Ch. 7 / Pt. 4 : When They Wear the Mask

Booker hadn’t believed Paul Somers. He hadn’t believed Deirdre, either.

He’d need to pay another visit to each of them.

The ex-profiler whose allegedly ‘ace’ profile had led him to a crime scene had little to offer beyond basics. The suspect was probably white, male, middle-aged, and of middle- or upper-middle-class income. The guy felt impotent in the face of whatever wreck his life had become and took out his rage and anxiety on people he believed represented the exterior causes of said wreck. Paul Somers had set up an illegal canvas of Denton in response to, essentially, statistical probabilities. And when Booker had asked Paul why the murderer wore a mask, Paul hadn’t had an answer. Still, the two vigilantes had ended up in the area somehow, and Booker didn’t peg them for accomplices.

Had Dr. Paul Somers been telling the truth? No way.

And ‘Deirdre Frankly?’ The woman with the fake last name? Please.

If Virgil LeDuff had kept them in jail…

Pulling his glasses away from his face, elbows on his desk, Booker buried his eyes into the heels of his hands and sighed. Two of Denton’s most vigilant night owls had called in with reports of suspicious persons in the area. Of course they’d targeted the wrong ones, Booker didn’t question that. Booker questioned what the wrong ones were doing there, why they’d confessed to chargeable offenses rather than tell the truth. Why Virgil had such confessions and had opted to release them.

His eyes squished as he rubbed them.

The interviews had eaten up most of the day. The crime scene techs had already cleared the area and Virgil had already held a press conference. The autopsy results had come back predictably: the perpetrator had stabbed the mother multiple times in the back, near the spine, and used her as a human shield while her son opened fire with a Malleus-manufactured .380 that the family kept for home safety. As the mother bled to death, used as a weight to off-balance her son, the perpetrator had reached around her torso and stabbed the kid in the abdomen four times. The perp had disarmed the teen, stabbed him in the palm, and dislocated his right knee. At some point, the killer had started carving the boy’s face off but had stopped to throw him out of a window, instead.

Why?

Booker’s palms rolled up his forehead and over the short bristle of hair growing from his scalp, his usually-tight Caesar growing into something else. “Asshole,” he muttered, referring to Virgil and his protection of these clear obstructions to justice but making the utterance non-specific in case anyone heard.

And someone did.

“I’ve got something.” Castellanos’ voice made him start, the woman seeming to appear just feet behind him. Her frayed hairs looked conditioned, her gaze, rested. A light application of make-up emphasized her features.

“What is it?”

“A cold case.”

“Shit.”

Castellanos rattled a new puzzle cube in her hands, this one with six rows and six columns. “Our guy isn’t the first sequence killer in Oceanrest to use the mask gimmick. There are a couple other similarities we might want to take a look at, too…”

“How cold is the case?” Booker asked.

“Seventy-nine through ninety-three.”

“Shit,” Booker repeated.

“Ready to get started?”

“Readier than I’ll be tomorrow.” He groaned out of his chair and picked up his glasses. Donning them before his facemask, he followed Castellanos as she walked away. Her puzzle box clacked and echoed in the near-empty precinct.

 

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