Page 9

First class felt wrong. Like putting fresh paint on a haunted house. Ella sat across from Ripley, a fold-out table between them, trying to reconcile the woman before her with the partner she'd known. Five months of retirement had changed things. The Ripley she remembered wouldn't be caught dead in a cream sweater, wouldn't order sparkling water instead of coffee, wouldn't be thumbing through a gardening magazine instead of a case file while they flew towards another dead body.

‘You're staring,’ Ripley said without looking up.

‘Just trying to figure out why you're really here.’

‘Already told you. Someone left your DNA on my doorstep.’

‘No.’ Ella leaned forward. ‘Why are you here ? In first class, flying to Ohio with your supposed-to-be-retired ass when you should be home with your grandson.’

Ripley closed the file and met Ella's gaze. ‘Guess.’

‘Either you missed this crap, or Edis asked you to keep an eye on me.’

‘Bingo, but I actually told Edis I wasn’t going to keep an eye on you. You’re not guilty of anything, and we all know it.’

‘Thanks.’

Ripley leaned in. ‘Don’t think for a second that he really believes you killed two of your friends. It was a knee-jerk on his part. A moment of desperation. We’ve all had them. But anyway, enough of that, you going to tell me what you think of this case or not?’

The plane banked right and knifed through a wall of clouds. Sunlight strobed through the cabin, turned Ella's coffee the color of weak blood. Ella opened the manila folder in front of her, and just like that, the world shifted into familiar territory. She was transported, her mind slipping free of the confines of metal and gravity to roam the blood-spattered contours of a dead man's living room.

Inside the folder were twelve crime scene photographs and two police reports .

The first photo showed a man sprawled on a beige carpet. Blood had sprayed up the wall behind him in an arc that suggested arterial spray. His eyes were open, fixed on whatever final horror had filled his vision. But it wasn't the dead-fish stare or the crimson collar around his neck that seized Ella's attention.

It was the letter branded into his forehead.

A perfect capital L, burned deep enough to blacken the flesh. The kind of mark that spoke of purpose or message or mission.

This was victim number one. Chester Grant, according to the preliminary report. Age 50, tenured professor of Medieval Literature at Denison University. Divorced last year. He was found by his cleaning lady at 8:47 AM on a Tuesday morning, already gone cold on his living room floor.

‘See something interesting?’ Ripley asked.

Here, in the space between evidence and intuition, Ella felt oddly at ease. The usual background chatter of doubts and second guesses quieted, replaced by a crystalline clarity. It was a world of violence and tragedy, yes, but also one of patterns and logic, where every sin had its consequence and every killer, no matter how smart, left a trail begging to be unraveled.

‘I see something alright. This guy, Chester Grant, throat slit and skin branded.’

‘Like a cow.’

‘Yeah. What’s the message here?’

‘You tell me,’ Ripley said.

Ella tore her gaze from the photos. ‘Maybe you ought to tell me this time. Prove that five months off hasn’t dulled your edge.’

‘Well, I can see his front door in this first photo. A slit throat means instant death, instant dominion. Put those two elements together and chances are this killer jumped him the moment he answered his front door.’

‘Blitz attack,’ Ella said.

‘Yup. So our killer’s on the weaker side. Cutting the throat is the easiest way to kill someone without a fight.’

‘He doesn’t have the social skills to befriend his victims either. He has to get in and out.’

Ripley flipped through the photos. ‘I’m not sure about getting out. Have you seen what he left at the scene? ’

Ella went through each photo one by one. Close-ups of the wounds and blood spatter and branding on the forehead. Then she came to a wide-angle shot of the whole room. At first glance, it showed exactly what she expected - a dead middle-aged gentleman with his blood painting abstractions up the cream wallpaper.

But as her eyes adjusted to the carnage, Ella noticed something else.

A strange pattern on the wall behind the corpse. A series of dark streaks and splatters that didn't quite match the arterial spray everywhere else.

She squinted and the marks resolved into letters.

‘NO EYE WILL SEE ME.’

The killer had left a message behind. And given the rust-brown color of the letters, the ink could only have come from one source.

‘Jesus, he wrote a message in blood.’

‘Yup,’ Ripley said. ‘No eye will see me. Any idea what that means?’

‘Sounds Shakespearian.’

‘Well, Macbeth here wasn’t in any hurry to leave the scene, so he’s got an air of confidence about him, which is a contrast to his killing method. So we’re looking at someone who hasn’t figured themselves out yet.’

Ella turned the phrase over in her head. A taunt? A challenge? The killer’s declaration of his own invincibility? She couldn’t place it.

‘No signs of sexual assault. No other bruises or lacerations, so sadism and lust killing is out of the question.’

Ripley said, ‘Depends at what point he branded this guy’s forehead. If the vic was still alive, then… have you ever been burned, Dark?’

Ella had done a good job of ignoring the pain in her legs for the past twelve hours. Ripley's comment brought it all back. Ella caught her partner's stare, and her expression said that Ripley already knew the answer. 'Yes, I have.'

‘It’s torture. Let’s hope for Chester’s sake he was dead when it happened.’

‘Who brings a branding iron to a murder scene? And how did he heat it up?’

