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Ella lowered her laptop screen, threw off her glasses, and then collapsed onto the desk. Two hours they’d been searching and they must have gone through the names of every man, woman, and child in town three times over.
No similar cases in the past. No one with a history of mental illness. A few criminal records but the last major crime in the area involved a child so the files were sealed.
“I don’t know, Ripley. What else can we do? Stake out every field in town in case he strikes again? Cross reference everyone’s names with victims’ names from unsolved murders? I’m praying forensics finds a fingerprint somewhere because I’m at a brick wall here.”
“Same,” Ripley said. “No prints at the first two scenes according to this report here. Scene three is still being scoured, as is Clara’s vehicle, but this guy knows his way around a crime scene. He isn’t gonna leave behind anything he doesn’t want us to find.”
“Too true. We could start canvassing the area? Somebody must know this guy. There are only two-thousand people in this damn town.”
“It wouldn’t help. This guy fits right in. He’s the friendly neighbor, the postman, the dog walker. Once we catch him, we’ll get a hundred people telling the press he ‘seemed like such a nice guy.’”
Ella believed it. Her thoughts descended to more outlandish possibilities, the kind she hated to bring up in front of Ripley because her natural instinct was to shoot them down. But it was on the tip of her tongue, and if Ripley’s comments were anything to go by earlier, it had crossed her mind too.
“This couldn’t actually be him, could it?” she asked.
Ripley slammed shut her laptop and sat back in her chair. “You know Dark, while I was out clearing my head, that was all I thought about. Is this another game of his?”
“He’s manipulated serial killers in the past. The guy on the phone sounded nothing like him, but it could be one of his new projects.”
“Truthfully, I don’t think so. This isn’t his style. If he did orchestrate this, he’d know that we’d be both be sent down here. He wants us in D.C. so he can kill us. He doesn’t want us a hundred miles away.”
A reasonable prospect, but Ella wasn’t so convinced. It was too convenient for her liking. With Tobias on her mind, she pulled open her laptop and checked the day’s news stories but found no mention of his name. That was a first in a while. She ran his name through a search engine and set the results to ‘New.’
The first three links were to new episodes of various true crime podcasts. Better not show Ripley, she thought. Ella struggled to disguise her distaste at some of their descriptions.
SHOCKING! WORLD’S WORST SERIAL KILLER ON THE LOOSE!
HERE’S WHAT THEY’RE NOT TELLING YOU ABOUT TOBIAS CAMPBELL.
THE STORY OF ‘THE EXECUTIONER’ IS SO CRAZY!
Sure, she thought. Maybe Ripley had a point that some of these folks weren’t actually in it for the research and the progress. If it bleeds, it leads, as they said.
But then Ella got an idea.
Eliza Matthews had linked her friend to a podcast. What was it called? She checked her notes.
Life Sentence.
Ella found the Life Sentence website immediately. She scrolled through their episodes and found they’d covered the Black Dahlia over three years ago. When she checked their contact page, she found they were based in England.
But it got the cogs turning. She rattled her pen between her teeth, apparently to her partner’s annoyance.
“That sound goes right through me,” Ripley said.
“Podcasts,” Ella thought aloud.
“Not again. What about them?”
“I don’t know. I just can’t get over the coincidence with Eliza Matthews.” Ella went back to her search engine and typed in Black Dahlia, Cheri Jo Bates, Tobias Campbell, podcast.
Hundreds of results.
She added Maryland in there too.
One.
