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Ella took a deep breath, feeling the weight of both the current case and the looming threat of Logan Nash. She couldn’t let her personal ties to the past get in the way of her duty to protect the people of California from a deranged killer.
‘We'll run backgrounds on each of them, see if any of them have criminal pasts or connections to any of the victims.’
‘You take half the names, I’ll take the other, and with any luck, we might get this fanatic before he begins act three.’
***
Ella sat back in her chair, massaging her temples. The list, which once promised a lead, now lay crumpled in a ball on her desk. The weight of disappointment pressed against her, but she wouldn’t let it pin her down. She turned her attention back to the drawing board she had been maintaining since she got here, a cacophony of notes, patterns, and scribbles about horror tropes. If there was a connection, it was buried in here somewhere.
‘Ella?’ Mia's voice broke through her concentration.
‘You’re coming up short too, right?’
‘Yup. These guys might be perverts, but they’re squeaky clean in the eyes of the law. All I’ve got is a few parking tickets and a public urination charge.’
‘That’s more than I’ve got,’ Ella said. ‘Cleaner than a duck’s back over here.’
Ella paced around, each step heavier than the last. ‘Have forensics got anything back from Ginny’s scene yet? Or anything from the new mask?’
Ripley scrambled around her table and pulled up a printout. ‘Negative. Nothing but a few cloth fibers at the scene, but tracing them to any source will be impossible. No hair strands in the mask, and tech said that this mask is completely unique. They’ve run it through imaging software and found nothing like it anywhere online. However, they did say there were flakes of skin around the eyeholes.’
‘Skin flakes? So we can pull DNA from that?’
‘Possibly, but sourcing DNA isn’t the issue. Matching it is.’
Ella ran a hand through her hair in frustration. ‘So, all we know is our killer wore this mask at some point.’
‘Yup. And like you said yesterday, homicidal killers in horror masks don’t just appear out of thin air. This little venture is his end game. Years of criminal activity has brought him here.’
Ella couldn’t agree more. She turned back to her board of movie tropes, trying to visualize the world through the lens of a horror villain. She thought of Leatherface, Hannibal Lecter, Michael Myers, Norman Bates, Pinhead, Jason Vorhees. The icons, the legendary faces of evil. Did they have anything in common that their unsub might relate to?
Their back stories had been the gateway to Ella’s life of profiling real monsters, so if she wanted to understand this killer, she needed to take a few steps back in time.
She threw some ideas out there, using Ripley as her sounding board. ‘Mia, the killers we catch all start small. They begin with burglary and rape and then progress to homicide.’
‘Yup. The psycho’s journey. What about it?’
She thought again of Michael and Jason and Hannibal. These fictional psychopaths didn’t follow the typical cycle of a fledgling murderer, and perhaps that was why the unsub related so much to them.
‘Horror villains don’t do that.’
‘They don’t?’
‘No. Theysnap.It’s rarely a cycle of abuse. Instead it’s a single incident that defines their evil.’
‘That happens in the real world, too.’
Ella considered it. Ripley was right. The Yorkshire Ripper killed thirteen women because a sex worker laughed at him. Ed Gein dug up corpses to symbolically resurrect his mother.
Thoughts of Ed Gein, the famous grave robber and murderer that inspired multiple fictional horror icons. Norman Bates, Leatherface, Buffalo Bill – all derivations of a real killer, all of whom were triggered by individual instances that characterized their wickedness.
Norman Bates was sent abused by his mother.
Leatherface was raised by a cannibalistic family.
Buffalo Bill was rejected for sex change surgery.
Ella spoke her next thoughts aloud, hoping Ripley might filter her thoughts and make sense of them. ‘Hannibal Lecter saw his sister get killed and eaten during the war. Michael Myers was locked in an asylum for decades. Pinhead had been traumatized by the war. Jason Vorhees drowned as a child. Jigsaw lost his child and developed cancer.’
