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‘Good insight,’ Ella said.
‘And I’ve still got a good feeling about our friend Lucas. That guy’s an angry son of a bitch, and fits the profile to a tee.’
As much as Ella wanted Lucas to be her man, her gut told her otherwise. ‘I don’t see it. He’s too unkempt. If that guy knocked on your car windshield, you’d drive off immediately. There’s no way he could charm his way into someone’s personal space.’
‘Maybe not,’ Ripley said. ‘So, keep digging.’
‘We should cross-reference the remaining members of the clique with their current addresses,’ Ella suggested, already pulling up the necessary databases. ‘We need to identify who's still in the area. Those are the people at highest risk.’
Ripley stood up and moved over to the whiteboard. ‘Well, we need a psychological profile by the morning, if only for our own benefit.’
Ella separated her brain into two halves, one focused on potential victims, the other on the profile of the unsub.
'He's thirty-six or thirty-seven, given that he was a classmate of these victims. Male, judging by the strength he displayed at every crime scene. He's powerful enough to strangle someone with his bare hands and drag an entire dead body into a fridge.’
Despite the general consensus of strangulation being a simple crime, it took a great amount of strength and willpower to manually squeeze the life out of another human being. Killing someone by asphyxiation took anywhere between ninety seconds and two minutes. Likewise, manually moving dead bodies was akin to picking up a hundred-plus-pound bag of sand.
Ripley noted it down. ‘Physical appearance?’ she asked.
‘He’s presentable, an everyman. He’s the soccer dad, the pool player at the bar, the tradesman. Non-threatening until the mask slips.’
‘Agreed. What about his mental state?’ Ripley asked.
Ella had already given this question some thought and didn’t have a definitive answer. ‘It’s difficult to say, but I think our unsub suffers from some kind of personality disorder.’
‘Why?’ Ripley asked. Ella knew she was being put to the test.
‘It’s highly likely our unsub was pushed about in high school by these victims. What kind of person gets pushed around? Losers, nerds, people struggling with mental and identity disorders. He could have hyperactivity, autism, dyspraxia, maybe a physical disability. Our guy would have been bullied around the late nineties to early two-thousands, and people were a lot less tolerant back then than they are today.’
‘Noted,’ Ripley said.
Ella paused for a moment, losing herself in the profile. ‘Our unsub is probably still struggling today, and perhaps blames his failures on the root of his insecurity, which is Demi, Mark and Miles. What we’ve got is an introspective psychopath, and that speaks to his intelligence – an intelligence he might only recently have discovered. It’s possible he suffered stunted developmental through trauma, and now he believes that he’s finishing a war that Miles and his friends started twenty years ago. He thinks it will free him from the shackles that have kept him restrained through adulthood.’
Ripley nodded, scribbling down notes as Ella spoke, the profile growing clearer with every word. ‘His current behavior suggests an escalation,’ she said. ‘Whatever happened in high school, it festered over the years. Now, he's taking control, reversing the dynamic of power he once endured. He's meticulous, patient, and his attacks are personal.’
Ella added, ‘That means he's been planning this for a long time. He's not impulsive. This is calculated, a series of actions meant to fulfill a specific purpose or resolve an internal conflict. And he’s familiar with the area. He knows where to find his victims and how to navigate without drawing attention. He's been blending in, hiding in plain sight. We're dealing with someone who's been damaged, who's turned that damage into a weapon. He's dangerous, not just because of his physical capability, but because of the depth of his emotional scars.’
She trailed off, only now realizing exactly how deeply she already knew a man she was yet to meet.
‘Alright, Dark,’ Ripley said as she put her marker down. ‘I didn’t expect such a sermon.’
‘Sorry,’ Ella said. She stared at the bland grey walls and blinked herself back to the present, promising herself that at no point would she feel sorry for this serial killer. Everyone had trauma, and most people didn’t try and rectify their sufferings through homicide.
Once again, she had to put the mental image of Logan Nash’s dead body aside.
The abrupt arrival of Chief Vasquez jolted Ella from her introspective spiral. His entrance, like the sharp crack of a whip, sliced through the atmosphere and said more than words could.
The grave look on his face said it all.
‘Another body,’ Vasquez announced with a voice that seemed to carry the weight of the world.
Ella’s heart sank.
The killer had beaten them to it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A crowd of onlookers, drawn by the commotion and the irresistible allure of tragedy, had gathered behind the police tape. Ella waited for the uniformed officers to part them before venturing forth, not wanting to end up amongst the cell phone footage that would no doubt be on news websites within the hour. She was acutely aware of the prying eyes and the digital lenses that sought to turn tragedy into viral content.
