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Interrogation rooms came in two varieties, Ella thought. The ones they showed on television and the ones where real monsters confessed. Television's versions were sanitized, but the real ones, like Granville PD's Room B, where Adam Canton now sat, favored psychological warfare through banality. The room was dull and cold enough to drive anyone insane. Ella watched him through the glass partition.

Canton should have looked diminished in this setting. Most suspects did when stripped of context and isolated from their preferred environments. He sat with perfect posture, hands folded on the table before him, neither fidgeting nor performing the anxious rituals of the newly arrested. An hour since his arrest Can, ton hadn't requested a lawyer or asked for water or a bathroom trip.

In fact, he hadn’t said anything at all other than ‘finally, you found me.’

‘Tell me again what happened when you found him,’ Westfall said, joining Ella and Ripley at the observation window. He'd asked this three times already, as if repetition might reveal some detail they'd missed.

‘We searched his apartment, found his murder shrine, and when we came back downstairs, there he was. Standing at the altar like he was waiting for us.’

‘And he pretty much confessed?’

‘Confessed is a strong word,’ Ripley said from her position against the wall. ‘But…’

‘The guy’s got surveillance photos of a woman we found dead last night. And I mean tons of photos. One of my guys is there now. He counted two-hundred photos, going back at least a year.’

‘The evidence is there. So is the motive.’ Ripley nudged Ella. ‘What say you?’

Ella had been watching him through the glass. The man was a Stoic portrait. If this unsub was killing one victim for every sin, he was still four away from his target. Serial killers with a mission never gave up so easily.

‘I don’ t know.’

‘You don’t know?’ Westfall asked. ‘You were the one who brought this guy here.’

Ripley said, ‘She always does this.’

‘Does what?’

‘Finds a problem.’

‘Westfall, did your guys find any photos of Chester Grant or Evelyn Summers? Me and Ripley didn’t have time to search the whole room.’

‘No. Just Torres.’

‘Yeah, why is that?’ Ella asked. ‘Our unsub killed three people, not one. Where’s his research on the others?’

Ripley said, ‘Two possibilities. Either he threw all his research away after he killed them, or Grant and Summers were distractions. It’s easier to hide a motivation when there’s three bodies instead of one.’

‘But if that was the case, he’d have picked two random victims, not people who’d genuinely committed sins. He’d want to muddy the motivation to throw us off, but Torres fits a pattern.’

‘Or, instead of theorizing, you could just get in there and ask him. You can crack this guy.’

Ella didn’t doubt that she could. She just wanted all of her ammunition lined up neatly. ‘Alright. Keep an eye on him from out here. If the unis find any more evidence in Canton’s room, let me know right away.’

‘You want me in there with you?’ asked Ripley.

‘No. Canton will respond better to a lone woman. If me and Ripley go in there, he’ll think we’re ganging up on him and that’ll play into his persecution complex. If it’s just me, he’ll try and make me understand .’

Westfall looked lost. ‘Wow.’

‘Plus, Ripley might remind him of his mom.’

‘That’s a bad thing?’

‘I’ll bet my ass that his mom was an overbearing bitch.’

‘Something we’ve got in common,’ Ripley said. ‘Go on. Get in there and make sense of this.’

Ella took a moment to center herself, to shed the weight of everything that had happened since they'd landed in Granville. Three bodies, three brands, three messages, one prime suspect.

‘Going. Keep a close eye on him.’

***

‘Please state your name for the record,’ Ella said.

‘Mr. Adam Matthew Canton.’

‘And your job.’

‘Pastor for the First Light Assembly in West Granville.’

Ella studied him across the table. Canton was stockier than his old mugshot suggested, with the compact density of someone who'd done manual labor before finding God. His shoulders strained against his black shirt, not from muscle mass but from a certain barrel-chested solidity. His brown hair was cropped short in an economical cut that required minimal maintenance; the kind of haircut you'd get if style wasn't a consideration but neatness was paramount. The knuckles on his right hand were subtly misshapen, suggesting they'd been broken long ago and hadn't set quite right. A sinner's hands that had found salvation, or a saint's hands that had discovered violence? Sometimes the difference was merely a matter of perspective.

‘I’m just going to present you with the evidence. We found hundreds of pictures of Rebecca Torres in your apartment. Photos that someone had taken personally.’

‘Because I killed her,’ Canton said.

‘I never asked if you killed her. I just said we found photos of her in your apartment.’

The wrinkles in Canton’s forehead suddenly grew deeper. The expression that emerged wasn’t suspicion, but something akin to watching the recipient of your Christmas present toss it aside half-unwrapped.

‘Okay,’ he said.

Ella sat back and said nothing. Time to use Ripley's trick: create a vacuum and human nature will rush to fill it with words. Ella was curious how deep Adam Canton was willing to dig.

