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Ella squinted against the assault of sunshine as they rolled into Palm Harbor.

The rental car’s A/C fought a losing battle against the heat that seeped through glass and metal like radiation from a nuclear blast. Even in December, Florida refused to acknowledge winter’s existence.

Ripley was doing the driving, and Frank Sullivan’s house was ten miles away according to the GPS.

‘Warmest state in winter, so there’s always that,’ Ella said.

‘What a silver lining.’

Ella had never bothered with Florida before.

It had always existed as a punchline in her mind; that dangling appendage of America where people went to escape their past or prepare for death.

A place where news headlines started with the words ‘Florida Man’ and inevitably ended with alligators, nudity, or meth.

She’d never even made the pilgrimage to Disney World as a kid.

The landscape morphed as they drove deeper into Palm Harbor.

Highways gave way to boulevards lined with royal palms. Strip malls with their discount sunglasses shops and endless seafood restaurants slid past the windows.

To Ella’s left, the Gulf of Mexico flashed between buildings.

The views had changed from Orlando’s tourist traps to something more authentically Floridian.

‘Have you been here before?’ asked Ella.

‘Palm Harbor? No. But I’ve been to Florida more times than I remember. Watch out for snakes.’

‘Snakes? I thought it was alligators.’

‘You know when you might run into a gator. Swamps, marshes, anywhere wet. But the snakes? They’ll get ya.’

‘You seeing this?’ Ella nodded toward a billboard advertising burial plots with waterfront views. ‘Even death gets the resort treatment here.’

‘Frank used to say Florida was where America stored its spare people.’

‘Frank was ahead of his time, huh.’

They passed through a series of small beach towns, each one bleeding into the next without clear boundaries.

Then they came to a tunnel of palm trees.

On the other side, the vegetation grew denser.

The topography of the land changed suddenly.

Ella rolled her window down an inch and let in a blast of air that smelled of saltwater.

They passed a retirement community where golf carts outnumbered cars three to one.

Every lawn featured at least one plastic flamingo, as though HOA regulations demanded them.

The closer they got to Frank Sullivan’s house, the more manicured everything became.

The houses got smaller and older but somehow more authentic.

The GPS announced their turn and Ripley swung the rental onto a narrow street lined with modest homes. Each had its own dock extending into a canal that fed directly into the Gulf. Most houses displayed seasonal decorations. A few had Christmas lights already strung along their eaves.

‘There it is,’ Ripley said.

Even without the crime scene tape stretched across the front door or the Sheriff’s cruiser squatting in the driveway, Ella would have picked it out.

It was the only house on the street without Christmas decorations.

Unlike its neighbors, with their well-tended yards, Sullivan’s place had the bare-bones functionality of a man who’d seen too much of the world to care about appearances.

The single-story ranch needed paint five years ago.

The small lawn was neat but devoid of ornaments.

No flamingos or gnomes or Christmas lights.

Just a plain American flag stabbed into the soil.

Ripley parked up behind the cruiser. They stepped out and the humidity briefly took Ella’s breath. She couldn’t quite reconcile the image of Christmas decorations and this kind of heat side by side.

‘Neighborhood watch is on high alert,’ Ripley said.

Ella glanced around the street. Directly opposite Frank’s house, an elderly woman in a green visor pretended to water plants that were already drowning. Two houses down, a man in golf shorts stood in his driveway with a newspaper in hand, his pretense all but abandoned.

An officer emerged from Sullivan’s front door at their arrival. He hitched up his belt with the universal gesture of law enforcement establishing territory. Young, glossy-skinned, with that particular blend of deference and defensiveness that cops always displayed when the Feds showed up.

‘Agent Dark?’ the man asked.

Ella extended her hand. ‘That’s me. This is my partner, Agent Ripley. Thanks for meeting us.’

‘Aaron Bauer. I’m the sheriff in charge of this mess.’ He looked at Ella with the cautious optimism of someone who’d Googled her on the way over. ‘Are you up to speed with the details?’

‘We’ve gone through the police report and the crime scene photos. Can you talk us through it from the start?’

‘Well, we got a call from Mr. Sullivan’s next door neighbor around 9AM this morning. He said Mr. Sullivan’s cat had found its way to his house. The neighbor tried bringing the cat back, but the vic wasn’t answering his door. Called us for a welfare check, and you know the rest.’

Ella made mental notes. ‘Have you interviewed the neighbors?’

