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An orphan.
Planned on murdering the family he stalked.
Remorseless.
Had webbed fingers on his left hand.
Was jailed in 1989 and set free in 1999.
Ella’s first thought was maybe this man had returned to kill the family he stalked, but his motivation was much more complicated. He was back for recognition. Ella was certain of this. However, there was one flaw in her theory, and that was that according to Chuck’s notes, the Crawler had died thirty years ago.
But that was just a part of the game, too.
And if the Crawler wanted Ella to find his zero victim, that meant he must have been charged for a different crime. He must have a criminal record, so she went back to local residents who’d served prison time dating back to the 1980s.
Ella lost herself in the data, scouring every name, every charge, every sentencing. Nothing jumped out at her. Nothing resembled the crime that Tyler had been talking about. And there was absolutely zero information about this perpetrator online.
Her first thought that this was some kind of ruse dreamed up by Tyler and Chuck, so she needed to know more. She rushed out of the office and down into the holding cells where she found Chuck Pierce asleep on his wooden bench. Ella banged on the steel bars to wake him up.
Chuck jolted awake in seconds, sitting upright, and coughing violently. “Uh, what? Where am I?” he asked.
“Never mind that. I need you to tell me about the Crawler.”
Chuck blinked the grogginess from his eyes and kicked his legs off the bench. “That’s personal information,” he said.
“Not when it involves homicides it isn’t.”
“I spent a long time researching that case. It was going to be my magnum opus. A best-selling novel.”
“It still can be. I just need you to tell me who he was.”
Chuck looked unimpressed. “Miss, your friends all think I’m guilty. I’m going to jail where I belong. I don’t need to help you.”
“No, you’re not going to jail. There’s not enough evidence to convict you. You’ll be set free. But if you help me, I can get you your old job back.”
Chuck’s eyes lit up. “Really?”
“Yes, but I’ll need a reason for my recommendation. And there’s no better reason than solving a serial murder case, right?”
Chuck rose to his feet and approached the bars, close enough for Ella to taste his breath and sweat. She didn’t like it but she needed to go along with it. Chuck spoke in hushed tones.
“Miss, the first thing I should tell you is that the Crawler is dead.”
“No he isn’t!” Ella said. “He just wants us to think he is.”
Chuck was taken aback. “Hmm. What makes you think that?”
“He sent us a letter. He talked about walking corpses and Cotard’s Garden. Cotard’s delusion is a syndrome where people think they’re dead. The colloquial term is Walking Corpse syndrome. And he left us a clue – a song – that deals with the subject of a serial killer coming back from the dead.”
Chuck rubbed his hands together and smiled, like he was finally getting to talk about something he’d been waiting his whole life for.
“Very good. You won’t find the Crawler’s name anywhere because one, nobody knew his name, and two, he disappeared off the face of the earth once he left jail.”
This was where Ella was losing track, because if he’d been in jail, his records must exist somewhere.
“He was an inmate at your prison? Then why can’t I find any mention of him? No mentions of nameless inmates, no mentions of the crimes he supposedly committed. On the surface, this man never existed and his little stalking incident never happened.”
If Ella could just find his name – or whatever name he happened to go by – she could trace the man’s past and potentially discover his zero victim. That was what this killer wanted, and it would reveal the last stage of his masterplan. Time was fast running out because if this killer’s schedule was anything to go by, he could strike tonight.
