Page 10

Ohio felt like someone had taken Virginia and twisted it sideways. The architecture was wrong, the trees were wrong, even the quality of winter light seemed off-kilter. Ella had never been to Ohio before, but the cab ride from the airport to the crime scene proved why they called this place America’s Rust Belt. Everything looked almost familiar, but not quite. Like a dream version of the East Coast. Granville itself seemed to be a college-town quaint with its historic shopfronts and endless coffee houses, but out here on the waterfront, wealth showed its face more openly.

She stood with Ripley outside Dr. Evelyn Summers' office, and the place challenged her expectations of what a therapist's office should look like. No sterile medical complex or professional suite here. Summers had worked out of what appeared to be a high-end log cabin. Odd choice, but Ella admired the innovation.

Two uniformed officers stood guard at the perimeter tape, looking bored but alert. One of them kept checking his watch, probably counting minutes until shift change. The other stared at Ripley with the wary recognition cops reserved for feds.

Ella showed her badge to the officers, who looked relieved to have someone else take point on this mess. The younger one - his nameplate read PETERSON – crackled his radio to life and summoned a higher-up. A minute later, a cruiser pulled up and spat out another officer from the driver’s seat. He approached the agents and extended his hand.

‘Feds? Appreciate you coming so quickly.’

Ella greeted him first. ‘Don’t mention it. You are?’

‘Ken Westfall, lead detective on this mess.’

The man was late thirties at most, Ella guessed. Short black hair with some premature grey at the temples. A scar bisected one of his eyebrows; the kind of mark that aid earned his detective's shield the hard way.

‘Agent Ella Dark. This is my partner…’ Ella paused, unsure what exactly her partner’s title was now. ‘Agent Mia Ripley. We’ve read the reports, seen the photos of your first victim. ’

‘You work fast, though I gotta say, when they told me FBI was sending profilers, I was expecting...’ He trailed off, probably realizing there was no good way to end that sentence.

‘Someone taller?’

‘That must be it,’ Westfall smirked. ‘We called you guys because we don’t really get serial crimes around here. We’re no stranger to shootings and stabbings, but we’re lucky that they’re usually one-offs. Crimes of passion. You know the types.’

‘That we do,’ Ripley said. ‘Any witnesses? CCTV?’

‘None of the above. No cameras inside or out.’

‘What about the other lodges?’

‘Negative. Dr. Summers’ cabin was the only business here. Everything else is residential.’

Ella asked, ‘Have forensics been?’

‘Been and gone. Still waiting on the coroner though.’

‘Still?’ Ripley checked her watch. ‘Body could have been cooling in there for 24 hours by now.’

'18 at most. Dr. Summers was with a patient until 5 PM yesterday evening. I checked her calendar.'

‘So the body’s still in there.’

‘Yup. I thought you might want to see it. In its natural environment and all that.’

This dance between preservation and progression was one of criminology's oldest dilemmas, like trying to study a butterfly without pinning its wings. Observing the body stayed in situ helped them understand the killer's mindset, but those same hours could erase crucial metabolic markers too. Death had its own timeline, so whatever the crime scene could tell them, it needed to speak quickly.

‘Let’s get inside,’ Ella said.

‘You’re the boss.’ Westfall ushered the two uniforms out of the way and grabbed the handle. ‘Door was unlocked when we got here. Our guy didn’t close up shop.’

Ella filed that information away. It was consistent with the blitz-attack approach in victim number one. If Ella had to guess, the killer waited for Summers to open the door and then made his move immediately.

Westfall opened the door, and death rushed to greet them. Not the sanitized death of funeral homes or graveyards, but death in its purest form; copper and rot and evacuated bowels mixing with lake breeze in a cocktail that hit the back of Ella's throat like a fist.

But beneath that familiar bouquet lurked something else. Something that triggered memories of her own recent encounter with fire: charred human flesh. The scent burrowed into her sinuses and made itself at home, settling in like an unwanted houseguest who planned to stay awhile.

