Page 57 of Girl, Accused

The sanctuary wasn't empty anymore.

A figure stood at the altar. Male. Medium build. Dressed in black pants and a clerical shirt with white collar. His back was to them as he gazed up at the wooden cross suspended overhead.

Ella drew her weapon. Ripley fanned out to her right, creating a tactical angle despite her unarmed status.

‘Adam Canton? Hands where I can see them.’

The figure at the altar didn't startle. Didn't flinch. Didn't show any reaction that evolution had programmed into human beings when confronted with sudden threats.

‘Canton? I won’t ask again.’

The man revealed himself by degrees. First a profile, then three-quarters view, finally full face. His features were ordinary to the point of invisibility. The kind of face that cashiers would forget the moment he walked away.

And he definitely matched the mugshot imprinted on Ella’s retinas.

The colored light from the stained glass windows behind him fragmented across his face in a mask of fractured saints. The effect was cubist perfection. One eye bathed in martyr's red, the other in prophet's blue, his mouth bisected by a shaft of golden light that made his smile seem to float independent of his face.

‘Hands. Up. Now.’ Each word a separate island in the ocean of churning adrenaline.

The man complied.

‘Finally,’ he smiled. ‘You found me.’

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Interrogation rooms came in two varieties, Ella thought. The ones they showed on television and the ones where real monsters confessed. Television's versions were sanitized, but the real ones, like Granville PD's Room B, where Adam Canton now sat, favored psychological warfare through banality. The room was dull and cold enough to drive anyone insane. Ella watched him through the glass partition.

Canton should have looked diminished in this setting. Most suspects did when stripped of context and isolated from their preferred environments. He sat with perfect posture, hands folded on the table before him, neither fidgeting nor performing the anxious rituals of the newly arrested. An hour since his arrest Can, ton hadn't requested a lawyer or asked for water or a bathroom trip.

In fact, he hadn’t said anything at all other than ‘finally, you found me.’

‘Tell me again what happened when you found him,’ Westfall said, joining Ella and Ripley at the observation window. He'd asked this three times already, as if repetition might reveal some detail they'd missed.

‘We searched his apartment, found his murder shrine, and when we came back downstairs, there he was. Standing at the altar like he was waiting for us.’

‘And he pretty much confessed?’

‘Confessed is a strong word,’ Ripley said from her position against the wall. ‘But…’

‘The guy’s got surveillance photos of a woman we found dead last night. And I mean tons of photos. One of my guys is there now. He counted two-hundred photos, going back at least a year.’

‘The evidence is there. So is the motive.’ Ripley nudged Ella. ‘What say you?’

Ella had been watching him through the glass. The man was a Stoic portrait. If this unsub was killing one victim for every sin, he was still four away from his target. Serial killers with a mission never gave up so easily.

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’ Westfall asked. ‘You were the one who brought this guy here.’

Ripley said, ‘She always does this.’

‘Does what?’

‘Finds a problem.’

‘Westfall, did your guys find any photos of Chester Grant or Evelyn Summers? Me and Ripley didn’t have time to search the whole room.’

‘No. Just Torres.’

---