Page 74 of The Hanging Dolls
She nodded in understanding just as Aiden rounded the corner. “Did you hear? About Scott?”
“Yeah…” He pursed his lips in a thin line. “That’s where I was. Hunter wanted me in the room when he broke the news to Scott.”
“What happened?”
“He seemed to be in shock… like there were other things on his mind.” His eyes narrowed. “Do you know something?”
“He showed up at my room drunk and told me that Carly confessed to him that Lucy was his child.”
Aiden’s lips parted. “Interesting.”
She checked her phone again, hoping to hear something from Scott. But there were no notifications. New town, an unknown terrain, and a killer who was too good at leaving clean crime scenes.
“I’m working with Terri going through social media to see if there are any hints there. I think we might have something.” Aiden hitched his thumb over his shoulder.
She returned to her desk, trying to wrap her head around Scott’s suspension and the weight of it all resting on her shoulders. The only relief she had was that she had finally figured out how to use the dated software at the station to analyze the CCTV footage found at the bakery. Her eyes still ached from the hours she had spent glaring at it without any breaks. The hustle and bustle of the station and the uneasy noise in her own head evaporated as she watched the video frame by frame.
Based on the dimensions of the counter, the height of the culprit was extrapolated to be between 1.78 to 1.83 meters. Itwas an average height and someone that tall could very well have a shoe size of ten. The display case was made of glass. She zoomed in and cleared the image, trying to capture a reflection of his face in the display case as he cleaned out desserts to feed his victims.
Her eyes narrowed, clicking the button again and again, but she was sure she could see a dark mark on the face. Irritation slashed through her. The killer was wearing a mask, hiding the lower part of his face. With his hoodie on, she couldn’t even capture the color of his hair.
But there had to be something. The need to salvage anything from the footage clawed at her.
And then she noticed it. In the reflection of his hoodie on the display case, there was something white. She focused on its shape—was it a logo? It was nothing familiar. Perhaps a local brand? But when she zoomed in on it, the shape of it was too haphazard with no definitive symbol or word on it.
A stain. That’s what it was, she concluded. Most likely bleach.
“A killer with a bleach-stained hoodie and a genetic disorder,” she repeated to herself. Outside the bright light weaved uninhibited through the branches crisscrossing the skies. Her mind drifted to Rachel, Keith, and the con that had changed everything.
The door to her office rattled open and Aiden popped his head in.
“Please give me some good news,” Zoe groaned, throwing her head back. “And get me some M&Ms from the vending machine so that I can think.”
“We found something.” He showed his laptop and placed it in front of Zoe, shoving hers aside with a sweep of an arm. “I had asked Terri to keep tabs and join those Facebook groups.”
With a few clicks, she opened a page of amateur sleuths in town discussing the case in a series of posts.
Detective Scott Cohen was drinking at a pub. He doesn’t care!
Lucy’s mother is a prostitute. I think she was abducted by the wife of some client she banged.
I made a map of where Lily’s and Tara’s bodies were found. I extrapolated where Lucy will be found and it forms an Illuminati symbol.
“This is a very active page.” Zoe kept scrolling over conspiracy theories that ranged from children being kidnapped for government experiments to blood sacrifice in the woods following some occult tradition.
“This is the most interesting thing to have happened to Harborwood. It’s a classic response to the traumatic breach of their sociocultural equilibrium caused by the violent crime, so the townspeople engage in collective projection and mass psychogenic hypervigilance. They spin conspiracy theories and become amateur sleuths to alleviate cognitive dissonance and reassert control over their disrupted reality.”
She stared at him blankly. “Was that in English?”
He bit his lip, hiding a smile, and highlighted a post. “We found this.”
As Zoe read the words, her blood curdled.
Anyone looking for pictures of Lily, Tara, and Lucy not known to public. Contact me.
Got unseen pictures of Lily, Tara, and Lucy. DM me for price.
“What the hell is this?” Zoe clicked on the name of the person who had made the post. Not only was the name John Doe, but there was no profile picture and the profile was locked.