Ella first caught the office’s pristine layout. Elegant desk flanked by framed certificates, two leather chairs, stress balls in primary colors. Fireplace. No couch, Ella noted. Modern practitioners had moved beyond that particular cliché.

Everything about the room screamed control. Order. The desperate need to make chaos conform to human will. But now those demons had broken loose and redecorated in shades of arterial spray.

Because center stage in this purposely-designed space, lay what remained of Dr. Evelyn Summers.

Her eyes were locked open, or what remained of them after eighteen hours of exposure had turned them into cloudy marbles. The slash across her throat gaped like a second mouth, deep enough to show the white gleam of vertebrae. Blood had pooled beneath her head and shoulders, soaking into the grain of the wood in hypnotic patterns. It reminded Ella of tree rings.

But it was her forehead that commanded attention.

Like Chester Grant, Summers wore the killer's brand, but where Grant had been marked with an ‘L’, Summers bore a 'P' seared into her forehead.

‘P,’ Ripley said. ‘Something tells me it doesn’t stand for psychologist.’

Ella spun to her partner. This was Ripley’s first corpse in five months, and Ella had to wonder how she was taking it. ‘You okay with this?’ Ella asked, but then suddenly felt foolish for asking such a question. You could take a hundred years off this job, you still never forgot what seeing a dead body was like.

‘Better than poor Miss Summers here. Identical approach to victim number one. Gash to the throat, branded on the forehead and left where she died. No theatrical staging. No excessive mutilation. No ligature marks.’

The dead woman's eyes stared at the ceiling, and Ella wondered what final image they'd captured before the lights went out. The killer's face? The red glow of the branding iron? Or just the familiar contours of her own office, suddenly made strange by the presence of violence?

‘Found exactly like this?’ Ella asked Westfall.

‘Yeah. Forensics worked around her, documented everything in situ.’

Ella circled the body. The slash across the throat was far from textbook. Clean entry, but slightly deeper on the left side. A right-handed killer, then. The blood spray on the desk matched the arterial pattern from Chester Grant's murder photos. Same technique, same killing stroke.

‘Westfall, gloves me,’ Ripley said.

'Here.' He passed the agents a pair of latex gloves each. Ella snapped hers on, then bent down to inspect the remains of Evelyn Summers. Ripley did the same.

‘Look at the flesh around this branding,’ said Ripley.

‘It’s black at the edges. So our killer held it in place for what, five seconds?’

‘Yeah. And it’s perfectly embedded in there. The branding iron didn’t slip.’

‘Meaning he branded her postmortem. An alive victim would have squirmed.’

‘We can rule out sadism. He wasn’t getting off to her pain. Death was the goal here.’ Ripley looked up and caught Ella’s eye.

‘So he’s on a mission. Eliminate them, leave his calling card behind.’

Westfall stepped closer. ‘What calling card?’

‘The branding is his calling card.’ Ella scanned her memory bank for Ohio serial killers for comparison. ‘Like how Herb Baumeister kept his victims’ clothing, or how the Mad Butcher decapitated his kills postmortem. It's not just about killing, it’s about addressing a specific fantasy.’

‘Is that what you guys call a signature?’

'No. Ritual.' Ella stood and faced the detective. 'A signature is what a killer does to get emotional satisfaction, but the ritual is the component that isn't necessary for the murder itself. The killer doesn't need to brand these victims. A cutthroat does the job just fine. The branding tells us why they're doing this.’

‘And why’s that?’

‘I don’t know yet, and first we need to figure out the how. ’ Ella glanced at the room and landed on the fireplace in the corner. She walked over to it. It was stone hearth, wrought iron grating. More decoration than utility in a therapist's office, but fully functional judging by the blackened-albeit- ornamental coals inside.

Ripley looked over. ‘Gas fireplace in a log cabin?’

‘Yeah, there are gas canisters outside,’ said Westfall. ‘I guess psyche degrees don’t always equal common sense.’

Ella pushed the knob, twisted it, and heard the gas seep through. A lighter sat beside the fireplace. 'Works just fine. This is how our unsub heated his branding iron. Which again means he knew there was a fireplace here.'

