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As it turned out, extracting a man pinned to a chair with industrial nails proved quite difficult without causing further damage to the body.

The Medical Examiner had explained how puncture vector integrity needed to be preserved for wound track reconstruction , so the end result was that Thomas Webb had to be taken to the morgue still affixed to his chair.

Ella stood at the window and watched the strange procession. The coroners carried Webb in his chair like some macabre king on a throne. It was easily the weirdest visual she’d seen in the past few days, and she’d seen a man with stones in his eyes and a headless woman in a pond.

She turned away from the window and basked in her new solitude. Sheriff Bauer had ordered his deputies to secure the perimeter but had granted Ella unrestricted access to the scene. The techs had finished their preliminary sweep, so she had the place to herself for the next hour.

Empty houses spoke if you knew how to listen. Ella had always believed this, even before her FBI training formalized the process. Houses absorbed the residue of their occupants, and Ella intended to hear Thomas Webb’s story in full.

She started in the office where death had visited.

The blood had already begun to oxidize, but beyond that, the room suggested Thomas Webb was a man of order.

His book were arranged by subject rather than author, and they bled from fiction to non-fiction to an entire shelf on the subject of juggling.

Unexpected hobby for a retired homicide detective, but cops were often more complicated than people gave them credit for.

There was a calendar on his wall marked with past appointments in handwriting so neat it almost looked typeset.

The desk drawers contained receipts dating back three years.

The bottom drawer held service medals from Webb’s police days.

Distinguished Service. Bravery. Twenty-Five Years of Service.

Two distinct nail holes marked the floor where his feet had been secured.

She worked her way through the living room next.

A decent TV, not ostentatious. Cable box, DVD player with a small collection of classics.

Sports documentaries and WWII films dominated his collection.

A sturdy armchair angled precisely toward the screen.

Beside the chair was a table with a series of framed photos.

Ella flipped through them, tracking Thomas Webb’s transformation from sharp-eyed rookie to weathered, white-haired veteran.

Sarah appeared throughout; pig-tailed schoolgirl, sullen teenager, proud college graduate.

In every photograph, Webb stood tall, as if perpetually on duty.

Noticeably absent were significant others. Webb’s wife appeared in the earliest photos but vanished around the time Sarah reached adolescence. If there had been anyone since, they hadn’t merited documentation.

Ella moved to the master bedroom next, careful to avoid the evidence markers that dotted the hallway.

The bed was made with military corners, something Ella herself wished she’d mastered.

Thomas had one pillow centered perfectly.

Not two pushed together, not one tossed aside.

This was a man who’d adapted to sleeping alone.

The closet held clothes organized by type, then color, then formality.

Even his socks were lined up like soldiers.

The nightstand yielded prescription bottles.

Metoprolol for hypertension, atorvastatin for cholesterol.

The pharmacological autobiography of a man in his seventies.

The drawer contained reading glasses, a half-empty pack of throat lozenges, and a worn paperback of Raymond Chandler’s ‘The Long Goodbye.’

Nothing jumped out as irregular. Nothing explained why someone would crucify Thomas Webb to his office chair.

The bathroom cabinet revealed more of the same; the mundane medical arsenal of aging. Antacids. Fiber supplements. Hemorrhoid cream. The unglamorous reality that awaited all of them, assuming they were lucky enough to live that long.

Next were the guest bedrooms. One was a home gym, the other was Sarah’s childhood bedroom, though it had been sanitized of personality. It had been transformed into the neutral space that appears in home decorating magazines but where no one actually lived.

At last, the kitchen drew her. Ella had already been through this room briefly when forensics had first arrived on the scene, but she thought it was best to give it a thorough dissection.

The place still smelled of chicken and herbs, and the timer on the oven now told the actual time rather than the elapsed cooking time.

8:02 PM. There was an empty wine glass on the side.

No dirty dishes in the sink. No food scraps in the disposal.

Ella opened the refrigerator and found it well-stocked. A six-pack of beer with one missing. A lasagna with a note taped to it: ‘From Marge, heat at 350° for 40 min.’ Thomas Webb had friends who cared about him, who would now mourn him.

She closed the fridge and turned her attention to the kitchen counter. A stack of mail sat near the coffee maker. Bills. Advertisements. A community newsletter. A reminder card from a dentist. The ordinary paper trail of an ordinary life.

Except for the large manila envelope that lay partially opened at the bottom of the stack.

Its size alone made it stand out. Legal-sized, cream-colored, bearing the return address of Talisman House Publishing in the upper left corner.

‘Talisman Publishing,’ Ella said aloud.

Ella lifted it carefully, noting its heft. Already unsealed, its contents partially protruding, as if Webb had opened it and then set it aside, perhaps interrupted by the arrival of his killer. Or perhaps by the preparation of his final meal.

She carefully extracted the contents. A thick stack of papers bound with a metal clip fell out.

The cover page read ‘PUBLISHING AGREEMENT’ in authoritative serif font. Below that, in slightly smaller text: ‘BETWEEN TALISMAN HOUSE PUBLISHING (Publisher) AND THOMAS WEBB (Author).’

A publishing contract? Did Sarah know about this? And if she did, why didn’t she mention it? It seemed odd to Ella that Sarah wouldn’t know about this, especially as she’d said at the library that she and her dad bonded over true crime stories.

Which asked a further question: if Sarah Webb knew her dad was looking into a cold case, why didn’t she get him protection? Purely because he wasn’t a member of the White Whale Group?

It didn’t make sense.

Ella’s pulse accelerated as she flipped to the next page.

AGREEMENT made this 14th day of December, 2024, between TALISMAN LITERARY PRESS, INC. (hereinafter referred to as ‘the Publisher’) and THOMAS WEBB (hereinafter referred to as ‘the Author’) with respect to a work tentatively entitled ‘STIGMATA: THE CRUCIFIXION MURDER OF 1986’ (the ‘Work’)...

Ella felt the air leave her lungs in a rush. The Crucifixion Murder of 1986.

The very case whose methodology had been used to kill him.

She rifled through the rest of the contract, and found a sticky note attached to the signature page: Final manuscript due January 15. Call me with any questions - Malcolm .

At the bottom of the contract, a handwritten phone number.

Ella couldn’t dial fast enough.