Page 3 of Girl, Fractured

Roadrunner.The man documented everything.If anyone would remember the exact date she’d been frantically hunting for her phone and hairbrush, it would be the Human Spreadsheet.

‘When are you coming home?’Ella asked.

‘At your discretion.’

The familiar dance of longing versus logic began.She wanted Luca here now, but another part of her knew better.Besides, he was still on administrative leave for using excessive force in a previous case.Coming back to D.C.now would just complicate things.

‘You stay put.No point coming back until you’re cleared.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m sure.’She wasn’t, but certainty was sometimes just another mask you wore until the real thing showed up.‘I’ll talk to Roady on Monday, and you should get off that roof and get some sleep.’

‘You too.’

After they said their goodbyes, Ella sat in the darkness with her phone clutched tight.She suddenly felt more exposed, as though this new knowledge had made her more vulnerable to this killer.

She glanced at the window and imagined her reflection visible to anyone watching from outside.Then she rose and closed the blinds.

CHAPTER ONE

Frank Sullivan had long ago learned that the truth was stranger than fiction, which was why he’d never written his memoirs.No one would believe half the things he’d seen.

He settled into his recliner as the TV documentary droned on.It was some typical late-night exploitative effort, what his wife would have called ‘murder rubbish’ if she was still around.Frank used to hate these kinds of shows, but in retirement he’d found solace in them, especially the unsolved cases.In fifty years of law enforcement, Frank had seen every torture method known to man, but no torture was worse than an unanswered question.It was comforting to know that other detectives still had a few missing pieces of their own.

Miami PD had been Frank’s baptism by fire in the seventies.He’d walked into the maelstrom of South Florida’s turf wars with nothing but a standard-issue .38 and a pathological inability to look the other way.Back then, the city had been a pressure cooker of drug deals, mass murders and serial killings.DNA was still science fiction then, and half the evidence got contaminated by humidity before it made it to the lab.

Those years had forged him from iron, which had caught the attention of the FBI.The Bureau had recruited him in 1982, extracting him from Miami's chaos and dropping him into the sterile corridors of Quantico.These true crime shows loved to mythologize the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, but Frank remembered when profiling was just a bunch of agents sitting around a table, chain-smoking and trading war stories.

He’d transferred to Quantico right when they were starting to take the psychological stuff seriously.The old guard had scoffed at it, but Frank had seen enough to know that every killer left a piece of themselves at the scene.You just had to know where to look.

Just like on the documentary he was watching.

Frank watched the faded crime scene photos flash across his TV screen.The documentary was covering the Riverside Strangler case from 1991 - one of those mysteries that kept armchair detectives up at night.Three victims, all found in public parks, positioned like they were sitting on park benches.All of the victims had a newspaper in their laps, turned to a page with an incomplete crossword.

‘They’re missing what’s right in front of them,’ Frank said to his sole audience.The tabby cat beside him offered a disinterested slow blink in response.‘They’re looking at the crosswords.They should be looking at the vics’ clothes.’

On screen, a talking head with ‘Former FBI Profiler’ beneath his name was expounding on the killer’s probable background.Frank snorted.He’d never seen this guy at Quantico, although in fairness he had retired back to Florida twenty years ago.

‘The folds in the shirts.They’re British military.The killer re-dressed every victim.’

Frank’s cat was unconcerned with this revelation, so went back to pruning itself.Frank was lost in the details now.He’d never heard of this case before, but he could tell a mile off that the unsub had been stationed overseas, probably during the Gulf War.The killings were a result of PTSD.It was right there, if the detectives had looked close enough.

The TV screen darkened and a text overlay said that the case remained unsolved.

That word.Unsolved.

There was a particularly American arrogance to that prefix.Like solved was the natural state of things, and only failure could corrupt it.Like ‘unfinished’ or ‘unopened.’Unsolved implied that the job had been abandoned halfway through while the solvers moved on to more important things.

If only the public – or these documentary filmmakers – knew just how much impact that littleunhad.

A pain in Frank’s knee told him it was time for his nightly meds.He planted both hands on the armrests and pushed himself upright.Seventy-three wasn’t ancient by modern standards, but his body kept meticulous records of every injury.Each step towards the kitchen was a negotiation between pain and momentum.The first few yards were always the worst, until his joints reluctantly remembered their purpose.

‘Getting old isn’t for cowards,’ Lisa used to say in those final months when cancer had whittled her down to nothing but angles.She’d faced her deterioration with the same no-nonsense pragmatism that had drawn him to her four decades earlier.Frank tried to channel some of that stoicism now as he navigated the twelve feet between his recliner and the kitchen counter.

The medication organizer – one of those plastic contraptions with days of the week embossed on each compartment – sat beside the sink.Frank popped open the ‘Sunday’ slot and tipped three pills into his palm: blood pressure, cholesterol, and the anti-inflammatory that kept his knees functional enough for basic household navigation.

He filled a glass with tap water and swallowed the pills one by one.A little bourbon would have helped wash away the medicinal residue, but his doctor had warned him off mixing alcohol with these meds.His heart was already on its last legs, so the last thing it needed was a shock to its system.

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