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“She’s over here,” the sheriff said. “No sign of forced entry.”
“Never is,” Matt said, looking around the living room as we walked past a pair of officers taking photos of a broken vase.
“There was a struggle, though,” I said. There were other things that were broken and scattered across the living room carpet. A thin wallet, a couple of books that must have fallen from the coffee table, which appeared to have been pushed out of the way.
“She was trying to run,” I said, seeing the trajectory of the objects, all of them thrown behind her as she barreled toward the door, toward her last chance of escaping this house alive. The trail of disrupted objects ended a few feet away from the door. She must have been so close.
We reached her bedroom, and the sheriff stepped aside. Matt walked in first. I heard the sharp intake of breath and a murmured “Jesus.”
Sammy’s bedroom looked like any other bedroom belonging to a girl in her early twenties. There was a table full of different makeup products, all kinds of colors and brands, that had once been neatly arranged and slowly devolved into a messy collage of items. A mirror leaned up against the wall, a couple of shirts hanging off the top and waiting to be tried on. Potential outfits that Sammy would never wear.
In the mirror was a reflection, showing the opposite side of the room. Sammy’s lifeless eyes looked at me through the glass.
She was sitting up on her bed, wearing a black bra and panty, her hands resting peacefully on her lap, her legs crossed at the ankles. Her throat was slit, but the blood had been cleaned up. There was some blood on the floor of the bed, likely where the murder happened, but then the Pegasus had taken care to place her back on the bed, as if she were waiting for us.
Behind her were the crimson red wings that sprouted off her shoulders and onto the headboard, growing past it and almost reaching up toward the ceiling before curling down. The feathers were drawn in great detail, with great care. They took their time.
“This is completely different than Lionel’s murder,” Matthew noted, crouching down and looking at Sammy’s neck. “The scene at least. It’s almost like we’ve got an organized offender mixed with a disorganized one.”
Organized and disorganized offenders were the two types of categories the FBI used to label serial killers. After decades of research, those two types were solidified as archetypes. A serial killer either planned out their crimes to the tiniest little detail and left behind zero evidence, or they struck through twisted outbursts that may not leave as clean of a crime scene. Lionel’s murder had felt like the work of a disorganized offender, but Sammy’s looked much more planned and controlled. Even the wings seemed to be drawn by a different hand, showing more detail than any of the last crime scenes.
What the hell was going on here? Had our killer decided to take some art classes and sharpen up his skills, or was there something else going on?
“Check this out,” Matt said, waving me over to the foot of the bed. There were splotches of blood on the carpet, but they seemed to cut off at a certain point, following a circular pattern.
“There was a bucket here. It must have been how the Pegasus collected the blood so that they could draw the wings,” I said. Another tick in the “organized offender” box, making Lionel’s messy murder seem even more out of place.
Matt stood back up and silently walked up and down the room, scanning everything with a penetrative gaze. Matthew’s expertise was in behavior, but he didn’t need to have his subject in front of him to work. I knew he was trying to paint the picture of what happened in this room by imagining the exact movements of Sammy and the Pegasus.
While Matt tried to crack one code, I worked on another. It’s what had made us such a strong duo from the beginning. Matt’s mind worked like a visual Rubik’s cube, flipping and switching and trying out all kinds of different possibilities and variations. On the other hand, I focused on going over the crime scene with a fine-toothed comb, looking for any kind of detail that might have been overlooked somehow, whether a strand of loose hair or a fleck of lint that could potentially be traced to the killer’s coat.
I started at one corner of the room and worked my way out, looking at every nook and cranny, underneath every book or unpaired sandal. There weren’t very many signs of struggle in the bedroom, which told me that she barely even made it in here before she realized something was wrong and decided to run.
