hung in the air, suspended between falling and floating.

“No. I’ll wait until all the remains have been excavated and the bone examinations are complete before submitting my profile and findings.” Brook moved to the next section of shelving and repeated the process. “Something doesn’t fit, Sylvie.”

“Because Nestor Ellingham doesn’t fit the profile?”

“That’s right,” Brook replied as she pulled another book. “The behavioral framework I built around Profile A assumes a mission-oriented offender who killed in service of his research. But every person we’ve spoken to, and I mean every single one of them, doesn’t indicate that Ellingham had that type of personality.”

Brook turned to face Sylvie.

“We know that character testimony is unreliable in most cases. People lie, or they romanticize the dead. But there’s a consistency here that I can’t dismiss. Five separate individuals, interviewed independently, each describing the same man. Gentle. Patient. Obsessive about his research, yes. Withdrawn, absolutely. But unchecked in his experiments? Not one witness gave such an indication.”

“So where does that leave us?”

“Stuck between a profile that fits the evidence and a man who doesn’t fit the profile.”

Sylvie stepped further into the room and set her notebook on the reading chair. She joined in the search, taking the opposite side of the room.

“I spoke with Gwenyth earlier today. Upstairs, outside my room.”

“Topic of conversation?”

“Porter, mostly. She asked about a funeral. She wanted to know if he could be buried somewhere nearby so she could visit him.” Sylvie paused before giving her full attention to Brook. “For a stretch of that conversation, she was lucid. Completely present. She spoke about Porter with a clarity that I haven’t heard from her before. No confusion, no drifting. Just grief.”

Brook stopped what she was doing and motioned for Sylvie to close the library door. Once the door was shut and the room was sealed from the hallway, Brook spoke freely. The silence deepened around them, the thick walls and the closed door cutting off even the faint hum of Bit’s equipment from the dining room.

“Even though we’ve been invited to stay here, first by Dale and then by Gwenyth, I instructed Bit to put in for a warrant this afternoon.”