Girl, Alone (An Ella Dark FBI Suspense Thriller—Book 1) Read online

  Then the darkness consumed her. For a few seconds she saw nothing except brief flashes of light, but when her eyes adjusted to the room’s conditions, she saw the outline of a man holding a knife in his hand.

  He was standing over her dad as he slept. Ella tried to scream, but no sound came out. She tried to run toward him, but she was locked in place. She picked up a small vase off her dad’s table and threw it at the strange man, but it just bounced off him and landed on the floor. He didn’t even notice she was there.

  He moved closer to her dad. All she could do was watch.

  In a series of violent thrusts, the figure plunged the knife into the heart of her sleeping father. The sudden attack rendered him completely motionless. He couldn’t struggle or fight back or make an escape. He was at the stranger’s mercy.

  Ella froze in place, as though her feet were nailed to the ground. Then, everything came in small fragments, as though the picture had been smashed to pieces and she was assembling the jigsaw back together.

  She saw blood seeping from the bed onto the carpet. She heard her dad screaming for her to get out of the house. The attacker turned around, pulled back his hood, and looked her in the eye. His face was unrecognizable, reminding her of a badly drawn composite sketch. Whoever it was, she didn’t know him. She hadn’t seen him before.

  Leaving her dad in a bloody heap, he launched toward Ella with his blade pointed toward her.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  A silent scream. Then everything disappeared. The world dissolved in front of her. The man, the bedroom, the bloodstained sheets. Reality came crushing back, and she was suddenly aware that she was looking at the back of her eyelids.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  Her eyes opened, adjusting to focus on the window blinds a few feet away. A trickle of sunlight seeped through. She sat up in bed and grabbed her phone off the table beside her. 7:05 a.m. Only now did she realize that the banging noise had been in the present, not in her dreamworld.

  “Who is it?” she called out. The cold air hit her hard and jolted her awake.

  “It’s me, Rookie. Time to get going.” Ripley’s voice from behind her motel door.

  “Sorry, I didn’t think we’d be leaving so early.”

  “Being early is on time. Being on time is late.”

  “Give me a minute and I’ll meet you downstairs.”

  Ella heard Ripley disappear, then she composed herself on her bed. She breathed in and out slowly then used the COUNTDOWN technique to slow down her fast-beating heart. She acknowledged five things in the room she could see. A TV, a leather chair, a motel-issue pen, a pile of books, her laptop. Then came four things she could touch, three things she could hear. After thirty seconds, she was calm.

  The visions were always the same. Unexpected and cruel, and they always taunted her with their obscurity. She’d been having them since that night twenty-three years ago, and while she’d learned to cope with the emotional aftermath a little better, they did nothing to paint the story any clearer. They’d distorted the events so much that she struggled to remember what was real and what wasn’t.

  Maybe her mind was making it all up, she thought. Maybe she never laid eyes on the murderer, or even knew he was in the house at all. Perhaps her five-year-old self had been oblivious to the whole thing, and trauma-cum-guilt had filled in the blanks.

  Or maybe she did see the murderer. She might have looked the man who killed her father dead in the eye. But if that was the case, why was she still alive to tell the tale?

  ***

  Ella expected the Mobile Parish Coroner’s Office to have a much more sinister aura than it did.

  It was located four miles away from their motel. It was a quaint, oddly shaped building with a gothic roof, multi-paned windows, and two chimneys. Outside, the sculpted lawn was decorated with a memorial bench to the building’s founder, and two evergreen trees stood either side of the glass entranceway. The interior was lined with a welcoming oak finish.

  From the small reception area, a member of staff escorted the agents to Room B3, where the bodies of the victims involved in the ongoing investigation were located. A sliding steel door blocked their entrance to the room. Before unlocking it, the staff member handed them latex gloves and plastic ventilation masks. He then unlocked it and motioned for Ella and Ripley to go inside. He shut the door behind them with a heart-skipping slam.

