Page 74 of Girl, Unseen

He was right, loath as Ella was to admit it. The kiln had done its grim work, reducing Victor Ashford to little more than charcoal and bone fragments. Any evidence, any clues to his killer's identity, had been burned away.

No. There was always something. Killers always left something behind, physical or not.

She surveyed the workshop while Luca and Ross debated timelines. The place looked normal enough - if normal included two thousand degree furnaces and tools that belonged in a museum. Nothing suggested struggle. No signs of forced entry.

Then she saw the water bottles.

Six-pack of Pure Life on the workbench. Five full bottles remained, still wrapped in loose plastic. But something about them caught her eye.

‘Water,’ she said.

‘Of course he’s going to have water in here,’ Ross said.

Ella surveyed the workshop again. There was a sink in one corner and a hosepipe tap in the other. No shortage of water there, and bottled water would have boiled in this temperature. Ella couldn’t see a fridge anywhere, either.

Something about them sang the wrong notes.

She broke the webbing and pulled one out.

‘Whoa, should you be touching that?’ Ross asked. ‘Could be prints on it.’

Ella held the bottle up to the light, and suddenly, the scene of what happened here recreated itself in her mind’s eye.

She inspected the next bottle. And the next.

There. And there. And there.

Every seal broken. The plastic rings snapped.

Someone had been busy playing bartender with these bottles.

Ross's phone buzzed. He stepped away, had a brief conversation, then returned looking like someone had just rewritten his rulebook.

‘That was the lab.’ He tucked his phone away. ‘Tox screen came back on Sarah Chen. Found traces of something called sodium thio-something in her system.’

‘Sodium pentobarbital.’ The words fell off Ella’s tongue.

‘That’s the one. No idea what it is.’

‘It’s…’ Ella began, but then she trailed off. Her mind suddenly erupted in a cascade of neural fireworks. Details that had lurked in her peripheral vision suddenly snapped into sharp focus – the careful precision of each kill, the clinical methodology, the way their unsub got close to victims without raising any red flags. Five thousand cases worth of profiling knowledge realigned themselves in her head like atoms finding a new molecular structure, and one of the biggest details she thought she knew about this killer underwent a violent reorganization.

‘Jesus Christ.’ The words escaped before she could stop them.

‘What?’ Luca asked. Some of the ice had melted from his voice. Whatever anger he held toward her, the job still came first.

She couldn’t deny the evidence. The minor details. The little things that seemed insignificant at the time but now blazed with new meaning.

‘Guys, I don’t think Ezra Crowley is our man.’

‘No?’ Luca's eyebrows climbed north. ‘Why not?’

‘Because no one is our man.’ Ella picked up the water bottle again, examined the broken seal. ‘Our killer is a woman.’

CHAPTER THIRTY NINE

Outside Victor Ashford's studio, the wind carried the sickly-sweet aroma of burned human flesh. She kept her back to the building and watched a flock of crows circle overhead, drawn by death and tragedy like nature's cleanup crew.

The world narrowed to this single point in time - to this grassy parking lot, to Ross looking like he'd lost a fight with a cement mixer, to Luca using those steel doors as a barrier between himself and everything that waited inside. But beyond the immediate horror of Victor Ashford's final moments, Ella's mind blazed with something that felt like revelation.

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