Ripley threw a photograph down on the table. ‘Look in the background. Victim had a fireplace.’

‘What if he didn’t? This killer’s a ritualist, so the killing is secondary. He wouldn’t risk not carrying out his ritual.’

‘So what does that suggest?’

‘That he knew Chester Grant had a fireplace in his house.’

‘Put it in the profile. What about victim number two?’

Ella peeled back the first report to reveal a thinner one beneath it. Not much to this one. Just a couple sheets of preliminary findings with none of the glossy documentation that told the real story.

‘Second victim just came in this morning,’ she said. ‘No photos yet.’

‘Still being processed, I'd imagine. They probably rushed just to get us this prelim.’

Ella scanned the details. ‘Dr. Evelyn Summers. Psychologist with a private practice. Same cause of death – slit throat. The mailman saw her body through the window.’

‘College professor and a psychologist. Both professionals, both in positions of authority, both killed in their own spaces. I love it when a pattern emerges.’

‘Yeah, but the victimology is all over the place. Two kills, two different genders. That’s rare.’

‘Without a sexual component, victim consistencies go out of the window. I’ll bet my pension that these vics aren’t surrogates. They pissed our killer off and now he’s getting his own back.’

Ella watched clouds roll past out of the window. Two hours and counting until they hit Ohio, and she had a lot to think about before she got there.

But before that, Ella wanted to probe a little.

‘Speaking of your pension, how’s that working out for you?’

Ripley's lips curved into something adjacent to a smile. ‘Best thing about being shot at for thirty years. That and healthcare. How else could I afford these reading glasses?’

‘How have things been since Martin?’

The name hung between them like a loaded gun. Martin had been Ripley's ex-lover, but he'd had some secrets of his own. Ripley drummed her fingers on the armrest and then twitched like a pianist who'd hit the wrong note.

‘You ever get blood under your fingernails, Dark?’

‘All the time.’

‘Hard to scrape off, isn’t it?’

Ella saw beyond the metaphor. ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have…’

‘Gardening helps. Dig deep enough and you find all sorts of things. Worms, grubs, bones. The earth swallows up everything eventually.’

Ella recognized the door closing. Not slammed, but firmly shut nonetheless. Ripley had buried the memory just like they’d buried her ex.

‘And retirement? Really treating you that well?’

‘It’s… different. Some days I wake up wondering what state I’m in, then I remember the only thing waiting for me is my garden and Max's sensory classes.’

‘Max? Your grandson?’

‘Yup. Adorable little thing. Chubbiest legs you’ve ever seen. Cheeks like a hamster. No idea how something that cute is related to me.’ Ripley pulled out her phone and showed Ella her background. It was a smiling young boy holding a balloon in one hand and a toy dinosaur in the other. Ella might have made peace with her childless status, but she wasn’t immune to the ovary-twitching sight of a cute baby. Here was a reminder that life didn't just end. It also created tiny humans with toys and balloons clutched in pudgy fingers.

‘He’s a cutie. How old?’

‘Just turned one. He calls me Riprip.’

‘It suits you.’

‘Thanks. How have things been with that partner of yours? Hawkins, is it?’

‘Yeah, Luca. He’s not my partner in the field anymore. He’s my… partner.’

‘No kidding?’

‘No kidding. I know you shouldn’t, y’know…’

‘Shit where you eat.’

‘Yeah,’ Ella said. ‘But this is different. He gets it.’

‘Doesn’t hurt that he was a looker too. You worked many cases together?’

‘A few, but the case we just closed was our last one. It gets messy, being in the field and at home together. Too many… factors.’

Ripley said, ‘I can only imagine. Where’s he now? Did you tell him to get out of D.C.?’

‘Yeah. He’s going back to Massachusetts. Your family aren’t staying in D.C., are they?’

‘No. Edis is sending them somewhere safe.’

‘It’s the least he can do.’ Ella said. ‘If your son lives in your house now, where do you live?’

‘Upperville. About ten miles away from my old place.’

‘Downsized?’

‘Yeah. Smaller place. No point having five bedrooms when four of them are empty.’

Ella stared out the window as she cataloged the pieces of this strange new reality. Here she was, miles above the earth, sitting across from a version of Ripley she'd never seen before. Not the sharp-suited agent she'd been five months ago, but this softer version with her gardening magazines and grandson photos. And yet, underneath that cream sweater, Ella had no doubt the predator still lurked. She still knew exactly how to dissect a crime scene and read the language of violence.

‘When we land,’ Ripley said, ‘we hit the Summers crime scene first. Fresh kills talk louder than cold ones.’

Just like that, the years peeled away. They could have been on any one of their hundred cases together, piecing together the puzzle of human darkness at thirty thousand feet.

‘Nothing's changed, has it?’ Ella asked.

‘What do you mean?’

Ella gestured to the table, the photos, the police reports. ‘This. Us. The way we work.’

‘Some things don't change, Dark. Some partnerships are written in blood.’

The irony of the phrase wasn’t lost on her. Somewhere in Ohio, a killer was writing messages in exactly that medium. Somewhere in D.C., state police were boxing up evidence of murders signed with Ella's DNA. And here they were, the dream team, back together for one more dance with darkness. Ella just hoped they remembered all the steps.