Page 53 of Girl, Deceived

‘Realistically, someone wouldn’t hold onto trauma for that long. Chances are his trigger happened in the past ten years.’

Ella adjusted her parameters. ‘Two thousand cases.’

‘Still a lot. We don’t have time to scour every single one, so let’s narrow it down.’

Time to profile. Time to blend real world probabilities with fictional tropes. Ella never thought this day would come.

‘It would be a serious crime. Someone wouldn’t don a mask and start killing people because his mom fell for an online scam or something.’

‘Right, so homicide, maiming, abduction.’

Ella filtered down her results. ‘Seventeen-hundred.’

‘Better. Now, location. Always important.’

Ella applied real-world behavioral science to the proceedings. This unsub might be playing the role of a serial killer, but he would still be unconsciously bound by the same pathologies.

‘Within three miles of the first victim, which was Kathleen Carter. He’d want to kill in a zone he was familiar with, so he has an anchor point somewhere near the old cabins where Kathleen died.’

‘Right. How many results?’

Ella did the work. ‘Just over eight-hundred. We’re getting closer.’

‘Okay, now the most important component, and one that we might potentially have overlooked with all this horror business. But why is he targeting young, attractive girls?’

The simple answer was that young girls made the best scream queens, but given that there was no sexual component to the crimes, the reason for his attraction had to lie elsewhere.

‘Because they’re the ones that wronged him. He views young girls as the source of his trauma, and he’s projected their actions onto surrogates.’

Ripley clicked her fingers again. ‘Right, and our victims were between twenty-one and twenty-four. Narrow it down.’

Ella did. She took a deep breath. ‘Just under five-hundred unsolved crimes within three miles of the old cabins that involve girls in their early twenties.’

‘Still a lot,’ Ripley said as she glanced at the wall clock. ‘We’ve got what, twelve hours before he might strike again? It’ll take us longer than that to devour each case file.’

Ella embraced the pressure like it was an old friend. Hard times made hard women. ‘Okay, let’s get logical. He's not just targeting girls in their early twenties, there has to be a specific trigger, a unique variable.’

‘Go back to your horror villains. We’ve done the tangible stuff, now we need to add the element that makes our killer unique. What is it?’

Ella regarded her horror board, the board that seemed to be growing more complex by the minute. What was this killer’s secret ingredient? The element that separated him from a textbook psychopath? The one that compelled him to frame his murders with horror references?

Ella pressed her palms to her face, assuming the position of oblivion, the state that helped push her unconscious mind to the limits. There was a connection hiding just out of reach, teasing her, pining for her attention but disappearing at the last second.

‘Masks,’ Ella blurted out, talking to herself. Masks were the only constant in all three crimes, the signature, the element that didn’t need to be present but was.

‘What about the masks?’ asked Ripley.

‘They’re his signature, so they’re crucial to his fantasy.’

‘Obviously.’

‘But…’ Ella began before dissolving back into her fantasy world, a world where she dissected the most iconic fictional villains from the comfort of her psychotherapist’s chair. Norman Bates sat opposite her, mother's wig and all. Leatherface with his chainsaw perched by his side, Freddy Krueger's gloved hand twitching, Jason Voorhees silently tilting his head, Michael Myers rigid like a mannequin.

‘What if the masks aren’t for his victims? What if they're for him?’

Ripley raised an eyebrow. ‘Come again?’

‘The masks,’ Ella continued, ‘they're not just to scare the victims or to hide his identity. They're a reflection of his trauma, a manifestation of what he feels. They're his safety, his armor.’

---