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Ripley gave a slow nod. Through the sliding glass door at the back, Ella could see the small dock extending into the canal. A neat stack of fishing equipment sat under a weathered awning. The life of a man who’d chosen solitude but wasn’t necessarily lonely.

Ella moved to the back door, unlocked it and stepped into Frank’s yard. Ripley joined her as she inspected the lock.

‘Scuff marks around the keyhole,’ Ella said. ‘Our unsub could have picked it.’

‘How hard is it to pick a lock like this?’

‘Standard deadbolt, cylinder lock, looks about 20 years old. The tumblers in this would be pre-2007 regulations too. ‘

‘Pretend for a second that I’m not a lock nerd.’

‘Sorry. It would be very easy to pick this. Any standard tool would get in here. These older locks often have worn pins, minimal security. They’re notoriously unreliable too. You could even fill the hole with wax and make a key from the mold.’

Ripley suddenly kicked at a plastic planter, sending it skidding across the patio. The outburst was so unexpected that Ella took a step back. For a woman who’d built her career on iron self-control, this volcano of frustration felt like watching Jesus scream a four-letter word.

‘Frank knew better than to have a shit lock like this. He spent years catching assholes and his own damn door couldn’t keep one out for more than a few seconds.’ She slammed her palm against the door frame, not hard enough to damage anything but her own dignity.

‘Maybe he didn’t think he needed it,’ Ella said, but she knew it was an empty platitude.

‘You know why I’m not dead? You know why my family aren’t dead? Because I have locks. Security. Just ask your hair killer.’

Ella stepped back. This was the particular anger of someone who’d spent a lifetime being right about the worst things imaginable, only to be proven right one more time when it mattered most.

‘Frank should have died in his sleep 20 years from now. Not like this.’

Ripley clearly needed a moment to wrestle with the ghosts here, and Ella doubted that any analysis, no matter how accurate, would help. Ripley didn’t want explanations. She wanted to grieve.

‘I’m going to look around the house,’ Ella said quietly. ‘See if anything sticks out. The killer might have left something besides the obvious.’

Ripley nodded, not quite looking at her. ‘Yeah. Good. I just need a minute.’

Ella retreated into the house and left her partner to her rage. Now, Ella had a moment to put her curiosity to rest. Somewhere in this house might be the line that connected past to present, and Ella needed to find it.

***

Frank Sullivan’s office was the last stop on Ella’s tour of his final moments.

She’d already poked through the bathroom, utility room, the spare bedroom that served as a junk repository, and the master bedroom where Sullivan had presumably slept his final night.

Nothing screamed ‘clue.’ Nothing whispered ‘motive.’ It was all just the residue of a solitary life lived neatly but without fuss.

Ella had left Ripley outside wrestling with ghosts and patio furniture, because sometimes the best way to handle grief was to let it run its course solo.

Ella pushed open the office door. It didn’t look like the nerve center of a legendary profiler; more like the den of any retired guy trying to keep busy.

Orderly, functional, a little impersonal.

The walls were painted a neutral beige that sucked the Florida light right out of the room.

A mahogany desk took up the entirety of one wall, with a leather chair and footstool tucked beneath.

Another wall was dominated by bookshelves crammed with titles that seemed to span Frank’s career: dog-eared true crime paperbacks and academic texts on forensic psychology.

Nothing here screamed panic or paranoia. There were no bars on the windows, no visible alarm system keypad. Just a man comfortable in his solitude, maybe too comfortable.

Ella ran her fingers along the spines of the books. Helter Skelter. The Stranger Beside Me. Whoever Fights Monsters. The classics. Frank had kept up with his homework. She scanned the shelves, half-expecting a hidden compartment or a loose binding that revealed a secret stash. None was forthcoming.

Her mind kept circling back to Jennifer Marlowe, the 1976 Palm Harbor victim.

Shot in the stomach, maybe eyes replaced with white stones.

Why did that detail stick in her head? Why couldn’t she find official confirmation?

Had she read it in some obscure journal?

Seen it in an old training video? Or had Frank Sullivan himself documented it somewhere, tucked away from official channels?

The thought felt right, but she had no proof. All she had was a profiler’s hunch, which, as much as she hated to admit, was sometimes just wishful thinking wrapped in jargon.

Her gaze drifted from the bookshelves. Surfaces collected things in houses like this.

Memories, dust. On top of one low bookcase, jammed between a dusty ship-in-a-bottle and a stack of old National Geographics, sat a cluster of framed photographs.

