Page 45 of So Lethal

The door to the shed opened, and Detective Ferris cleared his throat. “Miss Thorne’s on her way back home. I have Cooper giving her a ride.”

Faith nodded. “Thank you.”

“Sure. Don’t mention it.” He gestured at the body. “Sick stuff, huh?”

“Yes.”

"Not the worst I've seen, but sure ain't pretty. Any thoughts why he's escalating?"

Faith took a deep breath. “I think he’s trying to send a message.”

“What, like, you can’t catch me? I can do more, and you still won’t find me?”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t think so. I think he’s been sending a message the entire time, but it’s not coming through the way he wants it to. You remember how I noticed at Monica Smith’s studio that the killer used care to lower her body to the ground?”

“Yeah. I remember that. That’s why we thought it might be a lover for a second.”

Ferris thought it might be a lover, not Faith or Michael, but Faith let that pass. “I think he wants to show us that he cares about his victims.”

Ferris scoffed. “Cares about them? By killing them? Sick freak.”

“I won’t argue with you about that,” Faith said, “but that kind of false benevolence is far from unheard of in serial killers. A lot of killers have a mercy fetish where they believe they’re helping their victims by killing them. I worked a case in Washington State this past winter where the killer murdered people who were abusive to animals. She did this because she had abused animals in the past and believed she was going to hell for it. She killed her victims thinking she was saving them from judgment.”

“Christ,” Ferris said. He put his hands on top of his head and stared at Marcus’s body. “Ahh. What a mess. You said you saw the killer, Faith?”

“I did.”

“Can you describe him?”

Faith sighed. “He was definitely male. Tall, I think six-five or so. Slender build but athletic, like a runner. I think he is a runner, actually. He fled on foot and did a good job doing it.”

“That’s it? Tall, skinny, and fast?”

Faith’s lips thinned slightly at Ferris’s tone. “He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a ski mask. It was dark already by the time we arrived, so I couldn’t see the color of his eyes.”

Ferris swore and kicked a rake that leaned against the wall of the shed. It bounced fell over, the handle pointing at Marcus’s body as though to say, look what you caused, Faith.

She turned away. “Go ahead and send CSI in. This was a more complicated crime than the earlier ones. It was also his first time with the new MO. He might have made a mistake.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that.”

She left the woodshed and headed to the house, Turk and Michael following. Michael trotted next to her and said, “So this killer is showing his care for them with the angel wings and the ruptured eardrums?”

“I think so,” she replied. “He doesn’t see this as killing his victims, but as liberating them. The pierced eardrums represents him ‘destroying’ their ailment, and the wings are obviously meant to symbolize their souls escaping to Heaven.”

“So he thinks their lives are shit, and this is how he’s helping them?” Michael scoffed. “I have to agree with Ferris. This is sick shit.”

“When is it ever not sick?” she asked drily. “What about the device he left behind? Have you looked at it yet?”

“CSI has it now. They’re not supposed to give us an official answer yet, but they told me it’s an amplifier that creates a powerful subsonic frequency. It’s not something ordinary people can hear.”

She frowned. “But I heard it. My ears started ringing when it went off. And Turk heard it too.”

“The way they explained it was that this isn’t about sound so much as it’s about pressure. I didn’t hear a thing, and neither did Rebecca, but people with more sensitive hearing—like Turk, and you right now—would experience extreme discomfort, and people without hearing would feel the actual pressure waves. They’re very high-intensity for sound waves but very low-intensity for pressure waves. That’s why Cliff could feel the rumbling in his cheap apartment above Monica’s cheap studio while he was awake, but Barbara Porter sleeping soundly in her sturdy McMansion couldn’t feel a thing.”

“But hearing-impaired people are more sensitive to pressure like that, so they would pick it up,” Faith inferred. “That suggests medical knowledge.”

“Maybe. Could just be that our killer’s deaf too, so he knows what deaf people will pick up on.”

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