Page 23 of Girl, Sought

‘Ell!’ Luca's voice shattered her train of thought. ‘You need to see this!’

The urgency in Luca's voice sent her heart rate skyrocketing. She found him and Reeves standing at the end of the hallway, staring into what looked like a mad scientist's wet dream. The room had a green hue and a constant hum, like the server room at HQ. Shelves were lined with glass tanks and jars, tangles of tubes and wires connecting them like some kind of buggy life support system.

‘The hell am I looking at?’

‘I don’t know, but we got some movement in here.’

The space hummed with life - actual life, not the preserved facsimiles that filled the rest of the house. Glass terrariums housed miniature ecosystems complete with soil beds, heat lamps, and mesh coverings. Tiny bodies stirred amongst them.

‘Well, Finch was an entomologist. Makes sense he might have…’

‘Never mind that,’ Luca interrupted. He pointed to the top corner of the room. ‘Look.’

Her gaze followed his pointing finger and landed on a small, black lens nestled in the ceiling joint like a glittering eye.

A camera.

Ella's breath caught. She moved closer, eyes fixed on the device's red-blinking eye. Its position gave it a perfect view of the door, of anyone coming or going.

Coming or going. Like their killer.

‘God damn,’ she said.

‘If our killer spent as much time in this house as we think he did…’ Luca trailed off.

‘He might have come in here, either before or after the murder.’

‘Yup.’

The possibilities spun out in Ella's mind like a roulette wheel. Motive, method, identity - it could all be there, trapped in ones and zeroes, just waiting for them to crack open the secrets.

She met Luca's gaze. ‘We need that footage. Now.’

Their psycho collector might have just made his first mistake. And Ella was going to make damn sure it was his last.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ella was alone in her office. While she waited for the tech team to work their magic on the CCTV footage, she immersed herself in research.

But the problem was that there was no manual for what she needed to research: the psychopathology of a serial killer who apparently collected collectors. So, in lieu of textbooks, she opted for the next best thing – the depths of her brain. She picked up a marker and attacked the whiteboard in a stream-of-conscious frenzy.

The first thing that Ella had to remind herself was that there was always awhy.People didn't just wake up one day and decide to start garrotting women and dressing their corpses as dolls. The compulsion to create such scenes spoke to a trauma or a yearning that had been festering subconsciously for years. Sure, people sometimes snapped, grabbed the nearest revolver and gunned down people outside the DMV, but no serial killer ever nailed a man to a wall on impulse. Her unsub had come prepared on both occasions. He'd brought makeup, glue, a frilly dress, industrial spikes and possibly power tools along with him. This organization suggested a very capable offender and someone with one foot in reality despite the chaos in their heads.

Then there was the jarring nature of the killing methods and trophy capture. Eleanor Calloway and Alfred Finch’s crime scenes had both been staged for maximum impact upon discovery, and theatricality meant a desire for power and ownership. However, historical reflection told Ella that it was mostly lust killers that took trophies for their victims, because they wanted to relive the sexual high once the memories had faded. Lust killings always had an element of sexual gratification, but neither Eleanor’s nor Alfred’s did. Power-hungry killers took nothing and left behind everything, as though trophies were beneath them.

Therefore, this killer was utilizing elements from opposite ends of the serial killing spectrum. It was almost as if there were two minds at work.

But two minds didn’t always mean two perps, although it was a possibility. However, scenes this specific could not be part of a shared psychosis. This was one man’s fantasy brought to life, and Ella doubted that someone this determined would share that fantasy with another living soul.

For a moment, Ella wished Mia Ripley was beside her. Her old partner had retired three months ago and hadn’t been heard from since. Ripley had a way of cutting through the fog andseeing patterns that Ella sometimes missed when she got too deep in the research weeds. Luca, for all his profiling skills, didn’t quite hit the same notes. Ripley could have probably figured out what toothpaste this killer used just by looking at the crime scene photos.

But no. Ripley was gone. Probably somewhere in Hawaii, far away from casefiles and doll-making serial murderers.

Ella stared at the mess she’d made on the whiteboard. It was probably unreadable to outsiders, but it made sense to her.

She collapsed into her chair, turned to her laptop and clicked through the tabs she had open. They’d multiplied like bacteria when she’d dug into the world of collectors after getting back from Alfred Finch’s house, and she’d discovered that Chesapeake was indeed something of a collector’s paradise, much to her surprise.

Several major auction houses had branches here. The naval base had attracted officers who collected maritime memorabilia. Even a famous medical museum had once operated in town, housing one of the largest collections of anatomical specimens on the East Coast. Ella had kept the tab open on her browser:

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