Snared (Elemental Assassin #16)(37)

One by one, Ryan pulled out the folders and carefully, neatly arranged them on the table. Once all the folders were out of the box, he flipped them open and drew out a photo from the top of each file. He turned the photos around so that I could see them and lined them up side by side. There were a dozen of them, and they all showed the exact same thing.

A dead woman.

At first, I wondered what the point was, but then I took a closer look at the photos, and I began to see the similarities. Each woman was lying on a metal slab in the coroner’s office, cold and still in death. Each one had long blond hair and had probably been young and pretty—until someone had beaten her face to an unrecognizable pulp. Ugly, purple bruises also ringed each woman’s throat from where she had been strangled.

I moved down the row of photos, staring at them all in turn. But they were all so similar that they could have been carbon copies, and one face melted into the next and the next until they all seemed to solidify into a single dead woman. My breath caught in my throat, and my stomach churned as I realized exactly what I was looking at.

“All these photos, all these women. You’re saying that this girl tonight and all the rest of these poor women are connected . . .” My voice trailed off for a moment. “You’re saying that there’s a serial killer in Ashland.”





12


For the second time in the last ten minutes, my mind spun around and around, trying to make sense of this startling new revelation.

Even in Ashland, where violence was sadly so very common, serial killers were exceptionally rare. The only one that I knew of recently had been Harley Grimes, the Fire elemental who’d kidnapped and tortured Sophia, and had done the same to dozens of other men and women before Sophia had finally killed him last year. But even then, Grimes had just been a mean son of a bitch who liked to hurt everyone who crossed his path. He hadn’t been a true serial killer, driven to hunt, abduct, torture, and murder the same kind of person over and over again.

But all these young women, all roughly the same age, with roughly the same features, and all killed in roughly the same way. It was a stunning new horror.

“How many?” I whispered. “How many women?”

Bria looked at Ryan, letting him take the lead.

“The dozen women before you are all the ones that I know of, that I’ve done the autopsies for,” he said, gesturing at the files and photos on the table. “There could be more victims—many more victims. I’ve been going through the cold-case files, trying to figure out if there are others and how long the killer has been active, but I haven’t found anything conclusive yet. All of these women have been murdered over the past two years. All of them badly beaten and strangled, with their bodies dumped in locations all over Ashland.”

“What made you connect the deaths? What ties them all together? Besides how they look and how he kills them?” I asked, part of me not wanting to know the answer. “Because it sounds like there’s something else. Something worse, if that’s even possible.”

Ryan reached back into the box and drew out a large plastic bag that I hadn’t noticed before. Several small compacts, all different colors, shapes, and sizes, rattled around inside, along with pots of eye shadow, sticks of eyeliner, and tubes of mascara. “Makeup.”

“Makeup?”

He nodded. “Makeup. Foundation, powder, eye shadow, eyeliner, mascara. I’ve found quite a lot of it on all the victims’ faces. Far more than anyone would normally wear, and all of it in these bright, gaudy colors that look more like paint than makeup.” He shifted on his feet. “It looks like the killer . . . dolls them up, for lack of a better term. That he either makes the women put on the makeup or he does it himself before he, ah, well, you know.”

“Kills them,” Bria finished in a harsh voice.

Ryan winced and nodded again. He set the bag down on the table, making the compacts and other items inside rattle together again. The harsh sound reminded me of bones breaking.

“My resources are limited, but I’ve been working on it in my free time,” he said. “I’m certainly no expert, but so far, I haven’t found one brand or type of makeup that seems to be used more than any other.”

I glanced down at the photos of the dead women spread out on the table. I didn’t want to ask the question, but I had to know more. “What about lipstick? Like the blood-red lipstick he used for my spider runes?” A horrible thought occurred to me, and I had to clear my throat before I could force out my next words. “Has he . . . drawn my spider runes on any of the other women?”

“No,” Ryan said. “This is the first time that he’s put any sort of runes on his victims.”

I exhaled. It didn’t change anything, and it certainly didn’t help any of the dead women, but at least he’d only used my runes this one time. I didn’t know what I would have done if he’d marked them on all his victims. Probably felt even more sick guilt than I already did. Although I wondered why he had drawn them on this girl and not any of the others. Why mark her up? Why now?

“As for the lipstick, I have found that on all the victims. Their lips are the one thing that he actually seems to use the same color on from woman to woman,” Ryan said. “I’ve been trying to determine exactly what color and brand of lipstick it is, but it’s been hard to get a good, clean sample, given how badly he beats the women, and their subsequent exposure to the elements.”