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

by Blake Pierce

  A cobblestone path led to the home’s front door. Ella banged on it. Ripley kept her hand firmly around her Glock 17 pistol as they waited for an answer.

  Thirty seconds passed without a response. Ripley’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She picked it up.

  “Harris. Go. We’re at the suspect’s home. Looks like it’s empty.” She turned on speaker phone.

  “It would be,” Harris’s voice crackled through. “The house belongs to a couple named Jared and Chloe Green, but here’s the thing, they’ve been on vacation in Europe since last Friday. I just got through to Chloe and she assured me there should be no one in their house. They locked it all up when they left.”

  “Then someone’s using their home to attack young kids. We’re going in,” Ripley said. Ella took the initiative and began to shoulder the front door, but it was too rigid to budge.

  Harris’s crackly voice again. “The other officers are on their way. The GPS gets all screwed up out in the sticks.”

  “Understood,” Ripley said, placing the phone in her pocket. “Back door. Let’s go.”

  Ripley and Ella made their way along the side of the home, past a handful of windows, all of which were locked shut. Inside was shrouded in darkness too. There was no fence separating the home’s backyard from the region’s grassy surroundings, only an open garage which signaled the rough area where the home’s outdoor territory ended. Ella spotted three cars.

  “Two Audis and a Ford Focus,” Ripley said. “One of those isn’t like the others.”

  “The Ford must be Alex’s. He said the guy took it for a test drive. Look how he’s parked it.”

  “Jammed between the garage and the back door, so Alex couldn’t make a quick escape in it if he got free.”

  Ella put herself in Alex’s position. If he’d have managed to get in the car, it would have taken some serious maneuvering to get it out of the angle it had been locked in at. She felt a sensation of helplessness as she imagined Alex trying to escape his captor, realizing he’d have to escape on foot.

  They approached the back patio area. Two sliding glass doors gave a glimpse into a kitchen area. Ella pulled on one of the handles and the door opened the first time. She looked back at Ripley.

  “He escaped through here and didn’t have any way to lock it,” Ripley said. She pulled out her flashlight and shone it inside, finding a light switch to her right. She flicked it on. The kitchen area lit up. A pile of smashed glass lined both the kitchen surface and the floor. Ella moved forward and found the light switch for the living room.

  “Jesus wept,” said Ripley, scrutinizing the pile of blood which had dried into the gray carpet. “Alex must have caught him good.” Beside it was a white and gold vase, with a large chunk missing from its side.

  “Any thoughts, Dark? I’m not seeing any reason why this might be connected to the four other murders. Breaking into a home eight miles from his last murder site? A ruse about selling a car? Handcuffs? Why would he go to these lengths? If I was looking at this through the lens of an isolated murder case, I’d argue that sexual gratification was the prime motivator here, something which the other murders lacked.”

  “No, our unsub did this. I’m sure of it.” Ella knelt down beside the blood pool and recreated the scene in her mind. She visualized Alex’s entering and making small talk with the killer. She saw the killer eyeing him up from behind, ensuring that he was a suitable victim type. When he approved, he poured a drink and offered it him. Alex said no. Then she saw the rage and frustration overcome the killer. She saw him panic and reconvene his plan. Then came the recreation of historical events. Ella pictured the killer using the references in her memory bank. He was a stocky man, physically adept.

  A clown.

  This scene was indeed different from the rest, but also similar in one very crucial way. Things fell into place almost seamlessly. When she was sure she had the events in linear order, she ran it by Ripley.

  “Alex came in and sat down here. Remember how he said this John got upset when he refused his offer of a drink?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s because he was trying to pry him with alcohol, or possibly drugs to loosen him up, to make him an easier victim. We know this guy isn’t confident in his physical abilities. He always blitz attacks when his victims least expect it. He had to use drugs to sedate Shawn Kelly because he posed a physical threat, and Alex did too. He needed him weakened before he was comfortable enough to strike.”

