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“Five.”
“But how many did he really kill?”
“No one knows. He claims thirty.”
“Right. Those five he was convicted of weren’t his first murders. But there was a murder just like them a few years before.” Ella spun her laptop around to show her partner the file she’d pulled up.
Ripley stared at the screen, transfixed. Ella wondered if she was aware that her mouth was open.
“God, I forgot that name. Kara Banks.”
“Our victim was Clara Provost. Clara. Kara.”
Ripley looked away from the computer, probably trying to keep horrible memories at bay. “We considered Kara might have been a Tobias victim but he claimed no ownership of it. Plus it was in Massachusetts.”
“Exactly. Kara was killed – hanged from a tree – ten years before you caught Tobias. Our killer is merging these crimes together. Kara’s murder is unsolved, Tobias is the serial killer. See? If that wasn’t proof enough, he even said it in his letter. The zero-sum of their parts.”
Ripley scrambled out of her chair, clutching her bad shoulder. She hobbled over to the window, trying to disguise the pain but doing a bad job. “Okay, so let’s say our killer is referencing zero victims. He thinks Zodiac killed Bates, he thinks the Butcher killed Short, he thinks Tobias killed Kara. What’s his end game here? Why’s he doing this? What does this suggest?”
“It shows he’s an obsessive devotee. It shows he has a compulsion to prove he’s right. It means he’ll never act on his own fantasies, meaning he’s dangerous and unpredictable. He’s got no shortage of unsolved crimes to select from, so it’s basically impossible for us to calculate his next move. Short of psychic ability, there’s absolutely no way to predict when or where he’s going to strike next.”
“If you’re right about his vision, then you’re right about his psychopathology too. He doesn’t have a modus operandi, a victim type, a signature, or a ritual. He’s a walking replica of a historical killer. So, short of a forensic miracle, catching him is going to be close to impossible.”
Ella turned back to her whiteboard.
“No. Not at all. Quite the opposite.”
“What?”
Ella scrawled the word LAW ENFORCEMENT and circled it.
“Because I’m not sure if you noticed, but our unsub made a big, big mistake.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ella had erased everything on the whiteboard. Locked the doors. Spoke in a hushed tone. Whoever was doing this had to be one of them.
Ripley stuck her hands against her hips and glanced out of their office window. “I don’t know about that, Dark. Can you really see one of these guys doing this?”
“It has to be someone with police connections,” Ella said. “You said yourself, zero victim is a term used exclusively by us. You can run it through a search engine and absolutely nothing will show up. Plus, no one knows about the Mad Butcher washing his victims’ hair with motor oil. That piece of information has remained locked away for eighty years. It can’t be made public until a hundred years after the case.”
Ripley sat down with another loud groan. They needed to catch this guy and get out of there pretty soon because Ripley looked like another day of this might kill her.
“So, FBI workers?” Ripley said.
“No. Anyone. Anyone with a connection to the world of law enforcement. You know how easy it is to stumble on confidential information in places like this. Heck, when I was in Virginia P.D. I saw a bunch of stuff I shouldn’t have.”
Ella pulled up a list of local names on the police database, covering both Hicksberg and Spring Ridge. Just over sixteen-hundred, all of which she was already familiar with. She’d been through this list about three times already.
Ripley said, “So let’s profile this guy. Let’s dig into his brain. Who is he?”
“A white male. Average height. Average build. It takes at least three years to get into the force, so chances are he’d be 21 years old at the youngest. Oldest? Forties? He sounded relatively young on the phone.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Set the limit to late fifties.”
“Done. This is someone who’s been close to serial killers. These seem like his first murders, and so far we’ve seen no signs of remorse. No covering of the bodies, no graceful death poses. This guy is comfortable around death. He isn’t just some entry-level cop.”
“He’s obsessed with them,” Ripley said. “He’s a fan. They act the way he wants to act.”
