Ella eyed the victim from top to bottom again. “No, look. This blanket is wrapped around Barry”s ankle. That suggests he jumped up from this spot in a hurry.”
Byford came over and inspected the victim. “True. Good observation.”
Ella had seen all of the wounds she needed to. There was only one other thing left to check. “Sheriff, can you call a forensics agent back?”
“Sure,” he disappeared around the corner, returning a few seconds later with the same forensics technician who’d taken the pictures. Sheriff Hunter pointed at Ella and the technician came over.
“Some questions?” the woman asked. Ella could see behind her mask she was of Asian descent but couldn’t tell anymore.
“Would it be possible to remove these coins? We’d like to check something.”
The technician nodded then knelt down in front of the couch. With her gloved hands, she enlarged the area around the eye with one hand and removed the coin with the other. She placed it inside a small plastic bag and passed it to Ella. Byford and Hunter both glanced closely at it too.
It was a gold coin this time, with Asian characters around the edges and a swirling dragon on the face. On the other side, a bald man’s face. This time, there were no English markings whatsoever.
“What’s that, Japanese again?” Hunter asked.
“No, I don’t recognize these symbols at all. This isn’t Kanji. It might be Korean or…”
“It’s Chinese,” the technician said. “That’s President Kai-shek on the face.”
“Oh, thank you,” Ella said. “Can you read these symbols?” She passed the coin to her.
“I can indeed.” The technician took it and held the bag to her eye-level. “Hope and prosperity under Kai-shek’s rule. Shen-Si Province. 1964.”
The atmosphere changed when the date hit the air. The rush came surging back and Ella had to stop herself from clenching her fist in elation. “What was that year? 1964?” she asked.
“Yeah,” the technician pointed to a small inscription at the bottom edge of the coin. “It’s written a little different on coins to save space. Usually, it would be seven characters long, but they’ve just used the individual numerals here, so it’s only four. Does that help?”
Ella didn’t need any more confirmation. The coins at every crime scene were from 1964. It couldn’t be a coincidence. “Yes. Thank you so much.”
The technician checked the second coin on the body. “This one’s the same. Exactly the same coin. Is there anything else you need?”
“No.” Ella glanced between Byford and Sheriff. “You guys?”
They both shook their heads.
“Feel free to take them for testing,” Ella said. She stood up and headed away from the scene, coming to a conservatory door leading out into the garden. The glass panel reached from floor to ceiling. If this unsub came in through the rear, he’d have been able to see his target sleeping.
“Sheriff, do we know how the perp got inside?” she asked. Sheriff Hunter joined her at the window.
“Nope. That’s something you might be able to help with. When we got here, every door was locked.”
“Every door. We had to use the enforcer on the front to get in, and even that was bolted from the inside.”
From what Ella gleaned from cop talk over the years, the enforcer was a battering ram. “So he locked the doors on the way out.”
“Could be,” the sheriff said. “He could have lifted a key.”
“He could have, but why? He didn’t at the other scenes, he just left the doors open. And it’s not like this is a murder of convenience. Our unsub wants people to find these dead bodies.”
The sheriff took his mask off and threw it on a side table. “Prolong the process, maybe. I dunno. You’re the behavioral expert.”
Yes, she was, and she had to find out how this unsub gained access. She went back out the front of the house and looked at it with a criminal eye. Locked front door, no breach-able windows. The only other possible route was through the garden. She moved to the outside gate, a relatively low iron gate that could be easily bested. She unhooked the latch and made her way round the side of the house. There, she found herself on the other side of the large glass pane. Locked again, and the windows here didn’t open anywhere near enough for a grown man to fit through.
Ella took a few steps back, surveyed the building, and entertained the idea that this unsub might have climbed up the drainpipe to an upstairs window. Her eyes followed the pipe along the foundations of the roof, watching it snake round to the left and then miraculously disappear.
“Huh?” she said aloud. She moved around to the left, and there, sitting in a very narrow gap between the house and the fence was a set of steps. Ella approached them and found they descended down to the bottom level.
She followed them down, moving a trash can out of the way and coming to a large red door. It wasn’t quite sitting flush in its frame. Someone had recently opened it, she realized
One tug of the handle opened the contents within. Ella moved into a small basement, tripping over a pile of power tools upon arrival. The morning light illuminated it all, and it wasn’t the discarded chairs or the old motor engine that drew her attention first; it was the sacks.
“Oh my God,” she said, and suddenly, this case looked a lot different than it did before. “Byford, Hunter. Get down here,” she shouted. “You’re going to want to see this.”
She had everything she needed. This was it. This was how she was going to catch him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ella rushed back to the precinct with a head full of ghosts, vague ideas with the potential to fully manifest with enough energy. What she’d found in the basement had completely changed her course. Up until now, the jigsaw pieces had all been scattered to the wind, but this morning she uncovered the force that pulled them together.
They’d found coins. Thousands upon thousands of them. Barry Windham must have been a coin collector once upon a time but had since given up the hobby for whatever reason. Could this killer be targeting people in the coin collector trade? If so, how did the first two victims fit into it? That’s what she was going to find out.
In her office, she loaded up her desk with paperwork. For this, she needed physical copies, not words on a screen. Holding something in her hand helped make everything more authentic. Byford followed in after her.
“So, nothing to do with religion or sacrifice,” he said with a note of pretension. Ella was happy to admit when she was wrong, a trait a lot of people needed to adopt in her profession, she thought.
“Nothing at all. I went down a wrong path and I’m sorry.”
“I could have told you that yesterday. Oh well,” he said.
Ella wasn’t about to get into another argument with the man. Sometimes, he seemed like he had the potential to be a great partner. Other times, he made a great advertisement for working solo.
“You did, and I’m sorry I didn’t listen. But we’ve got a ton of evidence that backs this theory up, so how about we dive in and crack it open?”
Byford rested his hands on the table. “I’m with you on this one. The coin link is clear with this victim. Not so much with the others, but maybe that’s because we haven’t looked hard enough. And this 1964 link could be what helps us find this culprit.”