“Me too. I’ll give Johnson a call when we get back to the main lodge, see what insight he can give us.” It isn’t strictly how she should go about getting information, but not only had Johnson been vocal in his concerns about the Creacher case, they already have a relationship of sorts, meaning she is less likely to be fobbed off. If there was any real doubt over Creacher’s conviction, he’ll have the inside track.
Trudging forward, there’s a rustling in the trees. Only a bird, flitting between the branches, but Elin stumbles, ankle turning. Steed reaches out. “Hey . . . watch out . . .”
Elin nods. “Tired.” She can feel the adrenaline slipping away, the quick sugar pick-me-up replaced by a horrible flatness, the light hunger pangs settling into something more pressing, insistent.
“The timing’s still bothering me,” Steed says as they continue. “If whoever killed Bea and Seth is the same person who killed those teenagers, then there’s got to have been a trigger to act again after all these years. Not exactly the norm for a serial offender to decide to take a couple of decades off.”
“Maybe someone who was put away and only just got out. I think we need to do background checks on everyone here. See if there’s anyone who was on the island around the same time as the Creacher murders. Any names that correlate with anyone from that case. Kids, teachers, camp leaders. Any connections at all.”
He nods. “I’ll get on it. And no one strikes you?”
Elin’s thoughts immediately shift to Michael Zimmerman, but what does she have to go on? The fact that he’d looked at her strangely a few times? “No, but given what we found in the shack, we can’t discount someone not actually staying at the retreat, but accessing the resort illegally.” She hesitates. “The one thing that is clear is that whoever we’re looking for has a fascination with the rock, the curse. I’m no profiling expert, but I’d say it’s likely that they’re delusional, perhaps suffering from psychosis. In one of those kinds of episodes, someone can get hallucinations, hear voices instructing them to do something.”
“The reaper?” Steed muses.
“Not out of the realm of possibility, particularly after finding that cloak. The visionary theory is plausible motivation, someone killing because they think they’re being told to do it.”
Steed pushes his empty can into the side pocket of his backpack. “I get it, but surely anyone delusional wouldn’t be capable of planning to the degree we saw in Bea’s and Seth’s deaths?”
“You’re right.” She considers. “They would usually be more chaotic. That fits with the MO of the teenagers’ killer, which was pretty frenzied from all accounts, but not with Bea and Seth.”
“What if it is a copycat, someone inspired by Creacher? Might explain the anomalies.” He shrugs. “Or more than one person.”
Elin mulls it over, still unsure. Everything in that cave points to continuity. Someone carrying on with what they started during the Creacher murders. “Maybe, but I’m wondering if perhaps it’s not how they’ve been killed that’s important, but the fact they’ve done it, recorded it, and celebrated it.”
“Either way,” Steed adds, “the one thing we do know is that whoever’s doing this carefully planned Bea’s and Seth’s deaths to lead us in a different direction.”
She nods. “To give them time to act again.”
Neither of them speaks for a moment, the awareness of what this means weighing heavy.
The killer isn’t done.
56
Hana can barely hold herself together as she paces up and down the corridor past the bedrooms, fueled with an energy she doesn’t know what to do with.
Caleb’s words about Seth and Jo’s argument are swirling in her head: You’ve got to tell them that it was you who left the villa.
Jo had lied to the detective and lied to them.
The thought spirals—lurid leaps of her imagination that make no sense. She knows Bea fell—the detective confirmed it—but she can’t stop the questions mounting one on top of another.
Had Jo left the villa to see Bea that night? Had they argued? What if—？
Hana knows it won’t stop until she confronts Jo. Gets answers.
Burned out, she comes to a halt outside Jo’s door.
She has to do it now. Before she persuades herself out of it.
Raising her hand, she raps loudly on the wood. The first knock results in the door pushing open, revealing a thin sliver of room: wooden floor, an upside-down Birkenstock. It was already ajar.