  “I agree, he does,” Ripley said. “But that’s pretty common in murder cases the world over.”

  Ella looked out toward Alex’s car abandoned in the yard. She pulled up the visualization again in her mind and went through it step by step. “He was banking on Alex taking the drink, but when that approach didn’t work he had to think of another way to make Alex’s escape more difficult.”

  Ella pictured the killer doing his best to keep calm, but fretting on the inside. She saw him wanting to blitz-attack Alex like he had done with the others, but he knew that he couldn’t. She could almost see the look on his face as he fought that internal battle with himself. Get the kill, or pay the correct tribute?

  “Alex was sober, so he had to remove the car from the equation. That was when he came up with the test drive story. He was able to take the keys off Alex and park the car somewhere where it was more difficult to escape in. If Alex did manage to get the key somehow, or if he had a spare key in his pocket, he’d need to maneuver the car quite significantly to get out of that position.”

  Ripley listened with interest, following Ella’s pattern of thinking. “I suppose you could be right. If Alex did fight back, the only escape would be to run through the fields, giving the unsub a better chance of recapturing him.”

  Ella picked herself up off the blood-soaked floor. “Is Harris still on the line?”

  Ripley held up her phone. “He is.”

  “Tell him to ask Alex something. Ask him if this John person tried to show him a magic trick with the handcuffs.”

  Ripley did, then thanked Harris and hung up. “Ten out of ten, Rookie. What do you know that I don’t?”

  Ella didn’t yet respond. “The handcuffs approach wasn’t a deviation from his intentions. He had planned to do it, only he planned on Alex being intoxicated at the time. But because he couldn’t follow his plan to the letter, like he did with all the others, he slipped up.”

  “He panicked. That tells us he’s not good at thinking on his feet. Maybe he’s not as organized as we thought.”

  “There’s one thing I’m missing, though,” Ella continued. “Why here? He chose Alex because he fit the profile he needed, but the location is strange.”

  “He might have easy access to this place. He might be a friend or relative of the owners. He might have just chosen it at random. He might have tried a hundred houses before landing on this one.”

  “Do you think this guy would do that?” Ella asked. “All of his other scenes have been calculated and controlled to the letter.”

  “You tell me. In your profile of the unsub, you said that location was as important as victimology and signature.”

  Ella thought about it. “He wouldn’t just choose this place at random. He doesn’t do randomness, or convenience. Staging is everything to him. He needed to kill Alex in this house because it was part of the signature. Everything else matches up, except—” Ella stopped mid-sentence. She was browsing the window ledge which overlooked the front lawn.

  “What is it?” Ripley asked, seemingly picking up on her thoughts telekinetically. “Out with it.”

  On the shelf was a row of three trophies. Each one depicted a golfer in a different stance. Ella lowered herself to read the plaques on them all.

  The first one, UNITED STATES GOLF ASSOCIATION—JARED GREEN.

  The next, LOUISIANA GOLF SOCIETY SILVER AWARD—JARED GREEN.

  But it was the third one that made the sparks connect.

  Ella picked up the trophy and pointed to the en
graving. It simply said J.G.

  “What about it?” Ripley asked. “So he’s a golfer.”

  “No, look at the initials. The guy who owns this house is Jared Green. J.G. This whole scene is a tribute to John Gacy.”

  Ripley considered it for a moment. “Shit, I think you’re right.”

  “Between 1972 and 1978, John Wayne Gacy was responsible for the deaths of at least thirty-three young men and boys throughout the Chicago area. His victim count made him one of the most prolific serial killers in modern history. In his personal time, Gacy doubled as a children’s entertainer—a clown.”

  “It makes sense,” Ripley agreed. “This house a makes a great location for him. It’s in the middle of nowhere so it gives him privacy. It’s lavish, so people are going to be more inclined to come inside. It’s all here.”

