Page 5

Ella had interrogated serial killers across tables narrower than the space between her and Edis in the living room, yet this still felt more uncomfortable.

The director sat in the middle of the sofa.

Two brown folders were piled beside him.

It was a strange sight, seeing the man outside of his office.

FBI directors belonged behind mahogany desks with American flags in the corner, not in plush safe houses with pirate ships out back.

It reminded Ella of when you’d see your teacher at the grocery store as a kid.

He was holding off his explanation for coming until Ripley had done her grandmotherly duties.

‘You haven’t come to serve an eviction notice, have you?’ Ella said finally.

Edis’s face twitched. It was the closest thing to a smile his facial muscles allowed these days. ‘If only it were that simple.’

Ella’s brain kept circling back to the same thought: directors didn’t do house calls. They sent minions. They dispatched agents. They sure as hell didn’t show up unannounced at safe houses on Monday mornings unless something had gone catastrophically wrong.

‘Thanks for putting all of my contacts on watch,’ Ella said.

‘36 people,’ said Edis. ‘Cops are still in position. No incidents in a week.’

The way he said ‘no incidents’ made Ella think of hospitals. How they used the same tone when things were about to get much worse. ‘Have you got the case under Bureau jurisdiction?’

‘Still working on it. Should be cleared within a few days.’

‘I appreciate it.’

‘Agent Hawkins is also cleared to return to duty. I’ve ordered Marshall to give him the news.’

Ella’s chest tightened. She didn’t want Luca back. Not yet. He was safer in Massachusetts, where a killer couldn’t find him so easily.

‘Cleared so soon?’

‘Yes. It was a formality. You know how these things work. Is that a problem?’

‘No, it’s just…’ Ella began, then stopped.

How to explain that she wanted him back and away simultaneously?

That missing him had carved a hollow space inside her that nothing else could fill, but that hollow space was preferable to finding him with his lips stitched together?

‘Is that why you came? To tell me about Luca? You could have emailed.’

Edis opened his mouth to speak but footsteps announced Ripley’s return. She had a baby monitor in one hand. ‘Max is down for about an hour. Will, what are you doing here?’

‘Take a seat, Mia. I’ve got some bad news.’

Ripley sat in a recliner chair and then cracked her neck. ‘I’m too old for bad news, Will.’

‘Not quite.’ Edis handed out his folders to Ella and Ripley. Ella took hers but didn’t open it. Judging by Edis’s body language, this seemed to be more about Ripley than her. It was only fair Ripley could have the honors of being the first to see what was in the file.

Ripley turned to the first page. Her breath seemed to hitch. ‘Frank Sullivan? The Frank Sullivan?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ Edis said. ‘Responders discovered him dead at his home last night.’

Ella felt like an intruder on some private grief.

The name Frank Sullivan meant nothing to her, but Ripley’s reaction registered like seismic activity on her partner’s typically unreadable face.

Subtle shifts – pupils dilating, jaw muscles tightening, the slight forward lean of her shoulders.

Whatever this was, it had punctured Ripley’s heart.

Ella flipped open her own folder and found a standard police report, the kind she’d seen thousands of times, with its clinical language attempting to quantify the unquantifiable.

Victim: Frank Sullivan, 73

Location: Palm Harbor, Florida.

Cause of death: single GSW to the abdomen.

Time of death: between 10PM and 1AM.

Defensive wounds: none.

Ella looked up, aware of her own ignorance. ‘I’m sorry, but who’s Frank Sullivan?’

Ripley’s expression bordered on disappointment. Like her star pupil had finally gotten a question wrong.

‘Frank was part of the original profiling crew back in the eighties. He pioneered behavioral science back when everyone else thought it was voodoo. He was one of the first agents to catch a suspect through profiling alone.’

‘Was he?’

‘Chicago Strangler, 1982. Frank profiled the unsub as a teacher. He noticed that all the victims had the same type of callus on their right thumb. It turned out they all played string instruments at the local university. Found the killer giving cello lessons two weeks later. Frank could read a suspect like a newspaper.’

