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Her partner headed over to it. ‘That’s a first. He took all the other victims’ phones.’
'Yup. That means he was never in here, or he would have done the same.' Ella felt a pang of hope that maybe James' cell could lead them to other potential victims – or even directly to the killer.
‘I’ll get it bagged and inspected,’ Ripley said, applying her gloves. ‘Everything else looks pretty ordinary.’
Ella, deflated by the normalcy of the living room, went back through the kitchen towards the front door. Vasquez was on the threshold, conducting two forensic officers who’d just arrived. She had to ask herself – what would make a terrified, shielding victim open up their front door and run outside?
Ella pondered the subject as she swept the kitchen again, scrutinizing the plates, the overfilled trash and the buttered knives. Perhaps Ripley was right. Maybe James Gorton simply saw someone outside his house and approached them. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility, but it went against everything she knew about human responses to fear.
Then something spoke to her.
Something that, under other circumstances, would have gone under her radar.
But it seemed oddly familiar.
Ella’s pulse quickened as a faint memory came back to her, a memory conjured up by something sitting behind the trash can.
A brown piece of paper.
Ella gently moved the trash can, and now she saw a second item too.
One brown envelope, one piece of white paper.
She picked up the envelope and saw the same words, the same handwriting she’d seen on the envelope in Miles Rampell’s house.
OPEN ME.
Ella’s breath caught in her throat. Two strange envelopes, two dead bodies. This couldn’t be a coincidence.
‘Ripley!’ she shouted. ‘You need to see this.’
Her partner turned the corner, a bagged cell phone in one hand. ‘What is it?’
Ella placed her discovery on the kitchen unit. ‘Look. We saw this at Miles Rampell’s place too. Same kind of envelope, same message.’
Ripley put the phone down and peered closer. ‘Oh Christ, you’re right. Where was this?’
‘Behind the trash can,’ Ella said. ‘But I’ve got something else.’ She flashed the crumpled piece of paper, then uncreased it and laid it down on the kitchen unit.
Ella’s fingertips went numb as she processed the contents. It felt like a whisper from a shadow, a riddle spun from the depths of a disturbed mind. Ella sensed a chilling intelligence behind them, a dark creativity that twisted the mundane into the macabre.
‘In a clock’s face, where hands unite. Thrice six they mark, in day or night.’
Ripley pushed her hair back. ‘The hell does that mean?’
Ella went silent as she read the riddle over and over again. Then, she turned her attention to the mass of nonsensical letters below.
EWWL EW SL LZW YSJSYWK TQ LZW GDV TJAUC KLGJW LWF HE LGFAYZL GJ QGM OADD VAW.
Ella stared at the cryptic message, feeling the killer's mind penetrate her own. The jumbled letters seemed to dance before her eyes, a coded taunt from a mind obsessed with vengeance. She tried to untangle the riddle, the words echoing in her mind like an ominous drumbeat. But the solution eluded her, slipping through her fingers like shadows at dusk.
Exhaustion tugged at her. She didn’t have the mental dexterity to break the code. If she wanted to play this killer at his own game, she needed more references.
‘Take this back to the precinct,’ Ella said to Ripley. ‘Get the team to work on it. It's a cipher of some sort. We need to crack it.’
Ripley nodded, carefully collecting the papers. ‘I’ll get pictures, but we need to get this checked for prints first.’
‘Got it.’
