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.”
I barked out a short, brittle laugh. “Well, now you have a clean sample, thanks to my spider runes.”
He gave me a grim look. “Yes, I do.”
I curled my hands around the edge of the table, feeling the cold metal dig into the still itching and burning spider rune scars on my own palms. Fletcher had been wrong. Sometimes you just couldn’t brace yourself for the worst. Because I had never expected something like this to happen, not even in Ashland.
“So he kidnaps them, puts makeup on them, and kills them,” I said. “What else does he do to them?”
Ryan shook his head. “Nothing. He doesn’t do anything else to them. At least, not before the end.”
“What do you mean he doesn’t do anything else to them?” I asked. “Surely there has to be more to this than some creep painting women’s faces. He has to take them and make them up for some reason.”
He waved his hand over the photos. “There are no signs of physical abuse. No cuts, no burns, nothing like that. He restrains them, probably with a heavy rope, judging from the bruises around their wrists and ankles, but he doesn’t torture them.” His mouth twisted. “The beatings the women endure are horrific enough all on their own.”
Ryan looked at Bria, and she nodded, telling him to continue.
“If I had to guess, I would say that he ties them down to a chair. But he takes care of them. He feeds and bathes them on a regular basis, judging from my examination of the bodies.”
“So he kidnaps these women and holds them hostage. How long?” I asked. “How long does he keep them?”
“That’s a bit harder to determine. But judging from when some of the women were reported missing and when their bodies were found, the weather and the temperature at the time, and the varying rates of decomposition, I would say that he keeps them for at least four days. Sometimes a week or longer.”
So all of these women had endured at least four horrific days of being tied down, knowing that they would never see their friends and family again, knowing that they were going to be killed sooner or later, whenever the urge struck the monster who’d taken them.
That sort of helplessness was its own kind of cruel, cruel torture.