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“No sign of any therapists or counselors along the same road. A library, garden store, gift shop. Nowhere a therapist could hide.”
“Dammit,” said Ripley. “Zoom out a little. Let’s see what else is in the area. This is all what, a few miles away from here?”
“Yeah, about three miles by the looks of it.” Ella fiddled with the map and scrolled through the side streets. “We got a card shop, a builders, some place called New Wellness.”
“The hell is that? Sounds cultish,” said Ripley.
Ella stopped her search, intrigued. “You’re right, it does.” Ella dug into the establishment and found nothing but a name and address. No details about the business itself. She tried the name in a search engine and found the same information again.
Ella’s gaze fell upon the name of the business owner. A faint glimmer of recognition, bringing forth a recent memory. She’d seen this name before. Somewhere else, now illuminated in a digital world.
“Hold on,” Ella said. “Look at the owner’s name. Does that ring a bell to you?”
Ripley leaned closer and put forth her best Eastern European tongue. “Ted Kowalczyk. Kuh-voll-check. If I’d heard that name, I’d remember it.”
“Oh crap,” Ella said. “David’s storage unit!”
“Huh?”
Ella darted out of her seat, over to the boxes of evidence in the corner of the room. She dived in with eager hands, sifting through evidence bags like a scavenger over a carcass. At the bottom, she found it. Something from David Harper’s personal collection.
She displayed it to her partner. “Business card for one Ted Kowalczyk. Found among David’s possessions.”
Ripley slammed her hand on the table. “Yes! Two victims, one unlicensed therapist. This could be our link.”
Ella pocketed the business card then grabbed her things.An inexplicable surgeofenergy raced through her body, tingling her nerve endings, filling her with new life.This could be the game-changer they needed.
“What are we waiting for? Let’s get this guy.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Nestled between two larger buildings,thelittle structure went practically unnoticed.It waslike a secret chamber, only welcome to those in the inner circle But as Ella looked more closely, a few hints of its presence could be found - an old door handle, a faded sign – like cryptic cluesthatonlythe initiatedcould decipher. If not for her online search, Ella wouldn’t have known that this dingy, almost invisible building was the New Wellness Center.
“Not exactly a marketing expert, this guy,” Ripley said.
“You’re not kidding. Nothing about this place screams wellness.”
“We sure it’s the right place?”
Ella double-checked the address on the business card. “This is it. Building eleven, Heald Street.” On the way here, Ella had taken a quick look atTed Kowalczyk’s history. Very little information seemed to be on record, other than that he was once arrested for threatening someone with a knife three years ago. Ella reasoned that this little altercation could have been the reason he lost his therapy license and was therefore forced to go about his business under the radar. Could these underhanded tactics have been compromised by some new clients, and so Mr.Kowalczyk had taken matters into his own hands?
Ripley gripped the door handle and said, “We’ve got a sneaky therapist with a criminal history who has ties to two of our victims. I don’t usually get hunches but I’ve got a good one here.”
Ella felt it too. After a year in this game, she’d developed a sense for identifying homicidal maniacs in the flesh. When you shared the same airspace with someone who’d taken another’s life, you felt an indescribable aura in your bones and ears and nostrils, as though the souls of those they’d claimed were calling out to you from beyond and propelling you to push forward. She felt it now, that heavy blanket of instinct. TedKowalczyk had a sinister story and Ella was prepared to beat it out of him.
“Crap, door’s locked,” Ripley said. “Something tells me that knocking isn’t the wisest idea here. This building connects to the two either side. He’s got a million escape routes at his disposal.”
Ella sized up the lock with a critical eye, examining the grooves, assessing the legal ramifications of breaking it down. It was a standard lever handle with cam lock. Nothing that a few everyday tools wouldn’t penetrate.
“Nothing’s ever locked.” Ella reached into her pocket and pulled out a hairpin, then scoured the ground until she found a thin nail. She twisted the hairpin, destroying it, but transforming it into a makeshift tension wrench in the process. She hovered down, inserted her new tools of the trade, and twisted until she felt tension. Ripley’s gaze pierced down from above, stern and unwavering.
“You walk a fine line, Dark.”
“What? You didn’t learn anything from the last case?” Ella asked. A week ago, they’d done battle with a killer now known as the Key Master, and aside from putting a serial murderer in jail, she’d re-familiarized herself with the worlds of locks and lockpicking. She eyed her partner and said, “No permanent damage. We’ll just say the door was open.”
“Let’s just say I saw exactly what you wanted me to see,” Ripley said. One of Ripley’s qualities that didn’t get enough credit was her willingness to look the other way in the name of justice. Unless, of course, you threatened to shoot a suspect to elicit a confession, then you never heard the end of it.
“Like magic,” Ella said. The door clicked open, revealing a thin and claustrophobic stairwell. “What’s our approach?”