‘Ah, yeah. I know that case.’ Ella clicked her fingers, then turned back to the report in her lap. ‘That’s our victim?’

‘Yes. Frank retired from the Bureau twenty years ago. Before my time, but he used to give seminars back when he was in good health. Mia, you knew him well, correct?’

The muscles in Ripley’s face performed a complicated dance. Not grief exactly, but something deeper and harder to categorize. It was a blend of emotions that had no name in any language Ella knew.

‘I was one of Frank’s last students before he retired. Then one day he was just gone. No big farewell or anything. Classic Frank.’

Now Ella understood where Ripley had gotten her own retirement protocol from. She too had vanished with merely the briefest of goodbyes.

‘Frank moved to Florida right after leaving the Bureau. He’s been there ever since.’

‘And now he’s dead.’ Ripley spat the words, like she was putting herself out of her misery.

Edis watched Ripley with the careful attention of someone gauging how much weight a bridge could bear before breaking, then said, ‘But that’s not all. Please turn to the crime scene photos. These came in from Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office an hour ago.’

Ella turned the page and felt the air vacate her lungs.

Frank Sullivan sat dead in his recliner, looking for all the world like he’d fallen asleep watching late-night TV - except for the blood blooming across his stomach and his alien-like, dead-eyed stare.

Whatever those eyes were, they didn’t belong in a human face.

Then Ella realized exactly what she was staring at.

Two perfectly round white stones stared at the camera like gleaming marbles, nestled in the sockets where Sullivan’s eyes had been.

‘What the f….’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Ripley breathed. The words came out mangled, like they’d caught in her throat on the way up.

Ella glanced over and saw something she’d never seen before - pure revulsion carved into her partner’s features.

Ripley, who could crack jokes over dismembered bodies.

Ripley, who ate lunch over autopsy photos.

This had cracked her professional veneer like a hammer through glass.

‘I’m sorry,’ Edis said. ‘It’s awful.’

‘They took his eyes.’

The effect was worse than empty sockets would have been.

Those fake eyes gave Sullivan the appearance of perpetual, uncomprehending shock.

The killer had taken Frank’s real eyes - the ones that had caught serial killers based on observations, the ones that had taught a generation of agents how to truly see people - and replaced them with these sterile imposters.

Ella quickly scanned the police report and found the info she needed. Offender evacuated victim’s eye sockets and inserted white alabaster stones (diameter of approx. 1 inch) in place.

‘White stones,’ Ella said. Something snagged in the back of her mind, like a fishhook hitting the base of a muddy river.

She’d seen this signature before.

Maybe she’d encountered it during one of her research deep dives, perhaps during her Academy days. A footnote in a textbook, a passing reference in a lecture. The seventies? A murder with a stones-in-eyes finale.

Ripley rifled through the crime scene photos then asked, ‘Will, is this an isolated case?’

‘Yes. Frank is the only victim, but given his connection to the Bureau, I feel it’s best if we take over. The Sheriff’s Office have already invited us in.’

‘Who else knows about this?’

‘No one. And I want to keep it that way. Hence the home visit.’

Ella had lost herself in the photographs.

Judging by the close-ups, Frank Sullivan had been killed with a bullet to the stomach.

The trail of blood from the middle of the living room to his chair suggested the killer had dragged him into position and staged him.

There was minimal blood around the eye sockets, just the inevitable crusty skin that came with enucleation, which meant that all ocular mutilation had taken place post-mortem. A small mercy.

And it was all oddly familiar.

‘This isn’t new,’ Ella said.

Ripley looked up sharply. ‘What?’

‘The white stones. There was a case. A long time ago.’ Ella’s voice trailed off as she sifted through mental archives.

For once, her perfect memory was no help.

She hadn’t committed the specifics to long-term storage, just caught a glimpse of them in passing.

Unfortunately, her memory didn’t work like a surveillance camera.

