Page 12 of Girl, Forlorn

CHAPTER FIVE

‘This case is really weird,’ Ella said. ‘It doesn’t add up.’

En route to Connecticut, Ella had laid out her files on the table between her and Ripley. Her partner, meanwhile, was staring at the fading city out of their business class window. Even the altitude hadn’t done much to lift her spirits.

Ella snapped her fingers. ‘Mia, come on. Get your head out of the clouds.’

Ripley turned her gaze from the window, a sigh escaping her lips as she focused on the files sprawled before them. ‘Alright, Dark, what's so weird about it?’

Ella leaned forward, her finger tracing over the details in the case file. ‘Three victims, three nights, all strangled in private spaces. No sexual assault, no theft, no theatrics to speak of.

‘Go through each victim one by one,’ Ripley said. ‘The devil is in the details.’

Ella had consumed every detail in the casefile on the way to the airport, and now it was all lodged in her brain whether she wanted it in there or not. She scrolled through her mental database piece by piece. ‘Okay, so the first victim was Demi Hart, thirty-six years old, found strangled in her car. Bruises to her neck and larynx according to the autopsy.’

‘Where was the car?’ asked Ripley.

‘Parking lot. Keys were in the ignition when police got there.’

Ripley bent forward and plucked the crime scene photo out of Ella’s hands. ‘Wait a minute. He killed her inside the car?’

‘I know. Told you it was weird.’

Despite popular belief, the only way people died inside their cars in the modern age was through traffic accidents. Breaching car locks these days was close to impossible short of shattering the windows, which would immediately ruin all opportunity of a blitz attack.

‘So our killer somehow managed to get into a car with his victim.’

‘Yup, so he either acted quick or she trusted him.’

‘Or she was a sex worker.’

Ella checked the victim’s details. ‘Nope. Demi was an operator for an energy company. She was manning the phones on the night shift the night she died.’

‘What about the second victim?’ Ripley asked.

‘Victim number two was Mark Jensen, thirty-six, asphyxiated in his office. No signs of forced entry, nothing stolen, just like Demi.’

‘His office? So there should be cameras around?’

Ella checked the details. ‘No, Mark was self-employed, but he worked out of a small cabin he rented. He was a technical writer. But here’s the really weird thing…’

Ripley seemed to be emerging from her slump. She grabbed her own case file out of her bag and began leafing through. She found the second victim’s details.

‘Suffocated… with a vacuum bag.’

A reenactment of the death scene played out in her head. Bag over the head, air decompressed, the helpless victim struggling for breath. She flipped through a series of crime scenes showing Mark Jensen's lifeless body, his blue face frozen in death behind a layer of plastic. Ella paid a moment of silent respect, struggling to imagine the suffering that this poor gentleman went through in the moments before death. While there was no official scale, suffocation was considered to be one of the most painful ways to die.

‘Unique killing method,’ Ella said. ‘Arguably an unnecessary component of the crime.’

Ripley's expression darkened as she looked at the photos. ‘Strangulation is personal, but using a vacuum bag takes it to another level. It's like the killer wanted to watch him suffocate, to see the life drain out of him without preoccupying his hands.’

‘So he could sit back and savor Mark Jensen’s torment.’

‘Yeah. Or it’s possible he used a vacuum bag out of convenience. Once you pull the cord on those things, they’ll coil around whatever’s inside like a snake.’

Ella considered the comment. ‘He might not have had the physical prowess to subdue a man, so he wrapped the bag around his head, pulled the cord and let biology do the rest.’

‘Possibly. Or it’s escalation. Manual to automatic strangulation. A progression in M.O. What about victim three?’

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