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T.C.
Ripley again, “Dark, you’re the literature guru. What’s this guy babbling about?”
Ella recognized a few choice words, choice phrases. Some were stolen, some were extracted directly from his demented brain.
“The first line about God is from the poem Paradise Lost. Götterdämmerung Syndrome is a type of narcissistic rage. It refers to the last days of Hitler, although Götterdämmerung was a piece of classical music.”
“Okay,” Ripley said, “so he’s throwing historical, military, religious, and classical musical references at us in one giant heap of garbage.”
“It looks like it. You see the initials?” Ella asked.
“That’s just him messing with us.”
Cromwell jumped in. “Okay, so the letter is nonsense, but how does this help us catch him? There must be something here that helps?”
A heavy silence. Ella considered their options and couldn’t come to any conclusion that didn’t involve dissecting the letter line by line.
“Forensics, first and foremost,” said Ripley. “We need to scour this letter for prints. Run his handwriting through graphology software.”
“Come on, Ripley. You know he’s going to have been meticulous. Just like the Zodiac. He wouldn’t have sent it to us unless he was certain it was clean.”
The Zodiac.
An idea jumped into her head, too convoluted to process in the current environment. She entertained it for a second, fitting pieces together, throwing them away, transposing them to other crimes. It was a mess of jumbled words and dates and times and thoughts. She discarded it for the time being.
“Hair fibers,” said Ripley. “We need to inspect it. We can’t just assume it’s crystal. The other option is to scout out the area where he passed it to that kid.”
“Already on it,” Cromwell said.
“Then, Dark, we’re going to have to dig deep into this man’s head. He could have hidden something important in here. Tobias used to do the same, and we know he’s channeling Tobias.”
Ella sped-read the document, delegating the processing task to her unconscious brain.
Cotard’s Garden. Walk with corpses. Zero-sum.
Each body is the part of a larger puzzle.
One part of her felt like the entire thing had been written by an AI machine. Another part told her that every word in this entire thing meant something. Was this unsub completely deranged, spilling out the contents of his unstable mind onto paper? Or was he smart enough to know that appearing deranged could lead investigators down a wrong path?
It was impossible to say without deep analysis.
But there was something there. Something clawing away at the back of her mind. A familiar picture that she couldn’t fully form without the required memory reference. She’d seen these phrases before, all in the same place, in this same order. It was just a matter of clearing the mental fog and bringing it all to the surface.
The shifts in the precinct were switching over now. It was a hub of activity, officers coming and going, two still holding a teen hostage, a once-murder suspect sitting in the next room. What she needed was a moment of reflection, somewhere to build this vast jigsaw in her mind.
“Ripley, I’m going outside for a minute.”
“Now? We’ve got work to do.”
“Hold the fort. I won’t be long.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Ella didn’t smoke, but at times like this, she wished she did. She walked around to the back of the precinct, overlooking around twenty green acres that extended beyond her vision. Dusk was beginning to settle in. She took in five deep breaths then moved closer to the tiny fence that separated the precinct’s parking lot from farmland. She recalled the note, superimposing its words over the gray sky and green fields.
These murders you seek to judge are not as they seem.
Any professional in the Game of Death should know better.
