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“You’re lucky that’s all I did, you little jerk,” Ripley said. “Someone once told me never to retire with a full clip and I’ve got four bullets left. Answer wisely.”
Tyler grimaced in pain. Ella didn’t approve of Ripley’s techniques sometimes but she couldn’t deny they got results.
“I was at my mom’s house in Saddlemoor. From about 6pm ‘til this morning. Her boyfriend was over too. They can vouch for me.”
What was once a sure thing was now a flicker of possibility. These were the moments Ella struggled to cope with. Disappointment was worse than physical pain, she’d fast discovered.
“Thursday night?” Ripley asked.
“At home. Alone. No one saw me.”
Ripley massaged her neck and shoulder. Ella could tell she was hurting, but her partner kept a straight face through the pain. They needed to get out of this room and process everything so far. Tyler might have alibis but that didn’t completely exonerate him. Ella still had her suspicions, especially regarding the strand of hair in his possession.
“Ripley, can we go talk outside please?” Ella asked.
They got up and headed towards the door. Ella turned back to Tyler. “We’ll be keeping you in until we check your alibis. You’re not free yet.”
Outside the room, Ripley leaned against the glass and howled curses towards the sky. She took out a bottle of pills from her pocket and swallowed two, dry.
“You okay?”
“No I’m not. My shoulder feels like it’s on fire. My stomach is in pieces. And now this jerk has alibis for the night of the murders. This is a real blow, Dark.”
Looked like it was up to Ella to stay positive, as hard as it would be.
“He’s not innocent until we’ve checked them out in full. There are still a lot of hurdles he needs to get over. Do you really buy his story about finding that hair?”
“Not for a minute.”
“Well then. Forget about him for now. Wait for Cromwell’s team to check everything, and then we’ll start again.”
“Alright. Keep on top of it. I’m going to sit down for a second.”
“You sure you don’t wanna go back to the hospital?”
“No,” Ripley snapped. “Keep me away from them.”
Ella didn’t understand Ripley’s aversion to medical facilities. It was like she saw hospital care as a weakness. “Why? You could use some drugs.”
Ripley put her hand on her partner’s shoulder. “Dark, I’m worried that if I go into the hospital, I won’t ever come out.”
Then she hobbled off, leaving Ella alone outside the interrogation with a lot to think about.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
He spun the pen between his fingers, a trick he’d learned during all those years he spent waiting. Just waiting to strike. He had hours, weeks, months to bide his time, and to amuse himself he’d find pens around the house and manipulate them between his fingers. It was a pointless, futile trick that had no application in everyday life, but it reminded him of those less innocent days.
The call with the detectives had been thrilling, intoxicating. It was even more satisfying than slicing that girl in two. There was something about being so close to the opposition that really appealed to his sense of adventure, a sense that he’d all but forgotten he possessed. It turned out that this little boy was still a deviant, only now this boy was a man – and could do a lot more damage this time around.
But how could these so-called detectives be so blind to the truth? It was all right there in front of them. He even left a breadcrumb trail for them to follow. All they had to do was make the connections, follow the path, look to the past to determine the present. If there was one thing he’d realized about the human condition in his years, it was that humans never learned from the past. They were doomed to make the same mistakes over and over until oblivion put a stop to their idiocy. Going to war over trivial nonsense, electing corrupt officials – nothing ever changed. It was the same world he tried to escape from forty years ago.
According to some of the discussions he’d read online, people had finally made the connection between his second murder and that of Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia. If amateurs could identify it, surely the police were aware of this little fact too? It didn’t take a genius to work it out, but one could never underestimate the predictability of stupidity.
One term that continually cropped up in these discussions was ‘unsolved.’ Black Dahlia was apparently one of the most famous unsolved murders of all time. Cheri Jo Bates was an obscure unsolved homicide from the 1960s. For some reason, people latched onto this little aspect of the crimes like ticks at a blood bank. It was as though this little component was more important than the homicides – and the victims – themselves. It was sad how the human mind worked, but for the longest time now, he hadn’t considered himself one of them. As a child, his dad once beat him so hard that he blacked out for several hours, and that little boy was fairly confident that his conscious mind never woke up from that attack – only his material body. Ever since, he’d considered himself a dead boy. That was why he could stab a woman to death and not feel a thing. That was why he could hang a woman from a tree without any strain on his muscles. He had no muscles, just masses of pure, supernatural power. He was a walking ball of black energy, chaos manifested in human form.
He’d told the psychologists about this little belief back in the day and, predictably, they’d all laughed at him. Just a dumb kid, is what they said. But now, it was a real thing. Cotard’s Delusion they called it, or Walking Corpse Syndrome.
Except it wasn’t a syndrome or a delusion. It was a real phenomenon and he’d proved it.
