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Ella had been in a thousand precincts over the years, and they all seemed to follow the same template. However, the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office added its own flourish to the format: suffocating heat.

Sheriff Bauer steered them through the main artery of the station.

Most deputies kept their heads down as she and Ripley passed by, but a few of them regarded the agents with flat curiosity.

They were temporary oddities in this ecosystem.

One officer gave them a brief nod before turning back to his monitor.

‘This should do. Quieter back here,’ Bauer said.

‘Thanks, Sheriff,’ Ella replied. She and Ripley began the setup ritual while Bauer stood in the doorway.

‘One of my guys just got done interviewing Sullivan’s neighbors,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t find out much about the guy. He kept to himself, quite dramatically.’

Ripley plugged in her laptop and said, ‘Yeah, sounds like Frank.’

‘The guy who found the cat said Frank sometimes had one of his old pals over, maybe once a month. He’s not sure, but he thinks it was one of Frank’s old cop buddies.’

‘Any name? Description?’

‘No name, but he said the guy was about Frank’s age, bald, drove a blue Lexus.’

With everything set up, Ella slapped down the police report she’d found in Frank’s safe.

The weight of it felt different now, outside the context of Frank’s house.

She hadn’t yet dissected the thing from start to finish, but the pictures told more than words ever could.

Jennifer Marlowe, a young woman from Palm Harbor – this very town – enucleated and posed like a human mannequin in her own front room.

Now, Frank Sullivan had endured the same fate.

Two instances of stones-in-eyes, 48 years apart.

‘We’ll note it down. Did they find anything else?’

‘Nothing noteworthy, but I’ll give you write-ups as soon as they land on my desk.’ Bauer gestured to the police report Ella had taken from Frank’s safe. She’d already given Bauer the details. ‘Anything you want us to do with that thing?’

‘Would you have a copy of this report on file?’

‘Doubt it. The Pinellas Office has only been here since 2001. Before that, Palm Harbor P.D. were in charge of this town. When they closed down, all of their files were transferred to Florida State.’

‘We’ll look into hunting down the originals,’ Ella replied, though she knew the Jennifer Marlowe file in front of her was likely more complete than anything gathering dust in a state archive.

She hadn’t been through the whole folder, but it looked much thicker than any police report she’d seen in her life.

She doubted it was a symptom of the times.

More like a symptom of Frank Sullivan’s obsession.

Bauer lingered in the doorway. His body language suggested a man who wanted to help but had exhausted his immediate resources. ‘I’ll let you ladies get settled. Anything else you need, just holler. Dispatch can sort you out with the basics.’

‘Thanks, Sheriff,’ Ripley said.

‘I didn’t know Frank, but… I guess he was one of us. Badge is thicker than water sometimes.’

With that pearl of cop philosophy, Bauer disappeared into the hallway and pulled the door shut behind him. The lack of airflow quickly became apparent, and the heat engulfed Ella. She went over to the thermostat.

‘Never thought I’d need air conditioning in December.’

‘It’s a different world out here.’

Ella scrolled through the options but found nothing that suggested she could artificially cool this place down. ‘Jesus, this is heating-only.’

‘Then we have no choice but to get naked.’

‘You first.’

Ripley took off her jacket, boots and pulled her pants up to her knees.

‘Oh, you were being serious.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You gonna take your socks off too?’

Ripley tied her hair back in a ponytail. ‘Would that bother you?’

‘A little bit.’ Ella quickly made peace with the overbearing heat. Worst case scenario she could run her head under the cold tap. ‘So, where do you want to start?’

‘I’m just the consultant, Dark. Where do you want to start?’

Ella’s stomach grumbled, then she realized her throat was desert-dry. ‘First I could use some Coke, then we need to find people who’d spoken to Frank recently. Do you remember your last conversation with him?’

Ripley threw her boots back on. ‘Yup. On the phone, a few months after he retired. We promised to keep in touch, but, well…’

‘Life got in the way.’

‘Didn’t it just. I’ll go stock up on drinks. You start making some headway with… whatever we’ve got.’

‘The Jennifer Marlowe file. There’s a reason he had this report in a safe with his badge number as the combination. There’s a reason this file predicted his murder.’

***

One hour later, Ella had lost herself to the rhythm of a dead man’s 50-year-old investigation. The coffee Ripley had brought before disappearing to ‘follow up on something’ sat half-empty beside her, and the heat in the room had only worsened. But Ella didn’t care, because she was too lost in 1976.

The official report laid out the skeleton:

VICTIM: Jennifer Marlowe, white female, 26 years of age .

ADDRESS: 214 Dolphin Lane, Palm Harbor, FL .

OCCUPATION: Real estate agent, Coastal Properties.

TOD: Between 8PM and 12AM, January 14, 1976 .

COD: Single gunshot wound to abdomen .

RESPONDING OFFICER: Det. Frank Sullivan, Palm Harbor PD.

Then came the photos. Grainy, third-generation copies.

They somehow made the horror more vivid than modern HD shots ever could.

The human brain filled in the blanks, colored the wounds, imagined the smell.

