Page 22 of Girl, Accused

‘That must be it,’ Westfall smirked. ‘We called you guys because we don’t really get serial crimes around here. We’re no stranger to shootings and stabbings, but we’re lucky that they’re usually one-offs. Crimes of passion. You know the types.’

‘That we do,’ Ripley said. ‘Any witnesses? CCTV?’

‘None of the above. No cameras inside or out.’

‘What about the other lodges?’

‘Negative. Dr. Summers’ cabin was the only business here. Everything else is residential.’

Ella asked, ‘Have forensics been?’

‘Been and gone. Still waiting on the coroner though.’

‘Still?’ Ripley checked her watch. ‘Body could have been cooling in there for 24 hours by now.’

'18 at most. Dr. Summers was with a patient until 5 PM yesterday evening. I checked her calendar.'

‘So the body’s still in there.’

‘Yup. I thought you might want to see it. In its natural environment and all that.’

This dance between preservation and progression was one of criminology's oldest dilemmas, like trying to study a butterfly without pinning its wings. Observing the body stayed in situ helped them understand the killer's mindset, but those same hours could erase crucial metabolic markers too. Death had its own timeline, so whatever the crime scene could tell them, it needed to speak quickly.

‘Let’s get inside,’ Ella said.

‘You’re the boss.’ Westfall ushered the two uniforms out of the way and grabbed the handle. ‘Door was unlocked when we got here. Our guy didn’t close up shop.’

Ella filed that information away. It was consistent with the blitz-attack approach in victim number one. If Ella had to guess, the killer waited for Summers to open the door and then made his move immediately.

Westfall opened the door, and death rushed to greet them. Not the sanitized death of funeral homes or graveyards, but death in its purestform; copper and rot and evacuated bowels mixing with lake breeze in a cocktail that hit the back of Ella's throat like a fist.

But beneath that familiar bouquet lurked something else. Something that triggered memories of her own recent encounter with fire: charred human flesh. The scent burrowed into her sinuses and made itself at home, settling in like an unwanted houseguest who planned to stay awhile.

Ella first caught the office’s pristine layout. Elegant desk flanked by framed certificates, two leather chairs, stress balls in primary colors. Fireplace. No couch, Ella noted. Modern practitioners had moved beyond that particular cliché.

Everything about the room screamed control. Order. The desperate need to make chaos conform to human will. But now those demons had broken loose and redecorated in shades of arterial spray.

Because center stage in this purposely-designed space, lay what remained of Dr. Evelyn Summers.

Her eyes were locked open, or what remained of them after eighteen hours of exposure had turned them into cloudy marbles. The slash across her throat gaped like a second mouth, deep enough to show the white gleam of vertebrae. Blood had pooled beneath her head and shoulders, soaking into the grain of the wood in hypnotic patterns. It reminded Ella of tree rings.

But it was her forehead that commanded attention.

Like Chester Grant, Summers wore the killer's brand, but where Grant had been marked with an ‘L’, Summers bore a 'P' seared into her forehead.

‘P,’ Ripley said. ‘Something tells me it doesn’t stand for psychologist.’

Ella spun to her partner. This was Ripley’s first corpse in five months, and Ella had to wonder how she was taking it. ‘You okay with this?’ Ella asked, but then suddenly felt foolish for asking such a question. You could take a hundred years off this job, you still never forgot what seeing a dead body was like.

‘Better than poor Miss Summers here. Identical approach to victim number one. Gash to the throat, branded on the forehead and left where she died. No theatrical staging. No excessive mutilation. No ligature marks.’

The dead woman's eyes stared at the ceiling, and Ella wondered what final image they'd captured before the lights went out. The killer'sface? The red glow of the branding iron? Or just the familiar contours of her own office, suddenly made strange by the presence of violence?

‘Found exactly like this?’ Ella asked Westfall.

‘Yeah. Forensics worked around her, documented everything in situ.’

Ella circled the body. The slash across the throat was far from textbook. Clean entry, but slightly deeper on the left side. A right-handed killer, then. The blood spray on the desk matched the arterial pattern from Chester Grant's murder photos. Same technique, same killing stroke.

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