‘We need to check all of Miss Summers’ clients. Her cleaner. Anyone who might have stepped foot in this place before.’

Ella paced the room and let her mind slip into that liminal space between observation and intuition. On one end of the spectrum, a college professor. On the other, a psychologist. Both professionals, both educators in their own way. Both are marked with letters that might mean everything or nothing.

Her feet carried her in widening circles around Summers' body until she ended up behind the psychologist’s desk. Degrees and certificates crawled up the wall behind it, and the careful arrangement of everything suggested a mind who believed in the power of order, who thought the right word in the right moment could tame any demon.

Ella processed the connection. Words. Language. A literature professor and a psychologist. Two people who thought they could manipulate reality through language, and now this killer was distilling them down to single letters.

But then something caught Ella’s eye - a hardcover book on the corner of the desk.

Not the corner that would be closest to the client. The corner closest to where Summers must have sat.

Breaking the Cycle: New Approaches to Treating Narcissistic Personality Disorder by Dr. Evelyn Summers, PhD.

Ella picked it up, noting the pristine jacket, the professional headshot on the back that showed Summers as she'd been in life; helmet-hair perfect, smile calculated to the millimeter. The book jacket promised groundbreaking insights into the epidemic of narcissistic personality disorder in an age of social media and self-promotion.

‘Mia, Summers was an author. She wrote a book. ’

Ripley momentarily glanced up from the body. ‘And kept it right there on her desk? Talk about vanity.’

‘Yeah. I’m just wondering why she didn’t place it front and center, or frame the dust jacket.’

‘Maybe she never got round to it.’

Ella flipped through the pages, scanning chapter titles: The Narcissistic Ecosystem, Breaking Through the Mirror, When Self-Love Becomes Self-Harm. She stopped at a short passage in Chapter Three and read aloud.

‘When patients resist change, they construct elaborate fortifications around their dysfunction. The therapist's role is to systematically dismantle these defenses through direct confrontation. Only by breaking down these barriers can true healing begin.’ Ella looked over at Ripley. ‘What do you think of that?’

Ripley didn't even look up from examining the corpse's neck wound. ‘I think our friend knew some big words.’

‘You reckon?’

‘Max hates his high chair, but put a dinosaur toy on it and he jumps right into it.’ Ripley stood up and snapped off her latex gloves. ‘People don't change because you break them down. They change when you show them a better way to be. Dark, you notice something is missing here?’

Ella scanned the room. Dead woman, branded forehead, blood patterns. Everything was exactly as they'd found it. She thought back to the crime scene photos from victim number one.

Ripley was right. Something was missing.

‘He wrote on the walls in blood at Chester Grant’s house. No eye will see me. ’

‘Yeah, so where’s our message here? If our killer’s as mission-oriented as we think, no way would he skip the final act.’

Ella peered at the walls. They’d been stained a few shades darker than natural wood. ‘Blood wouldn’t show up on these walls, so he must have got creative.’ She moved to the walls, ran her gloved fingers over the textured surface. Nothing. She checked behind certificates, around the fireplace, under the desk. Her heart picked up speed with each empty search. The killer wouldn't break pattern. Not this early in his sequence. The message had to be here.

‘Think like him,’ Ripley said. ‘You've just killed someone. Branded them. Now you want to leave your manifesto. But the walls won't work.’

‘So I'd need another surface. Something that would show blood clearly.’ Ella's eyes swept the room again. Blank, bright surfaces. Places where red would stand out.

Then she spotted the book again.

The one that had been oddly positioned on the edge of the desk. The one she’d leafed through a minute ago.

The killer would have seen the book, understood its significance. What better place to leave his judgment than on Summers' own work?

Ella picked up the book again, but this time she wasn't interested in the contents. She was thinking like the killer now, seeing through his eyes. He'd want the biggest blank space possible. Something clean, something white.

Not the pages. Too small, too cramped.

The dust jacket. No - beneath it.

Ella peeled the dust jacket back slowly. The white cardboard emerged and there, in messy strokes of rusty brown, was another message.

‘NO ONE SEES ME.’