Ilse took a long sip from the cooling espresso sitting in the small, wooden holder in front of her. Sawyer had opted to sit at different booth, off to the side. He’d cited proximity to the outlet, but Ilse wasn’t so sure.
For now, though, she was too focused. She’d borrowed the laptop from the agency and was now scanning the results on her search page.
The coffee shop was small and exuded the familiar fragrance, primarily of the drip brew the local shop was known for. Due to the early nature of their attendance, morning commuters came in and out, fetching their daily dose of energy in egg-carton textured cup holders. The tables themselves were made of what looked like driftwood coated in some protective finish. The chairs and booth seats were comfortable and padded with crimson plastic.
Sawyer was staring at his computer screen, his eyes glazed, his baseball cap sitting on the table next to his mouse. His tousled hair jutted every which way, suggesting he hadn’t taken a comb to it that morning.
She tried not to stare at her partner, but it was a difficult thing to stay focused. He seemed to be ignoring her, or at the very least distancing himself. He hadn’t taken to the search with the same gusto she had.
Ilse’s brow flitted down, but she returned her attention to the search engine on her borrowed device.
Her theory sounded crazy.
She knew that.
But she was confident in it, nonetheless. Too much fit for it all to be pure coincidence. Now, she'd been up most of the night reading fairy tales and researching origins of the stories, as well as compilations.
But so far, it hadn't provided a lead-worthy clue. None of it would help if it didn't point her to the identity of the killer, or, at the very least, the identity of his next victim. Which fairy tale would he mimic next? This was what she was looking for.
She clicked on a link, and frowned, cycling through pictures on a website. “Did you know,” she murmured, “they have Renaissance fairs for this stuff?”
Sawyer glanced over. “Huh?”
“Yeah. Conventions, handmade crafts, fashion design. They sell fairy wings—hundred bucks a pop.”
Sawyer's eyebrows went up. “I found a fairy school,” he said dryly, turning his screen towards her.
Ilse winced. “Ah, alright then. You think that's connected somehow?”
He looked her dead in the eyes. “Not even a little bit.”
She rolled her own eyes, snorting and turning back to her screen. “You seem distracted again, Tom. Is everything alright?”
“Hmm? Fine.”
“You sure?” she said, not making eye contact. A trick she'd learned in counseling had been styles of confrontation. Women, oftentimes, could be spoken to face to face, across a table, or over a Zoom meeting. They were connected on a personal level, interested in the emotions of others and so would be willing to go deep across from another.
Many men, on the other hand, didn't do well with confrontation. A parenting technique for young boys was often to take them for a drive rather than seat them at the kitchen table for a reprimand. Facing towards a road, with the person at one's side, both looking away from the other, helped to offset the sense of confrontation.
Whereas plopping them at a kitchen table across from looming parents would yield rebellion and defensiveness. Sawyer was much in this second category.
Ilse refused to look in his direction, preferring to face across the coffee shop, in the same direction as Sawyer. Her attention, visibly, seemed fixed on her screen. But once more, she was watching Sawyer like a hawk out of the corner of her eye.
“You haven't been yourself,” she said simply, still not looking at him. She didn't phrase it as a question. Sometimes, allowing clients to come to their own conclusions was a far more helpful path. Other times, observations made as statements prompted more direct replies. Sawyer had always appreciated direct.
“Hmm,” he said.
“You're moody and distracted. You don't have to tell me what's wrong. But it might help us do the work better.”
Again, meeting him on his level. Sawyer liked work—he was married to the job. Something his ex-wife, Jennifer, could attest to.
“We're doing fine,” he retorted. “I'm looking into fairy schools.”
This time, he couldn't keep the sarcasm from his voice. Ilse looked at him now, frowning. “You don't have to mock my idea, you know,” she said. “You can tell me what's wrong, or pretend nothing is, but I'm not your punching bag.”
Sawyer blinked and scratched at his chin. He wasn't the sort to apologize, but she could tell he felt bad. He glanced around, noted her nearly empty cup and said, “Want another?”
She shook her head and hid a smile. “Yes, please. Thank you. And I forgive you.”
Sawyer just snorted, got to his feet and moved towards the register.
Ilse turned back to her screen. She couldn't focus both on Sawyer and the case, and for the moment, the stakes in the latter were much higher. At least, so she hoped. People were dropping like flies. She had to focus.
