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  Sykes:

  That’s right. Which means he was likely stalking her, following her and waiting for an opportunity.

  Elle:

  So, he takes Katrina when she’s catching the bus to her friend’s house, and both her parents don’t realize she’s missing until three days later?

  Sykes:

  Yes. They weren’t on speaking terms at that point, so they each assumed the other had her. Meanwhile, I abandoned my hope that TCK had stopped and tried everything I could to make sure Katrina didn’t end up dead too—but by that point, I think we all knew it was too late.

  I always felt like I was running out of time, and also that the days were dragging by before the inevitable conclusion. In the Child Abduction Response Training, they tell us that of the children who are abducted and killed, 44 percent are dead within the first hour. Almost three quarters are killed within the first three hours, and 99 percent are dead within the first day. Every one of TCK’s murders were in the one percent, the cases that defied the odds—but the timeframe was still rigid. He didn’t budge. And even though it seemed he had the ricin poisoning down to an exact science, he messed up when it came to Katrina.

  [SOUND BREAK: Shuffling papers, tapping fingers on a desk.]

  Elle:

  Martín, what can you tell me about Katrina’s autopsy?

  Martín:

  While she did suffer the effects of ricin poisoning and twenty-one lashes on her back, there were a couple key differences in her death when compared to the other TCK victims. First, she was not dying as she was whipped; she bled much longer than the other girls had. Second, her cause of death was not organ failure due to poisoning. She died from blunt force trauma to the head, which caused a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Elle:

  What do you think that means?

  Martín:

  Well, the medical examiner on her case thought it was due to a fit of rage. Essentially, that the killer became furious with her because she fought back—there were defensive wounds on her arms—and he killed her for defying him.

  Elle:

  Do you agree with that assessment?

  Martín:

  I think it’s possible.

  Elle:

  Are there any other possible explanations?

  Martín:

  Yes. I think it’s clear that he was angry with her. Blunt force trauma is usually a spontaneous method of killing, generally brought on by sudden passion or rage. But I’m not convinced it was because she fought back. The autopsy showed that her systems were shutting down at the time she died. It’s impossible to know for sure, but if I had to speculate, I would guess that she had mere hours to live. But the poison hadn’t acted as fast in her as it did in other girls. As I’ve mentioned before, ricin isn’t like cyanide; it usually takes days to kill when it’s ingested in castor beans. With the other girls, it might have worked to his timeline, but my hypothesis based on the autopsy results is that Katrina metabolized it more slowly than the others. I think he was angry with her for not dying when he wanted her to. It was more important to him that she died when he wanted, even if she wouldn’t die the way that he wanted.

  Elle:

  Explain what you mean by “might have worked.” All of his victims were found dead on the seventh day, so presumably that means it did work, except in Katrina’s case.

  Martín:

  That’s how it’s always been reported by police and the media. But I’ve always wondered why TCK waited a year in between killings, and why he always killed in the winter. It could just be part of his pattern. But it might also be for convenience. In the winter, Minnesota is one big outdoor freezer. If any of his victims succumbed to the castor beans before the seventh day, he could easily keep their bodies outside or in an unheated outbuilding where they would be preserved. It would be very difficult for a medical examiner to determine their time of death, especially since the victims were almost always discovered hours after they’d been placed in the public space, so they were usually frozen solid anyway.

  Elle:

  That’s an interesting theory. And it answers one of my other questions, which was about how Katrina could be the only victim who didn’t seem to die on time. My understanding is that ricin poisoning is relatively predictable, but the timeline leading up to death has a lot of variables.

  Martín:

  That’s true. I’ve always struggled to believe that all the rest of the girls simply died at the exact right time. It would be a remarkable stroke of luck for him, let’s just say. I think it’s more likely that some died earlier, but he just waited until day seven to “present” them to the public, because that was the most important part to him.

  Elle voice-over:

  Over the decades, criminal behavior analysts, detectives, internet sleuths, and journalists alike have tried to figure out what the numbers mean. Why TCK was so obsessed with them, and why—if Martín is correct—the time of his victims’ deaths was even more important than the method. This is an anomaly among serial killers, as far as I can tell. Much of the time, the physical act of torture and murder is how they get their release. Psychopaths and compulsive killers can literally spend months planning it ahead of time and then reliving it afterward.

  According to John Douglas, the former FBI special agent who made his name interviewing and analyzing serial killers, there is a difference between the modus operandi—the way a crime is committed—and the signature. The signature is what the killer does to achieve fulfillment. The way they kill might change over time, and it won’t necessarily impact the killer’s satisfaction. But every killer has a signature, something they have to do, or the kill won’t give them the release they’re after. Based on what we know, the numbers are his signature. The three girls, three days apart; the seven days of captivity; the twenty-one lashes.

  The numbers mattered more than anything else. And that tells us something.