And dig he did.

‘You want to know why I killed her?’

Ella shrugged. ‘Not really, but I’m curious as to why you branded a T in her forehead.’

Canton smirked. ‘It wasn’t a T. It was a G.’

Dammit. She’d tried to catch him out. It had been crude bait, admittedly. ‘What’s the G stand for?’

‘You haven’t figured it out?’

‘Of course. I just want to hear it out of your mouth.’

‘Art should be interpretive, detective.’

‘Tell me about the church.’ Ella said. Time to swerve the conversation, because looking at Canton, a new theory had taken residence in her head.

'What about it? It's my home in more ways than one.'

‘You live there. Why’s that?’

‘Why wouldn’t I live there?’

‘Because most people don’t live in churches.’

Canton looked confused. ‘It’s just an apartment that’s in a church. Why does it matter?’

‘Torres was going to knock it down, wasn’t she?’

‘Not was. She is going to knock it down.’

‘And you own the church, so you must be getting some good compensation.’

Canton swallowed hard. Ella could see the need consuming him now – this frantic, desperate urge to explain that he was the one who killed Rebecca Torres.

‘I don’t own anything. I’m getting nothing. Torres deserved everything she got.’

‘And you protested hard, didn’t you? I heard you and Torres got into quite the fight.’

'Yes, we did.'

‘And that’s when you began your surveillance? After that?’

‘No. I’d been watching Torres for a long time. The bitch has been milking this town dry since she got into office. Did you know that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And it doesn’t bother you?’

‘A little bit, but I’m not from here,’ Ella said.

Canton shuddered. ‘You’re the police. You don’t live in the town you protect?’

Ella could almost hear Ripley’s frustration through the glass. She’d want to zone in on Canton’s confession, but Ella had other plans. ‘Didn’t you listen to anything we said back in the church? Me and my partner out there. We’re not the police. We’re the FBI.’

Canton looked out at Ripley. The first time his head had swiveled since they locked him in here. ‘Of course. Torres gets the special treatment even in death.’

‘No. It’s because Rebecca Torres is the third murder this week. You didn’t think we were investigating a single homicide, did you? ’

Canton’s jaw dislodged just enough to suggest his mental narrative had suddenly veered off its course. Watching him process her comment was like witnessing a computer forced to divide by zero. It was a system crash in human form.

'Yes. No. I didn't think that.' Canton's voice became stripped of its sermonizing cadence. Now, it sounded like what it truly was: a middle-aged man with delusions of divine mission suddenly confronting the abyss between his fantasy and reality.

‘Chester Grant. Evelyn Summers. Both branded on their foreheads, just like Rebecca Torres. Any of those names mean anything to you?’

In the years Ella had been interrogating killers, she'd developed a mental catalog of reactions, from sociopathic amusement to narcissistic pride to tearful remorse. Canton's expression belonged to none of these categories. This was the face of a man who'd jumped from a plane only to discover mid-fall that his parachute contained dirty laundry.

‘No comment.’

‘Don’t mess me around. Did you kill them or not?’

‘I said no comment. I want a lawyer.’

'Wise choice. Now, before I get out of here, I just want to tell you that once we find you guilty of these murders, we'll be pursuing the death penalty.'

Canton jolted like he’d been electrocuted. Ella reminded herself that lying to persons of interest was perfectly legal in 49 states.

‘Death penalty? We don’t have the death penalty in Ohio.’

'Yes, you do. It was just put on hold a few years ago.'

'And you have the power to get it back? Yeah, right.'

‘Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve secured a death sentence. And you see that woman on the other side of the glass out there?’ Ella pointed to Ripley. ‘That’s my partner. Top of the FBI food chain. You know how much influence she’s got? She could have this whole town burned down for a laugh. One click of her fingers and she can get you the needle.’

On the other side of the glass, Ripley paced the hallway with a cell phone to her ear. Canton stared at her, and Ella saw the yawning void of a man watching his identity disintegrate in real time. It was the spiritual equivalent of looking down to discover your legs had vanished .

Questions ran through her consciousness, but a sharp rap on the glass yanked her attention sideways. Through the observation window, Ripley's face had set into the expression Ella used to call ‘zero hour.’

Ella thought she'd never see that expression again, but here it was, the mask her partner wore only when worst-case scenarios stopped being theoretical and started breathing down their necks.

‘Excuse me,’ Ella told Canton. He was staring at his hands. A man experiencing the existential horror of discovering he was merely a supporting character in a story he thought he was writing.

The temperature difference between the interrogation room and the hallway slapped Ella's face as she stepped through the door. Ripley waited three paces away, positioned precisely where Canton couldn't read her lips through the observation window.

‘What?’ Ella asked.

‘Guess.’

She didn’t need to guess. She already knew.