She hunched a bit, scowling at her computer screen. The killer was clearly basing his murders off of the stories... So the stories themselves had to be key. But the stories weren't ending in ever after. The killer was changing the endings, intentionally.
But why? Was that the key?
She clicked on a tab beneath the search bar, navigating back to a sales page for a compilation of fairy tales.
The murderer didn't like the happy endings, so he was changing them. Killing the protagonists of the tales. Was that it? Some sort of envy, or jealousy? Or something deeper?
Why was he altering the fairy tale endings? Was the man trapped in his own youth, somehow? Had his maturation been stilted? Most likely—fairy tales weren't often key landmarks of the psyches for adults. At least, not without multiple layers obscuring childhood narratives.
She stared at the screen, and then her eyes flicked down, and she frowned.
Beneath the picture of the compilation, she spotted a row of advertised products and then recommended books. One of the advertisements simply read, Read local authors!
The picture above the title was a very poor image from a horribly crafted book cover. Like someone with little know-how had tried to piece something together in Microsoft Paint. Paint was the extent of Ilse's own graphic design acumen.
She stared at the photo of the bad cover. Stared at the blurb. Read local authors!
A demand. Local authors?
She clicked.
The poor covers, judging by the reviews, also carried poor stories. She scrolled down to the sales rank of the story, noting that it hadn't performed particularly well, seeing as it ranked somewhere in the lowest rungs on the online retailer's website.
She scrolled back up, reading the book's description.
It simply said, How they should have ended...
She clicked to the reviews, reading them slowly, her frown deepening like grooves in clay. All the reviewers seemed to be complaining about the same things. The book was titled Fairy Tales, simple enough. But according to the reviewers, they all ended in disaster.
One reviewer said, “I picked this up to read to my daughter before bed. That was until I reached the end of the first tale. Everyone dies! Horrible. One star. Do not recommend.”
Other reviews expressed similar sentiment. A few five-star reviews read things like, “Lots of blood. Love it!”
Another one of the rare positive reviews said, “Turning children's stories into horror—just my thing!”
Ilse frowned, clicking to the main page again. The author's name was listed as Roy Clement. She clicked his bio, reading it slowly. Roy had moved to Seattle, it seemed, from San Francisco five years ago. Before becoming a writer, apparently, according to his bio, he'd worked at a prestigious studio adapting fairy tales. The way he spoke of the studio, though, in the biography, was hardly in flattering terms. He phrased it to maximize a sense of his talent while minimizing a sense of the studio's competence.
Had he been fired? Was that what had prompted the move?
And now, years later, he was writing stories that failed to sell whatsoever.
She clicked on the author's page and frowned at a picture of Mr. Clement. Perhaps it was all the time she'd spent studying online books over the last few hours, but in her mind, Mr. Clement looked a bit like Humpty-Dumpty. He had an egg-shaped, bald head, and oversized eyes that almost seemed to be bulging from their sockets.
He was smiling, but it was a weak attempt at the gesture.
Something tapped next to her hand, and a sudden gust of steam swept across her face. She blinked, looking over to see Sawyer having placed the new coffee next to her. He frowned over her arm at the image on the screen.
“Who's that?” he said.
Ilse said, “Thanks,” nudging the coffee, then said, “Not sure. But... But I'd like to speak with him.”
“Oh? Suspect?”
“I'm again, not sure... but...,” she stared at the image on the screen, frowning. “He re-writes fairy tales,” she murmured, “turning them into bloody horror shows.”
“Yeah?”
She looked up at Sawyer. “Also, he's local.”
“Huh. You think he might know something?”
Ilse glanced back at the author page and the published books beneath the photograph. “He's changed the endings of the Ugly Duckling and Jack and the Beanstalk. Killed them both in this tale here.”
“What are those two stars?”
“Those?” Ilse said. “Reviews. It didn't do very well in that arena.”
“Huh.”
“Right. Huh.”
“Fine,” Sawyer said. “I'll call Rudy. See if he can get us an address. You sure he's local?”
“That's what the ad said. Also, what his bio states.”
Sawyer stepped away from the table, fishing his phone from his pocket now. Ilse, for her part, slowly lowered the lid of her laptop, frowning faintly to herself. Someone was turning happily ever after into a horror show.
Roy Clement seemed the perfect culprit.