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“Sure. Let’s start over.”
“Great. Do you want to head to the airport together?”
“I just need to get my things.”
“Not printing off sealed files, I hope,” said Ripley. She meant it as a joke but the end result had a little more malice than intended.
Ella violently rubbed her face with both hands and said, “No. Just my overnight things.”
“Alright, I’ll see you outside.”
The rookie strode off with her head bowed down. Their relationship was going to take some mending but Ripley brushed off the thought, assuming time would heal their wounds. She turned her attention to more pressing matters – two victims who’d been stabbed and left for dead inside their homes. Time to dig into this killer’s mind, into these victims’ lives and find out exactly what this killer was trying to say. She had a few ideas in mind, but she had to ask herself: how did this killer know there’d be victims waiting for him in this home, in this storage unit? These two incidents could both technically be considered home invasions, and home invasions pointed to one type of offender above all others.
Ripley had to acknowledge that this might be more than a span of serial killings.
They could be dealing with a stalker.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ella thought that being thirty-thousand feet in the air might clear her mind, as though she could leave her problems back in D.C., on the ground. But she found she’d inadvertently brought them along with her. Staring at the crime scene photographs on the glossy table between her and Ripley, she struggled to focus on anything but the events of this morning. The dead end of her father’s strange death, Ben’s abrupt exit from her life.
Ripley got out of her chair once the plane settled into a steady motion and made for the coffee machine. She came back with two watery hits of caffeine and that was good enough for Ella. FBI private jets weren’t the height of luxury that the name implied, but Ella always thought that luxury was overrated. Nothing irked her more than paying over the odds for something just because it had a gold ribbon around it. Must have been a byproduct of growing up in a farmer’s town. A place where people would deep-fry roadkill if it meant saving a few bucks. Everything in the modern world just seemed like a re-packaged, worse version of something that came before, only with a higher price tag.
She put the nihilism to one side for the moment, making the most of the wonderful view of a fading city down below. It was the brief, transient moment between ground and clouds where you could glimpse an overview of everything you were leaving behind. Ripley tapped on one of the crime scene photos to get her attention.
“What do you make of this unsub?” she asked.
Ella scoured the papers, trying to place herself in the killer’s mind, trying to see the world from his twisted perspective. All she saw were two dead people, posed in a particularly odd position. She didn’t have much to go on right now, or maybe it was her clouded vision preventing her from seeing beyond the pictures to the real story.
“What doyoumake of it?” Ella asked.
“I see disparate victimology and barely any connections between the two. This first victim has all the makings of a crime of passion to me, and the second one could even be a suicide. If you hadn’t pointed out the positioning, that would be my conclusion.”
Ella saw something completely different. “I see a home invader.”
“Purposely targeted?”
Home invasion cases always began with stabs in the dark. Ella excused the pun. “Has to be. I doubt he’d just invade random houses.”
“It does happen,” Ripley said.
It did happen, but the cases were few and far between. Richard Ramirez, Richard Chase, Dennis Rader. The number of targeted victims in home invasions far outweighed random break-ins that resulted in murder. Ella didn’t have the energy or interest to give Ripley a history lesson.
“Yeah, but not here.”
“Why?”
Ella found a photograph of an exterior shot of the first victim’s house. The neighbors on either side were in the periphery. Ella wondered how this wasn’t obvious to Ripley, but then a sudden realization came to her.
“Mia, you don’t have to hold my hand here. Don’t play dumb just to get me to talk.”
It was a common interrogation trick. Mention the opposite of what you genuinely believed so that the suspect couldn’t help but correct you, thus confirming your initial thoughts. Ripley never did that to her. It was tantamount to condescension.
“I’m not getting much else out of you,” Ripley said. “But I’m glad you saw through it.”
Looked like Ripley was playing the long con. Ella didn’t have the patience for it.
“Victim number one could have been a burglary gone wrong, but he’s not going to gut someone and pose them just for catching him in the act. Plus if he was going to rob a joint, he wouldn’t target a house smack-bang in the middle of a busy street. Same goes for the second one. He’s killed this guy in a storage building. There must have been cameras everywhere. Either this guy is really dumb or he’s on a mission. I’m going to bet the latter.”