It was a biological algorithm that prioritized based on attention, emotion, and conscious focus.

Cases she worked directly burned themselves into her neural pathways, but cases she’d merely studied existed more in a hierarchy of retention.

‘There are 50 homicides a day in this country. Chances are it might sound similar to something.’

‘No. It’s…’ Ella quickly realized that now wasn’t the time for hypothesizing. She ditched that train of thought. ‘Any sign of forced entry at Sullivan’s place?’

Edis said, ‘I don’t know the finer details. That’s why I want you in Florida by this afternoon. There’s a flight at one.’

‘Me?’ Ella asked. ‘I never even met Sullivan.’

‘Exactly. You can stay detached from all this.’

Ripley snapped her folder shut. ‘I’m going too.’

‘Mia, I came to inform you, not to drag you back again. You shouldn’t be anywhere near this.’

‘Nonsense. I need to find out who killed Frank.’

‘This case-’

‘Has my name written all over it,’ Ripley cut in. From the baby monitor came the soft rustling sounds of a child turning over in sleep. Ripley turned to it, froze, and when no cry followed, she continued. ‘Why would someone kill Frank?’

Ella had a few ideas, some more plausible than others. ‘Because he was a career cop, and career cops make lots of enemies.’

‘Or,’ Ripley tapped her folder, ‘someone is picking off the old guard. The guys from the eighties and nineties. How many are still alive?’

‘Five. Including you,’ Edis said.

Ella considered this sudden theory with careful skepticism.

One body didn’t make a pattern, just a data point, yet Ripley’s fear had a certain logic to it.

It was a professional paranoia. If it happened to someone like me, it could happen to me.

She saw the determination in Ripley’s body language too.

For her, it was probably like looking into a mirror and seeing your mortality laid bare.

Frank Sullivan’s death was proof that even legendary profilers died someday.

‘Ripley should come with me,’ Ella said. ‘Will, I know you like to keep us away from personal cases, but…’

‘It’s never that easy,’ Ripley finished. She gave Ella a look that contained equal parts gratitude and suspicion, as if she couldn’t quite believe Ella was taking her side so easily. ‘I’m getting on that plane either as a consultant or civilian.’

Ella watched the calculations play across Edis’s face. He had that look bureaucrats got when they were about to cave but wanted to make it seem like their idea. Like they were granting a favor instead of surrendering to the inevitable.

‘Sending both of you creates vulnerabilities,’ he said.

‘And keeping us apart creates blind spots,’ Ripley countered. She’d regained her composure now, slipping back into the veteran agent who could argue Bureau policy like she’d written it herself. ‘Frank taught me better than to shy away.’

Edis sighed through his nose. He glanced around the room like he was looking for a hidden exit.

‘Fine,’ he surrendered. ‘Same deal as last time. No badge, no gun. Just your brain, yes?’

‘Perfect.’ Ripley checked her watch. ‘My son gets home in an hour or two. I can be ready for then.’

‘Very well. I don’t need to tell you that we need to keep this under wraps. I don’t want anyone else knowing about Frank’s murder, at least until we have a handle on it, clear?’

‘Crystal,’ Ripley said. Her gaze drifted to the baby monitor. The thought remained unspoken but clear as daylight: another goodbye to Max, another promise she might not be able to keep. Profilers made terrible grandparents, because they knew too precisely the statistics on safe returns.

‘Also crystal,’ said Ella.

‘Good. Keep me in the loop.’

Ella watched Edis’s posture subtly shift as he settled into his decision.

The director might present his reservations, but Ella knew he secretly craved this.

Just a week ago, he was begging the dream team to reunite, now he was pretending he didn’t want them to investigate a high-profile killing.

Ella never understood his need to put up a front.

The director gathered his belongings. Ella got hers too. She only had a few hours before she needed to be at the airport, and she still had a stop to make.

‘Mia, I’ll meet you at Reagan in a couple of hours. I just need to go see someone.’