Page 18 of Girl, Fractured

‘Frank was a gun nut,’ Ripley butted in.‘The neighbor assumed it was just Frank being Frank.’

‘Bingo.’Sheriff Bauer tipped his hat.‘Was that a guess?Or some of that profiling magic you guys do?’

‘A little of both.Frank was an old friend of mine.’

Bauer removed his hat and held it over his heart.‘Good lord, I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am.’

‘Don’t be.Anything else we don’t know about?’

‘No.We’ve tried tracking down some of Mr.Sullivan’s family to give them the news, but all we’ve found is a few cousins up in Georgia.No kids, wife’s passed on, no brothers or sisters.’

The comment painted a life that ended as it had likely been lived: alone.Ella watched Ripley’s face and saw the slight twitch at the corner of her mouth that betrayed more than any tear could.She quickly steered the conversation away from Sullivan’s isolation before Ripley could dwell on it.

‘Where’s the body?’

‘With the coroner.But I do have these.’

Bauer’s hand disappeared into his jacket pocket and emerged with two small evidence bags.Each one contained a small white stone about the size of a quarter.The bags were labeled in black marker: ‘Item #4-A: R.Orbital Socket’ and ‘Item #4-B: L.Orbital Socket, Sullivan, Frank.Case #PH-1224-S.’

‘CSU pulled these out before we transported the body to the ME,’ Bauer said.‘We thought that if there was one thing the perp would have left prints on, it was these.’

Ella reluctantly took the bags.‘And?’

‘No such luck.’

Ella nodded, unsurprised.A killer meticulous enough to perform a post-mortem enucleation and replace the eyes with symbolic objects wasn’t likely to leave fingerprints on the tools of his trade, however makeshift.Alabaster stones – easily obtained, easily inserted.Ripley grabbed one of the bags off Ella and held it up to the winter sun.

‘Sick,’ she said.‘Bauer, can we go inside?’

‘Go ahead.The place has been swept, but it’s still a little messy, so watch your step.’

Ella crossed the threshold with Ripley half a step behind her.The entryway opened into a kitchen with plain brown cabinets and matte white countertops.Three different gun magazines were stacked by a coffee maker that still had grounds in the filter.A cat bowl sat empty in the corner.There were a few piles of dishes near the sink.A frozen dinner carton sat empty in the trash.

‘TV dinner,’ Ella noted.‘Frank wasn’t expecting company.’

‘If he was, he’d have cleaned up.Frank had pride.’

The living room emerged once they exited the kitchen.The layout was what Ella assumed was classic Florida ranch.Open plan with one room flowing to the next, hallway leading to bedrooms in the back.

Ella stood at the threshold and swept her gaze across the space where Frank Sullivan had lived, and where he had died.Then she caught the evidence markers scattered across the beige carpet like small, numbered tombstones.

And the dark, irregular map spreading beneath the plastic sheeting draped over the sole recliner.

The scene ceased to be a home and became purely forensic landscape.The transition was always jarring.One moment, you saw the ghost of the life lived; the next, only the cold facts of its end.Ella felt a familiar, quiet pang.It wasn’t quite grief because she hadn’t known Frank Sullivan, but it was a kind of silent acknowledgment.73 years of life had been reduced to stains and numbered markers.

Rest easy, Frank, she thought.It wasn’t much, but it was all she could offer.A small, internal tribute before the analytical machinery fully took over.

Beside her, Ripley was unnervingly still.Usually, she’d be dissecting the scene aloud by now, firing off observations and theories and questions.Today, she stood near Frank’s bookshelves, rigid and unnatural.

‘You okay over there?’Ella asked.

‘I’ll be fine once we figure this thing out.’

Ella nodded at the TV remote lying on the carpet.‘Looks like our unsub interrupted Frank at the worst time.’

‘Yeah.The killer took him by surprise.Frank didn’t answer the door to him.He broke in.’

Aside from the discarded TV remote and blood stains along the carpet, there wasn’t much else to process.The kill had been simple and quick.It was the postmortem ritual that held the answers to this killer’s mindset, except ritual processes never left as much behind as the killing blows.

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