Page 69 of Girl, Undone
One more experiment, then disappear into the night.
The groundwork for this ultimate experiment had already been laid, not through the accumulation of materials or the construction of a controlled environment, but through the selection of the final variable: a suitable victim.The essence of its design lay in its simplicity.This was a return to the fundamentals of fear and human vulnerability.No tools and no engineered triggers.
He closed down the windows on his computer, preparing to shut it down, pack it away, and bring it with him to Italy or Spain or wherever he chose. But as the windows minimized and revealed his desktop background, he was confronted with an image that pierced through the layers of his persona.
There, frozen in the pixels of his screen, was a snapshot of innocence: a photograph of him and his sister as children.Their smiles were wide and carefree, still untouched by the shadows that the future held.
This was all for her, he reminded himself.Infamy and accolades were one thing, but they were nothing in comparison to shedding the trauma that had plagued him since age six.It was a joke amongst psychologists that it was they themselves who needed therapy the most, and he wasn’t above turning the microscope on himself from time to time.
Young Abigail, swallowed by the depths.He thought that by mastering the fears of others, he could somehow reclaim control over his own, to rid himself of the trauma that had taken root in his core.He knew, deep down, that no amount of understanding or control over fear could ever bring her back or erase the scars of that day.But quests for catharsis knew no bounds – something he’d spent twenty years telling his clients – and he knew it better than anyone.
But the haunting image of his sister, forever smiling from the screen, remained imprinted on his mind.
This was for her, he repeated to himself.
The emotional vortex that had momentarily ensnared him was pushed aside.Time was of the essence, which meant he had no time to utilize the advantages of Scarecrow to draw his next subject to him.The urgency demanded a more direct approach, the same one he’d used on Julia and Derek.
He rose from his chair, collected his belongings, and made for the door.
One more victim.
One more test.
The end was in sight.
CHAPTER THIRTY NINE
Ella's desk looked like a crime scene itself.Papers everywhere; from crime scene glossies to handwritten notes that she’d scrawled in haste.She leaned over the wreckage and moved from one document to the next.The list of therapists from the Scarecrow app sat open on her laptop - Dylan Hartley's gift - and she was running each name against Todd Williams's journalistic efforts.
But so far, she’d found no matches.
The unsub had to be on Scarecrow.Had to be at the group sessions.But the names didn't line up; they vanished into smoke the second she tried to pin them down.
‘Goddammit.’
Ella found herself adrift.She reminded herself that people at the group therapy sessions probably didn’t use their real names, so cross-referencing them with the names on Scarecrow was going to be a futile gesture anyway.Sure, Todd Williams had discovered some of their real names, but not all of them, and who was to say that their unsub was even in full view when she’d been at the group sessions?It could have been a church worker or a volunteer that had been eavesdropping.
Ella pushed away from her laptop and the mountain of paper.She got up, moved to her whiteboard, and began attacking it with a marker pen.
‘Our killer meets his victims at the group therapy sessions, then possibly lures them onto the Scarecrow app and gets closer to them.Does he reveal his true identity to them right there, and how long does he talk to these victims before pulling the trigger?’
Not long, Ella concluded.And why did no one in the group report that one of the members was a therapist in hiding?
Ella laid all of her thoughts out on the board.It became a chaotic yet strangely ordered reflection of the entire case from three days ago until now.It was messy, but it was a manifestation that somehow, amidst its chaos, it began to take on the shape of coherence.
‘He poisons them before subduing them, which means he has to get one-on-one time with them.How to administer enough poison into one’s system in one go?’
Ella benched the thought and moved on to the next question in line.
‘Whoever this unsub was, he was at the group classes when I spilled my needle phobia, but that doesn’t mean it was a member of the group.There were staff loitering around, church workers, priests.’
She stared at the board and hit a wall.Her mind drifted back to the cabin; to Derek's last seconds; to the words he'd choked out through the poison.
Find him.Group.Name.Don’t know.The man.Nick.
What had Derek been trying to say?Manic?Or did he say Nick?According to her notes, there was no one named Nick at all, be it a fake name or real name.Nor were there any therapists named Nick or Nicholas within fifteen miles of Cedarburg.
Or had Ella misinterpreted that too?
