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If the police were smart, they could figure this out. He’d left them a sledgehammer clue by playing the song at the hanging site, and if that didn’t tip them off, nothing would.
And if they could figure this little fact out, their mystery would be solved. It was the little keyword that decoded the entire cipher.
But again, they never figured him out all those years ago, so why would they figure him out now? He’d played them like a fiddle this entire time, sometimes literally begging them to make the connections. But just like his little foray into deviancy years ago, no one believed him. His story was too improbable, too outlandish. ‘Farfetched for even a fiction story’ one psychologist had put it.
The simple truth was that these murders were not unsolved. They all had obvious answers.
Cheri Jo Bates was not a random attack. Her killer was well-known, very famous. Infamous, even. The name of her killer had been spoken by every detective and true crime aficionado the world over at least once.
The Black Dahlia was not a lone, one-off murder either. Her killer was also a serial monster who any ‘researcher’ should have been familiar with. Did these investigators really think that a solitary killer was is going to abduct someone, slice them in half, and leave them in a public area on their first kill? The Black Dahlia’s murderer was obviously a master butcher, a fact that seemed to escape everyone but him. The truth was the sky; it consumed your vision to the point you didn’t notice it anymore. It was just there, part of the scenery.
Therefore, it rested upon him to give these investigators a little push. He wouldn’t stop killing until somebody caught on. Someone out there must be able to match his wit and insight. The idea that he might be the smartest person in the room made him feel even lonelier than he already did.
He stopped spinning his pen and put the tip against the paper. He was right-handed, so he wrote with his left – another clue that these detectives probably wouldn’t pick up on. Cheri Jo Bates’s killer had done the exact same thing.
Tonight, the police would hear from him directly.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Legends don’t die,” Ella said. She pardoned herself. She hadn’t meant it slip out of her mouth.
Ripley sat upright, struggling to position herself. “I assure you, we do.”
What TV shows never portrayed was just how much waiting was involved in the world of law enforcement. Back in her days of Virginia P.D., Ella had once staked out a suspect’s home for an entire week, and she’d done nothing but wait and think. It was a necessary part of the job, but enough to drive a person insane.
And that’s what she was doing now. Ripley sat on the other side of the room, a picture of physical anguish. The woman looked like she’d aged 20 years in a week. What she’d said outside the interrogation room had really unnerved Ella, because she often thought of Ripley as immortal, indestructible, mythical.
Ella couldn’t help herself. She had to inquire. The thought of a Ripleyless world was too dark, too unfathomable. “Did you really mean what you said?”
“About never leaving the hospital? Yes. That’s exactly how it ends for people like me. We hurl through life at full speed and skid broadside into the grave. I’ve decided I don’t want that.”
“Isn’t that more reason to go to the hospital?”
“No, because that’s admitting defeat. If I do only have a few years left, I don’t want to waste them in a hospital bed.”
Ella pressed a fingertip against her eye. She felt tears coming but held them back.
“It’s alright, Dark. Once you do a few years in this job, you accept that’s how it might be. You know, when I was a teenager we used to drive out to my mom’s place in Pennsylvania. I always knew when we were getting close because we would come upon this old cemetery. And by old I mean Civil War old. Maybe older.”
Ella didn’t know where this was going but she listened closely. She was pretty sure it didn’t have anything to do with their case, and for the time being, that was absolutely fine.
“There was this small stone house by the gate,” Ripley said. “Probably the caretaker’s house, and in the front window was this sign that read: ‘free fill dirt.’ Ever see signs like that?”
“Yeah. All the time,” said Ella.
“When you’re a kid, you never give stuff like that a second thought, you know? Year after year I saw that sign. It never moved, just faded in the sunlight. Every year, those blocky red letters got lighter and lighter. Then my mom passed away and we stopped going out there.”
Ella nodded.
“Years later, after my mom died, I went to her grave one day. Perfect summer afternoon. Blue sky, cloudless. I’m sitting there, telling her about my new job in the Bureau. A few plots down there was a fresh gravesite, right? And it suddenly hit me. I suddenly knew why that cemetery had free fill dirt. Why all cemeteries have free fill dirt. I thought about all those people who took them up on that offer over the years, filling their gardens, their potted plants, their window boxes. The cemeteries make space in the earth for the dead, and people take that dirt and grow things in it.”
Ella said nothing, instead thinking about all the lives that had been lost at the hands of the monsters they chased. People’s parents and children confined to the ground. Ella never considered that one day the soil they removed to fit her body would grow new life.
“That’s kind of beautiful. The circle of life.”
Cromwell opened the door, interrupting their moment. At least it kept her from bawling, Ella thought. She made a mental note to come back to this conversation later because she had a lot more to say.
“He’s clear,” Cromwell sighed. “One of my guys checked out Tyler’s alibis. His mom and her partner said he was at home all last night. We’ve got footage of him online during the hours Eliza Matthews was killed. I don’t see how we can keep him here much longer.”