  Inside was a heavy odor of medical fluid. Green-tinted walls stood behind several rows of what looked to Ella like filing cabinets, but she knew better. They were slots for bodies. A steel table sat in the center of the room, with a white sheet covering what lay beneath.

  A man walked in from a small side room, hurriedly wiping his hands dry with a towel. He threw it to the side and then greeted the agents with a handshake.

  “Good morning, Agents. Sorry for the lack of preparation. It’s been all go today. I’m Dr. Scott Richards, the on-site coroner here. I hope you found us easily enough.”

  Dr. Richards was striking figure. Ella couldn’t help but admire his looks. He was boyishly attractive, what her roommate might call bubblegum hot. He had short, curly black hair that boasted no particular style. Rectangular glasses magnified his caramel-colored eyes. He was wearing standard blue scrubs that were tainted with a couple of small stains around the chest. Ella placed him in his thirties, but she couldn’t be sure. He was one of those eighteen or thirty guys.

  “Good to meet you, Dr. Richards,” said Ripley without looking up from her notepad. “Could you walk us through what you’ve found so far?”

  “With pleasure,” Richards said. Ella dropped her bag and pulled out her notepad too. She watched as Richards applied fresh protective gear and pulled the sheet off the central table. A headless, mutilated body appeared. Even through her ventilation mask, Ella could smell the decay. She almost heaved.

  It took her a few seconds to process the visual. She thought back to all of the corpses she’d seen in books and crime scene photos, but the real thing was an entirely different story. This was all that remained of Christine Hartwell, a woman who only a few days ago was living her life while believing that death was many years away. And now she was here on a slab, all her dreams and hopes crushed to dust so a psychopath could enjoy a brief high.

  “Victim number three,” Richards began. He picked up a small metal instrument and passed it over her body, and then began to use it as a pointer to highlight areas of Christine’s corpse. “One bullet entry wound in the stomach, exiting through her back and clipping her spine in the process. This would have incapacitated the victim significantly. Lacerations to the neck and abdomen, caused by trauma from a tapered instrument like a felling or scythe ax.”

  Next, Richards wheeled in two more steel tables from the adjoining room. Ella maneuvered around to create enough space to fit them in. “Sorry. Not much room in here. We don’t usually get this many dead people at once,” he laughed. Ella just nodded, unsure how to respond. It seemed Ripley and Richards were a lot more comfortable around corpses than she was.

  Richards pulled off the sheets covering the remains of the first two victims. Their state of decomposition was much more severe than Christine’s, giving them a yellowish, skeletal appearance. He moved his pointer to the head of Julia Reynolds, victim number one. She’d been dismembered, and so had been pieced back together like a human mosaic. A final indignity.

  “Do you see these brown marks on the neck and arms?” Richards asked. “Blunt force trauma, most likely caused by hands rather than a foreign object. Cause of death was strangulation.”

  Ripley ran her gloved finger along the lacerations on the arms and neck. She looked back toward Christine Hartwell’s corpse and breathed out heavily. Ella did the same, comparing the wounds of the two bodies and trying to determine a pattern or similarity of any kind. However, the only thing they had in common was decapitation. Nothing else matched.

  “And victim number two?” Ripley said. The three moved around toward the dead bod
y of Winnie Barker.

  Richards moved his pointer to her midsection. “Thirteen stab wounds to the abdomen and one to the neck. I found traces of manganese and vanadium around the inflictions, so the murder weapon was most likely a carbon steel carving knife. Nothing special. Can be bought anywhere. Chances are she died from excessive blood loss during the attack, but she may have still been alive when he lacerated her neck. Once again, these cuts are chaotic and haphazard. He cut through two main arteries but I doubt it was intentional.”

  “Looks to me like he hacked away without any real idea what he was doing,” Ella said. On the surface, it looked to Ella like the three victims were the work of three different perpetrators. But of course, she also knew that that’s exactly what the killer wanted.

  “Not quite,” Richards said. “There’s more. Something I found very strange indeed. You see, while the death blows are incredibly violent and reckless, the—”

  “The posthumous mutilations were careful and steady,” Ripley interrupted. “I know, that’s exactly what I was thinking.”