  It tells us sticking to them was nonnegotiable, that death by poison was preferable but not essential. If Martín is right, it tells us that even if they died too soon, it was still critical to wait until the seventh day to reveal their bodies. I think the evidence shows that the act of killing probably wasn’t what gave TCK pleasure—it was the satisfaction of doing it within his constructed pattern. This is important when classifying him into a category of serial killers.

  Katrina’s violent death proves that the timeline was inflexible. On the seventh day, a girl had to die. And yet, detectives would continue to be too late.

  Next time, on Justice Delayed . . .

  6

  Elle

  January 9, 2020

  Just as Elle suspected, Martín was sound asleep on the couch when she got home a little after midnight. She crept over and pulled the fleece throw off the recliner next to him. Little sparks of static electricity leapt through the dark, prickling her fingers as she flicked the blanket open and laid it across him. Satisfied she hadn’t woken him, Elle poured herself a glass of wine in the kitchen and went upstairs.

  A night of research stretched out ahead of her. Even with the bullet wound in his face, she could tell she had found the right Leo on social media. She went through his profile again, more carefully this time. Last year, he’d changed his status from “married” to “single,” but his ex-wife’s name wasn’t tagged. The people he’d connected with as family on Facebook were all listed as living in various cities in Mexico. It wouldn’t be the first time she had to travel for a case, but she wasn’t sure she could justify an international flight for a tip she wasn’t even sure was legit. Plus, if they lived in Mexico, odds were none of them was the person Leo suspected of being TCK.

  Just to be sure, she sent off a couple messages to people she could see he’d interacted with recently on the timeline: photo comments, status likes, et cetera. Your son/brother/cousin told me he had information on a cold case. Do you know anything about that?

  It was in poor taste to message about him on the very day of his untimely death,
but this was the job she’d made for herself. She was here to get the truth, not make friends. In case they hadn’t heard the news yet, she kept condolences out of it.

  She looked at the time on her computer. Five hours ago, she’d been singing and eating cake with her family. Four hours ago, she’d gone to get what could have been the biggest lead on the TCK case to come out in twenty years. Or maybe it was nothing; maybe the tea was a red herring, or Leo had been making it up to get her to come to his house. Maybe he had plans to hurt her, and whoever killed him first had done her a favor.

  It had only been a month since she started her season on the Countdown Killer, but already the levels of online harassment she dealt with had reached new heights. Instead of just the mindless trolls in her mentions—who loved to offer stupid takes on every picture she posted of her sound setup or the mass of multicolored sticky notes around her desk—now there was outright aggression. Vicious emails mocking her for daring to think she could solve a case this big that no one, including some of the best detectives in the world, had been able to. Warnings to not bring back the decades of hurt the TCK murders had caused. Twitter DMs so sexually violent they made her skin crawl; those she reported instantly.

  If Leo was one of those, maybe he had a different plan altogether. Maybe he was going to set her up with a false tip that she’d go chasing, in order to discredit her. She did a quick search through the threatening emails she’d filed just in case, but none of them contained variations of Leo’s name. It was a small relief, but it didn’t really mean anything.

  Elle took another drink of wine. None of the family members had responded. It was after midnight, and her eyes prickled with exhaustion, but her brain was too wired for sleep. Scrolling through Leo’s friend list, she found the name she was after.

  Duane Grove’s profile was relatively locked down, but there were a few posts and status updates he’d made public. The latest photo was a cross-post from Instagram dated two weeks ago: him in a backwards baseball cap and sunglasses, throwing the peace sign at the lens like a tool. She considered sending him a message, but it would have been a waste of time. If he was on the run from police, there was no way he’d be checking social media; if he wasn’t, he was probably in a jail cell by now anyway.

  A box popped up on her screen—a video call coming in from Tina.

  Tina Nguyen was a former fan-turned-producer of Justice Delayed who lived in Chicago. She was also a crack online researcher and had helped Elle track down a lot of records that other organizations had assured her were permanently lost.

  When Elle answered the call, Tina was sitting in her usual spot: surrounded by other monitors, her face bathed in a bluish white glow. “How’s it going, Elle?” she asked, typing as she spoke. “You seen all the reactions to today’s episode? Molly won’t stop texting me every time we pass another ten thousand downloads.”

  “I haven’t had a chance.”

  Tina glanced at the camera, her black irises reflecting the screen. Something in Elle’s expression made her sit back in her wheelchair, take her hands off the keyboard. “What’s wrong?”

  Elle hid her face by taking another drink of wine. “What makes you think something is wrong?”

  “Come on, don’t do that pretend shit with me.”

  “Fine.”

  Tina listened with her arms folded over her Paramore T-shirt as Elle told her about Leo’s email, their phone call, finding him dead. She finished with a rundown of all the research she’d done into Leo’s background so far. “I guess now I’m just wondering if it’ll be a waste of time to keep trying to figure out the tip he was going to give me, if the tip even existed in the first place. Odds are, the guy I saw at the crime scene is the one who shot him. They supposedly ran a chop shop together, and from his profile, Duane seems like an asshole. There’s every chance Leo had no idea what he was talking about and I should just keep going with our scheduled episodes as they are.”

