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“Yup. Aside from an amateur meth lab, nothing of note in Alden’s apartment. Nothing relating to the victims. No ancient blades. The guy is screwed in the head but our hard evidence is sorely lacking.”
Ella struggled to believe it. “Then why’d he chicken out when we busted him? What idiot would jump off a roof if he’d done nothing wrong?”
“You didn’t hear me?” asked Ripley. “This guy isn’t selling weed. He’s running meth. With his past history, that’s fifteen years in jail. If he’s been robbing pharmaceuticals too, he probably won’t see daylight ever again. To a psychopath like that, death is the better option.”
Ella sighed, irate that the jigsaw pieces created a picture she didn’t want to see. A pinging phone briefly distracted her, but when she saw the name on her screen, her heart sank further still. It was the director.
Need updates. Why no progress? Call me ASAP.
“I know that look,” Ripley said. “Edis is on your ass.”
Ella pocketed her phone and nodded. Her teeth clenched as she envisioned herself approaching the end of a marathon only to find someone had pushed back the finish line another ten miles. “Yeah. I don’t know what to tell him.”
“Me either. Might as well just be honest. We’ve had two suspects, we’ve got a picture of the suspect out to the locals. That’s as much as we can do.”
Ella collapsed against the wall, feeling like it wasn’t enough, feeling like the key to this mystery was lurking just beyond the perimeter of her conscious mind. She could feel it swirling like a whisper in the wind, begging her to find that one little element that somehow made sense of this chaos.
The air in the office felt stuffy and cramped, as though filled with invisible weight. With the sudden rise in humidity, it began to feel like a sauna. She needed some reprieve.
“I need to go and think,” Ella said. “Somewhere else. I’ll be back soon.”
Ripley nodded and shooed her away, apparently welcoming the idea of solitude. Ella guessed she had her own ideas she needed to explore.
Ella headed down to the parking lot, jumped in her vehicle and hit the road. A certain place was calling her, a place she’d felt she could truly channel this killer’s thoughts. She’d never been religious in the slightest, but she couldn’t help but feel that some invisible, all-powerful force was telling her to do this.
Time to get inside this killer’s head.
***
Ella stood outside Saint Paul’s Church, still as majestic at dusk as it was in the midday sun. She walked through the door, down the aisle, marrying an invisible partner. A red cloth draped gracefully over the grand altar, crowned with a golden cross that glimmered in the stained-glass light. Behind it stood life-sized crucifixion scene, complete with a disheveled Jesus being impaled by a lance. The scene’s brutal and striking imagery left nothing to the imagination, although for reasons unknown to Ella, it rapidly turned the cogs of creativity.
Perhaps it was the contrast between such morbid visuals and the church’s magnificent splendor, or perhaps it was the knowledge that she was standing in a place her unsub had also been at some point. She did not doubt that their killer, this deeply religious homicidal maniac, had some connection to this place. He too had laid eyes upon this altar and this crucifixion and used it to fuel his own creativity, as misplaced as it was.
Ella laid it all out from start to finish, leaving no stone unturned. Their killer was a middle-aged white male who lived locally and had probably spent his whole life in this town. He was on some kind of religious mission, putting sufferers out of their misery, establishing himself as some kind of hero in his twisted mind. He was not hurting these people, he was providing a service. Like Thomas Alden, he was deranged enough to believe that death was a better alternative to suffering. Therefore, he targeted those already in a weak and vulnerable state.
The victims consisted of one woman and two men with an age range of twenty-six years. A drastically varied victimology that all but confirmed that the victims themselves were the targets. They weren’t substitutes for someone who wronged or traumatized him. There was no sexual component, no financial motivation, no signs of sadism or overkill. Each victim had been killed in the places they lived with a single laceration to the back or abdomen, then posed in the prayer position and left to bleed out.
Each victim had lost something that defined them. Joanne’s unborn child had passed away. David’s wealth had vanished. Gary’s possessions had been burned to the ground. These losses clawed away at their very cores, stripping away their identities and sending them into spirals of blackness. These people descended further and further into despair, unable to overcome their troubles, resulting in their deaths.
Family, wealth, possessions. Important components to a fulfilling life, maybe.
Or perhaps not. Ella couldn’t help but thing she didn’t have much of either. But then again, she was faithless. The virtues of such things had never been drilled into her, so perhaps that was why she didn’t chase any of them.
Exactly where the killer was finding these victims remained a mystery. If he knew the intimate details of their struggles, he certainly had personal contact with them prior to murdering them. These weren’t the kind of facts he could have read on a bulletin board. He interacted with these people, spoke to them, showed them false sympathy whilst secretly planning their demise.
As Ella ruminated on this approach, she realized that this killer could simply be a pillar of the community and nothing more. In towns like this, word spread easily. He didn’t need to attend rehab classes to know that another member of the community might be struggling. He could have extracted the information from a friend of a friend, a family member, a local gossiper.
Finding this victim source could be an impossible task, Ella thought, therefore, they needed to go a different route to catch him. They needed to intercept him in the act. If he was targeting the vulnerable, they just had to keep an eye on every vulnerable person in town.
Easier said than done, she thought. There were nearly two-thousand people here and she doubted many of them were living trouble-free lives. Few people did, even the most blessed souls. Plus, the crucial factor was how the killer perceived them. Perception was reality, and if this killer believed someone was vulnerable despite them appearing it on the surface, they could overlook hundreds of potential victims.
Children, wealth, assets. What came next?
“Back again?” a voice said, jolting her like an electric shock. “Miss… Dark, was it?”
“Hi Father. I hope you don’t mind me coming back.”
Father Kerley emerged from a nearby corridor, hands clasped together. “Not at all. Everyone’s welcome here.”
