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Ella sat down, brushing the thoughts of Logan Nash to one side. Now wasn’t the time to get sidetracked, not when there were multiple unsubs to zone in on somewhere in this city.
“But anyway,” Ripley continued, “I’ve got bad news and badder news. Which one do you want first?”
Ella familiarized herself with the new police database. Thankfully, most databases around the country utilized the same software, only the navigation was different. “The bad news.”
“Vanessa May’s ex-husband is in the clear. We tracked him down to Chicago, where he’s been living for three years. Alibi is rock solid.”
“Dammit. And the worse news?”
“We have the name of the owner of Blue Ridge Nursing Home, but he’s gone into hiding. Sold his house, ditched his car. Pretty suspicious, given that his biggest vocal opponent died last night.”
“Interesting,” Ella said. “What’s his name?”
“Arthur Walters. Fifty-six years old. Used to live in Dale Valley, about thirty minutes from here. According to everything the chief can find, he’s disappeared. Oh, and I have bonus bad news too.”
Ella usually felt disappointment in the face of adversity, but today, she felt nothing but determination. There was an unfamiliar resolve running through her veins, and no amount of setbacks could deter her from persevering. Bring it on, she thought. Suffering bred the strongest souls.
“Hit me,” Ella said.
“The director wants us on these cases until they’re solved. Both of them. He wants us to finish what we’ve started, even though it might not be a standard serial killer case.”
Ella was more than happy with that. “Good. Then we need to find this Arthur Walters guy. We have recent pictures of him?”
Ripley turned her laptop to face her partner. “Plenty. Loads of pictures from his recent trial.”
Ella scrutinized the man’s features, burned them into her brain. He was stocky and bald, plate-face, a few pounds north of overweight. Narrow eyes that resembled black slits and cracked lips that naturally downturned at the edges. The face of an abuser, psychopath, and possible murderer.
“Let’s see all the details we have so far. We’re going to find this son of a bitch.”
“Alright sniffer dog,” Ripley said. “Let’s see what you can do.”
Ella asked herself the question: how do you find someone who doesn’t want to be found? It was a question she asked herself on a weekly basis, but try as these people might, they couldn’t hide forever. Every little step left a footprint, physical or virtual. She recalled an old psychology mantra; when you anticipated the human mind, it left nothing to chance.
Time to go to work.
***
Ella dug through everything piece by piece, putting together the final moments of Arthur Walters’s life before he vanished into the ether. His license plate had last been caught a week ago on a CCTV camera in a parking lot over in Autumn Ridge, two towns over. His credit card had been used to withdraw two thousand dollars from a bank in the same town, and his cell phone had recently pinged from a tower three miles away from Katherine Parkinson’s apartment. He had one business under his name, Blue Ridge Nursing Home, and his criminal record listed sexual abuse, extortion, and suspicions of money laundering.
Whatever the case, Arthur Walters was somewhere in town.
Ella bounced her thoughts off Ripley, similarly lost in the same info. “He’s withdrawn two grand,” Ella said. “Hardly enough to sustain him for long.”
“He’s not staying in a hotel then, or at least not an expensive one. And he’s paying in cash.”
“Yeah. A guy like this wouldn’t stay too far from his anchor point. This kind of psycho-abuser? He’d see it as a weakness if he completely fled, and he probably gets a thrill from staying in close proximity to his crimes.”
“So, whatishis anchor point?” Ripley asked.
“His old house?”
“No. That’s twenty-five miles away. If he killed Katherine Parkinson, it’s something closer to her apartment.”
Ella performed a quick online search. “His nursing home? That’s barely three miles away from Katherine’s place.”
“Bingo,” said Ripley.
Ella pulled up a map of the local area and marked the main locations. “So, it’s unlikely that he’d stray more than five miles from his comfort zone. Katherine’s apartment is three miles away. Autumn Ridge is four. He wouldn’t go much farther than that, but he’d be far enough away that locals around here wouldn’t recognize him.”