‘Yes ma’am. A lot of oldies around here with terrible hearing. One neighbor reported hearing a gunshot around midnight, but, well-’

‘Frank was a gun nut,’ Ripley butted in. ‘The neighbor assumed it was just Frank being Frank.’

‘Bingo.’ Sheriff Bauer tipped his hat. ‘Was that a guess? Or some of that profiling magic you guys do?’

‘A little of both. Frank was an old friend of mine.’

Bauer removed his hat and held it over his heart. ‘Good lord, I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am.’

‘Don’t be. Anything else we don’t know about?’

‘No. We’ve tried tracking down some of Mr. Sullivan’s family to give them the news, but all we’ve found is a few cousins up in Georgia. No kids, wife’s passed on, no brothers or sisters.’

The comment painted a life that ended as it had likely been lived: alone. Ella watched Ripley’s face and saw the slight twitch at the corner of her mouth that betrayed more than any tear could. She quickly steered the conversation away from Sullivan’s isolation before Ripley could dwell on it.

‘Where’s the body?’

‘With the coroner. But I do have these.’

Bauer’s hand disappeared into his jacket pocket and emerged with two small evidence bags. Each one contained a small white stone about the size of a quarter. The bags were labeled in black marker: ‘Item #4-A: R. Orbital Socket’ and ‘Item #4-B: L. Orbital Socket, Sullivan, Frank. Case #PH-1224-S.’

‘CSU pulled these out before we transported the body to the ME,’ Bauer said. ‘We thought that if there was one thing the perp would have left prints on, it was these.’

Ella reluctantly took the bags. ‘And?’

‘No such luck.’

Ella nodded, unsurprised. A killer meticulous enough to perform a post-mortem enucleation and replace the eyes with symbolic objects wasn’t likely to leave fingerprints on the tools of his trade, however makeshift.

Alabaster stones – easily obtained, easily inserted.

Ripley grabbed one of the bags off Ella and held it up to the winter sun.

‘Sick,’ she said. ‘Bauer, can we go inside?’

‘Go ahead. The place has been swept, but it’s still a little messy, so watch your step.’

Ella crossed the threshold with Ripley half a step behind her.

The entryway opened into a kitchen with plain brown cabinets and matte white countertops.

Three different gun magazines were stacked by a coffee maker that still had grounds in the filter.

A cat bowl sat empty in the corner. There were a few piles of dishes near the sink.

A frozen dinner carton sat empty in the trash.

‘TV dinner,’ Ella noted. ‘Frank wasn’t expecting company.’

‘If he was, he’d have cleaned up. Frank had pride.’

The living room emerged once they exited the kitchen. The layout was what Ella assumed was classic Florida ranch. Open plan with one room flowing to the next, hallway leading to bedrooms in the back.

Ella stood at the threshold and swept her gaze across the space where Frank Sullivan had lived, and where he had died. Then she caught the evidence markers scattered across the beige carpet like small, numbered tombstones.

And the dark, irregular map spreading beneath the plastic sheeting draped over the sole recliner.

The scene ceased to be a home and became purely forensic landscape.

The transition was always jarring. One moment, you saw the ghost of the life lived; the next, only the cold facts of its end.

Ella felt a familiar, quiet pang. It wasn’t quite grief because she hadn’t known Frank Sullivan, but it was a kind of silent acknowledgment.

73 years of life had been reduced to stains and numbered markers.

Rest easy, Frank , she thought. It wasn’t much, but it was all she could offer. A small, internal tribute before the analytical machinery fully took over.

Beside her, Ripley was unnervingly still. Usually, she’d be dissecting the scene aloud by now, firing off observations and theories and questions. Today, she stood near Frank’s bookshelves, rigid and unnatural.

‘You okay over there?’ Ella asked.

‘I’ll be fine once we figure this thing out.’

Ella nodded at the TV remote lying on the carpet. ‘Looks like our unsub interrupted Frank at the worst time.’

‘Yeah. The killer took him by surprise. Frank didn’t answer the door to him. He broke in.’

Aside from the discarded TV remote and blood stains along the carpet, there wasn’t much else to process. The kill had been simple and quick. It was the postmortem ritual that held the answers to this killer’s mindset, except ritual processes never left as much behind as the killing blows.

‘There’s not much degradation in the drag marks. He wasn’t moved far, or clumsily.’ She gestured towards the path from the center of the room to the recliner. ‘Consistent with one individual managing the body.’