CHAPTER NINE

The Dover PD had all the ambiance of a meat locker and smelled about as fresh. Ella perched on the edge of a battered metal desk, trying to ignore the way the sharp edge dug into her backside. Across from her, Luca sat ramrod straight in a chair that looked like it had been shut out by an office supply store circa 1975. His eyes darted around the room, taking in the stained ceiling tiles and the sad little plant that was more brown than green. The place smelled like stale coffee, cheap disinfectant, and the slowly moldering dreams of a thousand burnt-out cops.

In other words, it felt just like home.

‘Welcome to the glamorous world of law enforcement,’ Ella drawled, waving a hand at the squalor around them. ‘Bet you”re regretting that career choice now, huh?’

Luca cracked a smile. ‘Not at all. This is exactly where I want to be.’

Ella snorted. ‘Well, you”re in luck. Looks like we”ll be getting real cozy with these upstanding officers of the law.’ She jerked her chin at the stack of files teetering on the desk between them. ‘Assuming they manage to dig up anything useful on our victims, that is.’

They”d put in the request as soon as they”d arrived - bank records, tax records, license plate hits, anything that might shed some light on who Archie Newman and Georgia Bolton were and why someone had decided to snuff them out like discount candles.

But in a city with this high of a crime rate, with cops working around the clock on an unlimited number of cases, she doubted they’d get so much as a parking ticket violation before the day was out.

Still, they had to start somewhere. And right now, the sad, abbreviated lives of their two victims were the only lead they had.

‘While we wait for the records to come in, I’ll check for anything about our victims online. Ransack their social media accounts.’

‘Go ahead,’ Ella said as she turned to the stack of crime scene photos in front of her. ‘There”s gotta be a connection. Something that made these two stand out to our unsub. People don”t just wake up one morning and decide to start building torture sculptures in public parks.’

But even as she said it, she knew it wasn”t entirely true. Sometimes, that”s exactly what happened. Sometimes, people just broke, snapped like an overtightened guitar string, their psyche shredding itself on the jagged edges of an uncaring world.

It was the scariest thing about this job. The knowledge that the monsters weren”t always born. Sometimes, they were made. Forged in the crucible of a life that had dealt them one too many shit sandwiches. And once that switch got flipped, there was no going back.

Ella shook off the maudlin thoughts, forcing herself to focus on the task at hand.

Archie Newman. Twenty-six years old. A bartender at some trendy little microbrew joint downtown. Last seen clocking out after his shift, then...nothing. No witnesses, no security cam footage. Just a big, fat goose egg until his body turned up in an alleyway half a mile from his last known location.

She flipped through the scene photos, her stomach clenching at the sight of Archie”s slack, waxy face. He”d been a good-looking kid. Probably had all the sorority girls lining up. Not that it mattered now. Death was the great equalizer, and Archie had been found in a narrow strip behind a strip club called the Boobie Trap, trussed up like a Christmas ham and displayed on a stack of wooden pallets like some kind of sick art installation.

Ella”s lip curled. This unsub had a flair for the dramatic, she”d give him that. Posing his victims like they were ready for their close-up, making sure they”d be found by some poor guy stumbling out of the club with a belly full of cheap booze.

‘Our guy has some audacity,’ Ella said. ‘Victim number one in a public alleyway, victim number two in a busy park.’

Luca added, ‘And he elevated them both. Georgia was on a bandstand. Archie was on a stack of pallets – for some reason.’

‘Odd choice for sure, but he probably just wanted to maximize the shock. He staged them to incite terror in whoever found them – or us. Danny Rolling used to pose the bodies of his victims so that it traumatized whoever found them.’

‘Hate that guy,’ Luca said. ‘Decapitated the head and hid it so the investigator had to search for it.’

‘Real monster. Blueprint for the modern lust killer. Albert DeSalvo used to pose the bodies in a similar way. So did Rodney Alcala, Bruce McArthur, Edmund Kemper, Gary Ridgway, George Russell.’

Luca grinned in her direction. ‘Is this your perfect memory talking?’

Ella returned Luca”s grin with a wry twist of her lips. ‘You heard about that?’

‘Who hasn’t?’

‘Ha. But yeah. Can”t forget a single grisly detail, even when I want to.’

Her partner spun on his chair and tapped his pen against his cheek. ‘Alright, I’m curious. How does it work? You just remember everything?’

”It”s ironic,” Ella said. ”I don”t actually know. A doctor once told me I just have a really long short-term memory. And by really long, I mean a lifetime, or until dementia sets in.”

Luca glanced out of the window then asked, ‘So, if you saw a license plate this morning, you could remember it forever?’

”If I committed it to my short-term memory bank, yeah. But it takes a few seconds to register. I”d love to be able to just take mental snaps of everything and recall them at will, but it”s not that simple. Does that make sense, or do I sound insane?”

‘The latter,’ Luca said. ‘How did you find out about it?’

Ella shrugged. ‘I thought it was normal until I was about eight. I remember my aunt took me to the store once to buy a record. Guns N Roses. On the way home, I read the booklet. You know, the little thing with all the lyrics in?’

‘Of course.’

‘When I played the record at home, I realized I knew the lyrics to every song even though I’d never heard them. My aunt thought I was pulling a prank or something.’

She could see the wheels spinning in Luca’s head, the implications of her little neurological quirk sinking in. The kid looked equal parts awed and horrified, like he couldn”t decide whether to be impressed or to offer his condolences.

‘Christ.’ Luca said at last. ‘You’re a walking encyclopedia. I bet you clean up at trivia nights.’

”I would if I knew anything worth knowing. Ask me about murder cases from the eighties, and I”ll talk for days. Don”t ask me the capital of Thailand.”

She reached for the second file, but before she could crack it open, the door to the bullpen swung open with a bang. Chief Harland stood in the doorway.

‘Saddle up,’ Harland barked. ‘Got something for you two.’

Ella was on her feet in an instant. ‘What is it, chief?’

Harland gestured to the hallway. ‘Follow me.’

Ella exchanged a glance with Luca, her heart kicking up a notch. She could feel it in her bones, thrumming through her veins like an electric current. It was a feeling she”d chased her whole life, from the first time she”d peeked through her fingers at a slasher flick on late-night cable. That morbid fascination, that sick compulsion to understand the darkness that lurked in the human heart.

And now, as she followed Harland out of the office, Luca hot on her heels, she could feel that familiar itch building beneath her skin.