She needed more coffee for this. “Okay, help me out here. They’re saying . . .”
“Let us do evil that good may result,” Dr. Ali repeated with deliberate emphasis. “While the entirety of the message is condemning that belief, the idea that it is mentioned at all is what I find interesting.”
It took a second to pick up what he was saying. But when Lucy did, she exhaled on a curse.
The care with the body, the clean kill, the prayer, the ammonia. “So essentially they’re talking about the ends justifying the means.”
“Take it with a grain of salt,” Dr. Ali reiterated.
“Why?”
“Why what?” he asked.
“Why did you think it was interesting?”
There was another lengthy pause and then a sigh. “I was looking at it within the facts of the case. The confession and the guilt, as well. Think about what the verse is saying. ‘Let us do evil that good may result.’”
“But you said that the overall message conveys that the good results don’t justify the evil deeds, correct?”
“Right, the verse itself is condemning the idea,” Dr. Ali agreed. “The verse says that even claiming that good people do evil for any reason is slander.”
“So why . . . ?” Lucy knew what he was getting at, but she needed to hear him say it, to put the innuendos into fully formed ideas.
“There are many things the killer could have chosen to put on the body,” Dr. Ali said, more controlled than he’d been so far. She knew he was picking through a field of land mines in his own head. One wrong move . . . “And they chose a verse that was included in a passage talking about the ends justifying the means. If they thought that verse explained the killing of the boy, if the murder was an evil act done for some greater good, the killer’s mind would probably latch on to it.”
“Like how Eliza made me repeat it in the interrogation room.”
“Exactly in that way, yes,” Dr. Ali said. “The older victims suggest Eliza is at the very least not working alone, if she is involved. But she seems equally invested as the killer is with the verse.”
“Could it be that it’s someone who grew up in an ultrareligious, cultlike community?” Lucy asked. “And phrases like that simply became part of their everyday vocabulary?”
Dr. Ali hummed low in his throat. “Well, I’m sure you’re aware of this, but most serial killers who employ religious symbols are not actually killing in the name of God. They grab on to that as a justification for their compulsion, but it is the compulsion itself that makes them kill, not the religious impulse.”
“Right, yes,” Lucy said slowly, trying to make it all slot into place in her mind.
Serial killers had rituals they were compelled to follow to satisfy the itch. Some bound their victims in certain ways, some cut off their hair, put makeup on them. Oftentimes, if they killed a victim without following through with their rituals, the murder didn’t even “count” in their minds.
It was no different for those who added religious symbols into the mix. They might have convinced themselves they were killing for or because of a higher power of some sort, but the rituals of carving crosses into victims’ skin were no different at a psychological level than putting the bodies in certain clothes or using a specific killing method.
Bottom line was that, like Dr. Ali had been saying since the start, messages like a verse, even sliced into a victim’s body, needed to be taken with a grain of salt.
It might not mean anything more than that was the killer’s favorite Bible passage. Or they liked the number twenty-three.
Lucy squinted out toward the trees at the back of the property, seeing other ones in her mind. The forest, the bodies. “So what you’re telling me is it’s either crucially important or not important at all? Thanks a lot.”
There was no bite in her voice, and Dr. Ali laughed. “I am not envious of your job, Agent Thorne.”
Lucy nodded even though he couldn’t see her. “Hey, Dr. Ali.”
“Hmm?”
“What do you think?” Lucy rested her head back against the rocking chair, tipping it into motion. Could she honestly say she was above doing evil if it had made the difference in one of her unsolved cases? “Do the ends ever justify the means?”
“Philosophers and religious texts much wiser than I have yet to answer that question, my dear,” Dr. Ali said.
“I’m not asking what philosophers and religious texts say,” Lucy corrected.
He huffed out a small breath, and then there was more of that silence, the kind that had punctuated their whole conversation, the kind that was so much a part of his careful cadence that it made Lucy smile in spite of the headache brewing at the spot the knife had sunk into Noah Dawson’s skull.
“I suppose I would have to say yes,” he finally said. “There are times when an evil act may lead to the greater good. And what is one soul’s destruction if a million more may be saved?”
Despite the fact that it echoed the thought she’d just had, Lucy shook her head. “But who gets to decide whose soul is destroyed?”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
ELIZA COOK
Three days earlier
The bus smelled of fried chicken and something simultaneously sour and smoky—marijuana, some distant part of her had noted.
Eliza had wrinkled her nose at the combination when she’d taken a seat by the window. She hadn’t picked the back of the bus, nor the front. Both would be too obvious. Her point was to blend in.
When an older gentleman in a paperboy hat and bow tie had settled in beside her with a friendly but distant smile, she’d finally relaxed, letting her head drop to rest on the cool glass of the window.
Now, as they neared Seattle, Eliza stared at the dirt beneath her fingernails, a thin, dark line that hadn’t gone away even when she’d scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed in the nasty bus station bathroom.
She sat on her hands so that she wouldn’t rake her nails across her eyes to dig out the images of Noah Dawson’s bloated face, swollen in death, the flies greedy for the blood that had gone cold days earlier.
When she’d first seen it, her stomach had heaved, a violent spasm that had sent her stumbling away, bent over, bile burning against her throat, the acidic remnants of it lingering on her tongue.
Her brain had taken mercy on her and had checked out for the rest of it. There was a white space where the memory of moving his body should be. She could still smell it, though, beneath the marijuana and greasy meat, the stench of death clinging to each molecule of her being. She thought it always would.
In wars, it’s not the people that matter but the beliefs, she’d told herself over and over again on a manic loop as she’d wrapped the body in a tarp, as she’d dragged it through the woods, the muscles in her arms straining against the weight.
She didn’t want to go too far. If she did, the other victims may never be found. And that’s what was important—that they be found.
Eliza wanted them to be found.
Molly most of all, some part of her had whispered, making a lie of her mantra. Eliza had tried desperately not to think of her as she placed the ammonia-soaked rags in a triangle pattern around Noah to keep the predators at bay for as long as possible. Tried not to think about what Molly’s face would look like after being in the ground. Tried not to think of the judgment that would be there anyway.