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Ella moved to her ear to the speaker, consuming the background noise. She heard commotion, moving water, fierce wind, chirping birds. Nothing useful.
“Killers always come home.”
A flat, monotonous voice with a local twinge. Feathery and light. Few discernible tones or inflections.
Fiddling, then static down the line.
“Wait. Don’t hang….”
Then the line went dead.
“Goddammit!” Ripley shouted. She dropped her phone on the dashboard and buried her head in her hands. Ella couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen Ripley so frustrated on a case. She was the one who kept a positive outlook even when their backs were against the wall, but something here had broken her.
“Was he on long enough to trace?” Ella asked, desperate.
“Nowhere near.” Ripley jumped out of the car and stood in the middle of the road, breathing heavily. Ella gave her a moment then joined her. On the inside, she had just as many doubts as her partner, but she had to stay positive for the sake of the case, for the sake of Ripley’s health. There was no chance Ripley could ease into retirement if there was a Tobias copycat on the loose. That fact would eat at her until the day she died.
A year ago, Ripley had given Ella the opportunity of a lifetime with this job. Now she had to repay her partner as best she could. This killer would see justice no matter what it took.
“We’ve heard his voice. We know he drives a van. He’s currently in Riverside. That gives us a ton to work with, Ripley.”
“No,” Ripley said, “it means he threw the phone away in Riverside. It means he has access to a van. And we heard a generic male voice.”
“And I can work with that. Now are you coming with me to scout out Riverside or what? We’re running out of time.”
Ripley marched over to their vehicle without looking back at her partner. Ella followed, hopping into the driver’s seat, not trusting Ripley to drive in her current state. The Tobias crime scene had spooked her and she needed time to process it.
“Riverside’s a couple of miles out. We passed through it earlier. Let’s go.”
They sped off along the dirt road and Ella asked Ripley to call in what little reinforcements might be available. Her mind wandered on the journey, and something clawed at the back of her brain, like an old, grainy memory playing on a fuzzy TV. She could identify the outline but the middle section was just gray static.
Killers always come home.
She’d heard someone say this before.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Ella began scrawling her thoughts on the whiteboard. What, if anything, connected these women? Was it all simply random, or did this killer have some grand meaning behind everything? Usually, these types of organized killers had some master plan in mind, and intercepting this master plan was what led to their capture. However, some organized offenders killed because of the sexual release, but as far as Ella could tell, there was no sexual component present in any of these murders. If he was attacking as a form of sexual gratification, the wound pattern would have been much more frenzied, not laid out to imitate an old unsolved murder.
This unsub was not acting out their own fantasies. He was channeling other people’s fantasies and mimicking them as closely as possible. He was a murderous phantom that assumed the forms of historical monsters. Therefore, there could be no sexual component.
The trek through Riverside yielded nothing useful. The place was too vast, too empty, but Ella was certain that the killer knew these roads like the back of his hand. He’d selected ideal locations to dump his victims, all of which were perfect balances between secluded and active.
He was obviously very familiar with these historical crimes to the point of obsession, rivaling even Ella’s own knowledge. While even the layman might be familiar with the Black Dahlia case, very few people knew about Cheri Jo Bates. To find out about her, he would have had to either do some research or be a true crime obsessive himself.
Could this just be a lonely man paying tribute to his heroes? What if he was one of those amateur sleuths, the types fascinated by unsolved murders to the point it consumes their entire being? God knew there were enough of them out there. The kinds of people that spend every waking hour ‘looking into’ unsolved cases and molding the information to fit facts they’d ‘discovered’? Ella knew better than anyone that sleuthing was a frustrating game, especially when you were so obsessed with making connections and finding out new information that you’d look for evidence in favor of convenience.
Fixating on unsolved cases can easily break a person’s mind. Ella thought of the recent case of Debbie Muldoon in Los Angeles, who suffered a psychotic episode while she was staying in a hotel and ended up drowning herself in a water tank. The explanation was obvious to many, but sleuths dug into the case and blew it up to ridiculous levels, citing ghosts, supernatural events, and assassinations as the ‘real’ reason.
Could this killer be one of these desperate amateurs, aggravated by his lack of investigative skills so that he flipped himself to the opposite side?
The door to Ella’s office burst open and Ripley came in, giant coffees in either hand. She laid them on the table and took a seat.
“Better?” Ella asked.
“Much. Let’s do this. What are we looking for? Give me your profile so far.”
Ella drew four columns on the whiteboard: Characteristics, Victimology, Residence, Other.
