Page 52 of Girl, Deceived

Ripley looked nonplussed. ‘Dark, are you okay? You’re talking about fictional characters. Real lives don’t have the convenience of a script.’

But Ella was too deep to let go. ‘Samara Morgan was drowned by her mother. Candyman was lynched. Carrie White was humiliated by schoolmates.’

‘You’re just talking about movies now.’

Ella’s gaze flitted back to her board, tracing the links she had made between the fictional villains and their motivations. ‘Mia, what if we’re profiling this guy all wrong. What if he didn’t start life as a criminal? What if he’s not a typical psychopath?’

‘You mean…’

‘Yeah,’ Ella said. ‘What if our killer is actually a victim?’

CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

Ella was back at her laptop, police database at the ready. With her new angle, she was ready to dive in at the deep end. She’d now found the simple term for what she was looking for – she needed to find her unsub’s origin story.

Mia leaned forward, elbows on her desk. ‘That would change everything. Our unsub might have had a turning point, a defining trauma that pushed him over the edge.’

‘Exactly. Maybe it's not about the evolution of a criminal, but the transformation of a victim into a killer. If we can identify that trauma, maybe we can get a clearer picture of who he is and why he's doing this.’

Ripley folded her arms, nodding along with Ella’s spiel. ‘It's not a common path. Most victims of trauma don't turn into killers. But if he's modeling himself after these horror icons, then he's choosing to act out in this way, driven by that initial trauma.’

‘And it means our profiling approach has to change. We're not looking for the typical signs of criminal escalation. We're looking for a sudden and drastic change in behavior. Could be something that happened to a wife, parent, sibling, friend.’

Ripley held up her hands in surrender, ‘Hold up a minute, Dark. Let’s apply some real-world logic to this whole thing.’

Ella’s fingers froze over the keyboard. She willed her partner to continue.

‘Slasher villains live unrealistic lives. There aren’t families of cannibals out in rural Texas. There aren’t deformed lunatics in hockey masks stalking campsites. If there was, we’d know about them.’

Ripley had a point, but Ella wasn’t sure how it fit. ‘So how do we fix that?’

‘Well, I heard all that shit you just talked and one thing stood out to me.’

‘What?’

‘Injustice. All those names you threw out all seemed pissed because no one helped them. Sound reasonable?’

Ella contemplated the idea and came to an easy conclusion. ‘Very much so.’

‘So, what’s the closest thing we have to such injustices?

The answer was right there in front of her. ‘Unsolved cases,’ Ella said.

Ripley snapped her fingers. ‘Murders, disappearances, somewhere an unsub might feel the system failed them.’

Ella nodded in agreement, her fingers moving quickly as she started compiling a list of potential cases. ‘We find that wound, and we find our killer.’

‘Bingo. Now we just need to…’

‘Oh Christ,’ Ella interrupted as her results flashed up on the screen. ‘I forgot LA was the murder capital of the world.’

‘Don’t I know it? How many results?’

‘Nearly eleven thousand unsolved crimes in total. Everything from murder to fraud to identity theft.’

‘Jesus wept. How far back?’

‘Forty years,’ Ella said.

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