  Ella leaned closer to inspect the neck wounds on each victim one by one. Ripley was right. The cuts were clean and relatively smooth, like they’d been carried out with professional equipment.

  “I’d go farther than that,” Richards said. “These mutilations were carried out with almost surgical accuracy. I’ve been doing this fifteen years and I’ve never seen any kind of cuts like this before. Let me tell you, there’s not many folks in this neck of the woods who could pull off something like this. This is some Alfredo Treviño stuff.”

  He suddenly caught Ella’s attention. “Alfredo Treviño?” she asked. “You know who he is?”

  “Sure do.”

  “I’ve never met anyone who knows who Alfredo Treviño is.”

  “Serial killers make great reading for an up-and-coming surgeon,” Richards laughed. “I spent most of medical school reading about serial killers who cut their victims up. It’s been a while, but I guess I still remember a few things.”

  Ella was a little taken aback. She hadn’t expected to run into someone who knew about an obscure Mexican serial killer from the nineteen fifties. Ella looked over at Ripley, who was inspecting the mutilations and taking pictures on her phone. Ella couldn’t help herself. It seemed like the perfect opportunity to ask.

  “Do you remember anything about Ed Gein, Richard Ramirez, or Edmund Kemper?”

  Richards placed down his equipment and removed his mask. He took off his glasses and cleaned the lenses with his scrubs. “Absolutely. Everyone knows those guys. I’m very familiar with their methodology.”

  “Well, I’m working on a theory that our unsub is copycatting different serial killers. Christine Hartwell’s murder is reminiscent of what Ed Gein did to one of his victims. Winnie Barker’s murder involved elements from Richard Ramirez’s crimes. And Julia Reynolds was strangled and dismembered, just like Edmund Kemper’s M.O.”

  Ripley looked up at Ella disapprovingly. “Rookie, is this something you should really be sharing? Think about it.”

  She was right. Big mistake. “Sorry. I shouldn’t be talking about things like this.”

  Richards laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t repeat it to anyone. But now that you mention it, I can absolutely see what you’re talking about,” he said.

  “Really?” Ella asked. She knew she’d made a mistake, but having her theory validated gave a small sense of accomplishment. She thought that maybe it would show Ripley that she knew what she was talking about too.

  “Sure. I mean, I remember those Gein crime scene photos as clear as day. Ms. Hartwell over there is pretty much a perfect replica. If I remember rightly, Ramirez hacked his victims with a knife while they slept, correct? And Kemper abducted teen girls and cut them to pieces? Damn, I can’t believe I didn’t make that connection myself. That’s absolutely amazing.”

  Ella didn’t expect such an enthusiastic reaction from the coroner. His fascination almost seemed to rival hers. “You know your stuff,” Ella said. “All that detail from memory?”

  “Quite. It’s been a while but there are some things you just don’t forget.”

  From the other side of the small room, a ringing phone interrupted their conversation. Ripley breathed a heavy sigh. She pulled herself away from the lower half of Christine Hartwell’s corpse and removed her mask and gloves. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her cell. Ella turned her attention back to the coroner.

  “Is there anything else you’ve noticed that we might have missed? Ligature marks, defensive wounds, things like that?”

  Am I trying to impress him? she thought.

  “Nothing outside of what was listed in the initial police report,” Richards said. “But your theory has opened up a new world of questions, so I’ll keep digging.”

  “Great, thank you. Give me a call if you find anything.”

  She felt a sense of pride, even though she could feel Ripley’s eyes burning her from across the room. She felt that revealing these details was worth it, since it gave Dr. Richards some ammunition to work with. She just hoped that she could make Ripley see her rationale.

  “Maybe I’ll give you a call even if I don’t,” he laughed. Ella didn’t quite know how to respond. But suddenly, Ripley’s frustrated tones broke the tension.

  “Are you kidding me?” she said down the phone. “Corner it off. We’ll be there in twenty.” Ripley shoved her notepad back into her coat pocket. She caught Ella’s eye. It was only two days into the job, but Ella knew exactly what Ripley was about to say.

