Page 56 of Snowman

As soon as I sat inside, I grabbed my work phone off the passenger seat, flipping it over to see Erik's name on the missed call. I pressed to call him back.

"Chief called us all in," Erik said the second he picked up. "See you at the station."

The line went dead before I could even grunt a reply.

The police station was surprisingly large for a small town. Three stories high, it seemed almost out of place. The first floor held the reception area and cells, the second floor held the chief's office and a row of desks for detectives and officers, and the third floor was quieter, mostly for officers dealing with paperwork. And outside, in a separate building nearby, were the lab and the coroner's office.

I went inside and climbed the stairs to the second floor, feeling eyes on me with every step I took. The building had that smell of stale coffee, stale air, and the faintest trace of bleach. When I reached the room, everyone's attention was not on me, but on the transparent board with evidence and clues about the Snowman serial killer. The chief stood in front with Donna, the coroner. And their faces said it all, their eyes rimmed with red, an exhaustion that was deeper than a bad dream.

On the clear board behind them were the photos; of Josh, Vic, Sigrid, and Ingrid, strings of notes and crime scene photos surrounded their faces.

I kept moving forward, weaving through desks until I reached Isak and Erik. They nodded as I joined them, and when the chief noticed me, he gave a quick nod to the officer at the door. Without a word, the man left, the door clicking shut behind him.

"Now that we're all here," the chief began, "let's get started."

He turned to the board, picking up a marker, but the way he held it told me his mind was elsewhere. I leaned toward Erik, lowering my voice. "What's going on?"

He shrugged, his eyes glued to the board. "You'll see."

The chief wrote something on the board, then stopped. When he turned, in red was a sketch of the snowman, like a mocking signature.

"What do we know about this guy?" he asked.

Isak raised his hand, but the chief just sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Isak, for God's sake, this isn't school. Just talk."

"Right." Isak cleared his throat and stepped forward. "He hunts at night, and every victim has a record. The first one we found was dumped by the road. She killed two teenagers in a car accident back in 2003."

"We thought it was a truck driver at first," a woman stepped in. Her hair was pulled back neatly, and she looked like she hadn't slept in days. I didn't recognize her. She was new. "He was moving south to north, so it made sense at the time. But none of these victims are random. He picks them."

"He cuts his victims into small pieces," someone in front added, "leaving trails and pieces of them for us to find."

"He is cold and calculated," the woman said, "and he will do it again."

The chief's voice broke in, colder now. "He's been taunting us for years. Playing some hero, deciding who deserves to live or die. But we still don't have a damn clue who this bastard is."

"He's local," the woman cut in, arms crossed tightly. "No one else would know the area this well."

Donna stepped forward. "There's a pattern," she said. "The way he cuts his victims… it's not random. He's skilled. Trained. It's surgical. Every single one of them was drained of blood, clean, controlled. And torture?" She paused, looking around the room. "That's personal."

For a moment, no one spoke.

The silence that followed was stifling. Everyone stared at the board, at the drawing of a snowman, as if it might suddenly tell us something we hadn't seen before. The chief's shoulders slumped as he stared at it, exhaustion written all over his face.

"Do you think he's searching for something?" I broke the silence. "Or is he just interrogating them for what they've done?"

"Yes," the woman replied without hesitation. "I think he's acting like a judge, pushing for confessions. And once he gets them? He kills them."

She stood up again and turned towards the room, I felt like she was looking for him in the room.

"There are four types of serial killers," she said, counting them off on her fingers. "Visionary. Mission-oriented. Hedonistic. Power/control-driven. But this one?" She paused, letting the words sink in. "He doesn't fit into any of those. He's all of them mixed into one."

She walked to the board, picked up a marker, and began to write. Each word came slow:Experienced. Antisocial. Dissociative.

She turned back to face us, pointing to the words as she spoke.

"He's experienced. He's antisocial. And he likely has a split personality." Her eyes moved across the room like she was daring someone to argue. "He might think he's a doctor," she added.

Wrong.

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