  After Elle stopped talking, Tina stared to the right of the camera lens for a moment, tapping her finger against her lip. “What if you’re wrong, though?”

  “Then Leo really did have something, and it’s probably on the flash drive that was in his pocket.”

  “Which you can’t tell them you know about without getting in trouble. And you’ll probably never hear what they find, because there’s no reason for the police to give it to you.”

  “Right.”

  “Hmm.” After a moment, Tina looked straight down the lens. “What if you’re wrong about the business partner, though?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if he really was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the killer got away before you both got there? What if Leo was killed because someone knew he was about to give you key information about TCK?”

  The thought had risen to the surface of Elle’s mind a hundred times in the past several hours, but each time she had shoved it back down again. If Leo was killed because of the information, that was both the most terrifying and the most exciting thing that had ever happened since Justice Delayed started. It meant what he had was legitimate, and it also meant that she owed it to him to find his killer.

  “Elle, cut it out. I can see you blaming yourself right through this screen.”

  “I’m not!”

  “You are, and it’s not your fault. No matter who killed Leo, it was their decision to do it—not yours.”

  Elle nodded, looking down at the tattoo on her right wrist—a semicolon. On Sash’s suggestion, Elle had gotten it done two years ago, right around the time she gave up on getting pregnant and sank into a deep depression. It was her reminder, her promise, that even the worst moments in her life didn’t have to be the end of the story. As much as she just wanted to crawl into bed right now and give up, she couldn’t. Not when she might be closer than she’d ever been.

  “I just . . . I have to know what he was going to tell me,” Elle said. “I have to know if he actually knew something.”

  For a moment, Tina was quiet. Then she looked at the camera again. “I know this case means more to you than the others, Elle.”

  She met Tina’s gaze through the lens, swallowing hard. “What do you mean?”

  “I know about your childhood ‘incident.’” Tina held up her hand when Elle opened her mouth to protest. “And before you get mad at me for digging into your background, you should know that I did it ages ago, back when I was just a fan of your show. And for what it’s worth, your information was really tough to find. You did a good job hiding it.”

  When Elle didn’t say anything, Tina continued. “It’s okay, Elle. What happened to you was awful. I’ve read the news articles, the police reports. Those aren’t on Google, but hey—you’re not the only one who breaks the rules. I didn’t mean to pry, honestly. And I want to help you. Anything I can do, really, you can ask.”

  Elle tapped a finger on her desk, fighting the urge to slam her laptop shut and end the video call. Whatever good that would do. Tina might as well have found a revenge porn site splashed with intimate pictures of Elle—it would have been no less violating. Angry questions about where she had looked, what she had seen, burned on Elle’s lips. It didn’t matter. If Tina knew about the abuse Elle had faced as a child that caused her to feel so much solidarity with TCK’s victims, it was too late to do anything about it now. Elle swallowed her anger and looked back up at the camera.

  “How can you help me?” The words sounded harsh, but Tina didn’t look put off.

  “Well, I’ll start by trying to get ahold of any of Leo’s coworkers, see if any of them knows anything. And I’ll manage all the emails coming in about the show stuff for now, so you can focus on this. But I want you to promise you won’t cut me out if you get new leads. I don’t care about credit, but I want to help you nail that asshole.” She smiled, her eyes twinkling even in the dim light of her computer screen.

  As much as she felt betrayed by Tina’s snooping, Elle needed her help. If anyone could convi
nce Leo’s reluctant family and friends to talk, it was Tina.

  “All right, and I’ll look into the girlfriend angle, while you’re at it. See if he was close to anyone romantically since his separation last year. But let’s do this quietly, okay? I don’t want to broadcast anything until I know whether Leo even had real information for me.”

  Pinching her fingers together, Tina mimed zipping them across her tinted lips. “You got it.”

  Elle forced a smile, pushing down her anxiety. “Great,” she said at last. “Let me know as soon as you find anything, please.”

  7

  Elle

  January 10, 2020

  She had tried to run from him as soon as he stopped the car at a light—opened the door and stumbled out into the frosty afternoon. It had been stupid to get into his car, even though he said he was friends with her parents. Stupid, stupid, stupid. The fear made her legs heavy and numb, and her steps were uncertain on the icy street. She ran and ran but went nowhere.

  A thick glove that tasted of gasoline closed over her mouth. She bit down, but he lifted her off her feet and threw her into the backseat. He got in and locked the doors.

  “There, now, don’t you feel silly?” he said.

  She did not. Warm, sad, angry, anxious. But not silly.

  He started driving again, and she glared out the window, watching the black dead trees blur by. When they passed her house, she felt a hand squeeze inside her chest.