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“Unless…” she questioned.
Gray skies turned to black. Clouds lowered, threatening rainfall despite the summer month. Ella clasped her hands together and thought herself into a hallucinatory state. It was all there right in her mind’s eye, toying with her and begging her to dig deeper. Their unsub was a local, that much they’d confirmed. All of this information led to one person, or a type of person, and around here, that person wouldn’t be too hard to find.
It was someone with inside knowledge. Someone who’d seen the darker side of this town, spent time with its ghouls and monsters. The locals around here wanted you to think this town was a slice of paradise, but the town’s dark underside was bubbling to the surface, and with Ella’s help it would overflow.
There was just one more thing that pieced it all together, and as the clouds slowly dissolved the imagined words she’d laid over the sky, only one line remained.
Each body is a piece of a larger puzzle, the zero-sum of their parts.
Ella turned and rushed back towards the precinct, convinced that she knew this killer, knew him better than he knew himself. He was trying to outsmart them, but she could see his whole manifest before he’d even written it. Her heartrate tripled in speed. The rush numbed any sense of exhaustion. Cut her and she would bleed adrenaline.
Their killer was not referencing unsolved murders. He was referencing a different obscure phenomenon: zero victims.
***
“Ripley,” Ella shouted as she reached their office. Her partner was nose-deep in her laptop. “Mia, listen to me. I know what our killer wants. I know how he thinks. These aren’t unsolved murders to him. They’re much more.”
Ripley waved her hand around. “Start over, Dark. What are you chatting about?”
“Zero victims,” Ella spat out. “He’s not referencing unsolved crimes. He believes these are all zero victims.”
Ripley’s eyes narrowed. She looked none-the-wiser. “Dark, that’s not a term the public are familiar with. That’s a law enforcement term. An FBI profiler term. You really think this demented lunatic knows what zero victims are?”
A zero victim was a serial killer’s first victim, but wasn’t discovered until after the others. The one that started everything. In most cases, a zero victim was never officially attributed to the serial killer believed of killing them, usually because considerable time had elapsed since he potentially carried it out. By this point, the killer in question was usually dead.
“He’s not demented. He’s smart. He’s hidden everything in plain sight. I just missed it.” Ella erased everything on the whiteboard, grabbed the marker and began scribbling.
“Our first victim, Cheryl King. Her murder echoed that of Cheri Jo Bates from 1966. At the time, people thought she was the victim of a random homicide, but it wasn’t until years later that people suspected she was the Zodiac killer’s first victim.”
“Right,” said Ripley, “and what’s the Zodiac got to do with this?”
“Cheryl King had a square cut out of her clothing. Just like the Zodiac did to one of his victims. And then he sent us this letter.” Ella grabbed the piece of paper off the desk. “Look at the slant of the text. He’s written it with his left hand. Just like the Zodiac did. In his twisted mind, it’s his way of marrying the two crimes together.”
Ripley gritted her teeth and glanced from the letter to the whiteboard. “That’s it? You got that from a letter and a piece of clothing?”
“No, because that’s just victim number one. Next up is Eliza Matthews, the Black Dahlia copycat crime. Obviously, the trappings of the murder are all there: bisection, mutilated lips, and he’d even dyed her hair black to look like Elizabeth Short.”
“Yeah. I agree he’s gone to full lengths to mimic that one.”
“The Black Dahlia murdered happened in 1947. Two years later, a serial killer terrorized Cleveland, Ohio. The Mad Butcher. He killed over 30 homeless women. Cut them into pieces. Severed their heads and dumped them in fields.”
“I remember reading about him. But how does the Butcher fit in here?”
“He washed some of his victims’ heads before disposing of them. Some kind of forensic countermeasure. It was the 1940s so he obviously wasn’t familiar with modern science, but what substance did he use to wash their hair?”
Ripley scratched her chin, clearly entertaining Ella’s mad theory. “Motor oil.”
“Exactly!” Ella exclaimed. “Who knows why he used motor oil for that, but the point is our killer has taken that concept but used it to dye the victim’s hair to look like Elizabeth Short. Again, he’s marrying the two together. One unsolved crime, one serial killer.”
“Okay, but why? What’s his point?”
“Because he wants to prove he knows who killed Cheri Jo Bates and Elizabeth Short. He thinks he’s smarter than everyone else. It’s a game of superiority. A game of death, as he put it.”
Ripley bit one of her nails. A rare sight. She’d always kept her nails immaculate. She really was becoming a different person, Ella thought.
“Okay, and murder number three? That doesn’t fit at all with what you’re saying.”
Ella grabbed her laptop and punched in a search query. “Because we were looking at it all wrong. Tobias was convicted of how many murders?”
