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‘Right before she was murdered.’
Daniels asked, ‘Can we listen to the calls? Are they recorded?’
‘No. No recordings, just information.’
‘Dammit,’ Ripley said. ‘Is there any way to dig deeper, maybe trace the caller’s location?’
'I doubt it. He's covered his tracks again, but we might be able to…' Ella stopped abruptly, one finger poised over her mouse. 'Wait a minute. Something doesn't add up here.'
Ripley felt an invisible dagger lodge in her stomach. After thirty years in the FBI, she knew when a breakthrough was on the horizon. It was cop’s instinct.
Ella was in a new page, a folder of thumbnails, each one beginning with the prefixVIDfollowed by a long number.
‘Media files?’ Ripley asked.
Ella tapped the screen. 'Ginny died around ten o'clock, and she received a video from someone literally three minutes before. Not only that, but she receivedanothervideo… this morning.’
‘Could be friends sending her stuff?’ Ripley said. ‘People send unsolicited videos all the time.’
Ella shook her head slowly. ‘But look, it’s from the same number that contacted her minutes before her death.’
‘Let’s see them,’ Ripley said. ‘Most recent one first.’
Ella clicked. The video opened.
Ripley’s heart sank to the pit of her stomach.
Because it quickly became clear she was watching the killer’s amateur horror movie.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ella felt like she was seeing beyond the veil, like she’d stumbled upon something she wasn’t supposed to see.
But every fiber of her being told her that the killer intended them to see this.
‘It’s… Jessica Owen’s death,’ said Chief Daniels.
The video showed a terrified woman running down a street, only for the cameraman to duck behind a house. There was a cunning in his maneuvers, a predator stalking his prey. Ella watched, her breath held, as he chose a new, unexpected path, circling around and positioning himself for the perfect ambush.
As Jessica neared her sanctuary, her front door just steps away, Ella could almost hear the deafening scream trapped within her own throat, urging the woman to move faster, to shut out the danger on her heels. The unmistakable rasp of the cameraman's excited breathing became louder, and then suddenly emerged from his hiding spot and attacked the woman that was clearly Jessica Owen outside her front door.
The camera shook with the violence of the assault. It tilted at an odd angle, offering a skewed perspective of the ground, before it jerkily refocused on the wounded torso of Jessica Owen. The camera then steadied, as though the killer had positioned it against a surface, then showed the final moments of Jessica’s life. A shotgun soon followed, solidifying the horrifying tableau that was now forever seared into Ella's memory.
‘He filmed it,’ Ripley said.
As Jessica Owen stood against her door, impaled by a rifle, a voice in the background began to speak.
I’m going to finish what we started.
The screen went black.
Ella, Ripley and Daniels exchanged glances, all of them wide-eyed, none of them willing to break the silence. Ella finally did it.
‘Finish what he started,’ she said. Ella tried to isolate the voice in her head, see if she could place it. Low-pitched, no regional dialect, classic middle American. It wasn’t distinct enough to latch onto, but she committed it to memory.
‘What’s he talking about?’ Daniels asked.
‘I don’t know, but we’re not done.’ Ella navigated to the second file, the one sent mere minutes before Ginny Mathers had passed away. ‘Brace yourselves, because this could be more of the same.’