The usual office archaeology. Ella picked up the largest.

Frank Sullivan, younger, maybe forty pounds lighter, hair visibly retreating but still fighting.

He grinned beside a woman with short blonde hair and a gold chain that was too big for her neck.

Frank’s late wife, Ella guessed. They stood on a beach somewhere, and looking at this picture somehow felt like picking a lock on a diary.

Ella replaced it carefully. The other photos tracked their life together: holidays, backyards, faces aging frame by frame.

Then she saw it, tucked almost out of sight behind a bronze eagle wrestling with an American flag.

Mia Ripley, decades younger, maybe mid-thirties, stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Frank outside the Hoover Building.

Ripley was wearing a gray pantsuit, and Frank, radiating pride, had an arm slung around her shoulder. Mentor and protégé.

The floorboards outside gave a soft creak. Ella turned and found the woman from the photograph filling the doorway. Her stare was locked on the picture.

‘Can’t believe he kept that,’ she said.

‘He must have been proud of you.’

Ripley came over and inspected the photo close up. ‘I remember this well. It was the day after I closed my first case. Must have been ‘96.’

‘And Frank was right there with you.’

‘Couldn’t have done it without him.’ She put the photo back on the shelf, then turned to Ella. ‘Sorry about earlier. I didn’t mean to be a bitch.’

‘Forget it.’ Ella waved a dismissive hand. ‘You’re always a bitch. Barely registered as unusual.’

‘I’ll take that. Did Frank keep anything else other than old photos?’

‘He kept a lot. Textbooks, his cop badge, a couple of shell casings.’

‘I’m guessing he didn’t keep any clues to who killed him.’

‘Not that I can see,’ Ella said. ‘But my question is; why does a retired detective need an office?’

‘You’re still thinking about that old case, aren’t you? You thought you’d find something about it in here.’

Ella couldn’t hide her curiosity. ‘Yup. Thought I might find old police reports or something.’

‘Did you search the place top to bottom?’

She pulled open the drawers beside the desk. Stationary in one, a bundle of cables in the other. ‘Now I have. There’s nowhere else to check.’

‘Well,’ Ripley crossed her arms, ‘are you not seeing what I’m seeing?’

Ella glanced around the office again, mapping it mentally. Desk: checked. Bookshelves: scanned. Low bookcase with photos: examined. Wastebasket: empty except for a crumpled tissue. What the hell was she missing? It wasn’t a big room. The hiding places were finite.

‘What? Unless Frank hid case files between the pages of Helter Skelter , I’ve hit a dead end.’

Ripley tilted her head towards Frank’s mahogany desk. ‘The footstool, Dark.’

Ella looked. A simple, square footstool, upholstered in worn brown leather, sat precisely where a footstool should be. Ready to receive tired feet after a long day of whatever retired profilers did. Maybe watching true crime documentaries and yelling at the screen.

‘Yeah? What about it?’

‘Look closer.’

Ella stepped forward and peered underneath the desk. The footstool rested on a metal base. Solid, thick metal, painted black. Not cheap tubular legs like most furniture. It was substantial.

‘It’s metal,’ Ella observed, still not getting it. ‘So?’

‘Ever seen a metal footstool before?’

Then it clicked. The odd weight she hadn’t consciously registered when glancing under the desk. The way it sat perfectly flush with the floor, no visible legs, just a solid block. The slightly too-perfect alignment with the desk chair. It wasn’t a footstool. It wasn’t furniture at all.

‘Son of a bitch,’ Ella breathed, crouching down for a better look. She ran her hand along the side. Cold, heavy steel beneath the thin leather covering. No seams, no breaks, except for a faint hairline crack near the bottom on one side – the door. ‘It’s a safe. How’d you see that?’

‘Hawk eyes. And Frank pulled the same trick with a fake radiator back in the day.’

‘Old habits and all that,’ Ella said as she knelt and slid the heavy object out from under the desk.

It moved with a low scrape against the floorboards.

She ran her fingers along the nearly invisible seam that marked the door.

On the front face, disguised as a decorative stud in the leather upholstery, was a small, circular indentation.

A fingerprint scanner? No, too low-tech for that.

More likely a cleverly hidden keyhole or a pressure point to reveal a keypad.

Ella pressed it gently.

Nothing.

She pushed harder. A section of the leather popped outward with a soft click and revealed a small electronic keypad and a tiny LCD screen.

‘Bingo,’ Ella muttered. She looked up at Ripley. ‘So? Do we crack it? See what secrets Frank was hiding?’