Jennifer Marlowe sat unnaturally upright on her floral-patterned sofa, blonde hair perfectly styled, wearing a modest blue dress.

Blood had soaked through the fabric across her stomach.

Those white stones stared out from her face like alien eggs.

Ella then checked the address online. Jennifer Marlowe’s house was only ten miles from Frank Sullivan’s retirement pad.

Which meant that even after working and presumably living in Washington D.C.

for the better part of thirty years, Frank still couldn’t resist the gravitational pull of this unsolved case.

Even these initial pages radiated Frank’s fixation.

This wasn’t standard procedure, keeping a decades-old file locked away like this.

Cops sometimes kept souvenirs of things that were important to them, but given Frank’s desecration of this police report – words circled, things underlined, notes written in the margins – this was far from a souvenir.

Ella turned the page. The official typewritten text continued, detailing the scene, the initial canvass, the ME’s preliminary findings. But Frank’s presence asserted itself.

Entry point: Rear kitchen door. Lock picked.

Beside this, Frank had drawn a crude diagram of a tumbler lock, then scrawled: Simple pin staging indicates planning, control.

Motivation? Sexual element unclear. No overt assault per ME.

Mutilation focused solely on eyes. Why? Symbolic.

Sight = witness? Or sight = judgment? Does killer feel watched? Judged? By her? By God?

Ella paused. Quite fascinating. Frank was thinking like a profiler before profilers were even a thing. He was trying to crawl inside the killer’s head via the limited tools and understanding of the mid-seventies.

Another page detailed dead ends: Checked missing persons reports tri-county area 6 months prior.

No obvious links. Canvassed local hardware stores, garden centers re: alabaster stones.

No leads. Staff turnover, poor record keeping.

Transient killer? Passing through? Doesn’t feel right.

Staging feels localized. Or killer IS local, but lives carefully. Blends in. No priors?

One page contained only a series of questions:

Who benefits?

Who knew her schedule?

Who knew the house layout?

Who hated her enough?

WHO PUT STONES IN HER EYES?

Reading these private thoughts felt like handling Frank’s exposed nerves.

It was a methodical detective battling the limitations of evidence, the nascent profiler wrestling with a psychology he couldn’t quite grasp, and underlying it all, the simple human frustration of not knowing why .

And this raw, handwritten dissection revealed more about Frank Sullivan than any official commendation ever could.

There were pages and pages like this. Theories built up, torn down.

Suspect lists compiled, annotated, viciously crossed out.

Timelines constructed, deconstructed. Diagrams of the house, the body, the stones.

It went on and on in a loop of unresolved questions.

Ella started to feel a prickle of unease.

Ripley had insisted Frank was sharp to the end.

But looking at this sheer volume of obsessive revisiting – could Ripley have been wrong?

This didn’t seem like the work of a sharp mind.

It felt like the work of one grinding itself down, trapped in an endless, fifty-year feedback loop.

The discomfort of witnessing this detective’s psychological unravelling momentarily blindsided her, and she nearly missed it. Near the end of the stack, she found a note dated just six weeks ago. Frank’s handwriting had become steadier, as if he’d suddenly found clarity.

Met with Cole today (10/28). Tried to discuss Marlowe case again. Claims he ‘can’t recall details’ about initial canvas. LIES. The man remembers what he ate for breakfast thirty years ago. What is Ramsey hiding?? He saw what I saw. If he’s lying now, what was he lying about then?

Ella stared at the name. Met with Cole today. What is Ramsey hiding?

Ramsey Cole? Who was that? The name had cropped up earlier, during the police report. Ella flipped back and scanned until she found the name again.

There it was, right in the preliminary notes. Ramsey Cole had been the second officer on the scene of Jennifer Marlowe’s murder.

The door swung open and brought a merciful waft of cooler air. The exposure to the slightly cooler hallway hadn’t done much; Ripley still looked flushed.

‘Find anything in Frank’s file?’ she asked.

Ella glanced back at the disorganized piles of Frank’s obsessive documentation.

The man had clearly been consumed by this case, possibly to the point of compromised judgment.

Ella’s instinct was to tell Ripley everything, but her partner was already struggling with her mentor’s death.

Adding ‘possible mental decline’ to the mix right now felt cruel.

Maybe later. For now, the lead was the thing.

‘Maybe. Does the name Ramsey Cole mean anything to you?’

‘No. Should it?’

‘According to his notes, he was the responder on the Marlowe scene.’ Ella tapped the most recent entry. ‘And still in contact with Frank right up until the end. Frank met with him six weeks ago, and he thinks he’s hiding something.’

Ripley took a closer look. The expression that formed suggested her thoughts about Frank’s mental state mirrored her own.

‘Let me run the name,’ Ripley said. She opened up her laptop and hammered away. ‘Got him. Ramsey Cole. 78. Retired Palm Harbor PD, 1999. Lives in Clearwater.’

‘Anything else on him?’

‘Nothing notable, but… vehicle registration shows a 2015 Lexus, blue.’

‘Then it’s the guy who Frank was meeting with at his house.’

Ripley snapped her laptop shut. ‘I don’t know what to think, but I know we need to pay this Cole guy a visit.’