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‘The last in line, your final friend. Tonight she meets her untimely end.’
‘Final friend. Who’s he talking about?’ Ella directed the question at Lauren.
‘Wait, there’s another cipher too.’ Ripley showed her partner the note. Ella focused on the string of mismatched letters below the riddle.
IULHQGV?
‘Question mark, that’s new. This isn’t like the others,’ Ella said. She applied her own gloves and took the note from Ripley as she began agonizing over the seven letters in front of her, too short to make any sudden connections.
‘Do your magic, Dark,’ said Ripley.
'Trying, but it's not long enough to see any patterns.' She went back to the riddle - The last in line, your final friend. Tonight, she meets her untimely end. It didn't evoke thoughts of any numbers whatsoever.
Ripley took over questioning duty while Ella focused on the message. ‘Lauren, you knew these victims, yes? You were part of their group? Can you tell us who else might be in danger?’
Lauren hesitated, rubbing the moisture off her fingertips into her palms. ‘I knew them, but wasn’t close to them. At least not beyond the few weeks I dated James.’
Ripley shoved her hands onto her hips and breathed a heavy sigh up into the night. ‘Well, a serial killer seems to think you were. Believe us, we don’t care about things that happened between kids twenty years ago. We need names.’
Ella looked up from the note. Beside her, Lauren bit her lip, clearly wrestling with memories. She gripped her skull with one hand and said, ‘Look, I can tell you everything, but I want immunity. It was… a long time ago. I was a different person back then.’
‘Immunity?’ Ripley said. ‘Immunity from what?’
‘From the consequences.’
Ella furrowed her brow, eager for the details. ‘Lauren, we can’t give you immunity. That’s for the courts to decide, but if there’s something we need to know, I suggest you tell us before more people wind up dead.’
Lauren's demeanor shifted, a weight seemingly lifted as she resolved to share her story.
‘Okay,’ she began, her voice gaining strength. ‘Back in high school, we... they... did some messed up things. I was there, but I never participated. I just didn't stop them.’
Ella and Ripley exchanged a look, Ella sensing that something of significance was forthcoming, something that could finally unlock the window into this killer’s psyche.
Lauren continued, 'There was this kid. He was... different. Obsessed with puzzles, always kept to himself. Mark, Miles and James, they... they tormented him. Pranks, cruel jokes. Then, one day, one of us decided to push it to the extreme.'
‘How extreme?’ Ella asked.
Lauren paused, her breath hitching as she delved into a painful memory. Her voice was barely above a whisper.
‘We indulged one of his little puzzles and told him to come hang out with us… in a junkyard. The one next to Lincoln High. Me and James lured him there, pretending to be his friend. When he arrived, the others were waiting. And they…’
Ella thought back to the crime scenes. The strangulation, the asphyxiation, Miles Rampell’s contorted body alongside slabs of meat.
At last, she saw the killer for who he really was – a tormented, confused child plagued by horrific memories of betrayal. She remembered what Thomas Holt had said about the boy losing his mother, about how he’d become obsessed with a riddle he’d found on the back of a cereal box.
And she now had a good idea of who this boy was.
She fit the pieces together, and if she knew this unsub as well as she thought she did, she already knew what this group of persecutors did to him.
‘You locked him in a fridge,’ she said firmly.
Lauren’s eyes welled up with tears, turning to ice the moment they graced her cheeks.
'Yes, we did.'
The day before, Ella told herself she wouldn’t feel sorry for this unsub. She realized now that she’d failed.
She stood up, suddenly not wanting to be so close to a person who’d committed such acts of cruelty for amusement’s sake. One half of her sympathized with Lauren given the night’s ordeal, the other half felt a deep-seated disgust.