  “It really is. Gacy preyed on young boys, the average age around nineteen. He used a number of ploys to get them back to his house, then he’d pump them full of alcohol until they were in no fit state to fight back. I’m just struggling to understand how he found a house not only with the homeowner’s initials being J.G., but who would also be out of town.”

  “There’s probably a million homeowners with those initials. Or he could have found one just named John, or Wayne. It’s called multiple outs. There were different ways he could have referenced the name, and finally, when he realized these guys would be in Europe, that cemented the decision.”

  Ella thought on it, then agreed. “I guess. After Gacy was done plying them with alcohol, he’d use the handcuff trick.”

  “Then strangle them and leave them under the floorboards,” Ripley finished.

  “And that was probably his intention here, but he failed,” Ella said. They exchanged a look.

  “In my experience, when serial killers fail, things tend to get more difficult for the investigators.”

  “How so?”

  “Serial killers lash out if they don’t manage to appease their fantasies, like if they get interrupted during the kill. It’s like someone slapping you in the face when you’re about to orgasm.”

  Ella’s mind jumped to Jack the Ripper, who had killed two women in one night because he didn’t manage to mutilate the first.

  “Some people like that,” Ella said.

  “True, and just like those people, I can feel things getting rough. If this is the first time his plans have been thwarted, his next attack could be completely unpredictable. It could be a random stabbing in the street, or an impulsive home invasion.”

  Ella ran through the possible scenarios in her head. Given his failure here, would he redo the Gacy murder? Would he find another victim, another home? Or would he go back for Alex again?

  “We’ll get forensics over here to comb through this place. We’ve got enough DNA samples here to get a perfect match if he’s on the database.”

  The other possibility was that he’d accept his failure and move on, but if so, to what?

  The only certainty she had was that the man in the holding cells back at the precinct was not the person responsible for these murders.

  “We need to get back to the precinct and revisit the profile,” Ella said. “There must be something we’ve missed.”

  “No sleep for us tonight,” said Ripley as they made their way out. “We need to solve this thing now.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  When Ella arrived at the precinct the next morning, her mind was a deadfall of questions. There was a new determination in her, because during all of yesterday’s chaos, Ella had overlooked something.

  She had been right.

  She locked herself in the office and began scrawling away on a whiteboard. She was quickly consumed by her thoughts, but a knock on the door pulled her back to reality. Ripley walked in with a steaming coffee in her hands.

  “You’re early,” Ripley said.

  Ella prayed that the red circles around her eyes had disappeared. She prayed Ripley wouldn’t notice the signs of tiredness on her face and skin.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” Ella said.

  “Those blotches give you away. You’re exhausted, and I’m not surprised.”

  Ella slumped herself down in her chair and stared up at her work. She’d drawn a table listing all of the serial killers the unsub had mimicked so far, listing victim counts, locations, times, dates, number of escapees, murder weapons, victim characteristics, specific rituals and M.O.s. In her hand she held a printout of her psychological profile. She ran her pen up and down the page, feeling a surge of overwhelming anxiety jolt her in the stomach. There was too much information for her to break down, too many factors, too much complexity. She had all this information as a baseline, but what if it was completely wrong? More people would die, and it would be her fault for taking the profile in the wrong direction. That was a burden she couldn’t handle. Despite what they found at Clyde’s home, she couldn’t help but feel that the whole endeavor had been a waste of precious time—and it was all her fault because of her profile. While they were looking in one direction, the real killer was striking in the other. The guilt plagued her; one of the reasons why she barely managed four hours of sleep last night.

  “Dark, talk to me. What’s on your mind?”

  Ella looked down at the paper in her hand.

  It would be safe to assume he would emulate similar lust killers, such as John Wayne Gacy, Gary Ridgway, Dennis Rader. If he was to emulate John Wayne Gacy, he would choose a young adult male or teenage boy.

  “I predicted he would only copy lust killers, and that Gacy might be one of them.”

  “And he did exactly that.”

  “So, I think I know how he might strike next, but I can’t be sure.”