  “We need to get out of here. He’s killed again.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Their destination was a house some three miles east. Ripley was at the helm, and the sat-nav told them they were six minutes away. Ripley hadn’t shared the details of her phone call, other than the fact they were heading to see a dead body in the flesh.

  “Did they say anything else on the phone?” Ella asked.

  “No,” Ripley snapped, keeping her eyes glued to the road. Since getting in the car, Ripley hadn’t turned the radio on. Something she’d done on every journey they’d taken so far.

  Ella felt resistance. She could sense something was wrong, and she had a good idea what it was. Ella took the plunge.

  “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “What the hell were you thinking back there?” she said, hardly pausing to let Ella finish her sentence. Ella didn’t need to inquire for more details.

  “I’m sorry. I just thought that if someone else believed my theory, it might help persuade you.”

  They pulled up at a traffic light with an abrupt stop. Ella felt the recoil. She’d pissed Ripley off something fierce. She didn’t dare look at her. Instead, she gazed out of the passenger window and saw a man opening up the shutters on his small liquor store. The shop was called LIQUOR OUT.

  “It was unprofessional, not to mention very stupid of you,” Ripley shouted, her voice laced with venom. “What happens if that coroner goes and tells someone else your little theory? That’s how rumors start. Not to mention that it’s unconfirmed and, at worst, could be completely incorrect. Can you imagine how that would reflect on us?”

  “But he has an obligation to keep things on the down low, doesn’t he?” Ella said.

  The car started rolling again. They were four minutes away from their destination.

  “No,” Ripley said. “He’s not a police officer. It’s no different than telling a stranger in a coffee shop.”

  Ella hadn’t yet seen Ripley so irate. She felt she was being scolded by a parent.

  “But he said it was a good theory. I thought that if he made the same connections I did, then he might look for additional things coroners might usually overlook. That could really help us. He even said he’d look further into it for me.”

  “And he couldn’t possibly have said that because of an ulterior motive? I know interpersonal skills aren’t your strong point and I know you’re new to all this,
but lesson number one: Don’t trust anyone with confidential information about murder cases. That’s how you find yourself up shit creek without a paddle.”

  “I’m sorry. I feel like an idiot for it. I got carried away.”

  She shouldn’t have done what she did, and looking back, it seemed obvious to her now. She felt a pang of embarrassment. She felt she’d let herself down. At the time, she thought it was something minor which Ripley might overlook. She didn’t truly know how damaging revealing confidential information could be.

  “I understand your enthusiasm but you can’t just go around spouting your theories to anybody who’ll listen. This isn’t a high school class. How would you feel if Julia’s parents caught wind of these rumors? Or Christine’s brother? Or Winnie’s grandkids? Have you ever lost someone you love?”

  Ella thought back to the dreams. They’d only happened a few hours ago, but it felt like days. “No,” she lied. “It won’t happen again.”

  “Good,” Ripley said. Up ahead, a row of detached houses came into view. There were three houses either side of the street, all of which featured modest front and backyards. A winding pathway encircled all of the homes, allowing pedestrians to pass by and enjoy clear views of the town’s more scenic areas.

  “My biggest concern is that the press get a hold of any information about our investigation, particularly your findings,” Ripley continued. “Far-fetched theories like yours are a journalist’s wet dream. The press would run with it and sensationalize it to death. Then our unsub would know we’re onto him and just like that, the FBI looks like a bunch of incompetent fools. Suddenly, we’ve got a media shitstorm on our hands. I’ve seen it happen.”

  “Understood,” Ella said, her embarrassment burning up her temples. “From now on I’ll keep things to myself.”

  “Tell me. Tell the Sheriff. Don’t tell anyone else.”

  Ella let silence do the rest of the talking as their car passed a cul-de-sac and finally pulled up outside a house on Lakeside View. Yellow crime scene tape surrounded the entire house with four uniformed officers surrounding it. Across the small path, two neighbors watched without shame.