First, he administers a paralytic to incapacitate his victim. Then,depending on what the environment calls for, he uses either a wire bone saw or an oscillating surgical saw to slice through the tendons and bone of the neck?—
While the victim is still alive.
Although the act is especially brutal, it’s not done for deviant delights. The staging of the victim is too purposeful for his intent to be sadistic torture.
Whether the head is taken as a trophy or in connection to a deeper, darker compulsion is irrelevant to me. It may interest the Feds, and even further our understanding of the serial offender mind, but this one—thisparticular offender—has something far more valuable to offer.
As I move around the body to capture images from different angles, I record the pose. Each previous victim earned a unique position, even the first buried beneath the desert sand.
This victim has been placed on his left side, his front facing the ocean. His knees are curled toward his stomach. Left arm extended, right arm stretched at a forty-degree angle away from his chest.
A sudden commotion rises above the roar of wind and waves, and I can hear Dr. Lancer speaking passionately into her phone. Not long after, Darby crosses under the yellow ribbon and tunnels his fingers through his thick hair.
“That might buy us a little time,” he says, exasperation weighing his shoulders. “And just to be clear, I never want to hear about fireflies again.”
I turn my face away from the gust, guarding my eyes against the spray of sand. “I don’t understand how they can be out here with this wind anyway.”
“Unfortunately, I do. I now know more than I ever wanted to.”
A smile slips along the seam of my mouth. “Like what?” I ask, knowing he’s actually dying to share. Darby acts tough, but he secretly enjoys trivia and—his worst offense—documentaries.
He blows out a terse breath. Then, glancing around, he points out one of the lightning bugs. “They’re beetles, notflies. Dr. Lancer was insulted I referred to them otherwise. The glow or light or whatever they emit can be different colors.”
I watch the lone firefly flutter its tiny, winged body against the wind and land on a blade of dune grass. The bottom of its abdomen illuminates into a brilliant green glow. The bloom of light is beautiful, filling me with a foreign emotion.
“They blink in a sequence, like a code,” Darby continues as he gloves his hands and crouches next to the body. “Flashing their light to create a pattern unique to their species.”
I recall what Dr. Lancer said about their mating signal, how they follow a pattern to find a mate. The male will flash while the female waits to be impressed by the light display. When she selects a suitor, she’ll time her flashes with his to lure him to her.
“Jesus,” Darby says, tilting his head at an angle to examine the mutilated neck. “No hesitation marks. Cut clean through. He worked fast.”
“Then the vic didn’t suffer long,” I say, my voice cut low by the wind. “Unfortunately.”
Darby looks up at me with a thoughtful expression. Though I give him credit, he doesn’t let an ounce of pity register in his eyes. “I also found out the female fireflies are toxic to predators,” he says. “Even in death, the victim fights back.”
A hard swallow scrapes my throat. Besides my superiors, Darby is the only agent who knows of my past, a consequence of his field in intelligence. He was the investigator who conducted my Personal Security Interview for the background investigation during my hiring process.
“Too bad her retribution comes a little too late,” I say.
Darby glances away. “Insects have their ways, and we have ours. That’s what we’re here to do.” He absently touches the leather band around his wrist. “Anyway, the last victim blew my theoryout of the water. He’s not targeting offenders who commit the same crimes. His victimology is all over the map.”
“Same as his kill sites.”
Like strings connected to points on a murder board, we’ve tried connecting every conceivable variable. Once a connection is made, it always feels obvious after the fact.
I need to be able to predict where he’ll strike next.
As Darby becomes invested in his evaluation, I wake my tablet and fill out the initial findings for my report, my thoughts still clinging to patterns and the blinking, harmonic glow of fireflies.
In psychology, the Gestalt principles explain how the mind uses innate pattern recognition to organize seemingly random details, applying laws of perception that simplify the chaos.
Like how the law of connectedness helps link separate objects into a single shape. It’s why our brains see a pattern even when there’s no intentional pattern to begin with. Like how the flashing of the fireflies, set against the dark backdrop of a starry ocean sky, resembles the stars dotting the night.
Their glowing bodies look like constellations.
“Oh, my god.” As soon as the thought strikes, I push my sleeve up, my fingers tracing the starry points inked across my wrist.
I glance up at the rolling ocean, the horizon now lost to the hazy offing. Clusters of burning stars scatter the black sky, their light reflected on the surface of the dark water.