  “Go on.”

  “With every kill there’s been an escalation of some form, correct? If you were looking at these outside of my theory, how you would view it?” Ella asked.

  Ripley took a gulp of her coffee and pointed to the first name on the list. “Well, the unsub’s first kill of Julia Reynolds was simple and straightforward. He dispatched her quickly, disposed of her immediately, and didn’t spend considerable time with the body, nor did he pose her or stage the scene in any way. “

  Ripley moved to the next name. “His second kill, Winnie Barker, was similar, but there was also a change in M.O. He killed her quickly and didn’t spend any time with her while she was conscious, but this time he left a small message in lipstick. This was where he really put the stamp on his kill. If he hadn’t done this, we might, or rather, you might never have suspected he was mimicking Richard Ramirez.”

  “And Christine Hartwell?”

  “That’s where he began to really hone his operation. He perfected this scene down to the last detail, even spending considerable time with her corpse postmortem. Here, he included things he hadn’t done before, copying Gein’s actions right down to minor things like restraint equipment. The whole thing was staged to obsessive levels.”

  “Would you see Shawn Kelly’s murder as a de-escalation, considering the staging was less dramatic?”

  Ripley thought for a second. She pushed back her auburn hair and held it in a ponytail. “No, I wouldn’t say that at all,” she said. “Just because the postmortem brutality wasn’t quite as extreme, it doesn’t mean there wasn’t an acceleration in his psychopathology. Escalation can mean different things in the confines of a crime scene and psychoanalysis. It isn’t restricted to displays of violence.”

  Ella considered the idea. She’d been agitated by the fact that Shawn Kelly’s murder was less theatrical, less systematic than Christine Hartwell’s. “Like how?”

  “Well, tell me how Jeffrey Dahmer approached his victims.”

  “He befriended them in gay clubs around Milwaukee and invited them back to his apartment. He promised them booze, drugs, and sex, then once they were alone, he’d get them inebriated and then attack them.”

  “And how does that differ from the others? Kemper, Ramirez, Gein?” Ripley asked.
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  “They all attacked on sight. Kemper spent a little time with his victims, but that was just to get them out in the open. Ramirez and Gein didn’t gain their victims’ trust at all.”

  “Right, well in that case, that’s the escalation here. Our unsub engaged in conversation with Shawn Kelly before subduing him. At least, to levels he hadn’t done before. Personalizing the victim is a common acceleration in serial killers since it makes the murder that much more satisfying when they do go through with it. They get off on the deception, and then again during the kill.”

  “Okay, and would you argue this escalation continued on to his Gacy kill?” Ella asked.

  Ella warmed her hands on her coffee, then rubbed them together. “Without a doubt. He went to the trouble of locating an empty house, arranging his victim to come to him, plying him with alcohol right there and then, and then went through the whole ordeal with the handcuffs? That’s a big jump from just drugging someone and waiting for the intoxication to take hold. Not to mention, we don’t know exactly what he would have done if the victim hadn’t escaped.”

  “I also think he’s escalating in terms of serial killer notoriety too,” Ella said. “The crime scenes aren’t just paying tribute to these people, they’re reflective of each killer’s presence in modern culture. Ask a random person on the street if they’ve heard of Edmund Kemper or Richard Ramirez, and they’ll probably say no. Ask them about Ed Gein, maybe one in ten people would say yes.”

  “But ask them about Dahmer and Gacy, and most people would recognize their names,” Ripley added.

  “Exactly. And now he’s reached Gacy, where do you go from there?” Ella asked. “Highest victim count of any modern serial killer in the US, one of the most prolific murderers of all time.”

  “You tell me.”

  Ella cleared her throat. “We excluded overseas killers like Jack the Ripper and Harold Shipman. We excluded historical killers like Albert Fish and H.H. Holmes. We excluded female killers like Aileen Wuornos. So, there’s really only one other notorious serial killer who could possibly come next.”